The Pantheon is serious business. As Marcel Pagnol wrote in Marius : “Honor is like matches: they only serve once.” I remember having signed – I never sign anything – the petition to bring in the great resistance fighter Pierre Brossolette. I found it astonishing that he was not already installed in majesty there. This man of honor, of extraordinary courage, of extraordinary moral constancy, who worked for the Republic and against the Nazis from 1940, who preferred to commit suicide by defenestrating himself after his arrest by the Gestapo, after torture , after having given a name, his own, has always had his place in the pantheon of great men. Without Pierre Brossolette, no unified resistance. The one who was excluded by the SFIO a few days before his death, who was already projecting France into the Fifth Republic, only entered the Pantheon in 2015. A serious matter, therefore.
Charles de Gaulle only pantheonized Jean Moulin; Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing obviously had their work cut out for France and much less need for symbols to hide their impotence, because no pantheonization took place under their presidencies; François Mitterrand, in two seven-year terms, holds the record with seven entries (including Condorcet as well as Pierre and Marie Curie); Jacques Chirac presided over two ceremonies, for André Malraux and Alexandre Dumas; Nicolas Sarkozy brought Aimé Césaire onto the Sainte-Geneviève mountain; François Hollande killed four entries with one stone by honoring the resistance fighters (Pierre Brossolette, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillon and Jean Zay). Emmanuel Macron will therefore not have beaten the number of entries into the Pantheon under his almost two mandates (but it is not over) – we will notice that the left pantheonizes faster than its shadow.
But the current French president will have given these entries a political dimension that borders on embarrassment. Simone Veil (2018), Maurice Genevoix (2020), Joséphine Baker (2021) and Missak Manouchian (2024) speak of impotence and like a race against time for separatism, an admission of weakness in the face of questions, doubts, abysses that tear apart France. They also say a form of magical thinking in Emmanuel Macron, which never ceases to surprise me. The “at the same time” reaches the absurd when the president changes his speech by moving from one media to another. As if he had so well integrated the reality of the archipelago of French society that he cannot imagine non-subscribers of Humanity read Humanity.
The misfortune of this Macronian “at the same time” has always been the same, but it is getting worse, because events are getting worse. When we feel obliged by a “at the same time” that has become ideological and therefore rigid to announce a tribute to the Franco-Israeli victims of the pogrom of October 7, then, quickly, another, to come, to the Franco-Gazawi victims, we do not not only says that a dead person is a dead person, we justify to the anti-Semites one tribute with another tribute. Perhaps things would have been different if Emmanuel Macron had marched against anti-Semitism, if on the very day of the march he had not given an interview to the BBC where he implied a genocide in progress in Gaza, ‘he had not taken advice from Yassine Belattar to artificially take the pulse of the suburbs which he therefore imagines to be anti-Semitic, if he had, on the other hand, worked so that the more or less representative bodies of French Muslims called for a march against anti-Semitism.
The republican arch sketch
The sketch of the Republican arc to which the RN may or may not belong depending on the days, the moons and the media is one of them. Confusion of discourse, confusion of politics, confusion of memory. Because, ultimately, why the Pantheon? Why him ? NOW ?
If it is just and beautiful that Missak Manouchian enters the Pantheon, if it is just and beautiful that the entire Red Poster and the metics who fought for Free France are honored by grateful France, it is harmful that the The president’s initiatives are now tainted by a frustrating in-between suspected of unhealthy politicking that harms everything he touches.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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