Spontaneous or prepared gesture? For the past few days, a funny little music has been playing around the course of the Molières evening, on April 24. Questioned by two activist actresses from the CGT on the consequences of the pension reform for intermittent workers and on her silence during this turbulent period, Rima Abdul-Malak departed from customs: she got up from her red seat at the Théâtre de Paris , took the microphone and counterattacked. The Minister of Culture was applauded, and the sequence appreciated within the government, can we read here Or therethe executive having seen it as a breath of fresh air.
Only, in recent days, the controversy has swelled. The string, for some, was too big. The next day, MP Aymeric Caron (LFI) tweets : “What a coincidence: a micro-hand which falls into the hands of the Minister a few seconds after being arrested, and a sentence by Gérard Philipe which she knew so well that she even knows how to date it to the nearest year ( 1957).” Cyril Hanouna, the star host of C8 in notorious conflict with the minister, continues a few hours later, relying on an article by Challenges. He assures that the two activists, Toufan Manoutcheri and Lucie Astier, gave the text of their intervention to the organizers of the ceremony in order to be able to read it on a teleprompter. And that it would have been, according to the article, transmitted to Rima Abdul-Malak. “So what did the minister do? She prepared her text. The organizers must know that everything was orchestrated, everything was mytho,” he claims.
According to our information, several scenarios had indeed been anticipated by the minister for the evening, the CGT Spectacle having announced an action at the Molières a few days earlier. Power outage, concert of saucepans, text read… Everything was on the table. “The minister wanted to be ready to react. Yes, a microphone was requested in case the minister wanted to intervene,” said those around him.
The mail from the unions
To prepare her response, the minister did not rely on the copy of the text of the activists, but on a letter which had been sent to her three days before the evening… by the unions in the sector, including the CGT. The two actresses were largely inspired by this text, consulted by L’Express, to write their intervention. In the document, the unions regret that the “conditions” are “not met” for the holding of a meeting with the services of the ministry. They believe that their concerns and claims are not listened to. Jumble: the “dramatic consequences of the reform” of pensions on intermittent workers; “the explosion of energy bills” which weaken cultural establishments; and the “increasingly frequent” threats against exhibitions and performances.
Rima Abdul-Malak therefore knew the reproaches that were going to be addressed to him, and was able to concoct his response. As for her precision on Gérard Philipe who there too, it seems, has raised some doubts, the minister’s entourage simply replies that being “passionate about theatre, she was very interested in the story of Jean Vilar and Gérard Philipe, as well as the history of cultural policies, and in particular how the regime of the intermittence of the show was born”. The string, finally, was not so big. And the controversy quickly died down.