Macron responds to Zemmour on Pétain: “let’s be careful not to manipulate history” – The HuffPost

POLITICAL – “Let us be careful not to manipulate it, to agitate it, to see it again.” This Wednesday, December 8, the morning of a day that will see him become the third president of the 5th Republic to go to Vichy, Emmanuel Macron responded in substance to Éric Zemmour on the History of France.

For years, and even more since he embarked on the race for the Élysée Palace, the polemicist has never ceased to seek to rewrite or revisit the country’s past. For example by trying to rehabilitate Marshal Pétain, by explaining in particular that the Vichy regime had “saved” French Jews during World War II. Historical untruths advanced by twisting the facts and by disguising the work of historians, replied the latter.

An attitude that Emmanuel Macron therefore wanted to denounce this Wednesday at the microphone of France Bleu Pays d’Auvergne. “Let us be careful not to manipulate [l’Histoire], to shake it, to see it again ”, declared the Head of State in particular. “But let’s honor those who fought so that we could be a free people.”

In this regard, the President of the Republic made particular reference to the 80 deputies and senators who, in July 1940, opposed the vote of full constituent powers to Philippe Pétain, the birth certificate of the collaborationist regime. “Let us salute the courage of these 80 parliamentarians, who in Vichy opposed what was the spirit of defeat, and said no,” insisted Emmanuel Macron.

Thus, for the Head of State, the main thing is to stick to the work of specialists. “We have lived this History, it is written by historians and it is a good thing to stick to it”, he recalled. “I think that History, we gain by respecting it, by learning it, by allowing historians on the basis of traces and documents, to build a historiographical truth.”

See also on the HuffPost: Clashes erupt in the middle of a Zemmour meeting, injured SOS Racism activists