Macron targets Zemmour at press conference, but without naming him

via Associated Press

POLITICS – “It is not for the President of the Republic to discredit a candidate”, but “to love France and respect the French is basically to have a certain idea of ​​the greatness of France”. This is how the Head of State responded, this Thursday, December 9 to a journalist who asked him about the candidacy ofEric Zemmour, essayist convicted in particular of inciting racial discrimination.

If he did not wish to say his name during this press conference dedicated to the future French Presidency of the Council of the EU, nor go back in detail to the controversies surrounding the far-right candidate, Emmanuel Macron drew up a European project which responds, in several points, to his favorite subjects. But also to its rewriting of history, via which Eric Zemmour rehabilitates Marshal Pétain all in claiming the legacy of General de Gaulle.

Before concluding the sequence by explaining that it was necessary “not to concede anything to racism, nor to anti-Semitism, nor to the questioning of our values, nor to the manipulation of our history”, the tenant of the Élysée also lambasted the deadly era of “revisionism”. Words in line with those he had spoken the day before traveling to Vichy, already declaring about the story: “Let us be careful not to manipulate it, to agitate it, to see it again.”

Macron wants to work on European history

“We are living a political moment in Europe where revisionism is settling in several countries, is used by the powers which want to question our values, our history”, affirmed the Head of State, in an implicit reference to the ideas far right who roam the Old Continent.

As a result, Emmanuel Macron “wishes that next June in France we can initiate this work of forging a history and a historiography of our Europe”. Because, in his words, “European history is not just the addition of 27 national histories. It has a coherence, a unity that everyone has a presentiment of, but which is not yet fully visible ”.

“It is an existential political fight for our values ​​and for our union”, added the Head of State who wants to make the French presidency of the European Union “a great moment of humanism” and a “time of mobilization ”in the face of the“ bad winds ”which“ arise. ”

The obsession with the “national narrative”

To lead this fight, Emmanuel Macron therefore wants to stimulate a kind of European story after focusing on draw the French “national story” with speeches and other pantheonization to respond to the different extremes. It is in this sense that he also wants the advent of a “European academy” to bring together specialists and thinkers from the continent under his control.

“I also hope that this presidency will be an opportunity to create a European academy which will bring together intellectuals from all disciplines, from the 27 member states, to shed light on our ethical debates, our relationship to freedoms, and also to propose actions and projects cultural ”, announced the Head of State.

One way to gain height on the debates that are going through Europe, and a fortiori France at the time of its pre-presidential campaign. “Our country is an old country made of values ​​of culture, of fighting”, he recalled towards the end of his press conference, refusing to “tell the French what to think.” A formula that is not worth a thousand words, but almost.

At the time of his meeting in Villepinte on December 5, Eric Zemmour attacked the President of the Republic with virulence. “Nobody, nobody knows who he is because he is nobody”, he had notably launched, also qualifying it as “nothing”.