The opposition to Emmanuel Macron is so tough right now that whatever he does, they always accuse him of having the worst intentions. This is what happened this Monday in his homage to the anti-Nazi resistance. Critics of the French president again accused him of using history and implicitly adopting progressive values, such as social security, which he himself undermined with measures such as postponing the retirement age by two years.
The president recalls the 1944 national consensus that guaranteed independence and avoided US tutelage.
Macron began the May 8 feast day in Paris, which celebrates the surrender of Hitler’s Germany, with traditional tributes in front of the statue of General Charles de Gaulle and in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. The Champs Elysées were armored much more heavily than usual by the police to deter protests.
Hours later, the President traveled to Lyon, specifically to the Montluc Memorial, to pay tribute to Jean Moulin, founder of the National Council of Resistance (CNR), and to all those who accompanied him in the fight against the Nazi occupiers, the thousands of Jews who were deported to the extermination camps with complicity of the Vichy regime.
Macron already caused resentment in some sectors in September 2022 when he decided to withdraw the National Refoundation Council, a kind of discussion forum about the big challenges of the future. They then accused him of choosing a name with too obvious historical references and with the same initials as the National Council of Resistance. The harshest accuse the head of state of blatant instrumentalization of one of the most dramatic episodes in French history. However, Macron’s forum has remained almost a pipe dream due to the lack of enthusiasm and skepticism of some of its potential participants, such as the unions.
Several union leaders, notably the CGT, yesterday blamed Macron for the hypocrisy of touting the National Council of Resistance, the embryo of the future French state after 1945, with a very important legacy of values such as independent trade unionism, the upgrading of wages, social security and protection for the weak, when he himself dismantles or undermines some of these social gains.
In his speech, Macron avoided drawing an explicit parallel to the current situation, although he emphasized the validity of the spirit of resistance as “loyalty to our nation’s deep aspirations, independence and humanism.” “Yes, we live in a country where the idea of republic and that of human progress cannot be separated with impunity,” he said. Post-Enlightenment republican France is inseparable from the great revolution in the values of justice and liberty.
The President described the formation of the National Council of Resistance in 1943 as an example of national unity beyond different political affiliations. Macron highlighted the presence of communists, radicals, republicans, christian democrats and, in addition, the main unions, including the CGT. “Jean Moulin is the man from London (where he received instructions from De Gaulle) and yet the resistance fighters from the interior are there,” he said. The Head of State recalled that since its inception, the CNR “had the deep ambition of a Fourth Republic that would introduce universal women’s suffrage, nationalize energy, create social security and free the press from the power of money”. According to Macron, it was this CNR program, this solid and consensual basis, that enabled De Gaulle in 1944 to “impose his provisional government on the Americans who wanted to place France under tutelage at the time of liberation”.
It was a solemn act and a history lesson for Macron, but everyone could interpret it in their own way, as a neutral exposure or as the Elysée’s will to use it to get out of the acute phase of national tensions.