National tribute to Maryse Condé: Emmanuel Macron’s memorial monomania

The great Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé died on the night of April 1 to 2 at the age of 90, in Apt, in Vaucluse, after a life of humanist struggles. A constant fight against racism and discrimination. Through around thirty books, she has told the history of Africa, the legacy of slavery and black identities. The Élysée announced Friday that Emmanuel Macron would pay him a national tribute on April 15, on the site of the National Library of France (BNF). e

The choreography is immutable: with a formal approach, the president steps forward, then speaks, in a serious tone. Emmanuel Macron, has developed a tropism for commemorations and tributes, a way of invoking a Nation brought together in times of fractures, and of sketching, implicitly, his own political project.

The Head of State went on Sunday April 7 to the Glières plateau, the Alpine theater of battles between the German army and the French militia against the resistance, then to the house in Izieu, in Ain, where 44 children and seven educators, all Jews, were rounded up on April 6, 1944 and then deported. This was the kick-off to the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the Liberation, of which the ceremonies on June 6, in memory of the Normandy Landings, will be the high point. An obligatory meeting, but one that Emmanuel Macron will mark over the year to make it a highlight of his second five-year term.

“Unquestionably”, there is a “memorial tropism” in this forty-year-old president, notes the historian Jean Garrigues. “A taste for history and memory”, “a tendency to exalt heroic figures” which results in “an increase in commemorative events”, he says. It was from the presidency of François Hollande that the number of tributes paid each year increased significantly (eight in five years).

Already 25 national tributes paid to personalities, 28 including national tributes to French victims of terrorism. Maryse Condé will be the 26th personality. To Charles Aznavour or Jean-Paul Belmondo, to the resistance fighter Léon Gautier or to the former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors, to the feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi or to the father of the abolition of the death penalty Robert Badinter. But also to everyday “heroes”, like gendarme Arnaud Beltrame, killed by a jihadist to whom he had surrendered to save a hostage during the Trèbes attack.

“It is the president who buries the second part of the 20th century,” slips an advisor to Emmanuel Macron to justify these repeated meetings in the Court of Honor of the Invalides – or in a symbolic place for the deceased. Under the leadership of the influential “memory advisor”, Bruno Roger-Petit, these ceremonies are an opportunity for crafted speeches, chanted with a voice from beyond the grave, to lyrically retrace a life journey. The style asserted itself as the temples of the youngest President of the Republic whitened.

But it was in the making from the evening of his election in 2017, during a long solemn and solitary march towards the Louvre Pyramid to the rhythm of the European anthem. Subsequently, the invention of a “memorial journey” for the centenary of the end of the 1914-18 war confirmed its appeal for the exercise. “Even before he came to power, the president said that he wanted to reconnect with the tradition of celebrating French heroes,” explains a source. Another explains this doctrine: “Memory is the cornerstone of the imagination which constitutes us as a Nation.”

Emmanuel Macron also chooses to include personalities in the Pantheon, such as Simone Veil, Joséphine Baker or Missak Manouchian, or to emphasize certain anniversaries supposed to resonate with the present or with his own leitmotif, "at the same time" of right and left. “Napoleon Bonaparte is a part of us,” he says in 2021 for the bicentenary of the emperor’s death. Georges Pompidou is celebrated for his “modernity of conquest”, who “thought of both Old France and New France”, while Georges Clemenceau, “Father of Victory” of the First World War, “inspires him enormously” for his refusal of “defeatism”.

If his entourage assures that he “always avoids” “talking about himself through the honored person”, the head of state nonetheless assumes a political message. Through the 80th anniversary of the Liberation, it should recall a time when the French waged war among themselves, before reconciling.

For Jean Garrigues, this “tropism” is explained in particular by Emmanuel Macron’s “difficulty in embodying the people he governs and who elected him”. “He seeks figures in the past of the Nation to fill this void”, in a form of “incarnation by delegation”, estimates the historian, while emphasizing that these moments can appear “disconnected from the daily reality of society French.

Communicator Emilie Zapalski wonders if the president has not finally “found his place” in this ceremonial, while “it is more and more difficult for him” particularly on the national scene, where he is deprived of a majority absolute in the National Assembly and sees the race for his succession opening before his eyes. The memorial, “it’s a bit of his best role,” she says, even if she pinpoints, in form, an “Emmanuel Macron who watches himself do and hears himself say.”