April was the cruelest month for François Hollande. The French president, battered by abysmal poll ratings, traveled to the southwestern town of Carmaux to commune with the spirit of its native son, Jean Jaurès, the founder of France’s Socialist Party, titanic tribune of the people and tireless defender of the values of 1789, writes Ropbert Zaretsky in The New York Times.
Desperate to save his own political hide, Mr. Hollande hoped he would somehow profit by identifying publicly with the man who ever since his assassination in 1914 — on the eve of the outbreak of the catastrophic war that he had fought so hard to prevent — has become a modern icon of French greatness, perhaps second only to Charles de Gaulle.
But if it were a miracle he sought, Mr. Hollande would have been better advised to visit nearby Lourdes. Though the police had cordoned off Carmaux’s center, Mr. Hollande (who has achieved the distinction of having the lowest ratings of any French president since de Gaulle formed the Fifth Republic) was not spared the wrath of its residents. Boos and hisses sizzled from the crowd. One resident raked him over the coals — once this depressed town’s principal industry — for his unfulfilled promises to revive the economy and battle unemployment. Mr. Hollande’s irresolution and indecisiveness, others shouted, would make le grand Jaurès turn over in his grave.
Would it, in fact, have been surprising if the angry citizens of Carmaux felt seismic rumbles coming from the depths of the Pantheon, where the earthly remains of Jaurès now lie? As France marks, on Thursday, the centennial of his assassination, we can measure not just the decline of the political party launched by this remarkable man, but also the decay of the republican ideals he embodied.
Read more of this article by historian Robert Zaretsky in The New York Times.