“On this anniversary day, it is not so much joy which dominates as lucid gravity,” French president Emmanuel Macron said when he celebrated the 150th anniversary of the republic at the Pantheon on Friday, reports The Irish Times.
Macron specifically mentioned the threat of “separatism”, his code word for Islamic fundamentalism, and the rise in attacks on “police, gendarmes, magistrates, mayors, all those who struggle against violence, racism and anti-Semitism”.
The government will present a draft law against separatism this autumn, he promised.
The speech was at the same time left- and right-wing, in keeping with Macron’s “en même temps” motto. He condemned “those who, often in the name of a god, sometimes with the help of foreign powers, try to impose their law”. That statement should please conservatives in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.
Macron’s homage to France’s “singular welfare state, a model of social protection which leaves no one by the roadside” may please the Left. “The increasingly fragile ties of respect and civility” which held France’s “unique” welfare state together were also threatened by violence and hatred, he said.
Macron chose the Pantheon because the heart of Léon Gambetta, the Italian immigrant, naturalised Frenchman and parliamentarian who proclaimed the Third Republic on September 4th, 1870, has reposed there for the last century.
Macron recognised the contribution to the republic of five naturalised citizens: Gambetta, Marie Curie, Josephine Baker, Félix Éboué and Gisèle Halimi.
“The republic is still fragile, still precarious. We must fight for her with every breaking day, with what I call republican patriotism,” Macron told five naturalised citizens from the UK, Algeria, Peru, Cameroon and Lebanon.
Jean-Noel Jeanneney, a leading French historian, was Macron’s guest at the ceremony. “His affirmation of the right to blasphemy struck me most, in this week when the Charlie Hebdo trial opened,” Jeanneney said.
Macron’s previous minister for justice criticised a lycée student for making obscene statements about Islam. The student was threatened on social media.
Macron said laïcité or state-enforced secularism “guarantees the right to believe or not to believe. It is inseparable from freedom of expression, which extends to the right to blasphemy . . . Being French means defending . . . freedom to ridicule, mock, caricature, which Voltaire claimed was the source of all other freedoms.”
The French language was “the cement of the nation”, Macron said. “Mastering our language means touching the soul of the nation . . . Our language is the cradle of the republic . . . Our language holds our people, our history together . . . In France, everything starts with words.”