It was to be a performance like any other at the Lepic theater, in the 18e arrondissement of Paris, Tuesday, December 6. Letters to Anne, directed by Benjamin Guillard, with Patrick Mille alone on stage in the role of former socialist president François Mitterrand writing to Anne Pingeot, his mistress. As soon as the curtain rises, however, a spectator fidgets in his seat, responds aloud to the actor. The letters follow one another, the spectators multiply the “hush” for their neighbour.
Then Mitterrand, replaying a somewhat stormy socialist colloquium from the 1960s, descends into the audience. He glares at the spectator, obviously inebriated, who spreads out loud his culture of the history of the Socialist Party. This is not enough. So he interrupts and asks her out. The other runs, gets up. A little distant from the president of the theatre, he multiplies the invectives, and reveals himself to the tune of “I am a deputy, you will have to deal with me, it will not stop there”.
The show resumes, ends. And we discuss in the room this extremely rare interruption. A spectator recognized Aurélien Taché: consternation, the drunken spectator was indeed a deputy. The director, in a tweet, challenges him: ” Who do you think you are Aurélien Taché? What world do you live in? » Social networks are doing their work, and right-wing and far-right political opponents or former macronist colleagues of the deputy, Marlène Schiappa in the lead, relay Benjamin Guillard’s message. An easy way to feed the image of a New People’s Ecological and Social Union with a deleterious attitude, far from the exemplarity required by the function.
“Political recovery”
Former socialist, ex-macronist, the deputy of Val-d’Oise is now a member of the environmental group in the National Assembly. He acknowledges having “a little naively disrupted the session” after consumption “a drink or two” during dinner.
Among environmentalists, some cite a problem of alcoholism. “We do not punish people who are sick”, we evade the better to refuse to make a political history of it. Others, Cyrielle Chatelain – the president of the environmental group – the first, assume the need for possible sanctions under the internal regulations of the group. The latter also called him on Wednesday to inquire about his condition.
At the theater, the media frenzy surprised, and everyone would like it to come down. “He put himself in this situation, but no one in the theater wants it to take disastrous proportions for him”, summarizes Salomé Lelouch, director of the Lepic theater. The director, meanwhile, while maintaining his indignation at the behavior of Mr. Taché, condemned, Wednesday, “the more than dubious insults and reflections to which he may be subjected following this tweet” and said to himself “absolutely frightened and paralyzed by the political recovery that is made of [s]are about ».