In our podcast Wait a minute !, make way for “Presidential minute! “, our weekly meeting devoted to the electoral campaign for the presidential election, its backstage and its angry questions. After having evoked the speeches, the financing, the social networks, the polls, the violence, place with the History and its use by the candidates with the presidential election under Fifth Republic.
In the speeches or the interviews of the candidates, it is a reflex. They appeal to the past, to history. And especially in two periods “which do not pass in France, the Second World War and colonization. For years, Eric Zemmour has claimed that Philippe Pétain, head of the Vichy government between 1940 and 1944, “protected French Jews”. Historians answer him factually, denouncing a ” falsification » historical. On the largest arrest of Jews in France during the Second World War, Marine Le Pen, in 2017, asserts that “France is not responsible [de la rafle] of the Vel’ d’Hiv”. The candidate opposes the recognition of French responsibility in the arrest of 13,000 Jews by Presidents Jacques Chirac in 1995 and François Hollande in 2012. In another register, about colonization, the candidate Emmanuel Macron , on a visit to Algeria in 2017, affirms that “it is a crime against humanity”, triggering heated debates in France.
“Creating controversy is not the only goal”
To understand why the past is so important in the eyes of the candidates for the presidential election, it is necessary to note the central place that history plays in education in France. How do presidential candidates borrow from the past, and to what effect? To answer in this episode, Noelline Castagnez, professor of contemporary history at the University of Orléans, editor-in-chief of Parliament(s). Journal of political history.
According to this memoir specialist, by referring to history, the candidates “legitimize themselves, show that they have a built project because they have learned from the past”. If the uses of history in political discourse are numerous and “form an integral part of political cultures”, “creating controversy is not the only goal”, she further analyzes. Good listening.
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