After formalizing his presidential candidacy on November 30, Éric Zemmour unveiled his first campaign slogan on social networks on Friday evening: “Impossible is not French”.
A well-known French expression, “Impossible is not French” was not chosen by chance by the far-right candidate.
It is indeed the sentence pronounced under the First Empire by Napoleon in 1808, about the capture of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. The emperor’s army was then blocked at the foot of the Somosierra pass, in the Sierra de Guadarrama, by Spanish soldiers. Napoleon decides to send a squadron of Polish light horses, a cavalry unit of the Imperial Guard, to take the Spanish batteries engaged against France.
Impossible is not French !
Join me on: https://t.co/4AGOutE5hG pic.twitter.com/aUfJCE6nlZ
– Eric Zemmour (@ZemmourEric) December 3, 2021
” How? ‘Or’ What ? Impossible ! I don’t know that word ”
Faced with the situation, the lieutenants told him that it was “impossible”. The Emperor would have answered them: “How? Impossible ! I don’t know that word! There must be nothing impossible for my Poles! “. With these words, Napoleon ordered his troops to attack. Result: Napoleon’s victory, and his army manages to take the pass. Imperial expression then circulated in the army and then reached the Court.
A few years later, in 1837, General Caulaincourt mentions this sentence in his memoirs. The expression was then popularized by the writer Balzac who published in 1838 the work “Maximes and thoughts of Napoleon”.
This slogan is a new nod to this historical period at the beginning of the 19th century. The former polemicist had indeed broadcast, during his declaration of candidacy Tuesday, November 30, the “Symphony No. 7” of the German composer Beethoven. Written in 1812, it was given for the first time during a concert celebrating the defeat of Napoleon’s French armies against the Duke of Wellington’s English.