Emmanuel Macron at Château-Thierry on Thursday. – ELIOT BLONDET-POOL / SIPA
- Traveling Thursday in the Aisne, Emmanuel Macron described the poet Arthur Rimbaud as “genius of classical painting”.
- The sentence was taken out of context on social media.
- The president was spinning a metaphor.
A phrase that wrongly aroused a wave of irony. Traveling Thursday to Château-Thierry, the city where Jean de La Fontaine was born, Emmanuel Macron spun a metaphor on the poet Arthur Rimbaud. “Rimbaud, at 16, was a genius of classical painting”, launched the Head of State in front of the actor Fabrice Luchini.
This quote was then shared on Twitter, without specifying that it was a metaphor. “Help”, “And Baudelaire is famous for his symphonies”, then quipped Internet users.
FAKE OFF
The President of the Republic was spinning a metaphor. Just listen to his full explanation, which is available including in this LCI video, from the 11th minute, to realize it.
Bouncing back on remarks by Fabrice Luchini, who recalled that La Fontaine had reworked fables written by the ancient writer Aesop, the Head of State then spoke on literary “genius”. This would emerge “when there is a mastery which reaches its height of the constraint of the classical form”, according to the president.
He then moves on to Arthur Rimbaud, whom he describes as a “poet of image, of color”. Emmanuel Macron then underlines that the poet had a solid classical literary training: “Rimbaud, at 16, is a genius of classical painting: he speaks Latin, he writes Latin. “
Arthur Rimbaud indeed composed several poems in Latin while he was at school in Charleville.
Emmanuel Macron was traveling Thursday to Château-Thierry to make reading “a great national cause” until 2022. He had rejected in January the entry of Arthur Rimbaud to the Pantheon, respecting the wishes of the rear child. niece of the poet and of the Les Amis de Rimbaud association.