In our podcast Wait a minute !place to Presidential minute!, our weekly meeting dedicated to the presidential election campaign, behind the scenes and its angry questions. After having evoked the speeches, the financing, the social networks, the polls, the violence in the electoral campaigns, place with the figure of the saver, of the myth of the providential man. A costume that candidates for the supreme mandate regularly wear under the Fifth Republic. But the story of this figure is much older…
Beware the fall
“This figure is rooted in the providentialist conception of history, born, in particular, from biblical stories”, notes Jean Garrigues, professor emeritus at the University of Orléans, president of the parliamentary and political history committee. He is the author, among others, of The Temptation of the Savior – Story of a Passion French, published by Payot in March 2022. And if this figure of the providential man is found in many countries, such as Hitler in Germany, Churchill in the United Kingdom, or Senghor in Senegal, France has a particular passion for this myth.
Why this French passion? How do presidential candidates seize on this myth, in their speech and their image? What successes, and misfortunes, for those who invoked this figure? Why can this mode of regulating social and political antagonisms be perceived as a deficit in our French democratic system? We talk about it with Jean Garrigues in this episode. Good listening.
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