Municipal: "Even local actors are victims of the climate of political brutality"

Jean Garrigues is a historian and president of the Parliamentary and Political History Committee. He teaches at the University of Orleans and Sciences Po. He is the author of La République incarnée. From Léon Gambetta to Emmanuel Macron (Perrin, 2019).

Read also: Municipalities contaminated by violence

LE FIGARO. - Targeted candidates, disturbed public meetings ... Are these events new, at the edge of a local election?

Jean GARRIGUES. - Campaigns have often been punctually affected by violence. However, the municipal elections had not so far been the scene of such acts. At this level of density, it was new under the Fifth Republic.

Does this situation echo other periods, before 1958?

No, the current brutality does not reach that of the 1890s, a period of deadly attacks committed by anarchists like Ravachol or Sante Geronimo Caserio, the assassin of President Sadi Carnot. Nor that of the 1930s, a phase of great tension during which Léon Blum was insulted in the extreme press

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