Marc Lambron: "Presidents who read"

3/3/2020, 7:30:39 PM

TRIBUNE - The writer, member of the French Academy, has read and appreciated the book In the library of our presidents - What they read and reread (Tallandier), of which Étienne de Montety, director of the literary Figaro, is the master of work.

At the instigation of Etienne de Montety, seven authors, including Christine Albanel and Éric Roussel, Camille Pascal and Laure Adler, looked into this national mystery: why is the literary superego included in the psyche of the French prince? Nourished by interviews with the presidents of the Fifth Republic still alive, the book details a crest of tastes that make up so many self-portraits. The roots are deep. With Commynes and Froissart, great national prose was born in the shade of the courtyard. Louis XIV bet his imperium on the protection of feathers. The Revolution was a provende for oratorical anthologies. Since 1958, the incarnation by the verb has exalted the transcendence of function: in its own way, each republican monarch has been marabouted by the rhetoric of writers.

Read also: Pompidou, better reader than good collector

This library is lit by the torch of a constable. General de Gaulle, who made Malraux minister, prized a tongue of marble heated with white by the whirlwinds of History, with