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President Macron: Sadistic Gaulish joy
Photo: Chesnot / Getty Images
Vive la France!
Fascinating France!
Land of finely cultivated manners and a siren-like singing language.
This, my France, was ravaged by a single word on Wednesday.
Fresh croissants suddenly lost their crispness in shock, noble perfumes turned sour, from near and far you could hear horrified »OUI?
NON!
OH!".
President Emmanuel Macron had uttered a verb that suddenly resounded stormily across the nation: "emmerder."
Which can be translated very literally and yet only half correctly: "piss".
But let's start at the beginning: On Tuesday, Macron conducted an interview with some readers of the newspaper »Le Parisien«.
In this conversation, a family man and a nurse also had their say, expressing their frustration with the current vaccination situation in France.
Macron then uttered the following, already historic sentences: “Les non-vaccinés, j'ai très envie de les emmerder.
Et donc on va continuer de le faire, jusqu'au bout.
C'est ça, la stratégie. "
"The unvaccinated, I really want to ..." - yes, what exactly?
We'll come to the translation of this word, which actually occupied the entire French political and media sphere.
First of all, to continue with Macron: “And accordingly we will continue to do so until the bitter end.
That is the strategy. "
This statement defines the taste for the presidential campaign: It will be bitter.
The vocabulary is filthy, the vulgarity is a challenge in an already tense social situation - even in France one looks a bit perplexed or annoyed at the group of the unvaccinated.
»Em-mer-der« develops an exquisite aroma of provocation, is frowned upon on the palate, rude in the finish, with a bourgeois core of ingratiation to the colloquial.
It is difficult to translate into German in a satisfactory way, because only in French - to use another cliché - insults like champagne, translations usually sound more like sparkling wine.
German media wrote "annoy", "lose your weight" or "get on your nerves".
Which all comes around the corner with the amiable gruffness of several Bud Spencer dubbing, but not the harshness of an ashtray rinsed with old red wine, full of cold ash and soggy cigarette butts with lipstick, which is inherent in the French original.
But Macron speaks with a sadistic Gaulish joy in challenging - and with all understanding that even a head of state can be frustrated by the drastic pandemic situation and the reckless in it - more the tone of a monarch than a Macron.
The caution with which the head of state chose this word becomes clear when one looks at the statement in the context of the interview and realizes that it is an allusion to President Georges Pompidou's directive against the bureaucracy which he gave his advisor Jacques Chirac in 1966 replied: "Stop embarrassing the French." Referring to this, Macron said that he did not want the French as a whole to be embarrassing, but that he wanted the anti-vaccination groups to be especially serious. The main speaking here is someone who knows that those who refuse to be vaccinated will not be among his voters anyway. Which is why it was a
low-hanging
grape vine to degrade.
It is noteworthy that the actually much greater violation of morals was expressed by him later in the conversation. It is easier to translate: “When my freedom threatens the freedom of others, I become an irresponsible person. An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen. ”That is actually the more worrying sentence, because this is about the question of respect for the rule of law.
Macron is very aware of the tensions in French society, they dragged through his entire term of office, and were very visible and audible at the latest with the so-called yellow vests.
The denial of citizenship is a shocking admission that puts a lot at stake to set a trap for his greatest political opponents: Valérie Pécresse, the conservative presidential candidate who can be particularly dangerous for him, as well as the right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen and the right-wing populist Éric Zemmour .
It is difficult for these three to defend the electorate who oppose vaccination when it is clear that the overwhelming majority of French people are very emmerdés from this minority.
The denial of citizenship is a shocking admission that puts a lot on the line.
Macron's campaign rhetoric suddenly made me appreciate the sentence by Olaf Scholz, who proclaimed with pragmatic equanimity that he was "also Chancellor of the unvaccinated".
And I venture the extremely courageous prognosis that in a pandemic it is not the most sensible tactic in political communication to deliberately target a group of people ...
Ha!
I think I've now found a reasonably good translation of the word emmerder into German.
Every lover of the French language will have to ostracize me for it as well as everyone of the German language.
Because it's an Anglicism: fuck off.
At least it is reassuring to know that in Germany in a few weeks, when the fax with the number of cases for the Christmas season is finally brought by a mail rider, no ruler will allow himself a similarly nonchalant attack: "The unvaccinated, I really want to really fucking her off. "
