Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He notably published Le coup de com 'permanent (Cerf, 2018).
President Macron's crisis storytelling was enriched by a visit to an Angers SME manufacturing masks. The object, after the address to the nation from the military field hospital in Mulhouse, is to script an emergency homelessness. The Head of State favors presence on the ground. After the front line in the East, this time it is the rear, that of production essential to the struggle effort, which is put forward. The communicative design is to "spectacularize" in the eyes of the French an Emmanuel Macron "in the oven and in the mill", far from the national palaces but as close as possible to the knots of combat.
The rhetoric of "transformation" gives way to an implicit call for the "reconstitution" of the national space.The desk from which the President speaks expresses a blue-white-red from which all references to the EU flag have disappeared. The symbolic effacement thus sounds like the questioning of the dominant doxa, even the collapse of which the young President made himself the agent against the sovereignists and other populists. The semantics duplicates again the elements of language declined for 15 days: "war", "sovereignty", "control", "production", etc. The "new world" is nothing more than the faded memory of an old campaign poster. Tested against the epidemic, the rhetoric of "transformation" gives way to an implicit call for the "reconstitution" of the national space.
This presidential road to Damascus is the admission of the generic misinterpretation of the initial promises that brought him to power.Something desperate emerges from the exercise, as if it were necessary to resort to the triangulation of all the anachronisms denounced still shortly by walkers suddenly confronted with the dead end of their vision of the future. It is to the exercise of his own transformation that a President who wanted to transform himself is now exposed. This presidential road to Damascus is the admission of the generic misinterpretation of the initial promises that brought him to power. The startupper became a logistician, acknowledging hollow, without saying it - the last sin of pride - that the word of crisis from the beginning had ignored the means to wage war. The “next day”, a new myth of a power to be tested, will be that of apostasy ... To see!