The Lorraine cross has enough arms for everyone to brandish a piece of it while believing that they are the only ones to have the real cross. In turn Emmanuel Macron poses as a defender of the "French spirit" embodied by General de Gaulle. This is the advantage of the presidential function: it makes the one who exercises it the successor of the founder of the Fifth Republic, thus offering him the leisure to claim to be the heir.
Read also: At Montcornet, Macron honors de Gaulle and celebrates "the French spirit"
It is both the charm and the limits of commemorative privilege. It allows you to enhance your own action by pretending to extol the merits of the celebrated model. When he exalts "the voice of coherence" , the gathering "beyond the discords which have become incidental and the disagreements which are often too fussy" , the current Head of State seeks the most prestigious and consensual of sponsorships before launch its offer of "national harmony" supposed to mark the restart of the country after the coronavirus crisis.
Fifty years after his death, no one can imagine how the father of free France would have reacted to a health crisis in a world that hardly resembles the one he knew and shapedAll presidents have done the same. The first year of his mandate,
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