Military adventurism, authoritarian drift, ostentatious nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire… Back from Istanbul, where he lives half his time, the Turkish writer - and emeritus research director at the CNRS - Nedim Gürsel deciphers the instrumentalisation of the past by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He has chosen to make the Ottoman period the subject of his new novel
L'Amour et l'Insurrection - Le voyage de Candide à Istanbul,
published this month in Turkey and being translated in France (Actes Sud).
LE FIGARO.- How to explain President Erdogan's stubbornness in transposing the Ottoman past into modern Turkey?
Nedim GÜRSEL.-
Rhetoric is not new.
Twenty years ago, then mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan decided to celebrate with great pomp the capture of Constantinople in 1453 by Sultan Mehmet II.
At the time, it seemed naive.
But people joined in and he has since made it a political instrument.
Currently in decline - his party, the AKP has suffered a serious
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