Emmanuel Macron's statement caused an earthquake in the French political landscape.
In an interview with our readers on Tuesday evening, the president clearly targets the unvaccinated against Covid-19, at a time when the pandemic is at its highest in France for two years.
"Me, I'm not for pissing off the French," he says first of all.
But “I plague the administration all day long when it blocks them.
Well, there, the unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off.
And therefore, we will continue to do so, until the end.
This is the strategy ”.
No one doubts that the incumbent president weighed his words.
Certain habitual followers of the president make no secret of the “passion” of the tenant of the Élysée Palace for President Pompidou.
In the corridors of the presidential palace or in private, it is not uncommon to hear the president repeat at will a little phrase attributed to Pompidou and which he paraphrased in his response to our readers: "I am not to piss off the French ”.
Already in 2018, questioned about a possible hardening of the Evin law on the sidelines of a meeting with farmers, the Head of State was pleased to quote this formula attributed to his predecessor (1969-1974).
Read also "Stop pissing off the French!"
: in 2018, Macron quoted Georges Pompidou
In reality, Georges Pompidou uttered this sentence when he was still "only" Prime Minister of General de Gaulle.
The future President of the Republic would have made his remarks, one evening in 1966, in response to the problem of legislative inflation.
He then storms over one of his mission managers who came to see him with a mountain of decrees to sign.
Pompidou scolds… Jacques Chirac
"But stop pissing off the French!"
he gets carried away.
There are too many laws, too many texts, too many regulations in this country!
We're dying!
Let them live a little and you will see that everything will be better!
Leave them alone!
We must liberate this country!
".
The man who had the misfortune to carry the initials that evening, a young civil servant of 34 years just entering politics, answered by the name of… Jacques Chirac!
For Christian Jacob, this loan from the former cacique of the RPR is not appropriate. “It is precisely anti-Pompidou. Pompidou was
Stop pissing off the French
. There, it is
I want to piss them off and I will continue to do
it, ”insisted on LCI, the boss of the LR group in the National Assembly, forgetting the notion of“ non-vaccinated ”in the presidential words.
The formula, which has become a classic, has been used many times in recent years.
In 2013, Jean-François Cope, then leader of the opposition to François Hollande, adopted the Pompidolian formula in the National Assembly during a censorship debate by cursing Jean-François de Rugy, then at the perch.
In 2015, the presidential candidate Alain Juppé also appropriated the words of the tutelary figure of the French right.
He then interprets it as an injunction to revive the taste for public affairs among fellow citizens.
“President Pompidou said
Don't piss off the French.
We must give this desire for politics to the French, "he said during a debate at the University of Paris-Dauphine.