A few days ago, Green MP Sandrine Rousseau accused Julien Bayou of psychological violence against his ex-companion, leading him to resign from his post as national secretary of the party.
Asked by Le Monde this Tuesday, October 4, Julien Bayou replies that Sandrine Rousseau
“has gone too far”
and castigates here a “misdirection” of feminism.
He thus accuses her of
“confusing feminism and McCarthyism”
.
But where does this last word come from?
Le Figaro sheds light on its history.
To discover
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McCarthyism, which can also be written as McCarthyism, refers to a dark period in the United States during the Cold War.
In February 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a senator then unknown to the general public, brandished a list of 205 names
"known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who are still working and shaping State Department policy"
.
Born shortly after from the pen of a Washington Post cartoonist, McCarthyism designates, as the Robert indicates
, "the policy of denunciation and persecution"
which tracks down alleged opponents to the reprimand of McCarthy by the Senate in 1953.
“I have lists of men”
The affair is racing and leads some to stuff pell-mell into these blacklists their personal enemies.
Senator William Fulbright noted then a year after the end of this policy of denunciation:
"The young senator from Wisconsin took so much advantage of the fears and hatred of uninformed and gullible people that he started a fire in the prairies, that neither he nor anyone else can control.”
It is estimated that several million Americans have been interviewed in four years.
Julien Bayou's image has something eloquent in that it recalls this witch hunt;
today it would be less of a manhunt than a manhunt.
“McCarthyism is a completely different subject,
recalls the deputy to Le Monde.
It is to say: "I have lists of men", it is to make accusations that you cannot contradict because there is no investigation.