Serge Grouard is LR mayor of Orléans and president of Orléans Métropole.
The city of Orléans has just designated the young woman who will feature Joan of Arc during our next historical celebrations.
These festivities bring together, each year, on May 8, all Orleans residents, without any distinction, religious, political or social.
On that day,
"half the city watches the other half pass"
, according to a comical formula which, although exaggerated, retains, decade after decade, century after century, all its relevance and all its value.
By celebrating Joan of Arc, in its military, religious and civil dimension, Orléans celebrates its unity and exalts its history, Orléans commemorates its heroine.
In Orléans, Joan of Arc brings us together, uplifts us and inspires us.
At the same time, the mayor of a municipality in the Loire, thanks to the rehabilitation of a square, decided in all discretion, according to a deliberation voted on by the municipal council in 2018,
"to remove what is obstructing the square»
.
And, in this case, it is for him a statue of Joan of Arc and a mission cross.
Only the bust of a renowned industrialist escaped this offensive and imbecile unbolting.
Faced with the outcry caused by this decision taken behind the backs of the inhabitants and the ignorance of many elected officials, the mayor indicated that he would make a new place for the statue of Joan of Arc in the public space of the city.
Thus, this mobilization undoubtedly prevented the statue from being stored in a private and confidential space, an antechamber of
A nation needs to know its ancestors, to celebrate its roots, in other words to understand its history, in all its complexity.
Serge Grouard
To say that ignorance, and not ideology, guided his action, as it seems to do, is neither a consolation nor a defence.
Not being a specialist in the Maid of Orléans is one thing, considering that her disappearance from public space is harmless is another.
Inevitably, there is in this unbolting an admission: that of considering, probably in the name of a secularism brandished like a sword that strikes blindly, that this statue eaten away by time, is very cumbersome and that the rust that ends by devouring it accelerates and justifies the amnesia of the nation.
To think that is to forget, precisely, that this memory is our base, the symbol of a rootedness without which we fall backwards at the first stormy wind.
A nation needs to know its ancestors, to celebrate its roots, in other words to understand its history, in all its complexity.
To use the aptness of Kundera's words,
“the struggle of memory against oblivion is the struggle of freedom against tyranny”
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Joan of Arc is part of our history, she embodies values and struggles which, in Orléans, command admiration and make the young women dream who apply, each year, to represent her.
Joan of Arc's armor is neither rusted nor cracked.
In Orléans, we have been polishing it for centuries,
