17/20 “Tell me about history”: “De Gaulle, the last king of France”, Le Figaro TV Île-de-France, Monday March 25, 9 p.m.
“
It is legally that I and my government have assumed the exceptional mandate of establishing a draft new Constitution and submitting it to the decision of the people
.
» General de Gaulle pronounced these words at Place de la République on September 4, 1958 during a large gathering.
Enough to launch the referendum campaign by which the one who is still only the last president of the Council of the Fourth Republic intends to establish a regime with a strong executive.
Eager to escape the political instability in which the country was bogged down, the French approved the new institutions by an overwhelming majority of 80%.
Enough to allow the General to have the means to reform France in depth.
Do his new powers make the first president of the Fifth Republic the “last of the kings of France”, as indicated by the somewhat provocative title of Patrick Rotman's in-depth and gripping documentary?
One thing is certain: never since the French Revolution has the Republic given so much power to a single man.
It is precisely this concentration of powers to the detriment of the legislature which shocked many left-wing politicians at the time.
The fact remains that, within the framework of this semi-presidential regime (and not presidential, like that of the United States), the man of June 18 pursues an effective policy over the long term.
Settlement of the Algerian war – certainly, in an extremely painful way –, active foreign policy to impose the singular voice of France between the two superpowers, the head of state took full advantage of the institutions.
These make him not the equivalent of a king of the Ancien Régime, but a republican monarch.
A democratic sovereign who, in 1962, anxious to strengthen the legitimacy of his successors, proposed by referendum to the French that the President of the Republic be elected by direct universal suffrage.
A proposal approved by 62% of voters.
Note that this documentary is presented as part of the program “Parle-moi d'Histoire”, presented by Guillaume Perrault, who hosts a very enlightening debate on set with General specialists Arnaud Teyssier and Xavier Patier.
To discover
TV tonight: our selection of the day
16/20 “Pompidou or the cruelty of power”, France 3, Wednesday March 27, 9:10 p.m.
Younger viewers should be startled: was this really how the politicians spoke?
Georges Pompidou, whose “peasant common sense” is more often commented on, impresses in these archives with his eloquence, his concern for the right word.
His taste for poetry undoubtedly had something to do with it.
We rediscover him carried away at the podium of the National Assembly, serious in a press conference, funny and amused during a trip to the provinces.
This documentary, broadcast on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, travels through his life at a rapid pace in order to fit into 1 hour and 45 minutes: his brilliant and indolent youth, the first steps to power, the whirlwind of May 68, the relationship made of esteem and ambiguities with de Gaulle, the violence of the Markovic affair, his policy of reforms at the Élysée… And, of course, his fierce fight against illness.
This remarkable film, produced by three fine connoisseurs of the Fifth Republic, only lacks one thing: a more in-depth insight into Pompidou's political vision.
A president attached to progress and social order, sensitive to modernity but concerned about the crisis of civilization in modern democracies.
A Gaullian who, some time before dying, made this recommendation to his ministers: “
Do not abandon yourself to compromise.
Don’t give in to mediocrity
.”
15/20 “Alexander the Great: the true story of a legendary conqueror”, RMC Story, Monday March 25, 9:10 p.m.
Alexander The Great ?
How familiar he seems to us, this ancient Macedonian king who seized the East before disappearing like a dream.
Rarely has life been dissected from so many angles: such a film probes the mysteries of his vanished tomb, such a series transforms him into a queer and tragic figure.
There is no deconstruction in this documentary which reconnects, in all simplicity, with the epic fiber.
The general's successive campaigns indeed have adventure in spades.
Inspired by the movement of The Iliad and its hero Achilles, the young king flies from victory to victory, from his misty Macedonia to the exotic gates of India, from the date palms of the Nile to the foothills of the Himalayas.
Without idealizing the piles of corpses - enemies and allies alike - which pave the way for this unparalleled gesture, the film places the Alexandrian moment in its time.
Alexander indeed owes a debt of gratitude to the Macedonian army and to the generals bequeathed to him by his father, Philip II.
But he stood out for his unfathomable thirst and his inexhaustible curiosity about the world which constantly pushed him forward, like an explorer.
A disciple of Aristotle, Alexander continued to send his mentor samples of the countries he crossed.
There was La Pérouse behind the emulator of Achille.
14/20 “Philae, a temple on the Nile”, France 5, Thursday March 28, 9 p.m.
There was a time when the goddess Isis was well established.
She resided on the sacred island of Philae, at the southern tip of Egypt.
Located 800 km south of the pyramids of Giza and the monuments of Memphis, this rock once bathed in the waters of the Nile, near the river's first cataract.
But there is a catch.
The island disappeared, submerged in the 1970s. The sanctuary it contained, on the other hand, was able to be saved from the waters and relocated to a neighboring island.
Educational, this documentary co-produced by France Télévisions nicely honors this remarkable architectural ensemble of Isis, embellished in the Hellenistic and Roman eras.
It recalls, above all, that this granite hailstone thrown on the Nile represented, for the ancient Egyptians, the sacred source of the Nile.
The house of Isis is also the last of the great sanctuaries of the kingdom invested by triumphant Christianity at the end of Antiquity.
The ankh of the temple's palm columns transforms into a cross.
And the hieroglyphs engraved by the last priests of Isis now give way to Coptic inscriptions.
Thus the history of ancient Egypt closes at Philae.
By one of those crazy coincidences that history reserves, the navel of Pharaonic civilization also received its swan song.
8/20 “I shot Andy Warhol”, ARTE, Thursday March 28, 10:40 p.m.
She wanted to shatter the most famous figure of American counterculture.
Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas swore, had betrayed her by stealing some of her ideas and, above all, by not supporting her.
She shot him one day in June 1968 and injured him.
The bullet had come from afar, from a poverty-stricken childhood marked by sexual violence, from a sad bohemian youth spent as a prostitute.
This young woman harbored plans in the rooms of bad New York hotels to crush men as well.
Her suffering served as inspiration for her texts, sarcastic and virulent, while making her sink into paranoia.
Because he was the first to so strongly denounce American patriarchy, his feminism made Valerie Solanas an icon in the eyes of certain defenders of women's emancipation.
Ovidie, a radical feminist director herself, wants to pay tribute to him through this pop and nervous documentary.
But the social and cultural context is not sufficiently supported.
A perspective would have been necessary to understand the fate of this pamphleteer who cried out for people to listen to her.
Or, his personality seems so tormented, suffering from a fierce obsessive neurosis, so that no one listens to him