Coup d’état
Talleyrand cannot let the week pass without noting the strange news out of France that the publication of an open letter from over 1,000 members of the French armed forces is being seen as a threat to seize power. Perhaps it was meant to honour the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death. Or perhaps to honour their forebears who rose up against Charles de Gaulle in 1961. De Gaulle, once known as the asparagus, keeps on rising again himself in the popular mind. Emmanuel Macron considers himself a Gaullist and keeps the General’s memoirs in a conspicuous place in his office. The people who filled the streets yesterday for May Day would have found it difficult to resist reminding themselves of the events that led to de Gaulle’s final loss of power.
‘Coup d’état’ is a specially French concept. One has to wonder about a people that cannot give up thinking about it (as opposed to people elsewhere who actually do it). Or about a people whose cyclical memories keep going back to the Great Man, le jupitérisme, the barricades, the force de frappe, and assorted other phenomena that most people around the world have left well behind. There are no more coups in Spain. As to Germany, why don’t more French look at Angela Merkel and say, ‘we could really use one of those’?
If Marine Le Pen, the proud daughter of a Gaullist-era legionnaire, does take power one day soon, she’ll almost certainly do so wearing the vestments of a Great Man. But what if by some miracle she transforms herself into a Mutti like Merkel? Then even Talleyrand will probably admit that France could do worse.