Emmanuel Macron and the New France

THE outcomes of the French presidential elections were announced on Sunday,  May 7, with Emmanuel Macron, the centrist political leader, having 65.8% of the votes as against ultra-nationalist Marine Le Pen’s 34.2 percent.  It had been a bitterly contested election. So much was at stake – no less than the future of France and of Europe itself. Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the far-right Front National, campaigned under the banner of xenophobic nationalism. She promised to act tough on immigration, pull France out of the EU, and revoke the citizenship of naturalised citizens with known terrorist sympathies. For her, it would always be “les français d’abord” – the French first! For Macron and his En Marche! liberal centrists on the other hand, the campaign was for winning back the heart and soul of France – for solidarity, social justice, non-discrimination and reaffirmation of France’s place in the heart of Europe. I spent some of my growing-up years as a student in France; first, at the provincial city of Vichy, in the heartland of the glorious Auvergne region, and later in Paris. I have drunk deep from the fountain of French intellectual culture. Blaise Pascale, François de la Rouchefoucauld, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas – among the greatest of the world philosophers – have been the thinkers with whom I have shared a spiritual kinship. If truth be told, I have nursed an ancient grievance against France because of the racist and humiliating manner she has treated our glorious continent.  No leader in the so-called francophone African countries could hope to survive if they decided to pursue an independent policy. Sekou Toure tried it in Guinea, with disastrous consequences. So did the martyred Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso and the lugubrious Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire. There is some speculation that the French and the Americans know a thing or two about Boko Haram that we don’t. Their murderous exploits have been successful in the north east of our country because they could kill and flee back to French and American military training camps in neighbouring Chad and Niger.  The French view our country as the greatest threat to their colonial ambitions on our continent while the Americans have never forgiven us for rebuffing their leprous Africom project. The French have a tendency to arrogance; but it is not arrogance entirely without basis. France is also a land of many virtues. The homeland of Lamartine, Honoré Balzac, Victor Hugo, Sartre, Régis Debray and Bernard Henri-Lévy is also the land where the apostles of the New Enlightenment stand sentry with all the oppressed of the earth.


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