At Mont-Saint-Michel, Emmanuel Macron calls for “not to fear the future”

by time news

2023-06-06 08:39:20

Emmanuel Macron climbed very high on Monday June 5. Where, he observed, the “sky is almost palpable”. From the cloister of the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel, after having climbed with his wife, Brigitte, the 350 steps which separate the mainland from the thousand-year-old monument, the Head of State was able to distance himself from what he describes as “crash of the world”.

On the eve of a fourteenth day of mobilization against the pension reform, the President of the Republic has distanced himself from the news. And, like a campaign candidate, launched into a eulogy to “this art of being French”embodied, according to him, by the small piece of land wedged between Brittany and Normandy.

Under the amused gaze of the sisters of the monastic fraternity of Jerusalem, Emmanuel Macron praises this humanist and spiritual France, eternal and resilient in the face of the perils of history and the upheavals of nature. “Mont-Saint-Michel is capable of facing the future”, ensured, in 1983, François Mitterrand. “Let’s not fear the future”pleads the Head of State today, recalling that“here had been restored the possibility of an island”.

An allusion to the Couesnon dam, which, in 2015, after twenty years of work and research, was able to stop the silting up of the mountain. An evocation, too, of the novel of the same name, The possibility of an island, by Michel Houellebecq, published in 2005, narrating the Baudelairean desire of a hero prey to melancholy. The cloister, an architectural feat where “the centuries are intertwined”and or “Each pillar of one age supports the next”is, in the eyes of the Head of State, the sign of possible reconciliation between “Human genius and the greatness of nature”.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Heritage: Mont-Saint-Michel, a marvel of construction

A metaphor for drawing a future where progress prevails over ecological anxiety. For Emmanuel Macron, Mont Saint-Michel is proof that the “man’s hand” is not destructive but can be restorative. Quoting the writer Charles Péguy, he compares the French to this “people of architects” quick to transform and embellish. “This place is that of the mastery of destiny by will”he bursts into flames as, behind him, the landscape gradually floods under the effect of the tide. “The Mount is proof that nothing is impossible if we adapt our use of the world to changing elements. Let’s not doubt it, because our great and old nation has always known how to meet the challenges of time., does he point.

Seduction from the right

The pension reform, which his opponent from the Les Républicains (LR) camp, Laurent Wauquiez, had described a few weeks earlier as “reform of the XXe century “is behind him. “Things are calmer than they have been”he noted earlier in the day, warning against those who try to rekindle the flames of anger: “We must not get used to a radicalism of minorities”he shouts.

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