2024-01-02 06:00:08
A discreet parade. Several close friends of Emmanuel Macron, including his influential memoir advisor, Bruno Roger-Petit, and his former writer, Jonathan Guémas, recently visited screenwriter Eric Benzekri to watch the first episode of Feverthe new series from the author of Black Baron, expected in mid-March on Canal+. After three very political seasons around the Socialist Party (PS), the former collaborator of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Julien Dray this time explores the identity divides that cross France.
The series takes place in the world of French football, plunged into a media storm. During an awards ceremony, a dark-skinned player headbutts his coach by calling him a « sale toubab » (“dirty White”). A war of influence ensues between the club’s communicator and a spin doctor. Who “instrumentalizes the event by fueling the identity and social divisions that are cracking the country”according to a press release from the channel.
Once again, the one who, in Black Baron, had written the rise of a centrist candidate to the Elysée, well before the election of Emmanuel Macron, hits the nail on the head, the fiction, written three years ago, outpacing reality. The scenario of Fever indeed singularly echoes the drama of the Crépol ball (Drôme), during which a teenager was killed, at the end of November 2023, during clashes between rugby players from the village and young people from a sensitive district of Romans-sur- Isère.
“Spectacularization of politics”
The event was immediately the subject of divergent readings, the right and the extreme right, notably through CNews, promoting the thesis of a ” civil war ” and racial, at the risk of fueling identity tensions, while others, on the left, argued for a tragic but banal fight gone wrong.
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When Eric Benzekri − he likes to quote Guy Debord: “In the truly upside down world, the true is a moment of the false” − started writing Fever, no one understood where he was going. Three years later, here we are. “There are culture wars when there is no more politics”notes the screenwriter.
Around Black Baron, fiction and reality were already intertwined in a disturbing way. The slap received by Emmanuel Macron in 2021 during a crowd bath echoed that received, a year earlier, by the (fictitious) president, Amélie Dorendeu, in season 3. In 2020, the series had portrayed a blogger anti-system, which caused cold sweats at the Elysée, where there were fears of the emergence of a populist figure disrupting the game of 2022. It was Eric Zemmour… “In politics, reality creates fiction, and fiction creates reality”repeats former Élysée advisor Gaspard Gantzer.
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