“We cannot accommodate all the misery in the world”: the story behind Rocard’s famous phrase, taken up by Macron

2023-09-24 23:06:45

He had been questioned by the sovereign pontiff, he responded by quoting Michel Rocard. While Pope Francis called on Europe not to remain indifferent to the fate of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, President Emmanuel Macron was keen to respond this Sunday evening, assuring that France was “doing its part”. And, above all, by recalling that he wanted to control immigration flows at the source, by reusing a well-known political maxim: “We cannot accommodate all the misery in the world. »

Attributed to Michel Rocard, this quote comes from statements by the Prime Minister dating from 1989, during the television program “Sept sur Sept”, in front of the journalist Anne Sinclair. This speech aimed, at the time, to justify the toughening of the government’s policy on immigration.

“We cannot accommodate all the misery in the world. France must remain what it is, a land of political asylum (…) but no more. (…) You should know (…) that in 1988, we turned back 66,000 people at our borders. To which are added around ten thousand expulsions from the national territory. And I expect that for the year 1989, the figures will be a little stronger,” declared Michel Rocard.

This image of the “misery of the world” that France cannot bear, the socialist Prime Minister took up several times in speeches and reports between 1989 and 1990, recalls Release.

“Truncated” declarations, considered Rocard

But in 1993, everything changed, explains The diplomatic world. Michel Rocard reconsiders his declarations, in order to differentiate himself from the right-wing government of Charles Pasqua, which invokes the expression “zero immigration” to describe its rigorous policy on the subject.

In 2009, Michel Rocard persisted and signed, and assured that his declarations had been truncated. “France and Europe can and must accept all their share of the world’s misery,” he said in a column published by the newspaper Release.

“An unfortunate inversion, which made me evoke at the start of a sentence the inevitable limits that economic and social constraints impose on any immigration policy, played the worst tricks on me: separated from its context, truncated, mutilated, my thoughts were constantly invoked to support conceptions that were the furthest from mine,” he then defended.

An expression repeated several times by Macron

Despite this, the formula has become anchored in French political discourse, and has been taken up many times by different leaders who assume their anti-immigration position. As in 2012, by Manuel Valls, then Minister of the Interior, who assured, during the evacuation of Roma camps, that France “cannot accommodate all the misery of the world and of Europe”.

Later, it was Emmanuel Macron who repeated this formula over and over again, since his election in 2017. “If you are not in danger and so on, you must return to your country. I can’t give papers to everyone who doesn’t have them. Otherwise, what do I do afterwards? We take our part but we cannot take all the misery in the world, as Michel Rocard said,” he said, for example, during a visit to the Restos du coeur to a woman in an irregular situation.

He will reproduce this “little phrase” in 2019, at the opening of a debate in the National Assembly on immigration. And he would repeat it two years later, again during an exchange with a man who had been waiting for eight years to obtain papers. “We take our part, but we cannot accommodate everyone,” he assured then. Enough to confirm the strict line desired by the president on the subject of immigration… Far from that which Michel Rocard wanted to defend… At the end.