Arthur de Laborde, edited by Gauthier Delomez / Photo credits: CHRISTOPHE SIMON / POOL / AFP
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07:54, August 18, 2023
Emmanuel Macron gave a first speech in Bormes-les-Mimosas on Thursday evening, before the Council of Ministers for the start of the school year. The president took this opportunity to appeal to the youth, a few weeks after the urban riots. A message of authority that introduces his political return.
Five days before the Council of Ministers for the start of the school year, Emmanuel Macron came out of his summer break this Thursday evening. The president participated, as every year, in the commemorations of the Provence landings in Bormes-les-Mimosas. This concise 13-minute speech centered around national memory was an opportunity for the Head of State to appeal to young people, after a summer marked by urban violence.
A beginning of response to urban riots
Without ever being explicit, without ever clearly referring to the riots, Emmanuel Macron seems to provide the beginning of an answer by addressing young people. “There is in our young people an appetite for freedom, an idealism, which sometimes seeks itself and to which we must respond. Otherwise, this noble aspiration sometimes turns against itself and undermines the foundations of this nation of freedom, of equality and fraternity initiated in 1789”, declares the president, who adds: “This sum of tangled destinies which increases French youth, generation after generation, faithful to the spirit of the Enlightenment.”
The Head of State insists on freedom, on rights, but also on duties. “Out of this common field prospers disunity, the division that paves the way for chaos and injustice,” he says. A message of authority far from being neutral, while the theme of order should be one of the strong axes of the political return. A way also for Emmanuel Macron to land in the center of what he calls “the republican arc”, of which he defines the contours himself.