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THE PALACE LETTER. Emmanuel Macron will pronounce his wishes to the French this Saturday, a formality dreaded by the pens of presidents.
By Sebastien Schneegans
© Alexandre MARCHI / MAXPPP / PHOTOPQR/L’EST REPUBLICAIN/MAXPP
Published on
VS’is an immutable ritual of the Ve Republic. Every evening on December 31, at 8 p.m. sharp, the President presents his wishes to the French, a tradition inaugurated by General de Gaulle in 1960 and respected by his seven successors. This is an exercise as banal as it is essential.
Each speech – most often listened to with a distracted ear – seems identical to the previous one and yet… nobody would understand that the President of the Republic renounces this boring formality. The discourse, agreed and strictly codified, is still scrutinized by observers of political life and widely followed by the public on the news channels. The exercise attracts at least 10 million viewers every year. We thus try to detect, in what some consider c…
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