Louise Bernard, with Alexis Patri
The Miss France company has announced the name of the city which will host the 2023 edition of the competition, as well as the destination of the preparation trip and the faces of the regional candidates. The choice of the host city breaks with the tradition of Miss France. This is unfortunately not what will be retained from this sequence.
Île-de-France will not host the Miss France 2023 competition. Diane Leyre, elected Miss France 2022, was first Miss Île-de-France and it is therefore her region which should have hosted the edition 2023 of the contest. It is customary for the region of origin of the Miss winner of the previous year to host the course the following year. But the Miss France company announces that the election of Miss France 2023 will take place in Châteauroux, in the Center-Val de Loire region.
This will not be a first for the city. Châteauroux had already hosted the Miss France competition in 2018, the year of Maëva Coucke’s coronation. The Miss France company also announced the destination of the preparation trip: the candidates will fly to Guadeloupe. Unfortunately, the usual ceremony announcement sequence was marred by a flurry of racist slurs.
Regular cases of racism and anti-Semitism
Lévana Boulou, born in France to Camourénais parents and just elected Miss Oise, found herself the target of racist comments on social networks: “I did not know that Oise was in Africa”, “the great replacement has already started” allowed themselves to write some Internet users. The Miss France society and the Oise Committee gave their support to Lévana Boulu, in the face of these racist attacks which are reprehensible by law.
This is not the first time that a candidate has been the victim of racism. Several Miss France, just elected, had suffered the same fate, such as Clémence Bottino in 2020, Flora Coquerel or even Sonia Rolland a few years earlier. Another candidate, April Benayoum, had been the target of anti-Semitic tweets. She had several perpetrators convicted.