Geoffrey Branger / Photo credit: Paul Harle / Ina / Ina via AFP
Pension reform, riots, immigration law… The year 2023 has been eventful for the government. As tradition dictates, Emmanuel Macron is meeting the French this Sunday evening at 8 p.m. for his traditional New Year’s greetings, during which the Head of State hopes to relaunch his somewhat struggling five-year term. A speech to follow live on Europe 1. But these presidential wishes are a very old tradition at the Élysée. Europe 1 delved into the archives.
On December 31, 1959, President de Gaulle was the first to take part in the exercise. An address to the French from the Élysée, seated behind his desk. “French people, on behalf of all of us, I wish France a happy new year,” he declared. The first to bring a little change was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who, in 1974, wished a Happy New Year in front of a crackling fire, legs crossed and using the informal address. “Farewell to 1974 and hello to you, 1975”.
François Mitterrand’s little sentence entered history
But what still remains in history today is this sentence from François Mitterrand for the year 1995, a few months before his death: “I believe in the forces of the spirit and I will not leave you . Happy New Year my dear compatriots! Happy New Year and long life!”
To have a new dynamic, we must wait for Jacques Chirac to wish the French a happy new year in 1998. He is standing behind a desk, a president who wants to assert himself in the midst of a period of cohabitation. His successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2008, tried this exercise directly.
A very popular exercise
Finally, during greetings, presidents tend to be optimistic for the year to come, like François Hollande for the year 2015. “2014 was a tough year. 2015 must be a year of audacity, of action and solidarity.” In this case, the attacks had a hard impact on this year: “2015 was a year of suffering and resistance,” François Hollande insisted the following year.
In any case, it is a very popular exercise, more important in form than in substance, since in most cases no major announcement is made at that time.