“Piss off” the unvaccinated: where does this expression come from by Emmanuel Macron?

Words in defense. After Emmanuel Macron said his will “to piss off the unvaccinated “ during an interview with the readers of the Parisian, Christophe Castaner, president of the LREM group has stepped up to the plate. The former Minister of the Interior affirmed that this familiar outing was rather a reference to Georges Pompidou, President of the Fifth Republic from 1969 to 1974. The latter thus left to posterity a famous sentence which would have been pronounced in 1966.

At the time, George Pompidou was therefore Prime Minister under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle and would have declared: “But stop pissing off the French!”

This expression, which has become famous, would appear, according to The Express, for the first time in a book published in 2000. Entitled Stop pissing off the French! (ed. Plon), it is written by journalist Thierry Desjardins, former deputy general manager of Le Figaro. Georges Pompidou would then address a young enarch who had just entered politics, Jacques Chirac.

The then Prime Minister would have spontaneously used this expression to criticize a legislative bulimia specific to France. “There are too many laws, too many texts, too many regulations in this country! We are dying! Let them live a little and you will see that everything will be better! Leave them alone! We must liberate this country!”, he continued.

For Christophe Castaner, Emmanuel Macron would have taken this famous phrase from Georges Pompidou in order to recall the health policy currently in place in France. And underlines the turn started just before the end of year celebrations, when the executive decided to assume to put the “constraint” on the 5.6 million people not yet vaccinated. Responding to a reader from Parisian, the Head of State thus affirmed: “I’m not here to piss off the French. I plague all day against the administration when it blocks. Well, the unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off.”

“From that sentence, he confirmed what our health policy is since we have mastered and widely disseminated the vaccine in our country. That of making sure that we put the strain on those who are not vaccinated, and that we give maximum freedom to those who are vaccinated “, has justified Christophe Castaner to the micron of BFMTV.

However, this is not the first time that Emmanuel Macron has used this reference. “pompidolienne”. The president had already liked to use this expression in 2018, when he was questioned about a possible toughening of the Evin law, which restricts advertising for alcoholic beverages, on the sidelines of a meeting with farmers. On the campaign trail in 2017, he also said to the National Federation of Hunters: “I think we have to let people breathe. I think it was Georges Pompidou who had this sentence when he said to his ministers” Stop pissing off the French. ”

In September 2018, Emmanuel Macron, now president, again uses the expression: “Stop pissing off retirees”, he launches to the address of his collaborators, thus excluding to modify the inheritance tax during the five-year term. “We asked retirees to make an effort. But now, stop pissing them off”, he had argued.