“I am struck by the resemblance between the moment we are experiencing and that of the interwar period”declared Emmanuel Macron, on 1er November 2018, highlighting the ” risk “ to see Europe “to be dismembered by nationalist leprosy and to be pushed around by external powers”. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the President of the Republic has always been haunted by the memory of the period, but his references have evolved according to his policy: while in June 2022, his call to “do not humiliate Russia” was a transparent allusion to the fate reserved for Germany by the victors of the First World War, the speech he gave in Prague on March 5, urging his allies not to be “cowards” facing a Russia that has become “unstoppable”, refers directly to the failure of the policy of appeasement of European democracies towards the IIIe Reich. Two years ago, Emmanuel Macron did not want to be the Clemenceau of the Treaty of Versailles (1919); from now on, he refuses to be the Daladier of the Munich agreements (1938).
That the French president chose Prague to awaken the specter of Munich owes nothing to chance: on the night of September 29 to 30, 1938, it was Czechoslovakia that the President of the French Council, Edouard Daladier, and the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered food to Adolf Hitler, hoping that by allowing him to annex the German-speaking region of the Sudetenland, they would save peace. Two years after the start of Russian aggression and while Ukraine’s strategic and diplomatic situation has deteriorated significantly in recent months, the analogy very clearly aims to remobilize Kiev’s allies and underline the seriousness of the moment. , in the hope of averting the risk of “fatigue” in public opinion.
In doing so, the Head of State has only reactivated a reference deeply anchored in the French political imagination, “Munich” having established itself as “the rallying cry of all those who consider dealing with the devil immoral, useless and counterproductive”to use the formula of the historian Pierre Grosser. “Yesterday Daladier and Chamberlain, today Le Pen and Orban. The same words, the same arguments, the same debates. We are in Munich in 1938,” did not hesitate to launch Valérie Hayer, head of the presidential majority list in the European elections, on Saturday March 9 in Lille, during her first campaign meeting.
From post-war to today
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