From Emmanuel Macron to the tenors of the right, many politicians are currently saluting the action of the second president of the Fifth Republic, who died half a century ago.
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Tuesday April 2 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Georges Pompidou. The second president of the Fifth Republic died on April 2, 1974. At the end of his strength, exhausted by the illness against which he had been fighting for several years. The mandate of Georges Pompidou, elected for seven years, ended after less than five years. For a long time, his memory seemed a little faded, in the shadow of the statue of the Commander, the General de Gaulle whom he had succeeded. And his legacy seemed rather meager. And what is striking half a century later is that Pompidou has become fashionable. Oh yes ! On the right first, of course: David Lisnard, the president of the Association of Mayors of France, was only five years old in 1974, but he has had a cult following for many years. He publishes a book, Lessons from Pompidou. Laurent Wauquiez, Éric Ciotti, and all the others extol his memory. And for seven years, Emmanuel Macron has not missed an opportunity to salute the memory of his predecessor. All Pompidolians!
France before the oil crisis
This nostalgia can be explained by the fact that the Pompidou years exude a scent of carefreeness. It is the end of the Thirty Glorious Years, years of strong growth and full employment, before the oil crisis. A France which is modernizing at high speed at the end of the long reign of General De Gaulle and the storm of May 68. And then the figure of Pompidou became unifying, mixing the common sense of the peasant’s son and the love of poetry of the normalien, friend of artists. “He thought of both Old France and New France”summarized Emmanuel Macron, fan of the side “at the same time” of this former President who also worked at the Rothschild bank. As a result, Macronism sometimes resurrects accents of pompidolism. Like the timeless: “Stop annoying the French!” to denounce the excess of laws, standards and regulations, for example during the recent agricultural crisis. Or, another cry from the heart from Emmanuel Macron, a few months ago “I love the car!”
But Georges Pompidou is also a fairly dated France. Concrete, highways, hypermarkets, and then this cult of the car, all of this has gone out of fashion. We are gradually moving away from cars at all, at least in urban areas. The proof in Paris, where the riverside lanes, renamed Georges Pompidou Lanes, the height of modernity in the 1970s, are now largely pedestrian.