Social democrat?
Yes: public education, equal opportunities, freedom.
Republican?
French Republican: secularism, Enlightenment, division of powers. I don’t have a drop of French blood… but France runs through my veins.
What is France?
A country in which a Moroccan is minister and a Barcelonan is prime minister.
You, and you aspired to be president…
I had become naturalized French when I was twenty. And I was mayor, deputy, minister…
Born in the Horta neighborhood!
On Campoamor Street: sweet memories.
2019: aspiring mayor of Barcelona.
An impossible adventure, but I freed Barcelona from an independence mayor.
Takes pride.
A lot: the “making a Valls” thing has remained! I chose the lesser evil, it is patriotism.
Pedro Sánchez will say the same.
No! The PSOE should have agreed with the PP to overcome the independence movement.
What will it feel like to see Sánchez invested?
Sadness. Seeing the Spanish left opposing the transition… it saddens me.
If it is for good and that we live in peace…
Falsifying history is always very bad: in 1714 there was a war of monarchical succession, not a war between Spain and Catalonia.
What did you learn about politics here?
Here the parties have exaggerated power. And he denies his own history.
For example?
Elcano and Magellan, Emperor Charles V, Charles III, the Cortes of Cádiz, Prim… they deserve to be praised! It is not done. And the transition is reviled as the “regime of 78”… but it was a democratic feat!
Do the French accept their history?
They are proud of the history of France! I learned it at school.
What did he learn?
Democracy and human rights, respect freedom of conscience, think with one’s own criteria: be a good citizen.
What else did you take away from Barcelona?
I met Susana, this wonderful love, because in life not everything is politics.
Very Camusian.
Camus is another hero. Leftist, he is brave and compares red totalitarianism to the Nazis. Some still don’t dare today! And he condemned torturers and terrorists.
As prime minister, did you confront ETA in France?
I supported the government of Spain and prevented French soil from being a sanctuary for ETA members.
And he lived firsthand the jihadist crime against Charlie Hebdo magazine.
I went to the editorial office bloody. I knew those murdered. Charb had caricatured me a lot… luckily! There the world visualized the dividing line.
Divider between what and what?
Between freedom and oppression. The freedom to give your opinion, draw, criticize, caricature, satirize, blaspheme… is untouchable! That’s France! Charb, threatened, was brave and is an example of courage for everyone.
What is Charb’s legacy?
He wrote that to stop satirizing something or someone so as not to hurt their susceptibility… is to belittle and discriminate against them.
Certainly.
Those who victimize themselves can end up being executioners who censor and even kill.
The cartoonist Charb, an example of courage… What is courage, Mr. Valls?
Doing the right thing humanly in a difficult moment, without calculating anything. “Courage is the first of qualities because it guarantees all the others,” Churchill said.
Give me another example of courage.
Jean Moulin: prefect of Chartres, he does not flee from the Nazis. They pressure him to accuse some Senegalese shooters as rapists. And he refuses! They torture him. He is afraid of failing and cuts his neck with a piece of glass. He will survive. Then he will organize the resistance. And they will kill him. That’s value!
Of course… Another example.
Clemenceau! He was a doctor to the poor. A humanist, he published Dreyfus’s J’accuse. He supported Monet and the Impressionists. He was the father of the French victory in 1917. And he was a lover of women…
Another brave one.
Geneva, 1553: the Aragonese Servetus, as a heretic, is burned along with his book by the rigid Calvin, and soon his secretary, Sébastien Castellion, will write: “Killing a man is not defending a doctrine. It’s killing a man. When the Genevans executed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine. “They killed a human being.”
Big! And current. Are you brave?
I maintain my basic convictions without looking at the personal cost. In the face of populism, there is no other system better than ours: now I long to reorganize the republican left in France against a now woke and anti-Semitic left.
