The opposition to Emmanuel Macron is so tough right now that, whatever he does, they always reproach him for the worst intentions. This is what happened this Monday in his tribute to the anti-Nazi resistance. Critics of the French president once again accused him of instrumentalizing history and of implicitly appropriating progressive values, such as social protection, which he himself undermines with measures such as delaying the retirement age by two years.

Macron began in Paris the festive day of May 8, which celebrates the capitulation of Hitler’s Germany, with traditional honors in front of the statue of General Charles de Gaulle and before the tomb of the unknown soldier, under the Arc de Triomphe. The Champs Elysées were much more heavily armored by the police than usual to prevent protests.

Hours later, the president went to Lyon, specifically to the Montluc memorial, to pay tribute to Jean Moulin, founder of the National Council of Resistance (CNR), and to those who accompanied him in the fight against the Nazi occupiers, as well as to the thousands of Jews deported, with the complicity of the Vichy regime, to the extermination camps.

Macron already generated discontent in some sectors, in September 2022, when he decided to pull off the National Refoundation Council, a kind of forum for debate on the great challenges of the future. They then accused him of having chosen a name with too obvious historical evocations and with the same initials as the National Council of Resistance. The fiercest against the head of state blamed him for a blatant instrumentalization of one of the most dramatic episodes in French history. Macron’s forum, however, has remained almost a pipe dream, due to the lack of enthusiasm and skepticism of some of its potential participants, such as the unions.

Several union leaders, especially the CGT, blamed Macron yesterday for the hypocrisy of extolling the National Council of Resistance, the embryo of the future French State after 1945, with a very important legacy of values, such as independent trade unionism, the revaluation of wages, Social Security and protection for the weak, when he himself is dismantling or eroding some of those social conquests.

In his speech, Macron avoided drawing an explicit parallel with the current situation, although he stressed the validity of the spirit of resistance as “fidelity to the deep aspiration of our nation, independence and humanism.” “Yes, we live in a country where the idea of ​​the Republic and that of human progress cannot be separated with impunity,” he stated. Republican France is inseparable, after the Enlightenment, from the great revolution of the values ​​of justice and freedom.

The president referred to the founding of the National Resistance Council, in 1943, as an example of national unity above disparate political affiliations. Macron highlighted the presence of communists, radicals, republicans, Christian democrats and, in addition, the main unions, including the CGT. “Jean Moulin is the man from London (where he received instructions from de Gaulle) and yet the inside resisters are there,” he stressed. The Head of State recalled that, since its inception, the CNR “carried the deep ambition of a Fourth Republic that will establish universal suffrage open to women, nationalize energy, found Social Security and free the press from the force of money” . According to Macron, it was this CNR program, this solid and consensual base, that allowed De Gaulle, in 1944, “to impose his provisional government on the Americans, who wanted to place France under guardianship at the time of liberation”. .

It was a solemn act and a history lesson for Macron, but each one could interpret it in their own way, as a neutral exposition or as the Elysee’s desire to take advantage of it to get out of the acute phase of national tension.