If Nicolas Sarkozy is extraordinary for one thing it is for continually grabbing the headlines – literally occupying all the space. Increasingly he does this by making apparently off-the-cuff and controversial remarks on a subject for which no one is prepared. He creates a storm of protest, then a day or so later he explains himself, putting his controversial speech into a much more common sense, although often populist, context. But while all that’s going on, the important things like reforms are forgotten.

On Wednesday night he did this during a speech at a dinner for France’s principal Jewish council, CRIF. He announced that from September this year every 9 or 10 year old child, during their last year in primary school, will be given “the memory of a French child who was a victim of the Shoah” to carry with them. Virtually no consultation, no preparation, no if’s or buts. What the President decrees happens, and now every little Mohamed is going to be given (confié) the memory of a little dead Shlomo to carry around with him for a year.

And as he obviously hoped, nobody is talking about anything else. Push to one side for the moment the rights and wrongs of yet again forgetting all the gypsy children, all the Communist children, what’s important is M. Sarkozy’s manipulation of “Le devoir de la mémoire”. I’ve written in Prospect about this, to me strange phenomenon which seems to have taken hold of many people in France. The duty of memory. Not “lest we forget” but “you must remember”. Memory becomes confused in the popular mind with history; memories are mostly based on emotions, so history is reduced to a series of emotional events – slavery, colonialism, especially the War in Algeria, and Vichy France. The President further works on the emotions by always picking children. Last year he decreed that children should listen to the adolescent Guy Moquet’s last letter to his parents before he was shot. Now he has taken this duty of memory a stage further by decreeing that all French ten year olds will be saddled with the morbid memory of a child his/her own age who was murdered in horrendous circumstances and with whom he/she is now supposed to identify.

An extraordinary imposition on a child’s psyche to saddle them with guilt for something they had nothing to do with, that happened 55 years before they were born. Far more salutary to decree that all French adults will be confié the name of a French adult responsible for rounding up those 12,000 children and make it a duty to think on how any human being, let alone one who has had the benefit of a French education, comes to do that. But of course adults vote, children don’t.

Many people, particularly in the professions affected – teachers, historians and child psychologists – have protested. Simone Veil, herself deported to Auschwitz as a child, has strongly protested. But that’s the clever ruse that Sarkozy is developing more and more: you make a statement that incites immediate reaction and revolt, which in turn makes some people believe you are doing something radical. You then justify the controversial outpouring with a second statement that clarifies and seems a step in the right direction, so that the protesters are made to look like dreadful old reactionaries. Thus having made his decree on Wednesday night, on Friday morning the President says that this is all part of moral education: everyone, he insists, must recognise and respect everyone else, especially their differences.

Now that statement is truly revolutionary in France. Recognising that people are different, with different faiths and different histories, is admitting the diversity of French society. Only a few years ago that was taboo. Azouz Begag, when he was Minister for Equality of Opportunity, made it his mission to bring that word into the French vocabulary and he had a huge problem getting it accepted. In a nation where everyone is equal (it says so above every town hall) you cannot admit diversity – and now Azouz’s implacable enemy has adopted the word for himself. But that too is part of his technique.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.