Louis de Raguenel and Alexandre Chauveau / Photo credit: MATTHIEU MIRVILLE / DPPI VIA AFP 5:50 p.m., August 16, 2023, modified at 9:04 p.m., August 16, 2023
The former president publishes on August 22 “Le temps des Combats”, the second part of his memoirs. He evokes his five-year term, between 2009 and 2011 and returns in particular to the speech of Grenoble, where he had made the link between delinquency and immigration. He also slips a few words about his relations with other heads of state, including Barack Obama.
This is one of the events of this literary season. Nicolas Sarkozy will publish on August 22 battle time, published by Fayard, second volume of his memoirs. 560 pages, including two photo books, during which the former president recounts his five-year term between 2009 and 2011. “I wanted to take the reader by the hand, to make him experience these years at the Élysée as if he had been by my side throughout these events”, specifies the back cover.
The Grenoble speech: “My ‘crime’, that day, had been to link the subjects of delinquency and immigration”
“A veritable wall of outraged protests rose with the same momentum. […] This time, it was clear, for my opponents I had taken up the rhetoric of the extreme right. So, according to the newspaper The world, I even violated the charter on the rights of the child, of which France was a signatory and which provided that every child had the right to acquire a nationality. The conclusion was stated, without nuance and without finesse, by the president of the League of Human Rights, the obscure Michel Tubiana. With the Grenoble speech, I was the one who stirred up hatred against foreigners, suspected of ‘coming to eat our bread’. He went on to accuse me of repeating ‘the old racist and anti-Semitic refrains of the 1930s’. All of this was of course asserted in the name of the camp of reason, moderation and the Republic!”, he continues.
The former head of state continues: “I sincerely wondered how it was possible to find oneself so disconnected from what the French people thought and lived. These declarations and these behaviors exasperated them much more than the commentators or the pollsters could They prepared and boosted the rise of populist and brutal behavior. They pushed many voters to abstain, who no longer recognized themselves in what they saw and what they heard from the political class. is disastrous for democracy, for sincere humanism and for immigrants, who are increasingly victims of rejection and misunderstanding”.
Gérald Darmanin, “One of the most promising of his generation”
The Lola affair: “Macron was right to receive his parents”
Barack Obama: “I found it hard to forgive him for such a lack of conviction on such a serious subject”
“It helped open my eyes to the importance Americans attached to Turkey, and how far they were willing to go to help their friend [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan. (…) Barack Obama was willing to give in or at least… to let some time pass. Angela Merkel and I opposed it with a united front until the end of the night, so sure were we of the civilizational significance of this symbol. Neither she nor I was willing to give in to the threat. To renounce this appointment was to accept the diktat of the fatwas. Reason prevailed. From that day on, my relationship with Obama was never the same. I found it hard to forgive him for such a lack of conviction on such a serious subject.
Nicolas Sarkozy will dedicate his new book on August 22 in La Baule, a city run by Franck Louvrier, who was his adviser at the Elysée for five years.
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