French President Emmanuel Macron has angered the country’s left after seemingly echoing Renaud Camus, the right-wing author famous for popularising the idea of the “great replacement”.
Speaking during a closed-door Council of Ministers session on Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron reportedly expressed fear that France was going through a “process of decivilisation” due to a recent uptick of violent events against politicians and frontline government workers, in other words, protests against his leadership.
Although the meeting was reportedly away from the eyes of the public, French newspaper Le Parisien suggests that Macron’s comments during the meeting were custom-built for public dissemination, with previous Presidents said to have often used the council as a platform in the past.
According to a report by the newspaper, Macron spoke of the illegitimacy of recent violence against public officials, telling government ministers that efforts must be made to “counter this process of decivilization” in France.
Such a framing of affairs however has caused deep upset among France’s left wing, who have seen the use of the word “decivilisation” as being a reference to hard-right philosopher Remaud Camus, who published a book of the same name back in 2011.
An controversial thinker in the country, Camus is ultimately most famous for coining the concept of the “great replacement”, the idea that Western governments are actively looking to replace the native populations of European countries with third-world migrants.
“The president endorses the smoky ‘decivilisation’ of the racist Renaud Camus,” Left-Wing EU parliamentarian Manon Aubry said regarding Macron’s choice of words.
Another left-wing parliamentarian, Alexis Corbière, also attacked the use of the “decivilisation” term, saying that any claim that the use of the term was “pure coincidence” is either “a farce or distressing”.
Politicians on the right in France have meanwhile defended the use of the term, many saying that the word “decivilisation” ultimately best captures what is going on in the country.
One senior politician who has come out in support of Macron is French Republican Senator Bruno Retailleau, who said that he shared the sense that France was suffering from a “process of decivilisation”.
“Not only do I share it, but it’s a word that I was probably one of the first to use,” he reportedly said. “There is decivilisation when there are phenomena of barbarism, of savagery of society, when the school no longer manages to transmit knowledge, when there is an enterprise of deconstruction in France.”
Meanwhile, Republican Party President Éric Ciotti said that if Macron truly was afraid of such “decivilisation”, he should work on cracking down on mass migration.
Senior populist politician Marine Le Pen appeared to roll her eyes at the comment, telling French media that Macron is late to the party on this issue, which she has been fighting on for “years”.
“I have been talking about enslavement for years and I am being accused of all the evils,” Le Pen said. “Emmanuel Macron comes once again to prove us right on the observation that we are making, except that we have been ringing the alarm bell for several years and he did not hear.”
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