We have the pleasure of inviting you to the lecture:
Emmanuel Macron and (French) History
given by
Pr Marc Olivier BARUCH
Director of Studies, School for Advanced Studies
in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris
on Tuesday, April 9, at 17h00
at New Europe College (Plantelor 21)
***
During a press conference held in February 2018, Emmanuel Macron presented his accession to the French Presidency as ‘the consequence of a form of brutality of history, a break-in, because France was unhappy and worried’ («le fruit d’une forme de brutalité de l’Histoire, une effraction car la France était malheureuse et inquiète»).
It should be seen as symptomatic that the newly-elected President refused to present his stunning success as the result of an especially clever political strategy. Pretending to break with old-times politics (often referred to by the derogatory terms « l'ancien monde »), he rather saw his victory as a by-product of some kind of historical law. Moreover, on the very day he was elected, Emmanuel Macron organized his first public speech in a grandiloquent way, setting it at night in the Louvre Palace – the symbol of the French monarchy.
It therefore seemed interesting to analyze the complex relations between Emmanuel Macron, first as a candidate then as a president, and history, specifically French history. We did not refer for this, or only episodically, to Macron's public speeches, a tightly formatted genre, in spite of the many historical references they offer. But much happens to be drawn from the reading, both literal and between the lines, of Macron's programmatic book, Révolution.
Biographical note
Born in 1957, and a former student of the École polytechnique and the École nationale d'administration, Marc Olivier Baruch has served since 1981 as a civil servant in the French Ministries of Education and Culture and by the Prime Minister's Office.
His career shifted to the academic world in 1997 when he became a research fellow in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. His doctoral thesis, "Servir l'État français. L'administration en France de 1940 à 1944" was published in 1997 and made him a key expert in the latest post-war trial of the French civil service, French Republic vs Maurice Papon.
He got tenure as a full professor when elected, in 2003, as directeur d'études in the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He has been invited to many European and American universities and was a visiting professor at the Universtiy of Toronto in the fall of 2010. His teaching and research deal with contemporary European political history, especially of the State and the Civil Service. As a specialist of the Vichy regime, he has also published a general story of the period ("Le Régime de Vichy", 1996), and edited a collective study on the purges of French society after WWII ("Une poignée de misérables: l'épuration de la société française après la Seconde Guerre mondiale", 2003). He also edited, with Vincent Guigueno, an analysis of the élites of France during the German occupation ("Le choix des X : l'École polytechnique et les polytechniciens 1939–1944", 2000) and with Vincent Duclert, "Serviteurs de l'État : une histoire politique de l'administration française, 1875–1945".
His latest book, "Des lois indignes? les historiens, la politique et le droit", 2013 deals with the complex relationship between history, politics and law in contemporary France.
This event is organized in partnership with
L’École Doctorale Francophone en Sciences Sociales (EDSS),
CEREFREA, University of Bucharest
Unde?
New Europe College
Str. Plantelor Nr. 21, 023971 București
Când?
2019-04-09 - 2019-04-09