Chapter 5: Memory as a Marker of Political Affiliation

Abstract

On 16 April 2007, just a week before the first round of the Presidential elections, the candidate of the conservative UMP, Nicolas Sarkozy, went on a political pilgrimage to the tomb of Charles de Gaulle in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. For a candidate who had always had a problematic relationship with Gaullism, and just six years previously had mocked the French right’s obsession with the memory of de Gaulle as a ‘caricature’, this pre-electoral visit seemed like an attempt to unite the UMP through acceptance of the party’s symbolic traditions. However, the speech Sarkozy gave at the general’s grave went beyond the opening tributes to de Gaulle as the man who ‘incarnated the passion of France’. It focused far more on the candidate’s new defining concept of fighting ‘systematic repentance’ of the left and instilling pride in France’s history, which he reiterated almost word for word three days later in Marseille’s Parc Chanot in front of a group of rapatriés, who were eager to hear the candidate’s support of their historical narrative of Gaullist betrayal. Here, the new Sarkozyst narrative of fighting against ‘repentance’ demonstrated a key development after 2005, in which high politics in France adopted the vocabulary of ‘memory wars’ and the debates about the memory of colonialism to define political identities of parties. Despite the theatrics of visiting de Gaulle’s grave, Sarkozy’s constant railing against a so-called repentance of the left aligned with the adoption of a pied-noir narrative of colonial nostalgia and therefore a repudiation of the UMP’s Gaullist record. This chapter will examine the transformation of the political conversation around political memory since 2005 to turn the remembrance of the colonial past into a marker of political identities.