A tradition in France: What is Emmanuel Macron’s legacy for posterity?

The legacy of the French president to posterity is part of the history of the republic. Francois Mitterrand left the Louvre Pyramid and the new Bastille Opera. Jacques Chirac preferred his admiration for primitive art and built the Branly Museum. Following his election as France’s youngest leader since Napoleon Bonaparte, Emmanuel Macron hatched a plan to leave a dazzling cultural legacy of his tenure.

With his love of literature and encouraged by his wife, Brigitte, a professor of literature, Macron announced that he would create a “Cité Internationale de la Langue Française,” a center to celebrate and promote French. His home will be Villers-Cotterêts Castle, the symbolic birthplace of the national language, where King Francis I decreed in 1539 that French, rather than Latin, would be the nation’s official language.

After five years and multiple delays, Macron’s great project is about to open, in the luxuriously renovated Renaissance castle, after an enormous cost. Each ticket will cost 9 euros.

Dubbed by critical parliamentarians and the media as “Macron’s folly”, the language center has so far cost €209 million, almost double the original budget, when it was planned in 2018. The reconstruction of the cathedral alone Notre Dame is more expensive than this project.

“International City of the French Language”, a center to celebrate and promote the French.

The Cité is now expected to operate at an annual loss of €6 million after it opens next month. Local officials worry that he will turn into a white elephant and fail to deliver on Macron’s promise to boost the depressed local economy in the country’s northeast.

Jocelyn Dessigny, a deputy from the Aisne region for the far-right National Rally party, attacked it in parliament, calling it “Macron’s whim.” Franck Briffaut, mayor of Villers-Cotterêts, complained of a “lack of consultation” and quarreled with administrators over the size of the parking lot.

Jacques Krabal, a member of Macron’s Renaissance party who withdrew from re-election in the Aisne seat last year, sounded the alarm in a lengthy memo addressed to the Élysée Palace. “This project now seems to have been conceived more for a Parisian elite than for the local population, and even less for the wider Hauts-de-France region,” he wrote.

Writing about “the presidential madness,” the news magazine L’Express said: “It is a total improvisation. Locally no one believes in it.”

Reveal the French language

Paul Rondin, former executive director of the Avignon theater festival, who was appointed to lead the Cité in January, said it will honor French as a global language spoken by 540 million people in 40 countries. It will host permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as host conferences and provide a venue for resident artists, including comedians, actors and rappers from Africa, Belgium, the Caribbean and beyond.

Museo del Quai Branly.

“The ambition of the Cité is to reveal the French language as a source of creativity and exchange, of intellectual and aesthetic development, of pleasure and as a lever for social, economic and civic integration,” says its site.

The heart of the Cité is the glass-covered courtyard, a venue that seats 250, which features golden words hanging from the ceiling. There are two archaic and rarely heard words that Macron likes to use: carabistouille (meaning lie). and saperlipopette (violin sticks).

In a scathing report on the Cité, the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche suggested that its real purpose “is simply to become a center for the interpretation of Macronian language.”