“Piss off” is too rude for Emmanuel Macron to have let it slip lightly, argues the British journalist John Lichfield, recalling cases of inelegant words launched by his predecessors.
In 1815, it is by the word “Shit !”* That a French general, Pierre Cambronne, replied on the battlefield of Waterloo to a British general who suggested that he surrender.
Since then, coarse or slang terms from time to time disfigure (but only from time to time) or brighten up the starched universe of “Official speech” in France.
Thus, recently, President Emmanuel Macron, whose dense, academic and directive language is often mocked, used a somewhat trivial expression during an interview with a newspaper, which made his people scream and swoon with indignation. political opponents.
“Word from Cambronne”
the “swear word”* employed by Emmanuel Macron is a derivative of “shit”*, this word used in Waterloo that we always designate in French under the expression of “Word from Cambronne” *, to be polite. The president said he was pursuing a policy of deliberately “Piss off”* the 8% of French people who are not vaccinated, in order to harass them so that they protect themselves, and protect others, once morest Covid-19.
He actually used the term three times in a lengthy answer given in a question-and-answer session with newspaper readers. The Parisian. When asked by an employee of a nursing home for the elderly, who asked him how he planned to reduce the number of unvaccinated people, who occupy 85% of intensive care beds, he replied:
We reduce it [la petite minorité réfractaire]Sorry to say it like that, pissing him off even more. Me, I’m not for pissing off the French. I plague the administration all day long when it blocks them. Well, there, the unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so, we will continue to do so, until the end. This is the strategy. ”
A less “Jupiterian” image
The repetition of the word suggests that this is not a mistake or an accident. Politicians and senior officials close to Emmanuel Macron have since confirmed that it was a deliberate choice on the part of the president to use more powerful and popular language. Not only did he want the message to get across, but he also wanted to give himself a more down-to-earth and less “Jupiterian” image (to use the qualifier
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John Lichfield
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