Statues

source: Liberation, Check News June 26, 2020
author: Jacques Pezet
translation: GoogleTranslate/doxa-louise

Did Philippe de Villiers call to remove statues in 1989?

While he claims that  statue attackers wish to perpetrate  "memory-cide", the Vendéen Philippe de Villiers had yet asked that several revolutionary figures, like Robespierre, be unbolted in 1989.

Hello,

In an interview published this June 24, 2020 in  Le Point , the founder of Puy du Fou (Theme Park) and right-wing essayist Philippe de Villiers opposes the downing of statues in France, the wish for which is currently expressed by anti-racist activists for links  to slavery and colonial history. He states :

"I leave that to the spiritual sons of Robespierre. The pretension to the removal of statues responds to a dangerous escalation that begins with individual whim, sometimes based on an understandable intuition, but which most often ends in the rewriting of history, thanks to a revolutionary mechanism that goes well beyond public epigraphy. The destroyers within  the great expiatory movement know very well what they are doing. They seek to break our collective imagination in order to excite one the other in a memory competition in order to separate the "absolute culprits" and the "ontological victims". It amounts to neither more nor less than to perpetrate a "memory-cide" and  initiate a process of penitential submission. "

However, as some internet users have noticed, Philippe de Villiers has not always been against the downing of statues. On June 30, 1989, then Member of Parliament for Vendée, he asked in the program Apostrophes that the occasion of the celebrations of the bicentenary of the Revolution "be seized by the President of the Republic to take down and unbolt all the criminals against humanity, whose crimes are imprescriptible: Robespierre, Marat, Saint-Just, Turreau, Carrier ”.


Descendant of the Le Jolis de Villiers family, part of the French nobility, Philippe de Villiers was one of the French politicians, often from the right or from the far right, who campaigned for those killed by revolutionary troops during the war de Vendée, from 1793 to 1796, be recognized as victims of a "Vendean genocide". Historians, like  Laurent Avezou , oppose this term since the victims were not killed because of belonging to an ethnic, cultural or religious community and prefer to speak of "war crimes" .

Note that Philippe de Villiers demanded that the statues of those who have committed crimes against humanity be removed. And we will remember the statements of Emmanuel Macron (with whom De Villiers tells us he is sometimes in private discussion), who during a trip to Algiers in February 2017 (then candidate for the presidential election) claimed that French colonization had been " A crime against humanity" , and  stated in November 2017, in Ouagadougou , that "the crimes of European colonization are indisputable".

cordially

Jacques Pezet