Vies parallèles | Michel Onfray

EAN : 9782221242278

Shaping : BROCHE

Pages : 418

Size : 1 x 240 mm

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De Gaulle-Mittérand: Parallel Lives

Michel Onfray

Release date : 03/11/2020

~~The most original, hard-hitting book of the year, marking the double anniversary of De Gaulle’s famous Appeal of June 18 speech in 1940 and his death in 1970.

~~In an article published thirty years ago in La Revue de deux mondes, Michel Onfray declared himself a fervent admirer of General de Gaulle, paying tribute to “a tragic character, an actor right out of one of Corneille’s plays.” He did not hide his fascination for the great solitary man,... ~~In an article published thirty years ago in La Revue de deux mondes, Michel Onfray declared himself a fervent admirer of General de Gaulle, paying tribute to “a tragic character, an actor right out of one of Corneille’s plays.” He did not hide his fascination for the great solitary man, who, after stepping down from power in 1969, marched in the sole company of his wife and his aide-de-camp on a beach in Ireland like an “old deposed king.” It is in the light of this final episode that Onfray viewed the change of décor and the protagonist who was going to take de Gaulle’s place: “The art of French politics had lost its last poet and none of those who would follow would ever surpass boulevard theater.”
Among these successors, Onfray was already lashing out at François Mitterrand: “One of the most venomous men is using socialism to satisfy an extraordinary desire for power that, the day it can be unleashed, will only excel in buffoonery in circumstances where the General exalted in tragedy.” A desire to explore the depths of this comparison is at the heart of this book, conceived according to the model of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. As a historian, philosopher, and polemicist, Onfray details everything that separates the two men who never stopped clashing. Through them are two destinies, two visions of France and the French people, two distinct, opposing views of how to embody the nation and lead one’s own life. On one side, the Resistance leader of 1940, the face of liberated France and the founder of the Fifth Republic; on the other, “the far-right demonstrator who marches against immigrants and campaigns against Jews, the Pétainist, Vichyist, and forever anti-Gaullist, the political opportunist with questionable morals.”
Separated into some fifteen chapters corresponding to a wide range of themes—social background, education, private life, power, history, philosophy, sickness, burial—this work sheds light on irreconcilable aspects in their respective personalities, their behavior in public and in private, and their ways of being and doing. For Onfray, there is nothing in common between “the constable and the lawyer, the well-read and the superstitious, the tragic and the egotistical, the loyal husband and the libertine, the upright and the liar, the humble and the vain,” according to the titles of each of his chapters, devised after any number of historical and political fables. Through them, Michel Onfray details half a century of French history.

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Voir la fiche produit

EAN : 9782221242278

Shaping : BROCHE

Pages : 418

Size : 1 x 240 mm

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