Tratamiento de fibroblastos PS1 y PS2 con cuerpos cetónicos

Representing the Real

Let me tell you a story. A story again of Nicolas Sarkozy as he stood on the cathedral steps in Puy-en-Velay. In painting in his speech an image of the women and men who had made the pilgrimage to the town in earlier times and in describing these individuals as united not by language but by faith the French President was not only evoking the macro narrative of the roman national of French national identity – as he had done with his earlier references to Versailles, Lascaux, Carcassonne, Picasso and Matisse – but was also exercising a particular tactic of real-and-represented. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the narrative of the pilgrims of Puy-en-Velay that President Sarkozy presented in his speech permitted him to make claims for the secular identity of France, portraying through the story he told of them a secularity that was, originally and ultimately, specifically Christian. This narrative locating of the contemporary secular identity of France in the nation’s Christian

106

tradition was not, however, just another instalment in an overarching political production of identity. The speech in Puy-en-Velay was made in March 2011; President Sarkozy, a year away from the next presidential election, had launched a political debate on secularism in French society two weeks earlier. It was necessary, the then-president said in one of his earlier public pronouncements on the issue, to “re-evaluate both the principle of secularism and its application to take into account the evolution of society”²⁷. This re-evaluation of one of the Republic’s key principles – a public process of re-evaluation that was to culminate in April 2011 in an official government event entitled ‘Secularism: living better together’²⁸ – was provoked by what Sarkozy, who had since his time as Minister for the Interior emphasised the question of religion in national identity, called “the issue of Islam and our Muslim compatriots […] There is, clearly, a problem. Our Muslim compatriots should be able to live and practice their religion in a manner comparable to anyone else in the country […]. However, this must be a French Islam and not an Islam in France”²⁹. This debate on the France’s cherished principle of secularism could also be framed, as the president himself acknowledged, as a debate on the multiculturalism in French society³⁰ and emerged in a political context that had seen, firstly, the president – in his decision to adopt a policy of

“neither…nor…” in electoral cases where there was a run-off between Socialist and far-right candidates – move away from the traditional evocation of a ‘republican pact’³¹ by which the centrist parties had in the past united against the rise of the Front National and the far-right, and in which, secondly, Marine Le Pen – a newly politically credible opponent to Sarkozy’s right – had engage in a polemic against Muslim Street prayer several months previously.

Sarkozy’s ‘re-evaluation’ was thus in line with the other debates on national identity and immigration launched during his presidency: aimed at consolidating, gaining or regaining conservative votes. The narrative possibilities offered by the sacred site of Puy-en-Velay allowed the president to present the Christian heritage of secular France as implicit, without making any explicit reference to the political debate that he had launched back in Paris. By

27 Original reads : “[C’est] nécessaire de réévaluer le principe de laïcité et son application, pour tenir compte des évolutions de la société”. ‘Débat sur la laïcité : Sarkozy fixe ses objectifs’, Le Figaro, 2 March 2011. Available at:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2011/03/01/01002-20110301ARTFIG00679-debat-sur-la-laicite-sarkozy-fixe-ses-objectifs.php

28 My translation. Original title is ‘Laïcité: pour mieux vivre ensemble’.

29Original reads : “Cela pose la question de l'islam et de nos compatriotes musulmans. (…) Il y a, clairement posé, un problème. Nos compatriotes musulmans doivent pouvoir vivre, pratiquer leur religion comme n'importe lequel de nos compatriotes. (…) Mais il ne peut s'agir que d'un islam de France et non pas d'un islam en France”. ‘Laïcité : trois heures de débat pour clore deux mois de polémique’, Le Monde, 5 April 2011. http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2011/04/05 /laicite-trois-heures-de-debat-pour-clore-deux-mois-de-polemique_1503022_823448.html#WGosPZDGuTAEw6eJ.99

30 Ibid.

31 The foundational belief in the universal rights of (wo)man and the values of liberty, equality and fraternity as essential to the character and administration of France.

107

nesting the micro narrative of a millennium of pilgrims united physically and spiritually by their Christian faith in the macro narrative of a historically inevitable and always glorious nation, Sarkozy was presenting a poetic representation of what he wished to claim as a particular ‘real’ of France.

During his period as president of France, Sarkozy’s predecessor Jacques Chirac had also engaged with the issue of the nation’s secular identity, introducing in 2004 a law banning the display of religious symbols – including the Muslim hijab and the Christian crucifix – in public schools. In July of that year Chirac gave a speech in Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Haute-Loire region, a village that had given refuge and protection to Jewish civilians hunted and persecuted by the Vichy regime. Chambon-sur-Lignon, the president declared in the opening of his speech, was “a site heavy with history and emotion” where “the nation’s soul was affirmed” a site where “the conscience of the country was advanced and incarnated”³². Chambon-sur-Lignon was – like the cathedral at Puy-en-Velay – a lieu de mémoire, a site of memory that served as “a symbol of a France that was true to its principles, true to its heritage, true to its nature”³³. In a manner similar to that employed by Sarkozy, Chirac in his speech nested the story of women and men of another time – brave men and women who had placed their values of tolerance, solidarity and fraternity over concerns for their own safety³⁴ – in the macro narrative of France. Just as the newly sacred location of Chambon-sur-Lignon – a site infused with history and emotion by the acts of its brave former inhabitants³⁵ – granted President Chirac the possibility of evoking the macro narrative of France as that of a country “loyal to its history, its roots, its culture” where this history and culture were composed of the values of universality, humanity, fraternity and generosity,³⁶ the micro narrative of the inhabitants of the site enabled the president to tell a story of contemporary France, a story in which these values manifested themselves though the country’s policies of secularism.³⁷ Not only did the heroic example of the people of Chambon-sur-Lignon recall all France fidèle à ses principes, fidèle à son héritage, fidèle à son génie”.

34 Ibid. Original reads: “Bravant tous les périls, ils ont fait le choix du courage, de la générosité et de la dignité. Ils ont fait le choix de la tolérance, de la solidarité et de la fraternité.”

35 Ibid. Original reads: “un lieu chargé d’histoire et d’émotion”.

36 Ibid. Original reads: “Une France […] fidèle à son histoire, à ses racines, à sa culture. Une France de l'audace et de la solidarité. […] Une France généreuse, qui refuse l'égoïsme, le repli sur soi, l'exclusion, la discrimination. Une France ouverte et accueillante, unie dans sa diversité, qui porte avec fierté son idéal de justice et de paix en Europe et dans le monde. [Une] France fraternelle.”

37 Ibid. Original reads: “La République est le bien commun de tous, de chaque citoyen, à égalité de droits et de devoirs […]

La laïcité permet à chacun de vivre et de pratiquer, en toute sécurité, en toute sûreté, sa religion.”

108

that was best about France and the French people but it also served as an example for how the citizens of France should live their lives in twenty-first century France. The actions of the women and men who had lived in this village sixty years earlier were told by Chirac as stories of that which his audience should be today, open and tolerant. “The example of [Chambon-sur-Lignon] shows us that it is the actions of each individual and the solidarity of all that, day after day, give human communities their strength and exceptionalism”³⁸. Rooting the stories of civic responsibility in the physical and historical site of Chambon-sur-Lignon allowed Chirac to bring the heroic story of the past into the present. In the speech he transitions from the purely historical narratives of Vichy France to the parallel challenges of the present-day nation, where “the victory of tolerance and honour is a fragile one, part of a never-ending battle”³⁹, finishing with the exhortation to each French woman and man to

“wear with pride our heritage”, “to remember a still-recent past [and] be loyal to the lessons of history”⁴⁰, lessons that, in the logic of the president’s speech, supported the removal of religious symbols from public schools⁴¹. Through the story of the humble, anonymous people of Chambon-sur-Lignon President Chirac advanced –as Sarkozy was later to do in Puy-en-Velay – a representation of his own “certaine idée de la France”.⁴² Furthermore, the representative possibilities offered by the story of Chambon-sur-Lignon created the possibility for the head-of-state to make claims for the ‘real’ identity and values of French society, an identity that in this case saw a civic education – free of the symbols of religion, promoting instead a tolerance through unity and equality of opportunity – as being at the heart of French republicanism⁴³.

38 Ibid. Original reads: “L'exemple du "Plateau" nous montre que c'est l'engagement de chacune et de chacun et la solidarité de tous, jour après jour, qui font la force et l'exemplarité des communautés humaines”

39 Ibid. Original reads: “Le combat pour la tolérance et pour l'honneur est une conquête fragile et toujours recommencée.”

40 Ibid. Original reads: “je leur demande de toujours porter avec fierté notre héritage […] je leur demande de se souvenir d'un passé encore proche. Je leur dis de rester fidèles aux leçons de l'histoire, une histoire si récente.”

41Ibid. Original reads: “La laïcité permet à chacun de vivre et de pratiquer, en toute sécurité, en toute sûreté, sa religion.

Elle permet à l'école publique, lieu d'acquisition et de transmission des valeurs que nous avons en partage, d'être ouverte à tous et à toutes les sensibilités. C'est pourquoi elle doit être défendue: l'école publique doit être à l'abri des influences et des passions”

42 Chirac finished his speech at Chambon-sur-Lignon with this phrase made famous by General de Gaulle.

43 Chirac’s credibility in making this speech – in presenting the new policy as one of tolerance and peaceful cohabitation rather than as a targeting of the traditions of the Muslim community, who were to be most affected by it – was perhaps reinforced by another of his most well-known and remembered speeches, another spatially referential speech made nine years earlier. In 1995, at the commemoration of the round-up of French Jews for deportation at the Vél d’Hiv (the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris) in 1942 Chirac became the first French head-of-State to acknowledge the atrocities of the Vichy regime not only as the terrible but isolated acts of those implicated in the Vichy government but as a failure of the French state and nation. This was a hugely significant moment for France’s Jewish citizens – who had protested when, at the 50^th anniversary of the Rafle de Vél’ d’Hiv, then-president Mitterrand had refused to recognise the responsibility of the French Republic in the terrible acts of the time – and for the interpretation of French history, as can be seen in the story of the Maison de l’Histoire de France and the references in both Sarkozy’s speeches and the preparatory reports to what they considered as the pitiful tradition of apologising for France’s past.

109

The rhetorical construction of a physically-rooted history leading to a telling of the present and a consequent (implicit or explicit) call for future action that characterises both these speeches can be clearly traced in one of François Hollande’s later museum speeches. In October 2015, Hollande officially inaugurated the new Musée de l’Homme in Paris, an anthropology museum that had been shut down six years previously after much of its collection had been taken, along with the collection of the former Musée Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, to form part of the collections of the new Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée (MuCEM) in Marseilles. Hollande quoted at the outset the founder of the Musée, Paul Rivet, who had sought to create a museum that would testify to the universality of the individual: “Humanity is an indivisible whole, not only in space but also through time”⁴⁴. Hollande’s story of the museum, therefore, became in the Musée de l’Homme a story of universality.

In the early narrative of the inauguration speech the president recalls the history of the museum and tells the story of Rivet and his contemporaries, who in founding the museum in a “time of crisis” (the original museum was officially inaugurated in 1938 after opening as part of the Universal Exposition in 1937) sought, by promoting the dignity of all mankind through the study of man, to counter a tendency of the time to view others as curiosities rather than peers and to oppose trends towards treating other civilisations as animal artefacts to be gazed at: a combat of science and knowledge against ignorance that was to continue in the years following the war.⁴⁵ In these early stages of the speech, Hollande emphasised the message of the museum as being that of the universal nature of humanity and the human:

“This museum is an ode to the unity of humanity. The museum offers a voyage of discovery of mankind, [exploring] the singularity of man as well as its universality. All of humanity coming together”⁴⁶. The emphasis is not only on the exceptional character of the French nation (“The museum epitomises the spirit of France, that is, the universal ideal. France is universal, thus it is in France that this museum dedicated to mankind is to be found”⁴⁷) but

44 “L’humanité est un tout indivisible, non seulement dans l’espace mais aussi dans le temps”. Cited by François Hollande at the inauguration of the museum : Discours à l'occasion de l'inauguration du Musée de l'Homme, 15 October 2015. Available at http://www.elysee.fr/videos/discours-a-l-occasion-de-l-inauguration-du-musee-de-l-homme/. Original citation by Paul Rivet, see: http://www.museedelhomme.fr/fr/presentation

45 Discours de François Hollande à l'occasion de l'inauguration du Musée de l'Homme, 15 October 2015. Available at:

http://www.elysee.fr/videos/discours-a-l-occasion-de-l-inauguration-du-musee-de-l-homme/

46 Ibid. Original reads: “Le [..] message du musée […] c’est un hymne à l’unité de l’humanité. Ce que le musée offre, c’est un voyage à la découverte de l’homme, dans son singularité aussi que dans de plus universel. Toute l’humanité dans le rencontre.”

47 Ibid. Original reads “Le musée de l’homme incarne l’esprit français: c’est-à-dire l’idée universelle. La France c’est l’universel ; et donc c’est en France qu’il y a – pas simplement en France – mais en France qu’il y a ce musée dédiée à l’humanité.”

110

also on the unity and mutual dependence of mankind. Whether humankind does good or evil to humanity, the president said, depends on the choices that we make in life. The message of the museum is therefore, that no being – neither individual nor state – can live an isolated life; the museum tells us that if we wish to participate in humanity we must know how to behave as social beings.⁴⁸

Just as Sarkozy’s story of the pilgrims of Puy-en-Velay and Chirac’s story of the brave inhabitants of Chambon-en-Lignon transitioned into a narrative of the France of today, reinforcing portrayals of the ‘real’ concerns and character of lived existence in twenty-first-century France through the discursive representation of a France of the past, Hollande’s speech drew on the historical narrative of the site of the Musée de l’Homme to transmit a message of contemporary reality. It becomes clear as the speech progresses that the unity of many for the greater good does not refer solely to the scientific challenges of the museum staff in the 1940s and 50s. Instead – in a manner more explicit than that of his predecessors in the earlier examples – Hollande uses the story of the Musée de l’Homme to construct a fait accompli for the present. The micro narrative of the museum, the story of this historical site – located again in a macro narrative of a presumed French identity, one that in this case is framed in terms of the universal spirit of the French national mission – becomes, therefore, a story of the present. The truth of the present day is to be found in the narrative of the past.

The truth of the present, in this particular case, is that of a France characterised by the same leadership through universalism that could be identified in the story of the Musée de l’Homme, a leadership through universalism that, the president explained, was to find its expression in the upcoming international climate change conference, to be held in Paris. It was no coincidence, Hollande declared that, just as the Musée de l’Homme had been born in a political era where an international approach was vital in the struggle of and for humanity, this second coming of the museum was occurring in the political context of unprecedented climate challenge, and in the specific context of the international conference, where only by working together could the nations of the world hope to save the planet and save humanity:

“Not a coincidence but a historical continuity; at every stage in the life of the museum there has been an international event of great significance – an uninterrupted line joining our country to the other nations of the world, across ages and generations”⁴⁹. The scientific minds

48 Ibid. Original reads: “L’homme est un être social. Personne ne peut vivre seul. Pas plus un pays qu’un individu […] Donc c’est un message aussi à l’égard de tout ce qui veulent être parti prenant de l’humanité, de savoir exactement commenter se comporter dans une société.”

49 Ibid. Original reads: “Coïncidence? Et je dis: non! Constance historique, qui fait qu’à chaque étape du musée il y a un évènement international de grande ampleur. Et j’y vois comme un fil jamais rompu, qui unit notre pays aux autres nations du monde, aussi à travers les âges et les générations”.

111

of France of eighty years ago had taken the lead in promoting an international, universal approach to the threats of their era; the France of the museum’s renaissance would equally take the lead not only in promoting an international approach to humanity’s challenge of

of France of eighty years ago had taken the lead in promoting an international, universal approach to the threats of their era; the France of the museum’s renaissance would equally take the lead not only in promoting an international approach to humanity’s challenge of