Claude Weil denounces the instrumentalisation of History

"An unlikely posthumous fate: sixty-six years after his death, here is Guy Môquet, the young communist shot dead by the Germans on October 22nd in 1941, promoted to the status of official hero in Sarkozy's Republic", writes the columnist Claude Weil on on the French president Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to make all French high schools read, on October 22nd, the letter Guy Môquet wrote to his parents on the eve of his execution. But for the columnist, though this letter "is heartrending, its historical importance is slender. It mentions nothing of his engagement, of his ideals as a young communist, nothing about the context. It is hard to see what reading it might trigger among today's high school pupils other than a surge of emotion, a moment of patriotic, emotional and a-historic communion. Is this not a manipulative instrumentation of history?"

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