The distortion of the truth in the discourse of those who run France is not new. What is, is the enthusiastic, earnest, determined way in which the Macronie engages in the exercise both of the power to impose control and the perversion of the language to disguise what it is about. The vocabulary of the Macronie has a habit of repeating itself. Like the annoying reflux of a distasteful meal, it betrays itself by the endless recurrence of mendacious double-talk.
Take four words in the following order: Merci, thank you; effort, one of those words from French into English without any change of spelling or meaning, unless you are an old-style French medical practitioner and you are referring to the consequence, a strain in the back, not the action, the effort, which caused it (which second meaning, as we shall see, could be very appropriate when it comes to the activities of a certain Bruno Le Maire); territoire, strictly territory, but as used by the Macronie now, more like locality; and autonomie, autonomy or self-government. There will be a fifth word analysed but that one will not be revealed until later because it is not a word Macron likes to have used about himself.
Merci
For many a month, the word Merci was the most common in the vocabulary of Macron’s acolytes. Google Stanislas Guerini and Merci and you open a Pandora’s Box of earnest declarations of gratitude. Guerini has been the one running Macron’s En Marche! organisation for the last eighteen months. He has developed the art of saying Merci to a pitch of ultimate insincerity. He has offered it to the En Marche! activists in the recent local elections, to the health workers dealing with Covid-19, and now to the firefighters at the cathedral in Nantes. If ever you go to an En Marche! meeting you are served it many times over.
