The municipality headed by Louis Aliot (RN) welcomes until Sunday May 5 the elite of conservative essayists close to the extreme right, from Eric Naulleau to Michel Onfray via Henri Guaino.
Robert Ménard initiated it in 2014 in Béziers, Louis Aliot did it, in a big way, ten years later. Since Friday May 3, the National Rally (RN) mayor of Perpignan has hosted a book fair in his Palais des Congrès, until Sunday, chaired by the essayist Eric Naulleau with, as headliners, the former writer by Nicolas Sarkozy Henri Guaino, and Michel Onfray, who taught philosophy courses for a long time in his Popular University before switching to the French neo-conservatives, followers of the racist theory of “big replacement”.
It is 2 p.m. this Friday when Eric Naulleau, in the park adjoining the Palais des Congrès, takes a shovel to add a little soil to the base of a small ginkgo biloba, as does Henri Guaino, followed by other authors. They celebrate the “first spring of freedom of expression”, the pompous title of this book fair. In the meager group of spectators, elected officials and agents of the town hall of Perpignan, including André Bonet, deputy mayor responsible for culture, who exults with Release : “The idea was Naulleau who had it, he was the one who did the programming. It’s completely new, this kind of show, it’s a great first!” The official organizer, the Mediterranean Literature Center, an association financed by the town hall of Perpignan, will appreciate…
Cultural battle
Its president, Françoise Claverie, responsible for leading the first round table soberly entitled “Wokism, new tyranny?” in the auditorium, asserts without fear of emphasis that“there are places where” freedom “is prohibited from staying”. Oh well, where? “If we talk about diversity and victim ideology”, “Islamo-leftist drift”, “the rise of immigration”, “if we talk about that, we change sides, you become a fascist and a Nazi, you are banned from the mainstream media”. However, we have the impression that it’s the opposite lately… It’s after 3 p.m. The tone is set, with all the key words of the cultural battle sought by the far right.
There is no crowd, only a hundred people with gray and white hair scattered on the stands, but Eric Naulleau, delighted, continues: “Freedom of expression is threatened by Wokism and Islamism, two ideologies which, under the leadership of Mr. Mélenchon, have concluded an unnatural alliance.” And the one who dedicated a pamphlet to the leader of the rebels concluded: “We are no longer in a free country: people who challenge Islamism are under police protection 24 hours a day. We have let the enemies of freedom do too much. The counterattack starts here.”
The participants of the round table, Samuel Fitoussi, Renée Fregosi and Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, also denounce, with applause, the woke danger, the cause according to them of “the erasure of our culture, of our civilization”. Enough to satisfy Loïc, 24 years old, who came to see “actually people talk about wokism”a portmanteau of social networks which above all allows the extreme right to caricature the left but which represents for Colette, a 73-year-old Perpignan resident, “a danger to our civilization”. Just that.
