Macron orders softening of WW1 events
Emmanuel Macron has ordered that ceremonies in France marking the centenary of the end of World War I next month must avoid commemorating it as a military triumph.
Sixty heads of state and government including Donald Trump, the US president, will attend ceremonies in Paris on Armistice Day, November 11.
The French president will make a speech at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe.
But Macron’s office said an ‘‘overly military’’ ceremony would risk offending the French, who view World War I as a ‘‘mass slaughter’’ rather than as a victory. An Elysee Palace source said: ‘‘The combatants were mainly civilians who had been armed.’’ About 40 million soldiers and civilians were killed or injured in the conflict.
Macron communicated his decision to downplay the commemorations to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who agreed. However the move is likely to disappoint Trump, who was so delighted to attend the Bastille Day military parade in Paris on July 14 that he announced plans to introduce a similar event in the United States.
Macron was keen to avoid any homage to Marshal Petain, a French hero of World War I who is reviled for his later role as head of the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis.
Macron was criticised on social media, with Michel Goya, a historian and former infantry colonel, accusing him of ‘‘insulting the soldiers of 1918’’.
However, General Bruno Dary, the head of the committee in charge of the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, said that even without a large-scale military parade, ‘‘the military dispositions will be the same as in previous years’’.
Macron was criticised in August for failing to interrupt his holiday to join Theresa May and the Duke of Cambridge at a ceremony in Amiens, his home town, on the centenary of a battle that marked the beginning of the end of World War I.
The British Government has been invited to attend and will send a ‘‘senior Government minister’’, the Foreign Office said last night.
Royal sources said it was likely that the Queen, with the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would be at the Cenotaph.
Lord Dannatt, the chief of the general staff from 2006-2009, who has sat on the UK’s World War I advisory board since 2013, welcomed Macron’s tone, saying: ‘‘Triumphalism, victory, those sort of notions are inappropriate . . . There is no need for jingoistic reaction at all and for Macron to be just coming to that conclusion now shows he is a pretty inexperienced politician.’’
– Telegraph Group