OPEN LETTER TO EMMANUEL MACRON
OF HUBRIS, MAMMON AND NEMESIS
Paris, 6th May 2017
Sir,
I write to you today as, in all likehood you will be elected tomorrow and I do not wish to have to address you as the French President, which for me you shall never be. You have done nothing to merit this honour, like your mentor Mr. Holland you will elected by default, with the same disastrous results for France that we have known. This is not the time to rejoice but rather to deplore that France cannot be more honourably represented.
For months now the public in France, and now abroad, has been regaled to satiety with the highly edited glossy intimate details of your love life, touched-up in technicolor. They are worthy of the picture stories published in women’s magazines Nous Deux and Bonnes Soirées, the latter claiming to be at its beginning in 1922, A Weekly Magazine illustrated with sensational novels. And you are just that : sensation. Your image has been cleverly crafted out of the hyperbolic hagiography of your former acting teacher, now your wife and Pygmalion, and the touched-up photographs of the popular press. You play the part of the debutant endowed with reasonable looks whose main quality is his youth, which is neither a gift nor a vertue but a passing state from which one must grow out to enjoy the full powerx of maturity. You and your wife with her thick sun tan seem to be cast out of one the 80’s TV series : you have all the attributes to be Joan Collins’s husband in Dallas.
The story of the young ambitious provincial boy who worms his way into the intimacy of an upper middle-class couple, and ends up marrying the wealthy wife to make his way in politics in the capital, is that of Maupassant’s Bel Ami. Thus you have not renounced your initial literary vocation, you remain in the world of fiction. Life’s hard realities elude you still as you remain the gullible teenager dazzled by the glamour of the social rank and wealth of a spoilt French teacher bored by provincial life, dreaming of a life of power and luxury in Paris. To be the muse of a young writer did not fit in her plans. As a character in one of Balzac’s novel, she is motivated by a petit-bourgeois mentalitybased on interest and money. She showed herself in the life choice she imposed on you to satisfy her own ambitions : ‘Learn a trade if you don’t want to be a gigolo’ , your own words to tell us of her admonishment. What better than to become a banker like her husband, to be rich and be able to tell your own mother when you reveal your intention to marry her : ‘I will keep her up… This public outpouring of private matters is very enlightening and reveals the real motivations behind a story made out to be romantic and idyllic. Yet it is only a vulgar story of interest, ambition, provincial snobism bound to the wealth of a locally influential upper middle-class family. This is no doubt the reason why your family did not file a complaint against your teacher for sexual corruption of a minor. In your interest it should have been done, then you could truly have assumed your own life and vocation instead of selling yourself to Mammon.
Despite all the spin your wife feels obliged to peddle in order to exorcize her sense of guilt at having stolen your life and your vocation, you are just sold out to the ambitions of a manipulating woman, and to the oligarchs and bankers you met with her and whom she wants you to emulate. You say so yourself : ‘We need more young French people who want to be milliardaires’ .
She has used your talents and intelligence, of which she gives an exaggerated account to redeem herself, in order to enjoy a more glamorous life, be dressed in Haute Couture and hobnob with the high and mighty of this world in the exalted circles she dreamt of in Amiens. To do this she carried on her former teaching job and coached you in your part. She has made you a puppet spouting out empty formulas, repeating others’ arguments, filling his speeches with literary quotes and illustrious names to bask in their reflected glory. You would do well to ponder on the words of the great Shakespearian actor Laurence Olivier :‘To be an actor is to be a whore’. It shows off your own image, of which, as Narcissus, you are so enamoured that you are blinded. You cannot see how your own wife keeps you in her nets with flattery, outrageously expansive public demonstrations of affection, and the use of persuasion and seduction that all teachers practice, here to the manipulation of a person with an obvious psychological flaw.
Her words are explicit : your candidacy at the highest position in the country was not dictated by the urgent need to redress the catastrophic situation in France. It does not arise from deep convictions and a sincere commitment to the values and principles aimed at putting France back to its rightful position in the world and renewing in depth a drifting society. No, you had to stand now because she says : ‘He must do it now, after there will be my (gueule) mug… !’ So the timing of your candidacy rested on the demands of your wife’s beauty calendar. Joan of Arc and the Général de Gaulle, of whom you recommend yourself, must be turning over in their graves in amazement and disbelief at the debasement of their borrowed ideals reduced to the dictates of good looks and the boudoir. This frivolous attitude, this superficiality and artificiality were all too apparent since the beginning of your campaign. It was confirmed in this last debate against Marine Le Pen on the 3rd of May on the France 2 TV channel. You were uanble to rise above the level of abuse and insult which she favours. The political debate ended up by being no more than a vulgar exchange of abusive meaningless words worthy of the gutter. This deplorable spectacle was the shameful performance of two political figures appealing to and playing on the fears and the lowest instincts of the country. It gave rise to dismayed reactions from some experienced political commentators, such Serge Moati who declared : ‘This last debate upset me terribly’, he judged it ‘very worrying for France’. As for Dominique de Montvalon, he found it on a much lower level than any other previous presidential debates.
France’s destiny seems to have been taken hostage by the private interests and personal ambitions of a small provincial couple whose cupidity, superficiality in the fake and the articificial and the love for self promotion are cleverly manipulated by the oligarchs and bankers who are calling the shots. To them France est devenue une grande horizontale, a high class prostitute, and you are its pimp. You have already played this role in selling theToulouse airport to a Chinese investor. Its fits you to perfection considering your personal background which you recount ad nauseam without thinking how it shows you off and condemns you.
France merits better than a petty fraud trickster psyched up by flattery and hyped-up compliments. To supposedly justify her falling in love, your wife says ‘He was Mozart…’ as you worked with her on a playscript aged 16. Since you have become ‘the Mozart of finances, the little Mozart of the Élyséee’. Never has the divine Mozart been submitted to such indignity ! You and you wife are simply grotesque and ridiculous. Yet no one seems to have the clear-headedness and courage to declare as did Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Emperor is naked’ and show you up. Pope François did feel it when asked to speak on the French presidential elections he declared ‘I understand nothing about French politics’. And of the two candidates ‘… I know that one stands for the far Right, but the other I don’t know where he comes from …’ Indeed where to you come from straw man without sincerity nor convictions, with no other aim than power and personal wealth? The latter is already yours once you belong to the exclusive former Heads of State’s club, such as Tony Blair and Sarkozy. Decades after them you emulate their neo-liberal policies in the pale reflection you present as your novel and original message.
Like Marine Le Pen, you are, Sir, a disgrace to France which you pretend to lead. And I am convinced that the Ni Le Pen, ni Macron slogans sprouting in Paris and in the provinces are just the first manifestation of this protest which will grow in clamour. I have too high an opinion of France, its position and role in the world, the importance of its history and traditions, to let it be degraded even more than it has already been at the hands of dubious characters who work daily at its debasement. You will never be a Head of State, you have neither the stature, the strength, the charisma, the vision necessary. Neither will you be able to govern since your candidacy instead of uniting and pacifying the country has divided it even further. As for your literary career it shall never be since you you do not have in you the sacred fire. In short, Sir, you will most probably be the next French President but for all the money you have aldready earned and will earn in the future, in human terms your are a failure. ‘What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?’’, Mark 8.36.
And if you think, Sir, that I am showing much presumption in depicting you in such severe and critical terms, the exceptional circumstances of my life and the principles and values that are mine justify it. Like you I come from the French province, but I come from this terroir rich of values and traditions which are my pride and strength. Like you I married a man of my father’s age, but unlike you it was motivated by a true love for a sister soul who shared my ideals and aspirations. I wanted to help him regain the dream he had left aside through life’s vagaries ‘ to be a bridge between East and West’. I did not destroy a marriage, his first one had been annulled long before we met because of his chronic depression and a forced marriage to a woman imposed by his family. She became vindicative and venimous once repudiated. I brought to this man all the stability and happiness he had never enjoyed before, and no sordid or venal consideration ever entered this union. Thus our mariage endured once his illness recurred and I supported him morally and financially until the end. From being a a father figure, he became my son, and I grew in stature, assuming a new maturity and authority as I took on increased responsibilities. After his death I was faced with renewed choices while the whole of London and the Homes Counties, unbeknown to me, were intriguing to find me a new husband. My position in London society and the Establishment was very attractive to quite a few, and some of my students themselves courted me. Fortunately my sense of ethics and integrity prevented me from falling into a relationship which can only be false and unequal between a teacher and a pupil. I therefore can look on your couple with a unique clear-sightedness which allows me to perceive all its cleverly hidden machinery.
Furthermore I have always resisted the siren call of Mammon’s worshippers. I could have led a life of luxury and Oriental opulence in Cairo with an arab diplomat, or in Beirut, on the French Riviera where luxurious villas, jewels, Haute Couture clothes and race horses were laid at my feet. Or else I could have remained in London and carry on with the social, artistic and cultural life I had. I would then have had the fate of your wife, commonly called ‘a fag’s hag’, a mature woman at the service of younger men. Instead I chose to follow the integrity of my calling as a poet and a writer, as I had done in love and marrriage, giving the best of myself. And if in Rome, where I lived after London, I was courted by over fifteen men between the age of 27 and 80 years, they were always platonic relationships which allowed me to grow in knowledge and stature in mixing with men as varied as poets, philosophers, diplomats, television producers, millionaire collectors, aristocrats or officers in the Army. The richness of my life is in reverse measure of my wealth : for now I live like a poor student in the deliberate choice of having stood by my ideals and principles in my vocation as a poet and an artist. But I own what is the most precious possessions of all for a human being : integrity of life and convictions, and for an artist, freedom of expression. I can keep my head high with all in life, and face the world and others with clear-headedness and enlightenment : I have never been for sale and have in all circumstances acted with honour to the best of my ability.
Here is, Sir, the priceless gift you have scorned which allows me today to judge and expose you with such authority In due course, you will, I am convinced, have to answer for it. Thus it goes for all of those who aspire to public life and have the pretension to lead their own country when they can only offer an unfortunate example of imposture and amorality. Nemesis always redresses the inconsiderate acts of Hubris.
Monique Riccardi-Cubitt
Paris, 6th May 2017