Let’s revisit Emmanuel Macron’s official presidential portrait—not the one from his 2022 reelection, but the original from June 29, 2017. The one that kicked off his “Jupiterian” era of enlightened centrism. The one that still hangs in 50,000 French government offices worldwide, staring down at diplomats and bureaucrats like a smug reminder of “progress.”
Look at the desk. Front and center, carefully placed and lit for maximum visibility: Les Nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth) by André Gide. Not some obscure tome, but the Nobel Prize winner’s 1897 manifesto of hedonistic liberation—explicitly inspired by his “travels” to North Africa, where he documented seducing and paying for sex with boys as young as 12 and 14.
Gide didn’t hide it. In his journals (published posthumously but drawn from the same well of “inspiration”), he bragged about these encounters as peak authenticity: “I gave myself to a little Arab boy of 12… It was a revelation.” He’d return to Tunisia and Algeria in the 1930s for more, treating child prostitution like a philosophical safari. Today? He’d be #MeToo’d into oblivion, facing charges under every modern child protection law from Paris to The Hague. But in 2017, Macron’s team chose this as the intellectual centerpiece.
Nothing in an official portrait is accidental. Macron himself is on video, meticulously arranging the props: flipping pages in de Gaulle’s memoirs (the open book, for patriotic gravitas), positioning Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (for social satire), and—bam—propping up Gide like it’s the height of sophistication. Two iPhones for modernity, a Gallic rooster for nationalism, French and EU flags in perfect symmetry. But Gide? That’s the wildcard, the dog whistle.
Fast-forward to November 2025. Macron’s out of steam, his “reforms” in tatters, France reeling from riots, inflation, and elite scandals. And yet, this portrait endures—Gide’s book unapologetically on display, a fossil of unchecked “cultural” depravity. In an age of #CancelCulture, where comedians get fired for bad jokes and teachers for wrong pronouns, why hasn’t this been scrubbed? Why does the Élysée still peddle a pedophile’s fever dream as presidential flair?
This isn’t heritage. It’s a relic of a France that romanticized colonialism and exploitation while exporting “universal values.” Macron promised to transcend left-right divides; instead, he immortalized a divide between the untouchable predators and the rest of us.
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