IThere has been a long round of applause in the large Emile Boutmy lecture hall when Angela Merkel enters in a burgundy robe. She embodies the “European ideal,” says Mathias Vicherat, director of the renowned French university Sciences Po, which awarded the former chancellor an honorary doctorate. With just three words “we can do it”, Merkel saved the honor of Europe.
“I stand before you today and thank you,” Merkel said at the ceremony. She recalls that she was only able to discover France in 1991, since she was not able to travel west in the GDR. She describes a trip to Normandy, in a hotel reminiscent of Marcel Proust, as formative. The historian Henri Ménudier invited her when he understood why she had never been to France.
Anyone who doubts Europe should visit military cemeteries
She walked the D-Day landing beaches and visited military cemeteries in the summer of 1991. Anyone who doubts Europe should visit military cemeteries. Merkel reminds us that working with the four French presidents was not always easy, but was always marked by compromises.
She emphasizes how much the geopolitical situation has changed as a result of the Russian President’s violent relocation of borders. What holds the EU together, she asks. “We must find Europe’s soul”. Diversity is the soul of Europe. Freedom makes this diversity possible.
Two former French Presidents congratulated Merkel in a cocktail afterwards. President Emmanuel Macron, who was in Marseille, sent his wife Brigitte to convey his congratulations.
Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande don’t want to miss the honor for Angela Merkel. The relationship with the Chancellor was not always relaxed. Sarkozy, for example, once said that he was “terrorized in Berlin”. Hollande, on the other hand, has never forgotten that she served him asparagus on his first visit, one of the few foods that the Frenchman, who is otherwise not averse to good food, cannot tolerate.
A sign in difficult times
But on Tuesday both presidents came to express their appreciation for “Anschela”. For both of them it was also a trip back to their own student days. Hollande and Sarkozy studied at Sciences Po, the elite political workshop on Rue Saint-Guillaume. With the honorary doctorate for Merkel, Director Vicherat wants to set an example for Franco-German friendship in difficult times.
In an interview with the FAZ, he previously said that the war in Ukraine shows how important Franco-German cohesion is for Europe. Merkel is the fourth political personality to be honored. Václav Havel, who, like Merkel, stands for the growing together of Europe after the fall of the Wall, made the start. Shortly before his state visit to Germany, President Macron advocated special recognition of the life’s work of the Chancellor at Sciences Po. Macron also studied at Sciences Po.
The founding of the university goes back to France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. The disgrace of the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles marked the beginning of the “German Crisis of French Thought”, as Claude Digeon called a famous book.
