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Wanted by Emmanuel Macron as an “essential time of clarification” of the political game, the dissolution of the National Assembly on the evening of the bitter failure of the presidential majority in the European elections has installed France, for a month, in fear of a government led by the National Rally. An almost identical remake of the 2002 presidential election, the extreme right was prevented from accessing the levers of power thanks to the mobilization of a republican front and thanks to the transfer of votes.
If Jordan Bardella saw, with a heavy heart, his dream for Matignon fly away on July 7 at 8 p.m. and if his party was relegated to third place in terms of number of seats, the Le Pen movement has not lost a prerogative. This one is temporary, devoid of power and effect on the work of the legislator. But from a symbolic and media point of view, it is nonetheless a showcase.
This is, after all, a protocol “honor”, the presidency of the solemn opening session of the 17th legislature of the Fifth Republic. By virtue of a provision of the rules of the Palais-Bourbon, it is the “oldest member” of the Assembly who will open the legislature and deliver the opening speech. And it is he who, in the company of the youngest, will officiate the first session dedicated to the election of the president of the National Assembly.
The whims of votes and age, the oldest elected MP goes by the name of José Gonzalez, 81, while the youngest, Flavien Termet, 22, has been an adult for four years. Both are RN members. When the session opens at 3pm, the director of La Chaîne Parlementaire – the provider of images to TV in France and the world – will only have eyes for the former.
By means of repeated “close-ups”, the director will show and re-show a dean who, in the eyes of the general public, is only a deputy but who, in the mirror of history, is an “ex” with a “nostAlgérique” past. A man who, since 1962, has never stopped replaying the memorial extensions of the bloodiest of decolonization conflicts and fanning the “poorly extinguished fires of the Algerian War”, to borrow a phrase from the journalist and writer Philippe Labro.
Outgoing MP José Gonzalez was re-elected in the 10th constituency of Bouches-du-Rhône (14 km from Marseille). In the second round, he won 55.66% of the vote against a candidate from the former presidential majority. A member of the National Front for 46 years, he began campaigning in the ranks of this movement during the time of the National Front and its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Born on April 28, 1943 in Oran, José Gonzalez arrived in Marseille in 1962. Like the majority of pieds noirs and repatriates, he searched for himself for a long time in the professional field. In 1962, he started by working at the port of Marseille at the fruit and vegetable exchange before running a driving school and finally joining the Marseille-Provence Chamber of Commerce until his retirement. In 1978, he joined the National Front, driven by the ideas that had never stopped working on him since his “Algerian” youth.
As he entered the Marseille section of Le Pen’s party, José Gonzalez wondered “if, in France, we were not going to suffer the same thing as in Algeria with populations pushing us out.” This brief verbatim statement appears in “Le Pen and torture. Algeria 1957, history against forgetting”, a book published at the end of 2023 by historian Fabrice Riceputi (see Le Jeune Indépendant of April 4, 2024). Before leaving Algeria against the backdrop of the “scorched earth policy” practiced by the OAS, José Gonzalez, the historian recalls, “militant notably in the company of Jean-Jacques Susini”, former number two of the terrorist organization, sentenced to death in absentia by the State Security Court for belonging to the organization and as the instigator of the failed attack against General de Gaulle in August 1962 in Petit-Clamart (a suburb of Paris). Jean-Jacques Suséni was subsequently amnestied.
By investigating in all directions, gathering documents and gleaning testimonies for the needs of his book, Fabrice Riceputi came across a very detailed press report signed Le Monde. Dated June 29, 2022, the article recalls a scene that, like a remake, will be replayed this afternoon of Thursday, July 18 in the Hemicycle.
The day after the 2022 legislative elections, organized in the wake of Macron’s re-election, José Gonzalez was only 78 years old and he was already the oldest member of the Assembly. As a senior, he chaired the inaugural session of the 16th legislature and gave a speech.
Against all expectations, he summoned the episode of the end of the Algerian War and peppered his speech with very “nostAlgériques” words and phrases. At one point, like a stage orator, he feigned emotion. “Excuse me, I’m thinking of my friends left behind…” And the dean continued, quoted by the special envoy of Le Monde at the Palais-Bourbon: “I left behind a part of my France. I am a man whose soul has been forever wounded by the feeling of abandonment.” Gonzalez, who will remain in the parliamentary history of France as the man who began the 16th legislature, presented himself as someone “torn from his native land by the wind of history.”
From the perch of the Palais-Bourbon and before a “full assembly”, recalls Fabrice Ricéputi in his book, Gonzalez delivered “a tearful speech of nostalgia for lost French Algeria, that is to say, in his eyes “abandoned”.
A “great move, which earned him the congratulations of Jean-Marie Le Pen himself.” This happened precisely one week before the sixtieth anniversary of Algeria’s independence, “which mortified the French far right.” A scene that did not escape the journalist from Le Monde and, in her wake, the historian’s curiosity, the oldest member of parliament was “applauded wildly, well beyond the benches of the far right.”
According to the journalist from Le Monde accredited to the Assembly, Marine Le Pen, president of the RN group during the 16th legislature (89 deputies), reread José Gonzalez’s speech in advance and validated its content.
At the end of the inaugural session and the election of the President of the Assembly, José Gonzalez found himself, an unexpected scene for him, facing a crowd of journalists, cameramen and photographers. Who came to meet not the dean who gave the starting signal to the 16th legislature, but the deputy who, taking advantage of his perch, replayed the Algerian war and was moved by the “lost land”.
Among other questions asked, one concerning the policy of the OAS and its crimes, particularly in his hometown of Oran. Instant response quoted in Le Monde and taken up in Fabrice Réciputi’s book: “(…) maybe now we will have to review history, but I don’t think so. Frankly, I am not here to judge whether the OAS committed crimes. I don’t even know what the OAS was, or almost not,” he says, using a negationism that is the trademark of the extreme right from the FN to the RN. “Come with me to Algeria, I will find many Algerians who will say to you: “when are you coming back, the French?””