My dear friends,
A few words to say thank you.
Thank you for answering this call to change your gaze, on those who come from elsewhere, to live and to survive.
Thank you to all those who came to debate, to inform themselves, to watch, to participate in this gathering, which was first and foremost a gathering of citizens.
Thank you to the artists and intellectuals who brought these 12 hours of events to life.
And especially to those who have made performances – the students of the Conservatory, under the direction of Robin Renucci, the street artists who continue to paint this huge fresco in the temporary gallery, and soon the actors of the French.
Thanks to the journalists who animated and moderated these debates, with all their professional conscience and media partners – AFP, France Médias Monde and Radio France.
Thank you to all the associations that participated in this day.
Thank you to Mercedes Erra and Benjamin Stora, to Hélène Orain, to Nathalie Sultan and to the entire team of the National Museum of the History of Immigration who have invested themselves since the beginning of the week so that these 12 hours can take place. Without their dedication and commitment, nothing would have been possible.
Ten days have passed since Nilüfer Demir took this picture of little Aylan, stranded on a beach in Turkey.
Ten days, since this photo went around the world and aroused the emotion, strong and legitimate that it deserved. Mine, yours, each one of us.
This emotion was translated into commitments: citizens, associations, elected officials, the government, ready to mobilize to welcome refugees.
And that’s happy. France is never as beautiful, never as great, as when it mobilizes in the name of its values.
Ten days later, if the emotion remains, we have arrived at the time of the answers.
To the tragedies that refugees experience every day,
At what pushes them from home – because we never leave without pain the land on which we were born, the walls we lived in, the perfumes with which we grew up,
To what leads them to risk their lives to arrive in Europe,
We need some answers.
To the terrors,
Ignorantly,
To selfishness, advocated by the most radical parties,
Who sometimes drive in France and Europe,
To demand illusory barricades and massive expulsions,
Stirring up the terror of invasion, dissolution, disappearance,
In a closing reflex,
We also need answers.
These answers are primarily political. The debates and interventions have shown that there is no simple, rapid, unambiguous, definitive response to this crisis that we are going through. There are geopolitical, strategic, military, economic, social, humanitarian, and many other issues to consider.
We need lasting answers to a lasting crisis. We are giving them.
France is taking its part in this collective effort.
These are strong decisions that the President of the Republic has made and that the Prime Minister is making today, to welcome at best the refugees who arrive on the territory and organize us with our partners. That was the meaning of the announcements of the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior before the Mayors this morning.
These are strong principles that the President of the Republic reaffirmed, calling with Germany for the establishment of a sustainable European solution through a mandatory mechanism; Recalling that the right of asylum was constitutive of our nation and that it was not divided into sections, according to the confession of the refugees.
Answer the question “how” is part of the policy responsibilities.
The Government as a whole assumes this responsibility.
Culture must bear a particular responsibility: to answer the question "why". And this question is no less essential.
Why has our society long looked away, rather than changed, in the face of the tragedies of migrants?
Why is our society so catatonic, paralyzed by the future and crossed by such deep currents, rather than raising its head?
What is happening that requires us to reaffirm values that we have long believed to be obvious – so obvious that they seemed intangible to us?
Culture has the power to provide answers to these vast and painful questions. It does. It can. And, forgive me for using the words of moral obligation tonight, but the questions we ask are serious enough to have recourse to them: it must.
Through intelligence and sensitivity, culture invites us to come out of ourselves.
When Abderrahmane Sissako takes us to Timbuktu to share the story of these families revolting under the yoke of jihadism, he takes us out of ourselves.
By showing us from other angles what is familiar to us, culture shifts our gaze.
When Radu Mihaileanu takes us to follow the little Schlomo, from Ethiopia to Israel, he makes us experience all the complexity of reality.
By sharing with us the story of another, culture invites us to think by putting ourselves in the place of others, and therefore to change our gaze.
Radu said it beautifully earlier.
With Fanny Bouyagui and We welcome you, we relive the journey of her father, from Senegal to France, and the way she lived it in her turn.
By confronting us with other inner lives – that of artists, that of their creation – culture invites us to dialogue, and takes us out of the solitude of inner monologues.
That’s what we’ll be experiencing in a few minutes, with Lisa Prosa and the first part of her Tryptic of the Shipwreck, the drama of Lampedusa – for it is the strength of the theatre to immerse us in the flesh of reality. Thank you to her, thank you to Céline Samie, for doing so with so much power of meaning.
This is what culture can do: it can do a lot, it can immensely, because it has this very great power to change the look.
It is because artists offer us a view through which everyone can enter that we can reconnect, together, with a collective history and consciousness.
That is why those who are waiting by reflex for the borders to be closed also want the culture to be closed by reflex.
They are the same, those who attack artists and those who attack migrants.
They’re the same, vandals who go after Anish Kapoor.
Because he’s an artist.
Because he is an artist, British, born in Bombay to a Hindu father and a Jewish mother from Baghdad.
Because he is an artist, and his work, which dialogue with the Castle, comes voluntarily to break the perfect symmetry of a French garden, to better question our representation of order and disorder.
Art opens gaps in our certainties, such as gaps in the walls or fences that separate migrants from the land they want to join.
No wall will ever hold an artist;
No wall will ever resist the desire of men to share a common future with other men;
No wall can ever define an eternal and isolated collective identity from the outside world.
None of these walls in history has ever lasted very long, because they are only walls of illusion. And that’s happy.
The greatness of France, as it has often been criticized, is its claim to universality. She owes this claim to her intellectuals, she owes it to her artists, who have shaped for her this beautiful idea of humanity.
This is why France is active today to keep the eternal trace of this universal heritage, destroyed in Palmyra by barbarism and the lure of gain. It will remain more than ever a land of World Heritage.
The greatness of France is to have given birth to Diderot, Rousseau, or Voltaire.
But the greatness of France is also to have welcomed, Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian immigrant;
Picasso, the Spanish refugee;
Marie Curie, the young Polish woman who has become one of the greatest scientists in France;
Serge Gainsbourg, the descendant of Russian immigrants;
Cioran, Kundera, Semprun, Yasmina Khadra,
And today Anish Kapoor at Versailles.
The greatness of France is to have welcomed great artists who have shaped its culture.
The greatness of France is that it has always welcomed anonymous migrants, unknown refugees, adopted children, and made them ministers. Our country, they have found refuge in it, have integrated into it, have shaped it in their turn, and have contributed their stone to what it has become today.
The greatness of France is its open identity, its multiple identity, a fabric woven by the dialogue of cultures, on the chain of humanity.
Thank you.