France was hurt, divided and in need of a great federating event after recent elections. And Emmanuel Macron framed the Olympic Games as an opportunity to “unite around a France that welcomes the world”, calling for a “political truce” during that time.
Conservatives, however, believe that the great moment of national cohesion has yet to take place. From the Republican party to the far-right National Rally, politicians throughout the conservative spectrum have described the opening ceremony’s scenes as “insults to the nation” and largely approached the event as a Trojan horse for the “woke ideology”.
Often heard in France in tandem with another idiom, “islamo-leftism” (islamo-gauchisme), which denounces the alleged proximity of the left with Islam, wokisme is increasingly the bête noire of a fringe of the political establishment. My research as part of the project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, HLJPGenre (History of Law and JurisPrudence, studied from a gender perspective), has already led me to analyse and decipher the use of the terms “woke” and “wokisme”.
