“Fallait-il tuer Macron?”

Getting an interview with the author is the stuff of spy novels. The pseudonym Nicolas Boucher protects a personality who could be recognised. So I send my questions to an intermediary and, so as not to alarm the Internet surveillance systems, I first refer to “Fallait‑il Tuer M?”, then, thinking better of it, only to FTM. A few days later, I find the answers in my spam.. or more precisely, answers to questions different from the ones I had asked. But one has to know how to seize the opportunities of fate, like the novel’s main character, an assassin who, throughout this 129-page fiction, presents himself as the instrument of a regicide that had to be carried out.

Provocative, zany, subversive. These are the three key words this work of fiction inspires in me. Keys to the universe built by the author. Keys that open the door of a cell in La Santé prison, from which the main character explains his act and wonders about its real and symbolic significance.

Incitement to murder?

The provocation can be sensed from the very title of the novel. It also crops up throughout the confessions of this strangely detached, factual and dispassionate assassin, who refuses to have his act interpreted as a political one. It is an ontological act. Provocative, when the narrator describes the activists strategically placed along the president’s route to “feed the idea that there was still a part of the country that had remained loyal to Him”. A president whose blood was “full of toxins, as the autopsy will reveal!”. The ultimate provocation: the assassination takes place during a presidential visit, on 5 December 2023, to… a slaughterhouse!

Impossible not to ask the author whether he fears that this novel might be taken literally, as an incitement to murder. “I would like to insist here on the fact that this is not a book about Macron. And even less any kind of incitement to use violence. The title, mind you, is not “Faut‑il tuer Macron?”. The narrator says it very clearly: Macron as an individual is very negligible, he is basically nothing, killing him would make no sense.”.

Indeed, in many respects the whole story seems deliberately zany. An assassin called Boucher who commits regicide in a slaughterhouse — at the end of a series of circumstances I will let you discover — which allows the Guardian to run the headline: Slaughtered like a pig! Zany, too, because the minor local civil servant is anything but a fanatical criminal: “not inclined to action, a man of meditation and study, I forced my nature to build scenarios…” He is presented to us as the improbable arm of fate, “where chance meets determinism to forge what, a posteriori, we call the event”.

So is this book a hoax?

“That is basically the question I want the reader to ask throughout the novel” the author replies mischievously. “Without imposing any particular reading, I would say that the book is a hoax as far as its narrative is concerned: the assassination of Macron, its zany modus operandi. As for the rest — I am thinking in particular of the second part — it is the opposite of a hoax. Behind the Ubuesque narration, I wanted to question the absurdity of the situation we have been living through in many respects since the so-called health crisis. Presented on a theatre stage barely three years ago, such a situation would have made us leave the auditorium. We could not have ‘bought into’ such an outrageous staging, so hopelessly outrageous.”

The author thus uses this politically incorrect crime novel to denounce a coercive, dystopian society that is out of touch with reality. Starting with the crime scene, a provincial slaughterhouse at the cutting edge of progress. The livestock there are immersed in a reassuring virtual reality simulating green pastures, to spare them any stress until the final blow of the cosh. A radically subversive image! All of this taking place in “a land of rural exodus and desertification of everything, (…) where it is the animals, not the people, that live, are cared for, are respected and die with the most dignity.”

However, in the second part of the novel, the assassin is beset by doubt. What if killing the arrogant representative of the start-up nation served no purpose after all? There are so many others, ambitious contenders for the title of Young Global Leader, just waiting for an (s)election to take his place. In the end, did the hero’s act have any meaning? “What does make sense, on the other hand,” the author explains to me, “is to try to kill the reality that people like Macron, who emerge from very private agencies for the purpose of systematically plundering a nation and its inhabitants, are trained to bring about. It is not Macron who must be killed; it is the world he comes from, the one he inhabits and wants, like so many other mercenaries disguised as heads of State, to impose on us.”

The narrator cannot resign himself to the dehumanising future that the New World Order is selling us. He describes Macron as “a plastic man, an image”. He traces his resistible rise. A subversive portrait. That of a character fashioned from scratch by agencies specialising in the manufacture of high-tech political products. A product “adapted to the expectations of the nation one wishes to enslave”. “Thus constructed, infused with millions, assured of the support of the financial world before which he had so long abased himself, Emmanuel Macron was able to make people believe that he had ‘won’ an election…” Subversive too is the assassin who wonders about the consequences of his act and worries: “Have I not, indecently, allowed the impostor to hand his name down to posterity?”

Is it ultimately the human that is under threat?

Macron, who is presented as the archetype of the virtual personality, is interchangeable. “Interchangeability is indeed what inaugurates the virtual reign of the leaders of his generation.” A virtual reality, like the one projected during the pandemic. A virtual reality that threatens “the very essence of truth.” A virtual reality that purports to be reassuring, like the one imposed on the cattle of the Lacaune slaughterhouse while they are led, unaware of the deception, towards a fatal end. Is it not ultimately our humanity that the Macrons of this world are calling into question?

“I also wrote this book because, faced with the situation we are living through, in which everything that you and I mean by the word human is threatened with extinction, few men and women of letters have mobilised. They have shown that culture, like the arts, does not escape compromise. In my eyes, they have sealed the defeat of culture. Otium no longer exists, that cultivated leisure uplifting souls which every society must seek to offer to everyone, including those most lacking in cultural heritage. Like everything else, literature, philosophy (with very rare exceptions) and art have abdicated into entertainment. They too have become a commodity, something to consume. One must have read the latest Annie Ernaux (a writer, incidentally, of abysmal insipidity), seen the latest film by some other person whose name tomorrow will have forgotten. Culture, thus commodified, has become the property (on an ontological level, when not stricto sensu) of the great merchants giving their orders to our leaders. Otium has been swallowed by negotium. A little literature. Without compromise. That is also what I wanted to offer the reader.”

This book, self-published, is available for pre-order from 5 December 2023, only on the website: https://apotastena.com/

KAro for BAM!

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of BAM!

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Illustration by BAM! based on a photo by JacZia on Adobe Stock