Paris On Air by Oliver Gee

Author:Oliver Gee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2020-03-04T17:06:26+00:00

5.5 Le Président de la République

After five years working at the news site (including three in Stockholm, but that’s for another book) my time as a journalist was coming to an end. The French were deciding whether to vote in their youngest leader since Napoleon, Emmanuel Macron, or Marine Le Pen and the far right. The election was to be my last story for the news site which seemed to be a fitting book end.

In the lead-up we reported the hell out of that election, and I’m glad to say that by now my French was much improved. I travelled around Paris and France and listened to anyone who’d talk. I spoke to young Parisians who were excited by the prospect of a president in his thirties. I went to a National Front rally in a former coal mining town, Hénin-Beaumont, where Marine Le Pen was a hero and people were hoping her anti-EU, anti-immigrant policies would turn their lives around. I even went to ghost towns in rural France where no one cared who would win and no one cared to even vote. In Roubaix, which was once the beating heart of the textile industry, people were so disenchanted with it all that they didn’t even want to talk to me about the election. The French papers called it the “capital of abstention” after 45 percent of people didn’t bother voting the last time around. It was fascinating to see how France could be so divided. Walking the streets of the towns in northern France made it evident, once again, that Paris wasn’t France and France wasn’t Paris. But no matter which way the vote went, France was going to get a change, which was clearly what everyone was after.

On the night of the election I was sent to the courtyard of the Louvre museum, where Macron accepted his victory. He strode out to greet the crowds as the European anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, blared from nearby speakers. He’d won in a landslide: 66 percent of the vote, and as I stood among the crowd of thousands, the result seemed to me like the exact kind of news that France needed. A fresh start. New ideas. And a pretty clear “non, merci” to Marine Le Pen.

I stumbled home that night exhausted, but relieved to have finished my work with the news site on a high after two years that included a lot of heavy reporting. But it felt like good news that night: the energy in the young crowd at the Louvre was exhilarating and contagious. They were excited for something new and so was I. But my new chapter had nothing to do with Macron. I was going to tell my own story.

I took a break after the election and spent some time setting up The Earful Tower to be its own entity as a podcast. I taught myself how to edit audio files so that I didn’t need to rely on any outside help to produce the episodes.

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