A pharaoh in Paris.
Ceremony with great pomp at the Invalides, meetings with the highest figures of the State, from the President of the Senate to the mayor of Paris, dinner in gala dress at the Élysée Palace.
These images of the visit of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi were revealed on Wednesday, December 8 by the Quotidien program on the TMC channel, which had to pick them up on the site of the Egyptian presidency.
"We will remember that for the first time we went to the site of an authoritarian regime to find out what is happening at the Elysee Palace", concluded the presenter Yann Barthès after the broadcast of these sequences, which had not opened to the French press.
Al-Sissi in Paris: gala, legion of honor ... Today, for the first time, we had to go to the website of an authoritarian regime to find out what is happening at the Elysee Palace.
⬇️ # Daily pic.twitter.com/BQlus7UnNe
- Daily (@Qofficiel) December 8, 2020
This is how the moment when President Emmanuel Macron handed the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor to his Egyptian counterpart was only immortalized by a cameraman from the Egyptian delegation.
This secret decoration sparked an uproar among human rights defenders.
An Italian intellectual, Corrado Augias, even returned his Legion of Honor on Monday 14 December to protest the distinction of a person he considers "an accomplice in criminal behavior".
On the side of the French press, the controversy around this protocol decoration revives the feeling of having been kept away from a whole section of Marshal Sissi's official visit.
Journalists were only allowed to attend the reception of the Egyptian president by his French counterpart at the Élysée Palace, as well as the press conference that followed.
"We are never present for the presentation of the necklace of the Legion of Honor to foreign dignitaries. But I have no recollection of ever having seen a state dinner that is not covered by the press," said Jacques Witt, photojournalist for thirty years.
The courtyard of the Élysée Palace is then open to the media in the evening to allow them to film and photograph the arrival of guests.
"We discovered a posteriori these images of Sissi on Quotidien. We did not have access to the full program of the visit and the state dinner was not marked on the presidential agenda", adds a journalist who follows the 'Élysée, also a member of the Presidential Press Association.
"In France, we are not in an Anglo-Saxon culture of transparency, where the meetings of each advisor are on the agenda."
The question of the Legion of Honor had not been raised at the time.
State visits to France are, however, the fruit of a well-established mechanism, with several obligatory passages: gala dinner, ceremony at the Invalides and the Arc de Triomphe, passage at the National Assembly and the Senate, visit to the town hall of Paris, etc.
As of December 3, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had communicated a schedule for Marshal Sissi's visit to allow the agencies and media of the Press Liaison Committee to share the various events to be covered.
Extract from the media coverage schedule of Marshal Sissi's official visit © France 24 screenshot
Barely two hours after this dispatch, the Liaison Committee sent a new message to the media announcing that these provisions had been canceled by the Quai d'Orsay because the Élysée was taking control of the procedure.
The stages mentioned in the previous schedule were not finally open to journalists.
Message announcing the cancellation of the media coverage arrangements for Marshal Sissi's visit © Screenshot France 24
The French presidency, for its part, affirms that it has in no way "taken control" over the media arrangements for this visit.
According to a source from the Elysee Palace, joined on Monday, December 14, the accreditation for each stage fell under the authority of the authorities visited by Marshal Sissi.
As for the state dinner, the Élysée did not consider it useful to leave the courtyard open to the media because "due to the Covid, there were only about twenty people, most of whom had come three hours before ", when the journalists were present.
The French press having been kept at bay, it was finally the images of the Egyptian delegation, mounted to underline the sumptuous reception reserved for Marshal Sissi, which made the rounds of the Web and gave an additional echo to a bad decoration discount. assumed on the French side.
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