When the hand of Marianne provoked the French conservatives

Yesterday, Wednesday January 27th 2016, Mrs. Christiane Taubira resigned her position of Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals, one of the French Republic's most essential role in the tragic context we live in: a state of emergency that's continuing just like the vigilance plan against terrorism for the past twenty years, exhausting both the collective attention and both French civilian and military forces.

Left, Mrs. Taubira's right hand on a picture published by Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace ; right, Marianne de la jeunesse's hand signed by artists Olivier Ciappa et David Kawena.

A direct link between Christiane Taubira and philately was told by Olivier Ciappa when the Marianne de la jeunesse, the current definitive series of France, was unveiled on the 14th of July 2013 - note that the respective role in this design is disputed by David Kawena who refused the claimed inspirations told by Ciappa (watch the soap opera article on SébPhilatélie - lot of irony in these 2013-2014 texts).

The allegory received a lot of positive reviews by the high school classes chosen to select the three finalist projects proposed to the President of the French Republic. François Hollande chose their favourite project despite other stamp artists being more experience in philately.

At the unveiling ceremony in the Élysée Palace, Olivier Ciappa announced to journalists all the women that inspired him. At the beginning of the Summer - a long slow news period in France, journalists and very convervative people, angered by Mrs. Taubira's law project of extended marriage right to homosexuals, focused on the name of Inna Shevchenko, one of the Eastern European feminist movement FEMEN. The lady envoyed the news by a tweet: all haters and racists would have to lick her backside to send a letter...

Some journalists, like Ivan Valerio of Europe 1 Lab, quoted Ciappa more carefully: he told that he was trying to create a face using features of actress Marion Cotillard, former right wing Minister Roselyne Bachelot and then current left wing Minister Taubira. Three progressive women.

Failing in the task, "I remarked that [Bachelot and Taubira] both did a very gracious movement of the hand, when they spoke a long time, in monologue. I kept this gesture in my Marianne."

One day we'll have the version of David Kawena, known to be more inspired by Disney classical animated movies. Waiting that day, the current Marianne reminds discretly that politics can be done with pertinent and thoughtful speech longer than 140 characters, and that a politician can have strong opinions that he/she would be faithful to and won't contradict in a Mea Culpa editions booka four years later.*


* : note to non French readers, these past months, as the next Presidential election is mediatically approaching, the right wing candidates publish their program books. And because they were in power from 2002 to 2012, in the first chapters, they all apologize for the things they didn't enforce and are now proposing for the 2017-2022 presidency and legislature... At the same time they reproach Mrs. Taubira to stand by her positions, especially in the domains of Justice and equality of rights.