The New Year’s card proposed by the city of Marseille shocked the conservative opposition a few days before the New Year. The reason: in the photo, the cross of the Basilica Notre-Dame de la Garde was removed from its dome, France 3 reported in an article published on Thursday December the 23rd. This detail caught the attention of numerous local politicians, such as Valérie Boyer, who addressed the city council on Twitter. The Les Républicains (LR) senator of the Bouches-du-Rhône department reacted not without irony: “Thank you to the city administration for being so attached to our traditions, our roots and our identity. After the disappearance of Merry Christmas (which has been replaced by Happy Feast), we learn that Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde has no cross. The Virgin Mary could be next?”.
The same opinion was expressed by Yves Moraine, former president of the LR group in the city council of the city. On the same social network, he addressed the mayor of the Mediterranean city, Benoît Payan, directly to find out the reasons for this decision: “Mr Mayor, the dome of Notre Dame de la Garde is crowned by a cross, why remove it?” Then resentment was also expressed in Paris, where a number of politicians of the political right in turn expressed their incomprehension.
This is particularly true of former minister Nadine Morano, who took the opportunity to castigate the “Marseille Spring” coalition at the head of the city administration. On Twitter, she called this majority “anti-France” after discovering the controversial greeting card. “They are destroyers of our civilisation, our culture and our Christian roots,” she deplored. This view was apparently shared by Gilbert Collard, former deputy for the Gard department, who expressed his anger at the “small-minded and Stalinist exterminators of our history”.
For its part, the city administration stressed to France 3 that the New Year’s card for 2022 was in fact nothing new. Audrey Gatian, the deputy mayor in charge of roads and parking, explained that this photo had been on display at city hall “[for] years”. She then shared that it was mainly a “stylised view of [Marseille], with the towers out of order, for example”. She concluded on regional radio: “This photo has been in use for years by MPs, even by Madame Boyer herself! This story is taking on ridiculous proportions…”.