"I'm struck by the resemblance between the moment we're living through and that of the interwar period," declared Emmanuel Macron on November 1, 2018, underlining the "risk" of seeing Europe "dismembered by nationalist leprosy and pushed around by outside powers." Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the president has remained haunted by the memory of that era, but his references have evolved together with his politics. Whereas in June 2022, his call "not to humiliate Russia" was a transparent allusion to the fate reserved for Germany by the victors of the First World War, his speech in Prague on March 5, urging his allies not to be "cowardly" in the face of a Russia that had become "unstoppable," refers directly to the failure of European democracies' policy of appeasement towards the Third Reich. Two years ago, Macron didn't want to be Georges Clemenceau, a framer of the postwar of Treaty of Versailles (1919). Now, he's refusing to be Edouard Daladier, the French premier who signed the Munich Agreement (1938).

It's no coincidence that the French president chose Prague to raise the specter of Munich. On the night of September 29, 1938, it was Czechoslovakia that Daladier and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain offered as fodder to Adolf Hitler, hoping that by allowing him to annex the German-speaking Sudetenland, they would be saving the peace. Two years after the start of Russian aggression, and with the strategic and diplomatic situation in Kyiv having deteriorated significantly in recent months, the analogy is clearly intended to remobilize Kyiv's allies and underline the seriousness of the moment, in the hope of warding off the risk of public opinion "fatigue."

In so doing, the French head of state has merely reactivated a reference deeply rooted in the French political imagination, "Munich" having become "the rallying cry of all those who consider it immoral, pointless and counter-productive to deal with the devil," to use the words of historian Pierre Grosser. "Yesterday Daladier and Chamberlain, today Le Pen and Orban. The same words, the same arguments, the same debates. We're in Munich in 1938," so Valérie Hayer – lead candidate for Macron's centrist party list in the European elections – was quick to point out at her first campaign rally in Lille on Saturday, March 9.

Denigrating opponents by calling them "pro-Munich" is a line of argument used extensively in French political debate since the post-war years, notably in 1954 to stigmatize those who wished to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh to put an end to the First Indochina War, or to disqualify supporters of the European Defense Community, accused of consenting to dangerous German rearmament. Two years later, Munich syndrome was again invoked by Guy Mollet and Anthony Eden – then-heads of the French and British governments – to justify the adventurous Suez expedition (October 29-November 7, 1956), agreed in reaction to Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the canal. London and Paris feared that, if they did not react to the Egyptian leader, they would fuel a wave of anti-Western nationalism in the Arab world, with the attendant risk of Israel's existence being challenged.

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