How D-Day commemorations became the stage for diplomacy and geopolitics

D-Day commemorationsTo mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, French President Emmanuel Macron will preside over an international ceremony on Omaha Beach on June 6. Every 10-year anniversary of D-Day has become a not-to-be-missed event for many heads of state. These commemorations have not always had a political and diplomatic dimension, but have acquired an international following over the decades.On June 6, 2014, François Hollande, Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth II, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, Petro Poroshenko and David Cameron pose in front of the Château de Bénouville in Normandy.Advertising Read moreUS President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European Council President Charles Michel. On Thursday June 6, 25 heads of state, kings and queens, representatives of allied and enemy countries, will join French President Emmanuel Macron at the international tribute to the more than 150,000 soldiers who landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.D-Day commemorations have become a key political and diplomatic event for many of the world\'s leaders, but June 6 has not always been so keenly observed.It took several decades for this historic day of remembrance to acquire an international following.Only a few hundred people commemorated the first anniversary of Operation Overlord, the code name for the Battle of Normandy, on June 6, 1945. World War II was not yet over in the Pacific, so the ceremony was limited to a delegation comprising the ambassadors of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, along with the French Ministers of war, the navy and the air force, who met at the town of Arromanches.In the years that followed, and as Normandy recovered from the war, the commemorations were almost exclusively military and mainly French. “They were more like popular communal events, with small committees set up all over the place,” says Tristan Lecoq, associate professor at Paris Sorbonne University and a specialist in contemporary military history.De Gaulle ignores June 6For the 10th anniversary of D-Day, the ceremonies took on a more official tone. French President René Coty, a native of Le Havre, visited the Calvados and Manche départements for two days. At Utah Beach, he attended a parade of Allied troops and inaugurated the D-Day Museum, the first museum built in Normandy to commemorate the landings.President René

Coty lays a wreath on a Normandy beach at Colleville-Montgomery, June 6, 1954, to mark the tenth anniversary of D-Day. AFPTen years later, in 1964, the commemorations were broadcast live on television for the first time. But the French president, Charles de Gaulle, was conspicuous by his absence.“He refused to commemorate June 6, given the way he had been treated at the time of the D-Day landings. He hadn\'t been involved in the discussions or in the implementation of the plan,” explains historian Denis Peschanski, involved in promoting local commemorative events for this year’s anniversary as part of the Mission Libération.“He always refused to recognise or even review the Kieffer commando,” explained Lecoq, referring to the only French commando unit to take part in D-Day. “As far as he was concerned, they were foreigners on the payroll. Behind it all was the notion of national and military sovereignty.”De Gaulle preferred to attend the commemorations on August 15, 1964 of the landings of troops on the Mediterranean coast in the south of France, and to highlight the role of French units, particularly troops based in French North Africa, in the Liberation of France.In 1974, Valéry Giscard d\'Estaing, the newly elected French president, did not make the trip to Normandy either, but simply sent his Minister of the Armed Forces, Jacques Soufflet, to represent the government.The following year, Giscard abolished May 8 – celebrating the Allied victory in 1945 – as a public holiday. “He wanted to appear like a young president, free of the heavy-handedness of the De Gaulle and Pompidou eras. He wanted to move on to another era,” says Lecoq.In 1981, having just been elected president, François Mitterrand reinstated the May 8 holiday.The 1984 commemorative turning pointThe real turning point for the D-Day commemoration and its significance in global politics came in 1984. For the first time, the French president invited six heads of state, including US President Ronald Reagan and the Queen of England, to an international ceremony at Utah Beach, attended by thousands of veterans.US President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy during a visit to Pointe du Hoc, June 6, 1984. © Ron Edmonds, APAt Pointe du Hoc, where US Army Rangers fought fierce battles with German soldiers, Reagan was filmed in a bunker with his wife, Nancy, while Mitterrand met Queen Elizabeth II at the British cemetery in Bayeux. Peschanski says that t