Col. Arnaud Beltrame has united the French people.
During a terrorist attack last week, Beltrame exchanged places with a civilian hostage and was killed by an Islamic State-inspired terrorist.
Speaking at a ceremony for Beltrame on Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron paid homage to the fallen gendarme and former special forces officer.
Beltrame’s life and sacrifice, Macron said, “honors us, elevates us. It says like nothing else what France is, what it must keep being and what it will never stop being as long as women and men decide to serve it with courage, honor, and love for their country.”
As the Paris rain dripped solemnly at the French home of war heroes, Les Invalides, Macron awarded Beltrame the nation’s highest honor, the Legion of Honor.
Yet, for a nation that continues to face great divisions on issues of identity such as integration and anti-Semitism, Beltrame’s death has served a great purpose: It has threaded the French people together.
Across the Fifth Republic, citizens are remembering a quiet man who lived and died in an immortal testament to the nation’s best values: liberty, equality, and solidarity.
“The French have been profoundly moved by his sacrifice,” French political analyst and Hudson Institute fellow Benjamin Haddad explained to me. “You see it on social media, on the political reactions left and right. These attacks have sparked a positive patriotism, an attachment to national symbols that was very difficult before.”
Symbols.
Ultimately, alongside the lives he has saved, Beltrame’s symbol is his greatest gift to France. He has proved that the symbols of patriotism which adorn France’s museums, monuments, and military uniforms are not echoes of a bygone era, but eternal markers of its greatness.
