These remarks were published in Le Figaro on January 8, 2021, and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman. Footnotes have been added for clarification by the translator, whose introductory comments are here.
In a democracy, liberty always goes hand in hand with responsibility. Donald Trump’s responsibility for the outbreak of violence on Capitol Hill is clear. Minimizing that responsibility, as Marine Le Pen did by asserting that the American president did not “gauge the impact of his words” is the false politics: Because it ignores that in our agitated democracies, facing an exhausted people, moderating one’s words constitutes the premier obligation of responsible politicians. It is more than a matter of civility; it is an urgent civic necessity, if we do not want to see the battle of tweets degenerate into a war of all against all.
Yet indignation is not enough. We also have to understand. What do we see on the other side of the Atlantic? An ailing democracy, to be sure. Ailing from an epidemic of anger, of which the violence at the Capitol was by no means the first wave, nor is America the only “cluster” of this epidemic, since it has already spread across the rest of the Western world.
This epidemic is due to the extensive seclusion of the elites in the face of the great downgrading of the peoples of the West.
The technocratic elite, who abandoned our frontiers in the name of open borders, and who failed to protect us [against the virus—trans.] out of an excess of caution, still provide no protection, even though they protect themselves, as we can see here in France, in the fiasco of the launch of the vaccination campaign. The untouchable class, as loquacious as it is ineffective, hides its incompetence behind a smugness that elicits mistrust.
The progressive elites meanwhile reserves the status of victim for a few minorities, while blaming all the problems on “retrograde Gauls” or the “deplorable” Trump voters, as Hillary Clinton called them. Let’s open our eyes. The source of the evil that is eating away at our democracies is the disregard by the “camp of the good” for the sufferings of ordinary people, who see their standard of living threatened as well as their very way of life. For this international of indifference, hunkered down in the shelters of unreality that it has built for itself, the people is no longer an active subject. Instead it has been reduced to an object to be used arbitrarily by the stroke of a pen at the bottom of a decree.
In a few months, perhaps, the world will emerge from the COVID-19 epidemic. But because the elites maintain the barriers that they have built between themselves and their people, the virus of anger will continue to spread. And this will destroy the few remaining immune defenses against the seductions of demagogues and the rantings of conspiracy thinkers. How can we maintain cohesion among citizens who no longer believe in vaccines, in information, or even in election results? The despair of the defenseless has led to a democracy without trust.
Europe is often just one step behind America, sometimes for the good, but sometimes also for the worse. The citizens’ anger against central power—we have experienced it too, in the crisis of the “yellow vests” as well as the electoral revolt of Brexit. We have also seen the identity-political overstatements associated with Black Lives Matters in the indigenist demonstrations around the Traoré affair.[1] If we want to recover civic friendship among the French, we owe the people a politics that brings them together, a politics of the common good.
The common good—that is first of all the dignity of every individual, especially through one’s work and livelihood: a job that pays and that is not amputated, neither by the voraciousness of a state that consumes more than half of the wealth produced by the French, nor by the ferocity of a disloyal competition that has sparked the social and economic decline of the middle classes. Common good: this is also respect for the common will, through a return to the popular sovereignty that is now being undermined by committees and “civic” conferences, that delegitimize democracy,[2] while it is also usurped by the courts and other institutions that bypass the choices of the French people.
This is especially clear with regard to the question of immigration: This phenomenon is undoubtedly the most significant upheaval that our society has faced in half a century, but the French people have never been able to vote on it. The common good is, ultimately, a matter of these frameworks that hold us together, which however have buckled under the joint weight of individualism and relativism. Family, school, nation, civic associations: these are the supporting walls of French unity that we must rebuild so as not to abandon individuals to the cold mechanisms of the bureaucratic state or the market alone.
It took several centuries for Western societies to build this regime of expectations and efforts that makes up democracy. These are efforts on the part of the governed to accept the law of the majority, but there are also expectations that rulers respect that majority as well. Because the rulers have not been carrying out their duties with regard to the governed that the democratic contract in the West is directly threatened. It is urgent to renew this pact, if we want to avoid the new civil war on the horizon.
Bruno Retailleau is a French Senator representing the Vendée and since 2014 President of The Republicans group in the Senate. The essay appeared in Le Figaro on January 8, 2021.
1. Adama Traoré was arrested on July 19, 2016 in Beaumont-sur-Oise. By the time he arrived at the police station, he was deceased. Medical experts differ on the cause of death. According to a court-ordered examination, Traoré died of cardiac edema, but a subsequent determination initiated by the family indicates asphyxiation, which would inculpate the arresting officers. The Traoré case has become a rallying point for a movement in France against police violence and racism more broadly, at times instrumentalized by other groups.
2. Part of the French response to the pandemic has involved a plan for consultations with citizens via ad hoc committees, in part to counteract the very high rate of vaccine-skepticism; as late as November 2020, 59% of the French said they would not, or probably not, be vaccinated. Retailleau is suggesting that such public relations efforts should not be viewed as substitutes for authentic democratic will formation.
Wonderful article.
But when you put side by side the strength of a less and less restrained anger and “… those frameworks which hold us together…”(the common good) there is, to my mind, little doubt as to which is more powerful.
I would argue that both cultural (internal restraints) and legal (external restraints) have been defeated.
Most of us now want blood,
Please persuade me that this is not the case!