President Emmanuel Macron’s ill-considered dissolution of the French National Assembly in early June, in advance of the legislative elections that followed soon after, at least made clear a truth concerning the nation’s political life that has long been latent and is now apparent to everyone. Having allowed the unwinding of the wellspring of our political regime—that is, the alternation between majoritarian parties proposing distinct political perspectives—we no longer know how to form a majority capable of governing. What we once eagerly embraced as a fortunate pacification of political life in France meant its emptying, and finally its paralysis. While we may find the result disconcerting, or even alarming, its causes are nonetheless far from mysterious.
Let us briefly review this long and sad history. First there was the cohabitation—the suggestive term by which the French refer to the situation in which the president and the prime minister are of two different parties—of opposites, or alternations that were less and less meaningful, the governing Right and the Left forgetting their respective principles in order to convert to a religion of “Europe” as vapid as it is imperious. But then what is the point of alternation? Why not unify the two wings, Right and Left, of the single party of Europe? This was Macron’s audacious stroke in 2017, which was initially celebrated as a great success. He brilliantly won an electoral majority, but one that implied the obsolescence of the majoritarian principle, as was soon clear in the inconsistency of the presidential party.
Drawing everything to himself, multiplying the “great debates” and “conventions” that circumvented national representation, capable of adopting the language of all the parties as circumstances demanded, as well as speaking directly to every citizen, whether favorable or hostile to himself, Macron was no longer the head of the institutions of the Republic but the solitary and omnipresent individual who attracted the gaze of all. His claim to transcend oppositions and to synthesize opinions, to be at the center of the circle of reason, was not only an expression of his personality but was also based on this process of leaving behind majoritarian alternation. Moreover, the sharing by the Right and the Left of the same European perspective was accompanied by a common revulsion. This period was defined by the rise—not so much in power as in volume—of the party of the excluded and even the accursed. The parties in government could neglect the most fervent wishes of their voters because they possessed this irrefutable argument: “At least we are not them.”
What is striking in the phenomenon of the excluded party, first called the National Front, then the National Rally, is the contrast between its intellectual sloth—the rarity and poverty of its initiatives, its inability over the course of 40 years to achieve the least social rooting—and its almost constantly growing electoral successes. It has prospered, not by the energy or quality of its actions, but in response, or rather, as it were, as a mechanical reaction to the increasingly glaring defects of successive governments. The curse cast upon it became its talisman, while for the political class, its excommunication became a technique of government and a means of social and moral control, which that class has used and abused in a way that profoundly altered the sincerity and freedom of the civic conversation in France.
It must be emphasized that the interminable face-off between the circle of reason—or the republican front—on the one hand, and the National Rally on the other, presupposes or brings about the undermining of the mechanism of representation. There are no longer two parties representing parts of the body politic, but instead the opposition between the legitimate members of the body politic and those who are excluded. This is no longer a debate concerning the definition of the common good but the brandishing of an ontological or religious separation between the elect and the reprobate. The salutary metabolism of political representation, which reinforces a sense of what is shared by the exercise—at once creative and purgative—of the most intense oppositions, no longer functions.
We are left, then, not with the catharsis associated with civic conflict carried out according to the rules, but with an exorcism by exclusion that leaves the defeated party humiliated and offended, while the winner is exposed to an objection that will prove paralyzing: by voting for you, we have not voted for you, but against the other, as you well know. One might reasonably object here that the diversity of the voters’ motives takes nothing from the legitimacy of the one elected. This is formally true, but it misses the fact that a great difference exists between a battle that takes place within the civic order—between Right and Left—and a battle that takes place between the legitimate order and those excluded from it, thus putting the significant political division out of play.
To present the current political situation as a confrontation between democracy and populism/nationalism—between democracy and its enemies—is thus grossly biased and, more importantly, superficial. What we now call democracy on the one hand and populism-nationalism on the other are the results of the process of separation that I am attempting to clarify. When democracy was strong, that is, when the representative republic was fulfilling its purpose, it succeeded in accommodating disagreements much more intense, powerful, and threatening than those surrounding the National Rally, and thus in reconciling them to the ongoing pursuit of the common good. This is worth repeating: the representative republic is the regime capable of accommodating the greatest differences of class, opinion, religion, and tradition—the greatest diversity of spiritual families.
Under such a regime, every great political movement brings about a certain synthesis: a great number of citizens, otherwise very different in their fortune, their opinions and tastes, and so on, can recognize themselves in its physiognomy. The last great synthesis was Gaullism, a synthesis that General Charles de Gaulle, at once a sincere republican and a faithful Catholic, a conservative committed to public liberties, had pondered deeply and pursued deliberately and constantly over many years, never losing sight of the need to gather together all of France’s history by embedding a sense of the monarchical and the classical in the very form of the republic. The approval that now surrounds the personage of de Gaulle allows us to forget or overlook all the divisive, at times hateful, battles through which the Gaullist synthesis was effectuated, as is indeed the case for all great political achievements.
While this Gaullist synthesis brings together, in my view, the greatest number of useful, or, rather, salutary political truths, it had its biases, its blind spots, its failures and faults. It left important segments of the citizen body constantly arrayed against “personal power.” In his own way, President François Mitterrand brought about the synthesis of all those whom Gaullism had revulsed or frustrated, from Communists to “the extreme Right”—a more cowardly and equivocal synthesis, but still a synthesis, since this is what politicians do. Thus, from de Gaulle to Mitterrand, from the hero of the “Free French” to one whose republican record was, shall we say, somewhat less glorious, the Republic found a way to purge its most painful experiences and to accommodate the most violent oppositions. The result was that, one way or another, and not without failures and injustices, all the parties of France’s modern history, as well as all the parts of the civic body, found some recognition and even a certain justice, albeit a justice of men and not of angels.
What came over us that caused us to require unanimous assent to certain “values of the Republic” and to impose extraordinary restrictions on words, so that now books or articles written before the 1980s or even later seem to us filled with intolerable language and unpublishable provocations? What is the source of our dizzying lack of self-confidence? What has happened is that we have slowly, imperceptibly, but decisively exited the political community that we once formed—that is, I repeat again, the representative republic within the framework of the nation. The institutions remain, doing what they do, but we have emigrated mentally and morally. We have allowed ourselves to be enveloped by the agreeable persuasion that the French Republic was for a long time guilty of excessive zeal, that the Gaullist “effort” was pointless and a bit ridiculous, that we could now finally relax and melt away into larger and looser associations, where impartial administrative systems, whether European or international, would take care of our rights and of our interests. We have come to believe that the Republic, and political life in general, was a useless or even dangerous passion.
Meantime, for its part, the party that so loudly proclaimed the nation did not propose a very convincing idea of it. What spiritual families did it connect with, what historical experiences did it propose as the most instructive? The “France” it invokes is an indistinct mass that elicits no reflection that might be developed, no lively affection, no distinctive language. The synthesis that I evoked above, which links political action to a certain understanding of the history and the life of the nation, and which is the signature of a real political proposition—this synthesis is not to be found. Not even the merest sketch can be offered, since the whole point is to avoid all possible causes of division inside the mass. There was nothing left but immigration, which, by definition, comes from the outside. But what France are we talking about, when we have nothing to say to French citizens who are products of this immigration?
I have spoken of the circle of reason and then of the national party. Now I must say a word concerning the third great protagonist. We must give this much credit to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical left movement and party Insoumise (France Unbowed): he explains with great force and clarity what he intends to do. He intends to form a new people, “our people,” as he says with a paternal pride. This people will indeed be mainly new, since it will be made up of all the world’s peoples, who will establish so naturally and openly their forms of life among the old and more recent citizens of this country that the latter will quickly blend into the new people, “our people.” This enterprise ignores the distinction between inside and outside. It ignores it so thoroughly that “Palestine” plays a central role for it. More precisely, it designates “Israel”—the State of Israel and the Jewish people—as the source and center of an altogether distinctive injustice that must urgently be placed at the center of everyone’s consciousness. The gesture that claims to point the way toward the future is the same gesture that points out “the Jews” as the obstacle in our way.
Perhaps the dissolution of the National Assembly, along with its consequences, will turn out to be the “extrinsic accident” that, according to Machiavelli, requires cities to “become aware of themselves” and to refound themselves. In the confusion and the lightning flash of this summer, a light has been lit: we must return home. Salvation will not come from “Europe,” which withdraws as soon as an emergency knocks on the door, and still less from the people-humanity that finds unity and energy only in hatred. Salvation will come only from “us,” from the French people governing ourselves according to the representative republic, the regime whose authority our higher courts have time and again obscured and whose functioning they have hindered. No one will come to our aid if we do not want to govern ourselves.
Photo by Bertrand GUAY / AFP via Getty Images