There is no doubt that the brave new world of Macronism is exhibiting all the hallmarks of a rather old world – that of an ancient monarchic regime. While it may not have the hereditary nature of a monarchy, it displays the privileges of caste and the arrogance of class, egocentric power and court society of one. Each new episode in the saga of this presidency confirms this and reveals, beyond the predictably neo-liberal aspect of its economic and social policies, a practice of politics that is a thousand miles from the “profound democratic revolution” promised in the first pages of Emmanuel Macron's election campaign book Révolution, published by XO Éditions in 2016.
Blinded by the weight of the story, we did not immediately grasp that we had to understand the meaning of this word 'Revolution' in its original, astronomical sense. Here it is defined as: “The return of a star to the point from which it left.” The point of departure for Emmanuel Macron is a step backwards. He evidently doesn't intend to start the revolution but to stop one from happening. Combined with a quick criticism of totalitarian regimes, with the French Revolution cast as their generic ancestor, his credo in the book is one of regret. Of a sense that France would have done better if it had not cut off its king's head and if it had trusted the management of those experts who wanted to reform the monarchy, rather than the sketchy, dangerous invention of its people.
Indeed, the cat was let out of the bag by another book that appeared just before Révolution. Its author was Jean-Pierre Jouyet who was none other than Emmanuel Macron's protector in the upper ranks of the civil service, his promoter at the Élysée and then in the government during the presidency of François Hollande. This book, Ils ont fait la Révolution sans le Savoir, ('They started a Revolution without knowing it') written by a man who was secretary general of the Élysée in a presidency elected in 2012 under the label of socialist, is a straightforward ode to France's Ancien Régime, its dandies, its libertines, its traditions and its wealth, its courtiers and its schemers.
His theme is one of mistrust for society, for its unpredictable turbulence, its uncontrollable counter-balances, its conservative people, its destructive enthusiasm. The whole book tells the anguish of a representative of this state nobility - today allied to the aristocracy of money – when faced with the possibility that its world of comfort and certainties might collapse. To take just one example worthy of a place in a collection of platitudes, the book gives an ignorant and anachronistic caricature of Mediapart's work, whose investigations are likened to the scapegoating practised by the Père Duchesne newspaper during the Revolution. The book states: “The Trotskist cult is ready to do anything – or virtually anything – to achieve its aim: destroy social structure from the inside.”
And the only information that one finds in 'Un personnage de roman' ('A Character from a Novel'), a swooning 2017 account of Emmanuel Macron's presidential campaign by his friend and author Philippe Besson who accompanied him, is precisely the centrist candidate's fondness for the Ancien Régime. Writing about the future president's candidature on November 16th, 2016, Besson writes: “I learn later that after his announcement, he asked to go to the Basilica of Saint-Denis [editor's note, in a northern suburb of Paris] burial place of the kings of France. I ask myself about this act, carried out alone, away from the cameras: by going to the tomb of the Capetians, had he come to enter into history? Seek anointment?” In March 2017, writing again about the Ancien Régime and Emmanuel Macron's evocation of it, the writer noted: “He really likes this model.”
Under the Ancien Regime reverence calls for recompense, regardless of expertise. So it is that Philippe Besson, the eulogistic narrator of triumphant Macronism, has been named as France's consul general in Los Angeles. This prestigious post has already been the subject of back room wheeler-dealing, when President Nicolas Sarkozy nominated his protégé David Martinon to it after the latter's failure in 2008 to become the conservative UMP party's candidate as mayor in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. But this appointment at least preserved administrative niceties as the position remained in the hands of a career diplomat, for Martinon, who had attended the elite École Nationale d'Administration (ENA) institute, had been a civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But in the case of Philippe Besson, there was no other criteria for getting the job other than his friendship with the president and his wife Brigitte Macron. The same was true with the appointment a year ago of the publicist Bruno Roger-Petit as spokesperson for the presidency, a position especially created for him.
The nomination of Philippe Besson to the LA post was permissible through one of those summer power grabs that our monarchic presidential system allows, imposing government fiat over the rule of law. During the meeting of government ministers on August 3rd this year, a decree was passed extending the government's discretionary powers of patronage – in effect, the president's powers – to twenty-two consul general posts. Until now they had been left as an internal staffing matter at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So once the current position holders leave, there will be twenty-one further posts awaiting other courtiers, from Barcelona to Hong Kong, from Bombay to Saint Petersburg, from Sao Paulo to Shanghai and so on.
In this way, the Macron approach follows in the footsteps of the era of François Mitterrand, who was the first to have massively extended the president of the Republic's power of nomination and patronage. In that case, too, the power grab took place over summer and there is even another similarity with this government, in that the Mitterrand presidency was also grappling with a politically explosive event. Though the Rainbow Warrior affair of 1985 was, it is true, rather more dramatic than the Benalla affair faced by the Macron's presidency.
After a decree issued on July 24th, 1985, that set out the senior positions whose nomination was left to government decision, a later decree on August 6th, 1985, listed no fewer than 148 management posts in public establishments, businesses and enterprises where the appointees were nominated by the council of ministers. The previous decree that had been in force, dating from 1967 under the presidency of Charles De Gaulle, had listed just 53.
A small army of dependants and vassals
The French presidential system is thus an institutionalised courtier system. Once they are elected the head of state has five years – it was seven years until 2002 – to build up a small army of dependants and vassals across all sectors of public life. On top of the prime minister, the departmental ministers, state advisors, ambassadors, top counsellors at the budget watchdog body the Cour des Comptes, prefects, state representatives in overseas territories, the top military brass, the heads of education authorities, the directors of central administrative bodies, members of the Constitutional Council and so on, there are now 170 positions that are filled on the say-so of the president. It is clearly a weapon that can be used to manoeuvre and control, and reinforces the power base of the Élysée. François Mitterrand had enlarged the scope for patronage ahead of the 1986 Parliamentary elections that he went on to lose, a defeat which forced him to have a government of 'cohabitation' with the Right until he was re-elected as president in 1988.
None of Mitterrand's successors challenged this extension of presidential power, this permanent power grab where the wishes of a sole individual prevail over government for all. Nevertheless, we are witnessing, especially since the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, an ever more debased version of this presidentialism, as if a generation of adventurers had taken over from a group of professionals. After all, Romain Gary, one of Philippe Besson's prestigious predecessors as consul general in Los Angeles, was not only a tremendous writer but in particular a great figure in the Resistance, in Free France, and was awarded the Order of Liberation. In the same way President François Mitterrand had the skill, even elegance, to nominate to such posts some of his fiercest critics; for example Gilles Martinet who was made French ambassador to Rome in 1981.
In the recent past the very real temptation to privatise the state came up against senior figures in public service who were rooted in a tradition of service in the general interest. Today such bulwarks seem very fragile if they exist at all. Is it not the case that the Parliamentary hearings into the Benalla affair revealed the active servility of a number of senior civil servants towards the Élysée, a servility which would have continued without any qualms if the video of the violence committed on May 1st had not been identified and revealed? The practice of serving at the president's pleasure thus reigns supreme, with no impediment or reserve. It is like that tribe of people devoted to the latest mishaps and activities of celebrities, as represented in relation to Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron by the PR Michèle Marchand, who has been hired to look after their image.
Perhaps one day the history of the Fifth Republic will have to be rewritten based on just one criterion: the extent to which this system of personal power, which is profoundly out of date in a complex world faced with well-informed societies, stupefies those who benefit from it. The best procurer of this “permanent coup d'État”, François Mitterrand, was himself defeated by these institutions, adopting the posture of a monarch through divine right at the end of his 14 years of presidency. All of his successors have seemed more intelligent during their election campaign, declaring themselves aware of the traps of the presidential system before they, too, have succumbed to its mirage, and given way to the excitement and blinkered nature of the all-encompassing presidency, or have sunk under the isolation and solitude of the Élysée. None has been able to rise to the challenge of the democratic radicalism that this gnawing French political crisis calls for.
Emmanuel Macron is the latest in line of these intelligent people whom the presidential system renders stupid. His recent remark on a trip to Denmark about “Gauls who are resistant to change” in contrast with the “Lutheran people who have lived through the transformations of recent years” is the latest demonstration of this. The subsequent claim that this was a humorous remark does not stop it being doubly stupid, compounded by poor manners. It was stupid from an historical point of view, as historians specialising in the Gauls have hastened to point out. It was stupid on an intellectual level, because to reduce a people to an intangible reality is to reason like racists, who only see a uniform, homogeneous and unchanging mass where there are in fact diverse, shifting and different individuals. Finally, Emmanuel Macron showed an inelegance towards the people whom he is supposed to represent and of whom he speaks as if he himself were not part of them and, in particular, is superior to them.
In the previous century, in the intellectual turbulence that accompanied the critique of social democracy that had become converted to the established order and of Stalinist communism discredited by its crimes, the Marxist critique picked up a formula from the past: that of “Parliamentary cretinism”. This was a term used by Karl Mark in 1879 when he and Friedrich Engels were in a heated argument with leading social democrats in Germany. It was intended to characterise a personal form of politics trapped inside its institutional bubble which becomes ignorant of the way the world is going and indifferent to changes in society. One that believes only in the power of its own speeches without paying attention to social realities. “They are already so far infected with Parliamentary cretinism as to believe themselves above criticism and to denounce criticism as a crime de lèse-majesté!” wrote Marx in September 1879, as was pointed out by Maximilien Rubel, one of the most libertarian of Marxist scholars.
Parliamentary cretinism is the illness of excessively powerful and solitary personal power. Locked away in their citadel, our presidents run the risk of losing their common sense, of losing the plot and their minds, because of a shameful complicity with an institutional system which, while strengthening them, numbs our democracy. “Everything that we're doing is unprecedented. I'm aware that it could fall apart in a flash,” Emmanuel Macron told Philippe Besson in September 2016. That warning holds true today, except that everything is falling apart because the unprecedented promise has not be kept, having been supplanted by the oldest form of politics.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter