Over the years dozens of people have declined to accept the award of France's highest distinction the Légion d'honneur or Legion of Honour. They have included artists, scholars and public figures who have turned down the accolade for a variety of reasons. Some have done so out of a desire to stay independent, as in the case of Edmond Maire, former head of the CFDT trade union or as an act of protest, as with academic Annie Thébaud-Mony, a specialist in occupational illnesses who turned down the Legion of Honour in July 2012 over what she saw as the “indifference” of society towards health in the workplace.
Nineteenth century French composer Hector Berlioz rejected the honour out of anger because he said the French state owed him money, while comic strip artist Jacques Tardi said no in 2013 on the grounds that he wanted to “remain a free man and not be held hostage by any power whatsoever”. The singer Georges Brassens disdained the award, even writing a song in which he attacked this “miserable ribbon, a shameful red”. Other big names to have declined the honour for their own reasons, and in their own style, include the artist Claude Monet, novelist Georges Bernanos, intellectuals and authors Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, novelist Georges Sand and physicist Pierre Curie.
The difference between them and Thomas Piketty, the economist who last week refused the Legion of Honour, however, is that the state did not write a novel with Georges Sand or carry out research with Pierre Curie. Nor did the French state sing with Georges Brassens or draw with Jacques Tardi. However, as presidential candidate François Hollande did speak incessantly of the “great tax reform” inspired by a well-known economist whose name was on everyone's lips: Thomas Piketty.
During Hollande's successful campaign in the autumn of 2011 and the spring of 2012 Piketty was not like other advisors, he was both the inspirer and the guarantor of reform. He was the proof that the handful of bold economic promises made by the candidate were not simply made up on the hoof. When the future president’s team and indeed the candidate himself promised to act to relaunch the economy in a period of crisis, it was because a fairer allocation of the public money coming from taxation was going to provide a major boost in public confidence in the fiscal system. To every question about the public spending deficit, or about the feasibility of such and such a measure, François Hollande talked about the “great tax reform”. This reform, among other things, involved the fusing of the contribution sociale généralisée (CSG) social charge with income tax, and came straight from Thomas Piketty's own works.
'Piketty' was the alchemist, a mixture of magic and science, a universal solution and the answer to everything. (Watch in French here the debate organised in January 2011 by Mediapart between Thomas Piketty and François Hollande, before the latter had become the official Socialist Party candidate for the 2012 presidential elections.)
After the elections, however, the universal answer changed into a series of adjustments that only met the demands of the Right and employers' organisations, and the alchemist was packed off back to his beloved researches, his lectures, his criticism, and then his world best-seller, 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'. Meanwhile the new president was spending 20 billion euros on tax credits for businesses and then 40 billion euros on the so-called Responsibility Pact to reduce employer taxes. The issue of the great tax reform was briefly raised again by then-prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in December 2013, before being definitively ditched with the nomination of Manuel Valls as premier in the spring of 2014.
Indeed, so definitively has the tax reform been abandoned, that the awarding of the Legion of Honour to Piketty seems, as we enter 2015, like an armful of flowers and wreaths laid on the gravestone of a promise, rather than marking the culmination of a career spent at the service of the nation. Geneviève Fioraso, the minister for higher education and research who was behind the award, could perhaps have guessed that this “recompense” would not appeal to Piketty's vanity, but instead irritate him.
But she didn't. Indeed, she failed to spot the symbolic dimension of what was, on the face of it, a simple straightforward decision; and she was not alone in that. When the controversy broke the entire government seemed to be afflicted by amnesia. Piketty was no longer the man who had worked with the candidate's entourage, those same people who are now ministers, he was simply an intellectual, an economics nut, a publishing star whose idiosyncrasies one mocked.
Last week the government's official spokesman and agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll drew a distinction between someone who “has interesting ideas but who's a researcher in an office, who does calculations” and a “politician, who is confronted with reality”. In other words, it seems, when François Hollande championed Piketty's tax reform as a candidate he was neither confronting reality or involved in politics. For junior minister Thierry Mandon, Piketty's tax reform was simply unworkable. This suggests, apparently, that a reform can be both a campaign promise and unworkable at the same time. Meanwhile the junior minister in charge of the digital economy, Axelle Lemaire, suggested that Thomas Piketty “is perhaps confusing the fact that a Légion d'honneur is an award for merit that is recognised by the nation, and not for supporting an economic policy”. This comment underlines how President Hollande is himself not supporting his own campaign economic policy.
From start to finish of this affair, from the announcement of the award to the turns of phrase later bandied about in the extensive media coverage of the row, the government and the president thus indulged in a form of collective amnesia. It was this inability to face up to their own past actions and deeds that gave this otherwise unimportant affair some significance.
There is another, perhaps even worse, aspect to the affair too. The recent winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, French economist Jean Tirole, was also offered the Legion of Honour, which he duly accepted. By suggesting that Piketty was the awkward one in turning down the award, in contrast with the good example set by Tirole, government ministers underlined their political change of direction, in other words what the radical left Front de Gauche, most Greens and rebels in the Socialist Party call the government’s “betrayal” on economic policy. For though he may be a Nobel Prize winner, Tirole is certainly not a man of the Left. He must have shuddered at Hollande's famous election campaign meeting at Le Bourget, Paris (at which the candidate said that the world of finance was his “enemy”), in January 2012 which was inspired by Piketty. Jean Tirole, the new fellow traveller of the Hollande government, is first and foremost a liberal.
It is worth noting in passing that in publishing terms the year 2014 was marked by two books. One involved the vengeance of François Hollande's former partner and 'First Lady', Valérie Trierweiller, who published 'Merci pour ce moment' ('Thanks for the moment'). The other concerned the meanderings of journalist Éric Zemmour, and his book 'Le suicide français' ('France's Suicide'). Everyone talks about the books because they sold a lot of copies. Zemmour's success is even seen as a sign of how French society is being influenced by ideas from the extreme right. Yet Piketty's 900-page book, published in 2013 and a demanding work which shows the excesses of a liberalism that is now all-powerful in Europe, has sold three times as many copies. However, the irritated socialist government says that the economist would be better off returning to his beloved research. If this is not yet a divorce, it is clearly a split.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter