Speaking before the French lower house, the National Assembly, on April 28th, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe had no hesitation in evoking the notion of “virtue”, which he described as being “this age-old quality which combines rectitude, honesty and courage”. The phrase came at the very end of his speech presenting “the national strategy” for lifting the lockdown on public movement introduced in France on March 17th to contain the Covid-19 virus epidemic.
He was trying to save the appearances of a state which was in a tail-spin from the effects of the contradictory, incoherent and irresponsible directives issued by he who is supposed to lead it, namely President Emmanuel Macron.
It was an astonishing speech, in which precautions, even humility – notably on the issue of the “shortage” of masks supplies, at last recognised – contrasted with the previous categorical, grandiloquent and paternalistic utterances in the three nationwide addresses on the pandemic by the French president. But, however lucid he may be in private on the question of the disorder sown amid these trying times by the head of state, the prime minister remains trapped by an institutional system in which, when the fate of a whole nation is at stake, everything is led by just one individual.
While Philippe paid tribute to the role of parliament, that of debate and concertation, the disastrous result is there to see: a strategy once again decided upon high, without prior presentation or discussion, about which the members of parliament (MPs) were called upon to pronounce a judgment at the very same time that they learnt about it, and when local authorities, trades unions and associations – in sum all those who are involved in the front line on the ground – were simply invited to then decide on the means of its application.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In short, the president has decided and the country must follow. Yet that is the recipe for defeats, like those in which the most responsible are generals obsessed by their vainglory, who are indifferent to the morale of troops and who have little concern for the provision of support. Contrary to the initial bragging by Emmanuel Macron about being at war, we are not at war, such as it is that we have no other enemy before us than ourselves; our unpreparedness, our blindness, and our ignorance.
Indeed, on the contrary, we now already witness a defeat in open terrain, that of a very old world which this presidency represents: a world of so-called sages who suddenly reveal themselves to be ignorant, and the supposed ‘winners’ who in an instant have discovered the concept of solidarity. It is a world of a self-declared elite who, even while the crisis demands empathy, can hardly hide their disdain for a people who they persistently admonish, infantilise and repress.
French historian Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat (L’Étrange défaite), during the summer of 1940, amid the shock of the debacle of France’s military defeat at the beginning of WWII. At the end of his “examination of conscience”, Bloch also evoked the question of virtue, a lesson from the French Revolution and, he underlined, the lively spirit of a state founded on popular support. This great historian, and future martyr (the book was finally published after his execution by the Gestapo in June 1944) envisaged, just like us during this period of lockdown, the world to come afterwards, when, he wrote, “the major duty will be to re-found a new France”. Addressing the generations that would have that responsibility, his recommendation rings as unquestionable: “We beseech them to avoid the dryness of regimes which, through rancour or arrogance, set about dominating the masses, without educating or uniting with them. Our people deserve to be trusted in, and to be placed in confidence.”
During this current health crisis in France, we have experienced quite the opposite, with a government which holds the people at a distance and in distrust. One which, since January, has shamelessly lied to the nation to the point of placing people in peril, while also implying their guilt; if you are in danger of dying it is because you have disobeyed instructions (ipse dixit the Paris police prefect), or if the ending of the public lockdown results in further disaster, it is because of your indiscipline (the health minister). Mediapart’s many reports on the crisis have regularly charted this inconsistency, underlining the incompetence which has sown distrust instead of confidence.
It is an understatement to say that the French presidency, a power in the hands of one person from who everything follows and answers to, has not shown the competence of the role it lays claim to. There was, firstly, the scandal of the shortage of protective face masks (see Mediapart’s first revelations on the issue in an investigation by Yann Philippin, Antton Rouget and Marine Turchi); the strategic stocks that were depleted, the non-requisitioning for healthcare staff of supplies destined for industry, and the initial false claims of their uselessness for the public – which veered to the ultimate indignity of the subsequent massive sales of them granted to major retail chains whereas they should be freely and widely provided by the state.
The bean-counting logic that led to this healthcare disarmament is also that which caused the shortage of supplies for hospitals – not only of masks, but also other PPE equipment, beds, ventilators, tests and medicines – which frontline staff have had to cope with, and whose mobilisation amid such conditions is all the more admirable. “There is no magical money,” Emmanuel Macron haughtily declared on April 6th 2018 in response to an auxiliary nurse at the teaching hospital in Rouen, northern France, when she tackled him about the reality of conditions in hospitals, and which now prove so costly. “On a daily basis, there are beds being closed down in the services, services closed down for lack of personnel,” she told him. “We need the means, we need personnel.”
We are thus paying the price of his lack of foresight, and his irresponsibility. In January and February, ignoring the warnings issued by the World Health Organisation, the presidency remained tied to its political agenda, blinded by its ideological obsessions to the point of failing to take the protective measures that were required.
There was the case of the president’s health advisor who for personal reasons left her post at the end of January without being replaced. There was also the continued authorisation of visas for those travelling between France and China, whereas all the other member countries of the Schengen Area had suspended their issuing as of February 1st. In mid-February, France’s health minister left her post to stand as a candidate for the president’s LREM party in mayoral elections in Paris. On February 29th, the principal measure agreed at a government cabinet meeting on the crisis of the Covid-19 epidemic was the authoritarian decision to impose the pension reform bill by decree instead of submitting it to MPs for debate; it appeared to be the principal concern, one that served profit, productivity and growth – at the very moment that the pandemic was about to demonstrate the vanity of such priorities by forcing a halt to the worldwide economy. Let us neither forget the decision to proceed at all costs with France’s nationwide municipal elections, just days before the lockdown was imposed.
This inconsequence has continued with the unilateral announcement by the French president, and by him alone, that the lockdown on public movement will be lifted on May 11th, with the re-opening of schools, but not universities. Confusion and disorder followed the decision which had failed to take into account the practical reality of either the epidemic or that of the education services, and which was taken without prior consultation with those primarily concerned, namely education administration officials, school heads, and local and regional councils.
As demonstrated by the regular twists and turns by labour minister Muriel Pénicaud and the junior economy minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the first in favour of imposing a return to economic activity, the second championing profit-making as an imperative, the economy is the obsession and the directional compass of the presidency, much more than a concern for schoolchildren and notably those who are the most disadvantaged. Indeed, the Covid-19 Scientific Council, despite being a body created in March on the behest of the presidency – and to the detriment of the health ministry’s existing structures (the “Haut Conseil de la santé publique”, the advisory high council for public health, and the national public healthcare agency, Santé Publique France) – made known its opposition to any return of schools before September. Until then, the presidential office, the Élysée Palace, had insisted on the leading role of the Council’s expert advice, which it claimed to follow.
The Council, whose recommendation was ignored, cannot be suspected of indifference regarding the question of social inequalities in face of the virus epidemic; it has documented the issue with all the more insistence given that its members, on top of two specialists in social sciences – an anthropologist and a sociologist – include a representative of the NGO ATD Fourth World, dedicated to eradicating poverty.
But there are others even more outspoken in demonstrating how the French president, far from his narcissist claims of “reinventing” himself, has changed nothing in his way of being and acting. Following on the calls by public healthcare activists with experience of other pandemics, and notably that of the HIV virus, for greater social representation in policymaking towards the Covid-19 epidemic (see a co-signed open letter to that effect published, in French, on Mediapart), the president of the Covid-19 Scientific Council, Jean-François Delfraissy, wrote a report he submitted to the Élysée, the prime minister and the health minister in which he recommended “the inclusion and participation of society in the response to Covid-19”.
The confidential document, dated April 14th and entitled “A societal urgency”, represents an indictment of the verticality and centralism of the Macron presidency. Arguing for a “democracy” in healthcare policymaking, it expressed alarm at “the rise of criticism” targeting a “management of the health crisis tightly knotted around a Scientific council appointed by the government and set up in an ad hoc manner”. It underlined that “the political powers maintain a quite strong control over the selection of organisations and people who are supposed to ‘enlighten’ public [policy] decisions”. Regarding the perspective of an “exit from the crisis”, it warned that “the exclusion of organisations from civil society can easily open the path to criticism of a management that is authoritarian and disconnected from people’s lives”.
Not only did this proposition for a “committee of liaison with society” receive no response, it was also, unlike other working documents of the Scientific Council, never made public by the government (the council’s advisory documents are published online, in French, here). It would never have been brought to public attention if Mediapart had not obtained and published the document (see the report by Caroline Coq-Chodorge, in French, here). In conclusion to its advisory note N°6 on the gradual lifting of lockdown, dated April 20th, the Scientific Council writes “To keep trust, have trust” – which sounded like an echo of the ignored document which presented “propositions to keep trust”.
The defeat of a self-disarmed state
Trust cannot be present in respect of a government which, during the present crisis as during the three preceding years, has constantly mistrusted society. “Who is society? There is no such thing!” commented the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine in 1987, she whose mantra of “There is no alternative” summed up the violence of her neoliberal offensive against her own society. Under the effects of the current health crisis, ‘Macronism’ reveals itself in all its coarse reality: a tardy reincarnation of Thatcherism, incapable of rising above itself to serve the general interest, save for occasional televised appearances in which his overplayed theatrical roles ring hollow.
In his own failure, it is a whole world which is undone, that of a social group which combines the ‘nobility’ of the state and the bourgeoisie of business – of which he is both a product and a representative. As a result of believing himself to be above the people, of assimilating his private interests with those of the public good, by favouring competition over solidarity, he reveals himself to be incapable of protecting society when it is assailed in its entirety by an aggression that makes no distinction between victims. Which is where we may come back to Marc Bloch who, in Strange Defeat, designated the responsibility of this social group which “feels or believes itself as belonging to a class that is destined to hold a directing role in the nation” but which no longer knows its own people, mistrusting them to the point of fearing them, preferring to condemn them instead of understanding them.
The same government which showed its great fear of the “yellow vest” movement to the point of employing a violent repression that is without precedent in peacetime France, cannot hope now to rally society to its cause in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. The magical slate with which it attempts to erase its past turpitudes just doesn’t work. When Emmanuel Macron suddenly remembers that the date of May 1st is international Labour Day, in France many of us think back to the May 1st of 2018 and the violent assaults upon demonstrators perpetrated by his protégé Alexandre Benalla , along with the May 1st of 2019 and the scenes of demonstrators seeking refuge from a deluge of tear gas in front of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, when they subsequently became the target of the interior minister’s lies over the events.
Amid so much imposture, duplicity and lies, it is impossible to believe the story anymore, even with the best will in the world. The worst of it all is that, in this decay surrounding presidential actions and words, Emmanuel Macron drags along the state itself into the situation, sowing confusion and harming its credibility. The incompetence of this presidency has reduced the credit of the whole of the public powers.
It is as if the state has become amnesic and has forgotten its own history. Plans for facing up to a flu pandemic in the form of a virus against which no-one is immunised had been established, in minute detail, since a decade ago. In a report dated February 5th 2009 by France’s National Advisory Council on Ethics (the Conseil consultatif national d’éthique), an advisory body on bioethics, it stated that “France’s plan is one of the most accomplished”, while adding that “the French population’s information about the existence and the contents of this plan is virtually nil”. It would appear that this unawareness stretched to the pinnacle of power.
In May 2019, a report (available here , in French) by France’s public health agency, Santé Publique France, into “the constitution of a stock of medical counter-measures in face of a flu pandemic” underlined that the creation of strategic national equipment stocks – like those now in cruel short supply, such as protective masks – “cannot be assimilated to undue spending”. Rejecting short-term accounting logic, it stated that such stocks “should be considered as the payment of an insurance which one wishes, despite the spending, to never have use of”.
We are the powerless spectators of this defeat of a state which was disarmed by itself. A defeat that continues with the difficulties in reconstituting the missing stocks of masks (see Mediapart’s investigation here), the problems over the massive production of tests which would put an end to combatting the epidemic blindfold, the delay in organising French research for a vaccine amid the international competition, and the failure to organise a solid scenario for an exit from the crisis. Under the reign of the “premiers de cordée” – a favourite expression of Emmanuel Macron which refers to the lead mountaineer who holds the top of the cord on which those below hang onto – the chain of solidarity has been broken to the degree that the state has ended up unlearning the ABC of its knowledge in the field of healthcare: the foundations of a public health policy which serves the greatest number of people.
But we are also the victims who have to carry the weight of its desertion with the lockdown that was imposed upon us in desperation, or, in the worst case, by paying the price of becoming ill, like healthcare workers contaminated by, and even dying from, the virus. Which is why the justice system must become involved, to establish responsibilities and to call them to account. A website has been created with that in mind (in French, here) and which proposes model texts to file formal complaints against persons unknown, notably for the “voluntary abstention from taking measures” against the crisis.
The website presentation reads: “Whereas the epidemic of coronavirus infections progresses everywhere, and despite the warnings of international health bodies, the French state did not take the necessary measures in time to protect the people on its territory. The measures taken recently are tardive, insufficient and incoherent. Because of this, numerous people, including medical staff, were and still are exposed to health risks, [and] fell ill or died”. More than 170,000 models for formal complaints have been downloaded from the site since March 24th.
There is little probability that legal procedures will be addressed against the primary person responsible, the French president. Because of the so-called “presidential” governing majorities, the submission of the legislative powers before the executive renders it improbable that he be called to account, as set out in Article 68 of the French constitution which dictates that the dismissal of the president is possible in the case of a failure to fulfil his duties when “manifestly incompatible with the exercise of his mandate”.
If in France there is one political lesson of this crisis, it is that of the necessity of dismissing this archaic presidential system which, far from protecting and rallying us, in fact makes us vulnerable, and divides us. On a human scale, the Covid-19 pandemic carries with it cross-border challenges and enigmas, which are medical, ethic, ecological, social and economic. But in the French context, it has already called into question the autonomy of democracy, this intrinsic weakness of our public life which has disarmed us, when other countries, from Germany to Portugal, from South Korea to Taiwan, knew better about dealing with the crisis.
And if we do not put an end to this, the catastrophe will continue. While the presidential office, via a spokeswoman who has adopted the role of minister of truth after having lied so much, sifts the supposed true and false reports about its actions (see, in French, the protest over this signed by more than 30 media editorial teams), we would do well to return to this ultimate warning by Marc Bloch that concerns our own profession as journalists:
“Have we not, as a nation, taken too much the habit of contenting ourselves with incomplete knowledge and insufficiently lucid ideas? Our governmental regime was founded on the participation of masses. But, towards this people, to whom we thus placed its own destiny and which was not, I believe, incapable in itself of choosing the right paths, what did we do to provide it with a minimum of clear and certain information, without which no rational behaviour is possible? Nothing, in truth. Such was, certainly, the great weakness of our system, supposedly democratic, such was the worst crime of our supposed democrats.”
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse