The leaders of France’s government have ceaselessly offered a helping leg up to the worst enemies of the country’s Republic.
A few months ago, with the move to strip French citizenship from those dual nationals convicted of terrorist crimes, the government shamelessly embraced an ideology of exclusion and withdrawal, ready to create a hierarchy between the French according to their origins. Until an awakening of parliament, in the form of the upper house, the Senate, which prevented the plan, the government was ready to inscribe into the marble of the constitution a measure of the far-right, and with the help of the conservatives of Nicolas Sarkozy. And here it is now, proclaiming without any hesitation that to govern is to violate, praising the authoritarian methods that trample over parliament, humiliate its members and which ignore societal protest.
The process of deliberation is the condition for the democratic legitimacy of laws. It is the assurance that they are not the fruit of the use of force by the executive powers against the legislative powers. When they are deprived of this prerequisite condition, which is the only true guarantee of their immediate credibility and their enduring solidity, not only does that produce fragile laws, but bad ones too. Whatever their contents, they are made illegitimate. They are the result of a violation, of a rape even. From the introduction of the Patriot Act in the United States in 2001 to that of the French state of emergency powers in 2016, the laws of exception that infringe fundamental freedoms have always been voted through in precipitation, amid fear-raising arguments in a manner akin to placing a revolver to one’s temple.
Concerning security, President François Hollande and his prime minister, Manuel Valls, could brandish the pretext, however arguable, of “the war on terror”, that posture of military urgency that is supposed to justify the suspension of democracy, and notably the deliberations of its institutions. But here, with the bill of labour law reforms (called the El Khomri law after the name of labour minister Myriam El Khomri), a subject that concerns the daily lives of all those who create the wealth of the nation, they decide, in the absence of a parliamentary majority, to ram their project through by force. Is it that on this subject too they are at war, a social war – or, rather, anti-social – so that they decide to impose without debate a minority-supported law, a law which, during the debates in the lower house, the National Assembly, could not even garner enough support to obtain the adoption of the first of its 54 articles.
True democrats know almost by heart these words by Pierre Mendès France from 1976: “Democracy is much more than the practice of elections and the government of the majority. It is a kind of moral, a virtue, a scruple, civic sense, respect for one’s adversary. It is a moral code.” In politics, the method sets out the project, and the means the end. That a bill of law cannot be adopted without a show of force against democracy is the admission that its very object is a show of force, in this case an act of violence against the labour legislation. In other words, against decades of social gains that have built this defence of the weak against the strong, where the arsenal of the law comes to the rescue of the employee in face of the boss, owner or shareholder, so that the worker is not a defenceless toy before their desire for profit, accumulation or speculation.
The El Khomri law ends up as it began, by a hold-up using the 49-3 decree, this anti-parliamentary weapon that is part of the so little democratic constitution of the Fifth Republic. As of the brutal arrival of this bill of law on the still smoking cinders of the plan to strip French nationality from those convicted of terrorist crimes, Prime Minister Manuel Valls had brandished the threat by correcting, in an authoritarian manner, the very first interview to the press given by the labour minister, appointed in September last year. The interview with financial and business news daily Les Echos was submitted to the prime minister’s office before publication for approval, when the latter added in the prospect of using the 49-3 decree. Those who, like the CFDT trades union, were prompted into joining the initial protest before retreating, should think about what their final acceptance of this illegitimacy will signify for workers. How can it be explained to a union official who in collective action combats the unilateral and authoritarian decisions of shareholders, and who submits to the majority vote of employees, that what is inadmissible in corporate practices is admissible in political life. And that the day-to-day conditions of those that the union official represents or defends is to be decided by regulations that are put in place by an anti-democratic show of force?
“Nothing replaces the act of governing,” declared François Hollande on May 3rd, when he gave a (pre-presidential election) speech to a conference organised by two think tanks close to the Socialist Party, Terra Nova and the Jean-Jaurès foundation. The use of the word “nothing” is an astonishing affirmation. Not only does he reduce democracy to only the acts of those who govern, who believe themselves the owners of democracy to the detriment of its complexity (the diversity of separate powers, the plurality of independent counter powers), but, forgetting all the history of republican conquests, he excludes those who invented it previously and who invent it today by their struggles, their combats, and their audacity. The president’s words were followed by a comment that was condescending towards the will of those citizens who join together at the Nuits Debout assemblies and in the demonstrations against the labour law reforms: “One doesn’t change the world, one doesn’t change Europe, one doesn’t change France, by staying in one’s place,” he said. “When I say in one’s place, that applies to all places.”
So, the Nuits Debout events and more widely the street protests are tantamount to immobility while François Hollande, amid his presidential solitude, embodies movement. This self-satisfaction illustrates the divide that has opened up under this presidency between those who govern and those who are governed. The government addresses society in the same way an old-school teacher would address an unruly class. It must be taught a lesson, it has understood nothing. And if ever it stubbornly continues to fail to understand, we will knock it on the head, as shown by the increasingly warlike policing of demonstrations since the death of Rémi Fraisse at the Sivens dam protests in 2014 (see here). As can also be seen by the recent promotion of the former prefect of Brittany, Patrick Strzoda, who was in his post when a young anti-labour reforms demonstrator in Rennes lost use of an eye in an incident with police, and who has become chief-of-staff to the interior minister.
Whether it be to teach us a lesson or hit us over the head, to treat us like children or to dismiss us, in both cases it is to never listen to us.
When Hollande denounced what he would later impose
Closed inside their bubble, despairing or exasperated, they look down upon us as if we are ignorant and uneducated. As if we have neither memory nor knowledge. As if, over the past four years and up to the state of emergency and the stripping of nationality, the amount of disavowals had not finally become transformed into a refusal. In lucidity, audacity and determination. As if we had not understood that the speeches in which they wrap their arrangements between themselves, their promises, their consciences and their fidelities had become void of any sense, cluttered up with words that devitalize and demobilise. That they have no truthfulness left, in sum.
So it was that on Wednesday May 11th, the day following the snap meeting of ministers which approved the use of the 49-3 decree, another inter-ministerial meeting was held on the subject of “the action of France within a partnership for open government”. The official statement released about the meeting set out what was at stake: “An increasing number of citizens wish to contribute to the democratic debate, to participate in public decision-making and to a greater transparency in public action,” it read. “This aspiration for a new public governance is strong. It is at the heart of policies led since 2012 under the impulsion of the French president […] By making this choice for co-construction, the government wishes to confirm, through example, that it is possible to contribute, in the digital age, to a governance that is more open to consultation and dialogue, to allow each citizen to better know, understand and orientate public decision and to thus liberate a collective intelligence.”
To say they are making fun of us is an understatement. Can there be a greater disassociation of words and acts as this imposture of phrases emptied of their meaning by actions which demonstrate the opposite? For what is it to ‘govern’, this imperative in face of which, according to François Hollande, our refusals are worth “nothing”. Is it to lie, betray, and deceive, to turn one’s back on pledges, to not render account, to despise contestation, to ignore opposition, to impose by force, or to forget that those who govern do so according to the will of the people? Is it, in the manner of the aristocrats of the Ancien Régime, to despise the “whoever” of the democratic ideal, who supposedly produces whatever, and to oppose them with the solitary competence of a minority of professional politicians who, for the most part, have had no other job than that? To speak and act in our place, to seek our votes and to just as soon emancipate themselves from them once elected, to ignore the concrete experiences and practical knowledge of the greatest number to better serve the interests of the minority of those who possess?
In his premonitory 1967 essay The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle), published one year before the social upheaval in France in May 1968, Guy Debord unmasked the mechanisms of domination at the service of absolute commercialization, by which the political representation is nothing more than the spectacle of our defeat. Some 20 years later, in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Commentaires sur la société du spectacle), he dug deeper in his analysis, describing a democracy that, believing itself “so perfect, fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism” and “wants to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results”. Further in the text he wrote: “All crimes and offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the impertinent pretension to still want to change something in this society, which thinks that it has only been only too kind and patient, but which no longer wants to be blamed.”
To be judged but in relation to its enemies, and to no longer be blamed. That is exactly the pre-electoral strategy of this minority government such is it now bereft of a base of social support, having lost en route not only the mass of working class support but also the support of the young, which it had pretended to promise a brighter future. As it has also lost, since the doomed project to strip French citizenship from dual nationals convicted of terrorism, the support of those on the Left who champion fundamental liberties and human rights. With a mix of PR (our enemies would do worse things) and repression (to no longer be blamed), the manoeuvre is a gross one. Who can believe in it? If they can pass by force, thanks to the privilege of the authoritarian tools of the French presidential system, they cannot pronounce a collective amnesia. Because we have a memory, this elementary democratic vigilance with which we do not lose hope that one day promises engage those who make them, and not only those who believe in them.
So we remember that François Hollande, this president who, for the fourth time, uses the 49-3 decree to impose socially regressive measures (the three previous occasions were to force through the economic reforms of economy minister Emmanuel Macron), declared in 2006 that the use of the 49-3 decree was “a brutality, a denial of democracy”. He was speaking at the time of mass protests by students and trades unions against the introduction of the Contrat Première Embauche (First Employment Contract), or CPE, by the conservative government of then-prime minister Dominique de Villepin. The CPE, which made it easier for employers to fire young adults in first-time employment, was introduced by the use of the 49-3 decree, and was later withdrawn in face of the widespread opposition to it. “You appear to fear democracy,” Hollande told Villepin when the latter forced the law through parliament. “I am telling you,” added Hollande, “the passage by force is the sign of weak governments.”
At the very same period, in Devoirs de vérité (Duty of Truth), a book of conversations between Hollande and myself and which he would undoubtedly now wish to forget, he made the following observations which, word for word, could serve today as a damning indictment of his own actions today: “Democracy is also a practice. Take the example of what Dominique de Villepin has gone through with the CPE. If he had based himself on a solid and united parliamentary majority, and not a divided or subjugated; if he had at his disposal a party that was capable of accepting public debate, including one on a controversial issue; if he had himself put his project before union organisations; if he had been capable of dialogue with the young, in sum, if he had progressed in a political culture where consent is something that is built and elaborated, he would not have ended up in this labyrinth out of which he himself could not find the exit.”
There then followed a radical critique of this institutional regime which, cutting off from society those who govern, renders them blind and deaf, arrogant and oblivious. “Concentrated around a place of power from where everything proceeds, he is himself vulnerable,” said Hollande of Villepin. “Everything depends on the Elysée and, when irresponsibility sets in, it is the whole system that loses its balance.”
A time for renewal
The paradox is that the current government has only the appearance of ruling thanks to this presidential system by which the will of the people is confiscated and the democratic ideal is trampled underfoot. Sheltered by the machinery of the state, it holds on only by the institutional illusion. Otherwise, and notably under a parliamentary democracy, it would already have been overturned some while ago. Its authoritarian headlong rush seeks to cover up the profound crisis that engulfs it, a necrosis of a regime that has run out of steam.
The dual between Prime Minister Manuel Valls and economy minister Emmanuel Macron is but a symptom of this, to which is added the unprecedented accumulation of declared or solicited contenders for the presidency in elections due in 2017. Well aware of this debacle, the dominating class is missing a Bonaparte figure who might climb above the silent anger boiling below in France and thus preserve the country from the accident it has always feared: the emergence of the event, sudden and improbable, by which democratic and social hope has always been reinvented.
Unless their catastrophe is allowed to perpetuate, we can only wager on this improbability, its eruption, its widening and its deepening. Still concerning too much of a minority, the Nuits Debout movement, created in the wake of the mobilization against the reactionary destruction of the labour code, has shown the way forward, beginning with the invention of a new calendar. The first Nuit Debout assembly was held on the Place de la République in Paris on March 31st, at the end of a demonstration against the labour reforms. It now marks the days as the prolongation of the combat (March 32 and so on, until the reform is withdrawn). A never-ending March is thus set in train, like a barricade of time that is saved and liberated, in face of the horology of the powers that be, their decisions imposed from above, their oligarchic show of force, their authoritarian and inequitable agenda.
In his 1940 work On the Concept of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte), the last before his death the same year, German philosopher Walter Benjamin underlined how much a real democratic and social overhaul of the existing order required another vision of time. “The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar,” he wrote. “ The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years.” He noted that during 1830 July Revolution in Paris, “an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris.”
Benjamin, who had no belief in history written in advance where there is no place for the unpredictable, set the calendar against the clock, the invention of the former against the repetition of the latter. The mechanical time of the clock or the watch, quantitative and immutable, is that of domination, an immediate time without memory or history, the time where the forgetting of the past dismisses the possibility of the future. With the unexpectedness of the revolt comes the attempt to halt empty time and to open up the path to qualitative time. A new time, that which holds an improbable hope that can stave off the ‘probable’ of the catastrophe.
To wager on this improbable is to take the time of invention against fatality. It is to build on the “we” present in our common causes, by using the leverage of the democratic imperative. Democracy is a poor word if it is reduced to being but a choice between elected representatives. All the more so in France where the latter are lowered by a presidential system that submits them to the whims of a unique representative, to the constraining obedience imposed by institutions. To confront the complexity of the world and its challenges, a lively democracy requires a permanent deliberation favouring a majority of ideas. It demands strong and respected counter-powers. It calls for a relation with society which is not reduced to the propaganda of communications directors and which, on the opposite, gives right to the appraisal of citizens, to their knowledge and grievances born from experience.
An essential leverage for expression and sharing around what we have, and are, in common, the democratic question holds the key to all the others that are lying in wait, whether that be the social crisis, unemployment, poverty, urban unhappiness, environmental challenges, collective security and living together. This is quite simply because finding the answers to all these urgent issues is dependent upon our capacity to debate collectively, to confront different experiences, to learn from one another, to associate exemplarity and innovation, to deliberate and participate, to choose and decide, to remain masters of our future.
“We are of those who say no to the shadow” is a phrase we liked to borrow from Aimé Césaire, poet, writer and politician from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. We directed it against the fears and hate that are nourished and reinforced by the anti-democratic pedagogy of the French presidential system, from the reign of Nicolas Sarkozy to, alas, that of François hollande. Now we must borrow another quotation from Césaire, written in 1956. It is from his well-known text, Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez), in which he addresses the then-leader of the French Communist Party with his resignation. It announced his rupture with a French Left that was too sure of itself, too far distanced from the people in the sense of the latter’s diversity of origins, conditions and cultures.
“The result is that at the present time the world is at an impasse,” Césaire wrote. “That can only signify one thing: not that there is no path to get out of it, but that the time has come to abandon all the old paths. Those which led to imposture, to tyranny, to crime. It is to say enough that, for our part, we no longer want to satisfy ourselves by assisting in the politics of others. To the trampling by others. To the scheming of others. To the patchings up of conscience or to the casuistry of others. The time for ourselves has sounded.”
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- The French version of this opinion article can be found here.