On April 7th, film director Dominik Moll attended a ceremony in the large lecture hall of the Sorbonne university in Paris, where he received the César des lycéens, a cinema award decided by a vote among 2,000 final-year school pupils, for his latest film The Night of the 12th, for which he had already won the coveted César Award, French cinema’s highest honour, for both best film and best director.
On the podium he gave a brief lesson on civics, addressed to those who govern France and he who presides over the country. Sitting a few metres away from him was French education minister Pap Ndiaye, whose silence gave away his unease. With the politeness of irony, Moll told Ndiaye, an academic before he was appointed as education minister in May last year, how much he applauded his “courage” in accepting to work with “a government and a president whose words and acts are a little contrary to the values that schools should transmit”.
To applause from the public gathered in the hall, Moll continued: “A government and a president who prefer to impose rather than discuss, who prefer to give lessons rather than educate, who sometimes prefer contempt over respect and listening, who prefer to split and divide rather than unite, who prefer particular interests over the common good, and whose only criterium for success appears to be that of being among the lead climbers.”
Three weeks earlier, just after his decision to use the French constitution’s article 49-3 allowing him to force his harmful pensions system reform, as needless as it is unjust, through parliament without a vote – after realising it would have been rejected – Emmanuel Macron was cited by his entourage (reported in French daily Le Monde) as saying that he had “no scruples, no regrets”. The absence of regret is not astonishing for a man who, inspecting restoration work at Notre-Dame cathedral on April 14th, just hours before France’s Constitutional Council approved his reform, had no hesitation in proclaiming, in swaggering manner and sure of himself: “Give up on nothing, that’s my motto.”
But the use of the word “scruple”, weighed on an assay balance of presidential PR communications, says much more about the personality and the project of he who has presided over France for six long years already. According to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (the official dictionary of the French Academy) “scruple” signifies a “feeling of anxiousness”, a “feeling that troubles the conscience of an individual before they act, and makes them hesitate, doubt”. Its etymological roots are in the Latin word “scrupulous”, meaning a small pointed stone and which, when caught in the sandals of a legionary would hinder his march to conquer.
It is indeed that sense which is noted in the venerable dictionary of Émile Littré, a French lexicographer and fervent 18th-century republican: a scruple, he wrote, is “what troubles the conscience, like a stone that troubles he who walks”.
His Dictionnaire de la langue française illustrates this definition with a quotation from the Mémoires of the cardinal of Retz who, in the 17th century, joined the Fronde against France’s absolute monarchy: “Most men commit great wrongs only by the scruples which they have about the lesser ones.”
If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.
So it is that Emmanuel Macron claims to have “no scruple”, having no doubt or hesitation whatever the “great wrongs” that result from his attitude. It is therefore of no use remonstrating with him over the risks he introduces to the French republic by brutalising democratic and social values which, constitutionally, are supposed to characterise him. Because by accepting responsibility for it, this brutalisation is not a one-off wayward slip, it is well and truly a project which combines the president’s personality and his ideological convictions.
"If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so." That insightful observation by French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (featured in Presentation on Psychical Causality, part of the collection Écrits) perfectly applies to the vertiginous chasms of France’s Fifth Republic, an elective monarchy where the will of the population is confiscated by the power of one person alone.
Emmanuel Macron, far from guarding against that, and even less so, resisting it, very early on espoused it. In a 2015 interview, when economy and industry minister, he described “the figure of king” as being missing in French politics, and later, after becoming president, argued that “a ceremonial, a distance, a verticality” is part of the presidential role, meaning less democratic precaution or deliberative procedure.
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This fundamentally illiberal approach to political power was summed up when, on the night of the first round of the 2017 presidential elections, when Macron came first and Marine Le Pen second – setting up a second and final round duel between them – he spoke of his “pleasure” at inviting his staff for a party at a Parisian brasserie, as if already celebrating future victory, just when the far-right was reinforcing its electoral grip.
Since then, Macron’s political movement, initially called “En Marche”, went about matters “En Force”, whose victims included the “yellow vest” uprising over falling standards of living and the recent social movement against the pensions system reform. Crowd control is the most political of the roles of the police, and the state violence that since 2017 has continually manhandled the fundamental right to demonstrate, to assemble and to protest, is the most visible side of this.
Far from being rogue acts, these incidents of excessive force are approved by the summit of power, where the existence of “police violence” is categorically denied. But they are joined by other brutalities to which this presidency has accustomed the country, from the contempt shown towards the independence of the justice system to the lowering of ethics in the sphere of public service, illustrated by the manner in which the executive has dealt with numerous cases that place in question the presidential entourage, its advisers and collaborators, and its ministers.
A further level of this disdain for democracy was reached with the saga of the pensions system reform, and which stripped this institutional absolutism naked. After depriving Parliament of a vote on the proposed legislation, which included raising the retirement age on full pension rights from 62 to 64, the government submitted the bill for approval by France’s Constitutional Council. The council’s subsequent capitulation by rubber-stamping all but a few minor details of the legislation, served to put the finishing touches to this demonstration of the fundamental authoritarianism of the presidential regime and the permanent threat it represents for the expression of the will of the people.
In the style of Oscar Wilde’s story of The Picture of Dorian Gray, centred on the narcissistic portrait of the decomposition of a British aristocrat of the Victorian era, Emmanuel Macron’s presidency pushes to the extreme limit the danger to the democracy that is curled up within the heart of a French republic which has never rid itself of the exceptional circumstances behind its creation in 1958 – a civil war and a military pronunciamento.
Almost the only thing missing is recourse to article 16 of the French Constitution and the exceptional powers it gives the president to carry on to the end of his term, a “permanent coup d’État” as the late François Mitterrand entitled his 1964 essay on the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, although Mitterrand would forget the sense of this once he arrived in office.
Macron’s presidency has accomplished this “authoritarian liberalism”, whose genealogy was traced by French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou in his book The Ungovernable Society, in which he shows how it was set out as of 1975 by the Trilateral Commission.
This political project, a dispossession of democracy by an authoritarian state draped in its electoral legitimacy, is one and the same with the economic offensive which aims to undo the social advances which limit and refrain, and which compensate or diminish the damage caused by capitalism. The brutality of that offensive is proportionate to the injustice and inequalities that it knowingly increases, for the profit of a cast of super-privileged individuals of the likes of Bernard Arnault and Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, two French billionaires who were recently proclaimed to be, respectively, the richest man and woman on the planet.
Contrary to what some of his opponents among the Left imagine, the stubbornness of the French president is not that of a “maniac”, as voiced by a socialist Member of Parliament, but that of determined man. Speculation about the psychology of Macron, which offers explanations through the prism of personal traits, depoliticises the issue and misses the point. We are not witnessing wayward behaviour, but rather a coherent one, to the degree that amid this crisis prompted by the pensions reform, the president himself put an end to the illusion of creating a “barrage” against the far-right, for which he was handed a majority of votes (including ours) in the two presidential elections he won in a duel with the far-right in 2017 and 2019.
“If people wanted retirement at 60-years-old, it wasn’t me who should have been elected French president,” said Macron, speaking on April 5th during his recent trip to China, implying that he had no obligation for the mandate given to him by those who voted for him, other than his own goodwill.
In the wake of that, Stéphane Séjourné, the general secretary of Macron’s party, renamed Renaissance, theorised on the very idea of a “barrage” against the far-right. “Demonization shows its limits,” Séjourné told French daily Le Parisien in an interview published on April 12th, referring to the “demonization” of the Rassemblement National (RN) party (the renamed Front National), placing the confrontation with its historical leader Marine Le Pen on a level of competence and effectiveness and no longer on that of values and principles.
To the contrary, the parliamentary Left is knowingly demonized by the presidential camp, and now systematically caricatured as a seditious ultra-Left. The Right, meanwhile, is ardently courted, already compatible with the Macron camp and brought on board, notably including interior minister Gérard Darmanin and economy and finance minister Bruno Le Maire, both former members of the conservative Les Républicains party.
With determination and method, the executive creates a political emptiness by placing the far-right as the supposed only alternative, if not its partner. In fact, the danger posed by the far-right is hardly underlined anymore, to the point whereby the violence behind it, evermore frequent to the point of becoming ordinary, hardly troubles the government.
Worse still, in the ideological sphere, all the blows are aimed at the camp of progressists and emancipating causes, with campaigns against “Islamo-leftism”, an obsession with “wokism”, and use of the weapon of so-called “separatism” with the aim of preventing the auto-organisation of those who are dominated and discriminated against. Not forgetting also the criminalisation of the ecologist movement, described as eco-terrorist.
In contrast to this, one can but note the inaction, when it is not complacency, in face of the expansion of the presence of the far-right across the media, which constantly accustoms public debate with ideological notions of natural inequality, discrimination and racism, in their radical denial of the most elementary democratic principles.
It is thus that the reform of the pensions system, and the brutality of its implementation, does not only reveal an executive that violates the demand set out in the constitution for a “democratic and social” republic. With all the clarity that brings a moment of truth, it also exposes a presidential camp which feathers the bed and plays the game of the opponent against whom it was elected, on two occasions, namely the far-right, with its anti-democratic violence and anti-egalitarian ideology.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse