How Macron's crusade against 'decivilisation' is a far-right diversionary tactic
Last week, following a series of violent but unrelated incidents in the country, French president Emmanuel Macron told ministers that the government needed to “counter this process of decivilisation”. The expression immediately provoked controversy. In this analysis, Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel says that despite what his supporters claim, the president's choice of the word “decivilisation” owes nothing to the late German sociologist Norbert Elias and instead owes everything to the normalisation of far-right ideas.
WordsWords matter. We have already witnessed how they assist the arrival of the very worst that society can offer. They do so by kindling the habits, the indifference, the turning of a blind eye that makes such things possible. “The power of words is so great that it's enough to designate in well-chosen terms the most odious things to make them acceptable,” warned French psychologist Gustave Le Bon. He was the author in 1895 of 'Psychologie des foules' (published in English as 'The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind'), a pioneering essay from which fascist intellectuals and then Nazis would later draw practical lessons.
