A funeral with great pomp and ceremony, national mourning decreed, a minute's silence in schools and state offices, and a deluge of media coverage that overshadows an industrial disaster and the resulting pollution in Rouen in the north of the country. For several days now the French state, politics and media have been mourning their loss and commemorating the passing of one of their own, former president Jacques Chirac, whose life work consisted mostly of the conquest and preservation of power.
To grieve seems to have become an obligatory patriotic duty. Those rare voices such as Mediapart (read Mediapart's appraisal of Chirac's career here) who point out that the former president's public life cannot simply be summed up by the blokeish figure he became in recent years, by the welcome “non” he delivered to the American adventure in Iraq and the clash of civilisations, by the much-needed speech he gave acknowledging French involvement in the genocide of Jews in WWII, and by a call for urgent environment action faced with a planet that is burning, those voices have been stifled, rendered inaudible or vilified.
Yet such reminders are simply a recital of historical facts after a man's death which, given he was a public figure, is not simply a private family affair where disturbing secrets have to be blocked out or forgotten, but on the contrary is an occasion when the nation should have the strength to look at itself directly, head on.
Unless we are to give way to official history, an account written by the powerful to deceive the downtrodden, not even natural curiosity or sympathy for an individual life can allow us to forget that Jacques Chirac was found guilty of offences incompatible with the ethics and probity of public office. And that in the wake of his headlong pursuit of power he leaves behind a tangled web of affairs that have little to commend them, involving wheeler dealing, violence and intolerance.
One cannot rely on the official political press corps to step out of line and refresh our collective memory on this. The Association de la Presse Présidentielle (APP) – which represents the journalists who cover the president and which is broadly equivalent in structural terms to the Westminster Lobby in London and the White House press corps in Washington – has already spoken of its “emotion” over the death of the great man, and talked of his “warm handshake coupled with a large smile” before going on to add that it will be involved in the “homages given to this great servant of the state”.
They are only big because we are on our knees; those words about tyrants by the 16th century French political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie are still relevant today in relation to the conscious servitude adopted by journalism in a democracy. There is a link here: after all, the man who is considered to be the “father of French journalism”, Théophraste Renaudot, is buried at Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, the Paris church used by the kings of France when they lived at Le Louvre in central Paris. Bound for eternity to absolute power.
This current submission to the system of presidential monarchy was preceded just before by a natural by-product of that submission, something which was duly reported on by the same deferential journalism. This was the coming together of politicians across the parties who agree on nothing save for the impunity which should ensure their smooth passage in professional politics, in their shared obsession with the conquest of political power.
As Mediapart's Fabrice Arfi wrote: “Following the judicial developments seen in several political-financial affairs in recent weeks … a motley crew from the French political classes … has worried about the hold the justice system has on public life, their public life. And when the politicians talk, the media follows. As a result, debates have sprung up on the airwaves and in the newspapers on the theme of the 'war' which is apparently breaking out between 'the' politicians and 'the' justice system, rather than wondering about the state of corruption in our country in view of the accumulation of affairs violating standards of probity which have been corrupting French democracy for so long.”
For, in the face of press revelations, of judicial investigations, of complaints made by civil society, this cartel of impunity is forming a common front from Left to Right, via the centre, even as these revelations, investigations and complaints paint a picture of a political class with a lengthy criminal record. And this despite the many hurdles, pressures and delays that have been put in the way of revealing hidden financing, ongoing corruption and repeated malpractice.
This coalition of self-interest, which tramples on the separation of powers, undermines the political counter-balances in the system and hates any opposition which targets them, is ruining democratic trust. Its participants are displaying the behaviour of owners rather than representatives, of political professionals who do not tolerate the people peddling in their trade.
This kind of mentality was highlighted on September 20th with an official decree that will in the future limit the state administrative services that former prime ministers will get, while at the same time providing them with a car and driver for life; and the limited restrictions will not even apply to the eleven ex-premiers still alive.
In the very same week this image of a shackled democracy was completed by the sight of former justice minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas going on trial before the Cour de Justice de la République, an archaic institution before which the governing classes can be judged only by their peers.
Urvoas, a minister under President François Hollande, is accused of having broken the pact of secrecy which guarantees the submission of the prosecution service - which rules on the appropriateness of prosecutions - to the executive, which is informed in real time of the progress of criminal investigations (see Michel Deléan's report, in French, here). His conviction would not challenge the prosecution authorities' dependence on the executive; on the contrary, it would in fact save this “French-style prosecution” service which remains a democratic anomaly that no political group challenges.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
This, then, is the state of our public life while elsewhere, at the same time, democracy is behaving as it should be: demanding in nature, a culture, a complex eco-system, a common practice. Brexit across the Channel and Donald Trump across the Atlantic are putting the British and American democratic systems to the test. Yet faced with these trials, these systems are proving themselves to be vigorous and strong, with no blind submission to the executive, with the systems' democratic balancing checks fighting back against executive powers, parliamentarians doing their jobs and a press playing its role by raising the alarm.
In Great Britain, the oldest Parliamentary democracy, the Supreme Court has unanimously re-established the rights of Parliament against an executive takeover by a prime minister who was forced to give way, and that after his own party showed it was not automatically subject to the executive either. In the United States, where the presidential system is counterbalanced by a strong Congress, impeachment proceedings have been launched against the sitting president after a federal employee, inside the intelligence agencies, exercised their right to raise the alarm, via the press.
Imagine if in France, in the interests of the country, Mediapart revealed the existence of a compromising conversation between the president of the Republic and a foreign head of state. What would happen next, if France were to operate in the way that American democracy works, something which is clearly unimaginable? Not only would France's National Assembly take up the matter (though there was no French equivalent of the impeachment process until a 2014 vote on a law applying article 68 of the French Constitution) but, moreover, the Élysée would automatically be obliged to make this conversation public, and then do the same with the report from the whistle-blower (though in France there is no Freedom of Information Act as has existed in the United States since 1966 or the United Kingdom since 2000).
A true democracy is where the executive is force to submit itself to other powers, even to the point where it has to make public that which could potentially damage it. And to the point where it has to respond to inquiries by Parliament and to questions from the press. And where it cannot evade this. In our very low-intensity democracy in France, that is obvious unthinkable. Moreover, the majority of the political and media worlds gladly go along with the fact that it is unthinkable, at the risk of discrediting democracy itself.
Faced with revelations such as these, the reality in France would be quite different. Here a president would rally his troops in Parliament to hold the line with no dissenting voices, urging them to put an end to the independent committees of inquiry, he would criticise the press claiming it was no longer looking for the truth, accuse opposition politicians of trying to overthrow the Constitution, refuse to hand over documents covered by secrecy laws, and call on his supporters to campaign against the destabilisation of democracy as represented by the person of the president.
All that is a factual summary of the actual reaction of Emmanuel Macron presidency to the Benalla affair, involving his former security aide Alexandre Benalla, a year ago. To the above one should add that the prosecution authorities, which are subject to the executive, dropped the case against three close advisors of the president after the matter had been referred to them by the Parliament's upper house the Senate.
The current president was simply making use of the full powers that the unchecked presidency affords him, the same powers that enabled his predecessors François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac to carry on despite the controversies that revealed the shady aspects of their presidencies. This system of presidential monarchy is a stronghold, and once it has been conquered provides a guarantee of survival and protection.
But because it is used against democracy itself, the exercise of this presidential privilege helps democracy's worst enemies. This past weekend, as the country was in full mourning for Jacques Chirac who was praised for at one time keeping the far-right from power, that very far right was itself receiving live television news coverage for the political convention organised by Marion Maréchal, the niece of far-right Rassemblement National president Marine Le Pen. A star speaker at the event was Éric Zemmour, the media commentator who has twice been convicted for provoking racial hatred.
How can we avoid conceding that democracy is yet to arrive in France? At least, democracy as understood by the lone voice of former prime minister Pierre Mendès France (1907-1982) who described it as “much more than the holding of elections and government by the majority” but rather a “form of decency, of virtue, of scruples, of a civic sense, of respect for an adversary, a moral code”.
Unless there is some popular surge to devise new ways and impose them on the old order of things, its privileges and sinecures, there there is a great risk that this hopeless stagnation and disastrous endless cycle will lead, through its authoritarian, unequal, xenophobic and racist degeneracy, to the presidential monarchy paving the way for those who want to impose identity politics.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter