A few weeks ago, Marc Bloch entered the Pantheon. With L’Étrange Défaite, the historian told us about the debacle of 1940, the fall towards the French State and the collaboration. A strange defeat, where progressive retreats and renunciations lead, almost without reaction, to the collapse of the Republic.
Eighty years later, we experienced two events in a few days, the maintenance of Marine Le Pen’s candidacy in the presidential election and the censorship suffered by DJ Barbara Butch in Grenoble, which indicate the weakening of our republican morality. Two strange defeats.
Double defeat
Ten years ago, at the time of the Fillon affair, the country said to itself that one could not decently be a candidate for the presidency of the Republic while being indicted. The candidate’s formula, ironically, hit the mark: “Who imagines General de Gaulle being indicted? »
Today, a political leader, twice convicted of embezzlement of public funds, is the favorite in the next presidential election. We are amazed at how far we have come. It’s a double defeat. Collective, by the weakness of the reactions that this situation provokes. This indicates the decline in our demand, which has been raised for almost twenty years, for transparency in political life.
It is also an ethical defeat. Certainly, Marine Le Pen formally has the right to present herself. But with minimal political ethics, she should not even consider being a candidate for the presidency of the Republic as possible or desirable. When you are a political leader, doubly convicted, you apologize and withdraw, you do not play for time in the hope of ultimately achieving presidential immunity.
Distrust of justice
With skill, the candidate of the National Rally (RN) moved the condition of her candidacy from the absence of conviction to the question of wearing an electronic bracelet. The elementary evidence that a person doubly convicted for having embezzled several million euros of public funds (which, even European, remain French money) should not be a candidate for the presidential election, is ultimately no longer obvious.
Not so long ago, any political leader involved in a case declared, according to a ritual formula, “to trust the justice of his country”. Today, the favorite in the polls makes distrust of this same justice system the founding basis of her candidacy.
A few days later, another defeat, with the raid led by activists La France insoumise (LFI) to interrupt, by force, the concert of DJ Barbara Butch in Grenoble. The authors argue that the act is not anti-Semitic, that it would not be motivated by the identity of the DJ, but by her political positions, which would make the forceful move legitimate.
Silent setbacks of our ethics
This is, again, a weakening of republican practice. We can have a disagreement and express it. We can demonstrate in front of a concert. But breaking in and censoring by force is not the Republic: it is a method of factious leagues.
Disagreement with Barbara Butch’s political opinion, which she has also denied but who cares, cannot justify violence: it is the very foundation of the democratic contract. We discuss, we debate, we oppose: we do not censor, we do not molest. Meanwhile, the mayor of Alès is exfiltrated in the middle of the night by the Raid, following threats from the DZ Mafia. Retreat, still of the republican order.
Strange month of July, scorching, and which sees day after day the strange defeats, the silent setbacks of our ethics, of our practice of politics in the Republic. Where the shared evidence of our civic pact is gradually erased. Faced with this, a rare glimmer of light in the month, the films in the diptych on General de Gaulle, which contrast these strange and twilight defeats with the light of the individual and collective ethics of our Republic.
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