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Loris Chavanette: "We historians do not take the degradation of statues lightly"

2020-07-10T19:43:19.713Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - The acts of vandalism committed on the statues of our public places resemble more the expression of destructive impulses than in the pursuit of justice, regrets the historian.


Loris Chavanette is a historian and novelist. Author notably of Ninety-five. Terror on trial (CNRS ed, 2017) National Assembly thesis prize, Stéphane Bern Foundation prize for the heritage of the Institut de France, and La Fantasia (Albin Michel, 2020), Mediterranean prize for the first novel.

The problem with us historians is that we always take everything seriously. The tiniest postilion, the most ridiculous jeremiad, the slightest protrusion are watched as potentially having a meaning. The trifles do not belong to our register. Surely we are too serious. The reason for this? It is the observation made that the details of our existence, individual or collective, can reach dimensions over time such that we are tempted, after the fact, to complain of not having been vigilant more early.

Ambient relativism would like to reduce the scope of these acts by describing them as acts committed by simple fools.

But what has wavered in recent weeks are precisely the statues erected in public places to our dead, some vandals having gone so far as to unbolt or paint some of them manu militari, without taking into account the complexity of the historical context . Ambient relativism would certainly like to reduce the scope of these actions by describing them as epiphenomena or acts committed by simple fools. However, that would be a big mistake. These degradations are undoubtedly the expression of a deep rancor, an invincible hatred. Emotion presides, above all, at this violence against an inanimate object. The Huguenots attacking Catholic churches, the Jacobins beating down on monuments bearing the image of kings, Eastern Europeans destroying the statues of Lenin, or our modern iconoclasts painting the busts of Minister Colbert in red or of General Faidherbe, all respond to a destructive impulse dictated by their passions; and almost always it is with the words of justice and freedom on their lips that they shoot down what they consider to be the negation of the values ​​of which they claim to be defenders. The vagueness surrounding these very notions means that one cannot judge all acts of vandalism equally. Who would blame the victims of the communist occupation, Czechs or Hungarians, for having dethroned the statues of Lenin and Stalin? Which of us does not have words strong enough to condemn the blasting of the representations of Buddha by the Taliban, or of the city of Palmyra by the jihadists? Everything is therefore a matter of assessing the merits of the cause defended by those who carry out this destruction.

But now the worst happens when we confuse words and things. It's not fair that pretends to be. Today, even those attacking, in the name of the fight against racism, the statues of Voltaire, the promoter of the spirit of tolerance, of Victor Schoelcher, the author of the abolition of the slavery, of Jules Ferry, the lawyer of the secular school, of General de Gaulle, the figure of the rebel against Nazism, and, across the Channel, of Churchill, the tribune of the free world against Hitler, even that of the peaceful Gandhi in Copenhagen cannot use the vigilante sword without turning this weapon of violence against their own ideals. More adept at handling anachronism than reflecting on our own history, they in fact convey a rejection of our heritage whose heritage is paying the price today. Denouncing a national novel written by the victors, they pose as supposed victims of a world that is no more. And on the altar of their wounded memory, they come to lecture us on the legend of state racism even though slavery in the colonies was abolished over one hundred and seventy years ago and that Colonial Empire disappeared almost sixty years ago.

Turning anti-racism into an ideology is the worst service that can be rendered in the fight against discrimination.

This refrain, obsolete as it is, is therefore not only false but also pernicious because it confuses everything, making anti-racism a new ideology, which is the worst service that can be rendered to the fight against discriminations. The reality is that these acts participate less in a collective emotion than in a vast concerted plan aimed at forcing our leaders to do work of repentance, as if the only reading grid in our history should depend on leaving the colonial era. Besides, it works rather well when reading the declarations of our political leaders or the calls for the “decolonialization” of France by a handful of “intellectuals” acclaimed by Mediapart. It is who will bow first. In doing so, we are trying to open a Pandora's box, which can only bring confusion and division, through communitarianism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia. This so-called desire for purification proves to be an enterprise of demonization of the other, at the cost of a simplistic reading of the past and of a "Nazification" of our history. The critical mind loses what Manichaeism gains from it.

Opening for example a serene discussion on our colonial past, as I wanted to do in my novel La Fantasia, is almost impossible these days because of the moralist postures and our tradition of repentance, admittedly recently promoted by French presidents and Algerian. For how much longer? As long as this system continues, our history will remain an eternal bone of contention, transforming France into a new tower of Babel, where everyone cries out for injustice with their own language. Those who wake up old ghosts today to chase them are nothing but retrograde healers; under the pretext of modernity and humanity, they overwhelm a society whose heritage they conspire in laws, institutions, mores, even in stone.

History could not be a cauldron where each susceptibility would melt to serve us a lukewarm soup.

This new intellectual inquisition locks us into a form of hiding civil war, because of the forgetfulness of this principle enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights, according to which "freedom consists in doing everything that does not harm others . " This fundamental lesson was not retained by all, it seems. These activist, politicized minorities, waving the standard of history, less to understand it than to fight it, dump their personal resentment on the tricolor. In fact, they aim to tear it to shreds, make it into confetti, so that everyone has a tiny bit of our sovereignty. However history cannot be a cauldron where each susceptibility would melt to serve us a lukewarm soup.

But of what construction does this current destructive logic prevail? What is the plan, the next step, for these acts of vandalism? How will political parties anxious to recover these voices of anger manage the identity crisis of which they have prepared the ground by constantly pouring into a vague and inconsistent syncretism incapable in the end of establishing a true dialogue of cultures because, as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote, "to have in front of you someone other than yourself, you must have a self" ? The absence of any perspective with which our era bears the mark today, with its soft Big Brother model, does not encourage optimism. And there is a strong fear that we will build a France like our lost children, in search of recognition, even if it means reducing our ambitions, rather than teaching future generations to take as an example what their country has better, using the art of education.

Read also: Christopher Columbus, Confederate: "The debunking of statues are symptomatic of the new identity age"

Instead of looking for an untraceable perfection in our past rites, isn't it more important to prepare, by knowledge, innovation, talent, the construction of the statues of the heroes of our national novel of tomorrow? "Man knows the world, said Paul Claudel, not by what he steals from it but by what he adds to it", and the latter is right to cultivate the hope and creativity of youth against pessimism , the negativism of the mediocre. France has always recovered from its crises because it has managed to go beyond the borders of reality to seek out paths of the possible, sometimes in the marvelous, which has always made its universality. That is to say its greatness.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-07-10

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