Claude NICOLET is president of the Citizen Nation.
Crossroads: Expression so widely used that it is not impossible that it has lost all meaning.
And yet ... it is not entirely illegitimate to think that we are there.
The political, economic, cultural, identity, social fractures that some of us have been announcing and describing for years are there.
We announced it in 1992, with Jean-Pierre Chevènement during the creation of the Mouvement des Citoyens.
For thirty years, no matter what at the risk of all the stigmatizations, all the names of birds and sometimes insults, we have remained faithful to the analyzes that are ours because they are based on deep convictions and a of France, of the Nation, of democracy, of sovereignty and of the Republic that we refuse to separate from each other, even if we do not confuse them.
Our warnings were not heeded, our proposals were not accepted and the left, by dint of espousing neoliberalism without ever really recognizing it, preferred to break with the people and break "
the marriage of the Nation and the working class
" wanted by Jean Jaurès and turn to the “
minorities
” whoever they were rather than questioning what would become the policy of the “
strong franc
” and the pegging to the Deutch Mark to make the euro at the cost of our industry.
The political parties are deeply discredited against the background of the disappearance of democratic oxygen because eliminated by the end of sovereignty.
The alignment of France went through its European and Atlanticist alignment.
The European Union which was accepted by the French as long as it was a question of making "
France in a big way
" has transformed into German Europe, isolating us for a long time and perhaps weakening us even more.
Admittedly, the "
turn of 1983
" to orient France in the direction of the "
prevailing winds
" of neoliberalism, perfectly described by Jacques Delors could seem inevitable.
But with the “
single act
” of 1986 handing over the country to capital movements, then the Maastricht Treaty (1992) engraving the gene for neoliberalism in the DNA of the European Union, the left was no longer really so.
From the presidential election of 2002 we were able to measure the divide and the expectations of the French.
The appeal of Jean-Pierre Chevènement did not go unnoticed.
From the communist Rémi Auchedé or Anicet Le Pors to the former chief of staff of General de Gaulle, Pierre Lefranc, including the radicals of Emile Zuccarelli, 2002 is the signal that the search for an alternative has been launched.
There is no valid political vision if it is not part of the understanding of the phenomena that are at work and if it is not part of the long term.
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The result of these forty pitiful is politically dramatic.
The political parties are deeply discredited against the background of the disappearance of the democratic oxygen essential to survive because eliminated by the end of sovereignty, condition of our freedom.
How to articulate the social question and the national question, how to articulate the question of secularism and citizenship, heart of the republican project if in reality the very conditions of the debate and especially of their existence are no longer met?
The disarticulation of the social question and the national question against the background of the end of sovereignty signals the end of the republican idea.
What constitutes us as a political people is precisely the fact of being able to debate these questions.
It is this “
common dispute
” which allows us to “
make France
”, to “
make Nation
”.
And it is today the very heart of this possibility which is attacked for the greatest benefit of those who want its end in order to deprive the people of their political identity and their capacity to act on their future, on their destiny.
Offensives by political Islam (which we shamefully seek to assimilate to “
Muslims
”), to active minorities who question secularism, republican equality, who categorize citizens as “
racialized
”, in sexual genders, in intersectional struggles, in communities separated from each other, in war between men and women, in a country where teachers are threatened, assaulted, molested and sometimes massacred, in a country where violence strikes more and more every day, especially blood crimes, so that it is the political dispute that connects us to each other, the political crisis inevitably turns into an identity and cultural crisis.
The war of all against all in a state of permanent tension is consubstantial with neoliberal society.
We can measure the damage in this field of democratic and political ruins with each passing day.
The disarticulation of the social question and the national question against a background of the end of sovereignty signals the end of the republican idea and constitutes the most beautiful of the victories of those who want to put an end to the historical and political cycle that began in 1789.
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As Philippe Séguin beautifully said, "
Maastricht is literally the antithesis of 1789.
"
He too had understood in 1992 what it was all about.
And he, the child of Tunis, the ward of the Nation, the son of a father who died for France in 1944, he, the honest and respected Gaullist, he the lover of France and the Republic, could not to accept what seemed unacceptable to him and which felt this choice deep down as a betrayal.
He was one of those men in search of the political alternative that would allow the Republic to be rebuilt.
Time and death have left him neither the time nor the possibility.
Forty years later we are there.
The European Union does not succeed, because it cannot substitute itself for the nations which compose it to "
offer
" or to propose a sufficiently powerful imaginary of substitution to forge a "
European people
" which decidedly refuses to exist.
The health crisis continues to demonstrate it.
Now is the time for daring and risk-taking because the situation demands it and the French know it when they feel the country is crumbling.
However, this neoliberal cycle started at the end of the 1970s by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan is coming to an end.
It is now on a new political perspective that we must work and propose to the French.
This can only be done from a precise understanding of our time and the situation in which we find ourselves.
"
To be free is to have the intelligence of your time
" says Jean-Pierre Chevènement, that is what it is about today.
This implies that we now have the ability to free ourselves from a certain number of reading grids which today paralyze us, both on the “
left
” and “
right
” because the real lines of fractures have totally affected us. to shatter what constituted "
the old world
".
But the “
new world
” has still not happened because it requires a considerable effort of reflection, collective intelligence and above all political courage.
The time is not for the old arrangements.
The artificial announcements of agreements of political apparatuses will satisfy only the last members of the clergy whereas the believers (if any remain) have already left to look elsewhere for a long time.
Moreover, depending on the church to which they belong they will not agree on anything.
Nuclear?
Energy and industrial policy?
Economic policy?
Transport policy?
Health policy?
Recovery policy?
Now is the time for daring and risk-taking because the situation demands it and the French know it when they feel the country is crumbling.
The time has
passed
even for the “
republican front
”, the idea of which no longer interests many people, as citizens have the feeling (are they wrong?) Of having been taken in.
No, the time has come for a republican refoundation with those who will have the courage, the will and who will have the capacity to act as free women and men in order to take back the course of our destiny.
