FigaroVox week - "European decline"

Dear subscribers,

Re-reading past speeches is a cruel exercise.

At the end of November 2020, in the middle of a year of collective sadness, a year of nothing, the President of the Republic hinted at the hope of a total deconfinement, of the reopening for bars and restaurants on January 20.

See where we are today.

The stoves remain cold, the rooms are empty, and the curtain on the screen fell again on Wednesday.

Emmanuel Macron announced that in addition to this life of restriction, the doors of schools will now be closed and nurseries deserted for at least three weeks, giving parents a cold sweat.

The professionals of AP-HP crisis directors are struggling to hide their impatience.

In recent days, they have installed the music according to which the situation is too serious not to give a new turn of the screw, that the Parisian hospitals would be close to saturation.

These knowing annoyed Christophe Prudhomme, doctor at Samu 93.

"These are the gravediggers of the hospital"

who chose not to open additional resuscitation beds after the first wave, who allow themselves to

"sound the alarm bell"

...

The hope of a return to happy days is, as we know, suspended from the success of the vaccination campaign.

Brussels, obsessed with the sacrosanct principle of precaution, was too cautious, regrets science journalist Tom Chivers.

To go faster, MIT doctoral student Antoine Levy suggests following in the footsteps of our British neighbors by opting for the “first dose first” strategy, in other words, delaying the second injection in order to have more vaccines.

In the meantime, Nicolas Baverez draws up a cruel assessment of the situation.

"One year after the start of the pandemic, the failure is total, marked by the shift of public authorities into chaos, between confinement to stay outside, acceleration of vaccination with suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine, multiplication of closures of 'activities and certificates defying common sense'

.

And then, this cursed virus shed light on the downgrading, the pauperization of France and Europe.

The causes are multiple, they are to be found in our bureaucratic State, the collapse of production, our struggling innovation and the disintegration of society.

Undoubtedly, the EU has also played the rooster for too long.

“From the outset, the European Union has seen itself as an indefinite process blessed with history.

We proceed as if we had eternity in front of us, ”

Pierre Manent nicely sums up.

Since we don't have eternity in front of us, read FigaroVox!

Have a nice week end!

Ronan Planchon

Interview of the week - Arnaud Teyssier

On the one hand, the Saint-Cyr De Gaulle who was built against the system.

On the other, the normalien Pompidou, a pure product of the republican meritocracy.

Everything opposes the two statesmen, according to observers.

Arnaud Teyssier strives to demonstrate the opposite in his latest work.

If they had different backgrounds and characters, they shared a love of the state, the conviction that capitalism had no future if it did not go hand in hand with a public power, assures the historian.

Arnaud Teyssier.

Helene Bamberger for Le Figaro Magazine

To be found in full in the Figaro Magazine.

The debates of the week

What is the Suez Canal accident the name of?

A 400-meter-long freight boat stupidly stuck in the Suez Canal and damage to world trade.

Journalist François Lenglet sees it as a warning for globalization.

One more.

What do Audrey Pulvar and Georges Marchais have in common?

Let's recognize a quality in the left: it has the gift of shooting itself in the foot.

By believing that the Whites should "be silent" during a single-sex meeting, Audrey Pulvar fractured her camp.

She thus follows in the footsteps of Georges Marchais in 1977, writes essayist and journalist Christine Clerc.

Faced with the identity drifts of the left, what should the right do?

It must start by proposing in each region, then in the presidential election, an uncompromising candidacy on the fundamentals, according to Thibault de Montbrial.

But above all, then apply, without weakness, the difficult but essential measures to restore the authority of the State and recreate a transcendence.

How to reconnect with meritocracy?

There is no a miraculous recipe.

But if we want to allow disadvantaged high school students to access the pathways of excellence in higher education, without resorting to positive discrimination, it is urgent to put in place national, regular and uniform exams, according to Raphaël Doan.

Is the Climate Law a popular anti-France law?

By implicitly pointing the finger at traders, farmers or transporters as the culprits of global warming, this text designates scapegoats in popular France, worries Maxime Tandonnet.

Who wonders if the government remembers the “yellow vests” crisis.

The quote of the week

Between believers (those who are engaged in the “woke” movement, the proponents of a decolonial approach) and unbelievers there is no common ground within which to exchange arguments.

Philippe d'Iribarne

The sociologist, X-Mines, research director at CNRS brilliantly analyzes the roots of the “woke” and decolonial movement.

For him, the radical nature of the exchanges between those who defend Islamogauchism and those who denounce the orientations questioned is intimately linked to the transformation that the promise of equality has undergone over the past half-century.

A tribune to read on the FigaroVox.