Marie-Estelle Dupont, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, has published
Freeing yourself from your toxic self (
Larousse, 2017) and
Discover your superpowers with the shrink
(Eyrolles, 2015).
On July 5, 2020, Philippe Monguillot, bus driver, died under the blows of his attackers.
He had "allowed" himself to practice his profession and check their travel tickets.
The facts having been requalified as “intentional violence in meetings resulting in death without the intention of giving it”, the two men aged 24 and 25 will escape the risk of life imprisonment that they would have incurred before the assizes.
They will be brought before a criminal court, made up of five magistrates, and face 20 years in prison.
First of all, I associate myself with the incredible pain of his family who, faced with the coldness and the slowness of the procedure, find themselves invisible.
Instead of being rehabilitated in their dignity, Madame Monguillot and her children face violence by trivializing their tragedy.
The relentlessness, instead of being an aggravating circumstance, becomes a means of alleviating the sentence since it is not the last blow - when the aggressors return to attack the victim - which completes him but the fall caused by this one.
Read alsoBus driver killed in Bayonne: “Banality of barbarism”
This logical construction allowed by the law shows the unthought of our justice which manages to cut out the facts so much and so well that the links are broken, and the whole thing is denied.
Faced with the lack of empathy of those who strike without caring about the consequences of their actions -even enjoying sadizing and humiliating a man on the ground by kicking him in the head-, our society responds with same lack of empathy.
More than negligence, it is an insult to the victim and his family.
However, if justice is not based on emotion, nor politics on benevolence, which is private, it goes without saying that justice done for and by men requires not denying the spirit, at the risk of getting lost in the letter and trivializing, and therefore encouraging, violence.
Isn't this lack of resources a sign of denial, even complacency, of a misplaced tolerance of violence?
Marie Estelle Dupont
Véronique Monguillot saw her life shattered in the most absurd way almost two years ago.
Two years without sleep, two years of pain, stupefaction and tears because the death drive erupted without anything or anyone being able to stop it.
Two years of waiting for society to do its job of restoring order.
To receive the most violent slap there is: the death of her husband was denied, minimized, trivialized, fragmented.
On television sets, some say that justice is not lax but lacks resources.
It's a point of view.
But even so, isn't this lack of means the symptom of a refusal of our politicians to carry out sovereign missions to the end?
Those which finally define the modern State since François Ier.
Isn't this lack of resources a sign of denial, even complacency, of a misplaced tolerance of violence?
Do we still not understand that it is the prohibition (on killing, incest, etc.) that guarantees the survival of the species and the group?
The intolerance is total on opinions, even questions.
In the name of good it is necessary to prohibit saying, thinking, and often prohibiting.
On the other hand, with regard to acts of barbarism, complacency is not lacking.
This daily observation is a source of despair for many of our fellow citizens who no longer identify with our society.
Isn't this lack of means or this laxity (these are the two sides of the same problem) the proof that technocratic coldness and the refusal to make common-sense links, dehumanize a society.
To the point that a magistrate explains that in our law
"one can lynch a man without wanting to kill him"
and that this justifies that life cannot be incurred?
In the case of the Bayonne bus driver case, it is not a question of questioning the decision of the judge who alone has the documents in the file but of understanding what is not working in our educational and judicial system. , therefore
ultimately
political, to come to be so overwhelmed by the irruption of gratuitous violence.
It is necessary to return to the fundamentals of society.
The human being in the state of nature cannot optimally guarantee his survival because of his inclinations for violence.
Society, with its laws, its codes, its traditions too, provides the framework within which community life is regulated, trade and diplomacy minimizing the risks of war, for example, and the courts, that of revenge.
Requalifying facts on the grounds that one can
“lynch without wanting to kill
” in a situation where the victim of these acts of barbarism is deceased, reveals to what extent we have integrated into our mentalities the major psychic regression of our time.
Barbarism, torture, the total lack of anticipation of the consequences of our actions, all of this has become more or less acceptable among adults.
This argument perfectly illustrates our times.
The denial of violence is often more violent than the blow
.
"Justice must take the necessary step back",
we are told.
Hindsight is not the absence of common sense or empathy, it seems to me.
The feeling of impunity is such that the law is no longer effective.
Marie Estelle Dupont
Nicole Belloubet had decided to unclog the assize courts by creating criminal courts.
But does this congestion really say nothing about us?
Doesn't it reflect the lack of means, which stems from an ideology?
An ideology where one should not prohibit, not punish, not confine, not sanction.
The feeling of impunity is such that the law is no longer effective.
It is therefore no longer preventive.
She runs after the facts.
However, an assize court had the merit of maintaining empathy.
Citizen jurors identifying with the victims will demand a sentence that restores the sense of justice.
Criminal courts cannot require life imprisonment.
At most 20 years and, for lack of space, the convicts will certainly be released long before.
What do we offer our children and young people as an identifying model?
What are we sending as a message?
What desire to master and grow do we give them?
Where has common sense gone?
Intelligence is not intellectual reasoning, or application of the law to the letter, but link and adaptability.
The perpetuity of the victim is without possible recourse, in the same way as that of his wife.
When you beat a driver to death for a ticket check, you risk at most 20 years in prison.
Not sure.
Where is our humanity?
Who are we to tolerate this?
What have we become psychically to stop reacting to unbridled hatred?
We no longer think (thought being the ability to establish links)?
We no longer feel?
Are we no longer able to identify with pain or understand the fragmentation of our society?
When will we finally allocate a little of our budget to sovereign functions, vital organs of the social body?
Pay attention to the anger of the victims.
This is how violence is fueled.
When justice is weak, the desire for revenge can come to fill the void left by the unthought of society.