Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He published
How are the politicians dead?
- The great malaise of power
(editions of Cerf, November 2021).
The "uberfiles" are an object that confirms the principle of degeneration of a regime.
It is of course not the regime that is in question: the institutions of the Vth have, through the test of history, demonstrated their stability, their democratic character, their capacity to absorb and overcome the seizures.
It is the men who no longer manage to embody them who are primarily responsible for this state of affairs.
History is not a mechanism, it remains first and foremost that of the men who make it.
However, this degeneration is not specific to Macronism;
it comes from afar, and macronism, from this point of view, is only the product of the latter.
It has resulted in the weakening of politics and the gradual abandonment of what gives meaning to a democratic mandate.
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The day when the marginalization of national independence, of its dilution in a globalized conglomerate, is recorded, it is the whole architecture of the principle of responsibility which is inflected and damaged.
With the latter, the moral foundations that legitimize the exercise of power also disappear.
No public morality without taking into account the “material and moral interests” of the people to use the formula of Chateaubriand, who brilliantly summarizes the low waters that we are going through in the light of what was in its time the Restoration: “
the ministry invented a new morality, the morality of interests;
that of homework is left to fools.
Now, this morality of interests, which we want to make the basis of our government, has corrupted the people more in the space of three years than the revolution in a quarter of a century
”.
Emmanuel Macron is the terminal clerk of a sequence of constant and sustained uberization of the general interest;
it constitutes the vector that is both the most logical and the most uninhibited.
Arnaud Benedetti
Thus, our uncertain times offer a disturbing echo chamber to the words of the great author, as if what macronism revealed was nothing other than an accelerated degradation of the public spirit following years of insidious proliferation.
Emmanuel Macron from this point of view is the terminal clerk of a sequence of constant and sustained uberization of the general interest;
it constitutes the vector that is both the most logical and the most uninhibited.
The starting point of this phenomenon is already to be found in the 1990s in the intoxication of nascent globalization and in the emergence of a techno-liberalism whose vocation was to acculturate state models to entrepreneurial logic.
The marketing of the "start-up nation", of which the "uberfiles" are an illustration, is the ultimate outgrowth born of a thought that is as much managerial as it is deregulatory.
The structural coherence of the event with the political software of the president could not however dissimulate, in addition to the moral and ethical problem which it poses, the political question which it raises.
She indeed questions the state of the quinquennium which is just beginning.
The convergence between an impossible lasting majority in the Assembly, economic prospects jeopardized by inflation, debt, lack of growth and the proliferation of suspicions of all kinds which weigh on the image or reputation of a number of those responsible for the executive delivers the representation of an atmosphere for the less “end of reign”.
The power of enchantment of 2017 resolutely evaporated, everything happens as if post-macronism had already begun, presumably invalidating the strategies of those who claim to pursue it with other figures and means.
Beneath the misleading, distorting and, to be honest, anecdotal appearances of the partisan games, it is not only the short-term future of Emmanuel Macron's mandate that is at stake but more broadly that of the regime after these long years that Chateaubriand, even once, can help us to understand on the magisterial wings of his prose: “
What destroys morality among nations, and with morality the nations themselves, is not violence but seduction;
and by seduction I mean what all false doctrine has that is flattering and specious.
Men often take error for truth (…);
coldness resembles virtue, reasoning resembles reason, emptiness resembles depth, and so on
.