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“From sword duel to clash on Twitter, a short history of violence in politics”

2023-02-14T16:58:47.165Z


FIGAROVOX/INTERVIEW - After the exclusion from the National Assembly of LFI deputy Thomas Portes who had posted a photo of him, his foot crushing a football bearing the head of the Minister of Labour, the historian Loris Chavanette returns to the evolution of violence in politics.


Loris Chavanette is the author, among others, of

Quatre-vingt-quinze.

The Terror on Trial

(CNRS editions, 2017, preface by historian Patrice Gueniffey), thesis prize from the National Assembly 2013 and history prize from the Stéphane Bern-Institut de France Foundation 2018, and from Danton and Robespierre

.

The shock of the Revolution

(Pasts compounds, 2021).

He also established the edition of a selection of Napoleon's letters,

Napoleon.

Between eternity, the ocean and the night.

Correspondence

(Books, 2020).

FIGAROVOX.

- The deputy LFI Thomas Portes was temporarily excluded from the National Assembly, after posting on Twitter a photo of him, his foot on a ball bearing the image of the Minister of Labour.

Is the act of the deputy a sign of a deterioration in the quality of parliamentary debates?

Loris Chavanette.

-

The rougher the sea, the more you have to know how to keep calm.

Responding to hate with hate doesn't help understand what's going on here.

However, many hasten to react to the provocations of the extreme left by comparing the Insoumis to Robespierre and their violent outings to the project of restoring the Terror in France.

Against these caricatural analogies, which flatter the rebels instead of refuting them, we must remember that we no longer cut off heads, the guillotine is in the closet and the deputy Thomas Portes had his foot on a ball in a photo posted on social networks .

This behavior is unworthy and must be strongly condemned, but it is not a call for murder as those madmen Marat and Hébert did in their newspapers.

The worst is behind us, even if no

Thierry Lentz: “Would the Insoumis put Terror on the agenda if they could?”

Yes, there is a degradation of political speech almost everywhere, especially within the hemicycle.

Institutions are weakened, the debate turning into a dialogue of the deaf, or rather into screaming barking.

Let's just go after ideas, not people.

It is certain that the ideas require more reflection, more complexity, than these sterile

ad hominem

attacks , when they are not barbaric.

The debate would certainly gain in depth, and the language in finesse.

In truth, what is dramatically declining is the quality of political personnel.

The deputies of the French Revolution were in most cases educated lawyers, experienced in the exercise of public speaking.

Parliamentary eloquence has fallen from its pedestal: formerly, exchanges in the Assembly offered pieces of literature;

now, it's cinema of the worst burlesque.

Les Insoumis reminds me of Marcel Pagnol's Schpountz: they dream of being tragedians, perpetuating Robespierre or Jaurès, but turn out to be comic troopers.

The problem is that the Assembly is turning into vaudeville in the worst possible taste.

They put into practice the lesson of Marx, who explained that history is born for the first time in tragedy before repeating itself in farce.

When did this phenomenon start?

We still have to define the phenomenon.

We find ourselves in the presence of a government and a majority whose legitimacy the opposition contests, either by explaining to us that in the second round of the presidential elections Emmanuel Macron was not elected for his program, or by brandishing a poll stating that the country would be against pension reform, majority in the Assembly or not.

The rules of law are not haphazard luck, if you allow me this expression: the law, you have to submit to it or resign.

In reality, we are in the presence of an important and legitimate political force (I speak of LFI) in our country, which aims to overthrow the regime, change the constitution and establish a new order.

This situation is easily resolved in dictatorships:

This conflict between democratic legality and revolutionary legitimacy dates from the very creation of French parliamentarism, in 1789.

Loris Chavanette

In a democracy, it is necessary to manage the coexistence between everything and its opposite, and, in the absence of a majority, to seek compromises between the currents.

But from the moment when our intellectual elites, at the university or outside, as well as the populist editorialists, on the right as on the left, are toiling to criticize representative democracy, how can public opinion not find itself not disoriented in this maelstrom and not ready to trust the best speaker?

This is what is happening today.

The parliamentary minority of Nupes claims the popular support of the street to present itself as the depository of the majority opinion of the country.

This conflict between democratic legality and revolutionary legitimacy dates from the very creation of French parliamentarianism, in 1789. Through their rhetoric, the Jacobin deputies claimed to be the expression of a direct democracy and the exclusive representatives of the "pure" people.

Politics was imbued with a religious spirit and democratic pluralism did not exist, due to the capture-usurpation of popular sovereignty by the strongest party (at the time the Parisian Sans-culottes).

Since that time, our political history has been uncomfortable with democratic procedures.

We have gone from sword duels, the last of which in 1967 between two MPs, to clashes on Twitter.

Is the National Assembly the reflection of a general evolution of society?

Democracy has always been subject to the danger of demagogy, each party going there with its anger or opportunistic flattery.

But our modern demagogues are alarmingly pitiful when their political culture is reduced to modeling their speeches at the podium, on the hysterical model of social networks.

To exist, you have to extremize yourself.

You will allow me to prefer to this great ball of the hypocrites, the answer that the great orator of 1789, Mirabeau had made to those who challenged him to a duel daily: “

Monsieur, I have put you on my list;

but I warn you that it is long, and that I cannot make a pass."

Before, death was ironic because it could always surprise you, whereas today it takes a lot of imagination to pass yourself off as a martyr.

But what do you want?

Mirabeau not only had a refined language, he was also a moderate.

Two things that are disappearing drop by drop in our entertainment society.

Freedom is also the excesses of freedom.

We have to accept it because our democratic history has never been cold water and never will be.

Loris Chavanette

Was politics more violent before, or has the nature of violence changed?

Verbal attacks have always had traits of assumed virulence.

Above all, we must not sanitize the political debate by putting it under the rule of I don't know what superior moral authority censoring here or there.

Freedom is also the excesses of freedom.

We have to accept it because our democratic history has never been cold water and never will be.

In terms of pure violence, I worked a lot on the so-called Thermidorian period, that is to say after the execution of Robespierre.

Under the Terror, there had been popular uprisings supported, even orchestrated, by the Jacobins.

In general, the political crisis was resolved on the scaffold with the elimination of the other.

But in the spring of 1795, when the crowd of rioters, many of them starving women, entered the Assembly, a deputy by the name of Féraud was beheaded and his head stuck on the end of a pike which was presented to the presiding officer.

Once order was re-established, the National Assembly organized a celebration of the law throughout the country in honor of deputy Féraud.

We knew the value of representative democracy, born in the pain of events.

But do we still know how to create moments of reunion and harmony?

Symbols count double, especially in times of crisis like the one we are going through in France, and even more so in Europe.

For this, history must be put to use, because what brings us together is more important than what divides us.

Source: lefigaro

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