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Postponement of the visit of Charles III: “Like Saint Petersburg in the 18th century, Paris seeks to conceal misery”

2023-03-27T15:18:18.824Z


INTERVIEW – While the opposition to the pension reform gives rise to scenes of violence in the country, the visit to France of the King of England has been postponed. For historian Loris Chavanette, history shows that the diplomacy of official visits has more or less the same codes.


Loris Chavanette is the author, in particular, 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,

Napoléon.

Between eternity, the ocean and the night.

Correspondence

(Books, 2020).

THE

FIGARO.

- In full protest against the pension reform, the visit to France of the King of England Charles III scheduled for March 26 to 29 is finally postponed, announced the Elysee in a press release.

By renouncing this visit because of social movements, is France admitting weakness?

Is this the sign of a form of decline?

Loris CHAVANETTE.

-

There is no question of decline in this affair which depends exclusively on a chaotic political and social context and not on a more global questioning of the future of the country.

The question of decline is too serious to approach it from the angle of a diplomatic visit, however prestigious it may be.

Then, let's imagine for a single second that the king comes in the current climate and gives the opportunity to the French extreme left to sadly shine by throwing stones at the police forces supposed to ensure the procession... Not to mention the rubbish, with the crowd of rats, fragrant scents… We have more to lose than to gain with this visit, and it is normal not to run the risk of humiliating ourselves further in front of the world.

The English tabloids would have a field day,

those who are used to making fun of our political excesses.

Nevertheless, the scandal provoked by the cancellation of the visit due to unrest reminds me singularly of these official visits organized in the capital of the tsars dreamed of by Alexander the Great, Saint-Petersburg: when Catherine II went there, the city transformed its appearance to show only a decor of wealth and beauty.

We concealed the filth and hid the misery to avoid the spectacle of pain and dirt in the eyes of the empress who was to see only what flattered her reign, even if it meant concealing the reality of the poverty of her subjects.

Today, we always try to show only what is suitable and even sumptuous, as if it were unimaginable to show a necessarily less flattering reality.

Read alsoLoris Chavanette: "How to stop the mechanism of dictatorships?"

Doesn't the Head of State thus give the feeling of giving in to the street?

Are there historical precedents?

There is "yielding to the street" on the essentials and "yielding to the street" on points of detail in our history.

The issue of pension reform is much more important and capital than the visit of a foreign head of state who belongs more to folklore.

In truth, if we take the famous episodes of the French Revolution, we see that until the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, power bent and broke in the face of pressure from the street.

Sometimes, as on July 14, the Parisians were right to raise.

Let us recall these facts that everyone talks about without understanding anything about them.

Louis XVI had just dismissed his reforming minister, the banker Necker, and called to his side countless foreign battalions, making up an army of more than 40,000 soldiers.

of

Clearly, the monarch intended to carry out an anti-parliamentary coup d'etat in order to nip the advent of new democratic institutions in the bud.

The storming of the Bastille was therefore necessary to fly to the aid of the deputies sitting at Versailles.

It is anything but an anti-parliamentary insurrection, but on the contrary a movement in favor of the concept of legality and national representation.

But, miracle we could say, the Parisian riot did not take place against the person of Louis XVI, who remains popular, even if it is only when he comes to Paris to capitulate, that the people sing his praises. .

However, the mob prevailed over the public forces, thus giving a dangerous precedent if by chance the idea of ​​marching again against power came back to him.

We know what happened next: in October, the Parisiennes forced the king and the assembly to settle in the capital;

and in August 1792, Louis XVI was overthrown by a new insurrection masterfully led by Danton.

Charles III is no more than a constitutional monarch inaugurating the chrysanthemums, he no longer has any power except to make state visits.

Loris Chavanette

It was only after the fall of Robespierre, and therefore under the Thermidorian Convention and the Directory between 1795 and 1799 that power really regained control of the streets.

I told this story in a book where I demonstrate that the so-called "bourgeois" republic of 1795 managed to defeat the revolutionary forces, whether by having the political discussion clubs closed manu militari (the best known being that of the Jacobins ) or even by adopting Abbé Sieyès' law of "big police".

In 1795, in a context of social tensions following inflation, the latter defined the imperative of maintaining order:

"The provocations to the looting of private or public properties, to acts of violence against people, to revolt against the constituted authorities, the republican government and national representation, the seditious cries that we allow ourselves to be uttered in the streets and other public places against the sovereignty of the People, the Republic, the constitution accepted by the People, and national representation are crimes.

»

I find this text extraordinarily modern!

But faced with the rise of street anger, the power ended up resorting to the army.

It is the famous cannonade of the Saint-Roch church, on the outskirts of the assembly, on 13 Vendémiaire, by which the young general Napoleon Bonaparte became famous.

He put down a Parisian riot described as royalist when in reality it was essentially Parisians from the beautiful neighborhoods denouncing the traffic in democratic elections (all the votes in Paris were canceled) and fearing the return of the Terror.

With Saint-Barthélemy and Commune of Paris, it is the biggest bloodbath in the capital (more than 300 dead).

We complain today about "police violence", but we have to imagine what it was like at the time.

Napoleon said it:

you should never open fire blank or above your heads, otherwise you are no longer credible.

We are far, very far even, from this type of process today.

So much the better by the way.

But the street never stops burning.

In the midst of pension reform, can a meeting between the president and the king shock the French revolutionary imagination?

The days when the English beheaded their king and we ours are over.

It is necessary to make the difference between an absolute monarch concentrating in his hand the three powers, sending to the Bastille by letter of cachet, therefore without trial, all those who displease him or embarrass him, that is to say a despotic regime, and the political regimes in which we live today.

The Revolution of 1789 passed through there, and that's good.

Charles III is no more than a constitutional monarch inaugurating the chrysanthemums, he no longer has any power except to make state visits.

As for the French, they live in a parliamentary system, semi-presidential of course, where the president, elected by universal suffrage, has laws passed by two assemblies.

How can this offend the

revolutionary imagination since we have destroyed the principle of monarchical succession where birth alone makes legitimacy.

None of that with us.

But do you want us to refuse all the monarchs of the earth?

Impossible.

On the other hand, it would be better not to lay out the red carpet for modern tyrants, like Gaddafi at the time or even Putin today.

Charles III has nothing to trigger such revolutionary passions.

This is to lend him more power than he actually has.

The revolutionary imagination nevertheless remains strongly present in France, even if the French Revolution is supposed to be over, as François Furet proclaimed, since we are a constitutional state, a state of law where the ideals of the founding fathers of 1789 are institutionalized,

engraved in the right note marble.

The problem is that there is persistence of a more insurrectionary revolutionary imaginary, more faithful to Che Guevara and Lenin than to Mirabeau and La Fayette.

They claim the right (it is true constitutional) to

“resistance to oppression”

.

But, like good spoiled children of liberal democracy, they forget what is meant by “oppression” in the classic sense of the term: it is the violation of fundamental freedoms.

This is not the case today.

It would be a serious mistake to abandon the discourse on the French Revolution to the demagogues who falsify its history and seek to monopolize its heritage.

Loris Chavanette

In truth, the current French revolutionary imagination is so marked on the far left that they fight economic and social inequalities, as if it were the oppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie.

This hatred of the bourgeoisie is the lot of both fascism and communism in the 20th century.

It is a fascistic ideology of the left that must be fought with the very weapons of the liberal spirit of 1789. However, we must recognize the regrettable consequences of 49.3, because it offers on a plate an argument to the opposition which feels justified in asking for a change of government and even more of a regime.

Emmanuel Macron commits here not an error, but a fault, because he gives the opportunity to his adversaries to affirm that the French Revolution does not

is not over, although it is.

Moreover, when I hear Jean-Luc Mélenchon dare to say that it is a shame that France lives in a

"Conditional rule of law"

, I want to show him the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 where each time a right is recognized it is immediately limited by the necessary respect for public order or the exceptions determined by law.

It is the very principle of our republican model to lay down these two essential principles: 1) the right ends where the abuse begins;

2) the freedom of some ends where that of others begins.

Whoever leaves this framework leaves the republic to enter the revolution.

There are anti-republican and above all anti-democratic revolutions.

They are even the most numerous.

Also the most dangerous.

Read alsoVisit of Charles III postponed: “A humiliation for France”

In addition, a banquet was to be held at Versailles, but the Élysée finally gave up to avoid triggering a controversy.

Behind the hesitation between Paris and Versailles, also hides a battle of symbols: The capital of the absolute monarchy then, for nearly 9 years, the capital of the nascent Third Republic versus the Fifth Republic...

Versailles was both the symbol of the absolute monarchy of which Louis XIV was the sun, and the symbol of the triumph of the first deputies of the nation in the spring and summer of 1789 against this same absolute power.

It was in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs at Versailles that national sovereignty, the abolition of privileges and the Declaration of the Rights of Man were adopted.

While going to have a banquet at the Palace of Versailles, the King and the President would have done well to go to the nearby Salle du Jeu de Paume, where the revolution broke out through the courage of a handful of deputies swearing not to separate until that France would not have a constitution.

As a historian, I had in my hands the original manuscript of the Tennis Court Oath and my heart sank imagining the Mirabeaus, the Baillys,

the Sieyès and Robespierre to unite in the same spirit for the defense of an ideal.

To reduce Versailles only to the castle is to make its history smaller than it actually is.

But for that, we still have to teach history to our children, and, I was going to say, also to adults, even to our political leaders.

It would be a serious mistake to abandon the discourse on the French Revolution to the demagogues who falsify its history and seek to monopolize its heritage.

As in all things, it is those who talk about it the most who do it the least well.

we still have to teach history to our children, and, I was going to say, also to adults, even to our political leaders.

It would be a serious mistake to abandon the discourse on the French Revolution to the demagogues who falsify its history and seek to monopolize its heritage.

As in all things, it is those who talk about it the most who do it the least well.

we still have to teach history to our children, and, I was going to say, also to adults, even to our political leaders.

It would be a serious mistake to abandon the discourse on the French Revolution to the demagogues who falsify its history and seek to monopolize its heritage.

As in all things, it is those who talk about it the most who do it the least well.

Source: lefigaro

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