Gaël Nofri is a historian, deputy mayor of Nice and Nice Côte d'Azur metropolitan councillor.
The famous – and apocryphal – words of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt to Louis XVI questioning him on the nature of the movement which had just led to the storming of the Bastille, perfectly illustrate a form of hierarchization of the contestation which populates the imagination. French.
The revolution would be a “
more revolt
” or a “
general revolt
”.
However, beyond the intensity, there is a difference in nature between revolt and revolution: the first arises from the contestation of a political choice, it aims to oppose governmental provisions, a determined policy;
the second, which can arise from an initial revolt, aims for its part at a general questioning of the institutions, their foundations, the very pact which legitimizes the public authorities.
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It is this posture that some would really like to adopt.
The Insoumis, the Mélenchonists or other left-wing extremists, won over to the idea of “everything conflicting”, from “bordélisation” in the Assembly to insurrection in the street, dream of transforming each political debate into a crisis of the regime: from the contestation of the retirement reform to the Sixth Republic, they would like to build a bridge with long strides.
If the step is still high, let's admit that it is not entirely certain that the context does not help.
If everyone intends to replace rights and democracy, that is to say the effectiveness of majority choices, in the name of the urgency personally felt - climatic, economic, social or other - what remains ?
Gael Nofri
Because on closer inspection, the crisis is in fact more serious, deeper, more certain than it seems.
More than the risk of revolution”, it is the risk of collapse that awaits us.
The collapse not only of a political institution, but even more strongly of a collective, of a society, of a Nation.
When fewer and fewer things experienced seem to bind citizens together;
when the acceptability of any collective constraint on the individual is systematically deemed illegitimate;
as soon as jealous individualism, and its lame cousin, victimized communitarianism, become the state religion;
no society can endure.
The best of democracies presupposes that the minority accepts the majority's choice, accepts it and sticks to it.
The Republic implies that the regular institutions, holders of legitimacy, are respected by all, even if the context does not make them sympathetic to us at the time.
If everyone intends to replace rights and democracy, that is to say the effectiveness of majority choices, in the name of the urgency personally felt - climatic, economic, social or other - what remains ?
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The reign of rights cannot exist without that of duties.
Thus, the debate today is less about the organization of the state than about its very existence.
Less on this or that measure or process than on the legitimacy and relevance of the principles of duties, rules, obstacles to individual freedom, of “respublica”.
Here we discover the omnipotent State, the ventripotent State, the omnipresent State is at the same time a rickety, puny and sickly State.
The one from whom we expect everything and to whom we finally recognize the right to nothing.
In Sainte-Soline, we want to be able to "break the cop and burn their vehicle", but we protest that the doctors and the emergency services take time to evolve in complete safety in this provoked guerrilla zone.
In Paris, it is considered natural to burn public infrastructures or to launch projectiles at the police, but we affirm the requirement of zero intervention, zero repression, zero blunders.
Sign of the times, we multiply the "Independent authorities", but independent of whom if not the public power?
Gael Nofri
On a daily basis, it's the list à la Prévert, aid, pensions, subsidies, pensions, illnesses, public services: but we demand that this be done without taxes - which end up weighing on an increasingly restricted population base, without constraint and especially without duty.
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Worse still, in the public debate, in the newspapers, among many elected representatives of subsidized associations or authorized thinkers, this questioning has taken on the aspect of well-oiled rhetoric.
Sign of the times, we multiply the “Independent authorities”, but independent of whom if not of the public power?
A rhetoric that works as it flatters egos, exacerbates individualities and adapts to the modern cult of immediacy.
Let us recall in conclusion that no civilization died of a revolt, all recovered from the revolutions they went through, but not one survived the disappearance of public spirit, collective disinterest, obliteration of the State and of the civic spirit.