Christophe Boutin is professor of public law at the University of Caen. Latest works: with Olivier Dard and Frédéric Rouvillois,
Dictionary of Progressivism
(Le Cerf, 2022);
with Frédéric Rouvillois,
The referendum, or how to give power back to the people
(La Nouvelle Bibliothèque, 2023).
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So, for Emmanuel Macron,
the “republican arc” –
whose members, once dubbed by the Jupiterian verb, would be the only ones called to legitimately debate the laws – would not include all the parties, nor all the people who sit in Parliament.
We will have noted, as often, if not always, the contradictions in the words of the Head of State.
On the one hand, in fact, for the pantheonization of Manouchian, he says his
“duty to invite all the representatives elected by the French people”
, because he cannot
“sort between them […] by an arbitrary gesture”
.
But on the other – eternal “at the same time” – he claims to have
“never considered that the RN or Reconquest!
were part of the “republican arc”
, with the consequence
“that important texts should not pass thanks to their votes”
.
We therefore have representatives elected by the people who are worthy of attending a ceremony... but not of participating in the vote on a law.
“This distinction – concludes Emmanuel Macron – is enough to say where I live”
.
We could not better demonstrate that he does not know it.
He thus reconnects with a sectarian approach to the Republic which existed since the Revolution among certain holders of power, first pushing those of the monarchist representatives who were not executed to emigrate, then acting in the same way towards Girondins who, insufficiently centralizers, were not “real republicans”.
Under the Third Republic again, the index card affair showed how those who were too Catholic to be republicans were expelled.
A sectarian system which, when allowed to persist, feeds itself: the real opponents sidelined, we always find someone lukewarm to condemn.
This headlong rush into exclusion is all the easier as the criteria which allow the latter are imprecise, and in
To be or not to be a republican
Frédéric Rouvillois demonstrated their inconsistency.
Universal suffrage?
The Republic was censary.
Universalism?
The recent debates on immigration have reminded us that the Republic knew how to exclude.
Laicity ?
Robespierre's cult of the Supreme Being is far from the combative secularism of the Third Republic.
It is not society that has normalized and trivialized the far right, it is the inability of successive governments to respond to citizens' concerns.
Christophe Boutin
Behind the
flatus vocis
and the overplayed indignation, behind the supposed ethical surge, the analysis of the practice therefore shows us, all in all, banal political instrumentalizations intended to maintain positions and prebends.
One of their last avatars, under the Fifth Republic, was the virtuous “republican barrier” designed by François Mitterrand to prevent the right-wing RPR and UDF from regaining power by prohibiting any alliance with a plague-ridden National Front.
It is still instrumentalization that we are talking about today, when Emmanuel Macron tries to damage the image of a party to which the polls give a strong lead over his own for the next elections.
But the President is years late: there is no point in remaining the arbiter of supposed republican elegance when the emptiness of the concept has become obvious to voters.
There is no point in evoking a myth which, every day, is shattered by this reality that those in power strive to deny.
Because, contrary to what Emmanuel Macron declares, it is not
“society which has normalized and trivialized the extreme right”
, it is the inability of successive governments to respond to citizens’ concerns.
In this context, it is worrying to note that this type of incantatory reference can still serve to exclude legitimate representatives from the debates and thus prohibit any real pluralism in parliamentary assemblies - a pluralism which the Constitutional Council nevertheless recalled in the years eighty that it is one of the foundations of democracy.
According to article 4 of the Constitution, political parties and groups must respect
“the principles of national sovereignty and democracy”
.
If those whom Emmanuel Macron dismisses violate them, then it is important to ban them as quickly as possible.
But if this is not the case, excluding them from the debates perverts the functioning of our institutions.
According to article 3 of this same Constitution,
“national sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it through their representatives and through referendum”
.
However, if Emmanuel Macron talks a lot about referendums, he rarely organizes them, and the place for expressing the general will is therefore Parliament, through a legislative debate which takes into account the voices of all elected representatives, all democratically legitimate.
“The “Republican arc” is the Hemicycle,”
said Gabriel Attal, visibly more respectful of the very principles of our Republic.