Arthur Dénouveaux is president of Life for Paris, an association of victims of the attacks of November 13, 2015.
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This March 11, 2024 will take place the fifth national day of tribute to the victims of terrorism, and especially the first without the President of the Republic who established it in 2020. This day was, however, the most emblematic opportunity to use this which until then was one of the favorite words of the president and the political class: “resilience”.
Emmanuel Macron, for example and without any exhaustiveness, used it just as much to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the death of General de Gaulle in 2020 as to talk about the hospital in 2022, but also about Mont Saint-Michel and the Ukraine the same year.
What if, deep down, resilience had gone out of fashion?
Let's start from the beginning: how could a word whose initial definition is "a temporary deformation with return to the initial form" become so irreplaceable?
How was he able to account for such disparate experiences and subjects of reflection?
The answer obviously lies in these rhetorical questions: simply because he saved us from having to think.
The trap of resilience has closed on all of us and on our society.
Individually, each victim of terrorism or other more or less intimate tragedies can testify to this: the injunction to resilience prevents any debate on the permanent after-effects caused by traumatic shocks.
Worse, resilience holds up a doubly distorting mirror, that of a possible return to the previous state and, on top of that, without effort.
Quite the opposite happens in reality, the victim must agree to enter a new life that is irremediably transformed and it is at the cost of immense efforts that she limits the degradation suffered.
Used in a collective sense, resilience inspires the same distrust, serving too easily as a screen for degradation with no known remedy.
Here is the great political virtue of resilience: since everything will
ultimately
be fine, why act?
Security laws pile up without consistency and the number of internal enemies does not decrease.
Arthur Dénouveaux
But turning a blind eye can obviously only last for so long.
Take the example of terrorism, the concept of "resilience" of our society in the face of successive waves of attacks does not stand up to a little careful examination: security laws pile up without consistency, the number of enemies of is not diminishing and terrorism officially represents the only possible reason for moving the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
So what to do?
Apparently, don't talk about terrorism in 2h30 of grand oral on television and let your Prime Minister take care of the stewardship of the tributes.
While we must of course rejoice at the end of the smokescreen of resilience, there is every reason to fear that the subjects it concealed will also be hidden away.
And this is obviously where the problem lies because resilience was by definition only invoked for complex subjects without obvious solutions.
Civil society will therefore have to mobilize so that political power does not put under the snuff all the problems that it cannot resolve, and so that days like that of March 11 retain meaning.
Furthermore, for those who are concerned about the lexical gap left in presidential speeches, rest assured, resilience has already been supplanted for several months by the most Gaullian resistance.
“The flame of the Resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished
,” said the General.