Saturday 04 April 2009
by: Sophie Wahnich | Visit article original @ Le Monde
In response to the tax ceiling on the income of the wealthiest in France, Sophie Walnich cites Mesnil-Saint-Germain's list of grievances during the French revolutionary period: "Poor people's lives must be more sacred than part of rich people's property." (Art: Eugene Delacroix)
Twenty years after its bicentenary, the French Revolution is once again breaking through the surface of public speech. The President of the Republic acknowledges that it's not easy to govern a "regicide country." Alain Minc warns his "friends in the ruling class" by reminding them that 1789 began in 1788 and that they must no doubt learn to renounce certain privileges. Jean-Francois Cope deplores the "natural temptation to permanently redo 1793."
At the very least, these declarations testify to a concern: the French people don't allow themselves to be governed so easily; they once knew and perhaps would learn again how to become revolutionary, even a chopper-off of heads. Talking about the French Revolution aims either to dismiss it by asserting that it will not be allowed to happen again, or to make it the model of an experience useful in order not to repeat past mistakes. Today, [revolutionary] violence must be able to remain symbolic, without touching the body. For that to be the case, we must know how to contain it on the one hand and how to dry up the wellsprings of its rise on the other.
Containing violence is the very exercise itself of maintaining order. But it does not pertain to the "forces of order" only. Revolutionaries conscious of the dangers of fury constantly look for calming procedures. When, on July 17, 1791, Parisians demanded that the king be tried, they brought neither weapons nor sticks to the Champ-de-Mars to petition with. The trial of strength is a picnic, a symbol in the art of democratic policy.
Today, the movements are nonviolent; they invent, as they did from 1790 to 1792, forms that allow anger to be spoken, all the while containing violence. The demonstrations and the strikes organized by the unions and joint committees reflect that tradition, but one may also see occupations take place with picnics, "a springtime of anger" that simultaneously offers open air cabaret. A reading of "The Princess of Cleves" in a vast relay of voices in front of a public theater.
Now these tools for the self-containment of violence can be jeopardized by the forces of order when they use repressive violence against bodies. Here again, we can recall the executive violence that rose up against the disarmed bodies of the crowd. On July 17, 1791, some died in a fusillade that came without warning; today, some lose an eye in a beating, children go home traumatized, demonstrators are arrested and condemned for rebellion.
Finally, that self-containment may give way should those to whom the demand for new laws is addressed not hear those disruptive emotions: anger, indignation and even terror related to the crisis. The desire for protective laws is the basis of the desire for law. The government plays with fire when it refuses to translate this popular demand into acts. That demand incarnates a specific mode of sovereignty in France: sovereignty in acts. To disqualify it in the name of representative democracy alone is to weaken still further an already-battered pact of social unity.
In fact, the necessity for a President of the Republic to represent the entire country, reunited after electoral division, seems to be neglected, even despised, the further we get from a presidential election.
Far from taking into account the expectations of the opposing side, our government hasn't even taken into account its own side, to which it promised a better standard of living. Today, crisis has installed itself. The social and political effects of the tax ceiling have become legible. We are witnessing a resolve to reform the French educational system without consultation, cooperation or dialogue, and so the reforms are experienced as pure and simple demolitions. A debt of honor and of life could pit two antagonistic social groups head-on against one another and deeply divide society.
A debt of honor because the electorate was fooled by a shameless use of the demagogic register and now knows it. Debt of honor, since the rejection of all consultation, cooperation or dialogue is justified by the suppositious value of electoral results in a democracy. In fact, Nicolas Sarkozy was well and truly elected and the value assigned to that ritual is turned against the very people who believed in it - outraged people in all social categories. Finally, a "debt of life" because today work and national education are experienced as "stages of life" that seem to disappear to the apparent indifference of the wealthiest people, who thereby confess to a complete lack of solidarity in the crisis.
The slogan now circulating, "we will not pay for your crisis," underlines this social division between an oppressed "we," and "you," the oppressors. But it emerges as well within the walls of Paris's Political Sciences elite institution. University students came to look for allies in there. They were turned away and sometimes insulted, called future unemployed whose welfare payments the Political Science students would have to pay. So this symbolic violence is already traveling through the different segments of society and can only fuel the rebellion of those who feel themselves flouted this way by a new aristocratic superciliousness. The students came looking for allies; they met enemies.
But the "we" of the oppressed is not constituted solely of part-time and temporary workers, the unemployed or future unemployed; it is constituted by the middle classes that have been made more vulnerable, by the literate classes who demonstrate and go on strike to defend a certain conception of the university and knowledge. It is constituted of all those who, finally, feel they are flouted and demand "justice." On this score, the social movements of this winter and spring are already experiencing the natural temptation to redo 1793. They want more justice and in order to obtain it, assert that, in spite of the electoral results, they embody the legitimate sovereign.
From the perspective of the President of the Republic, this natural temptation is egalitarianism, a term that discredits the very basis of democracy: equality. This suppositious equalitarianism would aim to prevent those who have best succeeded at amassing wealth from deriving the full benefit of that wealth. The tax ceiling is a law protecting against egalitarianism. In this regard, redoing would assume rejection of that phony debate. During the French Revolution, the bogeyman brandished by the rich was called the "agrarian law," a suppositious resolve to redistribute all land. On April 24, 1793, Robespierre rejected that idea: "You should know that this agrarian law you've all heard so much about is nothing but a phantom created by rogues to terrify imbeciles; a revolution was not necessary to teach the universe that the extreme disproportion between fortunes is the source of many evils and many crimes. But we are nonetheless convinced that equality of possessions is a pipedream. The issue is more about making poverty decent than proscribing opulence."
On June 17, 1793, he opposed the idea that the people be dispensed from contributing to public expenses that would be borne by the rich only: "I am informed by the common sense of the people who sense that the sort of favor some want to offer them is nothing but an insult. It would establish a class of proletariats, a class of helots, and equality and freedom would perish forever."
A law has been voted in today to enlarge that class of helots, but the government refuses to tax the immense wealth that could come to the aid of the "unfortunate." The pact for the just division of the wealth deducted by the state seems to have shattered when the amounts of the checks given to the new beneficiaries of the tax package became known: the richest 834 tax payers (with holdings of over 15.5 million Euros) each received an average check of 368,261 Euros from the fiscal authorities, "or the equivalent of thirty years of welfare payments." A debt of lives.
When Lot-et-Garonne deputy Jerome Cahuzac asserts that it is "unfortunate that the government and its majority are more attentive to the fate of a few hundred Frenchmen rather than to the millions of them who have just demonstrated for better social justice," he, in fact, rediscovers revolutionary language. Similarly, (present-day Essonne) Mesnil-Saint-Germain's list of grievances asserted: "Poor people's lives must be more sacred than part of rich people's property."
Some people, even among those on the right, seem to be well aware of that, when they demand, in effect, that we legislate against bonuses, stock options and golden parachutes. They resemble Roederer, who, on June 20, 1792, recalled that a good representative must know how to contain violence rather than fuel it. If the government is a "Mr. Veto" when confronted with these anticipated laws, if it pursues destabilizing public policies, then the configuration will be that of a demand for justice in a divided society, then justice will be called public revenge "that aims to purge this debt of honor and of life. An unfortunate and terrible situation is that in which the character of a naturally good and generous people is forced to indulge in such revenge."
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Sophie Wahnich is a historian and researcher at the [French] National Center for Scientific Research - Laboratory of Anthropology of Institutions and of Social Organizations (Laios-IIac). She is the author of many works on the French Revolution, including "L'Impossible Citoyen, l'stranger dans le discours de la Revolution franhaise" ["The Impossible Citizen, the Foreigner in the Discourse of the French Revolution"] (Albin Michel, 1997) and "La Longue Patience du peuple, 1792, naissance de la Republique" ["the People's Long Patience, 1792, Birth of the Republic"] (Payot, 2008).
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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