“All is accomplished …”
In the years that I listened to music nonstop, the passage marked by those words was for me one of the most intriguing in Bach’s “St. John’s Passion.”
In a plaintive soprano accompanied by a cello’s lament, lingering between song and silence, the memory came back to me Monday morning, June 19, after the second round of France’s parliamentary elections.
The event that has been accomplished, of course, is the resounding success of President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to obtain a majority in the National Assembly.
But, whether we like it or not, there is more to the event than that: Also accomplished is the record rate of abstention set by the 57 percent of French voters who disdained the rare and precious privilege of voting, a privilege invented several centuries ago by men who believed in deliberation, reason, and enlightenment.
Inevitably we will hear commentary about an electorate exhausted from a year of psychodramas that saw France pushed from her foundations and her traditional points of reference obscured.
We will be told about the inner wisdom of a nation that already knew the outcome and wished, without saying so, to avoid the appearance of an excessive victory.
Blame will be placed on the weather, the bridges, the media, the bitterness of spurned leaders, and the unknown quantities represented by the new faces of the president’s army of candidates.
But I do not believe that these anecdotal responses will hold up for long.
I cannot avoid hearing, in the deafening silence of the millions who abstained, the dissonant note one always detects in victorious fanfares: One never knows, at first, whether it is just a false note, the sound of things falling and continuing to roll briefly before finally coming to a stop, or a real clinker, a more jarring interruption, the herald of a real crisis.
And we cannot rule out that Sunday’s most salient statistic (57 percent!) signifies not only the last gasp of the supine corpses that had been yesterday’s political apparatus (and that may rise again to become tomorrow’s populist parties), but also of a process of dereliction, desertion, and dispersal affecting, beyond the vote, the idea that the French people holds of themselves, an idea that suddenly appears phantasmagoric.
Hobbes warned us.
“The people” is always an artifact.
The process by which it is fashioned, coming up against the unsociable sociability of human beings driven by their appetites and passions, is both fragile and brazen.
And, in the real world, it is the social contract, with its institutions and procedures, its modes of deliberation, delegation, and mediation, and, in particular, its votes, that stands behind the noble invention of “a people” and accounts for the fact that men occasionally take a break from tearing each other limb from limb.
I cannot help but wonder in the aftermath of Abstention Sunday whether the sound we hear is not the seizing up of this splendid, subtle machine.
I wonder if we are not nearing the end of a process of dissolution whose signs were already present but that now threatens to turn “the people” irreversibly into an abstraction, a fiction nearly impossible to imagine (let alone put a face to) and even more difficult to believe in. I wonder if the satisfaction of being a people, as invented by the first Europeans and Americans, reinvented by the French celebrants of national unity on July 14, 1790, and then celebrated by the French historian and poet Michelet is not becoming a thing of the past.
Which would leave us to choose one of two stances.
Either to accommodate ourselves to this irreality; to get used to the idea of these newly installed representatives of Macron, so preternaturally smooth and remote as to suggest that they might have been elected while Leviathan was sleeping; and to count on Facebook and Twitter to restore, by means of a technical radicalization that makes it possible to churn out in real time responses to instant referenda, a semblance of will and sovereignty to what used to be called the people.
Or else to detect in this prospect of answers without questions and choices without thought a headlong plunge that will lead eventually only to more inhumanity; to become seriously alarmed about the urges that may at any moment take hold of a people that senses itself withering away; in short, to gird ourselves with intelligence, reason, and courage, the better to return in force to the political arena and, inspired by the brave but painful work of the Enlightenment, recast in today’s language the theorems of representative democracy, a political system that remains (and will remain for a good, long time) without peer.
We must reassemble what is falling apart and drifting away like icebergs from the polar caps…
We must close the wound from which flows, like blood from a hemophiliac, the life of a fragmented society…
In a word, we the people must refound ourselves on the rubble of a smoldering world that trembles under our feet…
Such is the true revolution toward which President Macron and his parliamentary majority will have to work in France.
The task is quite obviously immense, historic, and ultimately metapolitical. It is a task for the accomplishment of which will suffice no single individual, nor several, nor even an overwhelming majority: What will be needed is the general will—no longer just individual or collective but truly general—of the Republic of France. And then, as in Bach’s “Passion,” in which the lamentation that “All is accomplished” is followed by strings and horns of Resurrection, it will become possible once again to discern in France’s politics the traces of her history—and the path to her future.
