The hunger games of this French election cycle began on the left. President François Hollande is done in by his own. Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls becomes the second course at the cannibals’ banquet. By then, the corpse of one of France’s two governing parties, no longer merely supine, has reached an advanced state of decomposition. And now the official candidate of the Socialist Party, wan Mr. Hamon, at the very moment one might expect a presidential candidate to tell the nation what he thinks of Trump, Putin, and Islamic radicals, can find nothing better to talk about than legal marijuana, red sludge, and endocrine disruptors.
On the right, the disaster crests. Early on, former president Nicolas Sarkozy is eliminated. Former Prime Minister Alain Juppé, after being crowned virtual president, is toppled by those who had adored him and, in the wake of the scandal surrounding François Fillon, loses his nerve on March 6 and definitively quits the race. And, with respect to Mr Fillon, the erstwhile frontrunner, the choice of four million primary voters, we have the spectacle of the crew morphing into mutineers and trying to nudge him out of the race. Schemes, sidesteps, calculations, and bargains follow. All based on polls interpreted by the modern equivalents of Roman haruspices. Another corpse.
Enter the investigating magistrates, who obviously are playing their rightful role in hearing evidence about a fake jobs scandal, but whose integrity will not be impugned by a gentle reminder that they are also human beings and, under their robes, are susceptible to human passions and resentments; that they wield considerable power and that this power tends, as all power does, to reach as far as it can; and, as a consequence, that they have become fully enmeshed in a campaign from which, invoking Montesquieu, they should strive scrupulously to hold themselves at a distance.
But we, voters and citizens, are the worst part of this entire picture. Yes, each and every one of us—and our new and strange relationship to politics as evidenced by the present circumstances. That relationship is summed up in three terms.
1. Cancan. Or, more accurately, cant-cant: the griping we do upon the appearance of the new Canard Enchaîné,the satirical weekly whose insurrectionary humor, once fodder for the loose cannons of the left and right, is becoming the everyday language of politics. There was a time when reading the newspaper was, according to Hegel, the philosopher’s morning prayer. Now reading that particular newspaper feeds the electorate’s insatiable appetite for ridicule. With what sardonic anticipation French readers await the latest on the base doings of our elected officials and their rivals! With what greedy delectation we devour our weekly dose of corruption, rot, and scandal! And what bleak disappointment we feel, what sudden loss of interest in life, when, by chance, there is nothing new to report! Ought we not bear in mind, with poet Stéphane Mallarmé, that when we amuse ourselves thus and become so inebriated with scandal, we “yawn gloomily toward a dark demise.”
2. Spectacle. In lieu of judgment, ceaseless and frivolous commentary on the thousand and one twists and turns of the electoral contest. Once, the news channels covered sports as if it were politics. Now political commentary resembles sportscoverage. “Game analysis” has become the paradigm of political narrative. And, in the venerable country said by Marx to be the political nation par excellence, politics is becoming a subspecies of soccer, with its teams, its fans, its referees, and its high scorers. Is it any surprise that at the height of the Fillon affair the right wing bosses and their phantom coaches turned (doctrinal and stylistic differences be damned!) to their second string, which was supposed to be sitting on the bench? Likewise, one wonders whether Fillon’s loyalists see in him anything more than his stamina, his ability to take a beating, or the figure he cut when, after being knocked flat on his back, he got up as if returning to an unfinished fight?
3. Finally, equality. It was, once, the noblest of passions; there was, in that passion, the dream of cultivating the body politic and, in so doing, dignifying politics. And I agree with philosopher Jean-Claude Milner who, in his recent book, Relire la Révolution (Verdier, 2016), takes on the Anatole France of The Gods Are Athirst (1912), maintaining that, far from simply offering the people their daily ration of blood, Robespierre also tried in his way to check the descent of the masses into a vengeful mob and to save what could be saved of the balances inherent in republican hierarchy. There is none of that in today’s brand of egalitarianism. Nothing but a mob inching ever closer to its moment of ultimate power while promoting an equality not of common interest but of complaints, indignities, grudges, and corruption. And, among the fragmented, distraught children of the Enlightenment, among the zombie heirs of Rousseau fibrillating between aggressiveness, blindness, and despair, we have an equality that is no longer a task but a taint, a sort of dark shroud, a halo of resentment and hatred to which our common tongue is tied as to a buoy in a tide. Another disaster. Another delusion. From redemptive egalitarianism to equal-opportunity grousing and score-settling, we have hiked the path that leads a society from life to death.
Frightening as it sounds, that is where France finds itself.
Not in a mere crisis; but in the last stages of what a great anti-Nazi historian called, in 1940, his nation’s “strange defeat.” We confront not a lone tree of iniquity but a vast forest of murky words, dangerous and lunatic in their debasement.
And, lying in wait, guided by the Eumenides (whose name—surprise!—is synonomous with fury as well as justice), a figuretakes shape under classical plumage, like the workings of dreadful fate: Mrs Marine Le Pen.
