French Destiny 2226320075, 9782226320070

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© Editions Albin Michel, 2018 ISBN : 978-2-226-43186-8 This digital document was produced by Nord Compo.

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To my parents.

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“History leads to everything, but only on condition of getting out of it. » Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, Wild Thought.

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Introduction It was a river that didn't look like much. It hardly deserved the name “river”, hardly that of “river”. He did not seem impressive, nor admirable, nor dangerous to me. It had neither the majestic elegance of the Seine, nor the wild fury of the Loire, nor the muddy power of the Danube, nor the romantic charm of the Rhine. The water flowed slowly under the June sun and yet I imagined it caught by the ice. An indolent serenity reigned on each of the banks; I persisted in seeing and hearing the noise and the tumult, the muffled footsteps of the horses, the howls of distress of the women and children who were drowning, the gunshots, the exhausted soldiers in ragged uniforms running in disorder, shooting at random, dying by surprise. The few passers-by nearby wondered what this stranger was doing, suddenly motionless and paralyzed, stiff and silent, also sometimes trembling, intimidated, moved, in front of this river that they were no longer looking at. I was aware of my stupidity, but I couldn't shake it. I felt a tear fall, then another grew bolder, and another. I could no longer pretend: I sobbed.

At the time, my parents were still alive, and beyond my rare childhood tears, which had most often been the rages of an imperious kid, the only pain that had grieved me had been caused by the unjust defeat and brutal action of the French football team against Germany in 1982 in Seville. I wiped my eyes in a furtive gesture of shame. My mind continued to wander between galloping horses, soaked soldiers, and the cries of agony of the drowned. A huge scene

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was playing out before my misty gaze, on this pathetic and casual river which continued its course without worrying about my moods or the fever which gripped me: I was in front of the Berezina.

Le Figaro sent me there for a report devoted to literary travel. Others had chosen Chateaubriand in Jerusalem or Flaubert in Egypt. I had asked for Stendhal and the retreat from Russia. Immediately after landing in Moscow, I visited the Borodino battlefield, a few dozen kilometers from the capital. Everything here reminded me of Stendhal, his contempt for the officers of the Grande Armée, his description of the fire of Moscow, the borrowing he had authorized of a book by Voltaire, in the abandoned home of a Muscovite patrician. I then followed the buried traces of our soldiers, passing through Smolensk like them. I found myself like them in front of this damn Berezina. I

saw General Éblé's pontonniers throw themselves into the icy water, at the sacrifice of their lives, to build the bridge which would allow the survivors of the Grande Armée to leave this accursed Russia; I heard the roars of the soldiers, but also of the women who rushed into the water without knowing how to swim; I guessed Kutuzov's Cossacks, furious at having missed Napoleon, who had fooled them one last time, rushing towards the stragglers, whom they massacred with fury and method. This epic spectacle had become my personal, intimate story. I mourned the debacle of the Grande Armée like the death of a mother, and the flight of the Emperor like the supreme humiliation of a father.

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Old habit that I had acquired since childhood. At 11, I devoured André Castelot's Napoléon , with its green cardboard cover, that my mother had given me for my birthday; I read it everywhere and at all times, until the day the manager of a summer camp called my mother to complain that reading this large work, on the train and in the rooms, prevented me from participating. “to the life of the group”. I would realize over the years that this Napoleonic passion had nothing original. Countless kids, from generation to generation, had collected the little soldiers of the Grande Armée. Like the children of Musset's century, they too took their part in the imperial epic, preserved the images from Epinal that I had replaced by films and serials. I rode with Vidocq, carried by a charismatic Claude Brasseur, plotted with Schulmeister, the Emperor's spy like Jacques Fabbri. Alternately on the orders of Fouché, taunting General Mack locked up in Ulm, I lived in and for 1800... Only d'Artagnan, Aramis, Athos and Porthos had convinced me to be a subject of Louis XIII and Richelieu. Twenty years later, and I knew about the troubles of the Fronde. The queen's necklace, and I became friends with the Count of Saint-Germain.

There was no break between school and television then. I immersed myself in the middle of the duel between Robespierre and Danton in The Camera Explores Time by Decaux and Castelot; every week, I boarded the “time machine” that the Americans had made: they were indeed going to the Moon, why wouldn't they have gone to the past, much more exciting than the sandy surface glimpsed underfoot

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of Armstrong, one night in the summer of 1969? I rebelled against poverty with Jacquou le Croquant. I seduced the beautiful duchesses with Fanfan la Tulipe, fell in love with Aurore, touched Jean Marais' bump, and the boot of Nevers had no secrets for me. There was no disconnect between school, television and the city. Each street, each square, each statue of Paris that I discovered, installed in the DS that my father drove with a nervous, even brutal hand, evoked for me a moment in history: Place de la Concorde, I strived to guess the place where Louis XVI had been guillotined, and where the Cossacks had celebrated an Orthodox mass in 1814; Place de la Bastille, I tried to mentally reconstruct the ancient prison; in front of Notre-Dame church, I looked for the shadow of Esmeralda and Quasimodo. There was no break between school, television, the city and literature: Rastignac at the Vauquer pension; the love nest where Rubempré joined Esther; rue Tronchet, where the hero of Sentimental Education had arranged to meet Madame Arnoux, who would not come. I couldn't wait to be old and rich enough to buy the Madeleine building lots that had caused the ruin of César Birotteau. Balzac was my Vautrin, who taught me to grow up, to know men and women, to fear and distrust them, to expect nothing from them except envy and pettiness.

There was no break between school, television, the street, literature and politics: at the head of state, the great Charles thought of settling in the Château de Vincennes as Saint Louis, warmed his old bones in the Austerlitz sun and spoke on television like Chateaubriand; and The Chained Duck, which my father bought every Wednesday, drew it in

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Louis XIV with his hair in a parody of the Memoirs of SaintSimon.

I knew where I wanted to live, who I wanted to live with, and how I wanted to live. To my stunned childish eyes, the word France shone brightly: history, literature, politics, war, love, everything was brought together and transfigured by the same sacred light, the same art of living but also of dying, the same greatness, even in defeats, the same pace, even in the worst turpitudes.

From childhood, I had understood that France was this unique country made up of heroes and writers, heroes who claimed to be writers, and writers who dreamed of themselves as heroes. Later, with Braudel, I learned that there were also French people who worked, produced, created, sold, bought, participated in the “world economy”. Roy Ladurie and so many others taught me that there were also, and above all, peasants who plowed, fed, suffered. With Philippe Ariès, I learned that there were also children, pampered or neglected. But France was this unique country where “stewardship followed”, at least in his imagination. France was this country made with swords but also with words, by cardinals who had swords at their side, and literati who had tongues sharp like a rapier.

The history of France flowed through my veins, filled the air I breathed, shaped my childhood dreams; I didn't imagine I would be the last generation to grow up like this. I didn't know that my date of birth would be decisive: I lived in the 20th century but in peace, far from the din of the two wars.

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world wars, and the Algerian war; Yet I was still warming myself in the final fires of the school of the Third Republic. I was moving between two eras, between two worlds. I grew up in the abundance of consumer society and yet my mind wandered in the heroic plains of yesterday. I subscribed to the Journal de Mickey, my body gorged itself on Tagada strawberries and Suchard rocks, but my head charged with Murat's horsemen in the snowy plains of Eylau. I was experiencing the best of both worlds. I didn't realize how lucky I was.

We all learned to read and write using the syllabic method; my spelling was impeccable (with the exception of an unexplained disenchantment with the circumflex accent), my knowledge of grammar internalized like second nature; and History would respectfully wait until I entered college, at the start of the 1969 school year, to cease being a subject in its own right and be content with the marginal status of an “awakening activity”. Our program had been established by the great Lavisse himself and owed nothing to the active pedagogy of “educational sciences” which were just beginning to become prevalent. My ancestors were still the Gauls, and my father blessed this lineage by rushing to the bookstore to acquire each new episode of Asterix, which he rushed to read before giving it to me. In my local school in Drancy, a Parisian suburb where my parents had settled, we met few authentic Gauls; a Martin or a Minot were mixed with many names ending in i. However, I have never heard these descendants of Italians proudly exclaiming their ancestry as Roman conquerors to despise these pathetic Gallic vanquished people.

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I had to abandon my school friends

ninth. My father had decided, on the advice of an uncle, to entrust me to the Lucien-de-Hirsch school from now on. I discovered at the same time the green charm of the ButtesChaumont, which we transformed right after school into a football field, and the ritual of morning prayers, before the start of classes. It was a private school under contract, scrupulously following the national education programs, to which were added two hours of religious instruction. I suddenly gained new ancestors: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and Solomon. But they did not erase the Gauls. We learned in class to sing the first verses of La Marseillaise, we recited La Fontaine's Fables by heart and we celebrated the great deeds of French heroes, from Bayard to Pasteur. As far as I remember, there was no competition or opposition between these two lines. I learned much later that Bossuet had given these same biblical ancestors to the son of Louis XIV, the Grand Dauphin, whose tutor he was. Only Saint Louis was the subject of dispute, whom some of my morning teachers persisted in calling Louis IX, as if his holiness came up against the persecutions of the Jews that he had ordered. The Torah was told to us and commented on in abundance. Reading Rashi, the chief rabbi of Troyes in the 13th century, and his very particular language, stuffed with countless French words written in Hebrew script, held few secrets for me.

Paradoxically, it was at the private school that I met children from very modest backgrounds; friends who came directly from their native Morocco, whom the school taught for free; they never said that most of their people had also left the Cherifian kingdom, but for

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emigrate to Israel; I never knew why their parents had chosen France as their land of asylum; I never asked the question; the answer seemed obvious to me: how could I not come to France? Almost all the Jews of Algeria did not ask themselves the question either when they had to choose between “the suitcase and the coffin”. In the school grounds, we wore a skullcap, which we did not then call “kippah”; but the general supervisor of the establishment ordered us to remove it as soon as we left. My mother was not the last to scold me if I forgot this instruction. At that time, it was not fear that motivated him, but instinctive respect for a strict concept of secularism which separated the public space from the private domain. The school, like the home or the synagogue, was private; the street should not tolerate the slightest affirmation of a religious identity. The words had cardinal importance: my mother was careful to say “skull” and not “kippah,” “communion” and not “bar mitzvah,” “Israelite” and not “Jew.” Her name was Lucette, and her brothers and sisters Paul, Bernard, Annie, Édith... On my father's side, it was the same litany of "French" first names, as we said at the time, with pride: Robert, Roger , Francette, Jean-Claude… In my class, among my friends, the Érics (fashionable first name in my generation) rubbed shoulders with the Philippe, Charles, Émile, Pascal, Jean-Luc, Francis, Yves… These first names came from the “calendar”, we said, without even knowing that they were the names of Christian saints. Much later, I understood that we were thus respecting a rule decreed by Bonaparte. Clearly, the Emperor was pursuing me. My ancestors were not with Murat during the charge of Eylau, nor at Rocroi with the Grand Condé, even less with Godefroi de Bouillon during the crusades. My

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father told me that my two great-grandfathers had fought during the First World War, one in Verdun, the other in the Dardanelles. I didn't feel any particular vanity about it, it was normal, I made no distinction between real blood and historical blood; as if they had been mingling in my veins for a long time. One day, my paternal grandfather showed me one of the stamps he collected. A fierce-looking fighter, his head topped with a turban, brandished a rifle. Only one name blocked the image: Zemmour. They were a famous Berber tribe, the old man explained to me. One of the last to submit to France, well after the taking of the smala of Abd elKader, which I had studied at school. My fate was complicated: I had been colonized by France, and I had even fiercely resisted the invader. Like Asterix facing Rome. The Gauls had become Gallo-Romans, after having acquired a taste for peace and Roman civilization. My ancestors had become Berber-French, after having acquired a taste for peace and French civilization. The Gallo-Romans had adopted Latin first names and donned Roman togas, learned to speak and read Latin; they said: “In Rome, we do like the Romans. » My ancestors had given French first names to their children, read Victor Hugo and donned the suits and dresses of Paris, right down to this so “indecent” miniskirt that my mother wore in the streets of the capital, instead of djellabas and Arab burnous that their grandmothers had worn. History was repeating itself. I believed it to be immutable even though I was still the last generation to repeat it. From the end of the 1980s, I understood that something was no longer going right in this beautiful country of France: those who had succeeded us in the HLM of Montreuil or Drancy were called Mohamed or Aïcha and

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not Marc and Françoise; Islamic veils covered the heads of some young girls; their language was a sabir which disdained French syntax; and it was beginning to be rumored that, in a number of suburban high schools, teenagers were refusing to study “your” holocosta, “your” crusade, but also “your” Voltaire, “your” Flaubert, “your” French Revolution…

However, I had always known that being French was precisely this feeling that pushes you to take the side of your adopted homeland, even if it had fought against your ancestors. “The homeland is the land of the fathers. There are fathers according to the flesh and fathers according to the spirit,” wrote André Suarès, another Jew who became French, who came from Livorno, and in whom I would find, many years later, most of my torments. , of my analyzes and my feelings, written in a language of crystalline purity worthy of Pascal. Even before reading it, I had internalized its lesson: to be French, when one is not a son of the fathers according to the flesh, but a son of the fathers according to the spirit, is to take the side of one's fathers adoption up to and including against his original fathers. It is taking the side of reason over instinct, of culture over nature, it is saying “us” even when the us that we have become confronts the us that we were. Suarès says nothing else: “Immigrants, if they want to be tolerated, must make themselves tolerable. If the flesh in them is not naturally sensitive in the sense of true sons, they must give proof that they have the spirit of the homeland, and that they are not reluctant to live according to it, and according to it. It may be that they are placed between the instinct of their birth according to the flesh and their feeling according to the spirit. » And Suarès clarified: “They have the choice but

they have to choose. They must speak out, with truth, with depth, for the fathers

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even if they must deny the fathers according to the flesh. If the choice imposes a sacrifice on them, it is all the more necessary. We do not deserve anything beautiful, good, or great without sacrifice. »

In my generation, and those before me, this feeling was almost commonplace. There was no shortage of examples, and some of the most illustrious. I felt deep within me what I would read years later from the pen of Raymond Aron: “I am what we call an assimilated Jew. As a child, I cried at the misfortunes of France at Waterloo or at Sedan, not while listening to the destruction of the Temple. No other flag than the tricolor, no other anthem than La Marseillaise will ever wet my eyes. »

Likewise, the great professor Alfred Grosser, during a conference in 1994, attested to this transmutation of hearts and souls which makes one become French: “Arriving in France in 1933 at the age of 8, I didn't know a word of French. When, later, I found myself saying to my students for the first time: “In 1914, we…” this “we” of course designating the French soldiers, even though my father had, for four years, served as an officer. - doctor in the German army, I thought, while continuing to speak: “Fully successful assimilation. Joan of Arc is my great-grandmother, Napoleon my grandfather and Goethe a great foreign writer.” »

In my family, we didn't ask ourselves that many questions. The various identities mixed without the term being used. We were Jewish at home, French in the street. We strictly respected the laws of kashrut at the family table, we separated milk and meat according to biblical precepts, but

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we also loved good restaurants. It was a complex and subtle gradient which will also prove to be more fragile than I thought as a child, which nevertheless made it possible both to respect the precepts of our ancestors and to share the pleasures of French sociability; to preserve and maintain rituals without cloistering oneself in the ghetto of orthopraxy; to reconcile individual freedom and family traditions. My mother had inherited from her mother-in-law the dishes from “home”, between couscous and meatballs, but she was keen to learn the recipes of “French cuisine”, between Hollandaise sauce and Crepe Suzette, which she gleaned from women's newspapers or asked the chefs themselves: she had the art of extracting their secrets from them, charming them with the childish smile of an Italian actress. We mixed tastes and flavors, like tunes and refrains. My mother listened to Aznavour and sang at the top of her voice “Ma vie”, by Alain Barrière, while my father spent many evenings, even nights, around the frenzied violin of Sylvain, the father of Enrico Macias, one of the most great artists of Judeo-Arab music, or the heady voice of Lili Boniche. Today we wonder how everyone managed to live these different identities harmoniously, while our contemporaries are constantly clashing between the contradictory injunctions of “diversity”. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that the answer is quite simple: there was no conflict because there could not be any. There shouldn't have been any. Private was private and public was public. The sacred was in the ritual, the law in the Republic. We sang Aznavour during the day and Oum Kalsoum at night. My father spoke Arabic in the cafés of Goutte d'or, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, where he enjoyed drinking anisette while playing rummy; but he held French literature

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for the greatest thing in the world, and carefully wrote down on a notebook the sentences of Victor Hugo, or Sacha Guitry, which he liked to recite sentiently at the family table.

France was life; Algeria, nostalgia. France, the great nation; Algeria, the small homeland. One fitted into the other, fitted in, curled up. I in no way grew up in Dad's cult of Algeria. My parents' families were very poor, even miserable. My father often told me, with an anger that he could not contain, the stupid comments of this CGT activist who had accused him of “having made the Arabs sweat burnous”. They did not lament what they had left there; they had left nothing. My father had not forgotten the daily fights with the “little Arabs”, as he said, in the playground, for a “Dirty Jew” who lashed out too often, too spontaneously; but he had not forgotten either this warm conviviality of simple people, whether Muslims, Jews or Christians, who visited and served each other, respected each other's rituals, and shared the identical values of hospitality and respect for elders.

He also spoke of the contempt of the “sons of settlers”, who did not always invite them to their surprise parties, when the Muslims were systematically rejected because they “refused to bring their sisters”. My mother especially remembered these groups of young Arabs who insulted her in the streets of Sétif, because she was too beautiful, because she refused to speak to them, and of her cousins arriving to the rescue to the punch against what was not then called “harassment”. The land of Algeria is

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harsh, partitioned into rival tribes, shaped over the centuries and conquests by rough and violent men, unlike gentle and good-natured Tunisia, or subtle and proud Morocco. Years later, I asked my father why his vision of Algeria did not correspond to the enchanting stories told by my Jewish comrades from Tunisia or Morocco. My father took a moment to think, and replied: “They were afraid of the Arabs; they had their backs rounded; We weren't afraid of them; we were French. » I will understand, one day, by reading the remarkable works of the historian Georges Bensoussan, the meaning of his words and his stories: daring to fight, for a Jewish child, returning the insults and blows to his possible Muslim aggressor, was already insanely intrepid, something his ancestors would never have allowed themselves; intrepidity that my father owed entirely to the emancipatory and protective presence of France.

We had been French since the Crémieux decree, in 1870, had granted French nationality to all Jews in Algeria. At the time, there were only thirty thousand of them and their children had already been flocking to French schools for several years. The Vichy episode was never discussed at the family table; the abolition of the Crémieux decree rarely mentioned; but the expulsion from public school had marked those who had experienced it. Only once did my maternal grandmother show me an old identity card with visible emotion. on yellowed paper, on which was written: “Native Jew”. Algerian independence came up more often in conversations. The men were warming up around the no one from General de Gaulle, who still aroused intact passions after he had left power; and even after he was dead; passions which were only appeased around one part

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of backgammon – which was not then adorned with a snobbish “backgammon” –, in the playful twirling of the chips on the checkerboard and the insults thrown in the Arabic language, to express with more ferocity the wicked joy of the winner and the the vindictive bitterness of the loser.

We gathered on Saturdays and Sundays, and on the evenings of the main Jewish holidays. My relatives were nostalgic for the warm and supportive life they had known in their villages in Algeria, far from the distant and cold individualism that they criticized in Parisians. We found ourselves alternately in my father's family or that of my mother. My paternal grandparents lived in an HLM in Montreuil, while my maternal grandparents lived in an HLM in Stains. My paternal grandfather, Justin, was as stocky and voluble as Léon, my mother's father, was long and taciturn; his wife, Rachel, was as massive and a good cook as Claire, Léon's wife, was petite and discreet. There, in Montreuil, I played football with the neighborhood guys, while I got on my bike to stroll through the streets of Stains or Pierrefitte, the adjoining town. Pépé Léon was full of praise for central heating, which was hitherto unknown; and Grandpa Justin spent his retirement discovering the technical mysteries of wires embedded in black and white television, while his wife forbade his daughters from undressing in front of the screen lit for “fear of being seen naked”.

Above all, I loved the political-historical arguments that broke out at any moment, over a word, sometimes an allusion, at the family table. It was a constant and fascinating spectacle. The voices thundered, the glasses

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trembled, hands and arms waved like semaphores, insults flew. The heroes of the past were evoked with grandiloquence; the history of the 20th century unfolded in a confused disorder, with its flood of wars, persecutions, and exiles; she had left an indelible and cruel bite on everyone, but which they pretended to ignore. Justin never failed to recall with truculent condescension that he had seen just before everyone else, when he had decided to leave Algeria years before independence: “Two open windows in an apartment, he said so to his wife and children [he mentioned Tunisia and Morocco, which had emancipated themselves], it's a breeze! » ; he always concluded his perorations with a grandiloquent statement: “France died in 14. The French of 14 are no longer there. »

This independence of Algeria did not prevent my father from voting in favor of the General in the presidential election of 1965. He admired his quest for greatness, his majesty as a monarch, his love of France, but he tasted by - above all his handling of the French language, of which he never tired of repeating the most incisive formulas. It was from my father's mouth, and long before I read it in Alain Peyrefitte's book, that I heard for the first time that de Gaulle "had given Algeria so that his village would not don’t call Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées.” This paternal Gaullism aroused irony from my grandfather and the ire of his older brother. This one, an EDF agent and union activist, voted left. He believed, as a good Marxist, that my father was incapable of properly evaluating the meaning of History, since having abandoned his position as a pharmacy technician to become a private ambulance boss, he

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had become one of these petty bourgeois, traitors to their class. Justin admitted to an instinctive distrust of de Gaulle, which dated, he said, from his arrival in Algiers in 1943, in the wake of the Americans. Curiously, Justin was not grateful to the General for having then canceled the abolition of the Crémieux decree, and restored the Jews of Algeria to all their rights as French citizens, while he did not forgive him for his famous remarks on the " Jewish people, elite people, self-confident and dominating.”

My father faced it with courage. He repeated that the General's much-hated phrase was in fact praise; that de Gaulle would have wanted the French people to also be an elite people, self-confident and dominant. That he had been formerly and that, according to the General, he should become so again. It prevents. The Six Day War had shaken my father. The fear of a new genocide was replaced by relief and enthusiasm. Fear of being crushed by Arab armies, admiration for the IDF. To admiration, pride. My father had never been a militant Zionist, but he rushed to “liberated” Jerusalem at the end of June. He came back in love, while my mother was content to find the Israelis “badly behaved”. Until his death, my father would repeat to me that Israel's military glory had restored the dignity of the Jewish people and definitively contained anti-Semitism!

Military glory is often a bad advisor: hubris would quickly follow pride. Nothing would be anymore never like before. Starting with the Six Day War in 1967, a double phenomenon occurred within the school, and

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more broadly within what we were beginning to call the “Jewish community”: the joint and often complicit rise in power of religious orthodoxy and Zionism. Jewish schools gradually put away their French patriotism to become relays of Zionist activism in France. The blue and white supplanted the tricolor. Over the years, my family, like many Jewish families, was divided between those who, returning to a rigorous application of the precepts of the Torah, had their heads in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, and those who remained with both feet in Paris. and on the land of France. If we are to believe Raymond Aron, it was because he had guessed this upheaval that General de Gaulle had uttered his famous sentence: "De Gaulle was not anti-Semitic, I am convinced... He was shocked by the reaction of French Jews in 1967, that is to say by their enthusiasm for the victory of the Israelis. He advised Israelis not to go to war. He then said to himself: “These French Jews are Jews, they are not French like the others.”

This was, I think, the origin of this press conference

1 .

»

At the same time, Aron added: “Jews have the freedom to choose themselves as Jews in the diaspora. They can choose to be Jews in Israel. But if they choose to be Jews in France and French citizens, then they must respect that their homeland is France and not Israel. »

This position remained obvious to me. Not for everyone, far from it. I have already analyzed in my previous book, Le Suicide français, this evolution of French Jews and beyond the whole country, as if the “Jewish community” had been the laboratory where the multicultural society and its identity conflict had been experimented with. we know and suffer today.

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The question of “dual allegiance”, to France and to Israel, which already tormented Aron and de Gaulle – and some of his supporters who saw May 68 as a “coup by the Israeli secret services” – has since returned. The Jews were for a long time ordered to renounce it under penalty of being treated as bad Frenchmen; from now on, they are ordered to subscribe to it, under penalty of being treated as bad Jews, renegades, “anti-Semitic Jews”.

The philosopher Rémi Brague, specialist in religions, explains that with the exception of Christianity, which is, in Hegel's words, the "absolute religion", all religions are both religions and something else: Judaism is both a religion and a people, Buddhism, a religion and a wisdom; Islam, a religion and a legal-political system.

Jews living in France, and in the West in general, will be increasingly forced to choose between the Jewish religion and the Jewish people. We understand why they refuse, the choice is painful. Some unite the two trends under the guidance of rigorous orthopraxy and a life as close as possible to what remains of the temple of Jerusalem. Others, often the most modest, found themselves in a trap, forced to abandon the suburbs where I grew up, under pressure from the bosses, the "halalization" of their neighborhood and anti-Jewish violence which attacks to their children. How far away it seems, this time of the 1980s when the left-wing Jewish intellectual and political elites, the BHL, Marek Halter and Julien Dray, paraded in the streets and on television sets, shouting “He who touches an Arab touches a Jew ". The Jewish, community and

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intellectuals, mostly left-wing, have locked their co-religionists in a double trap, identity and globalism, tribal and cosmopolitan, which separated them from their French fellow citizens, and made them the privileged victims of the Islamic migratory waves which swept through , always louder and more scathing.

The divide between Jews of the bourgeois classes and those of the working classes has taken a turn identical to that which it knows everywhere in France, in Europe and in the United States. The land of Israel has become over the years “France peripheral” of Jews of modest means; they settle in towns full of former compatriots, continue to speak their mother tongue among themselves and watch French television, all the while lamenting the dear old country they once loved so much.

I, too, do not recognize the neighborhoods where I spent my childhood and youth. Yet the buildings remained the same, mostly quietly ugly. Everywhere, whether in Drancy or Montreuil, in Stains, or even in the 18th arrondissement, the decor remained identical. It is the actors who have changed. In one generation, and a stone's throw from the center of Paris, or even in certain sectors of eastern Paris, we move to another continent, another civilization, another country. Malraux said: “A civilization is everything that coalesces around a religion. » When we change the dominant religion, we change civilization. And therefore countries. In Montreuil, we have the impression that the city is living under a permanent Malian transfusion. Traditional businesses have closed one after the other, halal shops are flourishing, and the few surviving pastries are banning rum babas. In Stains, I believed

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understand that the peaceful town of my grandparents had experienced significant promotion by becoming a European center of drug trafficking. At the Goutte d'or, mosques rub shoulders with African hairdressers, bigwigs in caps, pilgrims in djellaba. I had the great opportunity to get to know the suburbs with the Third Republic school, and before the implementation of family reunification procedures. This suburb was already made ugly by buildings pushed up hastily during the 1960s; but life there was quiet, joyful and serene. The “black jackets” of the 1950s, with their bicycle chains, that my younger uncles had faced with their bare hands, had aged and had parked their cars; and the time had not yet come for drug traffickers. Even under torture, I will continue to affirm that yes, definitely, it was better before.

Shortly before his death, my father, visibly angry, said to me: “I have had enough of hearing “The Jews of France” on television. I am not a Jew from France, I am a French Jew. I am not a foreigner or an immigrant. » A Frenchman of Jewish ritual and Catholic culture. This is the paradox and the complexity of what was previously called “successful assimilation”. All the subtle richness too. As André Suarès said: “A people like France can never go to Church: they are Christian in their marrows. His very errors are Christian and his excesses

when he wants to introduce politics into the realm of feeling. Very Christian nation: it has the Gospel in its blood. »

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I do not believe in the resurrection of Christ nor in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, but I am convinced that one cannot be French without being deeply imbued with Catholicism, its cult of images, of pomp, of established order by the Church, this subtle mixture of Jewish Morality, Greek Reason, and Roman Law, but also the humility of its servants, even forced, their sensitivity to the poor, or even what René Girard taught us on the way in which Jesus, by sacrificing himself, revealed and delegitimized the ancestral curse of the “scapegoat”. In his famous text on

“rooting”, Simone Weil distinguishes between Catholicism and Christianity. Catholicism is (Jewish) Law and (Roman) Order. Christianity is the message of Christ, it is “love one another”, it is “there are no more Greeks or Jews, neither men nor women”. Law and order subverted by Love. Although born Jewish, Simone Weil feels Christian, but derides Catholicism. I am the polar opposite of our noble philosopher. I make Catholicism my own, which although universal (in Greek, katholicos) is married – was married – with French patriotism. Catholic in the sense in which Bossuet understood it: “If one is obliged to love all men, and in truth there is no stranger for the Christian, all the more reason must he love his fellow citizens […]. All the love we have for ourselves, for our family, and for our friends comes together in the love we have for our homeland, where our happiness and that of our families is contained

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»

On the other hand, I put at distance this Christianity which has become over the last few decades, in the tradition of Vatican II, a crazy machine for loving the Other, whoever they may be and whatever their intentions. Christ's message of universal love is disconnected from divine law and the teaching of the Church. It is paradoxically instrumentalized in the service

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of a destruction of Christian nations and civilization and Europe.

In France, the emancipation of the Jews, proclaimed by the Revolution (and King Louis XVI!) was supervised by Napoleon following the famous meeting of the Sanhedrin in 1807. Beyond of the various questions asked by the Emperor, regarding the ban on mixed marriages or dietary regulations in the Grande Armée, he urged above all the Jews to consider the other French people as “brothers” and Paris, as their new Jerusalem. I simply remained faithful to this imperial injunction.

I still live in 1800, even after leaving the shores of childhood. I walk more than ever in the streets of Paris to find my ghosts from history or novels. I always believe that we become French through history and literature, if we have not had the chance to be French through blood and soil. It is our national genius. I still believe, as General de Gaulle said to journalist André Passeron on May 6, 1966: “We were once an enormous country. We are made to be a huge country. This is what we must seek to achieve. »

I believe more than ever that France is not in Europe, but is Europe. It is Spanish through the Pyrenees, Italian through Nice and Provence, German through Strasbourg and the Rhine, English through Brittany: “The originality of French civilization was to melt and amalgamate Mediterranean elements and barbaric elements... The France was, through its Mediterranean coast, in intimate contact with the Greek, Roman and Byzantine worlds; by its Atlantic coast,

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with the Scandinavian Vikings; by its Pyrenean border, with Islam; by the Rhine, with the Barbarians. This mixture saved it from the eternal provincialism of Central Europe 3 .

»

In 1810, France incorporated the Belgian, Rhineland and Italian provinces into its fold. I really amuse my friends, especially those from those countries, by telling them that in my eyes, they are still French. They have no idea how serious I am. There is no difference, in my opinion, between Nice and Turin, Strasbourg and Cologne, Lille and Brussels or Antwerp. France is not a race; she is the heiress of the Roman Empire; the historical destiny of this nation, as Jacques Bainville or Maurice Barrès said, is to continue the task of “civilization” begun under the auspices of the Roman legionary beyond the Rhine.

Writing the History of France is, for me, tirelessly going up and down the same staircase: how the Church made a king; how the king made the nation; how the nation created the Republic; how the Republic made the great nation; how the great nation became a middle power; how the middle power is in mortal danger. The historian Pierre Nora summarizes this staircase with a cruel and magnificent formula: “I think that France's past is more interesting than its future. France knows that it has a future, but it does not see a future. »

France was the beating heart of the History of Europe, and therefore of the world, for a thousand years: feudalism, the crusades, absolute monarchy, the Enlightenment, the Revolution, democracy, colonization, socialism. On the other hand,

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the history of the 20th century was made around it, on its margins; it has not mastered anything, only suffered: communism, fascism, Nazism, liberalism, the crisis of 1929. France, from a subject, has become an object. Actress, spectator. She slowly withdrew from History. If we go back in time, we can undoubtedly locate the turning point of its tragic destiny in 1763, the date of the sinister Treaty of Paris. The defeat of the French armies in Europe, against the Prussia of Frederick II and in Canada, against the British red coats, without forgetting the abandonment of Dupleix in India, by a mediocre and stupid royal court, sounds the death knell for world ambition from

France. The world will not speak French and therefore will not think in French, b

All the patient efforts of our kings to succeed the Spanish Empire are then brought to an end. The entire rest of the story is explained by the always vain attempt to make up for this irreparable loss. It was to avenge the defeat of his grandfather Louis XV that Louis XVI engaged the French Navy alongside the American insurgents. It is because this war causes incredible debt that Louis XVI is overthrown; because the Revolution declared war on Europe, Napoleon tried to return to the great world game, by imposing French hegemony on the continent. Because we are inconsolable at the fall of the Napoleonic Empire (“The stop in the mud”, they said at the time) we are building a substitute empire in Africa and Indochina. Because our soldiers have developed the deplorable habit of fighting against poorly armed African tribes who were crushed by the powerful Prussian army in 1870; because we lose Alsace-Lorraine we are preparing revenge; because we won in 1918 and lost in 1940. Because we were crushed in

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1940 that we must abandon our colonies which are no longer afraid of the French soldier who has ceased to be invincible.

A terrible chain of events, a terrible fate. Each of our defeats digs the grave of French power; each of our returns marks the resurrection of a France-Christ. France lost its grip in 1815, missed the opportunity to regain it in 1918, lost it forever in 1940. And pretended to have regained it, without believing it, in 1945.

France has used divine leniency. His wounds mark his entire mutilated body. According to a well-known popular legend, a man, on the verge of death, sees the significant events of his existence pass before his eyes. France is experiencing an identical phenomenon today. She seems to go through all the stages of her thousand-yearold existence. A weakening of the central State, for the benefit of the “territories”, the large global groups and the mafia networks, of all these feudal lords who seem to have come out of a technological Middle Age; the great invasions, the Arab conquest of the 7th century as far as Poitiers, with the migratory waves; during the first oil crisis, in 1973, we heard in the Arab world: “It’s the revenge of Poitiers!” » A few decades later, the jihadists who struck France celebrated the “blessed raid” of Andalusian governor Abd al-Rahman. We can easily continue this journey back in time: perpetual peace projects have seen their consecration in the European Union; the hegemony of the Habsburg Empire is nothing compared to that of the American Empire; the fearful submission of our diplomacy to German wishes recalls the time of Bismarck; the cosmopolitanism of intellectual and economic elites evokes the Enlightenment;

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“sexual liberation” and crises of financial speculation take us back to the Regency; the power of judges has many points in common with the parliaments of the Ancien Régime; the rise in media power of women today often refers to their decisive role in 17th and 18th century salons ; our humble fascination with Anglo-Saxon culture and language was born during the “Anglomania” of the 18th and 19th centuries, etc.

Of course, nothing is exactly homothetic; but everything evokes, reminds, inspires. Everything repeats itself, but differently. We know Tocqueville's famous formula: “History is a gallery of portraits where there are few originals and many copies. » We know less about the intervention of Victor Duruy, in 1862, in front of an audience of polytechnicians, shortly before he became the Minister of Public Education of Napoleon III: “History is the treasure of universal experience . I know well that humanity never takes the same paths again, and that the path it follows is a bridge that collapses behind it. But the very ruins she makes serve as materials for her new constructions. In the present, what is more is always the past and sometimes the most distant past. Each of us carries within us all of humanity. Listen carefully, and you will hear deep in your soul, in your opinions and your beliefs, the dull echo of the centuries. »

Writing the History of France is the only solution to understand what is happening to it. This nation, which is neither a race, nor an ethnicity, nor even a geography, is an entirely artificial, entirely political construction, which owes everything to

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men and nothing to the elements. It could not have existed, and its populations and lands would have without harm been distributed among the Empires which shared Europe. Which almost happened on several occasions. Invented by History, France can only live by History, or die by History. France is defined by its history, while Germany is defined by its language or England by its society. There are more than six hundred histories of France since the 16th century.

France is one of the rare countries to have two origin myths: the Gauls and the Franks. The Franks for the aristocratic, Catholic, monarchical history, which starts from the baptism of Clovis. The Gauls, for anticlerical, republican, secular history. The French monarchy claimed to be descended from the Trojans, then from the Roman imperium. Each regime has successively established its form of identity with its own history. There was a Royal History with the Chronicles of Saint-Denis, the discourse on Universal History by Bossuet, then a History of a revolutionary type, divided between Girondins and Montagnards, liberals and Marxists. Fustel de Coulanges said: “History, as it is written in France, is a permanent civil war. » Our History is a succession of civil wars: the fight against the Albigensians, the wars of Religion between Protestants and Catholics, the persecution of the Jansenists by the monarchy, then the fight of the Jansenists against the monarchy, the revolutionaries against the partisans of Ancien Régime, the Blues against the Vendéens, the Jacobins against the Girondins, the Blue Terror, the White Terror, the days of June 1848, the Versailles against the Communards, the Dreyfusards against the anti-Dreyfusards, the

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fascists against the communists, the Pétainists against the Gaullists, the supporters of French Algeria against the Gaullists…

If France is the history of our civil wars, our civil wars are first and foremost wars of History. Memory wars, we would say today. Origin wars. Identity wars, since in France, identity passes through history.

We first experienced the struggle of the Germanists against the Romanists. The Germanists, like Boulainvilliers, saw in the nobles the heirs of the Frankish warriors, and in the third estate, the descendants of the little Gallo-Roman people, conquered and submitted. The king's historians, anxious to safeguard the unity of the kingdom, replied that the French monarchy was the faithful guardian of the Roman imperium. More expeditiously, the revolutionary Sieyès sent the nobles back “to their forests of Franconia”, while the sans-culottes ransacked the tombs of the kings in Saint-Denis, to implement with Vandal brutality the famous formula of Rabaut Saint-Étienne: “History is not our code. »

One Story replaces another. One historians' quarrel follows another. The whole 19th century lives confront the history of the monarchists with that of the republicans. The baptism of Clovis against July 14, 1789. Lavisse will manage to synthesize the two stories starting with the Gauls of Vercingétorix, but welcoming Clovis as a major marker. By integrating 1789 into the millennial history of kings. By mixing Christian roots and secularism. In glorifying the crusaders and soldiers of Year II. This is the famous

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"national novel" which experienced its apotheosis on November 11, 1918, with the final victory at the end of a terrible war which had seen those who believed in Heaven and those who did not believe in it, those who vibrated at the memory of the coronation in Reims and those who were sensitive to the celebration of the Federation, according to the word quoted to the point of Marc Bloch.

But just as there is no end of History, there is no end, in France, of the wars of History.

If in the 19th century the issue was the French Revolution, and in the 20th century its communist reading, in the 21st century, the struggle is focused around immigration. The places of confrontation are no longer the forests of Franconia against the Colosseum of ancient Rome, any more than the cathedral of Reims against the esplanade of the Champ-de-Mars. All these places, all these symbols, all these ideological and historical markers no longer mean anything to many people.

The task of deconstructing generations of intellectuals, sociologists, ideologues and historians has done its work: our History of France is now as a catalog of inventions forged by horrible white, heterosexual, Catholic men to persecute the poor, women, homosexuals, colonized peoples, Muslims. The “national novel” which had allowed the Republic to incorporate its gesture into the History of France, to bring the French together and shape a national identity in the face of Germany, has become synonymous with “myth”, “rubbish” or, worse, an emanation of “the fascist”.

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History must no longer be a tool that allows us to give meaning, an order to a community, but on the contrary the means of making impossible any community that would be too restrictive and not “inclusive” enough. How can we tell a History of France to our contemporaries that does not recognize women in the place that our current mentalities believe they deserve? How to tell a History of France which would show over and over again that Islamic civilization is not at the origin of the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, and even less of the French Revolution, and that it is even among our oldest and fierce enemies? In short, how can we tell a History of France that would be a History of France without contravening all our totems and taboos? So, our good minds say, eager for peace and love, rather than cruelly forcing people from elsewhere, with another civilization, another relationship to time, another conception of emancipation, to to make their own a History and a civilizational grammar which would have once martyred their ancestors, we might as well get rid of them. We might as well consider that there is nothing, lest there not be everything.

It is no longer time to oppose Clovis to Vercingétorix, since Clovis is a barbarian prince, more German than French, whose date of baptism is not certain, and Vercingétorix, formerly brandished by anticlerical progressives to detach the birth of France from its Christian matrix, is now placed in the nauseating closet of identity icons. There is no origin of France, since France does not exist, since there is no longer an origin for anything. France was born nowhere, except in the Chauvet cave ago

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more than thirty thousand years, “premise of a mixed humanity and migrant", as exalted by France's World History. Then, there were no

4 .

borders, neither State nor religion, and men were all nomads, who had the surface of the earth as their domain. Nations do not exist, borders do not exist, we are told, they are artificial and falsified creations; great men do not exist either, they are only usurpers who tyrannize social masses in action. Chronology, too, is an outdated concept; dates mean nothing or just anything. Today's historian aspires to shed his role as historian; he sees History as an illusion to be deconstructed; he dreams of being an anthropologist or sociologist. These historians hold the upper hand. They have titles and positions.

Friends and supporters. According to mafia logic, they have integrated the places of power and hold the controls of the State. They apply to the letter George Orwell's precept in 1984 : "He who controls the past controls the future." Whoever controls the present controls the past. » In a nation made by the State, and where the State determines the school curricula, they

have the right of life and death over the nation itself. Ave Caesar(s), those who are about to die salute you.

There is no point in softening the national novel with the national story, in order to make it more credible and more “scientific”; we will never appease the wrath of our censors. In "national novel", what displeases them is not the term "novel", but the adjective "national". Everything national has become shameful. Dangerous. This is the nation they wanted to disintegrate. They succeeded. With a historical narrative in pieces, they shaped a nation in pieces. With diverse stories, to pay homage to the different

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memories, they create a history of the French and no longer a History of France. They deliberately made history of France, and therefore of its identity, the product of the demographic balance of power. Everyone cooks their little story on their own little fire of identity.

We must not deceive ourselves. This deconstruction work left only ruins. We will not be able to rebuild what was destroyed. The “national novel” of Father Lavisse, the one that enchanted and nourished my childhood, became, in the words of Pierre Nora, a “romance”. Reading the Histoire[s] de France by Michelet and Bainville today, we see more similarities than points of divergence. The lyrical master of Republican history and the inspired cantor of the forty kings who made France seem close to each other today. This is of course due to their genius which carries enthusiasm, beyond ideological bias; but this shows that the issue is no longer there. Those who still thrill at the royal coronation of Reims are only a handful of diehards, and everyone has understood that after the Federation Day, there was the Terror.

To better appreciate their difference, we must extend the curves. As Marx's criticism of globalized capitalism which destroys all traditional structures to impose the global reign of the market is much more relevant today than in his time, we can say that the critics of the Republic were a hundred years ahead of the game.

The French universal quest, transmitted by Christianity to the Republic, has become a machine for torturing the French. The universalism of the French elites allowed our

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country to spread its soldiers and its ideas, when we were the “China of Europe”. This universalism turns against the French and France when it only represents 1% of the world population. In Denys Arcand's superb film released in 1986, The Decline of the American Empire, a history professor, played by Rémy Girard, gives his inaugural lesson to his students: “There are three important things in History. First, the number. Second, the number. Third, the number. » In the world of 1900, where the European population represented four times that of Africa, universalism saw the conquest and colonization of Africa by Europe in the name of civilization. In the world of 2100 where the population of Africa will represent four times that of Europe, universalism will be (is already happening) conquest and colonization of Europe by Africa in the name of human rights .

In these historical-demographic conditions, the end is at the end of the universalist path. The strategy of the universalists is simple: we exalt the Republic to better relieve ourselves of France. We wrap ourselves in the trappings of the rule of law to prohibit any policy that is not subject to the judge and the standards he has drawn from the Declaration of Human Rights. The Republic will be all the more universal because it will no longer be French. France will therefore have to choose whether it wants to remain France or a state of law among others. In a letter to his ambassador in Paris, German Chancellor Bismarck already wrote in 1871: “So we think of the great cities that have disappeared from the world scene: Tire and Babylon, Thebes and Sparta, Carthage and Troy. And this because France, denying its glorious past, handed over to lawyers and

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to the daredevils, will have ceased to be French to become Republican. » This debate is more relevant than ever for our time. From the end of May 68, François Mauriac, in his notepad, had guessed everything with astonishing prescience: "Between the French who think first of the destiny of France and those who don't care, and who want to change that of man, conversation is in fact impossible. »

The famous foreign party, which Mauriac still speaks of in one of his last notepads before his death (“The foreign party is an accusation that has been used and abused in France to disqualify the adversary . The fact remains that this party has always existed among us.”) is, whether we like it or not, one of the common threads of our History. To the rest of the feudal spirit, we must add the Church and the University, even foreign queens and their entourages. From the Middle Ages, the elements of French drama were laid down. The privileged instruments of the construction of France, and of its influence in Europe, can also turn against the unity of the country at any time, in the name of concepts too great for it: Christianity, the empire, the humanity, universal peace, the world.

The centralized organization of France, the extreme concentration of intelligence in a few streets of Paris systematically cut off the French elites from the people and give them the impression at all times that they can and must do without them, in turn giving rise to disaffection, revolts, rebellions, hatred. This dangerous dialectic explains why our country has spent its thousand-year history on the edge of the abyss. Always between greatness and the abyss. There

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greatness of speaking and acting above oneself; the abyss of dissolving into a great whole greater than oneself. Always complaining, rightly, about the excessive centralization of kings, the Empire or the Republic. And we still fear the “polonization” of France, that is to say the dislocation of a nation governed by valiant aristocratic elites but devoid of any sense of the State.

“Pro-German because they are anti-French, anti-French because of self-hatred, for all the abandonments, for all the compromises, for all the failings that they reproached themselves for, did not forgive themselves, they became so many little Saints -Just who would have glorified not Fleurus but Waterloo – and not their compatriots but the enemies of their Fatherland", wrote Emmanuel Berl in his work The End of the Third Republic (1968) to describe the state of mind which had ended by winning over the most collaborationist circles of the Second World War. This mentality has spread among our elites and affected the best of our minds. The “great nation”, once the object of respect and fear, is now the object of sarcasm and contempt.

Everything happens in truth as if the supreme function that many of our contemporary historians have given themselves (despite the valiant resistance of a handful of historians going against the grain) is to use History to put an end to the France. To put to death through History what was born and grew up through History: France. For centuries, an iron fist, whether monarchical, imperial or republican, had held together

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these disparate elements of our geography and our history; the same ones who, unifying the country under the heel of their soldiers and their administrators, took care to bring together the nation's past under a single ceremonial coat. It was not won: Pascal had difficulty getting along with Voltaire; the Jacobin Saint-Just was no less fanatical than the Jansenist Saint-Veyran. But the French crew had to take everything on board or risk capsizing. We know the famous words of Bonaparte: “From Clovis to the Committee of Public Safety, I take responsibility for everything. » We should extend it until today: “From Clovis to Pétain and Bugeaud, I take responsibility for everything. » Montaigne said that he loved Paris “down to its warts and spots”.

Now, it is the opposite: the great historiographical university machinery is euthanizing France. We remind him that France only has spots and warts, and we spend our time showing them off; we are told that it never really existed, to better admit that it no longer exists. It is denied its Christian roots, to better implant the Islamic graft on its soil and in its soul. What is at stake today, on French soil, is the ideological confrontation of two different and traditionally rival civilizational systems. It is the realization of Bernanos' prophecy in The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon (1938): “Christendom made Europe. Christianity is dead. Europe is going to die, what could be more natural? » France is told that its ancestors are imaginary, the better to invent others. In a book published in 2014, Dominique Borne began the History of France with the arrival of the Greeks in Massalia, in the 5th century, to decide between It is

Clovis and Vercingétorix; and allow the children of immigrants to

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find in the new image of Épinal of a France mixed from its origins!

We repeat that History is of no use so that France no longer has the temptation, as it did in past centuries, to seek out the many examples of its glorious History to rediscover a vital energy which would enable it not to die.

Tocqueville warned us: “When the past no longer illuminates the future, the mind walks in darkness. » Darkness is their thing. According to the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, History represents the way in which a civilization becomes aware of itself and accounts for its past. We must therefore abolish History to prevent our civilization from becoming aware of itself.

Yet, in the darkness, groping, men continue to advance. The 21st century will be – already is – the scene of multiple clashes, destructions, ruptures, collapses, which will provoke identity reconstitutions of new “we”, new forms of feeling of belonging which will take up elements of the past (let us think of the networks of monasteries after the fall of the Roman Empire). The scale of the movements is such (climatic upheaval, migratory waves, new technologies) that they largely escape human control and resemble an ancient curse from the gods. We are fast approaching what Drieu la Rochelle announced in his novel Le Feu fout : “It was the hour of consequences and the irreparable. »

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Ironic paradox of a modernity which claimed to free men from ancient fate in the name of the effectiveness of technical reason and which on the contrary restores all its force to fatality. In Lives of Men illustrious and great foreign and French captains, which recounts the wars of Religion, Brantôme writes: “When the French sleeps, the devil rocks France. » By being despised, rejected, denied, annihilated, History takes its revenge.

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1. Raymond Aron, The Engaged Spectator, Julliard, 1981. 2. Policy taken from Holy Scripture ; article “Love of the Fatherland”, 1709. 3. André Maurois, History of France, 1947. 4. Le Seuil, 2017.

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FIRST PART THE WEATHER

FOUNDATIONS

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Clovis

Very national All our great men followed in his footsteps. He was the model, he was the origin, he was the reference. Of course, he always had rivals: the Republic preferred Vercingetorix and “our ancestors the Gauls”, less clerical. Clovis was competed but never ignored, never forgotten, never desecrated. Never marginalized. What he is now.

Our historians dispute everything except his existence: the date of his baptism; the scene of the Soissons vase; the political importance of his wife Clotilde; its weight in the crumbling Roman Empire; its founding role in the building of France. Drunk with their brand new “scientific” discovery, they leave nothing standing.

All of Clovis is ruins. Clovis arrives too late – after the Gauls, even after the first settlements before the Roman Empire; or too early – before 987 (the coronation of Hugues Capet) or 1789. Clovis is too German, too Roman, too Catholic, too white, too violent, too bloodthirsty. Everything that previously passed for founding virtues is now considered to be a defining fault. All the subtle contradictions of his character, which made him the incarnation of subtle French contradictions, are seen as national defects that we want to erase, like old skins that we want to tear off.

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Clovis is German but dreams of being Roman. He is a barbarian king but dreams of being an emperor. King of the Franks but Roman official. He wants to be called Augustus but has not understood that the time of Rome is ending.

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ROME IS NO LONGER IN ROME We're not reasonable when we're 15. It is not reasonable to remain loyal and faithful to this old whore, wanton and slumped. Rome is no longer in Rome. The Franks are the good Barbarians, those who embody the hope of peaceful and harmonious cohabitation after the pillaging, strengthening the optimism of the Roman elites who had explained to all the birds of ill omen that the integration of these "immigrants" was possible, safe, and even rewarding; that the Barbarians will be the peasants and soldiers that Rome lacked; that they will become Romans like the others. But Barbarians can also be cruel.

It is not reasonable to ally ourselves with these GalloRoman populations, so accustomed to peace that they have lost the taste and the art of fighting. These little brown, stocky, short men of the Mediterranean type see, with fear mixed with admiration, these men with the ostentatious virility of demigods sweeping across their lands, these blond giants with long hair which fall, stiffly, on their stiff shoulders. It is not reasonable to rely on two women and a bishop. It was not reasonable for Saint Genevieve to associate with the weakest of the Germans and for a high Burgundian princess, Clotilde, to marry a little Frankish king. Not reasonable for Bishop Remi to support a barbarian king who is still pagan. To compare the Frankish wren to the great emperor Constantine. To pretend the Empire hadn't fallen. To want to restore everything to the way it was before.

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It's not reasonable to marry only one woman. To have a wife who refuses to sacrifice children and practice witchcraft.

Not reasonable to choose a small city like Paris as the capital of his kingdom. Unreasonable, all these dresses around this king of women and monks. Not reasonable to confront the king of the Goths, Theodoric. The Goths are the great power of the post-Roman world. Theodoric becomes Roman to better subvert and enslave the Empire, while Clovis becomes Roman because he wants to become Roman. More Roman than the Romans. Theodoric gave the people what they expected from Rome: bread and circuses. He became a Christian, but with an Arian tendency. Arianism recognizes the one God, but not his son Jesus as his equal. Arianism is more reasonable than Christianity which persists in believing in a God-man weak enough to be killed on the Cross: “If I had been there with my Franks,” Clovis would have said to Clotilde, “I would have avenged this insult. » A god must conquer or die.

Clovis hesitated for a long time. Procrastinated, argued, but also concealed. If he confesses his intentions to his rebellious soldiers, he may be challenged, overthrown, assassinated. This is the tradition in the forests of Germany. Clotilde mocks these gods who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear. Clovis does not let himself be impressed by his wife's theological quibbles. When she lost her first two children at a young age, he sourly pointed out to her that his gods would have saved their lives.

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But every time he returns to his gods, Bishop Remi takes him back to Rome. Its only chance is to rely on this Christian Church which, over the centuries, has become the last Roman institution still solid, capable of protecting the GalloRoman populations; the last Roman administration able to impose Roman law on turbulent and always threatening Frankish warriors. This is the bet made by Clovis and he cannot deny it without denying himself and giving up his dream. This is the origin of the famous affair of the Soissons vase – taken in Reims! Clovis has been king for only a few years (481). He confronts Syagrius, a Gallo-Roman who proclaims himself “king of the Romans”. Between the two champions, between the two heirs of the late Empire, it is a question of precedence: who will be the more Roman? Clovis is victorious. Among the looted riches is this famous vase that Remi, the bishop of Reims, claimed, but which fell, during a division in accordance with Frankish rules, to one of the victorious soldiers. The latter refuses to return this vase and rather than offering it to his leader, when Clovis asks for it, he prefers to split it with a big blow of an axe. Contrary to legend, the silver vase did not break, but some time later, the neck of the insolent soldier was not so lucky.

Remi retrieves his dear vase without shedding tears crocodile on the soldier. Christian charity has limits.

The Church did not blink either when, a few years later, Clovis exterminated all the men of his kin with great blows of an axe. A habit. However, the pagan Clovis has in the meantime been converted. Clovis imposes, by sword and blood, the law of the father separating the children from the mother and her family. He thus engages in the age-old fight for the family

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nuclear power which will only really become established in the year 1000. The Church can only be at his

is

century of the era

side. Since the Christian I , the Church has first led a fight against Roman society and its disdain for marriage, its preference for cohabitation and divorce; she banned infanticide, abortions and “those children who were exposed on garbage heaps to be devoured by dogs and jackals 1

". The demographic crisis in the Roman Empire was

one of the major causes of the barbarian invasion, but also of the excessive fear aroused by these migratory waves which never exceeded a few hundred thousand people.

In this terrible V

It is

century, while imperial Rome is nothing

more than a glorified memory, the Church has changed its adversary and is now fighting to impose the law of the father on the prolific Germans, but still governed by a remnant of a violent matriarchal system, which authorizes incestuous marriages and only recognizes the laws of revenge between clans: the faides.

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THE EVERYTHING

By establishing the law of the father in families, Clovis will be able to restore the reign of law in society. Salic law and Roman law will be the bases of his kingdom. Everything fits. The law of the father in the family, the Roman law in society, the Law of the Church in the spiritual domain. The restoration of the rule of law dear to the Romans. In 491, after ten years of reign, Clovis was still only a wren from northern Gaul. And he still doesn't hold all of Northern Gaul! The civil war rages. The Germans clash and the Gallo-Roman elites look for a protector. At the Battle of Tolbiac in 496, the Frankish army was on the verge of being exterminated by Alemanni soldiers. Clovis plays his all. He invokes Clotilde’s God: “If God and his son Jesus Christ give me the victory, I will believe in you and be baptized in your name. » He recites his wife's lesson but thinks in German, offering his faith to the God who will give him victory. La mort du roi des Alamans lui offer un succès inattendu. Il keep your word; will convert; will give his faith to the God of Clotilde. Clovis was baptized on December 25 around 498, in Reims . Remi gives him the famous apostrophe: “Humbly lay 2

down your necklaces, proud Sicambre, adore what you have burned, burn what you have adored. » On this Christmas Day, three thousand Frankish soldiers are baptized at the same time as their king.

Clovis will never be emperor, never Roman emperor, but Anastasius, the Eastern Emperor, sent him the consular dignity and insignia: the silver diadem adorned with precious stones which consecrates the “patriciate of King Clovis”. He is a

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sort of vice-emperor, on a par with Theodoric. He settled in Paris; he is acclaimed consul and august. He's almost there. The Franks hoist it on the bulwark and the Gallo-Romans hide under its protective wing. He believed he had won his bet, that of the unification of the two peoples, of the two civilizations, the restoration of the Roman Empire by the force of Frankish soldiers. There is neither winner nor loser; in the law decreed by Clovis, Michel Rouche tells us, the murders of a GalloRoman and a Frank are punishable by an identical fine of 200 sous. The Frankish Barbarians melted into the Roman civilization; and Christianity spiritually unifies all populations.

Before Clovis died, on November 27, 511, he believed, with his friend Remi, to have accomplished their historic project: to restore what should never have been destroyed. Pretend as if nothing had been destroyed. Put Rome back into Rome, extend and perpetuate eternal Rome. When he converted him, Saint Remi preached to Clovis: “Teach my son that the Frankish kingdom is predestined by God to the defense of the Roman Church, which is the only true Church of Christ. This kingdom will one day be great among all kingdoms. And it will embrace the limits of the Roman Empire. And he will subject all peoples to his scepter. It will last until the end of time! »

The entire History of France can be summed up in the stubborn, persevering, and never successful attempt, of generations and generations, to comply with the injunction of Saint Remi. “Reims, these places where Clovis was baptized, where we can say that France was also baptized,” de Gaulle told Peyreffite. The final victory went not to the strongest – it was

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Theodoric

–,

but at the most “clever”. Clovis is the little one

who is not afraid of big people, as de Gaulle said when comparing himself to Tintin. It's Asterix, another very French comic book hero. This will be the common thread of the French monarchy for a thousand years, which skilfully played its part, despite its weaknesses, between the threatening giants, Holy Empire, Habsburg Empire or Ottoman Empire or even England, all bigger, more powerful than 'She. And then, at the end of the long, thousand-year-old road, when it in turn becomes a mastodon, this “big animal”, for which de Gaulle had retained the inconsolable nostalgia, a demographic, military, political giant, from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 , under the century of Louis XIV until Napoleon, France moved to the second stage of Clovis' program: becoming in turn Roman Empire. “From Clovis to the Committee of Public Safety, I take

responsibility for everything,” said Bonaparte on the evening of the coup d'état of 18 and 19 Brumaire, 1799. For him too, it all began with Clovis Bonaparte found the bees on the coat of Childeric, Clovis's father, and adopted them as a symbol of his reign. A few years later, emboldened by his military successes, he asserted himself as the distant heir of Charlemagne to found his – ephemeral – restoration of the Western Empire. Charlemagne, who was the first to give shape to the dream of Clovis and Remi.

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UNITED BY THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION Clovis' victorious synthesis was based on religious unity around Christianity and the rapprochement between Franks and Gallo-Romans. The Franks were the conquerors, but they recognized the superiority of the culture, law, and God of the Romans. As Lucien Febvre says, Clovis left his sons and grandsons a motley collection of Franks, Salians but also Ripuaries, Hessians, Gallo-Romans, Burgundians, Alemanni, Provençaux. There were no Latins and yet all became children of Rome. This populus francorum was above all united by the Christian religion. Clovis was the only Catholic king in the West, all others being pagans or Arians. His original weakness became his greatest strength. Then, the Franks broke with their original francism; they broke culturally, ethnically, religiously and even geographically. Francia was no longer just the land on the left bank of the Rhine from which the Franks had left, but Paris and its surroundings, Île-de-France, where they had settled.

Clovis was buried in Paris next to his great friend Saint Geneviève. Clotilde and Remi survived him by many years. But neither could do anything against the children of Clovis who returned to the patrimonial conception of the Crown, as well as to the divisions between rival lineages; nothing against the return of civil wars. His sons took advantage of Theodoric's death in 526 to extend their arms where their father had never gone, beyond the Rhine and on the shores of the Mediterranean. France looked more and more like

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France and became the prey of terrible clashes between the heirs of Clovis. Everything had to start again.

It was not then reasonable to imagine that this small Frankish people would become the most powerful in the West. As Christopher Columbus discovered America, hoping to find a new route to the Indies, Clovis had dreamed of restoring the Roman Empire, but had unknowingly built the first steps of a future nation-state: France. It is for this reason that he embodied the origin of our nation as long as it assumed what it was without blushing: Catholic and Roman. It is for the same reason that Clovis is now thrown into the dustbin of History.

Like an annoying witness.

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1. Michel Rouche, Clovis, Fayard, 1996. 2. The stories hesitate between 496, 498 and 499.

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Roland

Sincere condolences It's our own western: a medieval western where Roland is the solitary and courageous cowboy, Ganelon the trigger-happy villain, the Saracens the Indians hiding in the mountains, Charlemagne the sheriff, and the Frankish army the cavalry which always arrives on time. But in our sublime epic poem, she arrives too late and the good ones die in the end. Distant memories, childish memories, when school taught us to love France with a carnal and quivering love: a sword which bears the sweet name of Durandal; long blond hair, a flowery beard, a traitor with a sad face, sinister Saracens; an ambush, a corridor, the Pyrenees; an alliteration that resonates endlessly: Roland's horn at Roncesvalles.

It was Jules Ferry who introduced, in the school programs of 1880, the study of La Chanson de Roland ; he attached Joinville's text on Saint Louis to it. The Republic of Jules had an iron consistency: republican but patriotic; liberal but statist; anticlerical but of Christian culture; democratic but exalting aristocratic values. The Song of Roland is the first poem in the French language; it is our Iliad, our Odyssey, our Aeneid. The obscure monks who hid behind the pseudonym Thurold wrote in the 12th century a story taking place in the 8th century, the text of which, exhumed in the 19th century,

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will be taught to all French children in the 20th century, then published clandestinely during the Occupation, before being expelled from the “national memory” by the apostles of deconstruction of the 21st century. The Song of Roland is a summary of a thousand years of French history. The beginning and the end

of a nation called France.

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FRANCE MADE MAN It was only after the defeat of 1870 that La Chanson de Roland emerged from the dusty cabinets of scholars to reach the general public. Victor Hugo exalts him in The Legend of the Centuries : “One is called Olivier and the other is called Roland […]/The shadow around them is filled with sinister clarity text from

1 .

» The

La Chanson s'atach. We swoon in front of its fragile literary beauties, this nascent language already so elegant; Sarah Bernhardt plays one of her first major roles in a play adapted from the epic poem.

“The battle is wonderful and painful. Olivier and Roland strike with all their might The archbishop returns more than a thousand blows,

The twelve peers don't waste their time And the French strike all together. Pagans are dying by the hundreds and thousands He who does not flee from death has no recourse; Willy-nilly he leaves his life there The French lose their best defenders; They will not see their fathers nor their parents again, Nor Charlemagne who at the passes awaits them. » “Roland is France made man,” wrote the historian Léon Gautier in his introduction to the publication of the text in 1872. Our brave patriot has no idea how right he is. He thinks of Roland the brave, loyal, courageous, valiant, daring, good-natured, frank, all qualities

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proven warriors that he takes from his distant ancestors, the Franks of Clovis. But Roland is the future France made man for better and for worse, its greatness and its mediocrities. His trickery and his immeasurable pride. His false skills and his real inconsistencies. Ganelon is guilty of felony; Roland of imperitie. The two lords are a pair; the feudal pair! This is the secret moral of the epic. The morality of the authors in the absence of the law of time. In this 12th century, feudalism is at its peak. The song turns out to be a propaganda text, a weapon of the Capetian monarchy against the feudal lords. Our skilful authors could not find a more illustrious standard of their little Capetian monarch than the glorious Emperor Charlemagne. Clovis, the Merovingian, had made the Frankish people the most powerful in the West. His distant successor, Charlemagne, heir to the new Carolingian dynasty, had victoriously fought the Saracens, the Mohammedan enemies. When The Song of Roland was written, Europe trembled in solidarity with those striving to emancipate themselves from Islamic domination in the Iberian Peninsula.

It does not matter that the skirmish which cost Roland his life at Roncesvalles was perhaps caused by Basque fighters; and that the Saracens were not all Arabs. Henri Pirenne taught us, in his major book, Mahomet et Charlemagne, that the Islamic conquest had completed the destruction of the Roman Empire, swallowed up a large part of the Eastern Empire under Islam, cut off the West from its Mediterranean openings, and gave Western Europe the awareness of its irreducible continental unity and

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Christian. “Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would undoubtedly never have existed, and Charlemagne without Mohammed would be inconceivable. » It was in the chronicle relating the victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732 against the Arabs that the word Europe was written for the first time in a text. Medieval Europe understands that it is above all Christian because it refuses to become Muslim. The Franks, from Charles Martel to his grandson Charlemagne, draw their glory and their domination over the West from the fact that they victoriously took the lead in the fight against Islam.

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ONE GOD, ONE LAW, ONE LANGUAGE

Franks and Arabs understand each other without speaking because they are alike: they are both invaders, conquerors; militarized tribes who have war as their profession and pillage as their instrument. They are myth busters; they destroyed eternal Rome; the Western Empire for some, the Eastern Empire for others. But that’s where their similarities end. As British historian Bryan WardPerkins explains, the Arab conquest was so rapid and effective that most of the economic structures of the conquered lands remained intact; the incursions of the Barbarians from Germany were less decisive, the Romans resisted longer; the economy of the Western Empire collapsed. But the difference doesn't stop there. The Arabs had in their luggage the goods they considered most precious: a God – Allah –, a law – the Koran –, a language – Arabic. Their God had given them victory; and they imposed their law and their language on the conquered populations, who ended up wanting to be heirs of the peoples who had subjected them. Perfect assimilation. The Eastern Empire was culturally covered by Islam, as ancient Egypt had been before it. In the West, on the other hand, Franks and Germans had neither common religion nor languages, nor powerful rights. They converted to Christianity, although some fell in love with a heretical version – and adopted Latin for culture and administration.

The Saracens had the Greek and Roman texts translated into Arabic, while part of the Franks, at the court of

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Charlemagne, spoke Latin and rediscovered ancient texts with delight. The German kings were part of “continuity” with Rome, while the Arab conquerors followed a strategy of rupture. Henri Pirenne had said everything and understood everything: “While the Germans have nothing to oppose to the Christianity of the Empire, the Arabs are exalted by a new faith. It is this and this alone which makes them inassimilable […]. Islam means resignation or submission to God and Muslim means submissive. Allah is one and he is logical that all his servants have the duty to impose it on unbelievers, on infidels. What they are proposing is not, as has been said, their conversion, but their subjection. This is what they bring with them. They ask nothing better, after the conquest, than to take as booty the science and art of the infidels; they will cultivate them in honor of Allah. They will even take their institutions to the extent that they are useful to them. They are pushed there by their own conquests. To govern the empire they founded, they can no longer rely on their tribal institutions; likewise the Germans were unable to impose theirs on the Roman Empire. The difference is that wherever they are, they dominate. The vanquished are their subjects, pay taxes alone, are outside the community of believers. The barrier is impassable; a merger cannot take place between the conquered populations and the Muslims

2 .

»

Where the Arabs Arabize, the Germans Romanize. Where the Arabs Islamize, the Germans convert. Everyone has a different conception of their victory, their conquest, their mission, making their respective area a land foreign and hostile to the Other: “Among the Germans, the winner will go to the vanquished spontaneously. Among the Arabs, it is

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the vanquished who will go to the victor and he will only be able to go there by serving Allah like him, by reading the Koran like him, therefore by learning the language which is the holy language at the same time as the master language […]. The Germanic language becomes Romanized as soon as it enters Romania. The Roman, on the contrary, became Arabized as soon as he was conquered by Islam […]. By becoming Christianized, the Empire had changed its soul, so to speak; by becoming Islamized, he changes both his soul and his body. Civil society is as transformed as religious society. With Islam, a new world was introduced onto the Mediterranean shores

where Rome had spread the syncretism of its civilization. A tear continues to this day. On the banks of the Mare Nostrum two civilizations no different and hostile. […] The sea which had until then been the center of Christianity became its border. The unit Mediterranean is broken. » (H. Pirenne)

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TWO CONCEPTIONS OF WAR The Romanization of the Franks will be their salvation. As long as the Arabs had faced adversaries in their image, former nomads like the Visigoths or Vandals, who had themselves migrated to North Africa and Spain, they had always had the upper hand. This is how they had conquered Spain, penetrated into the south of France, taken Narbonne, as they had previously swept away the Persians and the Byzantines. Abd al-Rahman's troops had passed Poitiers and were threatening Tours when they were stopped by Charles Martel. The Saracens did not immediately understand that the peasants they faced were not of the same species as their usual adversaries. The Merovingian king had imposed on each family of free men to provide an adult warrior for the royal army. They couldn't wait to get it over with and return to their work in the fields. They were not hungry for loot, but wanted to defend their land and their families from Arab raids. These “Frankish” troops were essentially composed of heavily harnessed infantrymen: large wooden shields, leather doublets, chain mail, conical metal helmets, sabers and spears, javelins and axes.

The clash between the compact block of infantrymen organized in the Roman style and the brilliant fantasia of the Arab horsemen turned into a discomfiture of these. Many contemporary historians urge us not to give this “battle of Poitiers” of 732 disproportionate importance. It was just a raid, a raid, a skirmish, one more and nothing more. On the road to

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Poitiers, every church or monastery had been pillaged; the Arab horsemen were overloaded with booty, which they had to abandon to protect their flight. These historians are not wrong. But they pretend to forget that the Arab warriors never carried out other operations; that they never knew or wanted to wage war any other way; that it was by launching incessant raids, by ruining the conquered countries by countless raids and by destroying the enemy troops by skirmishes that they had defeated all their adversaries.

“The composition of Islamic armies was very different from those of the West. There was a predominance of horsemen of all kinds, while infantry played a limited role […]. They made much of ambushes, partly because it is an obvious tactic for light cavalry. But the sharpest contrast between East and West was in the approach to battle. Everywhere the close confrontation was decisive and the Western tradition was to produce a situation of this type as quickly as possible. In the East, light cavalry could outflank and overwhelm formations with rapid movements. 3 .

»

In Poitiers, Charles earned his nickname “Martel” as his troops struck the Arab horsemen with the force of the hammer. It was therefore not only two armies which clashed, but two conceptions of war, two military cultures. An infantry against a cavalry. A a people of peasants against a people of pastoralists, sedentary people against nomadic Bedouins. Victor D. Hanson, in his book Carnage and Culture, reveals that this way of waging war was characteristic of the West since the Greek hoplites. And the assurance of its military superiority over the

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rest of the world. Charles Martel was quick to take advantage of this setback from Poitiers to push the Arabs further south, defeating the Saracens at Avignon and in the Corbières. The Arabs continued their raids and raids for several centuries in the South, but never reached Poitiers. Charlemagne will pursue them as far as Spain in an attempt to liberate the European continent. But now, Roncesvaux was the anti-Poitiers. In Poitiers, the “Franks” had fought like Romans; at Roncesvaux, Roland had fallen into a Saracen skirmish. He had refused

to call on Charlemagne for help, in the name of an excessive conception of honor. When he had resigned himself to finally blowing into his famous olifant to ask for help, it was too late. Hence the legitimate fury of his friend and comrade-in-arms Olivier.

“Roland said to him: “Why do you rage against moi?” Olivier replied: “Companion, you have it deserved,

For sensible valor is not madness. Better measure than rashness The Franks are dead because of your levity. We will never again serve Charles. If you had believed me, my lord would have returned, And we would have won this battle. You will die, and France will be dishonored. Today our loyal friendship ends:

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Before this evening with pain we We will separate.” »

In his famous History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Edward Gibbon laughingly imagines his beloved Oxford University transformed into a center of study Quranic studies if Charles Martel had not stopped the advance of the Mohammedans towards the north: “The Oxford Schools would perhaps explain the Koran today, and from the heights of its pulpits we would demonstrate to a circumcised people the holiness and truth of the revelation of Mohammed. »

This same University of Oxford where the fragments of The Song of Roland were found by an obscure medievalist, commissioned to Great Britain by the July Monarchy. This July monarchy which, at the same time, ordered General Bugeaud to continue the colonization of Algeria, a conquest that our peasant-soldier undertook without enthusiasm. Incredible spin of centuries, continuum of wars and inexpiable hatreds, interspersed with oases of peace and refinements in a desert of violence and crime.

The conqueror of yesterday is the conquered of today and will be the conqueror of tomorrow in the incessant ebb and flow of two irreducibly antagonistic civilizations.

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1. Victor Hugo, “The Marriage of Roland”, The Legend of the Centuries, 1859. 2. Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne, PUF, 1937. 3. John France, Western Warfare in the Age of Crusades. 1000-1300, Cornell University Press, 1998.

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Urban II

Return to jihad He is the ugly duckling. The one we hide, forget, deny. A past that we want to erase, a past that does not pass. Catholics are no longer told that he was sanctified; we no longer teach schoolchildren that he was the first to call for the crusade; we no longer dare remind children that he was French. His distant successor, Pope Francis, appears as his absolute antithesis, opening his arms when his predecessor raised the sword, welcoming Muslim families to European soil when he called on them to repel the invasion of the infidels.

Urban II is not fashionable. He could have been a pope among others, buried under the dust of centuries. This Champenois, trained at the abbey of Cluny, did not have to enter into posterity the vices and crimes of the Borgias, or the dogmatic stiffness of the popes of the 19th century, who spoke out against democracy, liberalism, human rights, socialism, as if they had sensed that these new religions would replace the old Christian faith in the hearts of Europeans. We only destroy what we replace.

Urban II is alone in the turmoil. He is, in the eyes of our modernity, worse than Pius XII – and his silence on the genocide of the Jews for which he is so criticized –, worse than the popes

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reactionaries of the 19th century, worse than the Borgias. Urban II committed the crime of crimes: he launched the first crusade.

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THE PEACE OF GOD The Christians of Europe did not wait for the Pope's call to journey towards the Holy City. In the crowd of pilgrims, the sublime mixes with the grotesque and the cruel, the fervor of the mystic with the ferocity of the plunderer. We molested, stole and tortured the Jews whom we encountered randomly on the roads of Lorraine and the Rhineland, as far as Bohemia, despite the vain protests of the ecclesiastics. Torn by hunger and cold, these hordes were pushed back and driven out of Greece or Hungary, before being massacred by Turkish troops. The survivors are sold on the slave market.

Some time before this council of November 1095, where he launched his famous "Clermont appeal", Pope Urban II had received a visit from a Picard who was called Coucou Piètre, or Peter the Hermit. He was returning from Jerusalem. The story apocalyptic view that he made of the situation decided the Pope. The call to the crusade must go beyond the poor wretches who rush to it; and the knights engage, the great feudal lords abandon castles, lands, women, duels and ribalds, the Christian kings cease their quarrels.

For centuries, however, the Church has endeavored to contain the warlike impulses of lords who often turned highwaymen, multiplying the "peaces of God", to proscribe the pillaging of church property and theft from the poor, and other “truces of God” (holy days, particularly Sundays) where all fighting is prohibited. As late as the 12th century, the doctors of the Church would threaten to

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deprive of a Christian funeral any knight who died in a joust or during a tournament. And the Lateran Council banned, in 1139, the crossbow, the first truly lethal weapon in history, capable of causing death at more than two hundred paces. So, the papacy is biased and deceitful. The crossbow should not kill Christians but can kill infidels. We rediscover the vengeful exhortations of the biblical armies of Joshua or Solomon, and we obscure the tender exordiums of Jesus of Nazareth or the pacifist aphorisms of the first fathers of the Church, Tertullian, Origen or Lactantius. Some even dare to accuse this Christian pacifism of having disarmed Roman spirits and caused the ruin of the Empire in the face of barbarian invasions. This is because the Pope does not have a concept as mobilizing as “jihad”, the term of which appears thirty-five times in the Koran. No Muslim thinker of the Middle Ages, even among the most tolerant, ever questioned the necessity and legitimacy of this “holy war”. Mohammed, “perfect man” according to the Koran, unsurpassable model of all Muslims, both prophet and war leader, opposes trait for trait to the Christ-like and sacrificial figure of Jesus who died on the Cross.

The “crusade” requires no forced conversion of Mohammedan enemies and does not sanctify the death of infidels, but exalts the liberation of holy places. “Just war” is not the Christian version of “jihad.” If the Pope speaks of conversion, it is above all that of his own troops, Christian lords often great bad men who will find in the struggle and suffering, even death, a redemptive purification.

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He hardly speaks of "crusaders", but of "men who have taken up the cross", or quite simply of "pilgrims": "Whoever wants to come to me, let him deny himself and take up his cross", he said to the Clermont assembly, who responded: “God wants it. »

The tomb of Christ, in Jerusalem, is not the only subject of concern of the sovereign pontiff. Faith is the engine of the movement, the initial inspiration, but the issue is also prosaic, geostrategic: the survival of the heritage of the Roman Empire and Greek intelligence, brought together and sublimated in their Christian synthesis. The destiny of Europe depends on it.

Urban II understood this.

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LAND OF ISLAM Hurry up. The Islamic wave is sweeping. Since the middle of the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks supplanted the Arabs at the head of the Muslim world and immediately attacked the Byzantine Empire; the alliance of fanatical Arab faith and the organized force of steppe soldiers proves formidable. The Turks, masters of Baghdad, captured Jerusalem and massacred the Christians there. In 1064, they took Armenia. In 1071, they took the Roman Emperor Diogenes prisoner at the Battle of Manzikert. This victory opens the road to Constantinople for them. Urban II knows what happens next, because he knows the past of Muslim invasions. Three centuries earlier, the first wave of Arab conquerors had taken Baghdad, Alexandria, and even part of Spain. Urban encouraged Reconquista efforts in Spain, but the country would take another four centuries to emancipate itself from Muslim rule. Alexandria, which was the beacon of Greek thought, became a land of Islam. Anatolia, conquered by Turkish troops, is about to experience the same fate. Little by little, the Turkish peasant replaces the Greek peasant, until the memory of the latter fades.

Greek culture is Europe; and for centuries its best defender was the Roman legionnaire. Asia did not wait for Islam to fight Hellenic civilization. But with Islam, Muhammad gives a faith and a flag to this fight. Islam is first and foremost an Arabism, but its victory makes it the standard of revenge of the East on "Iskander the roumi” (Alexander the Great) and a thousand years of domination

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Greek. Since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, this Christianized Hellenism had become a faith, a God and a creed; with the Koran, Asia responded with one faith, one God and jihad. To save the Saint Sophia Cathedral, which had become the objective of the Turkish troops, Pope Urban worked for the unity of Europe in the face of Asia. Ten thousand knights, seventy thousand footmen: his work looks proud. Its historical opportunity will be that the unity of Christianity will be matched by the division of Islam.

The European allies demonstrated a remarkable logistical capacity to move and feed armies on land and sea. The crusade was an immense victory. A victory French. The salvation of Christian Europe came from France: Gesta Dei per Francos. Godfrey of Bouillon opens the Crusades; Saint Louis will close them. “It was up to France to contribute more than all others to the great event which made Europe a nation […],” Michelet enthused. Judea had become a France […] The name Franks became the common name of Westerners. »

But the French have the faults of their qualities. Demobilization and division spread to the ranks of the crusaders. Everything begins in mysticism and everything ends in politics, according to the famous formula of Péguy; everything begins in politics and everything ends in commerce. The pilgrim will become conquistador; the conquistador, settler; the settler, merchant. The spiritual fervor of the origins quickly transmuted into colonialism; and colonialism into “imperialism”, in the words of the great historian René Grousset, a recognized specialist in the Crusades:

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political and land imperialism of the feudal French Capetians, economic and maritime imperialism of the Venetian merchants. The French colonists imbibed Levantine mentalities, even Muslim customs. The ports of Tripoli, Tire and Acre became the warehouses of the entire Levant.

Caravans bring products from the Indian Ocean there. The spice trade gradually replaced the redemptive faith.

The crusade lasted less than two centuries. The story then resumes its course interrupted in Clermont in 1095 by Urban II. The inevitable happened. No catastrophe was more predicted than the fall of Constantinople. No disaster was more accepted before it even happened. We can only judge the merits of the Crusades in the light of the fall of Constantinople to Turkish troops in 1453.

It is the road to Christian Europe which will then open under the gallop of the Ottoman horses. The Battle of Mohacs in 1526 gave them Hungary. Then, it will be the conquest of Algiers, the seat of Malta, and the Barbarys who will roam the coasts of Provence. Even the naval defeat at

Lepanto of the Turks in 1571, facing a European coalition led by Don Juan of Austria, the bastard son of Charles V, did not change the balance of power in their favor. The Turks will still have the strength to besiege Vienna in 1683!

Posterity has praised the realism of Philip the Fair, who, unlike his grandfather Saint Louis, abandoned any temptation to relaunch a new crusade. But in resigning to the failure of the crusades, Philip the Fair renounced

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any colonization of Muslim Asia. Less than fifty years after the departure of the last crusader from the Holy Land, it was Muslim Asia which invaded Christianity by attacking through the Byzantine Empire. He who does not advance goes backwards, says popular wisdom. Between Christianity and Islam, it is a thousand-year-old story. He who does not unite divides; he who does not attack retreats; He who no longer retreats conquers. He who no longer conquers is conquered.

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INSTINCT DE CONSERVATION René Grousset learned a lesson about the importance of Urban II's crusade, which is opposed to our contemporary doxa. According to him, the pope allowed Europe to delay the advance of Islam by almost four centuries and to prepare for the slow emergence of a Renaissance which would never have taken place under Islamic rule: “The catastrophe of 1453 which was on the eve of occurring in 1090 will be pushed back three and a half centuries... The Crusades constituted a

invaluable diversion which delayed the invasion of Europe by three hundred and fifty years. During this time, Western civilization completed its constitution and became capable of receiving the heritage of expiring Hellenism... The crusade was nothing other than the instinct for selfpreservation of Western society in the face of the most formidable danger that she has never run. We saw this clearly when the West gave up this effort 1 .

»

If the Turks had conquered Constantinople in 1090, it was the intellectual capital of Europe that they would have put under their snuffer. In 1453, it was too late for them: European intellectual genius, imbued with Greek thought transmitted by the Eastern Empire to the West, had flourished in Italy, France and England.

The weakening of the crusading spirit was not a mark of moral progress but a proof of decadence. It was due above all to the disappearance of France entangled in the Hundred Years' War.

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Part of Europe paid for it with four centuries of slavery, René Grousset reminds us, evoking the conquest of the Muslims: “In the Christian countries where their regime imposed itself, all free thought, all scientific and intellectual progress were for stopped for a long time. No emancipation of consciences or societies became possible. Political institutions could not rise above the most primitive despotism. A part of the European population found itself cut off from Europe. »

Western Europe had abandoned Eastern Europe to Islam, just as it would hand it over to Communism after the Second World War. With the same lightness, the same lack of compassion and the same cowardly relief. We then understand better the vehement refusal in 2015 of Hungarian, Polish, or even Slovak leaders to welcome "migrants", mostly coming from Muslim countries, despite the objurgations of Germany, the moral lessons of the France and threats from the Commission Brussels. When we have suffered Islamic enslavement for centuries, we cannot forget that, contrary to the mythological imagery of the Arab rider devastating everything on his steed, the Arab conquest of the Christian lands of North Africa or the Byzantine Empire has always started peacefully, with a fraternization of populations, even alliances between Muslims and Christians, united by monotheism and the seductive but artificial solidarity of the “religions of the Book”, against a despotic or oppressive power. It was only later, well after, when the balance of demographic power permitted it, that the Arab armies imposed the undivided power of Islam.

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To found and justify their murderous attacks on French soil in 2015, the propagandists of the Islamic Caliphate (Daesh) sounded the hour of revenge against the “crusaders”. This name made our secularized and unbelieving minds smile. We were wrong. This long history is still very much alive in the land of Islam, while our consumerist and guilt-ridden presentism has erased everything from our memories. We have forgotten that Urban II was French, that Peter the Hermit was French, that Godfrey of Bouillon was (practically) French, that Saint Louis was French. We have forgotten that, thanks to them, we escaped Islamic colonization and that Europe, firmly rooted in Greek reason, Roman law, and Christian humanism, was then able to rise towards an incredible destiny and glorious which was his.

If we have forgotten it, they have not forgotten it.

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1. René Grousset, Bilan de l'histoire, Desclée de Brouwer, 1992 (1946).

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Brother Guérin

France on the Move! Posterity has not remembered his name. It did not attract the attention of the academic glory-makers of the Third Republic. It remained forever a footnote. What is the reason for posthumous glory? However, he could have been presented as another Suger, the advisor to King Louis VI the Fat; paint him like a little Richelieu. He did more than save France, he made it possible. He prevented it from falling apart before it was even made. He was in Bouvines as others will be in Valmy or Verdun. Life is unfair ; posterity too. History is a cemetery of forgotten giants.

We call him “Brother Guérin”. His real name is Guérin de Montaigu. He served the Capetian monarchy for nearly thirty years. He is a member of the order of Hospitallers, knight of Saint-Jean-de-Jerusalem, fighting tirelessly. When he returned from the crusade, King Philip II, who would soon be nicknamed Philip Augustus, entrusted him with the drafting of official acts at the chancellery. He becomes a special advisor, a jack of all trades, a minister, the safest, the wisest, the most determined, the Keeper of the Seals, capable at the same time of leading an investigation into cases of heresy, of presiding courts, to arrange rulings in favor of the king, but also to buy complicity.

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When the monarch died, Brother Guérin would be one of his executors. Throughout his reign, Philip II showered him with gifts, properties in Orléanais and throughout the West, gold, jewels and precious stones taken from the royal treasury. He was one of those countless men of great talent but of low extraction, whom for centuries the Church extracted from nothing. Michelet wrote: “The Church was almost the only way by which the despised races could regain some ascendancy… the freedoms of the Church were then those of the world. »

Brother Guérin joins this small circle of the great ones of the kingdom. They will always regard him with the contempt that feudal lords have for a commoner. But the king doesn't care; he surrounded himself and was infatuated with a team of men “drawn from the dust”, whose talent, chatter, audacity, discretion and unfailing loyalty he appreciated. Their names are Barthélémy de Roye, Gautier le Jeune or Henri Clément. And Brother Guérin. They are hated by the great, by those they have supplanted, the Count of Flanders and other archbishops of Reims; but they have the confidence of the king. Their specialty is not having any; they get involved in

financial, legal and religious affairs. Even the military thing is not foreign to them.

Brother Guérin fears no one. He observed his fellow knights on the crusade. He does not ignore their valor, their courage, their intrepidity; he is also aware of their rusticity, their ignorance, their malleability. Lessons in virtue leave them cold or make them mean. They are determined not to let themselves be fooled by these little ones whom they despise and sometimes brutalize.

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Clerics, like Guérin, were then the only ones to read the fathers of the Church and even sometimes the illustrious pagans, to write in Latin and to decipher Greek. In the chaos caused by the disintegration of the Roman Empire, in the midst of material but also spiritual ruins, they preserved a certain idea of man, a certain idea of God, a certain idea of public morality. Res publica ! Since the time of feudalism began, the Church has been the only one to maintain this spirit of universalist unity bequeathed to it by Rome.

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BOTH PRIEST AND GUIDE The Church supports the king, and the king supports the Church. The king has two protectors, the Virgin and Saint Denis; he sprinkles his banner with fleur-de-lys and fights with the cry of “Montjoie Saint-Denis!” » while the priests provide him with the men and subsidies he needs. The crusade gave Philip a taste for the grandiose and the epic. He is not just the realistic and cynical king that historians have described to us over and over again. Philip II is the seventh king of the Capetian line. He feels cramped in the kingdom bequeathed by his fathers. To the west, it collides with the immense and luxuriant domains of the King of England; to the north, he comes up against the Count of Flanders; to the east, on the Emperor of Germany. To the south, in the county of Toulouse. He is suffocating. Having left for the crusade, he quickly returned, leaving his companion in battle and pleasure, Richard the Lionheart, the honor of covering himself alone with glory and successively losing his freedom, his kingdom and his life. Philip took advantage of the anarchy which then reigned in London to attack the possessions of his English vassal.

Brother Guérin and his followers buy complicity and consciences, bribe the courts and arrange judgments, disarm minds and prevent hostilities. By law or by force, Philippe seizes Normandy, Poitou, Maine, Touraine and Anjou. He tripled his estate in a few years. Multiply its vassals and its taxpayers; he extends “his long hands”. On the eve of Bouvines, he is at the head of the most

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powerful in Europe. The “lands of obedience to the king” open towards the Mediterranean.

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IT LOOKS LIKE THE SOUTH

Philippe doesn't know it yet, but the destiny of his kingdom will be decided in a few months, in a few battles, in a few throws of the dice. There will be Thursday at Le Muret and Sunday at Bouvines. Muret to the south and Bouvines to the north. Muret in 1213 and Bouvines in 1214. Muret, where Brother Guérin will be nowhere; Bouvines, where he will be everywhere. Muret, where the Church fights in its own name; Bouvines, where the King of France is his armed wing. Muret, where the feudal lords of the South cast their last fires; Bouvines, where the feudal lords of the North are so sure of victory.

The threat first looms in Languedoc. Among the Albigensians, as they said then. Brother Guérin took advantage of his ecclesiastical connections to give Philip II first-hand information. The French king of the North controls nothing, but observes everything; ready to seize any opportunity, any prey. In this South heated as never before, Simon de Montfort ended up crushing the “Cathar heresy” with the famous cry (which we are not sure if he really pronounced it!) launched by the Abbot of Cîteaux upon entering in Béziers: “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.” »

The Toulouse Raimond then understands that he is the last on the list of the cursed from Sodom and Gomorrah. He requests the help of the King of Aragon and the complicity of other feudal lords such as the Count of Foix. The battle took place at Muret, near Toulouse, in 1213. If the battle of Muret had turned to the advantage of the king of Aragon, a kingdom of all

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Spains, including Languedoc and Toulouse, would have forever prevented France from reaching the shores of the Mediterranean. But after pretending to refuse the fight, Simon brings down his heavy cavalry on the Aragonese and crushes him.

Stay north. The King of France is on the front line. The Emperor of Germany has decided to put an end to the pretensions of this French wren, whom he contemptuously nicknames regulus (“little king”) and invites without further ado to reintegrate his lands into the Empire. He threatens him, challenges him. The other Christian princes took advantage of this to gang up against Philip. According to his good habit, Brother Guérin distributes the tournament books by the handful to ensure complicity and neutrality in the land of the Empire. Which does not prevent Philip's most proud and valiant vassal, Renaud de Dammartin, Count of Boulogne, from rallying the king's enemies, while Count Ferrand of Flanders also rebels against his French overlord.

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EUROPE AGAINST FRANCE It is not an alliance, but a coalition. It is not a coalition, but the history of Europe and France, of Europe against France, for the millennium which is opening. It is the history of the wars of the monarchy, the Empire and the Republic. Always the same issues, the same opponents, the same battles, almost always in the same place. France is not a fiefdom, since the King of France is not the most powerful of the overlords. It is not a race either, nor a tribe, nor a language, since it combines from the beginning the Gauls, the Romans and the Germans, without counting the various alluvial deposits that have come over time. France is one king, one faith and one law. This double universalism, that of Roman law and the Christian religion, is both its strength and its weakness. Its strength, because wherever it imposes its imperium, France extends its territory, without worrying about the differences of races and ethnic groups and tribes; its weakness, because only an iron fist can contain its incessant quarrels and divisions. Each time the King of France advances his pawns, each time he imposes his law, each time the Church dominates souls, France gains land and men. Each time Europe believes that France is exaggerating, that it is expanding too much, it gangs up against it, at best to contain it, at worst to dislocate it. As long as France's weapons prevail, Europe submits.

But as soon as they weaken, Europe fights back and takes it by the collar. In 1214, if the Emperor won at Bouvines, France died before being born. Dismembered before being

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gathered. Divided into fiefdoms before being born into its national consciousness.

Hostilities begin with fanfare. Otto promises defeat to Philip and ruin to the Pope. In retaliation, the sovereign pontiff offered the imperial crown to Otto's rival, Frederick of Hohenstaufen, and placed himself under the protection of Philip, who protected him from the excommunicated Otto. Otto insists that the priests will be massacred, their estates confiscated and that they will have to be content with the proceeds of alms. The Emperor also announces to Philip that his inevitable defeat will lead to the division of his kingdom, which he will carve up for the benefit of his allies and vassals. Ferrand will have Paris. But the German quickly loses his arrogant certainties. His English ally, John Lackland, will not be able to join him: his army was defeated at Roche-aux-Moines on July 2, 1214. It was the son of Philippe, future Louis VIII, who crushed the English. This Louis could not celebrate more gloriously the birth of his heir, future Saint Louis, a few months earlier. Philippe is reassured. If John Lackland had won, his troops, moving up Aquitaine via Anjou, would have taken him from the rear. He can concentrate on the battle against the Count of Flanders and the armies of the Emperor.

This month of July 1214 will be decisive. Brother Guérin has sensed this and is busy. The coalition brings together between eight and ten thousand men; French soldiers are, according to royal legend, much fewer in number. We will fight one against three. Otto can count on an enormous infantry – the Flemish bourgeois did not skimp –, on the English troops from Salisbury, and on a cavalry of fifteen hundred men who

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will not be too much against the five hundred French knights renowned for their audacity, their bravery, even their ferocity. Philip flatters them: “Let the Teutons fight on foot, you, children of Gaul, always fight on horseback. » Philippe presses his troops in the North towards Tournai. The battle will take place on the Bouvines plateau on this Sunday of July 27, 1214.

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ADVANTAGE TO THE FRENCH The sun is shining and Otto's troops have it in their eyes, the French in their backs. Advantage to the French. Philippe enters the Saint-Pierre church in Bouvines, prays, comes out and exhorts his men, invoking the Almighty: “In God is all our hope, all our confidence. King Otto and his army were excommunicated by the Pope, because they are the enemies, the persecutors of the Holy Church... We are Christians, in peace and in communion with the Holy Church. Sinners as we are, we are in good agreement with the servants of God and defend, to the extent of our strength, the liberties of the clerics. We can therefore count on divine mercy. God will give us the means to triumph over our enemies, who are his. » At these words, his barons ask Philip to bless them and Philip, raising his hands, implores divine protection.

On the other side, among the Imperials, it's a completely different spectacle. We harangue, we threaten, we encourage each other. We want to be rascals. A cry rallies hearts: “And now, let’s think about our babies!” » Hay of divine invocation.

And suddenly, silence imposes itself on everyone. The enemy troops face each other. The red banner, strewn with fleur-de-lys, of the King of France responds to the oriflamme of the Empire and its enormous dragon surmounted by a golden eagle.

Brother Guérin wears the red tunic and the black cross of the Order of Hospitallers. It was he who developed the plan to

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battle: the right wing will attack first and throw itself on the Flemish cavalry led by Ferrand, to better penetrate the center, where the king is standing. On the left wing, the French will have to resist as long as possible the assaults of the English troops of Salisbury and the Count of Burgundy. On the right, everything is going as Brother Guérin had planned. The horsemen throw themselves at each other at the points of their swords; infantrymen do not have strategic autonomy; their role is above all to make the opposing riders fa kill them with a sledgehammer or slit their throats. The Flemish infantry disbanded in great disorder.

In the center, the fight started later. The king waited a long time for the troops assembled by the “communes of France”. The commoner became the historical ally of the kings of France. These bourgeois arrive out of breath, the banner of Saint-Denis at the head, at the moment when Otton launches the attack. The French camp panics; Philippe was knocked from his horse; on the ground, his arm whirls to protect himself from the ardor of the Flemish, German or Lorraine infantrymen who try to harpoon him like a pike. Philippe gets back on his horse. He is looking for Otton to challenge him in single combat. The Emperor's horse is injured in the eye and falls; Otton, struck, falls and gets back on another horse. But Guillaume des Barres grabs him and squeezes him to suffocate him; the German

horsemen disembowel Guillaume's horse, which ends up on the ground, while Otto, frightened, flees. Having got rid of his royal regalia, he will go straight to Valenciennes. Philippe laughs: “We will no longer see his face today. » This flight is a terrible blow to the morale of the Imperials who nevertheless co

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a fierce struggle. The melee is terrible, the dead pile up pell-mell with the disembowelled horses.

By the evening of this glorious day, victory was complete. The golden eagle, the imperial dragon and the chariot that carried them were demolished, broken into pieces and thrown at Philip's feet. This is a huge victory for France. The kingdom is saved.

An enthusiastic welcome is everywhere reserved for the king on the way to Paris. The towns are hung with silk curtains; flowers and green branches pave the hooves of his horses; the crowd cheers him. The peasants, with scythes on their shoulders, shout: “Christmas! » The common people mockingly make fun of the famous prisoners who are exhibited like the defeated leaders in ancient Roman triumphs. “He’s shod, Ferrand,” shouts the crowd, laughing, upon discovering the Count of Flanders among them. Philippe wrote to the very recent University of Paris: “Praise God, my dear friends, for we have just escaped the most serious danger that could threaten us! » The schoolchildren party, feast and dance for seven nights, lit by torches. It is the France of cities and the France of cloisters, the France of baptisteries and the France of amphitheaters, which confusedly seeks to emancipate itself from the rule of these lords to whom the peasant mass, too close and too dependent, still submits without saying a word. The king is their sword, their hope, their unifier. He is too weak to threaten them, and strong enough to protect them. He is the smallest of the great and the greatest of the small.

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BIRTH OF THE MONARCHY FRENCH The French monarchy has found its historical destiny. She will shoe all the Ferrands, lock up all the Boulognes, chase out all the Ottons and throw all the English into the sea. Philippe is the man of the bourgeois and the townspeople, who are not yet called the “third estate”. The king embodies this vague idea of France. He will make his weakness a strength. Philip became Augustus. His adversaries experience the fate they had promised him.

In London, John Lackland sees his throne waver. The great ones of the kingdom, the armed barons, reject his tutelage unchallenged. They imposed on him the Magna Carta, the Magna Carta, in which the king undertakes to respect the freedoms of everyone.

Bouvines reversed the roles between the king of England and the king of France. The strong have become weak; the weak became strong. The King of England gathered everyone against him – nobles and bourgeois and Church –; the king of France gathered behind him – Church and bourgeois, and a few nobles rallied to his fleurdelized panache – against the great feudal lords. Absolute monarchy is in the making in Paris; the parliamentary monarchy is in limbo in London. Equality on one side, freedom on the other.

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Between the enemy brothers English and French, the struggle for domination of Europe has only just begun.

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Saint Louis The Jewish King Rabbi Yehiel wipes large drops from his vast forehead, but it's not just because of the summer heat. In these last days of June 1240, he has good reason to sweat. The king summoned him for a solemn disputation between Talmudists and Catholic theologians. The design of Louis IX is to vividly denounce the perfidies and errors contained in the Holy Book of the Jews for the greater glory of the Christian faith.

Rabbi Yehiel requested the assistance of the greatest Talmudists, rushing from the four corners of the kingdom: Moïse de Coucy, Juda Ben David de Melun and Manuel de Salomon. He prayed to God to inspire him with his lights.

He discovered upon entering that the session would be chaired by Blanche of Castile; many great people of the kingdom assist him; he was flattered but frightened. He knows the exalted Christian faith of the king's mother, her very Spanish dogmatic stiffness. He instinctively knows that he will be forbidden to win; he must only strive not to lose. His opponent is an old acquaintance. Nicolas Donin of La Rochelle was born Jewish, but since his conversion to Catholicism he has displayed a vindictive zeal for his former co-religionists. His intimate knowledge of the Mosaic Law, his knowledge of the Torah and the Talmud give his accusations a strength that Rabbi Yehiel cannot help but admire,

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as he cannot help but admire these names of towns or professions that the “Gentiles” have gotten into the habit of giving themselves as surnames, while the Jews have maintained the ancestral custom of designating people by the only quality of son of their father.

But Rabbi Yehiel hardly has time to dwell on the beauty of the names of the “Gentiles” or on the colorful elegance of the attire of the great ones of the kingdom who stare at him with courtesan severity. His opponent began his indictment and grievances rain down on the Talmud like a sudden summer storm. The rabbi cannot hide a grin of exasperation in his full beard. The apostate's blows fall hard and true. He pertinently denounces the excessive weight that rabbis have taken on in Jewish life or the criticism and sarcasm against Jesus and Mary. Rabbi Yehiel also knows the quotes exhumed by Donin de la Rochelle, the invectives against the “Gentiles”, their exclusion by Jewish Law.

Rabbi Yehiel does what he has always done and what he has done best since his childhood: he discusses, argues, quibbles, nitpicks. Since the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70, the Jews have modified their worship, exchanging their ancient sacrificial rites for the study and commentary of the Torah. Every Jew learned to read to know the sacred text. They are educated when others are not. They are the only ones who can compete with the bookish knowledge of the clerics which so impresses their flock. To dare to discuss a divine word that Christians receive from the ecclesial hierarchy without being able to challenge it. If we are to believe the remarkable work of the Italian historian Maristella Botticini and the Israeli economist Zvi

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Eckstein, in their book The Chosen Few ("The Chosen Few"), this major asset changed the destiny of Jewish minorities in Europe: many of them abandoned work in the fields for commerce, medicine or finance. They traveled and organized themselves into networks. They obtained a much higher remuneration, but aroused the inexpiable hatred of their creditors.

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FRANCE IS “PURE” Faced with the strength and precision of Donin de la Rochelle's arguments, Rabbi Yehiel denies nothing. It completes, reframes, nuances. He contests with a touch of bad faith, a mockery. He compensates for the criticisms against the “Gentiles” with the innumerable praises coming from the same Text. He recalls that France in Hebrew is called Tsarfat, which means “to purify”: France is “pure”, because those who founded it were motivated by the purity of their feelings. He specifies that the denunciations that Christians believe are intended for them most often target idolaters. Attenuate insolence towards the Most High, with this formula of humility: “Man thinks and God laughs. » Exposes in homage to the king's mother the golden rule set out by the Talmud, “ Dina de Malkhouta Dina ”: “The law of the land is the law. »

Give as an example the great Rashi, who ordered the Jews of Europe to abandon the polygamy of the patriarchs for the monogamy of the Christians. The harsh criticisms against Jesus and Mary? “It was another Yeoushoua and another Marie. Not all Louis are equal and some are not kings of France. » The room laughed. Even the grown-ups giggle under the stern eye of the Queen Mother. Rabbi Yehiel has already noted that these “Gentiles” of France have a penchant for those who put the laughs on their side. He can then raise the colors, to show this great king, so humble and just, that it is vain to persecute them: “Our body is in your hands, but not our soul. »

Rabbi Yehiel has the answer to everything. He annoys Blanche of Castile. It is excluded from the debates. But his acolytes remained in the running

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apply its proven methods. On June 27, 1240, after three days of controversy, the king, on the advice of his mother, closed the session. Louis IX understood Rabbi Yehiel’s lesson; he will henceforth forbid any dispute with the Talmudists. He will no longer venture onto their land.

Each side claims victory. But two years later, twenty-four carts loaded with copies of the Talmud were burned at Place de Grève. In 1247, the king ordered the censorship of offensive passages in the Talmud for Christianity. Jews will be stripped of their property to finance the Crusades.

Since the Lateran Council in 1215, Jews had to wear a particular sign of infamy on their clothing, a rouelle, which Muslims had already imposed for a long time on all their “dhimmis”, Christians and Jews. The Pope then wrote to the Bishop of Paris: "It is appropriate to restrict the excesses of the Jews so that they do not raise their heads on which the yoke of perpetual slavery weighs... They must recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom the death of Christ liberated, while it enslaved the Jews. »

After this theological pass of arms, Louis IX ordered the Jews to live from the work of their hands and no longer from the trade of money. In 1288, thirteen Jews were burned at the stake.

On July 22, 1306, all the Jews in the kingdom were arrested. One hundred thousand will leave the kingdom for neighboring regions. The expulsion notice of 1306 will be canceled in 1315. Resumed in 1323, canceled again in 1360. But Charles VI the Mad will once again expel the Jews in 1394, putting an end to nearly a thousand years of Jewish presence. Most will retreat

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in the protected communities of Avignon or Bordeaux; others will go to Alsace, which is not then part of the kingdom of France. Some Parisian Jews had even emigrated to “Palestine”. Led by Rabbi Yehiel…

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THE FRANCS ARE THE NEW PEOPLE FROM ISRAEL

The Franks have always claimed the title of "best student of Christendom", protector of Rome. France is the eldest daughter of the Church since Pepin the Short. Starting with the Emperor Justin, Christianity designated itself the successor of Israel, verus Israel, the “true Israel”. The Franks adopted the same logic of substitution. The Franks are the new people of Israel. From the Carolingian era, the Frankish people “were considered the new chosen people”. France is “God’s favorite nation”. France is the kingdom of the new Alliance. We draw from the Old Testament all the signs, all the symbols, all the models. We take the coronation, the holy oil, the blue and gold banners, the fleur-de-lys, even the healing powers. The coronation of the Frankish kings is inspired by Samuel, who, with his horn of oil, anoints King David. By the coronation, the king of the Franks, heir to the kings of Israel, is the chosen one of God. A sacred land is also promised to this chosen people of God: France.

Thus, France draws from the Bible the doctrinal armor of its edification: sacred king and chosen people. We seek and find a promise comparable to that which God made to Moses in the Vita sacti Remigii, written by Hincmar around 878; but the blessing of Saint Remi during the baptism of Clovis is also often mentioned. The king of France is descended from King David; the French people descend from the people of Israel; the French language itself, beyond its Latin or Greek origins, draws its source from Hebrew. Nothing will stop the historiographers

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Capetian monarchs in the quest for their Jewish roots. When the people of Israel obey God, they are glorious; when he abandons the divine commandments, he is unhappy and defeated. Likewise, the victories of France are God's reward for his beloved people; its defeats and misfortunes are due to the ingratitude of the people who broke the alliance with God. The Frankish people are “especial people for the execution of the commandments of God”. When Louis IX became Saint Louis, under the reign of his grandson Philippe le Bel, this royal over-Christianization nourished the nation's feeling of superiority.

As the faithfulness of the kings of Israel to their God made the

glory of the chosen people, the unblemished Christianization of the kings of France ensures the glorious destiny of their nation. At the end of time, the King of France will return to the Promised Land and usher in the time of universal peace. France embraces the messianic destiny of Israel. She makes it her own. While drawing inspiration from the fierce nationalism of the people of Israel, the French monarchy proudly carries the flag of a Catholic religion that aims to be universal. This contradiction could have been fatal and prevented the emergence of French national sentiment. The French peasants who rebelled against the English occupiers after the Treaty of Troyes (1420) were afraid of finding the English soldiers they killed in paradise.

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MIMETICAL DESIRE But the greatness of the French monarchy is to reconcile the irreconcilable, to hold both ends of the scale, to correct the temptation of Jewish nationalist confinement by opening up to the world of Catholicism, to contain the dissolving potential of pacifism of Christ through the sacred selfishness of Jewish nationalism.

French royalty is “spiritually” Jewish, as Colette Beaune notes in her fruitful work on the Birth of the Nation France . But the more we admire the Jews of the Bible, the more we 1

persecute real Jews, according to a model that we know today thanks to René Girard and his famous analysis on mimetic desire. We want to be what we admire, but we hate it for being what it is, because we want to replace it. This is the whole meaning of the disputation provoked by Saint Louis and the condemnations and persecutions which followed. Voltaire will joke about these Jews being burned to the sound of Jewish hymns. The Jews had exterminated Amalek by divine order; the Jews took the accursed place of Amalek in the liturgy of the new Christian Israel.

The kings of France and their thurifers were not the only ones to draw inspiration from the biblical model. In the 16th century, Jean Bodin relied on the Old Testament to construct his theory of sovereignty. Hobbes affirms that the State of the Hebrews constitutes the prototype of the sovereign State. When Bossuet wrote a universal history for the benefit of his royal student, the Dauphin, son of Louis XIV, he was content

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to tirelessly evoke and comment on Holy History taken from the Old Testament. The people of Israel are the flattering mirror in which ancient France is reflected.

“Yesterday a soldier of God, today a soldier of the law, France will always be the soldier of the ideal. » Georges Clemenceau has no tenderness for the Catholic faith. His militant atheism made him an enemy of the “priesthood” throughout his life. But Clemenceau knows his classics. While the country has been engaged since 1914 in the most terrible war in its history, bordering on a sort of ordeal, it does not hesitate to sound the general mobilization, bringing together behind its warlike banner the France of the Crusades and the France of the Revolution. France which frees the tomb of Christ and France which frees the people from their tyrants. France which fights for God and France which fights for the law. France which brings revelation, the good word. France that converts. France which spreads the Holy Scriptures and that which spreads the Civil Code. France which repels the Muslim heretics yesterday and the Teutonic Barbarians today. Catholic France and Republican France united in the same fight for the eternal greatness of a messianic and civilizing France. These Frances are in truth one and the same

France, the one which had adorned itself with Saint Louis in the trappings of the chosen people.

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THE ROMANTIC NATIONS This French history did not end with the Most Christian Kings. The French Revolution broke out in 1789 with the cry of “Long live the nation!” ". The nation of patriots against aristocrats, kings, tyrants. All of Europe is gradually imitating the French model: the Italian, German, Polish, Hungarian, Irish nations, etc. are born in pain and exaltation, in love or hatred of their French model. Zionism is one of the last nationality movements of the

19th century inspired by the “great nation”.

Israel was for centuries the model of France. France in turn becomes the model for Israel. But their temporalities are out of tune. Israel is today the nation that France refuses to be. The fierce, self-confident and dominating nation, for whom war is the natural continuation of politics, for whom the glory of arms is a supreme form of art. The Tsahal revives the enthusiasm of the soldiers of Year II and the audacity of its young officers recalls that of the generals of the armies of the Rhine or Italy. Both countries have experienced the callous logic of nation-states condemned to having only allies and never friends. Israel is a 19th century nation for which national sovereignty is a good as unexpected as it is sacred, while France has exchanged this sovereignty that it had invented, which had founded and preserved it throughout the ages, for pacifist chimeras of a powerless and ungrateful European federation.

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The two nations are condemned under penalty of death to rediscover their ancestral intimacy. Without universalism Christian, Israel locks itself into an ethnic and segregationist nationalism which finds its rational legitimacy in demographic imbalance. Without Jewish nationalism, France is lost in the exit from the History of a Nation millennium dispossessed of its State, its past, its roots, its very territory, in the name of the abstract and blind religion of human rights.

It is no coincidence that Israel has been hated for decades by a post-Christian and post-national French left which, after having venerated Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China (some of their elders did not hesitate to collaborate with Hitler's Germany), submitted to Islam as the final imperial banner to bring down nations. It is France that they vomit up in Israel. The France of yesteryear and eternal France. France, its nation-state, its millennial history and its sacred land. Israel is the mirror of France

whom they hate so much that they want to erase even its reflection.

The flattering mirror has become a broken mirror.

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1. Gallimard, 1985.

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Nogaret

The slap of the century It's the most famous slap in history. A slap that made France more than many sword strokes or great phrases. A slap or rather a bellows, say the literary people; an iron gauntlet, historians specify. A gauntlet thrown down to men and to God. A gauntlet, a bellows, a slap, which has perhaps never been given. Never received. A slap, a bellows, a gauntlet, of which we still do not know whether the putative author was Guillaume de Nogaret or Giacomo Colonna known as Sciarra. A Frenchman or an Italian.

This one, from a great Roman family, is one of those condottieres whose Renaissance would soon immortalize haughty and rough face. Nogaret is one of those brilliant jurists from the South, the Plaisians, Flote, Marigny, all these “knights in law” who, since the 12th century, have used their knowledge of the Roman “imperium” to break the feudal and ecclesiastical rights which limit the sovereignty of the Capetian kings. Michelet calls them the “tyrants of France”, but recognizes that these “demolishers of the Middle Ages” founded “modern civil law”. They are the ones who will build the absolute Monarchy.

The Nogarets come from Languedoc; It is said that Guillaume's grandfather was Cathar. The wicked tongues of the church claim that his determination to break privileges

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ecclesiastics springs from family vengeance. He was appointed mage-judge, a sort of tribunal in his own right, for the seneschal of Beaucaire, near Nîmes. He also negotiated the passage of the city of Montpellier under the sovereignty of the King of France. A few months before this historic slap, he became the main collaborator of Philippe le Bel. Nogaret became de facto chancellor, even if he does not have the official title.

On this Saturday, September 7, 1303, it was sunny and warm in Anagni, an important city populated by thirty thousand souls. Rome then had no more, and its two hundred thousand inhabitants made Paris the most populous city in Europe. Fifty kilometers from Rome, it is the favorite vacation spot of Pope Boniface VIII and his family, the powerful Caetani dynasty. Behind high walls, the city dominates the ancient Via Latina which connects Naples to Rome. Nogaret has been in Italy for many months, but time is running out. His negotiations with the papacy failed. He has learned a few days ago that Pope Boniface VIII is preparing the “excommunication” of the King of France. The bull, whose publication is scheduled for September 8, could lead to the pure and simple deposition of Philippe le Bel. Historians still wonder if the King of France ordered to “apprehend to the body” the pope or if he let it happen. Or if he was unaware of Nogaret's activities.

At dawn, an imposing cohort of five hundred horsemen and a thousand infantrymen pressed in front of the city's fortifications. The Reîtres do not speak French. They come from neighboring Tuscany and Campania. The greatest aristocratic families of the region, the Supino, the Ceccano, the Di

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Mattia, joined forces with the Colonnas; everyone dreams of taking revenge on the Caetani clan, who exploited the access of one of their own to the Holy See to accumulate prebends and privileges. Nogaret covered them with gold; Sciarra commands them. They have no trouble entering the city walls. The gold of the King of France was able to convince.

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THE SLAP The enthusiastic crowd shouts: “Long live the King of France, may the Pope die!” » Nogaret takes the time to harangue the numerous onlookers, to justify himself, to plead his cause. The soldiers become emboldened. Attack the palace where Benedetto Caetani has retired. Even the cathedral is busy. At 6 p.m., it's all over. Nogaret has the fleur-de-lys banner raised over the pope's house. He faces it with ostentatious dignity. He receives the armed intruders on his bed, dressed in the red pontifical mantle, the tiara on his head, and clutching in his hands the keys of Saint Peter and a crucifix carved from the wood of Golgotha. When he leans forward with false humility and murmurs, “Here is the collar, here is the head,” legend has it that Nogaret held Colonna’s arm and his iron gauntlet. The famous slap!

Nogaret wastes no time. He summons the pope to convene a general council to respond to the crimes of heresy, simony, blasphemy and usurpation. The other haughtily refuses. Nogaret doesn't care; he won his sprint race; and launched the heresy procedure before the Pope drew his supreme weapon of excommunication. Meanwhile, Sciarra has given rein to his thugs, who are pushing and brutalizing, ransacking and pillaging the august residence without scruple. The crowd of residents mingles with them in frenzied disorder. Benedetto Caetani has a justified reputation for both greed and cowardice; he has accumulated countless prebends all his life and his taste for profit has not

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weakened by becoming the successor of Saint Peter. Nogaret even accused the Pope's nephews of having robbed their uncle.

Nogaret will not savor his victory for long. On September 9, residents once again invaded the Pope's palace, shouting "Long live the Pope!" Death to foreigners! » The versatility of crowds is not new. No doubt overcome by a feeling of guilt, they returned most of the proceeds of their plunder, under pressure from their wives and against the promise of a “papal indulgence”… Nogaret was wounded in the attack. He fled the city and reached the ramparts of Ferentino, where he would await his revenge under the protection of Rinaldo Da Supino. He remained there until the election of Benedict XI on October 22, 1303.

Boniface VIII has only a few weeks to live. At 70, the shock was too severe. He won't recover. He distributes pardons in abundance, even in Nogaret! He reconciles with everyone, even with the king of France. The imperious Holy Father became a tender pastor. The intractable fighter, humble penitent. Returning to the Vatican, he died there on the night of October 11 to 12, 1307.

From his retirement, Nogaret does not disarm. His followers spread a sarcastic tercet on their late adversary: “He came in like a fox He reigned like a lion He died like a dog. »

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The emotion is immense throughout Christianity. Dante immortalized him in his famous verses from Purgatory : “I see him, he enters Anagni, the fleur-de-lis. I see Christ captive in his vicar; I saw him mocked a second time; he is again watered with gall and vinegar; he is put to death between bandits. »

The King of France himself seems affected by the scandal. A few days before Christmas, in Toulouse, Philippe le Bel will give Nogaret a frosty welcome. But a few months later, he will shower him with gifts. In the meantime, Nogaret pleaded his case to the king. Was the king playing a double game? Was he changing things? Philip the Fair, like all the Capetians, is a sincere Christian; his faith, scrupulous and authentic. His private person submits without hesitation to the supreme authority of the pontiff; but the king cannot bow to papal authority. This separation of the spiritual and the temporal, Philippe le Bel practices it instinctively.

He cannot give in. This would mean renouncing centuries of slow royal construction. Nogaret's arguments are implacable. Undeniable. The story of events speaks for him.

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THE POPE’S MULE The Pope has gone too far; the king of France too. Both men are as intrepid, as imperious, as proud, as imbued with their prerogatives as each other. Philippe is younger than Boniface; he imposes it physically; he is not nicknamed “le Bel” by chance. The Pope is old, but the liveliness of his spirit is intact. He was one of those brilliant and iconoclastic young minds who did not hesitate to juggle with the Holy Scriptures, going so far as to question the virginity of Mary or the reality of the Trinity. For the sole joy of the joust, for the sole pleasure of arousing fear on the faces of his old masters. He had no idea that one day, a legal roué named Nogaret would turn his rascally provocations against the hoary pope that he has become, accusing him of all the evils of the earth, heresy, simony, blasphemy, and same sodomy.

Philip the Fair is “emperor in his kingdom”. The pope is sovereign pontiff, pontifex maximus, which formerly designated the emperor of Rome. The tiara he wears on his head recalls his august heritage. Clever minds even wrote a “donation of Constantine”, by which the glorious emperor Constantine, at the time of his conversion to Christianity, would have bequeathed his Western empire to the popes. The text is a fake, but at the time, everyone wants to believe it.

The pope plays on both sides, the sacred and the temporal. We kiss his mule. The pope is vicar of Christ and no longer just vicar of Peter. At their coronation, we

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whispers to the sovereign pontiffs: “Know that you are the father of princes and kings, rector of the universe and on earth vicar of Jesus Christ our savior. » Boniface VIII took this very seriously. He waited a long time to realize his dream. He had to endure many failures and humiliations. He always felt above others, above his colleagues and rivals, destined from all eternity for the supreme role. Since he has been on the throne of Peter, Benedetto Caetani can no longer contain himself. Receiving the ambassadors of Albert of Habsburg in 1301, he wore the imperial crown and brandished a sword: “Can I not watch over the rights of the Empire? I am the Emperor. » He had a superb funerary monument erected for himself during his lifetime, causing a huge scandal throughout Christendom for the pagan ways of a deified Roman emperor.

For a long time, the King of France let it happen. Unlike the Emperor, he does not claim temporal sovereignty over the entire Christian world. Submits to the pope, in the spiritual order. The alliance between the King of France and the sovereign pontiff contained with rare effectiveness the pretensions of the Emperor of Germany, who also wanted to be – first and foremost – the legitimate successor of the Roman emperors. The king of France gave his armies to the

pope; the pope gave his blessing to the king of France. The Germanic emperors never managed to break this alliance of iron and grace. HA Rome, we celebrated the victory of the French armies at Bouvines almost as much as in Paris. And everyone remembers the humiliation of Canossa, in 1077, when Emperor Henry IV of Germany had to request an audience with Pope Gregory VII, waiting in front of the fortress for three days barefoot or on his knees in the snow. Boniface VIII could not imagine

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that one day Philippe le Bel would play Canossa for him again, but in reverse. The beautiful alliance between the Christian king and the sovereign pontiff is falling apart…

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THE SACRED BONDS OF MONEY The king of France needs money. A huge, permanent, obsessive need for money. Building the nation-state, far from the reciprocal services of feudalism, always costs more. Bankers and traders are its first victims. Philip the Fair despoils and expels the Lombards; despoiled and expelled the Jews. But it's not enough ; it's never enough. The king of France's lawyers also became financial apprentices; they play on the gold or silver content of the royal currency, unknowingly inventing future monetary devaluations of which our Republics will not be stingy; but at the time, there was a close link between God and money, between Res publica and currency: Philip the Fair was accused of being a “counterfeiter”. He doesn't care. He created the first indirect tax: the “maltôte”. This nickname, found by the people, is taken up by the king, bravache.

There remains the Church. The clergy have owned great property since time immemorial. Philippe le Bel raises decimes. The Pope cries out. Feudal law and ecclesiastical privileges protect the clergy, who can neither be judged by royal justice nor imposed by the royal treasury. Philippe le Bel turns a deaf ear. Conflicts multiply, tempers heat up, minds sharpen. The Pope establishes an autonomous bishopric in Pamiers; the king prohibits any transfer of money outside the kingdom. The pope sends a legate to protest to the king; the legate is imprisoned. The Pope publishes a bull of condemnation; the bubble is burned. The Pope puts pressure on the French bishops; the king, supported by the University of Paris, holds

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against the pope a general assembly where the deputies of the cities joined the barons and the bishops, on April 10, 1302. The Estates General were born. Nogaret, king's prosecutor, thunders against the pope. Obtains the almost unanimous condemnation of all the representatives of the “nation”. No bishop dared to separate himself from the royal lot. The Church of France is consecrated. Gallicanism was born.

French bishops beg Vatican envoys to let them pay the taxes demanded by the king. The Pope “prefers to be a dog rather than a Frenchman” and announces that he will destroy the “superb Gallican”. Nogaret then suggests to the king to launch the trial of the pope for heresy. The king hesitates, sincerely affected by the “proofs” that Nogaret brings him; it is his duty as a Christian to prevent this scandal of a heretic at the head of the Church, but first orders Nogaret to find a compromise. To negotiate. Hence his trip to Italy at the beginning of 1303.

Compromise is impossible to find. The Pope doesn't want it. The Pope wants to correct “his very dear son Philippe”. The Pope wants to dictate his law. Boniface still tries to separate the wheat from the chaff: “Without a doubt, I personally consider the king to be a good and Catholic prince, but I fear that he has advisors who are not very useful. » And to compare these evil geniuses of Philip the Fair to Achitopel, advisor to Absalom, son of King David who wanted to usurp his throne and ended tragically. In the Old Testament Book of Kings, Achitopel means “ruin of my brother.” Nogaret is Achitopel. The insult is not light.

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The Pope will not take long to understand that we are well beyond a simple story of Achitopel. It is his theological-political conception that is in question.

Boniface VIII published a bull that the King of France could not let pass without reacting: “Two swords are in the power of the Church, the spiritual and the material. But this one must be handled for the Church, this one by the Church. The first by priests, the second by kings and soldiers, but at the request of the priest. It is appropriate, in fact, that one sword be subject to the other and that the temporal power be subject to the spiritual. » Philippe le Bel cannot tolerate such a transgression. Like his ancestors, the Capetian considers that he derives his power from God alone. There is no intermediary between him and God, even the Pope. Its legitimacy cannot be subject to human intermediation. No supervision or censor. Not of father correcting his son. Nogaret's audacity stopped a possible and dangerous theocratic evolution of the Roman Church. Some, in the Vatican, including his successor, understood this and corrected the situation. As Ernest Renan carefully noted, centuries later, the worst slap received by Boniface VIII was not so much that of Nogaret or Sciarra as that given by his successor Clement V, who took up all of Nogaret's arguments to justify Philip the Fair and overwhelm his predecessor.

The Western scene was definitively cleansed of its Eastern miasma. The Pope dies of grief, his dream shattered: the dream of unity of Christianity – Res publica christiana – under

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the domination of the pope, who, uniting the two swords in his hands, could depose kings without his subjects revolting.

As soon as he learned of the election of the new pope, Benedict XI, Nogaret rushed to Rome. Meeting Pierre de la Chapelle, Archbishop of Toulouse. During his weeks of forced inaction, he understood that the only justification for the attack on Anagni – and to avoid his excommunication and the anger of the king – lay in continuing the proceedings against the heretic pope. Even after the death of Boniface VIII.

On June 7, 1304, the new sovereign pontiff absolved Philip the Fair but excommunicated fourteen people, including Nogaret. He will see his sentence commuted to penance: he will have to complete several pilgrimages, and is obliged to go to the Holy Land and never return. Nogaret died before being able to make this dangerous journey in a region once again under the control of Islam after the end of the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem. But a month later, in Perugia, Benedict XI died in turn. The procedure is suspended. The Church has not finished with this devil Nogaret. On October 13, 1307, the king seized all the property of the Templars present on the territory of the kingdom.

It's always the same story, the same rapacity, the same confiscation: after the Jews and the Lombards, the Templars. The order, returned from the crusade, is too rich and too powerful. Philippe le Bel decided to shoot him down. Prosecutor Nogaret is back on duty. Always with the same methods, the same accusations: heresy, simony, idolatry, sodomy. Routine. The Templars also made their case worse by adopting

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the savage customs of the Muslim sects of the “Assassins” of Syria. But the Templars are religious and therefore do not depend on royal justice. Routine again. Nogaret remains inflexible. He reminds the king that the proceedings for heresy against Pope Boniface VIII are not closed. And that could make his successor think. Nogaret was right. On March 22, 1312, the Pope, Clement V, agreed to dissolve the order of the Templars and to condemn its main leaders for heresy, sodomy, idolatry. The king leaves it to the sovereign pontiff to finish the procedure against Pope Caetani. And to clear him.

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JURISTS WHO DECAPITATE A LAWYER After tearing the seamless robe of the Church, Nogaret burned both the crusade and chivalry. With his king Philip the Fair, he gave birth to these cold monsters that are nationstates. No successor to Philip the Fair returned to his legacy. Louis In 1905, the Republic divorced from the Church. And it is a Church in poor condition, in a dechristianized Europe of the 20th century, which will take a discreet and belated revenge on its nation-state tormentors by offering the blue star-spangled flag of the Virgin Mary to Jean Monnet and his dream of United States of Europe. Mass has not yet been said.

In the name of the European Union, the Commission, the Central Bank and the Court of Justice enclose the sovereignty of the nations that compose it in an increasingly tight corset of rules. Rome is now in Brussels, Frankfurt and Luxembourg. The Catholic religion has only been replaced by those of the market and human rights. There are slaps that get lost.

Nogaret's slap will remain, whatever happens, a memorable date in our history, a milestone. In the 18th century, Voltaire mocked this defeated Boniface VIII. A century later, the ultramontane reaction would cover Nogaret with opprobrium and,

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taking up the ancient curses of Jacques de Molay against the Capetian dynasty, will explain that only the sacrifice of Joan of Arc redeemed the heirs of Philip the Fair in the eyes of Providence. It is true that, in accordance with the imprecations of the master of the Templars, the king and the pope died in the year that followed (1314). All the descendants of the great king seemed marked with the seal of infamy, between the stillborn children and the scandal of the Tour de Nesle, with his two wives of crown princes accused of adultery, condemned, shorn, locked up for life, while that the merry men who served as their lovers, the brothers Philippe and Gautier d'Aunay, were skinned alive, their genitals cut off and delivered to the dogs, before being decapitated, their bodies dragged and then hung by the armpits. Philip the Fair had no descendants who reigned beyond his three sons. Can we imagine a greater curse for a dynasty so proud of this “Capetian miracle” which saw this lineage reproduce continuously over the centuries?

Before another sacrilege stained, in the eyes of the devout, the impious French nation: the death of Louis XVI. A sacrilege linked to the other by an invisible thread, like the true red thread of the French monarchy and the thousand-year history of our nation, and which Charles Péguy brought to light with sublime brilliance in his Joint Note on M. Descartes and Cartesian philosophy : “When the French Revolution decapitated royalty, it did not decapitate royalty. She only decapitated modern people… It was not the sons of commoners who beheaded a son of Saint Louis […]. It was the sons of Philip the Fair who beheaded a son of Philip the Fair. They were lawyers

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who beheaded a lawyer. It was forensic scientists who beheaded a forensic scientist. »

Nogaret's slap changed the course of our country's history. France will henceforth be this unique little piece of land in the world which does not subject the law of the State to the law of God. No one sacred finds favor in his eyes. Nogaret is the forever incarnation of this France as deeply Christian as it is anticlerical. The defeat of Boniface VIII put the final nail in the coffin of universal Christianity, the ultimate nostalgia for the Roman Empire. It was the second fall of Rome. And of the unitary myth of humanity threatened by the curse of the Tower of Babel and the “confusion of

LANGUAGES ". The hour of nation-states had come with its people gathered behind their state and in solidarity with their monarch. At no time had the people of France, including the prelates, thought of abandoning the king, for fear of the pope's threats of excommunication.

A slap made Nogaret, who made Philippe le Bel, who made France.

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The Grand Ferré

To the unknown soldier He is the ancestor of all popular giants; the carcass as large as the heart; as strong as tender, as heroic as patriotic, as fierce as devoted; the unknown ancestor of all Quasimodos, of all Obélixes. It is called “the Grand Ferré”. He will embody the people of France.

The scene takes place in a small village, near Compiègne. After asking permission from the regent and their priest, the peasants defended the village: two hundred enthusiastic and courageous plowmen, but hardly used to handling weapons. In their midst, “a peasant of incredible strength, a giant, but humble,” says Michelet, who holds in his enormous hand an ax so heavy that he is the only one who can carry it. The English soldiers camped at Creil are already rejoicing: “Let's drive out these peasants, the place is strong and good to take. » Badly goes against them: “The peasants began to knock as if they were threshing their wheat in the threshing floor; the arms rose, fell, and each blow was fatal,” Michelet recounts as if he were there.

The Grand Ferré's ax caused a massacre: “In one day, he killed more than forty men... But the Grand Ferré, heated by this work, drank a quantity of cold water, and was seized with a fever. » He falls ill, becomes bedridden, becomes exhausted. The English soldiers come running, this time sure of their deed. The giant

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stands up, in a supreme effort, kills five and scares away the others. This will be his last exploit. He's going to bed. And die.

We are at the start of the Hundred Years' War, in 1359. English soldiers are the occupying power. They have just crushed the French army at the battle of Poitiers, September 19, 1356. The king is a prisoner, his barons too; its soldiers cut to pieces by English archers; the Dauphin, Charles, a sickly 18year-old prince, struggles to assert his authority. Part of the territory is occupied by the victors, who pillage, ransom, burn and rape. The vanquished are not left out. Disbanded French soldiers maraud and rob already miserable peasants. The king is a prisoner, everything is permitted. Oaths of obedience no longer apply. Neither do the moral rules imposed by the Church. It's playtime. The young nobles have nothing but contempt for these ragged peasants who carry no weapons. They derisively nickname them Jacques Bonhomme. They repeat, laughing, the saying: “Anoint naughty man, he will point you; grip it naughty, he will anoint you. » The peasants are terrified. They no longer sleep, they hide in underground spaces. But in 1358, they revolted; rush at the nobles. They invade the castles in groups of ten, twenty, a hundred, slaughter the lords, rape the ladies to humiliate the lineage, kill the children to exterminate it. They also have a king, the peasant Guillaume Charles. Already, the “Jacques” troops are becoming emboldened, disciplined, banners flying in the wind. They come out innumerable from their dens, their caves, their woods, armed with their flails and their sickles. It is the first jacquerie in the history of France.

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ETIENNE MARCEL In Paris, the capital is also in turmoil. The Paris of the bourgeois, of the merchants, of the small trades, is heated against the traitors, the parasites, the idlers. Paris rebels. Paris gives itself a leader: Étienne Marcel, brilliant and rich merchant. For the first time, Paris plays its role as capital of France. Paris is Paris. Paris subverts the States General, brought together by force by the Dauphin. Paris arms the people and fortifies the city. Paris massacres the Dauphin's favorites. Paris demands a vote on taxes.

This Parisian revolution comes from afar. The political revolution was preceded by a sociological, cultural and intellectual revolution with the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics , itself triggered by an economic, geographical and technological revolution.

From the 12th century, the routes to the Mediterranean, closed since the Muslim expansion of the 7th century, reopened. Pilgrims mingle with the goods. Money is flowing again. In 1119, the Jews established themselves in Paris; they will move a little later to rue des Rosiers. The Lombards follow. The Templars create their deposit bank. From the 13th century, Paris became a university city, a trading city and a royal city. The boat becomes its emblem. The 14th century amplified general enrichment through unprecedented technical revolutions. The first firearms, with gunpowder, were used in 1338 in France.

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Linen, white and fresh, replaces coarse woolen clothes. The first paper mills make their ticking sound which signals the announced end of the parchment and the manuscript. A clock will soon be installed on all the belfries of France, like the one that Charles V installed in 1370 on a tower of the Palace in Paris. Time will no longer be punctuated by church bells, but by the abstraction of numbers. Man's time will no longer be regulated only by God's time.

The nobles, walled in their castles, their chivalrous rites and their crude games, remain away from these movements. Their strongholds are becoming poorer. The merchants are the new conquerors, the new nomads, intrepid and armed, conveyors on horseback of carts through the putrid swamps and dangerous roads. They invest in paper mills, which earn them a lot. With their new accounting books, they laugh at the old curses on money manipulators and ignore the ancient religious prohibitions on lending at interest. They are no longer ashamed of accumulating fortunes. They make fun of the lordly families, mock the ancient and rough paterfamilias as a ridiculous tyrant, and judge their obedient and fearful children stupid, taking pride in raising sassy, insolent, disrespectful, but active and dynamic offspring.

Two societies, two worlds collide. Two elites. Land wealth versus movable wealth. A start of quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. The war with the English seems to give the Moderns the decisive advantage. The fight became open as soon as the defeat of the French chivalry at Poitiers became known. The merchants show off.

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Étienne Marcel is “king of France”. “Modernity” triumphs.

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1789 BEFORE 1789

But Paris sins through pride. Paris forgets that it is not France. Paris forgets that there is France. The Parisian bourgeoisie, blinded by its modernist enthusiasm, did not appreciate the archaism of the sacred. Paris is a world in a world. A big city in a country of countryside and small towns. A city without farmers. A city of uprooted people.

A moment, a short moment, Étienne Marcel guesses it. He needs allies and reaches out to the Jacques. It is the alliance of the capital and the countryside around the national project. It is from this period that the expression “good Frenchman” dates. It is 1789 before 1789. It is the Republic of Jules before the Third Republic. But Étienne Marcel does not have the means for his policy: “Paris could not yet lead France, Marcel did not have the resources for the Terror; he could not besiege Lyon or guillotine the Gironde,” writes Michelet. In a hurry to force his destiny, he abandons the beggars to their fate, which he predicts will be disastrous, and opens Paris to an intriguer, an ally of the English, Charles the Bad, king of Navarre. So, France no longer follows Paris. The province remains loyal to the Dauphin, the future Charles V. The countryside feels betrayed by Paris. The bourgeois did not understand what was happening. We can't blame them. It was unpredictable and unprecedented in history. Patriotism was being born, in the midst of the poverty-stricken countryside. Michelet says it in one sentence: “The jacquerie begun against the nobles continued against England… England, by holding the king and the lords, had believed it held France. She realized that she was missing

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only one thing, the nation. » Pushed by the province, the Dauphin returns to Paris. Étienne Marcel will die.

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HALF-MAN AND HALF-TAURUS The two worlds, nobility and bourgeoisie, tradition and modernity, had in the fury of their struggle forgotten a detail, a third world: the peasants who suffer and grumble in silence.

The History of France thus opens, at this moment of the Hundred Years' War, the first of the cycles which will never cease to follow one another, that of the elites who compete for a country, hostage to their quarrels. Predatory and autocratic elites, forged by the Parisian monster of a world city and a centralized royal power, who while in their fight for absolute and undivided domination, forget that the people also demand sovereignty in the name of the nation. State persecutions are met with uprisings, popular “emotions”, in outbreaks of violence which surprise each time by their ferocity and cruelty.

The elites clash endlessly, with incredible rage, until they forget the object of their quarrel: France. They neglect it, despise it, throw it to the dogs, to the first dog that promises them victory and prebends, whether English, Spanish, German, Russian, American, Soviet, European: it is the eternal and always current “party from abroad”. So, the people rebel against the betrayal of their predatory elites and remind them of the path of patriotism.

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This patriotism which is born in the humble but terrible ax of the Grand Ferré, whose quivering lyricism of Michelet describes to us in detail the slow and painful advent: “This people is visibly simple and crude still, impetuous, blind, half-man and half-bull... He does not know how to guard his doors or guard himself from his appetites. When he has slaughtered the enemy like wheat in a barn, when he has sufficiently hacked him with his ax, and when he has warmed up to the work, the good worker drinks cold, and lies down to die. Patience ; under the harsh education of wars, under the rod of the English, the brute will become a man. Caught more closely just now, and as if torn, it will escape, ceasing to be itself, and transfiguring itself; Jacques will become Jeanne, Jeanne the virgin, the Maid. »

This virgin who will soon say: “My heart bleeds when I see the blood of a Francis. » A word that could not escape our incomparable dowser of French patriotism, who forged national consciousness by exhuming its obscure and glorious beginnings at the same time: “Such a word would be enough to mark in history the true beginning of France. Since then, we have had a homeland. These peasants are French, do not be ashamed, they are already the French people, it is you, O France!… Soiled, disfigured, we will bring them as they are to the day of justice and history , so that we can say to them, to these old people of the 14th century: “You are my father, you are my mother. You conceived me in tears. You sweated and blooded to make me a France. Blessed are you in your tomb! God forbid that I should ever deny you!” » This sublime warning, however, will at no time be heard by the elites. Neither before him nor after him. All

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the History of France can be summed up by this curse of constantly repeated denial. The Great Ferré never put his ax in the accessories aisle again.

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Charles VI

Don't touch my king He becomes crazy. He has hallucinations. Tantrums of fury.

He no longer recognizes anyone, not even his wife. He doesn't remember anything. He no longer even knows that he is King of France, that he is Charles VI; admits his distaste for fleurde-lis. At each crisis, he is tied to a cart and locked up. Those around him are frightened, the doctors helpless; even wizards and priests can't do anything about it.

In 1392, he rushed at his brother, sword in hand. The king's madness becomes public rumor and alarm. When he regains his senses, he thanks God at Notre-Dame de Paris or at the cathedral of Saint-Denis. He resumes his job as king, receives embassies, presides over councils. But the periods of remission are getting shorter and shorter. The state machine works very well on its own. The provosts and bailiffs administer and judge, Parliament issues its rulings, and royal decrees are published.

So, some sharp minds begin to ask themselves the forbidden question: what to do with a useless king? The most learned know how to answer. Ancient texts attest that the last Merovingian king was deposed by Pepin the Short, son of Charles Martel and father of Charlemagne, with the support of the pope himself. A lazy king is a “king who brings nothingness”, rex nihil faciens : a lazy king is a useless king. From the top

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Middle Ages, Christianity shaped the portrait of the ideal prince. It must be fair and strong. Strong to be fair. “Because we could not make the just strong, we made the strong just, so that there would be peace, which is the common good,” Pascal would later say.

The common good, which is also called Res publica, prevails over particular interests, even those of feudal lords, even those of the king. A tyrannical or incompetent king no longer has the legitimacy to remain on the throne. A useless king must be deposed. Knocked down, replaced. But Charles VI will not be. In the Kingdom of France, this is not done. The prestige of the French monarchy is such that it makes the king untouchable. Abroad, among our big neighbors, in England or Spain, or in Germany, we are less magnanimous. We never hesitate to depose, to overthrow, to kill. Not to mention Eastern habits where tyranny is corrected by murder. France is the exception that proves the rule. “This surprising French exception”, of which the great historian Bernard Guénée speaks. In France, the king is sacred. The coronation made him the inviolable chosen one of God. “There are three things that belong to 1

God,” wrote Victor Hugo: the irrevocable, the irreparable, the indissoluble. .

»

It was Pepin the Short who established the royal coronation upon his accession in 751. The Capetians imitated the Carolingians. Reims Cathedral became the obligatory place for coronations in the 12th century, in memory of the baptism of Clovis. The ritual of the ceremonies was carefully codified in the 13th century.

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Charles VI was crowned. Charles VI is loved, adored. When he goes to Notre-Dame to pray, the crowd flocks to his path. She cheers him, touches him, caresses him, cries with tenderness, compassion, despair: “A! dearest Prince, we will never be so good, we will never see you. Curse your death! we will never have anything but war, since you have left us. » The crowd is premonitory, the crowd is prophet

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CUCKOLD AND CRAZY

The Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, the king's uncle, had the Duke of Orléans, the king's brother, assassinated; he had been railing for months against the growing influence his rival was gaining over the mad king's wife. It is rumored that Queen Isabeau was the mistress of her brother-in-law; that she participated in the orgies to which the Duke of Orléans had acquired a taste in Italy. Nothing is surprising from this foreign queen, who came from Bavaria. The king loved her too much, celebrated her too much, adored her too much. She mocked him, deceived him; some say it was she who drove him crazy.

Civil war rages, but the king does nothing. To the north, the Burgundians impatiently await the English; in the south, people mourn the Duke of Orléans and hope that the king's son will save the kingdom. The English invasion is being prepared, but the king does nothing. In August 1415, Henry V's English troops landed at the port of Harfleur, but the king was not there. On October 25, 1415, English archers crushed the French chivalry at Agincourt, but the king was not there. In 1420, Queen Isabeau of Bavaria negotiated the Treaty of Troyes and offered her daughter Catherine to Henry V, who, on the death of Charles VI, would become king of France and England; the king is there, affixes his royal initials to the felonious treaty, but his spirit is not there. The day before his death, in October 1422, he shot again with a crossbow in the Bois de Vincennes.

The reckless love of the French for their king will lead the kingdom to the edge of the abyss. Around his pit, some dare

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shout: “Long live King Henry, king of France and England!” » But most cry, lament, moan.

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RELIGION ROYALE The people love their king even though he is crazy. The people love their king, even if he is mad. The people love their king because he is crazy. Charles VI is nicknamed “the Madman” by the people above but “the Beloved” by the people below. It would take centuries for Louis XV to replace him as the only “beloved” king in French history. The coronation clothed the king with France of an armor of love which does not protect its neighboring monarchs. The king is the darling of the people of France. These are the religious fanatics who will kill Kings Henry III and Henry IV in the name of legitimate tyrannicide. It was the fierce revolutionaries who condemned Louis Capet to death. The people will never approve of these executions. The people will miss their deceased monarchs, for whom they will be forever inconsolable.

The French people have never apostatized their royal religion. Napoleon understood this, who, after having “picked up the crown from the gutter”, placed it on his glorious head of all victorious battles. The Republicans stubbornly wanted to pass on this royal passion to the French just as the teachers of the Third Republic had decided to eradicate the two supreme evils that were in their eyes Christianity and alcoholism, as Pagnol recounts with nostalgic tenderness. in The Glory of My Father. The royal religion was, with Christianity, one of "those stars in the sky which would never light up again", which the socialist Viviani was so proud to have extinguished. This empty throne is the beating heart of all

crises which almost took away the Republic. The Republicans

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dressed the king as a tyrant; they adorned themselves with the glorious finery of Brutus, when the people dreamed of a Caesar.

At the time of Charles VI, the great minds of the time wanted to get rid of the coronation which gave too much power to the clerics and too much power to the king adored by the people. Likewise, today, progressive elites have never admitted the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. They fought as hard as they could to safeguard the traditional parliamentary system; denounced the new plebiscite, Caesarist, even fascist regime. Never admitted defeat. They have never stopped pleading for a Sixth Republic, which would only be the return of the Fourth . Have never stopped accusing the election of the president by universal suffrage of all evils, carefully keeping quiet the fundamental reason for their hostility to this election: it gives the

power to the people, whom they cherish in words to better fear him, even despise him in the truth of their hearts and minds.

And History resumed its course. We have reconnected with the past litany of imperious kings, wise kings, good-natured kings, lazy kings. Our penultimate monarch was not crazy, but was a useless king.

However, he was not overthrown or deposed before the end of his reign.

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1. See Bernard Guénée, La Folie de Charles VI, CNRS Éditions, 2016.

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Bishop Cauchon

We'll be stronger together There are names that are destinies. Curses. Eternal assignments. Unfair reductions. When your name is Cauchon, you can only be dirty, deceitful, bad. One can only be wicked, sad sire, comedic traitor. Pierre Cauchon is the dark side of the luminous story of Joan of Arc. The cursed part. The Antichrist of Christ's beloved daughter. Facing the heroine covered in white linen, facing the heroic virgin, facing the original patriot, facing the condemned innocence, he is the sellout, the prosecutor, the executioner.

However, the life of Pierre Cauchon bears no resemblance to the image preserved by posterity. He is a scholar in a France of illiterates. The cream of the crop: bishop of the diocese of Beauvais, doctor of theology and even demonology. The trial of Joan of Arc is the founding, almost mythological scene of their confrontation; in their face-to-face, nothing less than the future of France is at stake. It is first of all a cultural shock: the little shepherdess from her distant Lorraine, on the borders of the kingdom, “knows neither A nor B”, and according to her companions themselves “was very ignorant in everything, except the art of War ".

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It is the meeting of an urban man and a peasant woman, a Parisian and a provincial woman, a notable and a wild woman. Cauchon is learned, Jeanne is insolent. To her treacherous questions, she responds with nonsense. “What was Saint Michael like when he appeared to you?

– I saw no crown for him; and of his clothes I know nothing.

– Was he naked? – Do you think that God does not have enough to clothe him?

– Did he have hair? 1

– Why would they have been cut off?

?»

Cauchon is stubborn, Jeanne is stubborn. When she refuses to answer his questions, she haughtily says “get over it” which infuriates him. At the opening of each session, he asks him to take an oath to tell the whole truth. At the opening of each session, she vehemently refuses: the secrets of her voices belong only to her and the king!

“How do you recognize your voices?

– I know them because they are named after me. – Do you know if you are in the grace of God? – If I am not there, God puts me there; and if I am there, God will make me there

here. »

For her, he is the man of the “Godons”, because the English soldiers never stop swearing under their breath: “ God damned!” » For him, she is a sassy girl who laughs too much. A

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insolent girl who makes many jokes. An arrogant one who looks down on you. One of those girls of the people with truculent cheekiness. By spending so much time with the thugs, she adopted their thug ways. By hearing the voices of saints and angels, she thinks she is an angel and a saint. By repeating that she has “great will and great desire that the king should have his kingdom”, she ended up believing herself to be a kingmaker. By rubbing shoulders with princes, archbishops, dukes, she forgets that her father was only a humble plowman. By dint of leading a life, she despises the value of things. She was sold as a prize prisoner to the King of England by John of Luxembourg for a ransom of 10,000 crowns: a king's ransom! For her, it's barely a column of mercenaries, when he, Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, has difficulty getting his 100 crowns per court session paid by the English!

It was the University of Paris which, after a deliberation on July 14, 1430, asked him to investigate the trial of this Joan captured a few months earlier. Pierre Cauchon is the right man at the right place. He had been one of the negotiators of the Treaty of Troyes; this famous treaty of 1420, the “shameful Treaty of Troyes”, as it was nicknamed for centuries, which tore the crown of France from the son of Charles VI, to place it on the head of the heir of the King of England Henry V, the winner of the Battle of Agincourt, in 1415.

The clerics were worried about the Maid's growing popularity. Everyone knew his exploits, his childhood in Domrémy, his voices, his first darings, his first victories, his meeting with the “gentle Dauphin” in Chinon, where

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she then recognizes him as he has hidden among his courtiers. The capture of Orléans, its failure before Paris, its capture by the Burgundians before Compiègne. His escape attempt, his transfer to Rouen, his guard by English soldiers. A thousand legends surrounded him throughout Christianity. When she entered the towns she liberated, the crowd kissed her hands, the women stuck their rings to hers; we cut our standard into “butterflies” to keep it as a good luck charm; it was believed that she healed, that she worked miracles. It was even claimed that his prayer had resurrected a child who had died three days earlier.

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KIND DOLPHIN Our clerics saw in this fervor a popular superstition that they had the duty to eradicate; it was pure witchcraft that they had to burn. The fire had to be put out before it set the country, or even Europe, ablaze. The winner would put the vanquished on trial to show vividly who was the victor and who was the vanquished; to show that God was not with the vanquished but with the victor, and that Charles VII had entrusted his army to a witch.

Jeanne told her trial that she discussed with her voices, that she negotiated, quarreled, disobeyed them. We were suddenly projected back to the immemorial times of the Old Testament where Abraham negotiated with God the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. These biblical stories then filled the daily lives of populations with fervent faith. The Church was caught in its own trap. Joan behaved like those Jews who converse directly with God without the intermediary of a priest. It was a scandalous lesson in pride; scandalous heretical behavior.

Jeanne did not understand the importance of the affront or the scale of the stakes. She is all about her fight. She wants to put “her” king back on the throne. The obstacles in his path will be swept away. Without mercy.

But by driving her “gentle Dauphin” to Reims, Jeanne shook Pierre Cauchon’s beautiful building. In this race to legitimacy, it took a step ahead, while we

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assured the race was over, the war was over. She brought this 17-year-old rascal back into the game, who claimed to be Charles VII, even though we were not sure that he was of royal blood, as his mother, the famous Isabeau of Bavaria, had cuckolded her husband. , the “mad king” Charles VI.

Some claimed that Jeanne herself was the daughter the queen had with her brother-in-law's lover, Louis d'Orléans. Many rumors were circulating: the visit that an old woman had paid to the queen on June 12, 1407, in her residence on rue Babette; her age, which Jeanne mysteriously concealed despite repeated questions, eventually answering: “About 19 years old. » What did this “around” mean? Despite his repeated efforts, Pierre Cauchon could not make him confess his “secret”. Secret that she had entrusted to the Dauphin, to reassure him of his own parentage?

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ENGLISH PEACE Jeanne threw disorder into an order that people thought had been restored. Dynastic, political, social order. The University of Paris unanimously rallied the new power. The three orders, solemnly gathered in Paris, had approved the Treaty of Troyes. Pierre Cauchon was not unhappy to see the Capetians thrown into the dustbin of History. In 1414, he took a prominent part in the Cabochian revolt which was already believed to overthrow the monarchy. But the Parisians had recalled the Dauphin of France, Charles de Valois. This one had chased him away. Cauchon had his revenge.

La Pucelle brought the war back to a France that was believed to be pacified. Peace reigned. An English peace. But an English peace was better than a Hundred Years' War. We should reread article 24 of the Treaty of Troyes to better understand the issue: “And so that concord, peace and tranquility between the kingdoms of France and England are perpetually observed for the future […], that "advice and consent of the three states of the said kingdoms [...], be it ordered [...] the two crowns of France and England forever but perpetually, will remain together, and will be in the same person..."

In the middle of the 15th century, the feudal world was overturned and it was going to disappear. Printing will soon be invented by Gutenberg.

Gunpowder and bombards have already rendered vain the ancient art of chivalry and that of the crossbow. As we observed at Azincourt, the chivalrous codes of

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honor and noble combat are no longer in season. The Englishman did not hesitate to order the massacre of his French prisoners. Our arrogant lords, so proud of their noble districts, were exterminated by rustics from the taverns of London and the English countryside. Since the Crusades, the world has expanded, the routes to the East have reopened, contact has been reestablished with vast Empires, China, the Ottoman, the Muscovite. The Europeans discovered, startled, that other civilizations had not suffered the tragic destruction of the Roman Empire; they maintained secular and powerful imperial ensembles. The constant ambition shared by all our dynasties, from the Merovingians to the Carolingians, and from the Carolingians to the Capetians, had been to bring together the scattered elements of ancient Rome. The English monarchs seemed to fulfill their dreams. So, too bad if another dynasty pulls the chestnuts out of the fire. The English kings were cousins of ours. They spoke the same language, French, believed in the same God, and prayed to the same Lord, Jesus Christ, and submitted to the same Church. Together, we will be stronger against the Mohammedans and the heretics, proclaimed Pierre Cauchon and his friends. Our little France of yesteryear certainly had the bucolic charm of its hilly landscapes and its picturesque villages, they murmured, beguiling, but we are no longer able to face the giants who have arisen before our open eyes. This FrancoEnglish state is an unexpected opportunity for the French, they thought. We are the most numerous and the richest. The princes will be English, but their elites will be French.

This analysis was also part of a general movement in Europe at the time to bring together

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kingdoms in the name of “Christian” peace: Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were linked in 1385, and the Scandinavian kingdoms celebrated their union in Kalmar in 1397. This century would not end without Poland making common cause with Bohemia and Hungary, and the two crowns of Castile and Aragon uniting in 1492 in order to complete the Reconquista and definitively drive the Mohammedans from the Iberian Peninsula.

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ENGLISH ARCHERS AND BLITZKRIEG GERMAN

The kingdom of France and England was made to last. This whole did not lack coherence, neither political, nor cultural, nor geographical. If it had survived, the geologists of the future would have been able to rightly attest that the same rock masses made up the south of England and the Paris Basin, that the same lands continued without break from the Caux country, the Cotentin, Brittany to Cornwall and the London Basin. England hadn't always been an island...

The revolt of Jeanne and the kind Dauphin could and should have been contained and reduced. The English possessed military power; they occupied the richest lands of the kingdom; they had the support of the Church and the intelligentsia. The elites, embodied by Pierre Cauchon, had chosen reason over sentiment, the legality of treaties over the legitimacy of the former royal family, peace over war, the Church over superstition, the empire over the small homeland. They considered at the time that the French people, turbulent, combative, emotional, chimerical, changeable, capricious, as already described by Julius Caesar, always needed a tutor: whether this tutor was French or foreign mattered little to them. their eyes. This conviction of the French elites towards their own people is one of the common threads of French History. At every moment of crisis, after every defeat, he reappears on the surface.

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This story will repeat itself endlessly over the centuries, so boring to tell. It reached its apotheosis in 1940. It was inevitable. The collapse of our army before the German Blitzkrieg is the military debacle most comparable to that of Agincourt. Montoire's handshake between Pétain and Hitler was judged by many patriots as "shameful" as the Treaty of Troyes. The resistance fighters were called “terrorists”, like the “brigands” that Pierre Cauchon saw behind Jeanne’s friends.

The great historian Lucien Febvre then taught his listeners at the Collège de France that the German occupation zone corresponded to the contours of the territories under English domination during the Hundred Years' War. The collaborators preferred peace to war, and too bad if this peace turned out to be German, while in London Jean Monnet tried to resuscitate the kingdom of France and England. A declaration of union between the two countries was officially proposed on June 14, 1940 by the English cabinet, led by Winston Churchill. Between England and Germany, between the yes camp and that of the ja, everyone pulled back and forth, with the only common point being the conviction that France's time was over. Roosevelt was not wrong when he sarcastically compared de Gaulle to Joan of Arc.

The duel in which Cauchon and Jeanne engage goes beyond their persons and their time. The prosecutor does not hate the accused. He saves him from torture, offers him a lawyer, allows him to confess to a priest, even if it is to better spy on him. He is not insensitive, like the judges and the public in the courtroom, to the youthful and ambiguous charm of this young virgin strapped into military clothing. He advises her to wear "decent" women's clothing, in order to be guarded by

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jailers. These feminine clothes would have spared him the shackles on his feet and the wooden bar which, at night, prevented him from getting up. But the fierce Jeanne refuses anything that looks to her like a compromise with the enemy. Cauchon tries to avoid the fate reserved for him by the English soldiers, convinced that his virginity alone gave him magical powers, like the hair of the biblical hero Samson. He sets up a mock pyre to spare him the real one. He hopes to scare her so that she will retract and recognize the authority of the Church. The maneuver almost succeeded: Jeanne retracted; then, coming to his senses, retracts the retraction, abjures the abjuration. The English are fuming. Cauchon gets scared. She calls out to him, implacably: “Bishop, I die because of you! » He shouts to the English as they flee: “ Farewell! Farwell! Have a good meal! She is taken ! »

It was him or her. It will be her.

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1. The extracts from the trial are taken from Joan of Arc. The Rouen trial, read and commented on by Jacques Trémolet de Villiers, Les Belles Lettres, 2015.

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Charles VII

The canon state You should always be wary of supporting roles. Scamps who think they are giants, cowards who dream of being brave, pusillanimous people who turn out to be stubborn; of the beauty of the ugly. Our man is nothing like a king: none attribute of sovereign, no coronation mantle nor scepter; no fleur-de-lis or pose of majesty. A simple red jacket, widened at the shoulders to give fullness to a narrow torso, lined with fur at the wrists and neck; and a slightly ridiculous blue hat, to hide a pronounced baldness.

Examining this famous portrait of King Charles VII by Jean Fouquet, an art historian saw in it the “unforgettable image of a weak and weary man as much as the majestic effigy of a sovereign1 ”. A philistine's eye sees only bags under the eyes and thick lips, a sad look and a sullen expression. Louis XI has often been mocked, or praised, as the first “bourgeois king”; we discover that Charles VII already had the appearance. But it was undoubtedly his destiny to play a supporting role, a second knife, the “man next to”, the eternal subordinate: the “gentle Dauphin” of Joan of Arc, the hated father of Louis XI, the lover of the sensual Agnès Sorel, the debtor of the great financier Jacques Cœur.

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Charles VII was neither a knight-king nor a patron-king nor a builder-king nor a crusader-king. This is probably the reason for which his long reign of forty years, from 1422 to 1461, seems to have counted for nothing. Everything happens as if he continued to suffer after his death, and for eternity, from this “existential anguish” of which a historian speaks about him, that of an heir who is not sure of being the son of his father, the offspring of a landless, half-mad king, dismembered by English soldiers.

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FRANCE WAS DONE WITH SWORDS However, it is this dim-witted monarch, hero by default, who decisively changes the destiny of France. By forging the first permanent army in its history, Charles VII transformed the ancient kingdom of lilies dedicated to peace into a military monarchy, and indissolubly linked the fate of the nation to that of its weapons. In France and its army, opened with the famous phrase “France was made with swords”, General de Gaulle goes on to explain that five hundred years of Roman colonization left the Gauls who became French “the ideal – or the nostalgia – of a centralized state and a regular army. For the centralized State, several of them got involved, from Suger to Richelieu, from Colbert to Bonaparte. The regular army has only one father: Charles VII.

The first cavalry troop was established by a royal order of May 26, 1445 under the title of “Company of men of arms of the King’s ordinances”. Three years later, a new order created the militia of the Frank Archers, solid infantry available at any time. Each parish must provide an archer or crossbowman who “will be continually ready and who will be and will continually be in sufficient clothing and armed with salad, dagger, sword, bow, kit, and jackets or brigandine huques”. This is the first appearance of a reserve of soldiers of national dimension. They will be chosen by the elected officials of the municipality "among the most gifted and well-off for the fact and exercise without any other regard or favor to wealth or to

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What questions could we make about this? They will receive 4 tournament balance books per month. A new ordinance will subsequently create captains of free archers; they will swear an oath of loyalty to the king and will be placed under absolute dependence on the monarch and no longer on their lord.

The king quickly had fifteen so-called “orderly” mounted companies at his disposal, commanded by as many captains. Each is composed of a hundred spears; a “provided” lance includes six horsemen, including four fighters. The lower nobility wants their share of the “spear” and to command five men; the great lords requested a simple office of captain. Nine thousand horsemen are at the monarch's disposal at all times and obey only him. Troops are housed throughout the country; room and board are provided by the population in private houses or inns.

When hostilities resume with the English, this standing army will allow the king to end the Hundred Years' War to his advantage. The men, mostly from the ranks of the troops, had fought under the orders of Joan of Arc. They blindly obey their leaders, who have become the liege men of the king, Dunois or La Hire. For several years, some people did not hesitate to punch and shoot, to pillage, to steal, to kill; nicknamed “the Skinners”, they brought terror to Alsace and Lorraine. To incorporate them into his army, Charles VII pardoned them for all their crimes. A first rule which will be followed by all his successors: we are not careful about the manners and the moral pedigree of the troops which form the national army. German or Scottish or Swiss lansquenets

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in the royal armies; the Marseille or Parisian sans-culottes in the revolutionary armies; criminals in the Foreign Legion; the resistance gangsters in the FFI.

Jeanne bequeathed to her “gentle Dauphin” her men, even the least reputable; she also bequeathed him her “national” spirit, her popular mentality and her religiosity. It is the Christian soldier, like Joan, who fights for the descendant of Saint Louis. Charles VII's troop marches to reconquer his kingdom under the white cross banner of Saint Michael, the warrior archangel, protector of the Mount and of France. This religious nature of military power explains the constant policy of French monarchs against heresies and schisms. Without the fierce defense of the Catholic religion, the loyalty of the army to its king would be shaken; and the power of the monarch put in danger.

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THE KING IS ALWAYS READY This standing army must obey the king, and him alone, and defend the unity of the nation. At the time of Charles VII, the feudal lords still had the means to acquire troops by raising the seigneurial army. But soon, technical progress, those of cannons in particular, more and more powerful and more and more precise, will make the infantry the queen of battles, and cost more and more. The lords do not want to get off their horse. They don't even deign to supervise the men on foot. The lessons of the past were of no use to them: eight thousand French horsemen were massacred at Agincourt by English archers; the French cavalry had refused the day before the fight the offer from Paris to provide them with six

a thousand volunteers from its free companies: the participation of infantrymen would have spoiled the party!

The standing army's first mission will be to put an end to the recurring revolts of the lords. She will use it with varying degrees of success: the League of the Public Good under Louis But no one imposes their will on the monarch: “The king is always ready,” the rebels curse. Later, there will also be the Wars of Religion and the Fronde. No matter: the king has won the essential battle of ideas and hearts.

The feudal lords were all the more resigned to this new submission that they had obtained from the king as the famous “blood tax” legitimized the tax exemption granted to the nobility;

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they do not then imagine that the second jaw of the trap will close a few centuries later, when the Constituent Assembly abolishes the famous “privileges” of the second order.

Both the strength and weakness of the monarchy, this national army demands and legitimizes ever heavier taxes, with which the population is burdened, and kings ever more dependent on “dealers” and financiers. To have free rein, the kings did everything to escape the assemblies and other states general, which could have regulated and limited their financial and therefore military capacity. But when, after several centuries, the trap of debt closes on the monarchy, it will fall.

This spiral could not escape Tocqueville: “I dare to affirm that, from the day when the tired nation allowed the kings to establish a general tax without its assistance and when the nobility had the cowardice to allow the third estate to be taxed provided that we exempted herself, from that day the seed was sown of almost all the vices which plagued the Ancien Régime during the rest of its life and ended up violently causing its

2 death » .

For his part, Montesquieu wrote, concisely, in his Pensées : “The death of Charles VII was the last day of French freedom. »

This date was undoubtedly the end of the freedom of the nobles. Born Was it not also the first day of French freedom? Was there another way to eradicate the deadly feudal divisions? Was there another way to impose itself on a European continent where the Capetian monarchy had, since

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the great defeats of Agincourt and Poitiers, once again the figure of a superfluous “little thing” in the midst of feudal lords and empires?

This standing army will turn the tables. France attacks Flanders, Italy pushes its borders ever further. Charles VII has forty thousand men, Charles VIII and Louis XII lead sixty thousand in Italy ; Francis I

is

throws itself on the Milanese with even

larger troops. After François de Guise had created the “regiments”, Charles IX would have three, Henri IV eleven, Louis XIII thirty.

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BETWEEN THE HUNDRED WAR YEARS AND THE THIRTY YEARS ' WAR This army is professionalizing and internationalizing. People come from all over Europe to enlist in the troops of the King of France. The Swiss are in great demand, but so are the lansquenets of German princes; all follow: Walloons, Swedes, Poles, Danes, Hungarians, Piedmontese, Corsicans, Rhinelanders, Bavarians, Scots who came with the Stuarts and even the Irish.

From Charles VII to Louis From Louis XI to Richelieu, from Colbert to Louis In vain. Aristocrats continued to move en masse towards military careers and, for the most part, disdain “commoner” activities.

“Instead of the episodic heroism of the paladins, the greedy cunning of the truckers, the brief enthusiasm of the militias, the constancy of the professional troops will be, for three and a half centuries, the bulwark

3 .

» Between the Hundred Years' War and the

of France's Thirty Years' War, France had in his service the first army in the world.

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Louis XIV had inherited the army of Louis XIII to dominate Europe. Louis XV will inherit the bloodless army of Louis XIV, rotten by the Regency. Some, like Marshal de Noailles, in 1743, alerted the king: “Your majesty’s kingdom is purely military. Glory and love of arms have always distinguished the French nation from all others, and it is only for a certain time that it seems that there has been an effort to degrade the military state. »

In vain. This slow decline ended with the humiliating defeat of Rossbach in 1757 against the Prussian armies. So, from the sinister peace of Paris, in 1763, Louis XV mercilessly slashed the entire military hierarchy.

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THE REVOLUTION SAVED BY THE ARMY OF LOUIS XV The French army is reborn from its ashes. The Count of Gribeauval equips the army with cannons that are easy to handle and deadly effective. In his General Essay on Tactics, published in 1772, Count de Guibert advocated the splitting of the battle force into divisions, which would give his best student, Napoleon Bonaparte, unprecedented flexibility in the exercise of command and maneuver. Schools artillery are multiplying in the provinces, including that of… Brienne. The army stands out for constituting a true fourth order, with its schools, its rules of existence, its ceremonial, its hierarchy, its clothing, its own morality based on respect for commitment and the virtue of obedience.

The resurrection of the French army took place during the American War of Independence. When the armies of the Revolution were cornered by a European coalition, Carnot, following the teaching of Guibert, created divisions and organized armaments. The arsenals were stocked by the monarchy: two thousand Gribeauval cannons; seven hundred and thirty thousand rifles model 1777. Its war committee is made up of former engineering and general staff officers of the monarchy, Meunier, Favart, Montalembert, Marescot. The Revolution will be saved by the army forged by Louis XV. And Napoleon will find an incomparable tool, forged by eight years of campaign...

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Napoleon's Grande Armée was born in Rossbach. As the standing army of Charles VII was born at Agincourt and at the stake of Joan in Rouen. As the French atomic bomb was born from the debacle of 1940 and the humiliation of Suez in 1956. Millennial French tradition: our greatest successes come from our most terrible failures, just as our most complete catastrophes are housed in our most flamboyant successes .

Taking up the lessons of Charles VII, de Gaulle strives to put the French army back on its two feet: a centralized and sovereign state, which takes its staff out of the integrated organs of the Atlantic Alliance; a standing army, equipped with the most modern equipment, built by our industrialists. The advent of nuclear weapons gave French strategists hope that atomic weapons would make it possible to rebalance forces between the American and Soviet, and even Chinese, Empires and the more modest nation-states. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is not mistaken when he compares the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage and the atomic bomb to the coronation of Napoleon and the Grande Armée.

But the General's successors will break away from his

historical and military vision, without understanding that if they are listened to within the European Council, or the UN Security Council, it is only because they possess atomic weapons and an army still worthy of the name in a Europe which, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has disarmed at all costs.

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President Chirac's abandonment of conscription in 1995 transformed our professionalized army into an "expeditionary force", which accumulates external interventions in its African playground. Our troops are reconnecting with the poisons and delights of the colonial expeditions of the 19th century, these "races of nomads after nomads", in the disgruntled words of Marshal Bugeaud, who clearly felt that the French army was sinking into these asymmetrical wars, where she won too easily battles that never ended. The return to NATO military bodies, decided this time by President Sarkozy in 2009, further accelerates this development.

Our army has been “NATOIZED”: our air force is training with the Royal Air Force and the US Air Force as part of the Atlantic Trident exercises ; our military procedures are integrated with those of the Americans; our staff speaks English. His dream is to replace the British in the hearts of Americans, while our politicians dream of linking French industry to that of the Germans. Our army is under the orders of our American protector in the name of the Atlantic Alliance, while our military industry is gradually coming under German direction, in the name of Europe.

Our expeditionary army in Africa is appreciated by our American bosses, who admire its efficiency and support our forces with their drones and their Navy, and sometimes even with their bombs, which they slip into the holds of our planes if we do not have them. no longer in stock. When the Americans authorize us, as in Mali or Libya, our armies intervene without firing a shot. When President Obama vetoed the bombing of Assad's Syria, the

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President Hollande renounces, not out of pusillanimity, but out of incapacity. Our country has retained its ancient military virtues, but no longer has a sovereign state to use them.

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THE FRENCH MASTER BECAME VASSAL

We have gradually lost the habit, the desire, the audacity, the very capacity to conceive and execute military operations alone and in complete independence. Through cuts in defense budgets, the lives of our men are put in danger and our forces depend on the technology of our allies, particularly Americans. The standing armies of our kings had allowed France to speak as master on the European continent and to consider many of its neighbors as vassals, who provided it with the soldiers and equipment it needed. This order has been subverted, turned around. If the institutions of Republic the V grant absolute freedom to our It is

presidents of the Republic, heads of armies, our elites, they only know how to reason in terms of alliances and cooperation. The French master became a vassal. France now knows the fate of these little German princes who rented their lansquenets to Louis XIV. Technological development and the exponential cost of armaments caused the French State to suffer the fate of the feudal lords with the advent canon: a downgrade.

England's exit from the European Union (“Brexit”) and Germany's paralyzing pacifism, which has become second nature since 1945, nevertheless make France the main – and, frankly, the only – military power. from Europe. The only one to have an independent nuclear force; the only one to intervene in at least three theaters of operations.

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Never since Louis XIV and Napoleon has France known such superiority; France has never been in such a position to command militarily its European neighbors.

For the first time in its long history, it does nothing.

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1. Charles Sterling, French Painting. The primitives, Librairie Floury, 1938. 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, 1856, book II, X. 3. Charles de Gaulle, France and its army, Plon, 1938.

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Notre Dame de Paris

Under the cobblestones… greatness You have to look down on it. As the anonymous companions of the Middle Ages who built it from century to century never saw it. As the anonymous tourists who flock there in clusters behind their guide with the red umbrella no longer contemplate it. You have to look at it from above to detect the modernity of this heritage of the past, this naked, metallic force in the framework of its spiers which rise fearlessly towards the sky; something cold, pure, clear, precise, mathematical; this mixture of logical abstraction and very French idealism.

The spiers of Notre-Dame de Paris rise without fear

towards the sky and are planted in the ground like old peasant women of yesteryear. A Parisian slenderness, rooted in the terroir. Notre-Dame is already no longer a Romanesque church, and not yet a Gothic cathedral; a masterpiece of transition: it took six centuries to build it! A temple whose statuary made of angels, virgins, saints, prophecies of the patriarchs of the Old Testament seems softened by a thousand years of evangelical preaching.

Stone catechism, stone chronicle, stone symphony. Pope Alexander III is present for the laying of the

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first stone. Saint Louis places Jesus' crown of thorns purchased at a price of gold from the Latin emperor of Constantinople. Philippe le Bel brought together the first Estates General there, in 1302. Henry VI of England was crowned King of France in the presence of Bishop Cauchon in 1431. Henry IV married Queen Margot on the square and a few years later heard this famous mass that Paris was well worth.

All the flags won during the victories of Louis XIV are kept there; the Marshal of Luxembourg obtained the nickname “Upholsterer of NotreDame”. Turenne and the Grand Condé are buried there. Bossuet, from his pulpit, preached there. The entrails of Louis XIII and Louis XIV were collected there. Louis XV thanks God for having escaped Damiens' knife and Louis XVI celebrates the birth of his son. The mayor of Paris, Bailly, came to give thanks for the storming of the Bastille on July 15, 1789.

The statues of the kings of Judah on the facade were decapitated and vandalized by the populace who thought they recognized the kings of France. On November 10, 1793, worship was given to the goddess Reason, played by Mademoiselle Aubry, first subject at the Paris opera, carried in triumph to the Convention. Renamed the “Temple of Reason” under the Terror, it was then transformed into a wine depot for the armies, then returned to worship under the Directory. A classic neo-Greek decor receives the sarcastic and greedy scoundrel painted by David for the coronation of the Emperor and Josephine, on December 2, 1804. More than three hundred Te Deums have been sung in a thousand years of history. The kings, the emperors, the presidents of the Republic – from Jules Grévy to General de Gaulle without forgetting Marshal Pétain, celebrate the victories and pray to the Lord to avoid defeats for France.

–,

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THE FRENCH OF FABLIAUX AND THE FRENCH OF THE CRUSADES No one in the Middle Ages ever talked about the Gothic style. On the other hand, when the Germans or the English built their own cathedrals, they were conscious of imitating their French models. Opus francigenum. The prestige of France was then immense throughout Christendom: the orders monastics of Cluny or Cîteaux, Saint Louis and the Frankish knights of the East, up to the University of Paris, all there competes.

French architects developed the ribbed arch, which made it possible to build walls and vaults in lighter materials, less loaded with stones, and to cover them with elegant glass roofs. The rib was born in Île-de-France. The Romanesque vaults, which still resembled Roman basilicas, often collapsed, and their modest dimensions no longer met the new need for larger, more expansive and more proudly erected buildings towards the sky. The use of the flying buttress provides for this. Everyone gets involved. The king and the cities, the merchant corporations and the guilds. The French of the fabliaux rubs shoulders with the French of the Crusades. Faith and art, the sacred and the beautiful, are one, and all commune in this celebration. The Cathedral is “a treatise on theology; the book of a people who

has no book

1

". The building is dedicated to Notre-Dame, whose

worship of the Virgin unites God and the Mother, devotion and courtesy, fear of punishment and gentleness of protection. Rigors of the Beyond and simple humanity.

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But over the centuries, the industrial tribunal has become prosaic, dull, and gentrified. Decadence began as always with the head; with Louis XI, the holy king, healer of scrofula, became a great trader and a great cynic; greatness of soul has become a devious calculation; the merchant disguised himself as a king.

It is precisely at this moment that Victor Hugo sets his scene. We are in 1482. Louis XI saw the last months of his reign. The rough monarch will have led the country between the end of the Hundred Years' War and the Italian Wars, between English France, torn apart by the clashes between Armagnacs and Burgundians, and this France finally reunited, reunified, pacified, reassured, revived , who will soon dare to challenge the empire of Charles V. Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Between the time of cathedrals and that of palaces. Between the time of faith and that of humanism, the time of monks and that of scholars. The time of Saint Thomas and that of Rabelais. The spiers of Notre-Dame rise proudly up to the sky as if to better protect the debauched city from divine lightning.

All our poets, all our writers have sung Notre-Dame de Paris in all tones: Villon, Péguy, Claudel; even Balzac took her as a character in his Comédie humaine. But it is the reading, the vision of Victor Hugo, which will cross the centuries. Perhaps because Hugo is both a poet and a novelist, an anticlerical Christian, a legitimist friend of LouisPhilippe. A monarchist admirer of Napoleon. A mystical Voltairian. His contradictions make his political career illegible and incoherent; but reinforce his genius

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literary and give him the power of a visionary. Beyond divisions and beyond quarrels.

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" THIS WILL KILL THAT " Hugo combines with incredible audacity the democratic aspirations of his century with the religious passions of past centuries. It spans the French Revolution and Protestantism, Rousseau and Luther in the same bag, to resume this exhilarating moment when popular enthusiasm and Catholic fervor were one. Balzac had already explained that Protestantism was the mother of the Revolution and that printing had been the mother of Protestantism; Gutenberg, the precursor of Luther. “Every Protestant is pope, with a Bible in his hand,” Boileau said. Victor Hugo adds that Protestantism will kill Catholicism as the printing press killed architecture, as the book will kill the building, as the press will kill the cathedral. " This will kill that. »

Hugo was not yet 30 years old. He is no longer only the son of a glorious general of the Grande Armée, but already the controversial playwright of Hernani. Since childhood, he has had only one ambition: “To be Chateaubriand or nothing.” » Under Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo was already making an impact. The first is in the process of completing his Genius of Christianity. He still believes he is writing a historical novel, but his book will not be what he planned it to be. His book will escape him. His book is going to rock. The historical novel will be transfigured into an epic novel. Both poet and rhapsode, storyteller and prophet. He overthrows everything his era believed in, everything the Enlightenment taught it, everything the Revolution bequeathed it: “It is this decadence that we call Renaissance…

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It is this setting sun that we take for dawn. » Hugo resurrects the Middle Ages by recounting its death.

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THE ATTILA OF THE STRAIGHT LINE The solitary poet prepares to enter into communion with the people. The accomplished spiritualist turns tables and summons spirits. He does not seek the people in the revolutionary crowds; he finds it in the anonymous and obscure communion of cathedral builders: “The greatest products of architecture are less individual works than social works; rather the birth of peoples in labor than the birth of men of genius, the deposit that a nation leaves; the piles that the centuries make; the residue of the successive evaporations of human society; in a word, types of formations. »

He, Victor Hugo, the man of the 19th century, the poet cursed because he is glorious, glorious because alone in the face of the multitude, the man of that time and of that temper reaches out his hand to distant centuries where the people was a mass: “The great buildings like the great mountains are the work of centuries… The man, the artist, the individual, fade away on these great masses without the name of an author; human

intelligence is summed up and totalized there. Time is the architect, the people are t mason. »

Victor Hugo knew the Paris before Haussmann. It is no longer the Paris of the Middle Ages, but it is not yet the City of Lights of the Second Empire. There is already Les Invalides, Rue de Rivoli; the Arc de Triomphe rises slowly, the Stock Exchange and the Madeleine Church are adorned with their Greco-Roman colonnades, the Bastille prison is already nothing more than a

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souvenir, Place Vendôme displays its proud bronze column made from cannons taken at Austerlitz; the island of SaintLouis is no longer a simple garden but is populated by these elegant private mansions erected by courtiers who could no longer stand the atmosphere of bigotry and the hospice of Madame de Maintenon's Versailles at the end of the reign of Louis XIV; the Louvre is no longer this stone fortress protecting Parisians from an invasion from the Seine.

But the city has not yet been gutted by Haussmann, “the Attila of the straight line” gutted, gutted like a fish. Thiers and Chateaubriand both boasted of having shot a hare in the Monceau plain. Vines and lilacs still grow in Montmartre. Victor Hugo does not know that twenty years later he will go into exile and will not recognize Paris on his return.

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FROM QUASIMODO TO GAVROCHE Hugo can still see, imagine, smell, reconstruct this lively and popular Paris of the Middle Ages. “It was not then only a beautiful city; it was a homogeneous city, an architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. » Around Notre-Dame Cathedral there is still this forest of halftimbered houses with sloping roofs, bristling like portcullises to protect the high stone monument which stands in their midst. Hugo has before his eyes and at hand this teeming Paris punctuated by the arrivals of the Seine, "the nourishing Seine as Father du Breul says, obstructed by islands, bridges and boats", and the sound of bells chiming loudly: “Usually, the noise that escapes from Paris during the day is the city that speaks, at night, it is the city that breathes; here, it is the city that sings. » He prophesies: “Our fathers had a Paris of stone, our sons will have a Paris of plaster. » The visionary does not guess that his grandsons will have a Paris of iron, then of concrete and glass. To their greatest desolation.

At the time when Victor Hugo was completing his NotreDame de Paris, Charles X was repeating the errors of his older brother. He will also lose his throne, only saving his head at the cost of a melancholy exile in Prague, where Chateaubriand will find him. Everything fits. Victor Hugo undertakes the titanic work of which the kings of France are no longer capable. He reconnects the Christian faith with the people. It unearths the ancient alliance between the people of France and the Catholic religion. He

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shows the people and the elites the greatest miracle achieved by this centuries-old alliance: the cathedrals. With his character of Quasimodo, counterfeit but of Herculean strength, naive but irresistible, Victor Hugo forges the incarnation of an eternal French people, that of the Middle Ages of course, builder of cathedrals, but also the one, whom he known, of the Great Army crossing Europe to conquer it, or that of the working force snatching its mineral wealth from the depths of the earth to manufacture treasures of iron and steel: industry.

Soon, Les Misérables will succeed Notre-Dame de Paris, Gavroche to Quasimodo, the wooden barricades to the granite monument, but it will always be the same French people, exposed to contemptuous elites, who always belittle them, while they can be grandiose at the same time through his strength, his determination and his greatness of soul.

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1. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831.

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Francis I

Our Kennedy It dazzles. It sparkles. It shines brightly. He is Magnificent. A giant. A colossus. Historians praise him, women adore him; novelists cherish it; he is one of the rare kings, along with Henry IV or Louis XIV, whom the rising tide of ignorance among the populations has not yet covered. He is the conqueror of Marignan, the builder of Chambord, the friend of Leonardo da Vinci. It allowed Jacques Cartier to discover Canada. When he won a battle at Marignano, generations of schoolchildren memorized the date of his victory by playing: 1515. When he lost at Pavia, less than ten years later, he found the formula that saved him from humiliation. in the eyes of posterity: “All is lost for honor. »

He collects mistresses but remains a victim man of their inconstancy: “A woman often varies, the fool who trusts in it. » He is a scholar who founded the Collège de France and the National Printing Office; he is the first absolute monarch who governs according to "his good pleasure", and he publishes the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts, which establishes French as the only language in the courts, a major act of sovereignty consecrating the linguistic unity of the kingdom. He is a kingknight, friend of Bayard, “without fear and without reproach”, who knighted him in Marignano. He embodies the Renaissance, this glorious period when all certainties are called into question, all taboos are contested, all dreams seem possible to European man.

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is

With such a portrait, Francis I is ready for centuries and centuries. He is a hero both ancient and modern, a seducer and a warrior, a lover of the arts and of women. In an era which brought the heroes of Antiquity to the pinnacle, he was compared to Hector defying Achilles. For our time which swears only by America, he is our Kennedy, and Diane de Poitiers, his Marilyn Monroe.

Comparison is largely right. Hector is defeated by Achilles and dies despite his bravery. He, a mere mortal, made the mistake of attacking a demigod. Kennedy embodies the first president of the image age. With the passage of time, as his paid or enamored panegyrists (contemporary American and French journalists of the 1960s) age or die, Kennedy appears for what he is, the man of guilty procrastination (crises of rockets), memorable failures (the Bay of Pigs), deadly pitfalls (sending the contingent to Vietnam).

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THE HEART OF THE “WORLD ECONOMY” Francis I

is

is the man of lost opportunities, of missed

good shots. “You've just shined, don't waste your cards”, famous reply from Michel Audiard: the lover calls out to the cuckolded husband, who, after slapping his wife, throws himself at him, even though he is much weaker. After

is

, his, a

having shone, François I spoiled all his cards. However, they were not negligible. Charles VII bequeathed him the best army in Europe; the daughter of Louis XI, Anne de Beaujeu, forged an incomparable artillery which astonished Italy and Europe. The sword of France has never been so feared. Francis followed in the footsteps of his predecessors. The Italian wars are a financial, economic and strategic necessity. An effective way to make mercenary armies profitable, which are expensive when not used. A historic opportunity to be seized which would not present itself again soon. Fernand Braudel taught us that the dominant power is always the one which holds the center of what he calls the “world economy”, that is to say the most developed place on the planet at a given time. . At the beginning of the 16th century, the center of the world economy was in Italy, from Milan to Genoa, from Florence to Venice, so many city-states passing on the talisman of prosperity and commercial and ingenuity. financial.

But there is a gap between Italy's economic modernity and its political archaism. The time of cities has passed, that of kingdoms has come. The Italians will take three centuries to understand it. The city and the Empire, such is their

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eternal political grammar. The early unity of the kingdom of France gave it irresistible demographic, political and military power. Even compared to the empire of Charles V. Not taking advantage of this to attack the rich Italian lands would be worse than a mistake, a is is not crime. Francis I is not guilty of having done it, but of having missed it. To have given the keys of Italy to Spain for a century and a half, when it had less historical legitimacy than us. Francis turned out to be a bad soldier, a bad diplomat, a bad strategist. He won at Marignan thanks to the power of his artillery, but he did not understand the reasons for his victory, and preferred to enjoy it rather than finish it. He gives his opponent time to prepare for revenge.

He ended up believing his own propaganda as a king-knight, when his time was that of military science, tactics and firepower. In Pavia, he stubbornly refused to back down in the name of honor. He throws his infantry at the head of the imperials, rendering his artillery, although his main asset, useless. He lost the old heroes of all the Italian wars, La Palisse and La Trémoille, while the King of Navarre and Montmorency were taken prisoner just like him.

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THE STATESMAN IS CHARLES QUINT In the 17th century, we still knew all the evil we owed to . We is

Francis I

know what a king-knight is thanks to Louis XIII; and

a policy of domination of Europe with Louis XIV. We distinguish between Bayard and François. The distinguished glory of

is

; the

one does not improperly benefit the other. We are well aware that the King of France does not need to be knighted by Bayard, since he is automatically knighted during his coronation. We look with commiseration at this poor Valois-Angoulême knighted by the constable of Bourbon, who will betray his king and France in the service of Charles V. In this austere and noble 17th century, we hold responsible the monarch who did not know how to keep, by all means, the Greats near him. It was Richelieu who pushed for the glorification of Bayard; but the Cardinal clearly understood that the statesman is Charles V. His Eminence will and not François I is spend his life and wear out his in fragile health to correct the errors of Valois.

His contemporaries especially marveled, with a touch of irony, at his sexual exploits. It is Brantôme who makes François I colored

is

a Henry IV before his time, in a high-level story

populated by women, mistresses, saucy ladies, the ladies of quality hiding the army of prostitutes who will end up giving him syphilis, in 1546. He is the barely hidden hero of the 'Heptaméron, libertine novel written by his sister Marguerite de Navarre. He demands that his companions never appear at court without their mistress and questions them about their antics. Triboulet is not the only one to play

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jester role. But the libertine king is also the toy of women, of his strategist mother first, Louise of Savoy, of his brilliant sister, and of his greedy or fickle mistresses. The permanent presence of women gave an undeniable luster and charm, a refined art of living, a delicacy, a sure taste, to the French court, which its more austere European rivals would envy; however, it had unfortunate consequences on the weak and hesitant kings, who became prey to their entourage, their rivalries, their passions and their frivolity, at the heart of a monarchical power where the rational analysis of relationships should have reigned. of strength and the interests of the nation.

Francis turns out to be gullible with Charles V and fatuous with Henry VIII. He does not distrust his enemy enough and does not flatter his ally enough. As there will be "new people" rich", François I

is

later, a "new king", according to the colorful

expression of Lucien Febvre. He is naive enough to believe that his flaunted wealth and his displayed power will win him all hearts.

We will never know if the ostentatious and provocative splendor of the Camp of the Cloth of Gold and its defeat during the famous bare-handed combat of the two knight-kings pushed the Tudor into the arms of Charles V. Still, immediately after the Cloth of Gold Camp, Henry VIII met Charles V in Calais and Gravelines. No pomp or chivalry, but the two men agree to isolate the Frenchman. The Englishman claims to play both sides, proclaiming to anyone who will listen: “Whoever I defend is master”; but leans towards Charles: he had the skill to dangle in the eyes of the Tudor the memory of the French lands owned by his ancestors.

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Francis I

is

was fortunate to see the bitter memory of his

failures gradually covered thanks to a legend of glory and splendor. Thus, the famous anecdote of the dubbing of is

by Bayard was it forged by a doctor

contemporary François I of Lyon, Symphorien Champier, to restore the prestige of his defeated

1

. For a long time,

king in Pavia Bayard alone has legitimately attracted the spotlight. In the revolutionary Paris of 1789, a play will be performed dedicated to the “knight without fear and without reproach”; Rouget de Lisle wrote his eulogy; the First Empire will make him the ancestor of the heroes of the Grande Armée. Chateaubriand even dared to designate him in The Genius of Christianity as the most perfect of Christian knights.

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THE BEAUTIFUL DEFEAT

If the golden legend of Francis I's

is

is in veneer, its

errors and defeats were paid for in solid gold. Thus, the Peace of Cambrai (1529) was the burial of France's Italian dreams. It would be necessary to wait for Bonaparte for our country to obtain a second chance to conquer these rich lands of Lotharingia. But the revolutionary armies then carried with them the ideology of nationalities which could only push the Italian patriots to separate – one day or another – from their big French brother.

To wage war – and party

–,

the king is always short

of money. Francis handled taxes a lot, more than his predecessors; he forged this infernal machine of the sale of public offices, which will prevent until the end the fiscal modernization of the monarchy and cause its downfall. He even alienated royal domains and, never sparing of expedients, created the national lottery. All this to finance repeated failures.

There's worse: with his "all is lost for honor", he inoculated France with the venom of the vain but honorable gesture, of the humiliations that are wrapped in chivalrous trappings, a disease of panache which covers the worst failures, and of the beautiful defeat, happy defeat, defeat unconsciously desired, because less vulgar than victory. She continued with us for a long time, even in sports competitions. François I is the ancestor of Poulidor, the eternal loser but so beloved by the popular crowds. Or footballers from Saint-Étienne who parade on the Champs-Élysées like the victorious army of

,

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the war of 1914-1918, when they were defeated by the Germans of Bayern Munich.

The culture of failure becomes second nature to him. He proved to be a poor maneuverer in the Holy Roman Empire's electoral battle for the coveted title of King of the Romans. This assembly resembles what our Olympic committees and sports federations are. To obtain the votes of countless delegates, often poor and obscure, you have to cajole, promise, buy. To bribe. The two candidates make an onslaught of seduction, but it is the banker Jacob Fugger of Charles V who pays the most. As with the Italian wars, was not wrong to compete Francis I failed. is

Defeat is beautiful but drives you crazy; unless syphilis begins to act. His alliance in 1536 with the great Turk Suleiman scandalized all of Europe. It is fashionable today to praise this “backward alliance” in the name of the independence of France, which, alone in the world, only knows relations between States, without worrying about regimes or religions. But for the European monarchs, it is the “unholy alliance”. At the time, the Ottoman Empire was not a power like any other. It is not the Sweden of Richelieu, the Prussia of Louis XIV. It is not the daring alliance of reverses that our generations of schoolchildren of the Third Republic learned to admire when thinking of the Russian alliance, but the entry of the Islamic wolf into the Christian fold. As if Cold War France had joined forces with the USSR to attack NATO forces from behind.

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AT THE GATE OF THE CIVIL WAR Francis I

is

takes on the unbecoming costume of a traitor to

Christian Europe. His unprecedented transgression could be judged cynically by the yardstick of its effectiveness, if he had not failed once again. He gesticulates, he agitates, he contorts himself, he contradicts himself, he betrays; he got closer to the Protestant powers of Germany, while he had their co-religionists burned in Paris. Nothing allows him to take his revenge on Charles V. His armies no longer have the vigor of the beginning of his reign. They are on the defensive, must repel the invaders in Provence. The king himself no longer ventures onto the battlefield. The bitter memory of Pavia, the humiliation of defeat and the suffering of captivity cured him forever of the intoxicating pleasures of cannonade and duels with great thrusts. Francis I did not learn the lessons of Charlemagne or Saint is n’a Louis, nor even of Charles VIII, who had tried in vain to resuscitate the crusade: the nation which imposes itself as the dominant power in Europe is the one which defends Christian Europe against the external threat.

Francis I failed on every level. He lost Italy; he did not take charge of the Roman Empire; he did not break Protestant dissidence, without however taking the side of the elites of the kingdom, and in particular of his sister, in favor of the new faith. After a moment of complacent tolerance, his ferocious repression fell on the Protestants who dared to post a proclamation hostile to mass right up to the bedroom door of his castle in Amboise. His police arrest, torture,

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massacres the Reformed. Transforms the country of Vaud into a desert.

His henchmen are hardly more tender than will be the henchmen of Louis XIV, repealing the Edict of Nantes. is But unlike the Sun King, Francis I escaped the wrath of posterity. Yet it was he who gave this inexpiable color of bright red blood to the religious quarrel which arose under his reign. It left the kingdom weakened externally and on the verge of civil war internally.

At his death, France was dominated politically by Spain, spiritually by Germany, culturally by Italy. Francis I is is the incarnation and responsible for this decline that its thurifers have, through the centuries, disguised and concealed. Never before the 20th century was France's influence in Europe as weak as in the 16th century.

He is a king of France, made of all the kings of France and that

worth any.

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1. See Didier Le Fur, François I , Perrin, 2015.

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Catherine de Medici

We are all Catherines Black looks so bad on him. He hardens his already severe features. He made it even more ugly. It adds to its austere silhouette an air of specter. It gives his Florentine taste for magic an evil witch's aura. These black dresses that she wears at all times, in all seasons, since the death of her royal husband, will remain her mark in History. Black that goes well with red. The Red and the Black. The black of his robes and the red of his blood. The mourning of the regent and the blood of SaintBarthélemy.

Catherine de Medici, however, did not imagine such a dark destiny when she arrived in Paris in 1533. She was 14 years old. Her parents died a few days after her birth, but she is not an orphan like the others. She is the only heiress of the glorious and rich Medici family. The king is not his cousin, but the pope is.

She also returned to the Valois to consolidate the alliance between the pope and the king of France. The agreement quickly disappeared, but its French destiny blossomed slowly.

is

François I discovers that little Catherine is commoner but rich, timid in public but daring on horseback, ugly but intelligent; she speaks French poorly but has a culture

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refined. The court ridicules the “big banker” and the “merchant’s daughter”; but the taste of Italian artists brings together the old libidinous monarch and the disgraceful damsel, whose husband prefers to frolic with the sensual Diane de Poitiers, whom she pleasantly nicknames "the Whore of the King". Already his marriage was the occasion for sumptuous celebrations, with forty cooks who introduced the French to zabaglione and sorbets, before they introduced artichokes, broccoli, peas, asparagus, tomatoes, macarons and educate the French how to use a fork.

Catherine de Médicis did not look long for recipes to enhance these new vegetables. She likes to surround herself with poets, men of letters, musicians, artists. She has very sure taste, identifies and protects Ronsard, Montaigne, invites Italian painters and portraitists to the French court. She will build the Tuileries and expand Chenonceau. She adjusted the cultural policy of the Italian princes to the immense resources of the French monarchy. She proved to be one of the greatest patrons of the 16th century. The celebrations she organized in February 1564, in the Château de Fontainebleau, will remain in the annals. Catherine de Medici is the missing link between and Louis is Francis I XIV. It pursues a political objective, but without seeking to domesticate, subdue, or enslave, rather to pacify, to appease the warlike passions of men in general and of nobles in particular; to tear away from them this irrepressible taste for war, to divert it towards other distractions. Hence his famous “squadron flying", this battalion of pretty women that she brings together under her leadership which has made the libertines salivate so much and the fur of the Puritans stand on end.

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THE PRINCESS OF CLÈVES Catherine de Medici is not the Pompadour with her network of prostitution serving the insatiable appetite of Louis XV. At his court, one enjoys the pleasures of conversation, not the pleasures of the senses. We are in La Princesse de Clèves, not in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Catherine monitors the virtue of her daughters with severe looks

mother superior of the convent. When Isabelle de Limeuil is made pregnant by the Prince de Condé, Catherine chases her out of the house. court.

Because she comes from the Medici clan and born in Florence, she is believed to be the daughter of Machiavelli, even though she is an emulator of Erasmus, this demanding educator of Christian princes. These two thinkers embody the antagonistic poles of Renaissance political thought. Erasmus continues, with rare culture, the work of the Church which, since the Middle Ages, has built the portrait of the ideal prince, combining the strength of the heroes of Antiquity and the virtue of the Gospels. He does not distinguish between private morality and public morality. His supreme goal is peace and he considers war an expensive and dangerous entertainment.

Machiavelli does not care about his cautions and his lessons. He separates politics from morality; virtus takes its Latin meaning from vir : a man. The prince must rediscover his vital and virile energy, and distrust the emollient, feminine sweetness of court life. If Machiavelli advises the prince, Laurent de Medici, it is to better pursue his republican ideal. He

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does not fear war but dreams of waging it with citizen soldiers like the soldiers of Year II; his ideal is to politics what the inventions of his compatriot Leonardo da Vinci were to science: too far in advance. Away from morality, for Machiavelli, only efficiency counts; a great politician is both fox and lion, depending on circumstances and needs.

Catherine de Medici will always remain indifferent to this clever mixture of calculation and reason of state. She will not vary from her path despite her family heritage, some of her advisors and the demands of the times. Throughout her life, she returned to the teaching of Erasmus and disdained that of Machiavelli. The image of Catherine de Medici is an extraordinary mistake. She is the opposite of what she embodies. Historians will evoke his “black legend”. Again and always black. The curse of Catherine de Medici is that this emulator of Erasmus will end up despite herself following the lessons of Machiavelli without really understanding what she did or taking responsibility for what she dared.

She will never renounce her policy of harmony. She will never abandon her conciliatory illusions. She never will measure the fury that his policy of “tolerance” provokes in the ranks of convinced Catholics. She will never fully appreciate how her pacifist weakness pushes the Huguenot leaders towards ever more arrogant intransigence. With each outstretched hand, his bravado; with each gesture of peace, its gesture of war. For every sign of tolerance, its provocation.

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After the edict of 1562, which authorized freedom of conscience and freedom of worship of the reformed religion, it was the "massacre of Wassy", when local Protestants welcomed with stones the emissaries of the head of the Catholic league , the Duke of Guise. After the peace edict of 1567, it was the “surprise of Meaux”, when the troops of Condé (one of the Protestant leaders) failed to seize the royal family.

With each shot, Catherine placed herself under the protection of the Guises and the Catholic forces; as soon as the threat has passed, it moves closer to the Protestants. Even when she is forced to limit their freedom of worship, prohibiting "preaching and supremacy", she takes care to expose the exclusively political motives and never to qualify the "new opinion" as "heresy", openly. pity of Catholics. She surrounded herself with Huguenot advisors, Jean de Monluc, Jean de Morvillier, Paul de Foix; favors the appointment of Michel de l'Hospital, a notorious supporter of the policy of reconciliation and tolerance, as chancellor of France; brought into the king's council the leader of the Protestants, Admiral de Coligny, to counterbalance the hitherto dominating influence of the Catholics. The latter gradually became the mentor of the young King Charles IX. Everywhere, the rise of Protestantism is destabilizing European regimes and balances. The French monarchy strives not to sacrifice its independence to one of the two camps, friend of the very Catholic Spain and ally of Elizabeth's Protestant England. The Guises always demand greater proximity with the King of Spain, in vain. While the Dutch Protestants rose up against the tutelage of the Spanish imperialists, Coligny advised the King of France to support the prince's revolt.

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of Orange and the Batavian rebels. Charles IX and Catherine de Medici refuse this reversal of alliance. Coligny storms, demands, threatens. His “incredible arrogance” has no limits. He says to the king: “I am certain that you will repent of this. » Then turning to the queen: “Madame, the king refuses to undertake a war: God grant that another does not happen to him from which it will perhaps not be in his power to withdraw. »

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NOT AS A SUBJECT, BUT AS A REBEL

The king was privately exasperated at swallowing “big, bitter pieces of indignity.” He admitted after SaintBarthélemy: “Coligny had more power and was better obeyed by those of the new Religion than I was […] so that having assumed such power over my subjects, I could no longer call myself absolute King, but only commanding one of my parts of my Kingdom. » And Catherine de Medici confided that “Coligny behaved not as a subject but as a rebel” and that her supporters wanted the “subversion of this State”.

The Prince of Orange, Coligny and Condé, consulted and forged their new alliance in the open air. The Protestants have a foreign policy divergent from that of the King of France; and assume it with rare intrepidity and sovereign self-sufficiency. They take on the image of both feared and hated enemies from within. They constitute themselves as a state within a state and increasingly eye the democratic and decentralized principles of the Calvinist Republic of Geneva. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the Huguenot aristocracy predominates, is nicknamed “Little Geneva”. In the preamble to the edict of 1568, the king wrote: "To what we, seeing that they abuse our kindness and gentleness so many times, that we can no longer doubt their damned enterprise of establishing and constituting in this Kingdom another sovereign principality to undo ours ordained by God…”

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Between her fear of Huguenot subversion and her principles of concord and pacification, Catherine's torment turns into schizophrenia. Posterity will wrongly confuse premeditation and procrastination, duplicity and disarray. The same woman can organize with unprecedented splendor the marriage of the Protestant Henri de Navarre with the Catholic Marguerite de Valois (the famous Queen Margot), as further proof of her desire for peace and reconciliation, while giving the order to execute Coligny on August 22, 1572, guilty in his eyes of rebellion against the authority of the State and of sedition against the monarchy. In an exceptional situation, an exceptional procedure, “to his great regret and displeasure”.

This hasty execution is intended to be the manifestation of a strong power while it is the supreme proof of its weakness. A strong power would have dared to investigate the public trial of Coligny as a Richelieu would dare with all those who plotted against his authority. A strong power would have shown the small Catholic people of Paris that they would never submit to the pressures of the powerful Huguenots. A strong power could have assured the Protestants that the attempted crime against their leader would not go unpunished. A strong power would not have feared that the Huguenots would take justice into their own hands and take revenge by assassinating the Duke of Guise.

Distraught by the failure of the assassination of Coligny and the fear that her links with Guise would be discovered, Catherine then decided to execute all the leaders of the party, all those she called the “war Huguenots”. In panic, the convinced Erasmian gives in to the sirens of the crudest Machiavellianism. The Jacopo Corbinelli or Bartolomeo of Elbène justify to her the action of power in the name of the theory of

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“extreme remedies in case of danger” and “reason of state”. She endorses the thesis of “surgical ablation” which “cuts off an arm to save the rest of the body”. But Catherine goes to war like all pacifists, too late and too strong. In haste and improvisation, without having your back, without seeing what it will trigger.

The provost of merchants, Jean Charron, is summoned to the Louvre on the evening of August 23: the queen and the king ordered him to

close all doors and seize all keys. Guise's troops went on the morning of the 24th to look for weapons from gunsmiths. Everything gets carried away, everything bursts into flames; the tocsin sounds at the Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois church; the second Saint-Barthélemy begins, that of the people of Paris. Exterminating fury spreads through the streets of Paris...

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“ STUNNED POPULACE” We take revenge on a Protestant neighbor who is too arrogant, too contemptuous, too rich. We take the opportunity to kill an enemy, a lover of his wife, a creditor. All you have to do is shout to everyone, “Here is a Huguenot!” » so that his throat could be slaughtered. We kill because we were too afraid, afraid of submitting to Protestant law, afraid of being converted by force, afraid of having a son, a daughter seduced by the new faith, afraid of suffering from famine. , because it was announced that the Huguenots had undertaken the blockade of Paris, afraid of having seen the friends of Henry of Navarre wandering in the streets, munificent gentlemen from the South speaking loudly and laughing loudly, adorned and armed, afraid that they would steal , fear that they will rape, fear that they will massacre. With the complicity of the king and the Italian woman. The bodies of the Huguenot victims were attacked as a parody of judicial execution, as if they wanted to substitute popular justice for that of the king, considered too weak, too partial. Throughout the day of August 24, the king ordered the killings to stop and prohibited the looting. In vain. A Huguenot was even assassinated in front of the king on August 26: a crime of lèse-majesté that Charles IX must tolerate without saying a word. The number of victims will be estimated at three thousand deaths. for Paris and ten thousand throughout the kingdom. This massacre, which seems cruel and odious to us, will be considered in this year 1572 as a masterstroke. The Pope orders a Te Deum and strikes a commemorative medal. The King of Spain expressed his noisy satisfaction.

The Protestants adopt the same interpretation of the maneuver, to better denounce in their libels the “vast

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and subtle international Catholic conspiracy against France, planned by the Pope and the King of Spain and implemented by the Guises and the Parisian parliamentarians against a Charles IX too favorable to heretics. Everyone is deluding themselves. Everyone attributes to Catherine de Medici ulterior motives and a cynicism that are foreign to her. The misunderstanding lasts to this day. Catherine and her son, however, immediately made titanic efforts to justify themselves, to explain, in France and especially to foreign courts, that they wanted to “clarify the truth”. Catherine stubbornly distinguishes between the execution of Coligny and his lieutenants and the massacres of the “mindless populace”.

She repeats it tirelessly: her decision was political; religion has no part in it. The proof: while massacring the Huguenot leaders, the king and his mother intended to maintain the peace edict of Saint-Germain of 1570. To the Queen of England, Elizabeth, who scolds her for "not having followed the order of justice", of having struck before any legal judgment and of having provoked the "wrath of God" for having "transgressed the Decalogue", Catherine has this astonishing but sincere response: "And even if it were against all Catholics [ that the Queen of England would crack down] that we would not hinder or alter in any way the friendship between her and us. " Her

only goal was to punish the rebels in the name of the common good and the peace of the kingdom threatened by the sedition of the Huguenots. She is convinced of having achieved her goal: “But finally, thanks to God, everything is peaceful, so that we no longer recognize in this kingdom except a king and his justice, which is rendered to each person according to their desire. and equity. »

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« MONARCHOMAQUES » ET « MALCONTENTS » Catherine is wrong and loses on both counts: she will never regain the trust of Protestants and disappoints Catholics. The protest is winning over all camps. The Protestant but also Catholic aristocracies, tired of waging war, also joined forces against the throne and the foreigner. Overcoming its religious differences, the French aristocracy returned to its recurring nostalgia, since Philip the Fair at least, of the blessed times of the "paternal monarchy", relying on the great ones of the kingdom, before the bourgeoisie of the lawyers, coming from the dregs of the people, do not take away from them their ancient privileges. The “tempered monarchy”, say the aristocrats, was derailed by precepts from Italy, Roman law and the teaching of Machiavelli, which elevated treason and lies to the height of the art of governing. These protesters are called “Monarchomaques” or “Malcontents”.

According to them, the French monarchy must rediscover this mixed ideal of the ancients of the Frankish monarchy, a harmonious mixture of royalty, aristocracy and democracy. The king would enter into a contract with his subjects, in particular with the great ones of the kingdom; the paternal monarchy would be succeeded by the contractual monarchy, the preamble to a future parliamentary monarchy. Noble lineages, Catholic or Protestant, felt they were the only ones capable of opposing royal arbitrariness. The king would no longer govern with a few advisors and would rely on the regular meeting of the Estates General. But

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our moderate “contractualists” had not foreseen that their beloved Estates General, despite the filter operated by the distinction of the orders, would transmit the desire of the Catholic people to remain Catholic; and to reject any concession to “heresy”. The edict of tolerance of 1576, so favorable to Protestants, with its religious freedom and its eight strongholds granted to Protestants, was rejected. The States General of 1576 declared themselves in favor of a return to religious unity and the abolition of the edict of pacification. The parliament of Paris will soon establish, in 1593, with the Lemaître judgment as the fundamental law of the kingdom, the obligation for a king of France to be of the Catholic faith. The proof is striking: the country in its depths does not want tolerance towards the Protestant minority.

The political elites are therefore changing their tune. We cannot both desecrate public space and desecrate the king. We can only be tolerant if we are strong. We can only escape absolute power within the framework of a homogeneous nation. Otherwise, political divisions solidify into religious dissensions and turn into civil war.

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ORDER ALONE MAKES FREEDOM This will be the French paradox: only absolute monarchy will allow us to escape the wars of Religion. Order alone will impose peace and freedom. This is the lesson of such French history that Charles Péguy will learn in a sentence that Charles de Gaulle was so fond of quoting: “Order, and order alone ultimately creates freedom. Disorder creates servitude. » This is what Catherine did not understand.

The greatest minds of their time will be more lucid. Jean Bodin converted to the principles of absolute sovereignty, in his master book Les Six Livres de la République, published in 1576. From his Bordeaux retreat, Michel de Montaigne, apostle of religious tolerance and even a certain detached indifferentism, drew the same absolutist lessons from the ordeal: “Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are just, but because they are laws. This is the mystical foundation of their authority. »

Mass has been said. The famous mass of Henri IV. THE St. Bartholomew's Day massacre is a decisive turning point in this history, but we did not immediately know in which direction. The Protestants, full of their pain, do not understand that their dream of a Huguenot kingdom of France has perished with their thousands of deaths. Historian Arlette Jouanna states it bluntly: “Saint-Barthélemy’s Day sealed the definitive annihilation of the hope nourished by the Reformed of converting the entire kingdom to their faith. France will not be Protestant. Before the tragedy, this observation did not appear

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obvious. » There were two million of them in 1560. At the end of the Wars of Religion, there were only one million left.

The Protestants lost. The Catholics did not win. To their evil joy, the latter do not understand that the image of the evangelical message of their Church will be forever tainted. Catherine de Medici and Charles IX, all in their desperate attempt to preserve the image of a "French nation that has become odious everywhere", do not realize that their policy and even their dynasty, "rotten sample of the great blood of the Valois", vomited by the poet Agrippa d'Aubigné, are condemned by History. The death of Charles IX, at the age of 24, constituted the first warning sign. His face covered in blood from tuberculosis is the “wrath of God blazing on his face”; it is the blood of Saint Bartholomew that he rejects; the king would have confided to his surgeon Ambroise Paré (Huguenot protected during Saint-Barthélemy) that he was haunted by “hideous faces covered in blood”.

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“ KILL THEM ALL AND LEAVE THEM NO ONE REMAINS TO BLAME ME FOR IT »

France will remain Catholic. She will not become a Protestant. France will be a monarchy and not a republic. A unitary kingdom and not a federation of autonomous cantons. This was the French way of entering modernity. But we cannot accurately assess the extent of these issues without freeing ourselves from the vision of the Protestants bequeathed to us by the bloody memory of Saint-Barthélemy and the republican and anticlerical historiography of the 19th century . Protestants as a

peaceful, persecuted and exiled minority; the Protestants as a new “heretical synagogue”, as a “small remnant of Israel”; they are also called “marrabets”, that is to say marranos who, like the Jews, turn their persecutions into a sign of divine election; Protestants as privileged propagators of progress, capitalism and democracy; rationalist and humanist Protestants prey to the murderous passion of intole

In this chromo for crazy children of modernity, Catherine de Medici plays the bad role, the one given to her by both the Huguenot pamphleteers and Voltaire, who pulls out all stops to crush the infamous: "The greatest example of fanaticism was that of the bourgeois of Paris who ran to murder, slaughter, throw out windows, tear to pieces, on the night of Saint-Barthélemy, their fellow citizens who did not go to mass. » This univocal vision will be institutionalized by the republican historians of the 19th century and the school of Lavisse and Ferry, who, following Rousseau and the

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revolutionaries, never stopped denouncing, not without reason, the excessive and pernicious influence of women, wives or mistresses or mothers, on our kings.

Catherine de Medici ticks all the boxes of the “black legend” of a misogynistic, patriotic and progressive era. She is a woman, a Catholic, a foreigner. She is the devious Florentine who sets her traps. The foreigner surrounded by unscrupulous Italians to kill the “good French”. The harpy mother who harasses her son Charles IX, too weak to resist her criminal injunctions, until he cries: “Let us kill them all and let none remain to blame me . » Alexandre Dumas even accused him of having poisoned the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, and her son Charles IX. Even its rare laudators, like Gabriel Naudé, in the 17th century, and especially Honoré de Balzac, in the 19th century still in

,

will weigh down

spite of themselves the charges required against it, glorifying it as the ultimate and courageous bulwark of reason of State and of unity of the kingdom exposed to the democratic and liberal subversion announced by the emergence of the Reformed faith.

This “black legend” has become a commonplace over time; it has the good fortune to suit the heirs of the Huguenots, the dominant doxa, politicians, the media and intellectuals; even the Catholic Church, after having resisted for a long time and tried in vain to light counterfires, to evoke the abuses of Catholics by Protestants, including the famous “Michelade” – the massacre of Nîmes Catholics in 1567 –, has ended up giving in and submitting to it by repenting on Saint-Barthélemy's Day, August 24, 1997.

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This vision has all the virtues; it suffers from only one fault: anachronism. An anachronism born with and through Saint-Barthélemy. An anachronism which is above all the product of an era and a particular state of mind of our national elites. From the decline of the Sun King, at the beginning of the 18th century, and especially from the defeat

of Waterloo, our bourgeois elites embodied by the Anglophile Guizot, but also by the Freemason Republic of Jules, are convinced that the relative decline of France in the face of the victorious emergence of the Protestant powers, England and Prussia, comes from its guilty obstinacy in remaining faithful to its old Catholic faith and from having refused to take the Protestant t

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“ HE WAS NOT THE SON OF A GOOD MOTHER WHO DOESN'T WANT TO TASTE »

No one has summed up this state of mind of our elites more brilliantly than Ernest Renan, in his famous Intellectual and Moral Reform, written in the fever of the defeat of the French armies against the Prussian armies during the war of 1870: “ France wanted to remain Catholic; she bears the consequences. Catholicism is too hierarchical to provide intellectual and moral nourishment to a population; it makes transcendent mysticism flourish alongside ignorance; it has no moral effectiveness; it has harmful effects on brain development. A Jesuit student will never be an officer likely to be opposed to a Prussian officer; a student in Catholic elementary schools will never be able to wage learned war with sophisticated weapons. Catholic nations that do not reform will always infallibly be beaten by Protestant nations. »

France wanted to remain Catholic, Renan regrets; but it came close. The “new religion” first benefited from the craze for novelty. Protestantism is in fashion. People flock to listen to his itinerant preachers. Their puritanical stiffness seduces women, their attachment to texts flatters scholars. Protestantism is a return to the sources, literally to revive the spirit; it is a fundamentalism which reassures all minds worried and troubled by the upheavals of the time, from the printing press to the discovery of America. According to Blaise de

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Monluc, “he was not the son of a good mother who did not want to taste it”. It is the religion of the great, the rich, the intelligent, the literate. Happy few, Stendhal would have said.

In Paris, the separation corresponds to a class opposition which will be decisive when the common people of Paris have the impression that the time of pillage is finally authorized by the king. This is the faith to be in. The Huguenots were not free from intolerance or arrogance. They are convinced that they will supplant the old Roman faith as Christianity has become the new Israel. They overwhelm with their contempt for the ignorant priests and the uneducated people who remain faithful to them. They cover with sarcasm the indecent splendor of popes and Churches and do not hesitate to reconnect with the destructive fury of iconoclasts, breaking sacred vases and holy images. Huguenot fundamentalism fascinates but also irritates the last restive minds. Ronsard adjures a Protestant friend thus:

“No longer preach an armed Gospel in France A stuffed Christ, blackened with smoke Who like a Mohammed goes carrying in his hand A large cutlass red with human blood. » Even Montaigne is annoyed by the stubborn refusal of Protestants to give their children “these ancient names of our baptisms, Charles, Louis, François, to populate the world with Methuselah, Ezekiel, Malachi, smelling much better 1

from the sheets

". After Saint-Barthélemy's Day, this politician, however 2

very moderate, confided to his friends: “It had to be done

.

»

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Catherine's pacifying and tolerant policy was interpreted by the Protestant elites, but also by the Catholic people, as submission to this inexorable Huguenot destiny of the kingdom of France. The care she shows in everything, even a few hours after having ordered the execution of "Coligny and the Huguenots of War", to separate the wheat from the chaff, to distinguish political quarrels from religious questions, to denounce the rebellion of the Huguenot leaders, without ever questioning “heresy”, led Catholics to think that the king was guilty of collusion with the enemy or a prisoner of evil guardian angels. That he must be protected from his bad company or his weakness. This is why, on the morning of August 24, the people of Paris will enter the scene with a fury increased tenfold by the feeling of being abandoned by the king and the irrepressible desire to take justice into their own hands, since the State has renounced to return it.

Catherine will have her revenge. But not during his lifetime. It was her favorite son, Henry III, who stripped her of her power and influence. Sick, crippled with rheumatism, she nevertheless continued a journey across the country to preach peace, concord and reconciliation. In vain. Henry III did not even warn her when he decided to execute the Duke of Guise, even though she was trying to bring him closer to the Crown. In 1589, she died of pleurisy, in despair, because she finally understood that her policy had failed and that her family had to pass the royal torch to the Bourbons. Catherine de Medici then entered a long historical purgatory. The “black legend” will last for centuries.

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“ A CRIME OF LOVE”

But in recent years, everything has turned around. Everything that earned her the wrath of historians and novelists of the past is now credited to her: she is a woman, a foreigner, surrounds herself with her compatriots, wages war to save the peace, massacres out of weakness, seeks without end of conciliation, concord, peace. Contemporary historians are like the leaders of political parties or the bosses of large groups: they are in search of women and diversity. They are ready to do anything to beautify the image of their rare, always too rare protected ones. A historian, looking back on his tragic destiny, even talks about Saint-Barthélem as a “crime of love ". Some also detect with 3

finesse and astonishing modernity.

By constantly favoring the political struggle against Huguenot subversion while sparing the Reformed religion, the Queen Mother carried the seeds of the dissociation between the spiritual order and the temporal order which founded our liberal and secular modernity. But this royal truth of reason of state was too intolerable to the most ardent Catholics; and will always be despised by Protestants who seek to use it to impose their law. Our contemporary historians note that Henri IV and Richelieu will implement the policy desired by Catherine de Medici; but they will do so from a position of strength, not weakness. They will pursue a policy of religious tolerance after having consolidated the sacralization of the absolute monarchy. Unlike Catherine's pacifist approach.

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We then understand better the recent discovery of the great merits of the Florentine, long devoted to historical stigma. The thunderous arrival of a new religion, Islam, on French soil brings us back to the questions of this period of the War of Religions, to conflicts, subversions, religious fundamentalism and the State within the State. , to its ardent proselytism and its now suburban strongholds, to its foreign interference on a weak power, to these Koranic first names “much better with a sense of faith” as Montaigne said. Our political, media, intellectual and economic elites all resemble Catherine. They have their weaknesses and naiveties. Its taboos and its totems. His Machiavellianism shoddy and his profound naivety. His contempt for the people and his misunderstanding of their deep feelings. His fascination with the threat that is undertaking the subversion of the country and his pusillanimity in the face of its actions. Catherine, it's them, Catherine, it's us, Catherine, it's our time. We are all Catherine de Medici.

Our black future is written with the red letters of the blood of its past.

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1. Essays, I, XLVI. 2. Quoted by Arlette Jouanna, Montaigne, Gallimard, 2017. 3. Denis Crouzet, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy, Fayard, 1994.

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SECOND PART THE WEATHER

OF GREATNESS

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Richelieu

Touched flowed The painting is as famous as the painter is forgotten. We only see red, that of the Cardinal's dress which seems to envelop the entire rest of the canvas, the sea, the ships, and even the dike, although gigantic with its massive logs which stand like cannons, in front of a hieratic and martial Oxford, boots up to mid-thighs and sword at his side. Seeing him, we better understand the famous speech of the Cardinal's method: “I dare not undertake anything without having thought about it well; but, once I have made up my mind, I go straight to my goal, I overturn everything, I mow everything down, and then I cover everything with my red dress. »

I then spent the feverish nights of my childhood with Alexandre Dumas who told me about the siege of La Rochelle through the exploits of three musketeers, who, with four skillful swords and four ardent hearts, repelled the assaults of the English, and intrepid love and reckless of Buckingham for a queen having some problems with her studs. I was also shoed, but Alexandre Dumas spoke to me about love and chivalry while this one was buried there and that one was banned. Modern France was born before my eyes and everything was hidden from me.

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TWO MODERNITIES The clash of two modernities was preparing at the beginning of the 17th century to divide Europe and the world. Protestant modernity was the first to take off: that of printing and merchant cities, of sailors and financiers, that of the United Provinces and England, which precedes and announces their big American sister still in limbo; where Calvinist or Anglican austerity and flaunted virtue conceal limitless greed and great inequalities of conditions. Catholic modernity was slow to respond, but it eventually found its feet, the counter-reformation with baroque for style, and absolute monarchy for politics. The two modernities measure and assess each other. The Protestant oligarchies disguise themselves as humble bourgeois while the Catholic bourgeois adorn themselves in the trappings of aristocrats.

Richelieu was a Catholic of strict obedience and great faith, "but who would consider religion as a statesman, and politics as a religious man", in the beautiful words of Louis de Bonald. Between the Protestants and Richelieu, it is not a theological quarrel, even if the Cardinal never gave up on bringing them back to the “true faith” nor on reconciling the Calvinists with the Catholic Church; it is a political war: His Eminence always denounces the “Huguenot faction” and not heresy. Richelieu is not leading a war of religions, but a fight for the restoration of the State. When he dies, the priest will ask him if he forgives his

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enemies; imperious response until death: “I have never had any other than those of the State. »

The essential battle is being played out in France. The alliance of feudalism which does not want to die and the Huguenot republic which is slow to impose itself shakes the kingdom. Nearly two centuries later, in 1789, this association of the ancient and the new, the archaic and the modern, of feudal nostalgia and liberal dynamics brought down the absolute monarchy. A century earlier, it had given birth in England to the Glorious Revolution and the British parliamentary regime. It already has a model that makes all the Colignys of Europe dream: the republic of the United Provinces of William of Orange. But, in France, this association that we believe to be irresistible falls on a bone with a red dress. Whether Richelieu delivers to the executioner the heads of the greatest names in the kingdom, Chalais or Montmorency, or besieges La Rochelle, it is the same fight, the one which eliminates all obstacles on the road to monarchical centralization. An alliance between the king and the third estate which prepares – without knowing it – the advent of the one and indivisible Republic; “Our kingdom of France,” said

Péguy, who guessed everything. France will never be a monarchy tempered by a

It is customary today to consider that the Edict of Nantes, in 1598, ended the Wars of Religion; and that good King Henry, with his paternal charm, calmed the heated spirits with a Sunday chicken pot. If the Edict of Nantes froze the situation in ice, the ice floe continued to move for the benefit of the Protestants. The Edict of Nantes did not resolve the quarrel, it made it worse. The Edict of Nantes granted numerous places

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strong to the Huguenots, in the west and in the south of France. La Rochelle is the main one but not the only one. It is at the same time a port, a trading city and a fortress. The Huguenots were busy there in every sense of the word. They want to make this city the capital of a network of Protestant cities. They proclaimed themselves “good French” by negotiating an alliance with England. They raise taxes and soldiers. A general assembly of religionists gathered in La Rochelle, despite the Edict of Nantes, which prohibited it, and despite the king's defense, constituted itself as a permanent body on Christmas Day 1620. The little Huguenot people hardened to great fear of the bourgeois who, fearing the royal wrath, remained faithful to the Crown. Protestant towns close their doors. Catholics are persecuted and hunted there; we distribute weapons and muskets, we raise militias and we roll up cannons which we derisively call “mass hunts”; we mock the king who is nicknamed “Louiset lou cassaire”! Under the leadership of La Rochelle, a sort of network of

small federal and decentralized republics, which form an autonomous state within the kingdom of France. A people within the people and a state within the state.

Chancellor Brûlart de Sillery confided his concern to the Venetian ambassadors: “I don’t know what will happen to us. Evil is in our blood, in our guts. The Huguenots formed a body which prejudiced the authority of the king and which took the scepter from his hand. In La Rochelle, they hold their assembly, without permission, draw up statutes, establish taxes, collect money, constitute these militias, build fortifications, as if the king did not exist and as if they were the sole masters. absolute. »

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Even if some today put the Protestant attacks into perspective, Michelet, who cannot be suspected of being hostile to the Reformed, writes: “The Protestants showed themselves to be more threatening every day. They demanded, with arms in hand, the execution of this dangerous edict of Nantes which allowed a Republic to remain in the kingdom

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A DANGEROUS ILLUSION France almost turned Protestant on several occasions. It was a close call. The wave was very high. Saint-Barthélemy pushed it back but did not break it; Henry IV's conversion to Catholicism was only a pause, a halt, the final hesitation of destiny. On the eve of his death, he was preparing to launch a Protestant crusade against the House of Austria; France would have brought together the German princes, the king of Sweden, without forgetting the United Provinces and why not England in a war to the death against the domination of the house of Austria; the Huguenots saw it as the perfect opportunity to swing the entire country into the reformed religion. What did good King Henry himself think of it? A new apostasy would not have frightened him, he who was in the habit of making his confession the variable for adjusting his political interests. This religious background explains the suspicions held until today against the Spaniards and the Italian Marie de Medici. But the mystery surrounding the sponsors of his assassination ultimately matters little to us: the assassination of Henri IV gave carte blanche to Marie de Medici and her mentor brought back from Italy, the sulphurous Concino Concini, to develop a discreet but effective reversal of alliances. Hence the marriage of young Louis XIII with the Spanish and very Catholic Anne of Austria. Weak as any regent, Marie de Médicis nevertheless conceded the meeting of the Estates General in 1614, from which nothing came out. The third estate remains faithful to the traditional monarchy.

We are not yet in 1789.

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Like many Catholics, the future Cardinal Richelieu was convinced that the peaceful balance established by the Edict of Nantes was a dangerous illusion: "The good French complained of seeing a republic in the monarchy, and could not suffer without pain that our kings were not absolute in the State 1 displayed by most Protestant» Despite patriotism .

figures, the risk of dislocation of the kingdom is then feared by many French and foreign observers. The State has retreated too much, given in too much, procrastinated too much; and the Huguenots became too emboldened. The king hesitates. La Rochelle's dissidence paralyzes France's foreign policy and renders its monarch mute. The fate of Europe is at stake without him. He is faced with a dilemma that will soon be called "Cornelian": support the Huguenots against the Habsburgs while the Turks threaten Christianity or support the House of Austria and risk subjecting France to the dominant power in Europe. Louis XIII came to help the Habsburg emperor against the revolt of the Protestant States of Bohemia, by analogy with that of La Rochelle; even Marie de Medici, very pro-Catholic, had never gone this far. Richelieu begins to make him hear his little music, which he will codify in his political testament: the true greatness of a king is not "in being able and doing everything that one wants", but "in wanting what 'we have to " ; “you must be strong by reason and not by passion”. He applies the precepts of Machiavelli and his distinction between private morality, which submits to God and the message of Christ, and public morality, which only submits to realities and power relations; and warns against monarchs who want to mix the two: “Many would save themselves as private persons, who in fact damn themselves as public persons. » Little by little he imposes the

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notion of “state good” which recovers the Christian idea of “common good” and prepares the advent of the secularized formula of “general interest”.

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L’IMPOSSIBLE DESTIN HUGUENOT FROM FRANCE It was the fall of La Rochelle that definitively halted the Huguenot destiny of France. Protestantism was killed at the same time, at least as a political party. But at the time, religion and politics were just the same. Richelieu feels it, understands it, is determined to accomplish it. Whatever the cost. The siege of La Rochelle will have cost around forty million pounds in eighteen months, or one year of the ordinary state budget! Of the twenty-eight thousand inhabitants of the city, only five thousand four hundred survived. Richelieu takes all the powers. He abolishes the office of constable and that of admiral of France. He becomes superintendent General of Navigation. Under the pretext of economy, he orders the reduction of pensions and the demolition of fortresses. It isolates La Rochelle from the sea by a prodigious dike of fifteen hundred toises. Famine sets in. In May, a procession of women and children tried to flee. The royal troops push them back sword first. We eat donkeys and mules, dogs, cats, shellfish. We replace the bread with a mixture of straw and thistle roots. The Duchess of Rohan had the two horses in her carriage killed; the soldiers eat their boots and their belts. Women prostitute themselves for a pittance.

The city's mayor, Jean Guiton, a man always dressed in black, honest and courageous, embodies the fierce resistance of a city under the influence of fanaticized pastors. Guiton and his Areopagus refuse to give in even though Richelieu makes them

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know that it will not deprive them of their freedom of worship. He holds a knife in his hand with which he threatens anyone who is tempted to give in; he persists, because he is convinced that the English will come to save him. He made an alliance with the King is of England, ; and is aware of nothing of the determination of the Prime

James I minister, Buckingham. Three times, the English navy launched the assault and each time, the French sailors repelled it. The British navy was not yet the invincible Navy that it would become almost two centuries later with Nelson, to the great misfortune of Napoleon. However, Buckingham put in the means. On June 27, 1627, the English fleet had left Portsmouth and sailed towards the French coast. Ninetyeight ships, five squadrons, four thousand sailors and eight thousand soldiers. Buckingham intends to deliver La Rochelle while the Duke of Soubise raises the Huguenots in the south of France. The English claim to be abusive protectors of the rights of Protestants in France when the French do not hesitate to claim the defense of the rights of Catholics in England.

Beyond the religious issues highlighted, the confrontation is economic. Richelieu intends to create a fleet, develop monopoly trading companies and conquer colonial bases. England first wants to get rid of the Dutch who have made Amsterdam a “supercharged urban economy 2

» ; they do

not want to see new competitors arrive. Buckingham prefers prevention to cure, nipping France's maritime and colonial ambitions in the bud. The French do not give in; they are tired of always being late: behind the Spanish, the Italians, the Portuguese,

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the Dutch ; and now on the English. Traders and sailors from all over Europe flocked to the riches of the New World while the French, a peasant people, cultivated their gardens; only the racing war, between heroism and piracy, that of Jean Bart and later of Surcouf, awakened French passions and talent at sea. Louis XIII was forced to issue a decree guaranteeing aristocrats that investing in maritime trade would not carries no risk of derogation; and to promise ennoblement to the commoners who venture there. 3

The state must take care of everything. He puts his military power at the service of the country's economic interests; but already the weight of Parisian bureaucracy is quickly weighing on the necessary commercial agility.

The battle around La Rochelle was the first battle at sea between the French and the English. The French win it without imagining that it will be the exception that proves the rule. It is a fight to the death for the domination of Europe and the world. A fight to the death between two nations who must break the other to reign alone. A fight to the death which will end in total victory for the British. A new Hundred Years' War. “Such is the nature of the English,” Richelieu wrote to his ambassador in London, “that if you speak low with them, they speak high, and if you speak high, they speak low. » We already think we are reading Napoleon! In 1642, Louis XIII and Richelieu, both dying, found the strength to create the Compagnie de l'Orient, which offered a monopoly on trade in Madagascar and the surrounding area. Mazarin and Colbert also wanted to wrest the “empire of the seas” from England. In 1660, they created the China Company. Great characters, Bossuet, the Prince de Conti, the

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brother of Nicolas Fouquet, will not hesitate to invest there. In 1664, Colbert founded the French Company for the East India Trade, based on the model of the Dutch (VOC) and English (East India Company). It was necessary, he wrote, “to prevent the English and the Dutch from benefiting alone”. The rivalry is both commercial and religious. Military and ideological.

La Rochelle embodies the heart of the French paradox: to safeguard the political unity of the kingdom, France liquidates its best asset in the commercial battle it is waging against England. This nation of Catholic peasants, which intends to remain so, sacrifices its most beautiful city of Huguenot merchants. To stop the infernal and suicidal spiral of the wars of Religion, the monarchy sacralizes political power; but "if state power is defined as coming from divine power, the unity of the state cannot be assured and the king of France and his principal minister can only fulfill their duty if they restore the Catholic unity of the kingdom

4 ».

The conflict between Protestants and Catholics is more and less than a war of religions; the salvation of souls is not the only thing at stake; it is also about the conception of the world. As Carl Schmitt has carefully analyzed, there is a logical link between the sea, Calvinist Protestantism, commerce and free trade, constitutionalism and parliamentarism, capitalism and the ideology of human rights. Conversely, the state, the land and Roman Catholicism, the nation and the borders go together. From the reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603), England began an unprecedented revolution: the country of sheep breeders, who sent their wool to Flemish clothiers, was transformed into a nation of privateers and

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pirates who roam the seas. The Queen blesses heroes like Francis Drake. She victoriously engaged in combat against the Catholic world power of the moment, Spain, by crushing the great Armada (1588). In 1600, it granted commercial privileges to the English East India Company, which would later offer the whole of India to England. The loot from everywhere enriched England like never before in its history. Thousands of Englishmen follow their sovereign and become capitalist privateers.

In the past, there had already been maritime powers which ensured their supremacy over the sea, such as Athens or Carthage, Byzantium or Venice. But the case of England is unique and exceptional: “She truly transposed her entire collective existence from land to sea. This allowed her not only to win numerous wars and naval battles, but also to win something else, in fact infinitely more: a revolution. A major revolution, that of planetary space” Walter Raleigh, one of these great English navigators, favorite of 5

Elizabeth I, then explained bluntly to his sovereign: “He who holds .

the sea holds the commerce of the world, holds the wealth of the world; who holds the wealth of the world, holds the world itself. »

Calvinist Protestantism gives a religious and ideological breath to this hegemonic project. The theology of predestination can be interpreted in today's terms as the assurance of an elite nation, sure of its superiority and its right to dominate the world. The French Huguenots participated fully in this movement. Their natural enemy is Catholic Spain; their natural ally, England. Whatever their sincere attachment to the French monarchy, they are active members of the war

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inexpiable that global Calvinist Protestantism is waging against global Roman Catholicism. The French choice to remain Catholic inevitably involves conflict with the Huguenots. The sacralization of the State within the framework of the pacifying absolute monarchy keeps France in the camp of the Earth. The historian François Bluche notes that Louis had previously united the throne, the altar and the people. Without forgetting the army.

Richelieu, then Colbert after him, find themselves in a trap: they have understood very well the importance of the navy and international trade in the new war of powers, but they cannot imitate the English, under penalty of undermining the foundations of the French monarchy, civil peace and national unity.

The rights of Protestants began to be reduced at the end of the reign of Louis XIII; the road is clearly mapped out towards the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis built around the famous triptych: “one faith, one law, one king”. The Edict of Nantes had been an error, but its revocation will be an even greater one. The bloody fall of La Rochelle saves the unity of the kingdom and restores its sovereignty, but the dragonnades are an indelible stain on the radiance of the royal sun. Contemporary historians have put an end to the long-held myth of the country's economic weakening; the fact remains that the exiles will transport their know-how and their

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work ethic – and their hatred of the King of France – among the powers which will be our most formidable adversaries in the 18th century: Netherlands, England, Prussia. The fall of La Rochelle restored and exalted the power of the French monarchy and, at the same time, prepared, in the following century, the emergence of a liberal opposition to this absolute monarchy which, in the name of tolerance and freedom, will eventually bring him down.

The fall of La Rochelle marks the end of the Wars of Religion, the confirmation of French sovereignty and the resolute entry of the kingdom into the modern era. The end of municipal freedoms and city privileges. The end of the feudalists. The end of medieval France. A multitude of tyrants is replaced by the sole authority of the king. The adults got the message. Richelieu acquired the definitive confidence of the monarch. Everything goes through him, everything is decided by him. Louis XIII, however, had difficulty getting used to this imperious and stiff prelate: “The king had antipathy for a man in whom he seemed to sense a master,” notes a sagacious Michelet. The quarrels, the sulking, the disagreements between the two men will never stop. For La Rochelle, Richelieu pleaded in vain for clemency, while the king demanded the destruction of all the city's fortifications. The survivors shouted “Please, have mercy!” », and to their great surprise, it was the Cardinal who lent the most compassionate ear. No offense to our sumptuous Dumas, the most determined, the most ruthless, the most implacable was not, in the couple composed of the king and the Cardinal, the one he complacently portrayed.

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The consequences ran throughout the century until the revocation of 1685. Richelieu had destroyed the Protestants as a political party; but he had left them their parliaments, their synods, part of their internal organization. He planned to rely on them. He vainly imagined himself bringing them back to the Catholic religion by persuasion. Louis XIV spent a lot of money and believed he had succeeded; they told him so, and he believed it. As François Bluche notes with finesse, in his plea for Louis XIV, “only a Louis XIII could in his time abolish the clauses of Nantes while avoiding the horror of those of Fontainebleau. We can say that he left his son a poisoned gift […]. But this did not suit Cardinal Richelieu, who was anxious to spare the Protestant princes of the Empire. Among those responsible for the Revocation, we must therefore never forget Louis XIII and his minister.”

All of Europe viewed the siege of La Rochelle as a major issue for the continent. Louis XIII could enjoy his entry into the rebellious city in November 1628 and defeat. He had a mass celebrated “in the Rome of Protestantism.” He ostensibly reconnected with the ritual of healing the scrofula, as if to better convey the sacredness of his person to the arrogant city which had dared to question his thaumaturgical powers.

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WE WOULD SPEAK FRENCH, WE WOULD THINK FRENCH, WE WOULD REASON FRENCH This victory for Richelieu gave France back its role

central in Europe. The King of France spoke again loud and clear; was able to resume its traditional policy of tilting against the Habsburgs. Richelieu initiated his great European policy, which his best heir, Mazarin, brilliantly continued with the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648: wresting Germany from the Habsburgs. “Bring everything together in France, divide everything in Germany”, here is the lesson that we would henceforth give to each of our dauphins, each of our kings, to give a French peace to Europe.

In this “European Republic” of courts, diplomats, great minds and great names, we would speak French, we would think French, we would reason French. We would definitively leave behind the archaic sentimentalism of Middle Ages Christianity and submit to the iron reason of nation-states which have neither eternal allies nor eternal enemies, only eternal interests to defend. France then believes it has imposed its political, military and cultural hegemony. The 17th century will be his. The century of the only “King”, while the other monarchs are only kings. The century of grandeur and reason. Of order that prevails over disorder. Of Catholic communion on Protestant freedom. From Europe to the world. Land on the sea. A European “balance” which has the clarity of the French language and which must guarantee French hegemony on the European continent. Until it is challenged, corroded, and finally

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overthrown, by the English who will sound the resounding revenge of Northern Protestantism on Roman Catholicism, of the Empire on the nation-state. From the sea to the land.

The French won a battle; they do not know that they will lose the war.

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1. Jean-François Senault, On the use of passions, 1641. It is

2. Fernand Braudel, Material civilization, economy and capitalism, XV

–

It is

XVIII

century, Armand Colin, 1979.

3. Code Michau, 1629. 4. Jörg Wollenberg, The Three Richelieus, serving God, the King and Reason, Guibert, 1995. 5. Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea, The Labyrinth, 1985.

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Bossuet

A god, a master What does our era know of Bossuet? Nothing. What does she want to know? Nothing. What would she think if she knew anything about it? Only bad. Bossuet is one of those characters from the past that we have thrown into the dustbin of History. We ignore it without regret and hate it without knowing it. Instinctively. Bossuet is all that that we are not; he defends everything we reject; he admires everything we abhor. Between us and him, the misunderstanding is radical: he sees anarchy where we see democracy; it detects the anomie where we only want to see a chimerical freedom. “Where everyone can do what they want, no one does what they want; where there is no master, everyone is master; where everyone is master, everyone is slave. »

We remembered that it was nicknamed “the Eagle of Meaux” while wondering how we could associate a royal bird with a lost hole like Meaux. We have preserved a few scattered expressions, "Madame is dying, madame is dead", vanished traces of an eloquence that we are told is sublime and unequaled, and which repels or intimidates us in due proportion. We are ready to grant beauty to Bossuet's prose, but without reading him, like Cicero or Demosthenes, other great orators of a dead language.

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Bossuet preached in churches that we deserted. He exalted the grandeur of an absolute monarchy that we have guillotined. He established a duty of obedience: “We must obey without murmuring, since murmuring is a disposition to sedition”, when the only duty we tolerate is that of disobedience. “Except when the prince commands against God,” he added; we decreed the death of God after that of the prince.

He legitimized the Salic law which excludes women from the royal succession because women whose sex was "born to obey" make themselves "a master by marrying", while we have reversed the ancient submission, sanctified the " equality between women and men” and makes access to women with all powers the unsurpassable symbol of the superiority of our modernity.

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BOSSUET SURPRISES US AND US SHOCK Bossuet is not of this contemporary Church which confuses ecumenism and confusionism, which has given up preaching the Gospels in favor of a syncretic slurry borrowing from all religions, which no longer sees in the Other a sinner to be saved, but a difference to venerate, and in Islam, no longer this long-denounced Christian heresy, but a “religion of love, peace and tolerance”. Bossuet surprises and shocks us. He has neither this complacency, nor this cowardice, nor these renunciations: “Islam! This monstrous religion has for every reason its ignorance, for every persuasion its violence and its tyranny, for every miracle its weapons, which make the world tremble and re-establish by force the empire of Satan throughout the universe. »

We love everything that is not him, everything that was before him, everything that was against him. Before him, there had been Descartes and his Cogito, Pascal and his bet, PortRoyal and its ruins, Corneille and his dilemma. We love this generation of Louis XIII, proud enough not to be servile, free enough to be individualist, brothers at heart of Athos or Aramis, and whose sometimes fervent faith does not seem to be bothered by either the Church or the hierarchy. We love them because in our crass ignorance, and our unparalleled pretension, we have the impression that they are like us. Our latest scholars are grateful to them for having prepared and forged the “French Grand Siècle”, without having had the time

to know its courtesan or warlike excesses. We especially love his successors, the

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rebels of Bossuet, especially Fénelon, the pacifist bishop who dared to tell Louis XIV that the poor were starving in his kingdom; we are infatuated with the aristocrat exiled from the court by the old valetudinarian and vindictive monarch, and who makes fun of his former master, the "Eagle of Meaux", petrified into a courtier sparrow pecking at his master's hand.

Bossuet is a Catholic from the Counter-Reformation. He embodies a Church which still resists the “Protestantization” of Catholicism, without shame of the intolerant rigidity of its past nor of the munificence of its rites. He did not dissuade the king from abolishing the Edict of Nantes as he was sure, like the nineteen million French Catholics at the time, that the supposedly reformed religion was a heresy; convinced, like all priests, that personal examination of sacred texts was sacrilege; and convinced, like most of the subjects of the Great King, that Huguenot solidarity was a screen for disloyal intelligence with our most formidable enemies, the Dutch and the English. He did not say like Claudel: “Tolerance, there are houses for that”, but he could have thought so. “Those who do not want to allow the prince to use rigor in matters of religion because religion must be free, are in an impious error... However, it is only at the extreme that we must come to rigors , especially at the last ones. » In his controversy with Pierre Bayle on tolerance, we remember above all the "extreme rigors", the forced conversions, the violence of the dragons of Louvois, the houses pillaged, burned, the families dislocated, martyred, the exiles forbidden and forced to that time.

Let us try to slip into the head of our great prelate for a moment. Protestantism is a frontal attack against the unity of the kingdom and against the Church. This is also how

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Luther began by breaking the religious and therefore political unity of the Holy Empire, and by contesting the sale of "indulgences" by the papacy to finance the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. However, the Church is undoubtedly the most admirable political, but also artistic and cultural, in short civilizational, product resulting from Catholicism. In the famous words of Alfred Loisy: “We were waiting for Christ, it was the Church that came. » And as Régis Debray writes: “Faith is a disappointment overcome and the Church, a reasoned administration of disappointment. » Indispensable Church: Luther knocks it down, but Calvin immediately builds another. For Bossuet, France had to be Catholic or Calvinist, but not somewhere in between. However, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the marginalization of Protestantism were a Pyrrhic victory for the French Catholic Church.

In the History of France there will be a before and an after Bossuet. “The majority of French people thought like Bossuet; all of a sudden, the French think like Voltaire: it’s a revolution,” says Paul Hazard in The Crisis of European Conscience. The paradox neglected by our simplifying era is that Voltaire thought as much of Louis XIV as Bossuet. But Voltaire was also the most famous, even if Montesquieu was the most profound, of these “philosophers” who made the British parliamentary system fashionable. Our political psyche has hardly changed since those years. For us, England is the unsurpassable model; for Bossuet, it is the anti-model. For us, it is the Glorious Revolution which imposes the parliamentary regime in 1688, which we try in vain to imitate, in 1789 as in 1830. For Bossuet, the counter-example

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is English is the revolution of 1642, King Charles I Stuart, beheaded in 1649, anarchy in the kingdom, the dictatorship of Cromwell. Because he too had so much difficulty closing a revolutionary parenthesis that was much more devastating, Napoleon praised Bossuet, as well as Corneille, because they entered “with full sails of obedience into the established order of their time”.

It has been a constant in our history ever since. Each time one of our “providential men”, from Napoleon to de Gaulle, via Louis Napoléon Bonaparte or Clemenceau, has taken back by the hair the destiny of the country on the brink of the abyss, he has returned to the teaching of Bossuet : concentration and sacralization of power. “See an immense people united in a single person, see this sacred, paternal and absolute power; see the secret reason which governs the whole body of the State, enclosed in a single head: you see the image of God in kings, and you have the idea of royal majesty. »

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THE FRENCH SYNTHESIS OF ROOTS JEWISH, CHRISTIAN, GREEK AND ROMANS

Napoleon will replace God with the glory of his weapons, and de Gaulle with universal suffrage. Bossuet is France as General de Gaulle still defines it without fear or reproach: “We are above all a people of the white race, of the Christian religion and of Greco-Roman culture. » Bossuet succeeds in a language of unequaled purity the French synthesis of the European quadrilateral of Jewish, Christian, Greek and Roman roots. When he wrote a universal history for the young Dauphin, he tirelessly recounted the deeds and misdeeds of the Jewish people. Voltaire would later make fun of this universe reduced to the “little” Jewish people, who ignore the countless Chinese! But Bossuet is not as uneducated as Voltaire pretends to believe. Its “Jewish people” is an emblem, a summary of the history of all peoples. It is a parable, in the great tradition of the French monarchy, of the one who replaced it as the chosen people: the French people. His faults are his own, his convulsions and his torments, his divisions and his denials, his glories too. “Monarchy is the most common, oldest and also the most natural form of government. The people of Israel reduced themselves to it, as being the universally accepted government... We are never more united than under a single leader; We are also never stronger, because everything is a competition. »

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Bossuet knows his classics. He read and benefited from Aristotle's Politics . Greek philosophy and Roman history irrigate his thinking, and illuminate his story of Jewish destiny. In the library of our prelate sits in majesty Leviathan by Hobbes, in several editions. Bossuet annotated it carefully. The praise of absolute power, the only one capable of ensuring civil peace, could only seduce the admirer of Louis XIV, who had experienced the troubles of the Fronde.

He draws a fine and original synthesis. Like many at the time, he adopted Aristotle's famous presupposition: “Man is made to live in society. » But the Christian that he is above all cannot forget that original sin broke the initial harmony. Human sociability, established by so many “sacred bonds” has been destroyed and ravaged by passions. Aristotle leads to Hobbes by the grace of Bossuet: man has become “a wolf to man”. Everyone wants to impose themselves on their neighbor; disunity and violence are everywhere, unless everyone agrees to renounce them and all submit together to a single power, which will have the legitimate monopoly of force.

Bossuet's monarchy is absolute and unitary, but “paternal” and subject to reason; in no way arbitrary. Bossuet does not have harsh enough words for this “barbaric and odious form” of government, “depraved desire to dispose at will and, independently of the law of God, which is that of the kingdom, of goods, of honor , of the life of a subject”. Absolute monarchy respects the natural rights of men, creatures of God, and in particular the right to property. Bossuet is not the ancestor of Robespierre, even less of Stalin. Bossuet then ceases to follow Hobbes, and his power

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without limits, to join Jean Bodin and his legitimate monarchy. Bossuet shaped “enlightened despotism” before the 18th century invented the word. As the great historian François Bluche noted, we will glorify Frederick II of Prussia for what we will reproach Louis XIV.

Bossuet is the anti-Montesquieu. He wants neither separation of powers nor counter-powers. “The only true counterweight to the king's power is the fear of God. » Bossuet is the anti-Voltaire, and does not suffer from

“tolerance”: “There is no State, no public authority without religion, even false o But the absolute monarchy dear to our prelate is not very Catholic either. He eludes the contradiction between the doctrine of the Church, which affirmed that all power comes from God through the people, and the French absolutism of divine right, which draws its power directly from God. We can guess which way he leans. Bossuet's absolute monarchy is above all French; and brooks no foreign interference, even in the name of religion. In 1682, an assembly of thirty-five bishops, of which Bossuet was the driving force, decided that "the pope has authority only in spiritual matters, that in these things even general councils are superior to him, and that his Decisions are only infallible after the Church has accepted them.

There is a big difference between a monarch who fears God and a tyrant who has neither God nor master: during the "great winter" of 1709, while famine threatens many of his subjects, Louis XIV gives imperious orders to his stewards to contain and reduce it, while Stalin, more than two centuries later, himself organized a famine in Ukraine to crush opposition to the communist regime. One fears

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for the salvation of his soul, and questions the validity of his choices, as in a Racine tragedy, while the other jokes like a Dostoyevsky hero: “A dead person is is a crime, a million deaths, it's a statistic. » Power is a burden, not a “job”, as Nicolas Sarkozy claimed. Power is not a hedonist's pleasure, but a stoic's sacrifice.

From the top of his pulpit, with all the usual oratorical precautions, Bossuet never ceases to denounce the illegitimate loves of the monarch, but also and above all the insatiable thirst for glory of the Sun King. He summons holy history and profane history, the great kings of Israel and Jesus Christ to remind his proud sovereign that "if the majority of vices combat charity, that of vain glory combats faith: the others destroy the building, it overturns the very foundation.” Bossuet contains the glory of the king through divine glory; compensates for the desacralization 1

of society brought about by the emergence of an administrative monarchy thanks to the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures; fills the withdrawal of religion from the political sphere, carried out since the end of the Wars of Religion, by the reminder of Christian morality.

Bossuet is both the monarch's primary supporter and the opposition to His Majesty. It measures the offense done to Christian morality by the religion of royal glory. He tried to avoid the irremediable separation between religious faith and political obedience, which would carry away both religion and the monarchy in the following century. It is yet another French paradox of the Grand Siècle: a monarch by divine right, but

who holds his crown directly from God, and not from the Church, will give birth to t

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divination of the State, which will gradually emancipate itself from the 2

tutelary figure of the monarch .

Our time no longer understands or rejects Bossuet; no longer understands or rejects the social and ideological alliance which was formed between the king and the bourgeoisie, between the State and the third estate. The social and ideological alliance that made France. Bossuet comes from a family of magistrates, ennobled bourgeois; he is not an old-line aristocrat like Fénelon. His ancestors were not with the knights who surrounded Godfrey of Bouillon at the crusade; he is the heir of Suger, Guérin, Nogaret, Bodin, Colbert, men of the Church or men of law who imposed royal power on rebellious elites, through sermons or edicts.

Absolute monarchy was the only means that these great servants of France found to avoid our country the disastrous fate of Poland, which, with its valiant but quarrelsome nobility, always prey to internal wars, always on the verge of rebellion , always on the verge of betrayal, its nobility basically so “French”, created a sort of noble Republic, with a king elected by a college of all-powerful feudal lords, which ended up being cut up and shared by voracious neighbors. Poland is the twin sister of France, the unhappy sister, the sister with a broken destiny, the fanciful sister, the utopian sister, the sister who refuses to sacrifice her freedoms to the harsh necessities of the edification of

the State, the sister who believes she has discovered the treasures of the Res publica without submitting to the hierarchical rigors of absolute and hereditary monarchy.

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Poland is a France where Cinq-Mars would have had the head of Richelieu, where the slingers would have defeated Mazarin and put Louis XIV under the tutelage of Cardinal de Retz and the Grande

Miss. It is a France where the Church would have taken its orders from Rome and not from Versailles. Poland is the sister that fascinated the Enlightenment and on which Rousseau and others focused; the sister we would have liked to be; but the sister who was allowed to be cut up without daring a move, on several occasions, in 1772 and 1792, without a word of reproach to her executioners, neither to Frederick II of Prussia nor to Maria Theresa of Austria, and even less to Tsarina Catherine II, these dear friends of our humanist and progressive philosophers. Poland disappeared for more than a century and only reappeared in 1919. Poland, or our eternal remorse; a sister who has long been looked at with the commiseration of the more reasonable and prudent elder, who avoided the great catastrophes of life.

But we have since forgotten the lessons of this tragic History. We adorn the freedoms inherited from the Middle Ages with the trappings of independence; we love their spirit of resistance to all power, their hostility to all administration, this taste for ancient franchises, what the Anglo-Saxons call “medieval constitutionalism.” » Our progressive modernity has rediscovered the outdated charms of feudalism that Bossuet and his contemporaries were relieved and proud to have dissipated.

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FRANCE SCUBADES ITS STATE, ITS CULTURAL HOMOGENEITY AND THE UNITY OF HIS PEOPLE

The twin sisters now play with their foreheads reversed. Instructed by its misfortunes, the resurrected Poland protects like a precious jewel its ethnic, religious and cultural unity, the only guarantor of its territorial and political integrity. Ignoring the lessons of the past and forgetting the virtues of its History, France is scuttling its State in the name of freedom, its cultural homogeneity in the name of human rights, and the unity of its people in the name of universalism; it in turn sanctifies an imaginary Republic, a Republic without people or nation, a Republic of principles and values without order or incarnation, without hierarchy or verticality.

While Poland has adopted the lessons of our Bossuet, today's France continues the chimeras of yesterday's Poland.

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1. “Sermon for the profession of Madeleine-Angélique de Beauvais”, 1667. 2. See the article by Ran Halévi, “Louis XIV: the religion of glory”, Le Débat, n_

150, 2008.

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Racine

Soft power Jean Racine was not a nice guy. An ambitious, an arriviste, an upstart, an ennobled bourgeois, a bourgeois gentleman. A libertine who turns bigot. An exalted and deceived lover of the most beautiful actresses of his time, who ends up as a boring father of a large family. A servile courtier whose excess of incense Louis XIV himself is bothered by; after his official historiographer had read to him one of the eulogies he had written to his glory, the Sun King sneered at him: “I would praise you more if you had praised me less. »

This child, raised and educated in Port-Royal, hardly defends his former masters when the iron fist of the monarch falls on them. Racine betrays Molière, who nevertheless performed his first plays in his theater at the Palais-Royal, to rush to his rivals at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. He provokes controversy with old Corneille to make himself known. He poses by opposing, he knows that we grow by competing, that we write against before writing for. Sophocles wrote against Aeschylus, Pascal against Montaigne; Racine will write against Corneille. After them, there will be Voltaire and Rousseau, Proust and Céline, Aragon and Drieu la Rochelle, Sartre and Camus. We are jealous, we challenge each other, we confront each other, we insult each other; but secretly, we admire and respect each other. Young Racine spent hours

dissecting Corneille's verses, as a studious young schoolboy he struggled to tran

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Suetonius; often, he rewrites them, sometimes, he does not dare touch them, writing his admiration in the margins. His veneration. He envies the cheerful nature of Molière and the hieratic and stony elegance of Corneille.

Racine wants to create a synthesis of his two glorious elders. He is looking for unobtainable oxymorons: a ceremonious nature, a humble grandeur, a contained sensuality. His friend Boileau gave him as a model the sublime simplicity of the beginning of Genesis: “God said: let there be light and there was light. Let the earth be made and the earth was made. »

Racine is the man of tight intrigues. The rule of three units is for him a beneficial corset which magnifies his economical style, while Corneille suffocates there and never seems to be able to remain confined there. Racine is Italy without the baroque, Germany without the heaviness, England without the coldness. It is a language made of all languages and which summarizes them all. A French language made up of all the languages that made France. A universal language to say the universal. The language of straight, pure lines, of clear waters. The language of refined lines, of borders. Racine is the Vauban of poetry.

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GOOD TASTE IMPRISONES AND FASTENS LITERATURE Sainte-Beuve considered that “clearness” had appeared between “the end of La Bruyère or Fénelon and the beginnings of Jean-Jacques”. The French language “became the language of the perfectly honest man with Pascal”. An imperishable form of Western sobriety is then built which very quickly corrupts. She is already restricting herself and suffocating under Voltaire's short sentences. From the 18th century, good taste imprisoned and weakened literature.

Voltaire sends Shakespeare's plays to Cardinal Bernis so that he can laugh at t Madame du Deffand judges Saint-Simon’s style “abominable”. She scoffs: “He’s not a smart man. »

In the middle and at the top, there is Racine. “The honest man walked around the void between two chairs,” says the Italian author Roberto Calasso in his book The Ruin of Kasch. Racine will neither be equaled nor imitated, and will have no heirs. The 18th century understands nothing of the ferocious, desperate, almost nihilistic cruelty of the Jansenist playwright, who, following the lessons of Port-Royal and Pascal, makes intelligence a deception, and reason an illusion. The 18th century only admired and imitated his concern for the natural because, in the meantime, the honest man had lost his faith and, with it, a part of his greatness. Even Talleyrand admitted it with rare remorse: “There is nothing less aristocratic than incredulity. »

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Racine writes for actresses who are also his mistresses, Du Parc or Champmeslé. They are his things, his creatures; they only have his words to speak, click his rhymes to breathe; they are under alexandrines, holding back his verses like tears. He is God, he is the Word, he is the divine breath that speaks through their delicate mouths. Boileau observes that there is a woman in him. Corneille notes with irony that he is more gifted for poetry than for action. Molière takes revenge by parodying him. His characters are lovers with "too many verses", just as Mozart's music is criticized for having "too many notes". Racine's art is not virile enough; we mock her feminine language. These male heroes are bland: “Tender, gallant, gentle and discreet”, Voltaire will mock. Too touching to be manly. We contrast the Cornelian male hero in search of glory with the Racinian heroine in search of love.

We are mistaken. The lover of love is not who you think he is. In the chivalric tradition inherited from the Middle Ages, women exchanged their position as objects of conquest for that of dominant and demanding mistress. Courtly love has made the knight the vassal of his lady; he renounces the superiority that his strength gives him to place himself at the foot and in the service of his mistress. He is his captive, it was said in the 17th century. His passion is dedication and voluntary subjection. The Cornelian characters are the last heirs of this courtly tradition. Love is their master demanding much more than glory; and they must display treasures of heroism to repel him and make him give in. Nothing like that at Racine. Love is not dominating but a slave to its fury; it is no longer devotion to the person adored, but selfish, cruel, implacable passion, a desire for jealous possession.

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Blind passion that knows itself poorly. Blind passion which is all instinct. Blind passion that leads to disaster.

Racine is the student of the moralists of his century more than of the troubadours of the 13th century: “If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship” The heroes Cornelians still have to justify themselves for renouncing love. Their Racinian 1

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successors do not bother with quibbles or grandiloquent pleas; they go to the essential, to the natural; submit to the strongest movement, foreign to all morality. Kings and princes in love renounce their throne or their ambition more willingly in Corneille than in Racine. Racine uses Corneille's words and postures to better divert and return them. He caricatures heroism to better reveal its falsity, to better make it lie, to better deny it.

At the Academy, we bet to see which of the two authors will embody the “French genius” in posterity. We make fun of Racine’s “gibberish”. He is accused of multiplying ambiguities and overcomplicating the language. We will always criticize the poverty of the action of his plays. He hates the fashion for machines that the public loves so much. He favors simple action without drama or effects, so that the spectator listens to each tirade as if it were the last, the most beautiful. He would really like us to go to the theater as we go to Church. He dreams of a tragedy without action as Flaubert dreamed of a novel "almost without subject... A book about nothing, a book without external attachment, which would stand on its own, by the internal force of its style...". He will declaim his verses in the Tuileries park as Flaubert chants his prose in his “mouth”.

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He contemplates the king and this “great nation” which rises with and through him: the king is its sword and scepter; it will be its language. Without the sword, the language remains dialect; but without the tongue, the sword remains mute. In three centuries, clever Americans will claim to have invented what Louis XIV and Racine practiced every day in their Versailles cabinet: the irresistible alliance of hard and soft power.

It is said that the king, since he saw his Britannicus, decided not to dance anymore. He is a serious and warrior ruler. Not a dancer. Not a girl. Neither does Root. He will show it with an unexpected brilliance. He is told that Corneille is writing the story of Titus and Berenice. He chooses to challenge him on his ground. To finish it, to end it. He drops his work in progress, reads and rereads Suetonius: “Because Rome opposed their marriage, Titus had to send Berenice home, inuitus inuitam (in spite of himself, in spite of herself). »

Racine will not emerge from this outline. He will be more Cornelian than Corneille. It is with him that love will give way to duty, that passion will give way to the law. While his old rival gets tangled up in quarrels and love rivalries, he goes straight to the goal traced by Suetonius, and connects his story to the inevitable renunciation of Titus, in the name of reasons of state. Love is big and intense, but must bow before the law of Rome. Titus loves Bérénice and Bérénice loves Titus; but Rome forbids any emperor from marrying a foreign princess. Berenice is Jewish and Titus, after he destroyed the temple of Jerusalem and brought back the

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treasures that were there, intends to succeed his father, Vespasian. And Titus reign. “Rome, by a law that cannot be changed. Does not admit any foreign blood with his blood. And does not recognize illegitimate fruits. Which are born from a hymen contrary to its maxims

2 .

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THE VIRILE TRIPTYCH OF RACINE WILL VICTORY

The law, the State, reason. Racine holds his virile triptych. He won't let go. His victory will be total, implacable, indisputable. The Titus and Berenice of old Corneille will not be played only three times, when the spectators will come to cry at Racine's Bérénice without getting tired. When the ComédieFrançaise was established by royal decree, in October 1680, the royal troupe chose Bérénice for its first performances, with Champmeslé in the leading role.

The king himself will follow the vox populi and demand “his” representation before the court at Versailles. Princess Palatine described in her correspondence the imperceptible disturbance gripping Louis bubbly and twirling – even if she was far from being the prettiest – of her Prime Minister's nieces. But Cardinal Mazarin had other ambitions

for his royal pupil and the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659 required marriage with the Spanish infanta. Young Louis, scolded by the cardinal and begged by his mother, bowed. During their tender and heartbreaking breakup, young Marie had these Racinian words: “You are the king and you are crying. »

Racine had only had to put his words into his own. He thus continued an uninterrupted dialogue with the king. It

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exalted great achievements without concealing his human weaknesses; he glorified his sacrifice, his submission to the fundamental laws of the kingdom, the ultimate bulwark against tyranny, his sense of responsibilities attached to sovereignty and the continuity of the monarchy and the State. Racine would not only be the Sun King's favorite tragedian nor soon his enamored historiographer, but the one who would bring the new political and social conditions imposed by the monarch into harmony with the imagination and morality of the time. He matches the body of France with its soul. Louis XIV defeated the Fronde and, through the failure of this final revolt of the aristocrats and their beautiful ladies, he completed the Middle Ages. He is bringing France into modernity and forging a more egalitarian society, where politics is prohibited, because the time of aristocratic rebellion has passed, where the heroism of the great will give way to majesty and where the rule imposes itself on everyone, even the hero.

Racine is the first modern poet, just as Louis XIV was the first modern king. He is the intermediary between the heroes of yesterday and those of tomorrow, between the military glory of yesterday and the literary glory of tomorrow. Between the knighting of the soldiers of past centuries and the crowning of the philosophers of the next century, when, in the famous words of Tocqueville, writers will have become the “main politicians of the kingdom”. Then, Madame de Pompadour will explain to Louis XV that it is the great writers who have forged the eternal glory of the Sun King; and Voltaire, in his superb Century of Louis XIV, will claim that his greatest claim to fame was the spectacular promotion of men of letters.

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This new society bears the mark of the words and characters of Racine, as it bears that of the gardens and fountains of Le Nôtre, the facades of Le Vau or the paintings of Le Brun. Taine was the first to bring together the customs of the Racinian theater with those of the court of Versailles, and the incontestable agreement of the architecture of the Racinian work

with the etiquette, order and pomp of court life: “This accommodation of the heroic virtues to the temperate atmosphere of the court where it was appropriate that nothing in the individual should rise too brilliantly above above the common... The submission of the nobility was accompanied in the moral order by a degradation of heroic values; but many remains of the old spirit persist, of which we retain the elements that are the least worrying for power, the most compatible with the abdication of the old pride... Aristocratic values adapt to the times without completely denying themselves

3 .

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THE LIKELY CHARACTER IT IS TITUS If we have freed ourselves from the famous but too simple thesis of Norbert Elias, who had recently explained to us that modern sociability would have emerged fully helmeted from court society, and the very French courtesy of courtesanry, Versailles was all the same the place of the education of an entire a people who, through the behavior of aristocratic courtiers, themselves modeled on the model of the great king, learned to control their passions and emotions, to reject violence, entrusted to the exclusive use of the State, of the repression of natural functions imposed by a more acute sense of modesty, of the internalization of morality, of greater self-control, of the rationalization of one's analyzes and reactions. We have moved from a society of orders in the plural to a society of orders in the singular. The old customs and medieval festivals in the countryside, the charivaris, the bull races are considered unsuitable. The Catholic faith itself, under the influence of the new priests trained by the Counter-Reformation, purified itself of the remnants of paganism. Individual reason asserts itself to the detriment of

holistic sociability of Ancient France.

Bérénice definitively seals the pact between Racine and the king, between Racine's tragedy and the society born of absolute monarchy. Louis XIV is Titus and Racine's Titus speaks for the king: “I know all the torments in which this design book,

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I feel that without you I would no longer know live, That my heart of myself is ready to move away, But it's no longer about living, it's about reigning. » This final verse, which summed up the young king's impatience to govern by himself, our time no longer understands. She does not understand that in the 17th century the sympathetic character is Titus; today, it’s Bérénice. Romanticism has been there. In an era of limited, shared sovereignty, it is no longer sovereignty that is absolute, but individualist hedonism. The man of power wants to live and love, and believes, the naive, that he will be able to reign too.

Our contemporaries are reluctant to submit to the laws of the nation and the State, but can no longer tolerate not submitting to the fires of love. It is reason of state which bows to amorous passions. This is how, we believe, Racine is ours, when he no longer celebrates the glory of the Sun King, but praises that of our feminized era. To reduce everything to feeling, however, is to make Racine hemiplegic, it is to preserve tenderness to better exclude violence, it is to confine him to his feminine side, without seeing that she can only flourish because the The virile part fertilizes it, dominates it, imposes itself on it to better sublimate it. It is the message of Bérénice, the message of Racine, the message of the king, the message of the Versailles of Louis XIV, a court where women are queens, but where the warrior monarch is the supreme arbiter.

Read and understand and love and soak up the language of Racine is reading and understanding and loving and soaking up the

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France ; it is to become a Frenchman for life and to be one forever. The language of Racine is the language of France. Racine is the blood of France. Racine is more than an identity document, more than a passport; it is an induction, a dubbing. By the grace of his verses like others of their sword, Racine makes us French knights. He makes us French. The key word of France in the Grand Siècle was not reason, but glory. France is not about measure, but about grandeur. France is Racine.

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1. François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims, 1664. 2. Bérénice, Paulin's reply, act II, scene 2. 3. Paul Bénichou, Morales du Grand Siècle, 1948.

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Saint-Simon

The sublime spy Monsieur le duc is a failure. A failure of politics, a failure of court, a failure of war, a failure of fatherhood, a failure of lineage. A failure of everything. He is small, ugly, mean, spiteful, resentful, jealous and unfair. In Versailles, he stayed in a rat hole for a long time. He criticizes the king for having loved buildings too much. He is the only one who finds the castle in bad taste.

He was almost appointed ambassador to Rome at the age of 30.

penalty ; the king changed his mind: the “perfidious had praised him too much”, he consoled himself. Before asking yourself with rare conceit: “How can we exonerate ourselves from having wit and knowledge? » The Sun King's greatest crime in his eyes is undoubtedly to have disdained to use it. When many years later he obtained an embassy to Spain from the Regent, he ruined himself there through his munificence.

Saint-Simon became the king's musketeer at the age of 16; don't like it. He was present at the siege of Namur and participated in the cavalry charges at Neerwinden; does not support the advancement of more daring and more gifted officers and prefers to hide his bitterness behind a condemnation of the new system of the "order of the table", put in place from 1675 by Louvois, after the death of Turenne, with the intention of promoting merit over birth. He gives up the army in 1709, while France suffered terrible setbacks.

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That year, after the bloody battle of Malplaquet, Madame Palatine wrote: “We only see bandages and crutches at Versailles. The court is often just an antechamber of death. »

Louis de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, careful guardian of the privileges of the old nobility of the sword, pretends to ignore that the blood tax is the only justification. Completely detesting the Sun King and his court, the little duke does not see that the balls, the masquerades, the amorous pleasures, the hunting, which he mocks so much, are also the rest and the reward of the warrior.

Barely returned to his lands, Saint-Simon fulminated against the establishment of the "tenth" and the "capitation", taxes paid by all French people, refusing to personally support the war effort of the entire nation, then even though the country is threatened with encirclement, or even invasion. His religious faith, sincere and vibrant, could bring him closer to the king and especially to the bigoted Maintenon; but it is tainted by Jansenism, since the Duke retires every month to Trappes to find peace there. Even his marital happiness makes him ridiculous in the eyes of a court which only knows and loves illegitimate loves. Our duke is a prosperous “gentleman farmer”, who will later end up master of the ironworks; but too disdainful of material achievements, he will not derive honor or simple satisfaction from them.

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FRANCE WANTS THE RETURN OF THE ORDER

The Regency should have been the great chance of his life. He became a member of the Regency Council, a kind of Minister of State, but refused the Finances and the Seals, and twice the place of governor of the king: “A right heart, friend of public happiness, fears to embark. » Saint-Simon is a Cornelian character, a Cid of paper, of comedy, preferring honor to power. He is convinced that those who believe they govern are governed by others. He displays a disillusioned and haughty cynicism to better conceal his stupidity: “The fate of public affairs is almost always to be governed by particular interests”; he himself will only accept his embassy in Madrid to make one of his sons a grandee of Spain. He hides behind the maxims of Cardinal de Retz to better justify his fearful renunciations: “There is nothing more annoying than being the minister of a Prince of whom one is not the favorite”; However, he is the personal friend, the confidant of the Duke of Orléans, who tolerates that Monsieur the Duke scolds him for his libertine evenings with his "roué" friends or the greedy one because he does not celebrate Easter.

The Regent makes fun of him, of his bigotry as much as of his dreams of a “tempered” monarchy. Saint-Simon is obsolete, archaic, old-fashioned: with his small circle of disciples of Fénelon who gravitate around the Duke of Burgundy, he serves us the poorly reheated dish of the ideology of the leagues and the Fronde, the return of bigots and feudalists, an aristocratic reaction mixed with Christian charity. Saint-Simon is the only one not to understand that the France of Louis

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tired of all this and even of the States General. Above all, she wants the return of order.

Saint-Simon is the contemporary of Voltaire, but understands nothing about freedom. He is from the same century as Rousseau, but understands nothing about equality. He is passionate about stools that are not properly fitted, but does not say a word about the famine of 1693 which reduced the French population by a million people. Monsieur the Duke of Saint-Simon is the archetype of the vain and grumpy lord who takes refuge in an internal exile and cultivates a vain nostalgia for legends of monarchy in the good old days of King Louis XIII (who made his father a duke ) or in the golden age of Saint Louis. His hatred of the “rule of the vile bourgeoisie” foreshadows the noble reaction of the second half of the century which would take the monarchy to the revoluti

Everything always goes wrong for him. He wasted all his good cards, did not do much with the friendship of the Regent or that of two ministers of the king, Chevreuse and Beauvillier, without forgetting the Duke of Burgundy. He provided the grandson of Louis XIV with projects to reform the kingdom to break with the centralized and absolute monarchy; approves of Fénelon's pacifism; proposes a sort of House of Lords; and, in a text that he does not dare sign, defends the peasants.

He thought he had reached his goal when the Dauphin died in 1711.

Saint-Simon describes the spectacle of this crazy night when the son of Louis

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pushed each other, and walked incessantly without almost changing location... Madame de Maintenon, rushing to the king and sitting on the same sofa, tried to cry... All you had to do was have eyes, without any knowledge of the court , to distinguish the interests painted on the faces, or the nothingness of those who were nothing: these calm to themselves, the others penetrated by pain, or gravity, or attention on themselves to hide their enlargement and their joy… Joy, nevertheless, pierced through the momentary reflections of religion and humanity by which I tried to remember; my particular deliverance seemed so great and so unexpected, that it seemed to me, with evidence even more perfect than the truth, that the State gained everything in such a loss. Among his thoughts, I felt, despite myself, a remnant of fear that the sick man would survive again, and I was extremely ashamed. »

The Duke of Burgundy died before having reigned, a year after his father. The little duke finds himself in the shoes of these courtiers who had bet everything on the Dauphin and whose disillusions he had analyzed, with wicked satisfaction: “They lost everything after a long life full of little care, assiduity, work, supported by the most flattering and most reasonable hopes, and the most prolonged, which escaped them in a moment. »

The most astute contemporaries understood and historians have continued to tell us since: Louis XIV had placed the former rebels under house arrest at Versailles to better monitor and control them! The king prefers that Monsieur, his brother, take care of the ranks and his court at

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Meudon rather than intrigue against him, as in the time of his uncle and Cardinal de Retz.

Louis XIV transformed the rebels into courtiers, and, as Chamfort said, “the courtiers are poor people enriched by begging”. However, they are happy and even exalted to serve the king they admire. Courtiers are not full-time. They combine jobs and functions. The incessant wars of Louis XIV made them seasoned soldiers. The little ribbon marquis is a formidable warrior. He loses a lot of money at games of chance: hoca, bassette, reversi, lansquenet; but Louis XIV does not force anyone to play to ruin and keep him.

Contrary to legend, the king does not keep all the nobles in his gilded Versailles cage. The castle cannot accommodate more than ten thousand people, including five thousand nobles.

One in twenty! Others can take care of their land. Versailles did not cause the desertification of the elites that we constantly talk about. Louis Louis XIV is not an oriental despot; etiquette at court is taken from that of Henry III; we do not kneel at Versailles, whereas we kneel before the monarch in Madrid, in Vienna and even in London.

The king kept the men left to him by Mazarin: Fouquet, Le Tellier, Lionne and Colbert. He got rid of Fouquet, and Lionne confined herself to business

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diplomatic. The Colberts and Le Tellier-Louvois are the two clans that ruled France throughout the reign. Louis XIV only decided against the advice of his majority in his Council of State six times in fifty-four years.

The little duke protests with irony: “The dress dares everything, usurps everything and dominates everything. The first magistrates claim to only yield to dukes and officers of the crown; it is still a great modesty, for which we must be very obliged. » However, Louis

The sword fights and the robe governs. Conti, Condé, Vendôme and even the future Regent distinguished themselves in war while the ennobled bourgeoisie, the Colberts and the Louvois, the Philipeaux and the Pontchartrains, administered and legislated. Louis

Venus. In the 17th century , Louis

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THE ONLY REFORMATIVE POLICY INTELLIGENT IN SERVICE

OF THE POWER OF FRANCE Moderate but constant use of this “villain soap” was the only intelligent reform policy in the service of the power of France. Our little duke, blinded by ducal vanity, did not understand this. Louis The aristocracy has three successive ages: the age of superiorities, the age of privileges and the age of vanities. Exiting the first, it degenerates in the second and goes out in the last. »

and of Louis XIV is a subtle blend of François I Louis XI. Both knight-king and bourgeois-king; artist disguised as a patron and merchant disguised as a king. He approves and supports Colbert's mercantilism, while upholding the heroic and warlike values of the Capetian dynasty. He is trying to adapt the country to the times ahead while retaining the founding principle of the monarchy: honor. is

The Sun King will be with Napoleon the last French statesman to hold the line on finance. To impose the law of politics, of the State, on money and commerce. But the wave is strong and the war is expensive; and the French tax system is not up to the strategic ambitions offered by military successes. Napoleon will use the strong approach: “I close the Stock Exchange, I close the stock exchange holders.

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shut in " ; the "dealers" will take their revenge, as Stendhal will finely analyze it, when they abandon in Russia, then in Leipzig, a Great Army deprived of everything, which will not fight with its usual ferocity and efficiency because it will have hungry and cold.

Louis Samuel Bernard had suggested it to him. Like his Capetian ancestors, the so-called “greatest king on earth” was forced to evade and play on the vanity of men of money.

Louis the bourgeoisie. Preserve the foundation of the monarchy and the honor of ancient France, while giving it the economic and financial means to ensure its domination over Europe. It was a Herculean undertaking, which ended up ruining the work of our two heroes, defeated in the same way by European coalitions financed by the City, while Saint-Simon, blind to the balance of power and the issues, vilifies the bourgeois platitude of his reign and his tastes.

Later, much later, much too late, when everything has been consummated, after the great king and the “great nation” have fallen into line, lucid minds will rectify the SaintSimonian course. Péguy will say: “In his greatest abuses,

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the Ancien Régime was never the reign of money. » Renan noted, between pride and regret: “France only excels in the exquisite, it only loves the distinguished, it only knows how to do the aristocratic. We are a race of gentlemen; our ideal was created by gentlemen, not like that of America, by honest bourgeois, serious businessmen. Such habits are only satisfied with high society, a court and princes of the blood. »

Only a Louis XIV would have tried to maintain this in

allowing this. To marry this with that. The old glorious nobility with valiant and talented commoners. The full meaning of this order of Saint-Louis, created at his instigation in 1693, a red cordon announcing the Napoleonic Legion of Honor. The king wants to be both the first gentleman of his kingdom and the great equalizer. “Power,” wrote Bertrand de Jouvenel, “is a leveler insofar as it is a State, because it is a State. Leveling does not need to be on one's agenda; he is in his destiny. » Louis XIV is in the process of forging the modern State and at the same time trying to preserve its extra aristocratic soul. “Average intelligence,” as the evil Duke notes, does not preclude ample vision.

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THE FASCINATING PARADOX OF SAINTSIMON His blindness was nevertheless visionary. His unjust prophetic resentment. This is the fascinating paradox of Saint-Simon. As is often the case, nostalgia for past times prefigures judgment about future times. Fifty years before the Revolution, he announced “the end and imminent dissolution of the French monarchy” due to the degradation of the aristocracy. A century before Tocqueville, he sensed that the monarchy would clear the way for an egalitarian and centralized clean slate. Even before the Revolution, the young Louis XVI, well chastised by his educators, wrote that "one of the causes which contribute to the ruin of States is prodigality for the tastes of vain glory or of useless expenses which have no other object than the personal satisfaction of the sovereign .

The school of the Third Republic will not be more tender towards what Lavisse will call the “lust for glory”. Mass, even for Freemasons, was said: Louis XIV had loved glory too much, loved war too much, squandered the money and blood of his subjects. In his duel for posterity with the Sun King, Saint-Simon had won. But at what cost ?

Saint-Simon has the gift of making people talk, and when he knows nothing, he lets us see through hearsay. “Sublime spy,” it was said. Our Duke is a false witness of genius, he fantasizes for our happiness and our education. He shows us behind the scenes sumptuous court, where everything is graces, favors, kindnesses,

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benefits of sovereigns: “The intriguer said hello in his ear, spoke through his fingers and climbed a hundred stairs a day. » He shows and dismantles the political alliances and the “civil war of languages”, the cabals and the clan struggle, the pettiness of the great and the vanity of the “tierelets of ministers”: “The very few had in mind only the good of the State, of which the faltering situation was given by all as the sole object, while the majority had no other than themselves..." His snobbery made him the father and model of Proust's search for lost time. The spectacle of the court shows us the forge of salons but also of parties, where romantic, social and political strategies, marriages and appointments are developed through the “channel of graces”. We converse and we intrigue, we dance and we plot, we feast and we eliminate, we smile and we kill with a cruel but sparkling word.

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THE CURSE OF THE COURT Saint-Simon observes the still invisible cracks in the grandiose Louis-Quatorz building. His always sour gaze is translucent. The war machine serving the glory of the monarchy and civil peace that is the court is escaping its creator, and turning against him, against the power of this king who wanted to govern through him - itself, and against the greatness and power of France, sacrificed on the altar of small ambitions and small submissions, of compromises which turn into compromises, of great designs which are lost in great cowardice and betrayals.

At the time when Saint-Simon retired to the countryside to write his vast masterpiece, Frederick II's Prussia provided the example of an absolute monarchy without a court. France, from the little marquises to Voltaire, blames this courtesan deficiency on Germanic heaviness and Prussian stiffness. The military defeats of Louis to the armies of the great Frederick will soon teach them that the emollient charms of the Versailles court have also inconveniences. Emotions, libertinage and irreligion, the appointments of the piston, even the corruption of the greatest, will taint the power of the French monarchy under Louis XV, and sully its reputation under Louis XVI. And it's not over. It was the court – and its crazy heads of vengeful former emigrants – which convinced Charles declare war on Prussia, for the greatest

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satisfaction of Bismarck. This war of 1870 will lead to revenge in 1914 and the revenge of revenge in 1939. Until the final catastrophe of May-June 1940. The spirit of the court, both casual and servile, lying and greedy, pursues us until our days, with our presidents of the Fifth Republic, who never succeed in break away from the Elysian confinement, in the midst of misleading statistics, laudatory compliments, docile senior officials, “barbouzes”, and manipulative communicators. It is

The Duke has missed everything. But his misfortune will bring his immortal glory and the happiness of his readers. Happy, he wouldn't have written. He understands nothing but guesses everything. He reasons crookedly but prophesies sublimely.

Saint-Simon wrote his Memoirs under Louis XV to recount the century of Louis XIV while dreaming of the good old days of Louis XIII; will only begin to be published under Louis XVI, but will only be well known and admired under Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe. Both archaic and modern, unequal and Christian, Saint-Simon is a world of its own.

He will be to Louis XIV what Voltaire was to Louis opposition between the scepter and the pen, the providential man and the great writer, the king and the prophet, who brought each other into a tête-à-tête unique in the world and so French.

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1. Louis XVI, Reflections on my interviews with the Duke of La Vauguyon, Communication et tradition, 2000.

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The Pompadour

And this century created woman She had the gift of baptizing everything she touched with her name, the negligee she wore like the sword knot she retied for Marshal de Saxe. There was the Pompadour carriage, the Pompadour fireplace, the Pompadour mirror, the Pompadour sofa, the Pompadour bed, the Pompadour handkerchief, the Pompadour chair, the Pompadour fan. Pompadour, Pompadour ribbon, even Pompadour cases and toothpicks. The 18th century is a relic of the king's mistress. All the objects, all the furniture and all the accessories, all the craftsmen and all the artists are in his hand and from his hand.

She orders and board. Through her brother, whom she had appointed, in 1751, general director of buildings, gardens, arts and factories, she spread the king's favor to painters, sculptors, engravers and architects. She advises them, criticizes them, gives them her ideas, her imagination. She imposes her taste on the century. She tears French painting away from the servitude of Greek and Roman heroes, to all those Alexanders and Caesars, for subjects of everyday life and the present. She is the godmother and queen of rococo. She created the Military School to collect and educate the orphans of nobles killed in war. She founded the porcelain factory of

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Sèvres, to supplant that from Saxony. She exhibited her production in Versailles, where she became a state merchant.

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THE CENTURY OF WOMEN All 18th century art is his client: Boucher, La Tour, Fragonard, Chardin, Soufflot, Gabriel. It is said that the 18th century was that of the Enlightenment, the century of philosophers. We should rather say, like the Goncourts, that it is the century of women. A woman's.

This ideological shift of the century began with the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This literary battle had turned into an ideological and political fistfight. The court sided with the Moderns while the salons in Paris sided with the Ancients. Grouped around Boileau, the Elders intended to prevent worldly people, and in particular women, from becoming the arbiters of literary and artistic elegance. The Moderns party, on the contrary, led by Charles Perrault, wanted to promote the public's freedom of judgment and contested the principle of authority. Today, it seems that the Ancients were fighting against the law of the market and the modern “everything is equal” which makes success (and therefore money) the only criterion of quality. Louis

The Moderns won with the support of women. Mythology disappeared from the theater and literature, took refuge in the opera and the statuary of the fountains of Versailles, became a simple decorative object, stripped of its political and

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allegorical. Even before the death of Louis XIV, the policy of glorifying the Sun King was over.

The “learned women” of the 17th century , who wanted to impose their taste and their language, had been mocked and ridiculed by Moliéresque verve; their heirs will be praised and glorified by the philosophers and scholars of the Age of Enlightenment. Fontenelle writes a scientific work with the daughter of Madame de la Sablière and Madame du Châtelet initiates her Voltaire lover with scientific thinking. The women are passionate about the flight of the first hot air balloon and rush to Messmer's psycho-electric experiments. Some even claim to have seen Marie-Antoinette hidden under a mask.

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BOREDOM IS THE EVIL OF THE CENTURY

The Pompadour will give an unprecedented scale to this gender revolution. She is one of those leading women, of the Maintenon race, of those cold-blooded governesses of kings. But if the Maintenon had acquired great influence through the “channel of pardons”, the king kept it at a distance from political decisions. Louis _ His descendants do not have the same character or the same prejudices. The Duke of Burgundy, devout and pacifist, is under the influence of his young wife, the dapper Duchess of Savoy, while on the other side of the Pyrenees his brother, who became King of Spain under the name of Philip V, leaves govern the queen and, with her, the Jesuits.

The incandescent rays of the Sun King burned his descendants. His great-grandson Louis XV is plagued by an illness that our modern doctors compare to chronic depression. Contemporaries called this state “boredom”.

Boredom is the evil of this century. He is embodied by the king; boredom is the king's evil genius. “He degrades to the point of indifference a sovereign who shied away from his history and abdicated France,” the Goncourt brothers analyzed in their biography of Madame de Pompadour. Victor Hugo will define the king's spirit as a “stupid joy with vast boredom”. After his death, Frederick the Great wrote to Voltaire: “This cursed man was an honest man who had the only fault of being king. » Abbot Galiani will say of Louis XV that he “does the

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the nastiest job that is done as reluctantly as possible.” “They wanted it that way, they thought it was for the best,” pleads the king when his ministers fail. “If I were a police lieutenant,” he said again, “I would defend convertibles. » Louis XV, when young, was obsessed with “lazy kings”. One day, Cardinal Fleury told him that in France there had been kings deposed because they did nothing. Two days later, the monarch asked his minister: “I have thought about what you have told me about some of my predecessors who have been deposed; but tell me, when these sovereigns were deposed, did they have good pensions? »

Louis XIV was the actor of royalty, Louis XV will be the audience. He will view his reign as a bad play: “Do what Madame wants,” the king most often concludes, to the great dismay of his ministers. La Pompadour is more than the king's mistress, she is a favorite; she is more than favorite, she is queen; she is more than queen, she is Prime Minister.

She refused to be confined in a vain and empty superintendence of the sovereign's amusements. She annotates the projects that are submitted to him with a regal “we will see”. She amasses land and castles like a Colbert, a Mazarin or a Richelieu or even a Montespan. She had the head of her enemy Maurepas and imposed Choiseul. She locks herself in with police lieutenant Berryer and speaks in a low voice. She appoints the administrators of the Bastille and rejects the prisoners' requests for pardon. She obtained the expulsion of the Jesuits from the kingdom. She is Voltaire's ally in his fight against the "infamous", and the "fanatical imbeciles of chaplains" who rail in their sacristies against the "beautiful philosopher".

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Voltaire is the favorite of the favorite; she makes him an academician, historiographer to the king, an ordinary gentleman of the chamber. She also protects and pensions Crébillon, Buffon, and even Montesquieu; and tries to seduce Rousseau, whom she nicknames with mocking affection “the Owl”. Madame thirsts for immortality, wants to make history. Like Louis XIV, she uses writers to sing her praises. It was in his antechamber at Versailles that the economists gathered who, around Quesnay and Mirabeau père, castigated the policy of the “infamous ministry”. The Revolution began in

the antechamber of the king's mistress. She corresponds with the Empress of Austria Maria Theresa, who calls her “my friend”. Nothing stops him. During the Seven Years' War, she sent Marshal d'Estrées a campaign plan, where the positions were indicated with flies stuck to the vellum of her letters.

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“ A PIECE OF A KING” During her countless sleepless nights, Pompadour compares her life to a “perpetual battle”, in the daily torment of a disputed domination which does not leave her a moment of rest. To relax, she digs into her incredible library. It is cultivated with a political, public law or history book; she delves into a text by Voltaire or the 18th century moralists or the Stoics Greeks; she leafs through a work on the theater or opera or a novel; she forgets herself in a love novel; she has all kinds, from all countries, all heroic, historical, satirical, political, comic, fairy tale novels...

When she is too tired, she lets her mind wander with her memories. How far we have come since his childhood filled with all the gifts and all the graces. His mother was full of praise for this “piece of a king”. It was predestined, shaped, made. At 7 years old, a card reader promised her that she would become the king's mistress. She learned singing, harpsichord and dancing with the best masters in Paris. Crébillon taught him declamation and the art of more intimate conversation; she rides a horse like a musketeer and draws delicately. She has a supple, slender, elegant waist. Beautiful light brown hair and a delicious smile that can cajole, bewitch and chill. Eyes that turn from black to blue, and whose charm lies precisely in the uncertainty of their color. She entered into a marriage of convenience at the age of 15 and, since then, salons and great ladies have been vying for the “little madame”.

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d’Étioles.” Whose flattering reputation eventually reached the king…

Madame has only one fault: her birth. His father, Mr. Poisson, fled France for embezzlement and a sentence to be hanged. He is one of those traders with questionable practices as much as the origin of his fortune. The young Antoinette Poisson stands out with her manners, her language, her taste for nicknames: “My pig”, “My rag”, “My simpleton”, “My little horror”, “My little husband”. This “ribbly” language bothers even the king: “It’s an education that I will have fun with. » After she had described a quail as “fat” at a dinner, Voltaire, mockingly, whispered to her:

“Plumpy, between us, seems a little abode to me I tell you quietly, beautiful Pompadourette. »

But the worst is yet to come. Inspired, written at court, and in particular by the prince of courtiers, Maurepas, notoriously impotent who pursues with his hatred all the mistresses of the king whom he does not control, a cloud of epigrams, ariettes, satirical verses , of songs, spread from Versailles to Paris, from Paris to France and from France to Europe. “A little bourgeoisie, Raised in sausage, Measuring everything by his height,

Make the yard a dump, say, say; […] This subordinate whore

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Insolently governs him And it is she who awards Honors at a price of money, gent, gent, gent. » These “fisheries” are reminiscent of mazarinades and announce the pamphlets against Marie-Antoinette. It is a cold sling and a repetition of the Revolution. The same circuits from the Court to the City, the same networks, the same methods, between opposition journalism in limbo and medieval rumor against witches, the same themes which mix sex and politics, in an often fantastical lyricism. The Pompadour is the first case of a royal mistress without birth. She had the king's adultery waived. His affair is experienced as a misalliance. Even the The ladies' hairdresser at Versailles, a man named Dugé, is reluctant to do her hair. The ultimate privilege of the nobility is snatched away by this insatiable money bourgeoisie. The transgression of Louis XV seems unheard of. Certainly, his ancestor had married Madame de Maintenon, an aristocrat of low birth; but this morganatic marriage had remained secret. Certainly, the Sun King, especially in his green youth, like his gaunt and bawdy grandfather Henry IV, never refrained from a gallant adventure; but he chose his official mistresses among the greatest names in the kingdom. Certainly, the Regency had known the evenings of "roués" in their Parisian "folies", where the harlots feasted with the friends of the Regent, and where the great ladies, even the Regent's own daughter, ended their orgies in the early morning. in the arms of “mirebalais” of as modest extraction as vigorous virility. But the Duke of Orléans was known for his life of debauchery, had not been anointed in Reims, did not cure scrofula; and his

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companions had no influence on his political choices. La Pompadour had a political head. It was not her rather cold temperament, a "scoter", as she said with annoyance, which kept her close to the king, but habit, affection, working together.

She does not hesitate to silence her jealousy as a woman to safeguard her position of power: she herself takes care of providing the royal livestock for the “little mistresses” of the Cerf Park and personally settles the side effects of marriages. arranged for clandestine births. “It’s her heart that I want and all these little girls who don’t have an education won’t take it away from me,” she says to reassure herself.

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COTILLON II His cold, cerebral, selfish attitude, without apparent weakness, without clemency or forgiveness, driven by an exclusive and imperious ambition gives credence to the worst accusations and the wildest fantasies. Her friend Cardinal de Bernis wrote that she “pushed the figure's self-esteem to the point of ridicule”.

All of France knows and fears its power. She has the character that the king does not want to have. All of Europe laughs at this French monarchy headed by a woman, a bourgeois one at that. The King of Prussia, Frederick II, nicknamed her Cotillon II. A 1748 caricature titled The Print of the Four Nations shows the king bound, garroted, with his pants removed, the Queen of Hungary whipping him; England saying, “Hit hard”; Holland: “He will return everything. »

The Pompadour is everywhere, falling back on the smallest detail; the Prince de Ligne makes fun of “his politico-ministerial nonsense”; he is accused of transforming the monarchy into despotism. She lets her maids accept bribes, sell the king's bonds, and associates courtiers with the profits of the farmer generals. The monarchy is in his hands only a sheet of profits; he is accused of teaching the nobility the vile passions of finance. The court and France bend under the yoke of this “liberallibertine”; but this mixture of sex, money and politics at the heart of royal power is a time bomb for the monarchy

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French. A machine for desacralizing what is nothing without it sacre.

After the death of Pompadour, Louis XV elected as his official mistress an authentic whore named Du Barry. Enough to distress the daughters of Louis XV who already nicknamed the Pompadour “Mama whore”. After timid first steps, the Du Barry will reveal a lot of finesse, delicacy, and taste. It will be inspired by the Pompadour and will also become the reference for state cultural policy. The Pompadour pink of Sèvres porcelain is now called Du Barry pink. The market adapts.

La Du Barry will cautiously stay away from politics for fear of imitating the Pompadour; but she will find in front of her the daughter of the Empress of Austria, Marie-Antoinette. The young queen also has a weak and easily influenced husband. She is also pretty, teasing, charming. She also has taste and directs, through her orders and her ideas, the art of her time. She also likes to play in the theater and gives her name to colors and objects and launches fashions. She also appears in satirical songs as an eater of men (and women). From the beginning of the Revolution, Marie-Antoinette's energy supplanted her husband's apathy. The king is no longer in his mouth the person who is “above me”, but “near me”. The queen consults, listens, decides. It is her that Mirabeau, then Barnave, will advise. Some ministers refuse to see the king without her. It uses funds and secret agents. She becomes dissembling, no longer has her “redness” of youth. The queen became a statesman. Marie-Antoinette took over the role of the Pompadour. Neither the people nor the revolutionaries will be mistaken. They will know who their enemy is. They will know who to hit.

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THE DEFEAT OF ROSBACH If a whore could become a queen, a queen can become a whore. Pompadour, Du Barry, Marie-Antoinette: diabolical trilogy, confusion of positions and feelings. The decadence of the monarchy by women. Their tragic end will confound them with a similar fate: when the Pompadour is dying, the king takes her to Versailles, although, according to etiquette, only princes can die there. Du Barry will die on the guillotine like Marie-Antoinette. Queen or whore, same fate.

Love and hate have in common that they need this crystallization that carries away the passions. Crystallization took place on November 5, 1757 during the defeat of Rosbach. The Pompadour burst into tears as soon as she heard the news. She doesn't sleep anymore. She no longer travels except with horsemen and marshals for fear of insults, or even attacks, from a vindictive mob.

The whole court, all of Paris, all the people, all the authors, the whole century curse the “king’s rascal” for this defeat. Rosbach is experienced as a new Agincourt. And announces the humiliation of Sedan in 1870. The national territory was not occupied by the Prussian armies, but this defeat sounded the death knell for France's world power. At the end of this Seven Years' War (1756-1763), considered by historians as a sort of "first world war", Louis XV lost the largest part of the empire bequeathed by his ancestor and the positions that had accumulated the legendary Dupleix and Montcalm in India and Canada. Michelet

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will say, sarcastically: “What then does France lose? Nothing ; if not the world. »

It was the Pompadour who precipitated this war. It was the Pompadour who initiated the “great reversal of alliances”. It was the Pompadour that moved closer to Austria and further away from Prussia. It was the Pompadour who took up on this occasion the ultimate strategic brilliance of Louis XIV at the end of his reign: the formidable enemy was no longer the Habsburg Empire, but England. We must ally ourselves with this one to defeat this one. It was the Pompadour who imposed this Catholic league on Louis XV against the English and Prussian Protestants. It was Pompadour who imposed her men at the head of the armies, Soubise and Richelieu, a ridiculous incompetent and a corrupt thief.

The disastrous outcome ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1763 revives bad memories. During the previous war, in 1748, the French armies, led with mastery by Marshal de Saxe, covered themselves with glory. We are then in the blessed time of the battle of Fontenoy and the “beloved” king. But the latter had surprised everyone by renouncing his conquests, in this case Belgium. Although he evoked the distant precedent of his ancestor Saint Louis, and was inspired by the pacifist teaching of Fénelon, the king's gesture did not pass. Marshal de Saxe did not hide his fury: “In truth, it is a good piece and we will repent of it… magnificent ports, millions of men, and an impenetrable barrier… Why abandon them without necessity?… I see that the King of Prussia took Silesia and kept it, and I wish we could do the same. » All of France then thought like the Marshal of Saxony. So many

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sacrifices, deaths, injuries, destruction, so much money wasted, all for nothing! “We fought for the King of Prussia,” Voltaire mocks. “Stupid as peace,” curse the herrings of the Hall, spitting on the ground.

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" AFTER US THE DELUGE " We then begin to say in a public opinion influenced by a growing and vibrant patriotism that there is a dichotomy between the interests of the king and those of the nation. Louis XV renounces a good conquest for France, but skillfully plays the game of dynastic politics by strengthening his links with the Bourbons of Naples and now of Parma. In the most literate salons, we recall that the great king himself also acted in this way during the beginnings of the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1701: while a partition treaty offered France the magnificent lands of Lorraine, the Spanish Basque Country, and especially Tuscany, Naples and Sicily, Louis XIV preferred to put his grandson on the throne of Spain, without any direct advantage for France. But, at the time, the Sun King's decisions were not discussed. This is no longer the case half a century later. We discuss, we contest, we accuse. We evaluate the merits of a defeated army, whose last great victorious generals were foreigners.

The defeat of Rosbach was the turning point in the reign of Louis XV and perhaps in the history of the French monarchy. Over the past two centuries, there has been much interpretation of the famous words thrown by Pompadour to her defeated king: “After us, the flood!” » Historians of the Third Republic had proof of the levity of this court which had led the king and the country to its downfall. Some time ago, one of the most famous German philosophers, Peter Sloterdijk, made this word the quintessence of a modernity that only knows the moment, and

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believes that freedom is only forged in the refusal of any roots in the past.

The Pompadour is undoubtedly less “modern” than our German friend thinks. It is her defeat that she deplores with this famous word, and that of the nation, a word she uses half a century before the Revolution. The defeat of what was then called the “French race”. Like her contemporaries, the Pompadour saw it as a sign not of God, but of decadence. She thus wrote to the Duke of Aiguillon: “I am in despair because there is nothing that causes me as violent as excess humiliation… Being beaten is only a misfortune: not to fight is an opprobrium. What has become of our nation? Parliaments, encyclopedists, etc., have changed it absolutely. When we lack enough principle not to recognize either divinity or master, we soon become the scum of nature, and that is what happens to us... We must renounce all glory. It is a cruel extremity, but I believe the only one which we stay… "

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PLEBEIAN AND VIRILE REACTION The friend of philosophers is saddened by the decline of religion and authority. The king's favorite, the great organizer of the pleasures of the court, the godmother of Boucher and Fragonard, laments the withering of the souls of the courtiers, civilized to excess by the court. The woman who imposes her wishes on the king complains of the lack of temperament of the men of her country and her time. The Pompadour reproaches her century for everything that her century reproaches the Pompadour. Michelet will say: “Towards the end of this ignoble Seven Years' War, where the aristocracy had fallen so low, the great plebeian thought broke out. It was as if France had shouted to Europe: it is not me who is defeated. » The plebeian and virile reaction is one and the same. It is theorized by Rousseau, who denounces the excessive power of women at court and in public affairs. Rousseau returns women to private space and encourages them to breastfeed their children rather than entrust their offspring to wet nurses in the countryside, where most of them died in the bumps of the journey.

“I must notice another effect of this revolution, which is nothing but natural; it is that the enormous influence of sex is weakened or rather reduced to nothing, remarked Arthur Young, on January 10, 1790, before leaving Paris; previously, they interfered in everything in order to govern everything. I think I see the end of this state of things very clearly. Men in this kingdom were puppets, set in motion by their wives; now, instead of setting the tone, in the

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questions of national interest, they must accept it and be content to move in the political sphere of some famous leader, that is to say they return to what nature had destined them for; they will become kinder and the nation will be better governed 2 .

»

The feminine and curial trilogy of the 18th century, Pompadour, Du Barry, Marie-Antoinette, will respond to the plebeian and virile trilogy of the Revolution: Rousseau, Robespierre, Bonaparte. Rousseau denounced female tyranny in the salons, the artificial falsity of social relations under their domination, and campaigned for the return to their maternal “nature”. Robespierre will destroy this aristocratic society and expel women from political life; he will have the feminist Olympe de Gouges and Madame Roland guillotined. Napoleon will legally codify the principles of this new bourgeois society, by reestablishing the verticality of patriarchal power, in the family as in the State.

The people and the nation against the aristocracy and the court. Ancient heroism against the delicacy of the boudoir. Virile verticality against the egalitarian indistinction of feminization. The sacralization of republican power against the desacralization of monarchical power. To re-enchant and relegitimize politics, damaged by the court, women and military defeats, the “virtuous” republicans, haunted by the memory of the virile Roman Republic, will distance women from power, and reimmerse the French “race” in the blood of glorious battles. The aristocracy has failed, devirilized and feminized, it no longer protects the nation: let it return to its forests of Franconia, according to the famous words of Sieyès, let it be exiled or guillotine, and let the people arrogates its privilege to bear arms, to fight at the borders.

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May the People in turn be the Man of France.

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1. Antoine Furetière, Universal Dictionary, 1690. 2. Arthur Young, Travels in France, 1787.

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Voltaire

The flattery of grandeur He storms. He belches. It's thundering. Threatens. He shouts. He agonizes the weak with insults, but bows his back to the powerful. He receives the rich and titled people with pomp in his home at Ferney, he chases away the poor and the poor. He complains, groans, laments, suffers a thousand deaths, an eternal dying hypochondriac, a comedy Volpone always between life and death, the better to pity and circumvent.

We think we are with Louis de Funès, but we are with Voltaire. We seem to hear from Funès: “The poor are made to be very poor and the rich very rich”; but it was Voltaire who said: “It is absolutely necessary that there be poor people. The more men there are who have only their hands for all their fortune, the more land will be valuable. » We think we're with de Funès hitting his servants: "You're too big, get down, a valet shouldn't be so big!" ", but it was Voltaire who said: "We need a punishment that will make an impression on these buffalo heads... Let the people receive the pack from the builders who build them, but let us not be beaten. »

Voltaire or Funès? “He always seemed to be angry with these people, shouting at the top of his lungs with such force that I involuntarily flinched several times. The room

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eating was very sonorous and his thunderous voice resounded there in » Voltaire or Funès? " I have the most frightening way shame 1

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of stupidity and base and servile submission where I lived for three years with a philosopher, the toughest and the prouder of men

2 .

“Voltaire or de Funès? “In general, respect

for the great degrades the fact that we admire what is far from being admirable. We praise actions and speeches that we would despise in a private

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Voltaire is one of Funès in letters, one of Funès in majesty; one from Funès in a dressing gown and wig wearing a patriarch's cap. De Funès could play everything, industrialist or trader, cop or mafioso, restaurateur or Spanish grandee; Voltaire could write everything, poetry, tragedy, novel, story, political essay, historical story or epic. The character played by Louis de Funès, with incomparable comic genius, reflected the advent, in Pompidolian France of the mid-20th century, of a new bourgeoisie, greedy and brutal, amoral and cynical, in a hurry to make their fortune and achieve . Voltaire embodies , with incomparable literary genius, the advent, in the France of Louis The same thirst for recognition.

The same careerism. The same class contempt. The same liberal Darwinism. The same social cruelty. The same reign of money.

A confidant of Voltaire mentions his “150,000 pounds of income, a large part of which he earned on ships”. The slave trade “is undoubtedly not a real good”, recognizes Voltaire in a convoluted formula, before writing to his businessman: “I wait with all the impatience of a

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compote eater your enormous Bordeaux cargo. » In October 1760, Voltaire popped champagne with a few friends to celebrate the defeat of the French in Quebec in a war “for a few acres of snow”. The patriotic humiliation and the geostrategic downgrading seem to him to be of little importance in view of the commercial stake: to safeguard in exchange the French possessions in the West Indies and their sugar exploitations, very abundant and very remunerative, even if they use a labor force. slave labor fueled by the slave trade.

Our humanist looks away. Business is business. Work is the supreme good. Especially the work of the poor. “Force people to work, you will make them honest people. » He praises the deportations to Siberia like the convicts in the English colonies condemned to “continuous labor”. He thinks like Quesnay, the leader of the Physiocratic economists, “that it is important that the common people are pressed by the need to win”; and has no compassion for the "two hundred thousand idlers who slog from one end of the country to the other, and who support their detestable lives at the expense of the rich."

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THE GREAT IMPORTER OF “IDEAS ENGLISH » Our great man dresses his social insensitivity and his insatiable greed in the becoming trappings of freedom. He brought back from England this marriage of economic liberalism and political and philosophical liberalism. He is the great importer of these “English ideas” that our armies will soon spread throughout Europe, after having upset France, for the better, but also for the worse: “The French were only the monkeys and the actors of these ideas, their best soldiers too, at the same time, unfortunately, as their first and most complete victims, because the pernicious Anglomania of “modern ideas” ends up withering the French soul so much that we no longer remember, today Today, with an almost incredulous surprise, its 16th and 17th centuries, its deep and passionate strength of yesteryear, its creative power, its nobility... European nobility – nobility of feeling, of taste, of morals, in short, nobility of all the higher senses of the word – is the work and

the invention of France; European vulgarity, the plebeian baseness of modern ideas is the work of England

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The attraction was too great. The taste for change. The fascination with big words and big principles. Freedom to think, to write, to speak; freedom to trade too. The freedom to believe or not to believe. Human rights. The tolerance that he defends urbi et orbi, for the rehabilitation of Calas or the Chevalier de La Barre, and that he practices so little: “Tolerance? Lead by example,” says

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Madame du Deffand. Only those close to him guessed that Voltairian tolerance was based not so much on respect for each person as on contempt for all. Same contempt for the Catholic “populace” who persecuted the Calas and for these “idiots” from Calas. “We are not worth much, but the Huguenots are worse than us. » Contempt for the Jews: these “enemies of the human race”; this “vagrant horde of Arabs called Jews”.

Contempt for the poor: “It seems essential to me that there are ignorant beggars… The vulgar do not deserve to think about enlightening them… The brothers of the Christian doctrine have appeared to end up losing everything: they teach to read and write to people who should only have learned to draw and use the plane and the file, but who no longer want to do so. » Contempt for the people: “It is a very big question to know to what extent the people, that is to say nine parts of the human race out of ten, must be treated like monkeys. » Contempt of the French: “The rubbish of the human race... the first apes in the universe... a race of apes in which there were a few men... Below the Jews and the Hottentots. »

Contempt for humanity: “Let us look at the rest of men like the wolves, foxes, and deer who inhabit our forests. »

It is at this point of intersection that temperament and ideology come together. His humanism is perverted by his feeling of superiority. Voltaire appropriates Terence's famous words: “I am a man; nothing that is human is foreign to me”; but he decides who is a man and who is not. There are the “honest people” and the “rabble”. For this “rabble”, a God is essential for

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“stop stealing from me”. Voltaire animalizes his enemies with all his might: "It is right to drive away with whips the dogs that bark in our path", as much as the populace, the "savages", the Blacks, the Hottentots, the Jews: "animals calculating”, the “stinking beasts of Jesuits”.

This is the heart of his disagreement with Rousseau: “Only he is crazy enough to say that all men are equal. » This is above all the heart of his conflict with the Catholic Church. In his inexpiable fight against Catholicism, we don't know who is the chicken and who is the egg; we do not know if Voltaire rejects the equal dignity of all men because it is a Catholic creed or if he vomits Catholicism because he defends the equal dignity of all the sons of Adam: “Our chaplain claims that the Hottentots, the Negroes and the Portuguese descend from the same father. This idea is very ridiculous... there is indeed a pleasant image of the eternal being, a flat black nose with no or no intelligence. » In his book Birth of the sub-human at the heart of Lumières, Xavier Martin shows how Voltaire's questioning of the Christian universalist message leads him irremediably to a hierarchy between men, the mother of all excesses; how his hatred of Christianity naturally leads him to that of the people who inspired him. Jesus: “A Jew from the populace, born in a Jewish village, from a race of thieves and prostitutes… ignorant of the dregs of the people, preaching above all the equality which so flatters the rabble…” Saint Paul: “liar and wicked beast”, who “would succeed in ruining the Roman Empire by making the principle of equality of all men triumph before one God”. Without forgetting the Genesis, this “Asian novel”, a text weighed down with “all the

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disgusting reveries with which Jewish crudeness has stuffed this fable.”

Our iconoclastic historian notes that Drumont in Jewish France, like Fourier or Proudhon, in their anti-Semitic diatribes, quote Voltaire copiously. Chamberlain, a famous English antiSemite of the 19th century, also bases “his challenge to the unity of the human species under the authority of the Enlightenment”. The final blow is given by the greatest historian of anti-Semitism in Europe, Leon Poliakov: “The crushing of the infamous will prelude (through as many mediations as one wishes) to otherwise vast slaughters. » The people of Vendée will be the first to suffer in their flesh this denial of humanity. Others will soon be described as “subhuman” and animals. “Christianity had made the unity of the human race prevail. The reign of reason will paradoxically undermine this Adamic conception of humanity by undermining the very idea of the unity of the species,” underlines Georges Bensoussan, historian of the Shoah. The division of humanity into distinct, and soon unequal, races emerged in the 19th century from this Voltairian questioning of the Christian unity of the human species. Chamberlain, Gobineau, Rosenberg are not the odious products of the anti-Enlightenment, but the sons of the Enlightenment. Not the rebels against Voltaire, but his degenerate children. Voltaire's bastards! The author of Candide is lucky: progressive and humanist posterity refuses this lesson, however implacable. And covers his ears when Poliakov turns Voltairian irony against the master: “We will therefore continue to fight racism in the name of these apostles of the Enlightenment who were its de facto inventors. »

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VOLTAIRE IS EVEN BIGGER DEAD THAN ALIVE These myth-busting efforts are in vain. Voltaire is even greater dead than alive. His sovereign literary talent intimidates even the most hostile. Even Joseph de Maistre took precautions before tearing down the idol: “One should only praise Voltaire with a certain restraint, I almost said reluctantly. The unbridled admiration with which too many people surround him is the sure sign of a corrupt soul. » However, de Maistre is right, two centuries in advance. Posterity has not preserved much of his protean work: a few tales where his ironic lightness works wonders, like Candide ; but nothing of his tragedies, even less of his poetry or epics (La Henriade !) survives in memories. His political texts do not have the depth of those of Montesquieu or Rousseau. He is a talented pamphleteer, a genius activist. The German depth of the 19th century made Voltaire a usurper of “philosophy”.

Despite everything, François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, embodies, in our eyes which refuse to open up, freedom and modernity, the end of religious obscurantism and superstition, the era of sovereign reason and of the individual who emancipates himself from the holistic corsets of traditional society. “Voltaire, it’s the end of the Middle Ages”, will bow again Lamartine.

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But why him? His supporters evoke the persecutions he would have suffered, his stays in the Bastille, the beatings of the great for his irreverence, his famous and insolently prophetic words: “Your name ends where mine begins. » In 1717, he was 23 years old; he is imprisoned for having written insulting verses against the Regent; but he left the Bastille eleven months later after sending a poem to the Regent... who paid him a pension. In 1726, after the volley inflicted on it by the Knight of Rohan-Chabot, all of Paris flocked to visit it. The apartment which serves as his prison turns out to be too small to accommodate the jostling crowd; he must be freed.

We have experienced more cruel persecutions. Those suffered in particular by the Poles invaded in 1768 by Catherine II.

Voltaire nevertheless defends it: "The Empress of Russia not only establishes universal tolerance in her vast States, but she sends an army to Poland, the first of this kind since the earth existed, an army of peace which only serves to protect the rights of citizens and to make his persecutors tremble. » Voltaire invented on this occasion the humanitarian war, the war for peace, the war for the freedom of the peoples we occupy. He is ready to do anything to protect his sovereign friends. He even described the murder of his husband by the empress as a “trifle”.

On the other hand, nothing passes to the King of France, this “despot”. Louis Don't ask him for his opinion on

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policy to be carried out; do not seek his approval before declaring war. Despite the pressure and the supplications of the Pompadour, Louis XV did not enjoy the company of Voltaire, finding him pedantic and fatuous. Louis XV is of the ancient rock, he has a confessor from the Catholic Church. These Capetians are obsolete; they have not understood the new times: they do not treat Voltaire (and the other philosophers) as a director of conscience: “No prince will start the war,” said Frederick II, “before having obtained the plenary indulgence of the From now on these gentlemen will govern Europe as the popes once subjugated it. » The Russian Empress Catherine II would not say anything else about her long companionship with Diderot: “Throughout these years, I pretended to be the student and he the severe master. »

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A NEW BREED OF WRITERS Voltaire is liberal, but not democratic: “I would rather obey a single tyrant than three hundred rats of my kind. » His ideal regime is enlightened despotism. Despotism enlightened by philosophy. He is a reinvention of Plato's philosopher-king. He dreams of being a despot's despot. Hence his tumultuous quarrels with Frederick II, who had difficulty coping with his tutelage. He inaugurated a new breed of writers, who a century later would be called “intellectuals”, who had the common characteristic of adulating despots (we would soon say “tyrant” or “dictator”), but only when they were foreigners. : German, Italian, Russian, Algerian, Egyptian, African, Vietnamese and even Chinese. Already, at the time of Voltaire, Quesnay praised the Despotism of China (1767)! What does the bottle matter, as long as one is drunk. These despots are all enlightened, progressive, humanist. They are the future of the world. The unsurpassable horizon. Even more praised, praised and flattered when they are the enemies of France. This militant xenophilia extends to their peoples. These are proud, dignified, and have the virile virtues that the French people are blamed for having lost; or which he is prohibited from possessing. They are still fighting for freedom. They too are even more worthy of praise when they revolt against France.

Voltaire is the father of all these future “intellectuals”. Their master. Their unsurpassable model. The father of successive generations of destroyers, “deconstructors”, nihilists, insatiable lovers of a clean slate. In The Origins of

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Contemporary France, Taine has well grasped the eminent place that Voltaire holds in the genealogy of the French spirit which led to the great Saturnalia of the French Revolution. In the 17th century, the classics used a refined, abstract language, which through its clarity became universal. With La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Racine, Descartes, Boileau, the honest man is already from nowhere and everywhere. It is French because it is universal; universal because French. But the monarchical and religious dogma was still intact at the time. Finally came Voltaire. Or rather the scientific spirit of the world revisited by Voltaire. Descartes and Newton brought, transcended, simplified, purified by Voltaire. Reason, made sacred by science, corrodes everything, undermines everything, destroys everything. Tradition is swept away. Religious dogma will not recover. The monarchy will follow. It will be enough for the pessimism of the 17th century to be replaced by the optimism of the 18th century for all the dikes to be washed away. Man is the same everywhere, he therefore has the same rights everywhere. In the books of philosophers, the Persians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Arabs, the workers, the bourgeois, the knights of the Middle Ages all speak and think like an 18th century Parisian who frequents the salon of Madame du Deffand. No one is surprised.

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THE FIRST WITNESS OF THE DECLINE FROM FRANCE Voltaire was the first to have known, suffered, and undoubtedly suffered, the decline of France at the end of the century of Louis XIV. The defeats in the War of the Spanish Succession, the rise in power of England, the concessions of the Treaty of Utrecht, the overtures of the Regency towards the Protestant powers, all signs of a detestable weakening. Voltaire will be the first theorist of French “declinism” with his “century of Louis XIV”, conceived as a monumental reproach to his successor. Voltaire will also be the first intellectual – in an endless lineage – who will seek abroad – England, but also Prussia, even Russia – a model and a master, even a protector against the French “rabble”.

Only Rousseau, once again, understood what was going on; only Rousseau denounced the trick: “Beware of these cosmopolitans who search far and wide in their books for duties that they disdain to fulfill around them; such a philosopher loves the Tartars to be exempted from loving his neighbors. »

Voltaire cannot fade from collective memory, because, like a king, he is carried by successive generations of writers and intellectuals who glory through him. The Voltairian is the solid support of the Radical Republic; Ferney's ancestor is the tutelary figure of Gambetta's "new layers", of this bourgeois elite who understood that he is

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Money-friendly republics. Another century and we find our Voltaire as the ancestor of the liberallibertarians who only emerged from their revolutionary chimeras of May 68 to better don the clothes of the wealthy globalized bourgeoisie. Always in the name of freedom, progress, cosmopolitanism. A joyous, thunderous agnosticism animates them which only spares Jewish and Muslim monotheism; in the name of the past crimes of the odious Catholic Church: always and again “crushing the infamous”, even when the infamous is on the ground.

This alliance between “philosophy” and “money”, between the intellectuals of freedom and the liberal capitalists, will give its most dazzling political fruits during the Revolution, as Edmund Burke so well analyzed: “It This is why the alliance of the authors in question with the capitalists contributed not a little to weakening in the people the feelings of hatred and envy that this form of wealth inspired […] they attracted, by dint of exaggeration, the strongest hatred for the faults of the court, the nobility and the priests. Having become a kind of demagogue, they served as a link to unite, in the service of the same enterprise, opulence and poverty, the odious splendor of the one and the hungry turbulence of the other […] the alliance of people of money and men of letters explains the universal fury with which the entire land heritage of the Church and religious communities was attacked while protecting with extreme care, contrary to the very principles invoked, the money interests which originate from the sole authority of the Crown

5 .

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This alliance had already won before the Revolution. Voltaire experienced the dechristianization of society during his lifetime French. A profound, inevitable de-Christianization, which began at the highest levels of society and extended to the people. His friends joked about it: “You see the Promised Land and you will not enter it,” Madame du Deffand wrote to him.

He himself laughed about it: “However, this is unfortunate; what will we make fun of? » Voltaire “crushed the infamous”. It is neither the Revolution, nor the Terror, nor Robespierre, but Louis of the Jesuits in 1764, to the exultation of philosophers, most of them ungrateful former students of these same Jesuits.

Voltaire and Diderot were not the only ones to leave Jesuit colleges. All the elites, for centuries, had been educated by the followers of Ignatius of Loyola. With the expulsion of the Jesuits, the balance of power shifted. School will no longer cease to be a major stake in the ideological war. Whoever educates children holds the minds of the elite. Whoever holds the minds of the elite dominates the minds of the country. The rebellious students become the masters. The persecuted, the persecutors. The vanquished, the victors. This is the Revolution before the Revolution. The Revolution under the Ancien Régime. The Revolution with the blessing of the Ancien Régime.

This ideological and cultural victory is not the result of chance nor of Voltaire's literary talent alone. She is the product

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of an iron, quasi-military organization, of an inexpiable struggle waged against the adversaries of “philosophy”. A war imagined, orchestrated, led by Voltaire himself. “I would like philosophers to be able to form a body of initiates and I would die happy,” he wrote to d’Alembert; “Rise up and you will be the masters: I speak to you as a republican, but also it is a question of the Republic of letters oh! the poor Republic. » He sets the example. He pursues with his vindictiveness all those who dare to contradict him, challenge him, confront him. Posterity has preserved the memory of his altercations with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His contempt, his arrogance against the one who “made you want to get down on all fours”. It is less well known that the intellectual struggle was coupled with a judicial and police manhunt. He does not hesitate to raise letters of cachet against his enemies; he does everything to have Fréron locked up in Bicêtre prison; rejoices when his wishes are granted: “You have buried Fréron, you will stifle the other insects in their birth. » He wrote to the Duke of Richelieu: “We We once needed literature to be encouraged and today we must admit that we need it to be repressed. »

The historian Augustin Cochin deserves great credit for having unearthed the dark side of what he called the “philosophical sect.” » It took shape and strength during the 1770s. The “Republic of Letters” dear to Voltaire intimidated even the court. Diderot's Encyclopedia imposes its themes and its laws; two or three Parisian salons, run by friends or allies of Voltaire, lead a biased intellectual debate where the adversaries of “philosophy” are ostracized or ridiculed; the French Academy was

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won by a hard struggle with the entry of Duclos, and especially d'Alembert. In the provinces, academies are multiplying in large cities and literary societies in small towns, based on the Parisian model. The correspondence within this little world is incessant; it unifies and brings together the army of philosophers, young and old, within the “centers of Enlightenment”. The pack gangs up and rises up at will against the clergy or the court, against this or that who thought they were attacking a local coterie and found themselves torn to pieces on all sides. “From 1765 to 1780, the literary and political world suffered a Dry Terror, the Encyclopedia of which is the Committee of Public Safety and d'Alembert le Robespierre. His guillotine is defamation, “infamy”, as they say then, a word launched by Voltaire, which has been used since 1775 in provincial societies: “Noting infamy is a well-defined operation, which involves a whole procedure , investigation, discussion, judgment, execution finally, that is to say public condemnation to contempt, yet another of those terms of philosophical law whose scope we no longer appreciate. And heads roll in large numbers: Fréron, Pompignan, Palissot, Gilbert, Linguet, Abbé de Voisenon, Abbé Barhélemy, Chabanon, Dorat, Sedaine, the president of Brosses, Rousseau himself, to speak only of the men of letters, because the massacre was much greater in the political world 6..."

The intellectual revolution preceded the political revolution following a path that would later be theorized by the Italian communist Gramsci. It was the Ancien Régime which raised, protected and pampered within its bosom the philosophical serpent which would kill it. Years after the Revolution, the Count of Ségur will evoke in his Memoirs the climate which reigned in the upper echelons of society: “The seriousness of the ancient

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doctrines weighed on us. The cheerful philosophy of Voltaire carried us along while amusing us […] Freedom, whatever its language, pleased us with its language; equality, by its convenience […] If inequality still persisted in the distribution of places and offices, equality began to reign in societies. On many occasions, literary titles were given preference over titles of nobility […] Institutions remained monarchical, but morals became republican […]. We preferred a word of praise from d’Alembert, from Diderot, to the most signal favor of a prince…”

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A COLD CIVIL WAR CLIMATE Voltaire forged this climate of cold civil war specific to French intellectual life. The Jacobins will treat their adversaries as criminals to be executed; the communists, as class enemies to be ostracized. The bigotry of the progressives continues to this day; their propensity to judicialize, psychiatrize, animalize political conflicts; to deny their adversaries their freedom, their reason, even their status as human beings sometimes. Their astonishing ability to pose as victims when they are executioners. Their fallacious rewriting of history. Everything is in Voltaire, both tutelary father and experimental matrix.

The “philosophers” criticized the fathers of the Church for having enslaved reason to theology; but they have enslaved God to reason. At least reason was able to rebel and emancipate itself from theology. All Western countries have experienced a secularization of public space comparable to that of France; but only our Voltairian country has pushed dechristianization so far and with such vengeful anger, causing spiritual desert, social anomie and almost totalitarian control of minds by a sectarian and intolerant elite. No doubt the two phenomena are closely linked: because they wanted to destroy the Church and the Catholic religion, and not just loosen its sometimes stifling grip, Voltaire and his people had to replace it. To replace it, imitate it. The adversaries of the Church founded a counter-Church; the enemies of the priests have preached; for better

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denouncing persecutions and excommunications, they persecuted and excommunicated.

Voltaire was funny but mean; talented but arrogant; superior spirit who uses his freedom to sweep away those who are not at his level. His character flaws alter his genius. His smile is always ironic; his tolerance always contempt; his mockery always sarcasm. He blasphemes or insults. For eternity he has this mask of a bitter and surly old man with which the sculptor Houdon adorned him; and forever wears that “hideous smile” that Musset evokes.

“The laughter that [he] excites is not legitimate: it is a grimace […]. A terrible grin, Joseph de Maistre already noted. Other cynics astonished virtue, Voltaire astonished vice. 7

Sodom would have banished him

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»

His sovereign talent has forever corroded the French spirit with this haughty and grimacing bitterness. The Church was not wrong to refuse the honors of genius to someone who abuses his gifts.

Voltaire himself noted: “A corrupt mind was never sublime. »

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1. Madame de Genlis describing the atmosphere in Ferney. 2. Collini, a secretary of Voltaire. 3. Voltaire undoubtedly speaking from experience. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886. 5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790. 6. Augustin Cochin, Thought Societies and Modern Democracy, 1921. 7. Joseph de Maistre, The Evenings of Saint Petersburg, 1821.

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Rousseau

Nose in the stream He is the only writer who is called by his first name: Jean-Jacques. Like a child or teenager. Like an old friend. Like a singing or sports star. We know everything about Jean-Jacques Rousseau; he himself confided to us: his first romantic and erotic emotions, his sorrows and his joys, even his thefts; that he was a poor lover; that he abandoned his five children to public assistance; but that did not prevent him from writing treatises on education. He warned us that he “preferred to be a man of paradoxes rather than a man of prejudices”.

When he walks in the streets of Paris, people stop him, question him, shout their admiration. He complains about it and retires to the countryside to rediscover the simple joys of herbalism. Jean-Jacques was our first rock star. Every rock star needs an emblematic rival, a systematic opponent: the Beatles had the Rolling Stones; Rousseau had Voltaire. Hate and admiration, insults and threats, the relationships between the two men seem to be written by devious agents. However, posterity, good girl, will never stop associating them in common admiration. They embody an era, an idea, a century. Before them, writers wrote books or plays or poems; after them, they will be “intellectuals”, they will give their opinion on everything, they will be “committed”.

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We know Gavroche's song about the barricades before to fall under the bullets of the soldiers. “If I fell to the ground, it’s Voltaire’s fault. Nose in the stream, it's Rousseau's fault. »

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FREEDOM AND EQUALITY Voltaire and Rousseau are two mythical figures, closely associated; two Siamese brothers with the same ideal. Everything then seems to bring them together to the point of confusing them: their death the same year, 1778, and their successive entry into the Pantheon under the Revolution, condemned for eternity to remain side by side; they each embody a branch of the national ideal: Liberty for Voltaire, Equality for Rousseau. The hatred they arouse among the counter-revolutionaries brings them together even more. Joseph de Maistre is no less tender for Rousseau than he was for Voltaire: “One of the most dangerous sophists of his century… Everything, even the truth, is misleading in his writings. »

The two figures of the Revolution will, however, separate and oppose each other. The social quarrel, which became preeminent in the 19th century with the emergence of industrial capitalism, alienated them: the bourgeoisie was Voltairian, the common people were Rousseauists. The individual on one side, the general will on the other. Liberty and Equality now become antithetical. Gavroche is indeed the last to adore his two lay saints together; the Voltairian bourgeoisie will bring troops to the days of June 1848 against the Rousseauist and socialist workers. SoonThere Third Republic, still conservative, chose its camp: in 1878 it only celebrated the centenary of the death of Voltaire, to whom it gave the name of a boulevard, while it confined its old adversary to a narrow street in Paris. THE communism sounds the revenge of the citizen of Geneva: the

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Marxist historians exalt Rousseau to better defend Robespierre and Lenin. However, Voltaire and Rousseau lived before the industrial revolution. Voltaire's fortune comes, like that of all the great bourgeois of the time, from a business linked to state orders or the trade economy; the rustic romanticism of Jean-Jacques is contemporary with a time when the majority of French people were made up of peasants.

This economic and social dispute between Voltaire and Rousseau was largely artificial; she made the dead speak. We would have to wait two centuries to find the authentic terms of their founding quarrel. Two centuries to find the very essence of their disagreement. So that their words, their thoughts, their outbursts, their fury join our concerns and our ideological divisions. Globalization and nation, openness and withdrawal, universalism and national preference, cosmopolitanism and patriotism, free trade and protectionism, Europe and national sovereignty, xenophobia and xenophilia, all these themes which agitate and tear us apart today agitated and torn Voltaire and Rousseau yesterday. In the same terms, in the same contexts as We.

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EUROPEAN REPUBLIC If Voltaire and Rousseau came back from the dead, they could resume their controversy without the slightest change of scenery. Rousseau would note: “Today there are no more French, Germans, Spaniards, even English, whatever people say; there are only Europeans. » Voltaire would retort that the “European Republic” is a guarantee of peace, to which Rousseau would acquiesce, like a desolate prophet: “National hatreds will die out, but it will be with love of the homeland. » Rousseau is, like some of us, a patriot lost among cosmopolitans. “Tenderized” by his homeland, he endures the chatter of cold and sneering rationalists: “These vain and futile declaimers smile disdainfully at these old words of homeland and religion. » Jean-Jacques is proud to be a “citizen of Geneva” when Voltaire is more of a citizen of the “European Republic”. Rousseau, flayed alive, Swiss in Paris and French in Geneva, who feels excluded and rejected everywhere because he is a foreigner, feels, understands, theorizes the immense happiness of having a homeland: “The more I contemplate this little State, the more I find how beautiful it is to have a homeland; and God keep from harm all those who think they have one, and yet only have one country. »

Rousseau has the great fault of not being fooled by anything. The Genevan dispels the illusions of the Parisian salons: attachment to the homeland is irreconcilable with rationalist cosmopolitanism; we cannot love our homeland and the world, our own people and foreigners; universal love is an illusion: “We cannot be affected by the calamities of

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Tartary or Japan, as those of a European people. » We must choose between self-love and love of the Other: “Patriotism and humanity are […] two virtues incompatible in their energy… The legislator who wants them both will obtain neither one nor the other. »

Jean-Jacques denounces the dangers of the universalist message of the Church and at the same time demonstrates to anticlerical philosophers that they are only the misguided parrots of the Gospels: “Christianity is the religion of man and not that of the citizen. Interesting the individual above all in his salvation, he diverts him from his earthly and political destiny. This is why Christian law is ultimately more harmful than useful to the strong constitution of the State..." Maurras will remember Rousseau's lesson! He will distinguish between the Catholic order embodied by the Church and the Christian spirit of the evangelical message which corrodes and dissolves the nation in the name of universal fraternity.

It is always a big mistake to be right too soon. The cosmopolitan century of Enlightenment will end with the birth of the nation. The European dream of French philosophers will end in the booted imperialism of the “great nation”. The revolutionaries will store their universalist tirades and their declarations in a double-locked cupboard. of peace in the world to exalt the “homeland in danger”; they will find all the theoretical and political paraphernalia at their dear Jean-Jacques: conscription for citizens who defend the borders; the military rigor of Sparta given as a model; republican and patriotic holidays; civic and historical education: “Every people has or must have a

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national character; if he lacked some, we would have to give him some. » The French Republic celebrates its wedding anniversary with patriotism. Saint-Just read Rousseau, who read Plato: “Every true republican sucks with his mother's milk, love of the country. »

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“ NATIONAL SELFISHNESS” The Republic cherishes its children, but is harsh to foreigners. The nation does not exist without a radical preference for the group of which one is a member. “The main thing is to be good” A king can unite around 1

to the people we live with

.

his person diverse peoples who are not

united by morals or language. The Republic is incapable of doing so. Rousseau understood that the concept of general will inevitably leads to that of the people. The people to the nation. The Republic of citizens is inseparable from the nation. The nation poses itself in opposition, stands out in “national egoism”; and dissolves if it is drowned in the burning waters of universal fraternity: “The patriotic spirit is an exclusive spirit which makes us regard as foreign, and almost as an enemy anyone other than our fellow citizens […] the spirit of Christianity in The contrary makes us regard all men indifferently as our brothers. »

This fraternal universalism acts like an invader who would destroy the national identity of an occupied country. To the Poles swallowed up by the Russian Empire, Rousseau explains that there will be no point in resisting with arms. He encourages them to tackle a less glorious and more useful task: saving the Polish soul. A state can be wiped off the map; the nation can survive through education, mutual aid, solidarity, language. Rousseau settles our endless debates on identity and sovereignty two centuries before us: “It is neither the walls nor the men who make the homeland, it is the

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laws, morals, customs, the way of being which results from all this. » Before Maurice Barrès, Rousseau composed the first novel of national energy for Poland; before Simone Weil, he became the champion of small suffering nations. The great nations of yesterday are the small nations of today…

Throughout the 19th century, the French left tried to reconcile the enemy brothers, Voltaire and Rousseau. Freedom and the general will; bourgeois individualism and patriotism. The universality of human rights and national preference for citizens; the Republic thus reconnected with the fruitful ambivalence of our ancient kings who also married Catholic universalism and the fierce sovereignty of the “Emperor in his kingdom”. All syntheses were still possible. The word “nationalism” did not yet exist. It was Barrès who made it a political doctrine from the 1890s. The left was in the process of changing direction. She is apparently still a good student of Rousseau. Throughout the century, she criticized the monarchical powers for their excessively pacifist policy and the submission of the “great nation” to the European concert of the “Holy Alliance”, this Europe of kings which distrusts France. In 1871, the Communards revolted again against the defeat and capitulation before Prussia and tried to reenact once again the grandiose tragedy of the “homeland in danger”. One last time. It will be the swan song of the revolutionary tradition of Paris and the patriotic tradition of the left. Already, among certain communards, the myth of the International is breaking through… They have swapped Jean-Jacques for Karl. However, the Third Republic, following the

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advice from Rousseau, feeds all the children of France with the milk of the “national novel” and patriotic celebrations. But the left will change for the universal and abandon the fierce patriotism of Rousseau during the Dreyfus affair. The captain's first lawyers were quickly overwhelmed by an antimilitarist and antipatriotic agitation which took the pretext of this legal battle to initiate an opinion campaign hostile to the military traditions of France, of which Zola would become the talented but stinging champion.

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GIONO RATHER THAN SAINT-JUST This “leftist” offensive will provoke the violent reaction of the “nationalists”, Barrès and Maurras, who will add to the most foul anti-Semitism to, they believe, protect the army; but also the fury of patriotic Dreyfusards, like Charles Péguy or Daniel Halévy. Years after the Affair, Maurras still wrote: “My first and last opinion on this was that, if by chance Dreyfus was innocent, it was necessary to appoint him Marshal of France, but to shoot a dozen of his main defenders for triple harm they did to France, to Peace, and to Reason. »

Only the conflict of 1914 will momentarily extinguish the ashes of this cold civil war. It is the “sacred union” around the nation. For the last time. The left will never forgive itself for the Sacred Union. Love of the country was not worth such butchery in his eyes. The absurdity and magnitude of the sacrifice irremediably destroyed his patriotic fervor. The left wants to forget Rousseau. Absolutist pacifism will henceforth serve as its compass. “I prefer to be a living German than a dead Frenchman”: Giono’s phrase has replaced as the ideal of the French left the revolutionary “Liberty or death” of Danton, Saint-Just and Robespierre. There will be patriotic backlashes, reversals, the Resistance, and the very late rallying of the communists to the tricolor flag; but they too, like our monarchs of yesteryear, will have to strive to reconcile their patriotism and the universalist fraternity of the communist religion.

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After 1848, and its "spring of the peoples", after the internationalism of the Commune, after 1918, 1968 is the final date which marks the divorce of the left from the nation. The students demonstrate, shouting: “We are all

German Jews. » We are back to square one. We have returned to the bourgeois cosmopolitanism of the Age of Enlightenment. We came back to Voltaire. The “religion of humanity” regains its rights. In the name of human rights, the rights of citizens are disregarded. In the name of Europe, we despise the nation. In the name of openness to the Other, we despise the general will. In the name of universal brotherhood, national preference is despised. We are once again moved by the misfortunes of “Tartary” to better disdain the misfortunes of its neighbors, the poor, the unemployed, the abandoned workers of the north or east of France. The Republic is gentle to foreigners and harsh to patriots. The left throws Rousseau overboard once again.

And his bones freeze at the hideous smile of Voltaire.

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1. Émile, I.

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I'm sorry

The wall of idiots We fear them. We insult them. We revere them. We adore them. They are threatened. We circumvent them. We seduce them. Is the

softens. We applaud them. We dazzle them. They are excommunicated. We vomit them up. We obey them.

Judges are among the most controversial figures of our time. The most publicized too. Most revered. There are small judges and great judges, judges of the right and judges of the left, iron judges and perverse judges, wise judges and bold judges. Judges at the Valenciennes court and judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; divorce judges and constitutional judges. Administrative judges and anti-terrorism judges.

But beyond their differences and their divergences, in the eyes of our enamored age they are the guarantors of the “rule of law”, which has become in common language synonymous with both democracy and freedom. We even saw during the last presidential campaign, in 2017, against all democratic traditions, and all the principles of the separation of powers, magistrates indicting the favorite of the test, even if it means influencing decisively on the final fate of the election.

This incredible promotion is very recent.

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Under the Third Republic, parliamentarians embodied democracy and freedom. They were the representatives of the people and the general will. starting general Under V de Gaulle, the President of the Republic, elected by universal suffrage, took away this flagship role from them. The first French politician to have uttered the expression "rule of law" was President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, in 1977. He thus intended to defend his constitutional reform which allowed sixty deputies or senators to appeal to the Constitutional Council against any law. voted by Parliament. As always, Giscard did not understand all the consequences of his audacity. Very imbued, however, with his presidential power and legitimacy, he did not understand that he was making the constitutional judge the suprem It is

Over the years that followed, the “wise men of the PalaisRoyal”, as they were laudably described by the media, became emboldened. Other judicial courts, the Council of State, but also the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Communities, were also active in putting under supervision the legislative activity of our country and that of our neighbours. Many popular essayists during the 1980s were enthusiastic. They invoked the model of the American Supreme Court and the glorious magisterium of Montesquieu. This was opposed to Rousseau. The “rule of law” of Montesquieu to the “general will” of Jean-Jacques. The Girondins (Montesquieu was from Bordeaux!) to the Jacobins. Liberalism to Marxism. No one pointed out that this notion of "rule of law" was in no way an expression of Montesquieu, but rather of German jurists who, traumatized by the democratic advent of Hitler, believed that in a "state of law"

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law” every decision of the State should henceforth conform to a standard of law, sanctified by a judge.

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THE “MOUTH” OF THE LAW Montesquieu definitely had no luck with posterity. Maybe he was too subtle for her. Already, in the 1960s, the Marxist Althusser had reduced him to the role of organic intellectual of his social class, that of financial traders and the aristocracy of dress, while Georges Pompidou had denounced him to Alain Peyrefitte as honorable English secret service correspondent only considered that judges should be the

1

. Montesquieu a

“mouth” of the law. No more no less. A mouth repeats like a parrot. It neither interprets nor censors. Robespierre, who wanted to be Rousseau's first heir, would one day take up this expression as his own.

Montesquieu would undoubtedly have been hostile to the “rule of law” dear to our moderns, he who had estimated that “if the power to judge were joined to the legislative power, the power over the life and freedom of citizens would be arbitrary because the judge would be a legislator.” This is exactly our contemporary situation, where we see the legislator writing under the dictation of the great constitutional and European judges.

This confusion did not come out of nowhere, however. Montesquieu embodies a class, an era, a history. A class: the nobility of dress of the parliaments of the Ancien Régime. An era: the reign of Louis XV in the France of the Enlightenment. A story: the conflict which pitted the parliaments against each other, the parliaments and the king. Originally, nothing could have suggested such opposition. The fight was too disproportionate. The parliamentarians were only

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jurisconsults charged by the king, the sole justice of the kingdom, to administer justice in his name. To advise him too. To record laws, edicts. A purely technical skill which became, over the centuries, more political.

Little by little, parliamentarians took themselves, and were taken by public opinion, to be “magistrates” in the Roman sense of the word, that is to say, politicians who regulate the functioning of the State. Rome was fashionable at the time. Montesquieu himself wrote his Considerations on the causes of the greatness of the Romans and their decadence (1734). Parliamentarians then emerge from a long period of foreclosure. With the Sun King, they had no say. Louis XIV never forgave them for having taken a prominent part in the troubles of the Fronde. Legend has it that the young Louis XIV, returning from hunting, his boots on his feet and his whip in his hand, paid a “courtesy” visit to the parliament of Paris, before returning to his palace. He took advantage of this to take away this “right of remonstrance” which allowed parliamentarians to delay the publication of an edict until the monarch had taken their observations into account. The parliamentarians had remained silent throughout his reign. But before his death, Louis XIV had planned in his will to bring his “bastards” closer to the throne. This did not suit the Duke of Orléans, who had been designated Regent of the kingdom. To get the parliament of Paris to abrogate the late king's will, the duke promised the judges to restore their “right of remonstrance”. He had no idea that he had just undermined the foundations of the reign of the little child in his care.

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The twilight end of the reign and the debonair nature of the Regent had also given rise to a taste for change. Disorder had been the enemy of the previous generation; despotism had become that of the new generation. Parliamentarians, quickly reading Montesquieu's theses, now consider that the monarchy descends into despotism as soon as it does not listen to their wise advice. The magistrates begin to pepper their “remonstrations” with references to the Merovingian or Carolingian capitulars, invoking very seriously the laws of Childebert I is of Clotaire II, Charlemagne or Lothair. ,

Responsible for verifying the content of new laws compared to old ones, they believe they share legislative power. They claim a right of veto over council decisions. Parliaments even pride themselves on representing the nation outside of the States General (which have not been convened since 1614!). They take on the (grand) air of the English “House of Commons”. Louis XV can't believe it. Parliamentarians dare everything, that's how the king recognizes them. They know the intoxication of popularity, which they confuse with omnipotence. The most resolute intend to place the King of France in a position inferior to that of the King of England. Their strength seems limitless. The other courts of the kingdom, the parliaments of Rennes, Toulouse, Aix, Dijon, Bordeaux, etc. proclaim their unity and indivisibility. It is the “union of classes”. All consult, consult, agree. They even went so far as to reject the edicts under the direction of the parliament of Paris. Sometimes even decide on the arrests of officers of the Crown.

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In the provinces, the dress delegitimizes administrators, intendants, engineers, subdelegates. Some stewards submit and favor local interests to the detriment of the general interest. The institution of intendants, founded by Richelieu to unify the country, was running out of steam, won over by the antiVersailles noble ideology. Even Voltaire sounded the alarm: “This astonishing anarchy could not persist. It was necessary either for the Crown to regain its authority or for the parliaments to prevail. »

The conflict is inevitable. The two camps embody the two great contradictory movements of the time: the rationalization of the State and the aristocratic reaction. These two movements both express this quest, which spans the century, for a new legitimacy based on the rights of the nation. Everyone strives to win the favor of philosophers. These handlers of symbols, of words, of concepts are feared and formidable weapons for winning the favor of the opinion of literate bourgeois people. Our philosophers are not hostile to enlightened despotism in the name of progress. Liberty is also “the freedoms” which the nobles inherited from ancient times, when their Frankish ancestors fought alongside Clovis; privileges unduly curtailed, torn apart by a Capetian monarchy which over the centuries turned into despotism. This nostalgia fuels a vindictive reaction. Jean-Jacques has his most fervent readers in the castles. Philosophy and noble reaction have in common the quest for a golden age, one for the past and the other for the future. This ambiguous alliance of reaction and progress will make the Revolution...

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The parliamentarians, puffed up with vanity and importance, get involved in everything. They blocked the tax reform, supported the Jansenists against the king, and forced the expulsion of the Jesuits from him.

Soon, all opponents from all sides, philosophers or devotees, saw in the parliament of Paris their relay and their official organ. The king understands that it is time to strike a big blow. He wrote to the Duke of Richelieu: “Driven to the limit as I am, I cannot delay making my Parliament feel that I am the absolute master, that my absolute power comes from God, and that I only have to account for it. 'to Him the day he takes me out of this world. »

This is the famous scene of March 3, 1766 that remains in our History under the name of “flagellation session”: Louis of the Kingdom ; the magistrates are the officers responsible for discharging the truly royal duty of dispensing justice […].

It is in my person alone that the sovereign power resides, whose proper character is the spirit of counsel, justice and reason; it is from me alone that my courses derive their existence and their authority; the fullness of this authority, which they exercise only in my name, always remains in me, and the use can never be turned against me; it is to me alone that legislative power belongs, without dependence and without sharing […] the entire public order emanates from me and the rights and interests of the nation, which we dare to make a body separate from the monarch, are necessarily united with mine and rest only in my hands..."

Basically, the king only recalls the secular doctrine of the French monarchy, which is neither an enlightened despotism nor

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an English-style parliamentary system. Even less the government of judges that certain bold minds dream of, but a monarchy tempered by council. Parliament is not an intermediary between the nation and the king and does not participate in legislative sovereignty. But the parliamentary agitation continues as if nothing had happened. A blow for nothing. “To prevent us from acting, to suffocate us, we would have to be annihilated,” proclaim the provocative parliaments; “We are resolved to remain faithful to you to the point of becoming the victims of our loyalty.”

They will be heard beyond their expectations. A few years later, on the occasion of a new rebellion, the king recalled the doctrine of flagellation. Solemnly repeats that parliamentarians have no right to strike. Order the musketeers to their homes to give them their letters of exile and arrest the leaders. Routine. A parliamentary delegation is received with great pomp by the Duke of Orléans in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. This is one provocation too many. It is said that the king then came out of his proverbial slump because a fractious Breton parliamentarian, La Chalotais, tried to blackmail him by claiming to possess love letters from the sovereign to one of his mistresses. He is more likely that the king, having fallen in love with a certain Du Barry, recovered his vigor as a man and a monarch...

The king is all cheered up. Determined, proud, almost joyful. In the process, he took the opportunity to get rid of Choiseul, who believed himself indispensable and was reluctant to conflict with the parliaments. In his Memoirs, Choiseul wrote furiously: “The king had an inconceivable vanity, the vanity of servants. » The unbearable Choiseul spoke like a goldsmith...

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During this time, the secret of the reform of the parliaments was well kept between the king's ministers, Maupeou, Abbot Terray, and the Duke of La Vrillière. The decree dissolving the Paris parliament was taken by Maupeou in December 1770. On January 20, 1771, the bailiffs confiscated their offices and the musketeers brought them an order of exile. On January 24, Maupeou temporarily installed the black robes of the state councilors and masters of requests in place of the red robes. On February 23, he decreed the abolition of venality and the hereditary transmission of offices. Free justice is proclaimed. It is the end of the “spices” which seasoned the income of our magistrates. The jurisdiction of the Paris parliament is dismembered. But he is the only one in France to retain his political functions. The judges then become appointed and irrevocable civil s

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THE MOST HATED MAN IN FRANCE It was a great day for the French monarchy. She gets rid of a feudal heritage which encumbered and paralyzed her. She comes out of the Ancien Régime. Royal legitimacy was reestablished by this coup d'état which it would be better to call, in the manner of the ancient jurists of the 17th century, a "coup de majesté". Maupeou does not want to stop there. He proposed to the king to transform the provincial parliaments into simple higher councils. It would then have signaled the end of local traditions. Louis XV refuses this unification, however decisive, of his kingdom. Maupeou must give up his great idea which would have crowned his reform: a single Civil Code. The grandiose project will remain locked in the files of Chancellor Maupeou's secretary. This one is called Lebrun. He will be designated third consul, alongside Bonaparte and Cambacérès after the coup d'état of 18 and 19 Brumaire 1799...

The king undoubtedly hesitated at the last moment before

the emotion of public opinion. Maupeou became in a few hours the most hated man in France. Her surname, until then little known, joins those of the reviled Pompadour and Du Barry, the names whispered with horror of these great ladies who were accused of drinking the blood of young common people to cure their illnesses, or of these lords suspected of the worst crimes to satisfy their sexual perversions. Or the king himself! Don’t we say “birds of a feather flock together”? Mau-Pou: two syllables that now sound like an insult. Libels are

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widely distributed, seditious posters put up. In the streets of Paris, women cry out for despotism. Philosophers even see it as irrefutable proof of their analyses: “A coup d’état by the chancellor,” Mably wrote, “revealed the despotism which was the secret of the Empire. »

He is overwhelmed with insults, insults, rumors, slander, and pamphlets. We would think we had returned to the time of Mazarin, a century earlier. Maupeou is said to be a creature of Choiseul. It is said that he owes everything to his father, himself a former Minister of Justice. It is said that this family benefited from excessive “royal favor”. It is said that this brilliant former student of the Jesuits at Louis-le-Grand remained their man. He is said to have the support of Du Barry. It is said that he married his wife, of old nobility of the sword, for her enormous fortune; It is said that his death hardly pained him. We say anything and everything, but René Nicolas de Maupeou has none

cure.

At 54 years old, he is not a partridge of the year. Before becoming Chancellor of France, that is to say Minister of Justice, he held for a long time the very exposed position of first president of the Parliament of Paris. On numerous occasions he suffered the cold anger of the monarch; he saw from the inside the outbursts of senior magistrates, the imprudence of young advisors, the extremism of hotheads, the manipulative maneuvers of the Jansenist minority, the violent pressures it exerts on a “swamp” apathetic and frightened, the double or triple game of Choiseul, the alliance with the philosophers. He was able to admire the patience of the king in the face of the insolence of the parliamentarians.

The impasse in which the monarch gradually left himself

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lock up: whether Louis XV was authoritarian or conciliatory, he is blamed; he is compared to a despot while general disobedience condemns him to impotence; the people accuse him of persecuting the defenders of freedom, while the capacity for inertia and blocking of parliamentarians prevents the monarch from carrying out the reforms that the people demand. Everyone defends parliaments; everyone suddenly cherishes these courts of justice of the kingdom; everyone pities the magistrates who were broken, dismissed, exiled, sometimes even imprisoned, by the edict of Chancellor Maupeou; everyone exalts freedom against despotism. Justice flouted. A royal revolution!

Only Voltaire agrees with the king: “The edict seems to me yet full of useful reforms. Destroying the venality of charges, making justice free, preventing litigants from coming to Paris from the ends of the kingdom to ruin themselves there, charging the king with paying the costs of seigniorial justice, are these not great services rendered to the nation ? In truth, I admire the Welches for taking the side of these insolent and indocile bourgeois. For me, I believe the king is right. »

Voltaire saw up close, during the famous Calas and La Barre cases, the disruptions and inequities of justice as it was administered by parliaments. Partiality, cost (the famous “spices”), which are the ordinary part of justice and sometimes corruption. Members who sit as judges in cases in which they are parties; and are sometimes guilty of abuses and cruelties that even the Crown does not dare

commit.

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Above all, Voltaire has not lived in Paris for years and escapes this torrent of passions which carries away the most reasonable minds. At Versailles, the king had a lively exchange with the Duke of Orléans before dismissing him sharply. The princes sign a political manifesto in favor of parliaments. Louis XV did not care: “I defend all deliberation contrary to my edicts and any action concerning the former officers of my Parliament. I will never change. » Malesherbes is exiled to his lands... The king remains inflexible:

“I have been pushed back many times. They thought it would be the same this time, but they were wrong. They pushed me to the limit. » In his youth, Cardinal Fleury taught the king that his ancestor Louis Let the king be reassured: emotion is at its height, but there are no barricades in his capital.

No barricades, but still a big uproar: the parliament of Paris summons the king to withdraw the edict of Maupeou; Louis XV crumples up the paper and throws it into the fire. The parliamentarians declare a general strike with cries of “ Omnes!” Omnes! » (“All! All!”). They raged endlessly against Maupeou. An advisor even suggests putting him on trial for disturbing public order. The oldest recall with knowing nods that they were always wary of the man who was one of them. Don't they say that one is never so betrayed as by one's own? Maupeou has the face of betrayal, he has the manners of villainy. And to make fun of his small size, his big bulging eyes, his black eyebrows, thick and bushy, his forehead

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low, his prominent nose, his yellowish and bilious complexion. A beautiful traitorous figure.

His courtesy is only affectation; his phlegm, contempt; his busy, courteous air; his austere manners, hypocrisy; his outbursts, brutality; and his enormous capacity for work, which nevertheless recalls Colbert, careerism, frenzied ambition to succeed.

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MAUPEOU COULD HAVE SAVED THE MONARCHY Maupeou is the dark side of this incredible story. The man who could have saved the monarchy is looked at askance by all camps. Its supporters must admit that their system suffered from many dysfunctions; those of the Revolution must recognize that their founding event of a new era of humanity could never have happened. It is much more convenient to talk endlessly about the artificial opposition between Montesquieu and Rousseau, between the “rule of law” and the “general will”…

Maupeou’s “coup de majesté” came too soon or too late. Louis XV died three years later. Badly advised by his confidant, the Count of Maurepas, Louis XVI suppressed the reform and recalled the parliaments in 1774. The young monarch fell with both feet into the trap set for him by the times: he wanted to be loved... he would be guillotined. Maupeou, ulcerated and desperate, fulminated, wrote a letter that he perhaps never sent to its recipient: “I had won the king a trial lasting three centuries. He wants to lose it again, he is indeed the master. » Historian Jean-Christian Petitfils assures that Maupeou would have, on this occasion, released a prophetic message to his loved ones: “He’s screwed2 . » From then on, the parliaments

never stopped preventing Louis XVI from carrying out his reforms; the king, tired of fighting, had to resort to the States General in 1789 to circumvent the judges' blockage. And everything rushed...

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Perhaps the monarch remembered Maupeou when he initialed the law of March 24, 1790 passed by the National Assembly which abolished parliaments. This time, public opinion was hardly moved. The Revolution had cut the Gordian knot of ambiguities and unnatural alliances, by pushing parliamentarians into the camp of the hated privileged. This Revolution that the parliaments had contributed more than anything to provoke was going to sweep them away and break them. It would be up to Robespierre to define, on November 18, 1790, the new juridicopolitical religion of the nation, the antipodes of the dream of government of judges cherished by parliamentarians: "The word of jurisprudence of the courts in the acceptance that it had in the old regime no longer means anything in the new; it must be ignored in our language; in a State which has a Constitution, legislation, the jurisprudence of the courts is nothing other than the law. »

Robespierre follows in Maupeou's footsteps. And will announce Bonaparte with Lebrun as a napkin holder. All regimes, republican, imperial, monarchical, will rigorously apply the new Robespierrist doxa. The judge is the “mouth of the law”, the famous expression that no one today attributes to Montesquieu, who nevertheless added: “Of the three powers, that of judging is in some way null” Jurisprudence will be monitored, framed within narrow limits. Judges will be strictly controlled by the legislator. No regime in France would forget the lesson of 3

.

Maupeou until the end of the 20th century. No regime will want to lose a three-century-old trial.

But a time came that would no longer know Maupeou. A time that will deny Robespierre and Bonaparte in the name of freedom. A time that will reject the principles of the Republic

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in the name of Anglo-Saxon models. A time that will fall in love with the American Supreme Court. A time which will only swear by human rights and the judge as arbiter. Ours.

The shift took place under the reign of General de Gaulle, but no one realized it. Already, the European judge is outlining in the name of the Common Market a first placing under supervision of national sovereignty, but the French judges, Council of State and Court of Cassation, easily contain his inclinations. During the press conference of January 31, 1964, General de Gaulle clarified the idea he had of the spirit of the new institutions and his function as republican monarch in a formula which reminded all connoisseurs of the famous intervention of Louis XV during the famous flagellation session: "It must be understood that the indivisible authority of the State is entirely delegated to the President by the people who elected him and that there is no other, neither ministerial nor civil, neither military nor judicial, which cannot be conferred or maintained otherwise than by him and that it is up to him to adjust the supreme domain which is his own with those in which he delegates action to others. »

The emotion is at its peak. The general is accused of dictatorship and megalomania. Of despotism. Of tyranny. We came back in 1766. The Maurepas are biding their time. She won't be long. And like every time in France when the State weakens, the judges become emboldened. Everything started again with a parallelism that seems to prepare and announce the “flagellation” of General de Gaulle. The senior magistrates of the Republic pepper their judgments with historical-judicial references, not to the capitularies of Lothair or Charlemagne, like the parliaments of the Ancien Régime, but to

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the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789. They say this that they want to follow ancient and often obscure principles.

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THE LAST WORD BELONGS TO NO MORE TO THE LEGISLATOR, BUT TO THE JUDGE

Since the death of General de Gaulle, through “bold” decisions and principled jurisprudence, the Constitutional Council and the Council of State have imposed the role of co-legislators on the government and Parliament. Ignorant or weak, the elected representatives of the people have willingly submitted to these new priests who unduly derive a prophetic function from human rights. Supported by the media, and some law professors, who see it as a lucrative income for specialists in “constitutional litigation”, they forge the myth of “constitutional democracy”, where the last word no longer belongs to the legislator, but to the judge.

We in turn know the dictatorship of these new

Jansenists who also tolerate no discussion, no contestation of their sacred ideology which they call “Rule of law”. The sovereignty of the people must submit to these imperious priests and their religion of human rights. National sovereignty itself must comply, even and especially when it is carried and imposed by foreign judges, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Like the parliaments of the Ancien Régime, our judges claim both a political role and a judicial role. They inspire laws and enforce them. In the name of human rights, they prohibit political power from protecting citizens. In the name of freedom, they authorize large

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companies to move their headquarters to the tax havens of the Netherlands or Ireland; always the right to serve the privileged. Like their distant predecessors, they intend to deal with questions of religion, taxation, work and family.

The former parliamentarians printed and distributed their remonstrances in thousands of copies, to the great displeasure of the king; our judges, large and small, have the active support of the media: journalists defend the decisions they make or “leak” information that serves to legitimize their investigations and accusations. Our modern judges have the same thirst for notoriety as their ancestors: they want to please journalists as d'Éprémesnil wanted to please philosophers. Their ideological and political passions guide them today as yesterday.

As there were the Calas, de La Barre, Sirven cases, our judges had the Grégory, d'Outreau affair, that of the Carlton de Lille and many other “scandals”. A union of magistrates posted on the wall of its union premises, under the joyfully infamous name "wall of idiots", the surnames of politicians, intellectuals, journalists favorable to the maintenance of republican order, even the names of the parents of raped and murdered children, who only had the presumption in the eyes of our bar-tabac Antigones to demand justice.

The “little” judges are intrepid and dastardly, as were the magistrates of provincial parliaments. The “wise men” of the Constitutional Council or the Council of State have the arrogance of the high dignitaries of the nobility of the robe

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parliament of Paris which annoyed even Saint-Simon. Louis XV was accused of despotism while the judges rendered his power impotent. Our governments of the Fifth Republic are suspected of not respecting the "rule of law" if they contravene judicial injunctions, to respond effectively to citizens' demands for protection. French passions never die. Our legal order is no longer based on the sovereignty of the people, but on human rights. Politics is not seized by the law, but by judges. Democracy is replaced by an oligarchic and aristocratic regime, a judicial theocracy, in an uneven mixture of legalism and moralism. It is

In the spring of 1995, while presiding over his last Council of Ministers as head of state, François Mitterrand, in the weak voice of a dying man – he was to die a few months later – delivered his final political advice to the ministers of the Balladur government: “Beware of judges. They killed the Monarchy, they will kill the Republic. »

Since then, we seem to hear the mocking voice of Chancellor Maupeou: “You are screwed. »

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1. Alain Peyrefitte, Le Mal français, Fayard, 2006. 2. Jean-Christian Petitfils, Louis XVI, Perrin, 2005. 3. On the spirit of the laws, XI, 6.

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The Royal Palace

The center of fantasies The gloomy silence is only disturbed by the laughter of children, the blowing of the wind in the branches of the trees, the sound of a heavy iron chair, which a solitary reader moves to enjoy a ray of sunshine, the clicking of the heels of the rare women who stroll nonchalantly through the aisles, absent-mindedly ignoring a window of decorations, stopping for a moment in front of the boutiques selling jewelry or dresses or garishly colored paintings, calling out to their husbands, their lovers , their friends, already far away, their heads tucked into their shoulders, their fingers compulsively gripping their cell phones, walking with haste, muttering “What does she want again? ".

The gardens of the Palais-Royal are a temple where no worship is anymore celebrated. The stone columns still look great, but their soul has long since disappeared. In winter, thin lime trees look like upturned brooms; in summer, the dust from the flowerbed makes walkers cough. Some kids kick a ball; their joyful cries disturb the lovers embracing on the benches. Even when it's hot, it's cold; even when there is noise, silence reigns. Les Invalides exhibits the tomb of Napoleon, and the cathedral of SaintDenis, those of the kings of France. At the Palais-Royal, the tombs are empty and anonymous. Discreet plaques on the walls indicate that the judges of the Council of State and the Constitutional Council occupy the vast rooms that can be guessed i

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looking up towards the tall and elegant windows which overlook the garden. Our “wise men” are discreet shadows who no longer come out of their golden lair.

The perfect symmetry of the quadrilateral which surrounds the garden, a reflection of an architecture that is elegant without being imposing, hieratic without being heavy, evokes a time when everything was “only order and beauty, luxury, calm, and voluptuousness”. If we let ourselves go, if we let ourselves be carried away, if we let ourselves be carried away, if we listen, we hear, we see, we feel noises, rustling sounds, odors, whispers, a whirlwind of shadows and lights, ideas and promises, crowded café terraces where France and the world are remade, where news is dissected and commented on until we drop, until what they become: rumors, slogans, poisoned arrows which soon dissipate in a labyrinth of petticoats, flowers, masks, pompoms, boxes of rouge, gauze and long pins...

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THESE GARDENS WHERE WE INVENTED OUR MODERNITY

It is hard to believe today that these quiet gardens where children play were the bustling place where other, less innocent games were experienced. Where we invented, in the midst of tumults and plots, between freedom and license, our modernity; where the Revolution was begun and completed, where all revolutions were outlined and outlined. As an Italian writer wrote with nostalgic lyricism: “The West dreamed of being encyclopedia and brothel, stage and museum, Eden, polytechnic, seraglio: once this dream almost came true at the Palais-Royal. But the dream was afraid of 1

itself. He accompanies us, suspended

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It all started in the 17th century. The cardinal of

Richelieu had taken up his quarters there: he only had to take a few steps to penetrate the thick and cold walls of the dark Louvre palace and watch over his dear Louis XIII. Upon his death, Richelieu bequeathed his palace to the king. Little Louis

Cardinal, and where Mazarin only had to cross the garden to go from his Tubeuf hotel to the queen's apartments. After the Fronde, the king gave his property to the Duke of Orléans. But the duke, in debt and greedy, opened the gardens to the public from the middle of the 18th century, had buildings built all around and set up shops under the porticos. The “superb exterior of the Palais-Cardinal”, previously celebrated by Corneille, were then invaded by shops, gambling dens and brothels. The Palais-Royal becomes Palais-Marchand. THE

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name changes will accelerate. Like History. The PalaisCardinal, now Palais-Royal, will be called Palais-Égalité, then Jardin de la Révolution, then Palais-Royal again.

In just a few years, it has become the meeting place for an underworld community, where great ladies rub shoulders with whores, where scholars interact with adventurers until late at night. Where the greatest minds like Diderot stir thoughts and ideas, ogling pretty women out of the corner of their eyes: “Whether the weather is nice or ugly, it's my habit to go at five o'clock evening, take a walk at the Palais-Royal. It's me who you always see alone, dreaming on the Argenson bench. I talk to myself about politics, love, taste or philosophy. I abandon my mind to all its libertinage. I leave it up to him to follow the first idea, wise or crazy, that presents itself, as we see, in the Allée du Foy, our dissolute young people walking in the footsteps of a courtesan with a stale air, a laughing face, sharp-eyed, snub-nosed, leave this one for another, attacking them all and attaching themselves to none. My thoughts are my whores. » The Palais-Royal was then nicknamed the “capital of Paris”. The center of the center. With his entomologist's eye, Taine will see the heart of an abundant and bastardized modernity which will destroy the old frameworks of traditional society, all these students, onlookers, clerics, journalists, adventurers and declasse, all this new uprooted urban humanity , who runs from precarious jobs in gambling dens and cafes.

The Palais-Royal is the emblematic place of the perversion of innocence. We come here to relax, to learn, to sober up.

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The debauched rub shoulders with the virgins, the obscure bask in the rays of the glories of the day, the masters of the moment ignore the masters of tomorrow. One evening, a young officer with long hair and a gaunt face, with blue eyes that pierce you like a cannonball, accosts a young woman of the fair sex, while being "permeated more than anyone with the odiousness of his state." ". Swearing out every word in his terrible Corsican accent, he says to her: “You will be very cold, how can you bring yourself to walk through the aisles? – Ah sir, hope animates me. I have to finish my evening. »

This perceptive and bored civilization awaits its cantor, its Homer: it will be Choderlos de Laclos. He is the good man in the right place of this Anglophile era. He is the secretary, the man of confidence, the handyman, the man of all hands and all ideas and all writings of the duke from Orléans. He joined the Duke after leaving the army. The moment is judiciously chosen: we are, in 1788, on the eve of the great upheaval. The Palais-Royal will be the beacon from which he will observe and plan everything. The Duke of Orléans, like his ancestors, and more than many of his ancestors, has until now spent his time between his pleasures and his plots, between his women and his “roués”. He tried hard to find his place in a regime that gave him the money so as not to give him power. He does not yet know that his son will be king of the French, but he already dreams of it. The Palais-Royal is his domain, his lair, his kingdom. Its capital in the capital. No musketeer or soldier of his cousin has the right to enter there. We have seen that with each quarrel with the court and the king,

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the parliamentarians were received there with great pomp by the Duke of Orléans to the cheers of the crowd.

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THE PALAIS-ROYAL EXPERIMENTS THE REVOLUTION BEFORE THE REVOLUTION For years, Madame de Genlis, who “to avoid the scandal of coquetry always gave in easily”, watched over the future Philippe Égalité alone. But when he discovers Laclos' masterpiece, he guesses that its author is his man, his chance, the second protector he was waiting for to take flight. The two will make a pair: he will have his black man and his white lady; vice and virtue. The villainous gallantry dear to Laclos is a useful prelude to villainy in politics. His Dangerous Liaisons are the most brilliant and acerbic description of French aristocratic mores that has ever been written; a moralizing text which surrounds the sin it denounces in a shining setting; and makes it more desirable than the most admirable virtue.

Laclos wrote his epistolary novel to dispel his boredom while he resided at the military port of Rochefort. He monitored the English squadrons which threatened the French coasts while Louis XVI decided to help the American “insurgents”. He is waiting for the enemy who will make him a hero. Our engineering officer ends up getting tired of contemplating the uniformly blue sea and sky which make him nostalgic for Paris. Nostalgia for its nymphs and its roués. Nostalgia for its sounds and smells. The nostalgia that awaits him everywhere as soon as he leaves the city a few miles. “So here you are in the countryside,

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boring like sentiment and sad like loyalty,” Valmont wrote to Madame de Merteuil. The final death of Valmont, the incarnation of the great bad man, preludes the aristocratic massacre that will crown the Revolution. Like Molière's Don Juan, he can only die a victim of his misdeeds, his perversity, but also of his naivety. The roué is not what you think. The French aristocrats will be strong enough to stop and destroy the monarchical absolutism which was crushing them under the extinguisher of state egalitarianism; but not enough to resist vindictiveness and popular violence. The worldly man has covered up the old military fund; the dancing master replaced the fencing master.

The nobles went into business, investing in coal mines, forges, factories, glassworks, earthenware, draperies, paper mills, chemical companies. Louis XV also ennobled large shipowners, manufacturers and traders. A business nobility has emerged over the years. But the French monarchy was unable or unwilling to create a true English-style gentry. Its elites refuse both the old rigors of Louis Fourteenth grandeur and the hypocritical and greedy rigidities of English liberalism. They are looking for their third way, which would combine both knowledge and pleasure, a freedom which is not only freedom of commerce, an equality which is not a leveling egalitarianism. Free without becoming shopkeepers; equal without becoming small.

With his customary equanimity, Tocqueville will understand better than anyone else what has happened: “It would be wrong to

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believe that the Ancien Régime was a time of servility and dependence. There was much more freedom there than today; but it was a kind of irregular and intermittent freedom, always contracted within the limits of classes […]. Thus reduced and distorted, freedom was still fruitful […]. Through it, these vigorous souls were formed, these proud and daring geniuses that we are going to see appear, and who will make the French Revolution the object of both admiration and terror for the generations that follow it.

2 .

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It is the Revolution which will cut the Gordian knot. A Revolution that could only start from the Palais-Royal. On July 12, 1789, two wax busts of Necker and the Duke of Orléans crossed the gardens. Gathered at the Café de Foy the day before, Mirabeau, Danton, Sancerre, Laclos, Desmoulins launched the most worrying rumors: foreign troops, requisitioned by the king, were preparing to invade Paris. A Saint-Barthélemy of patriots is being prepared... Two days later, Camille Desmoulins harangues the crowd, and, wearing in her buttonhole one of the leaves torn from a tree

from the garden, exhorts him to take the Bastille…

From then on, the roles were reversed: the declasses of the PalaisRoyal, these speculators of the voice, became the voice of the people, filled the galleries of the Assemblies and intimidated the provincial delegates, promised them the lantern, ostentatiously put two fingers to their necks, warning them that they will be hanged if they do not obey. Michelet says that in a few days spent in “this house where everything is false”, the honest and ingenuous deputies will lose their illusions and all courage. The “pure” Assembly governs the “impure” Assembly. Foy's café governs France.

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The National Assembly receives a “petition from the two thousand one hundred public women of the Palais-Royal”. Around ten large courtesans welcomed the noble emigrants' apartments on the second floor of the galleries, with small Negro servants and worldly furniture. One of the most sought-after “nymphs”, La Chevalier, is the daughter of the executioner of Dijon. Women wear their hair “like a sacrifice”, like a “victim”. They wear gold and silver earrings in the shape of a guillotine. On October 5, 1789, we recognize a man dressed in a brown coat, in the middle of the first groups of women (and men disguised as women) who set out for Versailles, from where they would bring back "the baker, the baker , and the little mitron. It's Laclos. The operation was paid for by the Duke of Orléans, organized by the author of Dangerous Liaisons. The same Laclos became a member of the Jacobins club in 1790…

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WE'RE NOT MAKING FRANCE AGAIN

AND THE WORLD IN THE GARDENS OF THE PALAIS-ROYAL

The Revolution ate its children. Mirabeau is dead. Philippe Égalité was guillotined. The Girondins too. And Desmoulins, and Danton. Even when Foy's café is full, it seems empty. The scent of the nymphs still mixes with the smells of wide open kitchens where haymaking is hung which attracts stray dogs, but the heroes are tired. Discouraged. Tired. We no longer remake France and the world in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. The shy and blushing young man, with a gaunt face and a terrible Corsican accent, became First Consul. Napoleon installs the Council of State in the Palais des Orléans. He puts the seal administrative on the center of fantasies. The place is abandoned

his remains to the Administration. Bonaparte returns to the Roman conception of the French monarchy: unity through law and greatness through heroism. The Palais-Royal is no longer the capital of Paris. The center of the center. “The Revolution is over. »

In 1801, the author of Dangerous Liaisons began writing a new novel, in order to “make popular the truth that there is only happiness in the family”. The libertine himself married a young girl from the bourgeoisie of La Rochelle, whom he had recently impregnated. Valmont marries Mademoiselle de Volanges! He will be a sensitive family man in the manner of Greuze. Laclos follows the advice that Valmont has

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given to young Danceny on the eve of his death: “Ah! believe me, we are only happy through love! » Fortunately for literature and the glory of the writer, death took him before he brought his novel to fruition. It is the entire 19th century, the century of Louis-Philippe, the son of his former master, model father of a large family and king of the French, who will write the novel in his place: work, family, money, or the triad of the triumphant bourgeoisie.

There will still be many fires, many restorations, many barricades. The passages of the Palais-Royal will open onto the streets of Paris. Gas and kerosene lamps will usher in the industrial era to illuminate gardens. Colette and Cocteau will stay there.

They too, like the generations that will follow, will listen and hear the dazed murmur of heroic times which reveal their secrets to us.

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1. Roberto Calasso, La Ruine de Kasch, Gallimard, 1987(1983). 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, 1856.

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Mirabeau

And at the same time… His death was the greatest moment of his life. His only incontestable, incomparable, incomparable success. The summit of a glorious existence. A death that lasted a whole week. A death staged, dramatized, with careful images and historical words. A death which does not return one's soul to God but to History. A death in splendor ostentatious to which the kings of France, humble Christians, had always refused. A death which foreshadowed the national funerals that the Republic is fond of today, from Victor Hugo to Charles de Gaulle. The dead man who inaugurated the Pantheon. Even before Voltaire and Rousseau.

On April 2, 1791, a man entered a Parisian café, hailed joyfully by the waiter: “Monsieur de la Place, the weather is beautiful today. – Yes, my friend, the weather is fine, but Mirabeau is dead. » For several days already, countless crowds had been crowding in front of the home of the glorious “Demosthenes of France”. All we talked about was his illness in the aisles of the Palais-Royal. The “universal concern” had spread across all social classes, throughout Paris, throughout France, and beyond the borders of the kingdom. People came from all over Europe to witness his death just as they had come to hear him thunder at the Constituent Assembly. For the foreigners, since the beginning of the Revolution, seeing Paris was

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see Mirabeau. The king and queen had even sent servants to check on him. The surrounding streets had been barricaded so that the noise of the cars would not disturb the dying man. The rumor of a poisoning spread. Fifty-two is young to die, even at the end of the 18th century. To appease the crowd, an autopsy was performed. Faced with the desolate spectacle of this eviscerated body, one of the strong men from Les Halles who had come in a delegation to attend, grumbled, with tears in his eyes: “What this is of our father now. »

As soon as his death was known, the Assembly was moved. Each There goes his tirade and his funeral eulogy: Barnave: “The Constituent Assembly has never been satisfied with hearing it. » Robespierre: “He was the illustrious man who, in critical moments, knew how to oppose the greatest force to despotism. »

Marie-Antoinette, too, cries: “Our last resource is taken away from us,” when her friend Fersen tells her the news: “It’s a great loss, because he was beginning to be useful. » Only Louis XVI's sister, Madame Élisabeth, remains inflexible: “I do not believe that it is through people without principles and without morals that God wants to save us. »

A national funeral is decreed. The firsts of the Revolution. The procession sets off on April 4 at five o'clock in the evening. It takes three hours to arrive at the Saint-Eustache church. A detachment of cavalry and a double hedge of

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National Guards escort him. Twelve of them carry the coffin. Followed by the family, the deputies, the municipality, the courts; and the impressive cohort of members of the Jacobins club. All the ministers are there. We estimates the crowd of Parisians following the procession at four hundred thousand people. Spectators cling to wherever they can, roofs, windows, street lights, tree branches. The funeral oration hardly shines for its originality: “Mirabeau saved France” comes back repeatedly. Of the drum rolls resonate continuously; Parisians hear for the first time the haunting sound of the tom-tom.

For posterity, his premature death is unexpected; it keeps open, legitimate, all possibilities, all uchronies: Mirabeau would have prevented the king's flight to Varennes; or in any case would have organized it better; Mirabeau would have avoided external war; he would have warded off the Terror. He did not have the crazy head of the Girondins nor the criminal coldness of Robespierre. The sarcastic Camille Desmoulins understood everything, guessed everything: “One of the talents of Monsieur de Mirabeau was to know so much the moral tactics of his century that he did nothing except when appropriate and within his reason; its very end seems to be new proof of this. It seems that the moment of his death was of his choice. He left this world at the moment when perhaps his glory had reached the top of the pyramid. »

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RECONCILING THE INCONSCIABLE Mirabeau is the incarnation for History of the good revolutionary. The one who reconciles the irreconcilable. The moderate in the middle of the extremes. The rational among the fanatics. The peaceful in the midst of the warlike. The aristocrat among the democrats. The liberal among the reactionaries. THE tamer who separates lions ready to fight each other. “The greatest political genius of all time,” Lamartine wrote emphatically. However, his time had already passed. He had embodied the early Revolution. That of his tirade famously from the Jeu de Paume hall to the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé: “If you have been tasked with getting us out of here, you must ask for orders to use force. For we will only leave our places by the force of bayonets. » But his political synthesis was dated, outdated.

Outdated. His conciliation no longer reconciled many people. Its contradictions became visible. His connections with the court were known; and his need for money never satisfied. His situation at the Jacobins club was increasingly contested, from the spring of 1790. For months, Camille Desmoulins and Marat had denounced the “great betrayal of Monsieur de Mirabeau”. He himself felt the “ostracism” rising against him. regard. His haughty contempt for all those whom he crushed with his intellectual superiority exasperated the many mediocre people. His maneuvers, his apostasies, his twisted tricks were tiring. The Mirabeau weather vane was dizzying.

The man who had brought down the monarchy was eager to raise it up again. The man who had thundered against the undue privileges of

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the aristocracy and clergy were now railing against the egalitarian “orgy” of the night of August 4. The man who, from August 1790, was preparing for civil war, posed as a defender of peace. The herald of the populace who relied on agitation to intimidate the court now only wanted to silence Paris and “its demagoguery”. He alternately avoided falling into the trap of moderation, a rightwing trap, and the trap of violence, a left-wing trap. He comes to be applauded by the Jacobin Club in a blue coat with two immense epaulettes of a battalion commander of the National Guards and meets Marie-Antoinette in secret in the gardens of Versailles with many bows and bows. He voted in the Assembly for the abolition of titles of nobility, but that same evening, on returning home, he grabbed his valet by the ear and cried out to him, laughing: “Ah, that! funny, I hope that for you, I am still Monsieur le Comte. » Rejected by the order of the nobility in 1789, he improvised as a cloth merchant to be elected within the third estate; but recalls Chateaubriand, “he did not forget that he had appeared at court, ridden in carriages and hunted with the king”.

Mirabeau does not want to break with the Jacobins in order to better destroy them. He despises the king and the king distrusts him. For months, without tiring, he tried to explain to Louis XVI that the Revolution could be the unexpected opportunity for his reign. May it realize the dream of its ancestors of a unified, egalitarian kingdom, where the intermediary bodies, nobility, clergy, parliaments, are subdued and domesticated, where the individual, deprived of his traditional protections, finds himself in a faceunequal face-to-face with the state administration. That it allows those in power to rule the country with an iron fist, without the privileges of some and the ancestral customs of others. We had a “kingdom

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bristling with privileges and intermediate bodies", and we now have "this perfectly smooth surface which freedom requires but which also makes the exercise of authority easier. This would have pleased Richelieu,” he explains in one of his secret letters to the king. The Revolution intends to recover the heritage of the monarchy which it abolishes; she even destroys the final obstacles and scruples which still held back kings, since she now speaks and acts in the name of the nation. But the revolutionary emulator of Richelieu quickly found himself in front a strategic impasse. How to dispossess the monarch of the Ancien Régime, while maintaining the constitutional monarch? How to bring down the king to better raise him up? How to kill him to better resurrect him?

“It would have taken a great king, or a great minister,” said the historian Albert Sorel. But Louis XVI was not the king of the situation: “To get an idea of his character, imagine oiled ivory balls that you would try in vain to hold together,” confided his brother, the future Louis XVIII. His phlegm becomes apathy, his optimism becomes ingenuousness, his stubborn humanity becomes guilty weakness, his admirable refusal of civil war becomes a denial of his responsibilities as a statesman. At home, the Christian has supplanted the king. He who makes the angel makes the beast. The Duke of Orléans, approached for the role by Mirabeau, also disappoints him with his pusillanimity and his excess of scruples: “He wants, but cannot; he is a eunuch for crime. » And the “great minister” will never be a minister. So decided his envious colleagues who, by the decree of November 7, 1789, established that ministers can no longer be chosen from among the members of the legislative body. Mirabeau may be ironic in proposing to the Assembly to be more explicit and to

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“limit the exclusion requested from Mr. de Mirabeau, deputy of the communes of the Sénéhaussee of Aix”, it is achieved.

Mirabeau makes good policy against bad luck; he no longer wants to ride the Revolution but to stop it. It will be the first, but not the last: “It is the most coherent expression of the dream of stopping the Revolution, which will haunt all its leaders, in the face of the indefinite drift of power,” writes François Furet. After Mirabeau, it will be the turn of Barnave and the Feuillants, then the Girondins, Danton, finally Robespierre who, for want of the king, that is to say history, puts the supreme being in his camp. Basically, after the failure of the Thermidorian Republic, it is Bonaparte who is the instrument of the project of Mirabeau, a king of the Revolution.

But it is at a price that Mirabeau would not have conceded: freedom 1 .

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From the start of the Revolution, behind the smokescreen of the great humanist and universalist tirades, the brutal question of force arose acutely. It is because the king is not sure of his French guards that he cannot prevent the storming of the Bastille. It was because La Fayette, eager for popularity, did not dare to arrest the rioters of October 1789, that the king was forced to leave his palace at Versailles for his “golden prison” at the Tuileries. The monarchy was in truth abolished on the days of October 5 and 6, 1789.

Mirabeau understands this, as do the many monarchist and moderate deputies who have their passports signed and are ready to leave. “It is with iron in hand,” writes Mallet du Pan, “that opinion today dictates its decisions. Believe or die, this is the anathema that ardent spirits pronounce, and they pronounce it in the name of freedom. Moderation is

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become a crime. » The king is in the hand of the Assembly, which is in the hand of the people which is in the hand of the commune of Paris, which is in the hand of the national guard, which, since the resignation of La Fayette, after the Champde-Mars massacre of July 17, 1791, was in the hands of the Jacobins.

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STOP THE REVOLUTION The entire history of the Revolution is embodied by Mirabeau. He was the first, but not the only one. All his successors will lean into the streets like him to take power, then will try to channel and stop the popular tumult which carries everything in its path. He is a traitor to the monarchy for true monarchists and a traitor to the Revolution for true revolutionaries. We can no longer stop the stormy course of the Revolution. You had to ride her to the end or not start her. There is no good Revolution and bad one, 1789 and 1793, human rights and the Terror. The germ of most of the laws of the Convention is already in the Constituent Assembly. “For any impartial man,” wrote the monarchist deputy Malouet, “the Terror dates from July 14”; with the head of the governor of the fortress on the end of a pike and the famous phrase of Barnave: “Was this blood so pure? » Napoleon said: “It is the Constituent Assembly that must be accused of the crimes of the Revolution. » Mirabeau unleashed lightning. He is the arsonist firefighter. We cannot build a constitutional monarchy by dreaming of a kingdom unified by the iron fist of Richelieu. We must choose: freedom or equality. Privileges or the State. An Englishstyle parliamentary regime, liberal but unequal, which is favored by the deputies who voted for the abolition of privileges, on the night of August 4, to build a society based on property and the acquisition of wealth; or an egalitarian, nostalgic and archaic society, of which the peasants who burn the castles and the sans-culottes who threaten the above-mentioned people dream.

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Beyond the great principles and big words, “liberty”, “equality”, “fraternity”, the French Revolution is above all and in essence a transfer of property. Sale of the Church's national assets to large peasants and bourgeoisie and installation of ministers in the private mansions of aristocrats are the most striking symbols of this. This transfer of property is the engine, the force, the passion of the Revolution. “The obstacles it encounters only make it more destructive: beyond the properties, it attacks the owners, and completes the spoliations through proscriptions” Gangs expel, pillage, knock out, injure the 2

proscribed. It is the alliance of brigandage and patriotism. .

A reversed aristocracy has taken power and exercises it more brutally than the old feudal lords. Poor people are substituted for rich people, commoners for nobles, bourgeois for ministers of state, actors for legislators, lawyers for magistrates, priests for bishops, journalists for publicists, citizens for soldiers, from soldiers to officers, from officers to generals. Batches of farmer generals, then lawyers, and parliamentarians were guillotined. The rich are the only aristocracy left to crush. Barère from the tribune declared that “commerce is usurious, monarchical and counter-revolutionary”. We add to “incivism” and “moderateism” the new crime of “negotiantism”. Merchants, merchants, active and industrious, flee or die. The Revolution has the luxury of a new revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Camille Desmoulins will honestly recognize this: “Our revolution, purely political, has its roots only in the selfishness and self-love of each person, the combination of which

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the general interest was made up. » Red caps supplant red heels; the three thousand to four thousand Jacobins who sat at the club on rue Saint-Honoré succeeded the three thousand to four thousand nobles who rode in the king's carriages. In this inverted hierarchy, in this great replacement of elites and privileged people, the king can no longer be the master, not even the guarantor, but becomes a target.

Burke had warned: “You don't depose a king half-heartedly. » In a revolutionary situation, we cannot have order and freedom. It's necessary to choose. By refusing this choice Cornelian, Mirabeau condemns himself to failure. The Constituent Assembly will erase the king; the Legislature will table it; the Convention will guillotine him. Then, the Montagnards will guillotine the Girondins, the Thermidorians will guillotine the Montagnards. Finally, the Frucidorians will deport the constitutionalists, the Directory will purge the Councils and the Councils will purge the Directory. In the end, the liberal Constitution that Mirabeau dreamed of will give birth to the centralizing despotism of Bonaparte. Rivarol had been even more prophetic: “Either the king will have an army, or the army a king. »

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“ MACHIAVEL-MIRABEAU ” Mirabeau will never be Bonaparte. He stopped in the middle of the ford. It is part of both revolutionary imagery and monarchical legend. The man who dreamed of becoming the “Richelieu for the nation” “will never be anything other than a Cardinal de Retz,” as his father, never shy of perfidy, had predicted to him. He is nicknamed “MachiavelliMirabeau”. It’s all “obscure intrigue” and “artificial dissimulation”. He is the product of this fruitful encounter over the centuries between France and Italy, where his ancestors, the Riquetti, come from, the French monarchy imposing the ordered forms of the nation-state while the Italians teach the subtleties of politics to these chivalrous and rough-hewn, brutal and ingenuous French people: their faces were successively the advisors of Catherine de Medici, Concini, Mazarin, Mirabeau, Bonaparte, Gambetta. The Italians were also the masters of commedia dell'arte. Mirabeau is the first great star of this “theatrocracy” that was the Revolution, according to Thibaudet’s apt words. Lamartine, who was also a great revolutionary tribune – but of the revolution of 1848 – will recognize in good faith the superiority of the master: “His resounding words become the proverbs of the Revolution…

He alone is the entire people... Mirabeau did not invent the Revolution, he manifested it. Without him, it would perhaps have remained at the stage of an idea and a trend. He was born, and she took in him the form, the passion, the language which makes the crowd say when they see a thing: “There it is.” » Eighteen months after Mirabeau's death, on November 20, 1792, workers discovered in a wall of the castle

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Tuileries an iron cabinet in which we find documents which attest to its links with the court. Immediately, the National Assembly decided that his bust would be veiled. On September 21, 1794, his body was removed from the Pantheon, because “there is no great man without virtue”. The same day, Marat's was transferred there. Marat had been the only one to insult his memory from the day of his disappearance. A replacement as an emblematic summary of the course of the French Revolution. “The impure remains of the royalist Mirabeau” are scattered. No grave will bear his name. The “small morality”, which this cynical amoralist had always mocked, had its revenge.

His father had often said that he had “sinned from the base, from his morals”. However, the question of Mirabeau's morality is not the essential one. Certainly, his lavish lifestyle was annoying when so much misery was on display; and his dinners at the Palais-Royal with “Opera dancers well known but not for their virtue”, a few days before his death, did not give him a chaste reputation; but his debts, his escapades, his scandals, his trials, his sulfurous mistresses and his tumultuous loves, his conflicts

with his father, who seemed to pursue him everywhere, like his conscience, and like a vengeful God, persecuting him everywhere, his stays in prison, at the fort of Vincennes, were part of its legen Like her enormous powdered hair. Like his big misshapen head, pockmarked with smallpox, so ugly and repulsive that it became fascinating. “A colossal and muddy satyr,” wrote Taine. Like the disproportionate size of the buttons of color of his coat and the buckles of his shoes. As the excessive profusion of his manners, bows and compliments. Like the southern accent which surfaced in

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despite his efforts to contain him. Like the uncontrollable movements of his hands, his arms, his gestures, the passionate intonations of his voice, the emphasis of his words, the hyperbole that broke through, this declamatory tone that charmed even the most informed listeners. Alive, Mirabeau would have known the fate of his relatives and his brothers of race and generation, all the Calonnes and Chateaubriands emigrating to escape the egalitarian furies of the national razor. He would have followed his friend Dupont de Nemours and emigrated to America. He had written to his mistress Sophie that he dreamed of his daughter being educated among the good society of Boston.

“Of so many reputations, so many actors, so many events, so many ruins, only three men will remain, each of them attached to each of the three great revolutionary eras, Mirabeau for the aristocracy, Robespierre for democracy, Bonaparte for despotism always lose in the midst of the passions which they themselves 3

provoked.

.

» It is the eternal drama of the moderates who

Each era has its moderate, each era its Mirabeau: Guizot, Lamartine, Gambetta. Each era has its failure. The moderates lead as long as the weather is not stormy. They lack determination, strength, even brutality. So, they pass on. They are unsuitable for storms. Mirabeau had embodied the Revolution, a moment of the Revolution, its liberal moment. Without ever being able to stop it from the principles which had started it.

He was not the man for the job; he was only one man.

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1. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (dir.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, Flammarion, 1988. 2. Hippolyte Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France, 1876. 3. François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from beyond the grave, 1848.

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Robespierre

The stoned man He is not a man but a concept. Not a character but a symbol. Not a destiny but a curse. Not a story but a court. Not a name but a slogan. Which says more about the one who speaks about it than about the one about whom one speaks. Which reveals more about the era which evokes it than about the era which is evoked. We say Robespierre, but we never say who Robespierre was.

Our time hates Robespierre. The doom to gemonies. Made him an absolute foil. A monster. Our monster. Our French Stalin. Our Hitler without a mustache wig. A tyrant, a criminal, a fanatic, a genocidaire, a psychopath. The exact counterpoint to the vision imposed by Marxist historians of the hero of the masses, the man whose action had prefigured Lenin and his October Revolution, just as the prophets of the Old Testament had announced the coming of Jesus. -Christ. It was enough for us

liberal historians to reverse the point of view of their predecessors to build the new Robespierre, namely the accomplished model of this mediocre, anonymous and conscienceless bureaucrat, whom the crimes of the totalitarian orders, Nazi and Communist, have taught us to know and to to fear

Robespierre is our banality of evil. We now see him with the haughty look in which the

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vicomte de Chateaubriand: “At the end of a violent discussion, I saw a deputy with a common air, a gray and inanimate face, regularly coiffed, neatly dressed like the manager of a good house, rise to the rostrum. or like a village notary who takes care of his person. He made a long and boring report; we did not listen to him; I asked his name; it was Robespierre. The people in shoes were ready to leave the salons, and their hooves were already knocking at the door. » Even the austerity of his morals, his dignified and corseted appearance, which reassured the puritan bourgeois, are the object of the ridicule of the scruffy hedonists that we have become. Even his flattering nickname “Incorruptible” arouses sarcasm from our contemporaries who have returned from everything. We have adopted the disillusioned cynicism of Mirabeau as our own: “He will go far, he believes everything he says, and he has no needs. » For a long time, Danton, the corrupt swindler, was preferred, forgetting that it was Danton who created the revolutionary tribunal. We praise the Girondins, talented and romantic victims, forgetting that it was they who declared war on Europe.

Such is the posthumous life of Robespierre. Which started during his lifetime. It is the skill of its conquerors, the Thermidorian conventionalists, concealing their crimes and plunders under his name, and his name alone, which paradoxically creates the mythology of Robespierre, the eternal incarnation of the Terror. It is the cowardice of the committee members, not daring to confront him in public, but calling him "dictator" and "tyrant", as soon as his back is turned, which makes him the sole incarnation of a collective policy and system. And these are his weaknesses, his narcissistic concern for popularity, his pathological desire to be adored, his philosophical approach to politics, his sermons as a priest, and even as an inspired prophet,

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which will make him strong for posterity, while they will cause his political downfall.

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THE DICTATORSHIP OF PUBLIC OPINION He is against the Republic and he is going to save it. He is against the war and he will win it. He is against the death penalty, and he will embody it. He does not want to kill Louis XVI and he is going to demand his head. He wants to spare the queen and he will let her be executed. He wants to defend Camille and he is going to accuse her. He wants to ally himself with Danton and

he will eliminate it. He cries: “No Cromwell, not even me!” » and he will be crowned “king of the Revolution” by the English newspapers. Above all, he feared the emergence of a booted dictator, and Madame de Staël portrayed Bonaparte as a “Robespierre on horseback”. The dictatorship he aspires to is that of public opinion, the sovereignty of his speech.

Robespierre is lucid about the destiny that awaits him: “Death always death! and the villains throw it on me! What a memory I will leave if it lasts! Life weighs on me. » He knows his limits better than anyone: “No! I am not made to govern, I am made to fight the enemies of the people. »

He is a priest surrounded by his devotees, and especially his devotees. They stamp their feet and sob when he tirelessly rehashes his empty formulas, learned from JeanJacques or the great Romans, Socrates and his hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, the “torches of discord and the vessel of the State”. He loves the incense of the cult with which he is surrounded to better soothe his anxiety of not being good enough. The unhealthy suspicion that he shows towards everyone, including his closest friends, is only the expression of

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legitimate doubts he has about him. “Thirty-two years old, pinched, narrow shoulders, pale complexion, short-sighted look. He was more than unknown, he was mediocre and disdained. It was the last word of the Revolution, but no one could read it,” writes Lamartine. He incorporated the entire Revolution, principles, thoughts, passions; and thus forces her to incorporate herself into him. A Revolution is determined by the nature of the government it overthrows: the absolute Revolution is the direct product of absolute monarchy. Public safety is only a new version of reason of state. To save the homeland in danger, if the words and the men change, the concepts and actions remain the same. Richelieu would not have been out of place within the Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre just has to turn the old system around like a glove. Like the absolute prince, the nation cannot do wrong, since it is the new vicar of God on Earth. Succeeding God's anointed, Robespierre considers himself the sword of the Supreme Being. The American historian JM Thompson described the almost mystical transformation which transfigured the modest deputy of the Third Estate of Arras: “Robespierre had lived the Jeu de Paume oath like Rousseauism incarnate. He had heard the voice of the people and thought he heard the voice of God. From this moment on mission. »

The people became for Robespierre a myth, a Holy Grail. He invented an illusion so as not to see reality. Or rather reconstitute it, build it, forge it. The people, necessarily pure and immaculate, the Manichean antithesis of the libertine aristocrats. To its intrigues and perfidies, which have multiplied around the king, and especially the queen, since the beginning of the Revolution, the people have responded with violence, brutality,

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murder. This sanctified people must be protected against itself, like a still clumsy and brutal child. Since the massacres of September 1792, this “Saint-Barthélemy of freedom”, the men of the Revolution, seized with fear, fear that the violence of the people, which they have incited and encouraged, will sweep them all away. Robespierre, indicted, nevertheless chose to attack to better defend himself: “Illegal acts? So is it with the criminal code in hand that we save the homeland? This was all illegal, no doubt. Yes, illegal like the fall of the Bastille, illegal like the fall of the throne, illegal like freedom! Citizens, do you want a Revolution without revolution? The sensitivity which moans almost exclusively about the enemies of freedom is suspect to me. » Robespierre, but also Danton, have no choice; the people – “that is to say the crowd”, wrote Taine – leave them no alternative: they must strike so that he does not strike; they must kill to contain the killings; they must judicialize revenge to stop that in the name of justice: “Let us not let these children of the Revolution play with the people’s thunder; let us direct it ourselves or it will devour us,” confides Robespierre. “Let us be terrible to exempt the people from being terrible,” Danton echoes.

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“ THE UNHAPPY APPLAUD ME”

It is this fatal paradox that our era, weakened by decades of peace and simplistic and pacifist slogans, is no longer able to grasp: the Terror was invented less by Robespierre and Danton against the enemies of the Republic than against the furies of the Revolution. herself. The emigrants and the Vendéens are the pretext and the unfortunate expiatory victims; but the rabid, the exaggerated and the hordes of sans-culottes were indeed the target. This guillotine that they are demanding with loud cries was set up especially agains The Terror did not emerge entirely from a particularly criminal brain, but on the contrary from an instinctive and collective reaction that we call the “spirit of the times”. Contrary to analogies that have become historiographical commonplaces, Robespierre is not Lenin or Trotsky, who, haunted by the memory of the French Revolution, decide from the first day to provoke an inexpiable Terror so as never to suffer the repercussions of Thermidor. He is not Stalin either, because for Robespierre it is a matter of tearing off the masks of traitors and felons, and not of arbitrarily designating individuals required to play the role of traitors and felons from whom the masks will be torn off. for a bloody dialectical masquerade.

The Terror was born little by little in an emulation, an auction of patriotic pledges: each criticizes the other for not giving enough to the Revolution: Barnave to Mirabeau; Brissot to Barnave; Danton to Brissot; Marat to Danton; Hébert to Robespierre; Saint-Just in Danton; all to the Girondins. It is

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Rousseau who introduced compassion into political discourse: “an innate repugnance at seeing one of our fellow human beings suffer”. It was her emulator Robespierre who brought her into political action. The “people” becomes synonymous with “the little people”: “The unfortunate people applaud me,” Robespierre congratulates himself. The Girondins speak in the name of the French Republic, Robespierre speaks in the name of the French people. The Girondins took up Mirabeau's project of an English-style society, free but unequal, once the throne, the aristocracy and the clergy were liquidated; or an American-style society, made up of departmental oligarchies. Robespierre embraces the entire people in his projects of emancipation, under a sacred and hierarchical trilogy, a people, a magistrate, a God: “The Republic? The monarchy ? I only know the social question. » The Girondins are democrats of circumstance; the Montagnards, democrats of principle. “The people only saw the Girondins as ambitious; he saw Robespierre as a liberator,” notes Lamartine. The law of Ventôse 1794 confiscated the property of the Church, emigrants and all “sus to the “unfortunate”. Saint-Just says: “The unfortunate are the

powers of the earth. »

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SOCIAL QUESTION Robespierre invented the concept of a welfare state which took one hundred and fifty years (and two world wars) to come to fruition: “Everything necessary to maintain life must be common and only the superfluous can be recognized as private property. » The law of May 11, 1794 established “national charity as a national political priority”. With incomparable finesse, Hannah Arendt, in her famous work On Revolution, analyzed how “the transformation of human rights into the rights of the homeless culottes marks the turning point of the French Revolution and all the revolutions that would follow. Robespierre abandons “his despotism of freedom” for the “rights of the sans-culottes, clothing, food and reproduction of the species”. Marx would theorize this ideological shift fifty years later. This French attempt to resolve the social question by political means will lead to the Terror. Compassion leads to violence. The only revolution where compassion played no role in motivating the protagonists was the American Revolution. Hannah Arendt shows that the American Revolution succeeded where the French Revolution failed because the first did not have to deal with the social question. In this land of plenty that is the New World, all the inhabitants lived in honest comfort. Never has poverty, and the fury it brings, buried, as in France, the foundations of freedom. The only misery, the only despair, the only suffering is that of black slaves; but the American revolutionaries

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don't care. Often slave owners themselves, they believe that their fate is not a political question. When the black question became political, a century after independence, the United States experienced four years of a terrible Civil War...

The people gathered around the new revolutionary idols of Liberty and Equality divide and tear the nation apart. The Vendéens fight to defend their priests and join forces with the insurrections of Normandy and the South; Marseille has taken up the torch of federalism; Toulon opens its port and its arsenals to the English; Lyon proclaimed itself a “sovereign municipality” and turned the guillotine against the representatives of the Convention. Foreign powers are defeating inexperienced French troops everywhere and are already fraternizing with the emigrants in Valenciennes. The political commissioners sent by the Convention aggravated the disorganization of the army by threatening generals who were too independent. The Revolution guillotines those who believe they are indispensable because they are necessary. It demands that men no longer be nothing so that the homeland can be everything. She confuses the art of war with the art of betrayal. She invents a war at full speed, with plebeian masses commanded by ignorant generals. The Girondins declared war on the whole of Europe and proved incapable of waging it. Thought, resolution, firmness, everything is lacking. Confusion, disobedience, idealism, unrealism reign supreme. Malouet notes sarcastically: “It’s the Regency of Algiers, minus the dey. » When Vergniaud, their most brilliant orator, voted for the death of the king, after he had spoken in favor of clemency – still the day before the vote, he spoke: “For me, to vote for death is

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insult me than to believe me capable of such an unworthy action” –, Robespierre smiles with contempt and Danton whispers to Brissot: “Praise your orators! Sublime words, cowardly actions. What to do with such men? Don't talk to me about it anymore, it's over. » And France with it. At the end of a work initially devoted to their glory, Lamartine will execute the Girondins with a single sentence: “Everything perished in the hands of these men of their words. »

Half conquered by the coalition of Kings, and torn from within by the counter-revolution, the Convention had the choice, in July 1793, only between dictatorship and death. The death of the Convention means that of the Revolution and the Republic. And the death of the Revolution and the Republic means that of France. The Polish example – well forgotten today – proves this to contemporaries. Austrians, Prussians and Russians then completed the dismemberment of the Polish nation begun twenty years earlier. France is next on the list. The countries allied against revolutionary France are targeting Alsace and Lorraine, French Flanders and Picardy. HAS Brussels, the Count of Mercy expresses all the ambition of the Austrian monarchy and its allies: “When we have taken its most beautiful provinces, this power will no longer be nothing. » In this tragic context, the federalist ambitions of the Girondins turned out to be criminal utopias: “You accuse us of enslaving the departments, we accuse you of decapitating the Republic,” Danton asserts to a Girondin. Which of us are most guilty? You want to fragment freedom, so that it is weak and vulnerable in all its members; we want to declare freedom indivisible like the nation, to

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that it is unassailable in his head. Which of us are statesmen? »

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THE NATION-STATE WON THE REVOLUTION There are dictatorships which are resurrections. Imbued with classical culture, the conventionalists drew the legitimacy of the dictatorship they established from the glorious memory of the Roman Republic. Robespierre is not a hated tyrant nor the useful idiot of capitalism since the Convention delegated all power to him. The Convention is the Revolution. The Revolution is France. The nation-state predates the Revolution, and will be saved by Robespierre. The nation-state defeated the Revolution and its dreams of universal brotherhood. Robespierre, however, is not hostile to the cosmopolitan and generous ideas of Thomas Paine; but his patriotism was strengthened by the height of the dangers incurred. He is an enemy of wars of conquest and only wants to defeat Europe through ideas. The patriotism of France is neither in the community of languages nor in the community of borders, even less in the community of blood, but in that of ideas. “The Revolution is the war of freedom against its enemies. » But at the height of the struggle, Robespierre admitted that he “hates the English people”. When he had the Prussian Anacharsis Cloots, a cosmopolitan apostle of “humankind”, guillotined, he exclaimed: “Can we regard a German baron as a patriot? »

From the summer of 1793, the “foreigner” became a political category, designating those who did not adhere to the Revolution. The aristocrat is a “foreigner from within”, doubly foreign, both as a descendant of the Frankish invader,

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living for fifteen centuries “at the expense of the Gallic nation” and as a “people apart, a false people”, enemy of the Revolution and the nation. Robespierre declares: “The plan of the Revolution was written in full in the work of Machiavelli. » He was referring to the great Italian's most famous phrase: “We prefer the homeland to the salvation of our soul. »

The great Revolution gives birth to the “great nation”. And Robespierre sacrifices the salvation of his soul to the homeland. The military situation was restored as soon as the victory of Wattignies, in October 1793. From that of Fleurus, on June 26, 1794, the French were on the offensive everywhere, dominating the Austrians, retaking Belgium, pushing back the Prussians on the Rhine , the Piedmontese in the Alps, the Spanish in Roussillon. HAS Fleurus, the French used an observation balloon for the first time in military history. But it is above all Poland – whose fate is definitely the inverted mirror of our nation – which will save the revolutionary army: to better divide the martyred nation, part of the Austrian and Prussian troops have stripped the western front to strengthen the east . Carnot, the “organizer of victory”, boasts and dreams aloud of “natural borders”. He takes offense at Robespierre's lack of enthusiasm, mistaking for a lack of patriotism what is the persistent fear of the fame of a happy general.

We must stop the war. We must stop the Terror. The dictatorship must be stopped. The three form a system. Robespierre feels it, knows it. Saint-Just wrote to Robespierre: “The use of terror has blasé crime, as strong liquors blase the palate. » Danton apostrophes Robespierre: “The anger of the people is a

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movement. Your scaffolds are a system. The Revolutionary Tribunal that I invented was a rampart; you make a butchery of it. » While he goes one evening to the Committee of Public Safety, Fouquier-Tinville, the public accuser, finds himself uneasy on the Pont-Neuf: “I think I see the shadows of the dead who pursue us, he said, especially those of the patriots whom I had guillotined. » War pays for war. The conquered countries finance the deficits. The devalued assignats allowed peasants to acquire national goods for a pittance. From an instinct for survival, Terror has become a method. Suddenly, she became tactical. Everyone wants to stop the Terror and everyone fears that they will be accused of moderation. Suspicion becomes synonymous with purity. The inhumanity of patriotism. We confuse philosophy with murder. The desire to stop the Terror makes the Terror worse. Robespierre does not even dare to condemn Carrier, the vile massacrer of Nantes, transforming his momentary weakness into criminal complicity in the eyes of History. Saint-Just justifies everything, especially the worst: “Nothing resembles virtue like a great crime. Everything must be permitted to those who move in the direction of the Revolution. »

Robespierre refuses to admit to a gesture of humanity which he confuses with guilty weakness. He postpones clemency day after day. “The system had killed nature in him,” notes Lamartine. He believed himself to be more than a man by immolating humanity within himself. He would have torn out his heart if he had been capable of advising him of a weakness. The more he suffered from this violence, the more he believed himself righteous. » The more he kills, the more he poses as a “martyr”. The more he sacrifices, the more he is convinced to sacrifice himself. “It’s Cain who thinks he’s Abel,” noted Taine, always ruthless. If he celebrates

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the Supreme Being, on June 8, 1794, is to disavow crime, to erect a God who condemns the criminal; but the conventionalists mock the devout priest who brings back the old faith and the people suspect him of wanting to be crowned Christ and king. “It is you who are killing us,” Saint-Just told him on Thermidor 9, 1794, when Robespierre hesitated to call the Parisian sections to insurrection. Napoleon will have the final word: “Robespierre died for wanting to stop the effects of the Revolution, and not as a tyrant. Those he wanted to kill were more cruel than him... If he had not succumbed, he would have been the most extraordinary man who had lungs. »

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“ NEVER HIM AGAIN” Put an end to Robespierre. Extirp Robespierre from the body and soul of France. Erase this Robespierre from the image that Europe has of France. Show that the Republic is not Robespierre. Prevent Robespierre from returning whatever the means. Whatever the price. This resolution of our elites, a sort of “never again”, has been one of the common threads of our History for two centuries. From 1830, while the people of Paris were clamoring for the Republic, the bourgeoisie snatched old La Fayette from retirement so that he could crown LouisPhilippe with his revolutionary aura, and install him on the throne of Charles , barely escaped. In 1848, the Republic was proclaimed, but Lamartine warded off Robespierre's terrorist curse by having the priests bless liberty trees and by repelling the flag.

rouge.

With the Commune, we believe we are returning to the fundamentals of Robespierrism but we are deluding ourselves. Most communards removed from their program any reference to the “one and indivisible Republic”. They reject any authoritarian conception of power, which they see, not without reason, as the reversed counterpart of monarchical authority. Followers of Proudhon, many Communards defend a federative France, decentralized, we would say today, an association of free communes. The Commune outlines an original synthesis between the social concerns of 1793 and the political liberalism of 1789. But the Communards will be swept away by the Versailles reaction, like the Republic of

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1848 had been confiscated by Napoleon's nephew. The Communards will succeed neither in defeating the Prussian enemy who is besieging Paris nor in imposing the workers' question on the vengeful Versailles bourgeoisie. They discovered, but a little late, that the Robespierrist synthesis of the Roman

dictatorship was also good. Marx, for his part, will learn lessons from the failure of the Commune. And especially Lenin and Trotsky. The history of th French Revolution had no secrets for the latter. He had understood the tactical error committed by Robespierre. Although the Jacobin Club was the heart of power, Robespierre had preserved the prerogatives of the National Assembly, to the great dismay of the Parisian sections who dreamed of imposing their law on the "representatives of the nation". This dichotomy of powers and this respect for parliamentary forms were fatal to him: when the Jacobins were defeated in the Assembly, the people remained indifferent and the Parisian sections did not come to their aid. Trotsky and Lenin did not have these weaknesses and ingenuousness: they gave the Bolsheviks the role of single party that the Jacobin Club had forged; without allowing any parliamentary formalism to remain.

The nation succeeded absolutism in the 19th century; the party succeeded the nation in the 20th century . But national and social questions remain at the heart of political issues across Europe. Robespierre remains the initial and essential reference. Each side keeps a piece while ignoring the other. On the right, the most lucid monarchists salute the man of the fatherland in danger: “Despite its atrocious follies, despite its vile agents, the Terror was national. It stretched the springs of France in one of the greatest dangers it has known. » (J. Bainville). On the left, the

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Marxist historians recognize their debt to the man who defended the “unfortunates”, even if he was not yet enlightened by the lights of “scientific socialism”. On the right as on the left, the necessary violence of the “Romanstyle dictatorship”, which to save the homeland, which to take big capital by the throat, is not contested. Only our moderate Republicans, for fear of awakening the sleeping specter of Terror, have condemned all violence, locking themselves in a sterile parliamentary shadow theater, and renouncing any effective resolution of the "social question", for the greater good. happiness of “interests” never mistreated. The two world wars, and the criminal atrocities of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century which also tried to reconcile the “national” and the “social”, sealed the historical destiny of Robespierre. He is designated father of all terrors, father of all fanaticism, father of all totalitarianism. He invented everything and prepared everything. Robespierre or our Antichrist. Our time demands everything and the opposite of everything, the Revolution but without violence, 1789 but without 1793, patriotism but without nationalism, social progress but without socialism. Industrialization without workers, protection without borders. We also do not want to see that there cannot be social without national. That there is no solidarity between the rich and the poor if there is no common feeling of belonging, united by history, customs, traditions. The Americans did not establish social security at the end of the Second World War, unlike the British and the Europeans, because the whites refused to pay for the blacks. They did not feel like they belonged to the same nation. Today, French workers and the unemployed are fiercely hostile to

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any form of “assistantship”, which according to them, certain immigrants and their children abuse.

Our time wants everything but gives up everything. She denies Robespierre with all the more haste as she abandons both the nation and the social question. The right abandons the nation for the market, and the left abandons the French people for humanity. The Republic of all is no longer national but European. Even global. It is no longer the French Republic but a universal Republic. It is no longer the Republic.

Farewell, Maximilian.

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Cart

Everything must disappear ! Sold out! We take the same and start again. A dandy with silk ribbons and lace frills like Robespierre. A man for women, seduced by the beauty of ugly people and scoundrels, like Mirabeau. An animal of the feline species, bold and determined, like Danton. An American freedom fighter like La Fayette. A little provincial aristocrat like Bonaparte. Who will himself command the military platoon which will execute him, like Murat. Initiated into Freemasonry like everyone else.

François Athanase Charette de La Contrie is no different from the men of the Revolution who pursued him relentlessly. He is from the same century, from the same generation; it is made of the same dough, social and intellectual. Like them, he has wit: “I am a French officer, sir, I only serve for honor,” he replies to a smuggler who offers him a percentage of his profits; like them, he is a bad sleeper, stubborn, resentful, cruel. In this month of March 1793, the “Knight Charette” was 30 years old. He has two years left to live. Two years that will change the face of France and the world. Two years that will change the face of the Revolution and the war. Two years which prefigure two centuries of inexpiable battles between the hated past and the radiant future, between the religion of Christ and the religion of

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Progress, between identity and humanity, between men's rights and human rights. Charette is a former Royal officer. This sailor has the brilliant idea of adapting the methods of buccaneers and privateers on land. He thus invented the “little war”, which the Spaniards would soon call “guerrilla” when they faced Napoleon’s army. The Vendée peasants take to the “maquis”, without knowing the word. They constantly move from their field of buckwheat to the battlefield. In the forest, “partisan villages” were created. Armed with winepress knives, pitchforks, scythes and hunting rifles, these peasants in clogs are barefoot, like the troops of Bonaparte's Army of Italy; and their heroism is the admiration of their adversaries, from Kléber to Hoche, up to their executioner Turreau. At the same time, the revolutionary troops also overturned the military tactics inherited from the “art of war” of the 18th century and forged the principles of “total war”, which would flourish in the two centuries that followed.

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AN OCCASIONAL GATHERING OF BANDS Blues and Whites, soldiers of the Republic and rebels of the royal army of Vendée, enemy brothers in spite of themselves and in spite of everything... It was the forced requisition of young people for the war on the borders which triggered the insurrection in March 1793 against the Republic, and not the death of the king on January 21 of the same year. White people, whatever the theorists and historians of the Revolution may think, are also fighting for freedom and equality. The peasants did not revolt to reestablish the monarchy, but to defend their way of life; not to restore the privileges of the Church and the nobility, but to protect their persecuted priests. Like Charette, the nobles procrastinated for a long time and hesitated to commit. Cathelineau is a wagoner, Stofflet is a gamekeeper. Charette will think, but too late, that it would have been necessary to imitate the Tsar, who, to combat Polish patriotism, had given the peasants the lands of the nobles. Still, Charette is not the worst. He eats soup with his men and speaks patois with them. On the eve of battles, he dances with his men instead of singing hymns. He is surrounded by Amazons who fight alongside him, before joining him to “chat on his sofa”.

Charette is a Vendée chef whose actions fall under the chouannerie. His army is an occasional gathering of

bands: one day eight thousand men, the next day, eight hundred. At most, he will have under his command a troop of fifteen thousand men. There are those who walk on brandy and those

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who walk on holy water. Charette multiplies her tricks, dressing her scouts in tricolor cockades; takes paths unknown to republicans, the rains erasing his tracks, always walking at night. As long as Charette uses the element of surprise, he wins; as soon as he accepts head-on combat, in Nantes or Cholet, he loses. Napoleon wrote that if Charette had dared to march on Paris, after his first successes, the Blues would have fled, and the white flag would have flown on the towers of Notre-Dame. Napoleon was wrong: the Vendée troops were only effective within their local framework; they could not be maneuvered like an army. Charette knows it. He refused to leave the lowlands which surround his stronghold of Legé to better hold “his kingdom”, this quadrilateral of the “military Vendée”.

It’s the beginning of the end for Vendée. Everything was at stake from the failed conquest of Nantes, on June 29, 1793. Nantes taken, all of Brittany rose up in rebellion. But Nantes resists, shouting “Long live the Republic!” ". An end punctuated by the defeat of Cholet, on October 17, 1793, and the massacre of Savenay, on December 23 and 24. Each time, Charette is

accused by the other white generals of not playing the game, of not showing solidarit Victory has ten fathers, defeat is an orphan. Charette was a hero, he is an outcast. The Vendée war is over, the hunt for Vendée begins. The civil war is gradually becoming a “law and order 1

operation”. The resistance fighter becomes a fugitive. The dandy Charette wears dirty shirts where lice are embedded. How far away it seems, the time of his black felt hats, decorated with white feathers, of his purple clothes, embroidered with silk and silver! Only five wives and two servants remain with the knight. An amazon has

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embroidered on his scarf: “Fight: often. Beaten: Sometimes. Shot down: never. »

It is the time of chimeras: first, the intervention of the English fleet, which he watches with avidity like the Huguenots, not long ago, hunted down by Richelieu; then, he was promised the arrival of the pretender to the throne, but the Count of Artois, future Charles X, refused to lead the troops. Louis XVIII sent him the grand red cordon of the order of Saint-Louis and named him lieutenant general commander-in-chief of the Catholic and royal army. Like a decoration as the last nail on his coffin. Charette dreamed of a

monarchical restoration which will never take place.

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“ GENOCIDE BY SMALL BITS THE PAPER » The war is over. The horror can begin. The Vendée is unique in that everything is reversed: the soldiers of the Republic, Kléber, Hoche, make peace, while the executioners of the Republic, Carrier, Turreau, exterminate. War gives way to genocide. The Vendée is the place of all anachronisms, where things do not wait for words to become reality. This is the “genocide by small pieces of paper”, which Reynald Secher will talk about. A “populicide” had accused, with rare lucidity, Gracchus Babeuf, as early as 1795. François Furet will speak of “rhetoric of extermination”. A rhetoric which has never been more clearly expressed than by Barère in his famous decree of August 1793 and his report 1

is

of October 1793. We are then after the battle of Nantes of

June 29, 1793; the Whites have lost a war that the Blues have not yet won. Against Charette, we invoke the manes of Louvois. To defeat the “war of the bushes” of Charette, we resurrected the scorched earth policy that the minister of Louis XIV had led in the Palatinate. Barère incites the revolutionary troops to destroy and burn everything: crops, animals, homes. And “brigands”. We must “exterminate this rebellious race”. The Vendée is an enigma for Barère. He does not understand how or why “the inexplicable Vendée still exists”. The Vendéens are beings anachronistic people who missed the train of History. These “fanatics” prefer God to reason. The past to the future. The Vendéens do not deserve to live. They are “subhumans”. The Jacobins wanted to give birth to a “man

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new” free from “aristocracy” and “superstition”. This “new people”, “regenerated” by the Enlightenment, will replace the “degraded human species” with the old faith and monarchy.

Turreau is not a conscienceless murderer; he has a political project: to exterminate the Vendée of its population to repopulate it with good sans-culottes. While Kléber campaigned for a reconciliatory amnesty, Turreau, to be zealous, proposed to the Committee of Public Safety to “depopulate” the rebel region. Turreau wins his case. The “rabbit hunt”, as the revolutionaries say, began in January 1794. Nothing and no one would be spared, men, women, children, pregnant women, all perished by the hands of the “infernal columns”. The victims are estimated at two hundred thousand people.

At the beginning of 1794, General Westermann wrote to the Committee of Public Safety: “There is no longer Vendée. I crushed the children under the feet of the horses and massacred the women who, at least those, will not produce brigands. I don't have a prisoner to blame. I exterminated everything, we take no prisoners. They should be given the bread of freedom and pity is not revolutionary. » In an exceptional situation, exceptional vocabulary: during this “great burning”, “we purge the cantons”, we slaughter: “We make people go behind the hedge”; and every evening we report on “the number of heads usually broken”. The guillotine is too slow; Carrier substitutes mass drownings in the Loire. It is the time of the “great patriotic distraction”; “patriotic baptism”; THE

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“Republican marriage in the national bathtub”. Carrier assumes everything: “We will make France a cemetery rather than not regenerating it in our own way. » The “Venge department” will live up to its name. Carrier will be guillotined even though he claimed to have followed Robespierre's instructions; but Turreau will be acquitted. He “followed orders”.

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EVERYTHING MUST DISAPPEAR Vendée is a laboratory. Everything is done in a small way that will be done again in a big way. Each event, each character, each anecdote, each massacre, reminds us of a character, an event, an anecdote, a massacre, which has occurred since then. The ransacking of churches and the public rapes evoke the Spain of the Republic and the civil war during the 1930s, or Chinese Tibet since the 1960s. We think we are reading Kaputt de Malaparte, and his German generals who massacred in a great burst of cynical laughter at all the Slavic “subhumans” they encountered during their Russian campaign. We recognize here and there the exterminating fury of the Nazis, the “populicide” of the Jews, Gracchus Babeuf would have said, before it was called “holocaust”, “genocide”, then “Shoah”; but also that of the Armenians by the Turks or of the Cambodians by the Pol Pot regime.

We inaugurate methods that the Yankee soldiers will use to slaughter the Indians throughout the country. The “scorched earth policy” will be implemented by General Bugeaud in the conquest of Algeria, then by American GIs in Vietnam, then in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Everything is brigand,” said the eradicators of Vendée. Everything is Indian. All is

" savage ". Everything is counter-revolutionary. Everything is kulak. Everything is an enemy of the Revolution. Everything is Jewish.

Everything is bourgeois. Everything is communist. Everything is terrorist.

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Everything must disappear to make way for the new man. To civilization. To progress. Solzhenitsyn made no mistake during his trip to Vendée in September 1993 for the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Vendée first announces resistance to this progressive totalitarianism, this new secular religion, which will give its full terrorist measure with communism. But not only. The former Soviet dissident has become, since his American exile, the most formidable critic of Western nihilistic madness. He understood that capitalism and communism were two sides of the same materialist project which ignores identities and roots, beliefs and faiths. He grasped the profound perversity of our modernity that our philosopher Simone Weil had already analyzed a few decades earlier, in her famous work Rooting : “The destroyed past never comes back. The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest crime. »

The French revolutionaries do not tolerate resistance because we must not resist progress. The emergence of an individual “liberated” from his religious and clan chains, the chains of this traditional so-called “holistic” society, does not

wait. Reason must crush the alienation of superstition which, as Barère said, “speaks Low Breton”. The French revolutionary project is a project of universalization of the world, in a dialectical logic, through reason. The “spirit of the world” will be expressed through the Civil Code and rationalization through law. Napoleon will no more understand the revolt of the Spanish guerrillas, to whom he "brought the Civil Code", than the members of the Committee of Public Safety had understood the "inexplicable Vendée". However, Napoleon had admired and glorified the heroism of the valiant Vendéens; but t

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will not be of use to him when he finds himself confronted with his “Spanish Vendée”.

This eradicating project in the name of reason and progress will gain momentum as new means of communication and exchange are developed by ever more efficient technologies: train, telephone, plane, container ships, Internet. What we call “globalization” is nothing other than a unification and standardization by law and the market of all the peoples of the world.

Recalcitrant peoples are threatened, ostracized or massacred. According to all the means already used by the Convention against the Vendée. The planet's demographic explosion also gives an unprecedented scale to this overwhelm by numbers. Migratory flows of populations from the south of the planet are flooding resistant peoples, who want to preserve their customs and morals, safeguard their intangible heritage. As Carrier wanted to replace the “Vendean fanatics” with brave sans-culottes, old humanity with a new humanity, globalizing universalism replaces the restive European populations with a new people of “diversity” who will punish them for their guilty attachments. past. This new humanity will serve as an ideal workforce, cheaper and more malleable than the old ones, equipped with know-how and political awareness that are now superfluous. As in Vendée, the towns, which have become metropolises, are the agents of this forced standardization, while the countryside, transformed into “peri-urban”, tries to resist in a losing battle. “He who is uprooted uproots. He who is rooted does not uproot,” warned Simone Weil.

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Marx explained to us that the French revolutionaries destroyed the old feudalities to impose the rule of the commodity on a unified national market. We must extend this reasoning to the planet. No more feudalism, no more traditions, no more borders, no more small homelands, for the unification of a large world market.

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FRANCE IS NEWS VENDEE

France has in turn become a target of the great world rendering. France is a new Vendée, like all the countries of Europe. The “big nation” has become a “small homeland”. His state is the last feudal state to be crushed. The “universal vocation of France” has long served French patriotism; today she turned against him. Like Charette, two centuries ago, those who rise to lead the resistance know their battle is lost in advance. We must read in Quatrevingt-Treize, by Victor Hugo, undoubtedly the most exhilarating story on this war in Vendée, which nevertheless aroused many, the final tirade that the Marquis de Lantenac, leader of the Whites, addresses to his republican jailer , to understand Charette on the day of her execution: “So be it, gentlemen, be the masters, reign, take your ease, give yourself some, don’t be embarrassed. All this will not prevent religion from being religion, from royalty filling fifteen hundred years of our history, from the old French lordship, even if decapitated, being higher than you... Come on! Come on ! Do ! Be the new men. Become s

We are all Vendée Catholics.

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1. According to the expression of General Louis Lazare Hoche.

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Captain Coignet

Elevator to the Gallows The social elevator is broken. Ritual formula of our time. An incantation. An obsession. A curse. What share of workers among the students of the grandes écoles? How many children of immigration among company executives? How many women among the leaders of large groups? Statistics are the auspices of modern times; we contemplate our destiny there as our distant ancestors sought it in the flight of birds. Our contemporary societies are based on the myth of social mobility, of equal opportunity given to everyone according to their talents and merits; and suffer when they realize that this promise is not kept. Society owes a debt to every individual: to assert oneself, to emancipate oneself, to realize oneself, to go as high as possible, even – and even more so – if it comes from lower down. The right has become a duty. The possibility, injunction. Promotion, obligation.

Under the Ancien Régime, in a social order based on heredity and tradition, an obscure birth closed access to top positions. In the great social staircase, there were several floors; everyone could climb all the steps of their own, but not go beyond; Arriving on the landing, we encountered closed doors. The upper floor was reserved for its inhabitants and their descendants. Each staircase had its

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suit ; to wear a more becoming one, one was ennobled. You bought a load, which cost you a lot and brought you very little; but your children then had a chance to change stairs. It was still necessary to acquire the manners and tone of Versailles. This social fixity did not only have disadvantages. Men used to stay in their condition. We did not look up with regret and envy. We felt good in his world. The souls were less troubled and less tense. The Frenchman followed his amiable and sociable instincts, which so charmed foreign visitors. Everyone noted the national habit of singing happy, good-natured songs at the end of meals.

“From 1789, France resembled an anthill of molting insects,” notes Taine. All French people are suddenly eligible for all jobs. Achieving becomes the only obsession. But until 1799, the rivalry of ambitions was reduced to a formless struggle of all against all, in fury and blood. The principle of equality remained for ten years in the sky of incantatory promises and constitutional declarations. Napoleon brings him down to earth.

“From now on, the career is open to talent,” he proclaims. He acts in his interest; he does not want to deprive himself of any talent, of any strength. His highest ambition allows him to understand that of others. Since all men are now equal, life has become a great competition. Bonaparte is the ideal arbiter: one succeeds with him neither through backroom intrigue, as under the Ancien Régime, nor through platform lyricism, as under the Revolution. He evaluates everyone based on their work, their efficiency, their “net return”. Soldiers risk their lives

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fire ; civilians risk overwork. He himself never measures his pain or his genius. He refuses nothing to those he has chosen: money, authority, influence, consideration, social pre-eminence. His dispassionate judgment allows him to appreciate what everyone desires. We know his words as a great cynic: “It is with rattles that we lead men.” »

We have less remembered the complement of this formula: “The French have only one feeling: honor. » One of the greatest sociologists of labor relations, Philippe d'Iribarne, would prove him right two centuries later. He will explain that unlike the Anglo-Saxons, who swear only by the contract, or the Germans, who see their company as a group to which everything must be sacrificed, French workers evaluate their professional activity, the interest of their work and relationships with their superiors in the light of a

1

feeling that takes precedence over all others: honor

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HONOR IS NO LONGER HONOR But if the word has remained, the thing has changed. Honor is no longer honor; he was the diamond point of a society organized around him: this famous “holistic society”, analyzed since then by Louis Dumont, where everyone was in their place and in their rank, where everyone, from the lord to the king - himself, did his duty according to his status,

where freedom meant not doing what one wants but what one must. This society was destroyed by the Revolution. In the name of freedom and equality, there is no more rank, no more status. And therefore more honor. Only honors remain . During the debates of the Constituent Assembly, certain aristocratic deputies tried to defend their status. “The privilege (of the nobility) is that of producing great men and doing great deeds It is for this reason that she is best able to “lead the people”,” proclaimed the aristocratic deputy Jacques de Cazalès. This last square of the ancient world was booed, insulted, swept away; when he was not condemned to exile or the guillotine. Our society is now an assembly of equal and rival atoms.

Napoleon cannot resurrect this world before the great revolutionary disintegration; he can only put his ancestral virtues at the service of the general interest. Honor is like noble titles; it allows it to consolidate its power and to constantly rekindle the flame of energy of the new masters of Europe. The Emperor knows the limits of his reinvention; He does not have a choice. He knows that his coronation at Notre-Dame does not have the mystical charm of

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that of Reims. He fights as best he can the dissipation of illusions by cursing all those, philosophers, revolutionaries, who have contributed to opening the eyes of the people. He re-establishes thrones knowing that they are “only four pieces of wood”, just as he re-establishes Catholic worship without having faith. He knows less than anyone that the wood he uses is only a veneer; the roots of the trees were torn up and the branches were cut off. The ambiguity of this restoration condemned to incompleteness will end up undermining the foundations of its power. When the time of lost battles comes, the elites he will have made and modeled on their glorious predecessors will forget honor for interest, sacrifice for the one who can, the sense of duty for business sense. . Then, we will realize that we will have pretended for fifteen years, that we will have acted “as if”. That everything was theater, even if the stage, the play and the characters looked great.

It must be said that the artist knows how to do it. He has a way, an incomparable art. The staging is meticulous, the sets majestic, the costumes sumptuous. The ceremonies are always grandiose, moving, intoxicating. Until the end of their lives, all those who attend it, even the most levelheaded and measured men, speak of it only with a tremor in their voice. Let's take August 15, 1804, the anniversary of the birth of the Emperor. At the Boulogne camp, facing the French fleet which was preparing the conquest of England, to the beating of eighteen hundred drums, Napoleon received the oath from the legionnaires and distributed their crosses to them. All the merits and talents of France are proclaimed that day.

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Soldier Jean-Roch Coignet can't believe his eyes or his ears. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honor on 25 Prairial Year XII, for his exploits against the Austrians, charging forward with bayonet, killing five artillerymen on their piece, and taking a cannon all by himself. In this prestigious promotion, Captain Coignet finds himself in the middle of a crowd of scholars, cardinals, marshals. He was a stable boy on a farm six years earlier; he does not know how to read or write and will learn, he will say, mockingly, between Friedland and Wagram; However, his “promotion classmates” include Monge, Laplace, Berthollet, Fontanes, but also Kellermann, Jourdan, Lefebvre, Masséna, Augereau, Ney, Lannes, Soult, Davout. An incredible destiny awaits him. This Legion of Honor will be his talisman. The Emperor was not mistaken. Captain Coignet will be in all the battles of the Empire, from Marengo to Waterloo, without ever being injured. He will enter Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Moscow. He died at the age of 89, in 1865, in his house in Auxerre. Under the Second Empire! At the end of the ceremony, he would recount many years later, “the beautiful ladies who could approach me to touch my cross, asked my permission to kiss me”.

Coignet was one of the first named in the first promotion. Napoleon had seen to that. As he purposely made Marshal Lefebvre the first of his dukes; “this marshal had been a simple soldier and everyone in Paris had known him as a sergeant in the French Guards”. Lefebvre was the son of a miller; Masséna, the son of a wine merchant; Murat, the son of an innkeeper; Ney, the son of a cooper; Lannes, the son of a stable boy; Augereau, the son of a mason and a fruit grower.

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PERMANENT EMULATION The Emperor, like God, elevates the lowly and humbles the great; but he does not ostracize them. Under the Republic, an illustrious birth, a great name were the object of opprobrium; voluntary obscurity was required and did not always avoid exile, or even the guillotine. The Revolution had expelled all those who, under the Ancien Régime, filled the administrations, held offices, enjoyed fortunes. Under the Empire, both the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the robe returned to service. Napoleon recovers the survivors of the political struggles of the Revolution; it does not matter to him whether one was a Jacobin or a royalist; former members of the Convention are judges, prefects, deputies, heads of office, etc.

Napoleon has neither hesitation nor qualms; he is neither generous nor altruistic, only utilitarian: “No one has an interest in overthrowing a government where everything of merit is placed. » The Emperor sumptuously endows his marshals, as did the kings of France who had given Chantilly to the Grand Condé and Chambord to the Marshal of Saxe, which Berthier would inherit. He showers them with gifts: a million books to General Lassalle; seven hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds in income for Davout, the same for Ney. The most greedy amass fortunes: Masséna, forty million pounds, Talleyrand sixty. All barriers are overturned, ordinary limits are exceeded. They then say in the army: “He became king in Naples, in Holland, in Spain, in Sweden”; as was once said of the same man: “He became a sergeant in such and such a company. » From soldier to marshal, we dream

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in large. Soult tried to get himself elected king of Portugal, and Bernadotte succeeded in becoming king of Sweden. “The children of every state thinks of becoming soldiers to have the cross, and the cross makes one knight, notes Roederer. The desire to distinguish oneself, to come before another, is a national sentiment. »

Emulation generates extraordinary results, which leave our enemies speechless: “French soldiers,” wrote a Prussian officer after Jena, “are small, puny; just one of our Germans would beat four. But in the fire they become supernatural beings: they are carried away by an expressible ardor, of which we see no trace in our soldiers…” Napoleon knows this better than anyone: “See Masséna,” he said a few days before Wagram; he has acquired enough glory and honors; he is not happy, he wants to be a prince, like Murat or Bernadotte; he will be killed tomorrow for being a prince. » This thirst to achieve, to succeed, to be rewarded, this permanent emulation does not only affect the military, but also civilians. Napoleon took care with his Legion of Honor not to neglect them. He visits factories and laboratories, encourages scientists and industrialists. Stendhal notes this with his customary ironic sagacity: “At that time, a boy pharmacist, among his drugs and jars, in a back room, said to himself, while folding and filtering, that if he made some great discovery, he would be made Count with an income of fifty thousand livres. »

Napoleon has more places and rights to award than previous kings. Instead of eighty-six departments with twenty-six million inhabitants, France ended up comprising one hundred and thirty and forty-two respectively.

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million. French administrative executives are found everywhere in Europe, from north to south, from Hamburg to Rome, without forgetting subject princes and vassal kings. The natives are in their eyes half-savages; they feel themselves members of a superior humanity like the Spaniards of Charles V or the Romans of Augustus in the past. Never has the Frenchman been looked at with such admiration throughout Europe; he has never enjoyed such self-esteem.

If all the members of the “great nation” are on the roof of Europe, the soldiers are on the roof of the great nation. War creates the hero and the nobility of the Empire is not artificial, justified by the war itself. The nobles of the Empire founded their own dynasties. The Duke of Moskowa or Auerstaedt is well worth in the imagination of contemporaries the Duke of Montmorency or La Rochefoucauld. Their titles are also hereditary. It is a new chivalry, which seems to reconnect with the age-old values of Christianity medieval, the exaltation of heroism, the sublimation of honor, based on respect for the faith sworn to the sovereign, the sense of sacrifice, the acceptance of death. The hero of Antiquity is a model for all. Paul-Louis Courier, horse artillery officer, renounced the spurs and the saddle, in homage to the ancient Greeks who did not use them. Without a horse, Murat is not Murat. After his legendary cavalry charge at Eylau, the Cossacks looked at him like a demigod, straight out of Homer's stories.

Marx mocked the French of this period who dressed themselves in Roman togas and noble heroic sentiments to better promote the prosaic advent of the

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bourgeoisie. He was wrong. Napoleon attempted to reconcile the feudal virtues of honor and sacrifice with efficiency scientific and materialist of modernity. He wanted to be both a new Alexander and a member of the Academy of Sciences. The Germany of Bismarck, then the Japan of the Meiji era, attempted and succeeded – for a time – in this marriage of the old and the new, of the Junker and the industrialist à la Krupp, of the samurai and the businessman. But neither Germany nor Japan had lived through 1789; suffered the great social disintegration in the name of freedom and

equality; destroys the values of authority and honor under the ax of the guillotin

Reserves of heroism are not inexhaustible. They wear out, deteriorate, become perverted. In 1792, we committed ourselves to saving the homeland; the French soldier sees himself as the liberator of humanity, a sort of soldierphilosopher. But little by little, he gives way to the hero. In 1799, our young Coignet signed up to distinguish himself. He said to his masters: “I promise you that I will return with a rifle of honor, or that I will be killed. » He is not yet calculating. During the first Italian campaigns, Stendhal testifies, “no one in the army had any ambition; I have seen officers refuse advancement, so as not to leave their regiment or their mistress.” Already, however, the looting has begun; war depraves the victor; the thug gradually supplants the hero. At Saint Helena, Napoleon said of Murat: “How many mistakes did he make to have his headquarters in a castle where there were women. He needed it every day. » Generalized rivalry breeds the worst and the best, the most sublime devotions and the most perfidious betrayals: “At Talavera,” writes Stendhal, “two officers were together at their battery; a ball arrives which knocks down the captain. Good,

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said the lieutenant, here is François killed, it is I who will be captain. Not yet, said François, who was only dazed and got up. – These two men were neither enemies nor evil; only the lieutenant wanted to move up in rank. Such was the furious selfishness which was then called the love of glory and which, under this name, the Emperor had communicated to the French. »

Soldiers who are happy for too long develop bad habits; everything – tributes, wealth, women – is due to them. They became proud, touchy, arrogant, irritable. They are upset not to be welcomed as heroes when they return from the campaign. They challenge the bourgeois to a duel over a word. The future Marshal Bugeaud wrote to his family: “In town, the soldier is little esteemed. None of us are received, not even the senior officers. » Napoleon inquired about it and was worried. As usual, his methodical and practical mind takes care of everything, without fear of indelicacy or ridicule. He transformed the prefects into “matchmakers” by demanding that they draw up lists of young girls from the nobility of their department likely to make good wives for his officers, with a rating on their character, a quantified evaluation of their dowry, and even a description. summary of their physical charms.

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TIRED OF GLORY France is tired of victories, tired of heroism, tired of grandeur. Tired of glory. It is only in the following generations, those of the children of the century confessed by Musset, that we will find the inconsolable admiration for his heroes. The report from the prefect of Périgueux indicates that young people of good families hasten to civilly marry their parents' old servants, promising to pay them comfortable income. So they are exempt. Rebels and deserters are hidden in castles. There weariness even affects the ranks of the army. He is too “ambitious”, they say of Napoleon. For soldiers and officers, “Little Tondu” is the greatest captain of all time; but for the marshals, it is only one of them that luck has served. They always want more; impudently imagine themselves in his place; are ready to do any maneuver, any betrayal, to save what they believe is owed only to their own merits.

The mechanism which, for fifteen years, had worked so well, fell apart of its own accord. The need to achieve, unbridled emulation, unscrupulous ambition, naked and raw selfishness suddenly appeared beneath the great principles and the great promises. After the fall of the Emperor, under his successors, the same mechanism will operate to break after a more or less long period. But it is only a pale imitation. Balzac will explain in one of his novels: “Napoleon alone was able to employ young people of his choice, without being stopped by any consideration. Also, since the

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fall of this great will, had energy deserted power. »

Then, Karl Marx's analysis finally became relevant: under our last kings, the nobility of the Empire remains in charge, with a few exceptions (Ney and Murat executed; and Davout, the only marshal of Napoleon to refuse to swear an oath to Louis XVIII); but the counts are bankers, the barons, industrialists. Napoleon never neglected the merits of civilians, but his successors only had that to think about. This is what Chateaubriand understood when he pushed the king to intervene militarily in Spain in the name of the Holy Alliance. After having disdained it, because it was stuffed with it, the “great nation” now thirsts for military glory; it's too late. The whirlwind of careers and successes then makes this old Catholic, peasant and feudal society dizzy. Money trumps fame. The novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Zola are full of this vanity fair, of these triumphant careerists and the victims of their ambition.

French society is discovering the perverse effects of its egalitarian obsession. The winner of the meritocratic competition is legitimately convinced that he owes his success to his qualities alone: his intelligence, his energy, his endurance, his character. He has nothing but contempt for those who have not reached his social level. The ancient nobility knew that they owed their status more to their parents and their birth than to their own virtues. This fragility made her less presumptuous and more attentive to the fate of the most modest. This is one of the great French paradoxes: the Revolution was intended to overthrow the aristocracy more than the king; she brought down the king and reestablished a

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even more arrogant than the previous one; even more contemptuous, even more imbued with her feeling of superiority. Those who are above believe themselves to be of another essence. The “cascade of contempt” of the Ancien Régime has changed its meaning and motives, but has by no means disappeared.

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THE DISINTEGRATION OF FRANCE BEFORE

We'll never go back. Under the Third Republic, the army headquarters was intended to be the closed conservatory of aristocratic and Catholic rites. The Dreyfus affair demonstrates the rejection by this caste of officers of one of their peers of the Jewish faith, only because his coreligionists embody in their eyes the adulterated world that they abhor, even though Captain Dreyfus and his family were imbued with the values of ancient France. The advent of the Vichy regime, after the debacle of June 1940, also marked the failure of the final attempt to re-establish a hierarchical and landed society, corporatist and Catholic. It is the Church itself which condemns anti-Semitic persecution, publicly by Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon, Primate of Gaul, or by Cardinal Saliège of Toulouse, and, behind the scenes, by putting pressure on Marshal Pétain so that he renounces the government's plans to denaturalize recently naturalized French Jews. In the feud of Vichy, the ancient virtues, which the National Revolution claimed, faded away quite quickly in the face of careerism, technocratic modernity and greed, which the theoreticians of the French State nevertheless criticized the Revolution for having infected. the national body.

The two world wars will accelerate the disintegration of the former France. The rapid fortunes of intermediaries, the cuckolded heroes of the trenches, social promiscuity, the inflation of the interwar period, the ruin of rentiers, the

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great revolutionary strikes of 1936, the decay of the Republic: France becomes a cemetery of elites who succeed one another at breakneck speed. We go up as quickly as we go down; former collaborators who are arrogant and often greedy, even cruel, become fugitive and sometimes cowardly “collaborators”; the “terrorists” hunted by the Militia become “resistance fighters” and heroes; the resistance fighters of the 25th hour are legion, but the new aristocracy of the companions of the Liberation seeks in turn to reconnect with chivalric values. The motto of Free France is Honor and Country. Malraux evokes the crusades and the soldiers of Year II to celebrate Jean Moulin's entry into the Pantheon; and Romain Gary specifies: “I am not French, I am free French. » They are not dukes and counts, but sometimes marry duchesses and countesses; they become deputies, senators, ministers, captains of industry. As under the Empire, war and heroism forge dazzling careers.

This will be the last time. Like the marshals of the Empire, our great resistance fighters cannot resist the lure of honors and especially money. The “glorious thirty” proved to be a formidable machine for enrichment and achievement. From the 1960s, we believe we have returned to the great eras of social upheaval, the July Monarchy or the Second Empire. The rise in the general educational level and the massification of teaching, the creation of new professions, such as that of manager in large companies, are disrupting traditional hierarchies. General de Gaulle, even less than Napoleon, failed to mix the unbridled materialism of society with these values of honor and of patriotism that they both defended.

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Napoleon had been betrayed by tired heroes who wanted to enjoy the accumulated wealth: “I only find nobility in the rabble that I have neglected and rabble only in the nobility that I have made,” he said in 1814. When de Gaulle left power after the lost referendum in 1969, his “nobility of Empire” did not hide its contempt for the gentrified rank and file who dismissed their great man. De Gaulle himself does not hesitate, in front of Malraux, to use the comparison with the abandoned Emperor: “Like him, I was betrayed by the jean-foutre that I had made... and we had the same successor : Louis XVIII. »

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SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION The General was right. His reign will give birth to new elites who will be the polar opposites of those who followed him: children of peace and not of war; children of the world and not of the homeland; children of pleasure and not of duty; children of geography and not history. More keen on economics than strategy. But we cannot escape the French destiny: these new elites feel obliged to go through history and politics to earn their stripes. De Gaulle playing Richelieu and Louis ridiculous, its naiveties and its presumptions, described by Flaubert in Sentimental Education. The romantic passion for Poland or Italy has only been replaced by that for South America, Africa and Asia.

If ingratitude is the characteristic of great people, this generation is immense. To strengthen its authority over the country, it lends itself to all kinds of denials. To better eliminate and replace its adversary, the Gaullist elite resulting from the struggles of the Resistance, it will treat it as “fascist” and “Petainist”. Product of the greatest educational effort made by the nation, it hastens, once in control, to disintegrate the educational system, in the name of egalitarian sociological theories, to lower the academic level to transform diplomas into university assignments. The reality of these new elites is the opposite of their speech: they will, little by little, voluntarily close the

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carries from the upper echelons to the working classes, whose children could threaten their own. The hegemony of the offspring of teachers is increasingly imposed in the great schools of the Republic; during the 2010s, only 9% of working class children were in the four major schools, Polytechnique, ENA, ENS, HEC, compared to 30% who were during the 1950s.

In order to allow children of immigrants who have come to France since the 1970s to climb the ladder of the social hierarchy more quickly, we are establishing unequal mechanisms, inspired by American methods of affirmative action for the benefit of black populations. They benefit from privileges depending on the origin of their parents or their place of residence. Aristocratic privileges due to birth are reinstated within the Republic. Our leaders pretend to ignore that this system they have put in place penalizes the children of the French working classes, whether of old or recent origins, who see themselves degraded in their own country. Captain Coignet would be confined today in a peripheral France, far from the metropolises, where all wealth is created and concentrated, without any chance of escaping his inferior condition. He is true that these elites themselves take advantage of their financial, cultural and media firepower, their networks and their influence, to push their own descendants forward. We see countless children of actors, singers, television hosts, writers, intellectuals, politicians, mediacrats propelled to the front of the stage, whatever their real talents and merits, resume the role of dad or mom. The Republic of Letters has become a Monarchy of Letters.

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They pass on positions and honors as if the king had sold them to them. The globalized economic system accentuates this social reproduction; the return of Western societies to a degree of inequality close to that before the war of 1914 is gradually creating a society of heirs.

A society that the French Revolution had abolished.

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1. Philippe d'Iribarne, The Logic of Honor, Le Seuil, 1989.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

The man to kill We no longer understand Napoleon. We can no longer understand it. We understand Bonaparte on the other hand. We understand it better and better: the ambitious, the selfmade man, the upstart, has become our daily lot. We compare any of our heads of state to Bonaparte, as long as they are voluntary or imperious. The Bonapartes are legion, in all countries, all areas. We are all Bonapartes at least in our dreams.

Napoleon is not Bonaparte. “Napoleon is a synthesis of the superhuman and the inhuman,” said Nietzsche. “He is out of line, out of frame, neither a Frenchman, nor a man from the 18th century,” Taine added. Bonaparte is a man of the Enlightenment; Napoleon is the romantic figure par excellence. Bonaparte is a great reader of Rousseau; Napoleon was “disgusted with Rousseau since [he] saw the Orient; the wild man is a dog.” Bonaparte is a young man full of passions; Napoleon is a man governed by his reason. Bonaparte is obsessed by his destiny, Napoleon by History. Bonaparte is his mother's son; Napoleon is the heir of Charlemagne. Bonaparte is Corsican, Napoleon, Roman. Bonaparte has a troublesome and arrogant family; Napoleon “has no family if they are not French”. Bonaparte is an Italian condottiere of the 15th century, a contemporary of Dante, Michelangelo, and Caesar Borgia. Napoleon is the Diocletian of Ajaccio, the Constantine of the Concordat, the Justinian of the Code

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civil. “Napoleon belongs to ancient humanity,” Nietzsche said. Bonaparte has the fury of the ambitious; Napoleon, the ridicule of the upstart. It is Bonaparte in him who exclaims: “What a novel my life is!” » ; it was Napoleon who never ceased to regret: “Ah, if I were my grandson! »

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THE SAVIOR OF THE REVOLUTION

The left does not forgive him for having liquidated the Revolution. Yet he saved her. This left should reread Ernest Renan: “If the royalist reaction had prevailed in 1796 and 1797, the Restoration would then have taken place with much more frankness, and the Republic would not have been in the History of France what it is in the History of England, an incident of no consequence. Napoleon saved the Revolution, gave it a form, an organization, and incredible military prestige. » The right does not forgive him "for having made France smaller than he had taken it", according to the famous words of Bainville, taken up by de Gaulle, forgetting that it was he who saved the Directory of a military discomfiture which would have led to the division of France between the victors. It is precisely to the recognition of the French that Napoleon owed his crown, as Stendhal analyzed: “General Bonaparte could say to each Frenchman: “Through me you are still French; by me, you are not subject to a Prussian judge, or to a Piedmontese governor; through me you are not the slave of some angry master who is afra So let me be your Emperor.” »

Our time thinks like Chateaubriand, long misunderstood when he admitted: “My admiration for Bonaparte has always been great, even though I attacked Napoleon with more vivacity. » We reproach him for having loved war too much, when all he did was defend himself against four successive coalitions; that he put an end to the war that the Revolution had declared on the whole of Europe by a series of

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peace treaties, upon his arrival in power, with England, Austria, Naples, Turkey. We are pacifists who swear by just wars, while Napoleon considers that “unavoidable wars are always just.”

We denounce its limitless imperialism while most of French expansion took place under the Directory. The English will pursue him with their vengeance for having made the port of Antwerp a “gun to the head of England”, while Belgium had become a French province by the will of the same Directory. Paul Kennedy taught us in The Birth and Decline of Great Powers that empires end up dying of their economies and their finances, when these are drained beyond support by military spending. We forget that Napoleon had his military expeditions financed by the vanquished, and refused debt on principle. It is for this reason that the City's financiers decided on its loss.

We speak of “Napoleon’s wars” when we should say the “wars of the Revolution”; and even, following the historian Pierre Gaxotte, of a “second Hundred Years' War” between France and England, from the League of Augsburg (1688-1697), to Waterloo (1815) , through the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713), the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1776-1783) and the French Revolutionary Wars since 1793. Until 'to the final French surrender. Napoleon implemented the projects of the Committee of Public Safety, which itself, after having guillotined the king, had continued the work of its Capetian ancestors. Napoleon completed the French Europe that Louis XIV had dreamed of.

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Napoleon will complete a thousand years of French history. It is the apotheotic end of the French dream; in both senses of the term: completion and definitive failure.

The Emperor is ahead of France, of Europe, of the world. He instinctively understood that it was changing scale. He does not know it, but his arrival in power, in 1800, coincides with the inflection of the demographic curves of humanity, which took millions of years to reach its first billion inhabitants and begins its exponential growth which will lead it to seven billion in two centuries. With its twenty-five million inhabitants, France was the “China of Europe” in the 18th century. A privileged position on the continent. But its birth rate collapsed between 1793 and 1799, and not because of the wars of the Empire, as the demographer Jacques Dupâquier showed in his book Revolution and Population. France will begin its demographic winter which will make it by the end of the 19th century a “country of old people” frightened and dominated by the juvenile powers of Germany, England, Russia and the United States.

The French Empire was the only solution to avoid this deadly downgrading. Napoleon draws on Charlemagne's Western empire which will allow him to embrace the future from a position of strength. This superb isolation of a prophet did not escape Paul Valéry a century later: “Napoleon seems to be the only one who had foreseen what was to happen and what could be undertaken. He thought on the scale of the current world, was not understood, and said so. But he came too early; the times were not ripe; his means

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were far from ours. After him, we started again to consider the hectares of the neighbor and to reason about the moment..." Yet another

century, and only a high dignitary of the American Empire will be in able to grasp the scale of the issue: “During the episode Napoleonic, it [France] extends its hegemony to almost the entire continent. If this company had been crowned with success, France would have become a real power overall. However, its defeat against a European coalition restores the continental balance of forces

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THE PAST BLINDS US To understand Napoleon, one must, as Léon Bloy was still capable of doing in 1912, “feel oneself a contemporary of the men of 1814; this story is so vivid to me that I really suffer from the abandonment of the plan to go to England as I previously suffered from the evacuation of Egypt; Although I know about this cruel series of disasters, it is impossible for me not to hope, at every moment, that they will not happen.” The past blinds us. The unchallenged domination of the English navy over the seas and the industrial power of England in the 19th century give us the illusion that it was the same in 1800. This is not the case.

The fight is then undecided, nothing is yet written. The leaders of London are aware that between France and them “it is a fight between two giants”. England defends freedom of trade and its domination of world trade. She wants to destroy the French and Dutch Empires in the West Indies or the Indian Ocean. Napoleon intends to make up for France's economic delay through politics and the conquest of territories. It is the fight of the Sea against the Earth. Napoleon said to Caulaincourt: “I am abusing power. But it is in the interest of the continent. While England really abuses its strength, its haughty power in the midst of storms and in its sole interest. The merchants of London are ready to sacrifice Europe to their speculations! But England's mask will fall. If I triumph over England, Europe will bless me! »

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The idea of annihilating England was a common idea in France at the end of the Ancien Régime. Napoleon said that “nature had made England one of our islands”. Robespierre “hated the English people”. Napoleon expresses the public spirit well by saying: “There is not a Frenchman who would not prefer death to suffering the conditions which would make us slaves of England and remove France from the number of powers. » The French are thirsty to avenge six centuries of insults since the Hundred Years' War. After making the Revolution, daring to guillotine their king, they have the feeling that they are the only reasonable beings in Europe.

Since then, we have moved so far from this fierce nationalism that we no longer understand it, or are ashamed of it. Cioran seems to read: “As long as a nation is aware of its superiority, it is cruel and respected; as soon as she no longer has it, she becomes humanized and no longer counts. » In 1800, the French were won over by the spirit of conquest. Military conquest accompanied by a conquest through ideas, language, law, the very administrative principles with which our Italian or Rhineland neighbors are eager to imbibe. A delegation from Cologne requests to be attached to the French Republic. Genoa requests, by referendum, its annexation, after that of Piedmont.

The English realize, startled, that peace promotes French influence even better than war. This is what pushed them to break the Peace of Amiens, just one year after having initialed it, in 1802. We were taught that Napoleon's major weapon, after his failure at Trafalgar, was the "continental blockade ". Blockade which pushed Napoleon to send his customs officers, and following them his soldiers, from Madrid to Moscow,

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from Lisbon to Hamburg. To excess and ruin. In one an astute recent book historian turns traditional analysis on its head. 2

,

Psychological logic leans in his favor: the blockade is for Napoleon only a measure of reprisal, violence opposed to violence, "injustice for injustice, arbitrary for arbitrary". A response to the blockade that the English navy is already deploying to prohibit trade with the French colonies. He does not make it the alpha and omega of his policy. The blockade is a means of pressure to foment political tensions in London, to try to bring down a bellicose Tory government; it can even promote, sheltered from these customs barriers, the blossoming of French industry, but also Belgian, Swiss, Rhineland and Tuscan industry.

Napoleon did not have in mind the creation of a large continental common market such as the Europeans built during the 1950s. Napoleon's project was above all political: unifying the continent around France, in the interest of France. Napoleon is not the father of Europe, but of the great France. His gigantic project has only one enemy and one obstacle: England. And England has only one shield: its navy. To destroy Carthage, Rome had to build a navy powerful enough to defeat its rival on its territory. Napoleon, once again, follows in the footsteps of his illustrious model. He is undertaking a huge project: building a navy that can rival the Royal Navy. This navy existed: it had been built by Louis XVI. She had defeated the English Navy during the American War of Independence. Revolutionary unrest and the emigration of aristocratic officers destroyed it. Everything has to be started again. The Emperor puts all the money he can into it, and all the men. His entire policy is illuminated by the light of his

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maritime challenge. And first of all its absorptions of territories, from 1810: Holland, Spain, Portugal, countries of both sailors and coasts. He will say, shyly: “Louis XIV only had Brest, I have all the coasts of Europe. »

The Spanish rebellion was an unpleasant surprise for him and a festering wound for his Grande Armée; many historians have wondered why he did not intervene in person to subdue her and oust Wellington's English. We detected the weariness of a mature man, determined to abandon himself to the carnal pleasures of his young and new wife, Marie-Louise. We can also guess a deliberate strategy to bring in as many English troops as possible to strip British soil. He then confided to Caulaincourt: “It is because England is in Spain and obliged to stay there that it does not worry me. You don't know anything about business. » He was already preparing invasion plans via Ireland, where General Hoche, sent by the Directory, had failed. He is biding his time, or rather that of his boats. 1812? 1813? He was jubilant when the Royal Navy suffered its first setbacks in a clash with the American Navy. Napoleon immediately sent a message of encouragement to the President of the United States. But he is a Napoleon after the retreat from Russia. A weakened, bloodless Napoleon, on borrowed time. The Russian alliance had, however, been the great affair of his reign.

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THE IMPOSSIBLE RUSSIAN ALLIANCE

In Saint Helena, Napoleon confided that the Tilsit conference (1807) was the happiest moment of his life. He then believed he had seduced and convinced the Tsar of the usefulness and the effectiveness of the “alliance of the two greatest powers in the world”. He goes too fast as usual; he does not realize that one does not sign an alliance treaty when the ink on the peace treaty is barely dry. He urges the Tsar to return to his fight against England. He describes the grandiose prospects for their division of the world: France will reign over western Europe while Russia, seizing European lands from the Ottoman Empire, from Constantinople to the Dardanelles, will exercise its control over ballast. Napoleon is ready to give the tsar supervision over the two German powers, Prussia and Austria. He keeps Germany and Italy, with the consent of the middle Germanic powers (Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, united in the Confederation of the Rhine), without forgetting Piedmont, Lombardy or Genoa: Napoleon invents NATO a hundred fifty years before the Americans.

Once again, Napoleon took over a project of the Directory, which, with rare finesse, had understood that the alliance with distant and autocratic Russia was the best choice offered to France since this country, by its very remoteness , geographical but also cultural, had the least to fear from the ideological contagion of the revolutionary armies. The reverse Russian alliance was born, but unfortunately it would not take shape until a century later,

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when a France weakened by the defeat against Bismarck's Prussia will seek support to resist German hegemony.

It will then be a defensive strategy when Napoleon was on the offensive. He drew up grandiose plans where the French army and the Russian army would go as far as India, not to take back their empire from the English, but to embarrass them, frighten them, open another front. The English did not take the threat lightly: already, when Bonaparte had landed in Egypt, the London Stock Exchange had collapsed; the squadrons in the Indian Ocean were put on alert and the garrisons of the British counters were reinforced, before Nelson destroyed the French boats in the harbor of Aboukir. Napoleon pulled out all the stops in his strategy of encircling the English Indian Empire. He went so far as to link up with the shah of Iran, to whom he sent weapons and instructors to train his army.

The tsar is fascinated by the personality of the “king of battles”. The fascination will not last. The young prince is harassed by his family clan and his court, who hate the child of the Revolution, regicide and deicide. The tsar will soon fall into a mysticism which will end up driving him mad. He gradually puts himself in the hands of the priests, they assure him that he will defeat the Antichrist and will be the sword of God. While Alexander showers Napoleon with caresses, he writes to his sister, his mother, his “cousins”, the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, “that the hour of vengeance would one day strike” . He continues to receive English money to prepare the revenge; and fears like the plague the British services who have already murdered his father with his tacit approval.

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THE NAIVETY OF THE EMPEROR Napoleon has no choice. He must trust him. His whole system rests on him. When the court of Saint Petersburg refused him one of his daughters in marriage, he swapped the Russian for the Austrian. He will go from Charybdis to Scylla, as he will soon discover. The Pole Poniatowski told him that the Tsar was preparing war against France. We are at the beginning of the year 1811. Napoleon decides, with death in his soul, to overtake him. The cohort of six hundred thousand men he has assembled cannot remain with weapons drawn for long, in a purely defensive position. The mobilization of such a force costs horribly expensive, in any case beyond what the French budget allows. And Napoleon refused on principle to borrow. He has no desire to plunge into the vastness of Russia, even though he only has eyes for England. As in 1805, he was forced to abandon the descent on the British coast to stop an adversary from the continent. Fateful fate. He said to Savary as he was leaving: “Anyone who would have saved me from this war would have done me a great service; but finally here it is, we have to get out of it. »

Dostoyevsky claims that it was neither winter nor patriotism that defeated the Grande Armée, but the inconsistency, the disorder of his adversary. Napoleon ended up being swallowed up by Russian chaos. While Moscow was burning, Napoleon, distraught and at the same time impressed by the heroic fanaticism of his enemies, wrote to the Tsar: "The beautiful and superb city of Moscow no longer exists...Humanity, the interests of

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your majesty and this great city wanted it to be placed in trust... administrations, magistrates and civil guards were to be left there. This is what was done twice in Vienna, as well as in Berlin and Madrid. » The tsar will end up winning this Homeric struggle: a Pyrrhic victory. He hopes to replace the Napoleonic system on the continent with his Holy Alliance. In his history of Russia, Solzhenitsyn will recognize that Alexander made a serious strategic error by sacrificing the French alliance. He believed he was imposing Russian tutelage on Europe; he will discover too late that he has drawn the chestnuts from the fire for English hegemony over Europe and the world. This British imperialism that its successors will soon face in the famous “great game” in Afghanistan.

The history of the Russian alliance is a summary of destiny Napoleonic. Contrary to the image we have preserved of him, it is not his brutality, his arrogance, his insensitivity, his bulimia of conquests or his dreams of grandeur which are at the origin of his fall. It's quite the opposite. His rush to make peace will have ruined the Emperor; his leniency towards the monarchies who had attacked him, his tireless quest for allies who would constantly deceive him, and, let us say it, his naivety.

The new French Republic could only live by surrounding itself with republics. For once, Napoleon did not extend the action of the Directory, and its famous “sister republics”. He was very wrong. He wanted to imitate the Bourbons by putting his family on thrones. After Marengo (1800), Austerlitz (1805) and Wagram (1809), he spared the Habsburgs, who gave him the final blow in the

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back. After Jena (1806), he allowed the Prussian house to survive, which hastened to prepare for the revenge, which would take place at Leipzig in 1813. At Austerlitz, Tsar Alexander begged his magnanimous conqueror to withdraw with the remains of his army, provoking the prophetic fury of General Vandamme: “To give them grace today is to want them to be in Paris in six years. » After Friedland (1807), he did not touch Russian territory, to the great surprise of the tsar, who believed in a miracle from God. At Wagram, he neglected to break up the Austrian monarchy. As a good Mediterranean, he cannot help but imagine that the Emperor of Austria will never turn against him from the moment he gives him a grandson. Each time, Napoleon understood a little late that the ally he had chosen, whether Prussian, Austrian or Russian, had duped him. He will even end up entrusting his destiny to the generosity of England, which attests to the extent to which he refuses to see the hatred that the English have for him. He is not doing what the Allies will do to the Habsburg Empire in 1919, and to Germany in 1945, what Stalin will impose on Eastern Europe conquered by Russian tanks at the end of the Second World War. World War. Bonaparte's hand is not as firm as Napoleon's mind. He's not the monster he should have been. We know Josephine's famous words: “You humiliate too much and you don't punish enough. » Élie Faure replied to the empress, a century later: “He doesn't have time to be mean. The strong man can rail against the stone he hits or the thorn that tears him apart. He forgets the stone and the bramble the second later. He even forgets that there are still other stones and other brambles on the paths. »

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FRANCE COMES INTO THE RANK Napoleon always forgave and was never forgiven. He tried to stop England's emerging hegemony over the world and paid for it with an inexpiable war. He wanted to unify the continent behind France and did not succeed in his Herculean attempt. His successor, Louis XVIII, will be more realistic. It must be said that he had no choice: exile had made him hostage to the enemy of his family and his nation. Before leaving London, to regain his throne in the spring of 1814, he ostensibly displayed “his eternal gratitude to the family British royal which restored to him the throne of his ancestors, and this happy state of things which promises to close the wounds, to calm the passions and to restore peace, rest and happiness to all peoples.

France falls into line and accepts its role as a middle power in a system of “balance” dominated by England. The English “balance” defeated the Napoleonic “system”. The “perfidious Albion” is at the top of its game. She never gave up bringing France back to its old limits, those before 1792 and the conquests of the Revolution. She let her continental allies make Napoleon look like a monster, an enemy of humankind, to better separate him from the French people, then declare herself ready to deal with France. But without him.

Napoleon guessed the intention of his enemies. He keeps repeating that “in defeat, we must always go back, as in victory, we must always move forward.”

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Let us cancel the treaties of 1809, 1807, 1805, and we will be brought back to 1800, then to 1792. But bringing France back to the size it had under the old monarchy is not restricting it. to its former power, because Europe is no longer the same.

Napoleon understood everything but lost everything. And France with him. The whole history of the 19th century is the fatal pursuit of this defeat and the – vain – attempt of the successors of

the Emperor to remedy this. France, from now on, will no longer dare to stand up to Europe. She will look for an ally, at all costs. She will hesitate between Germany and England. And will lose on both counts. Napoleon is preparing to experience disillusionment, betrayal and abandonment. The insults of those he made. The flight, in disguise, to escape popular vindictiveness. HAS Erfurt, a few years earlier, everyone wanted to see, to approach the one who dispensed everything: thrones, miseries, fears, hopes. Talleyrand noted, startled: “Baseness had never had so much genius. » He was the master of the world. God. He was compared to a sun with an inscription on stage: “Less tall and less beautiful than him. » He soliloquized, disillusioned: “These people must think I’m very stupid! »

Napoleon thought of the world in a universe that was not yet globalized. He announced the fury of the total war of the future, while Chateaubriand, ingenuous, believed “that he had killed the war by exaggerating it”. It was not megalomania, but lucidity. Or rather extralucency. The Tuileries were then what the White House became: the center of the world. It is not surprising that the Communards burned it and that the Third Republic gave up rebuilding it. These two French lefts, despite being heirs of the Revolution, no longer wanted or could not

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realize France's thousand-year-old dream. Since then we have no longer understood Napoleon. Over the years and centuries, unexpected defeats and vain victories, we burned what we had adored, we adored what we had burned. We were taught to hate what we had loved, to love what we had hated. The dream was called a “nightmare” and the English propaganda “historical truth”. And what was only immense was declared crazy.

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1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, Pluriel, 1997. 2. Nicola Todorov, The Grande Armée conquers England, Vendémiaire, 2016.

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THIRD PART THE WEATHER

OF VENGEANCE

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Talleyrand

The Devil's Hand He did not hurry more in death than in life; and posterity has vindicated this tortoise-like placidity of the fable. Talleyrand took one hundred and fifty years to become an icon, the idol of our elites, diplomats, politicians, technocrats, historians, academics, editorialists. They tirelessly praise the subtlety of his mind, the sagacity of his views, his unequaled knowledge of the mysteries of diplomacy, the breadth of his European vision, his love of peace, his acute sense of balance; his measured and reasonable attitude, which they contrast with the conquering and warlike bulimia that they attribute to the Emperor. Even his good words which are transmitted from book to book, from lesson to lesson, from praise to praise.

Even his corruption, incontestable and claimed, the famous “sweet treats” that he demanded from most of his interlocutors and solicitors, is trivialized in fact of the period. His supporters explain, in a learned tone, that the money he received from everywhere never influenced his political choices. They make his greed a guarantee of his integrity.

Yesterday's historians judged, however, that his immorality had prevented him from achieving the greatness of a statesman, which his superior intelligence deserved. “His existence was a prodigious and immoral success,” concludes Louis Madelin.

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in his severe portrait of the prince. Having been an Armand de Richelieu, he lacked a high-ranking heart and concern for great duties. »

Only his British biographers found virtues in him at the time; long aggravating circumstance in the land of “frogs”. Its Anglophobia has today become the admirable sign of a pioneering cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, as long as national sentiment was still alive, no one forgot that Talleyrand was in England's debt. Stendhal sums up the general opinion perfectly: “Mr. de Talleyrand had no plan, no great aspiration. But as he brought into politics the extreme finesse with which he earned his living, he easily saw that the English alliance was the only one suitable for France... The address of Monsieur de Talleyrand did not really lead him to great things than in Vienna when, before Waterloo, he prevented the kings of Europe from becoming afraid and forced them to march quickly and not give man time to establish himself. » We could add to the Stendhalian irony that a year before, in March 1814, while the Russian and Austrian troops hesitated to rush towards Paris, rightly fearing the reaction of the Emperor and his meager troops prowling on their backs, Talleyrand sends them this eloquent message: “You walk with crutches, use your legs and want what you want. »

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THE BLACK STAR OF EVIL His cynicism, his greed, his amoralism are then legendary; no one, not even him, thinks of discussing them or mitigating them; even less to turn them into virtues. He derives neither shame nor glory from it. Like an indisputable, irrefutable fact. At a time when good feelings flourished so much, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord had the notable privilege of embodying the black star of Evil.

He never aroused respect, from his youth as a “bad subject abbot”. If his witticisms about his contemporaries are famous, those pillorying him are no less so. Some have become proverbial, like the “You are shit in a silk stocking”, which Napoleon threw at him during one of his most famous tantrums. We could make a collection of it. Chateaubriand: “As he had received a lot of contempt, Monsieur de Talleyrand soaked it up and placed it in the two hanging corners of his mouth. » Mirabeau: “For money, he would sell his soul and he would be right, because he would exchange his dung for gold. » Or even Fouché, when Talleyrand received the title of vice-president chancellor: “It’s the only vice he lacked. »

The great writers of the 19th century, Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal, also participated in the priesthood, in a sort of rivalry over who would plant the most beautiful knife between the shoulder blades of the odious “Lame Devil”.

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Stendhal even assured that the prince was not the author of his most famous witticisms. “We put those that Paris still produces on his account and he only adopted them after two or three days when their success was assured. »

Talleyrand, it is Vautrin who educates Rastignac: “If I have one piece of advice to give you my angel, it is to hold no more to your opinions than to your words. When you are asked for them, sell them… There are no principles, there are only events; there is no law, there are only circumstances: the superior man embraces events and circumstances to lead them 1 .

»

To plead his case, the prince himself recounted, in his Memoirs, his loveless childhood (“I never slept under the same roof as my father”) and his accident at 4 years old, the fall of a buffet, a sprained foot, which led to his cruel infirmity, through a lack of care which afflicted him with this permanent lameness. Original setback which prevented Charles Maurice from experiencing the glory of arms, as his birthright in his illustrious family predisposed him to do. He was forced to take orders because he was lame, although he had neither the desire nor the faith. His whole life is a revenge against this childhood. He could have said like Cardinal de Retz, another man who entered the orders through family constraint: “I decided to do evil by design, which is without comparison the most criminal before God, but which is undoubtedly the wisest before the world. »

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OX EYE AND BOUDOIRS He was first and foremost a master of ceremonies. Big

chamberlain. The Grand Chamberlain of History. His role was to bring the government of the upstarts into the world; to put a few drops of oil in the gears where others put sand. But he despised everything and everyone, from the furious revolutionaries to the upstarts of the Empire, even the bourgeois Louis-Philippards: “It was clear that they had not been walking on a floor for long. »

His legendary impassivity was a supreme form of contempt. At 73, he was slapped and kicked in public. He said to Charles X, who questioned him: “Sire, it was a punch. » He is both root and uprooted, a defrocked prelate who remains a great lord. He does not have the arrogance of the upstart but the contempt of the born man. He even dares to mock Napoleon.

Talleyrand is not a man of the time he lived, but of the time that formed him. He is a man from the 18th century lost in the 19th .

He is a roué of the Regency and Louis XV, a reader

of the Marquis de Sade. He is a red heel, survivor of oeil-de-boeuf and boudoirs. He will retain their taste for mystification and court intrigues. “The word was given to man to conceal his thoughts… we must be wary of the first movement… because it is the right one. » He will remain forever perverted, as much by the physical disgrace of his childhood as by the moral disgrace of his youth.

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Like his friends of the time, the Vaudreuils or the Lauzuns, he wanted fortune, pleasures, women, good food, luxury, gambling; and the power that delivers it all. “You must never be a poor devil”; this is his rule of life. He lives surrounded by women who disdain their husbands. They trained him, helped him, protected him. Their name is the Duchess of Luynes, the Duchess of Fitz-James, the Viscountess of Laval. Insolent and adventurous in their youth, decrepit and intriguing in the end; they have always watched over the prince like a guard. “He was in their arms and at their feet, but never in their hands,” wrote the Count of Saint-Aulaire.

His contemporaries contemplate this spectacle, incredulous, between fascination and disgust. He describes to them with nostalgia the delights of an era of which they only know the ruins. He told them, without tears in his dead eyes: “He who has not known the Ancien Régime has not known the sweetness of life. » Talleyrand went from the time of gentleness to the time of sweetness. The charm works despite everything.

He finds the right line in Voltaire's style, in his words which he recites with learned slowness from the tips of his marmoreal lips; and even the “grand style” of the “Grand Siècle” when he forced himself to write. “He is the only one with whom I can talk,” Bonaparte confesses to those who urge him to dismiss him. Napoleon and Talleyrand are irresistibly attracted to each other, like two wild animals from distant climes, put by a trainer in the same cage.

He helped Bonaparte for his coup d'état of 18 Brumaire; Bonaparte confirmed this to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Bonaparte is the master of battles; Talleyrand is the master of diplomacy. But their complementarity quickly turns into rivalry. Since Italy and Campoformio, the warrior is also a peacemaker, while Talleyrand is more bellicose than is claimed. He approved the defense of the “natural borders” bequeathed by the Directory; he encourages Napoleon in his “progressive”, that is to say brutal, policy towards Prussia, which he hates; it is he who will advise the Emperor to put one of his brothers at the head of Spain: “Do like Louis XIV”, he whispers to him, always the courtier.

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OLD -FRENCH POLITICS The prince is a man from the past. Like the Regent, he did not share French hostility towards England; like Choiseul, he leaned towards the privileged alliance with Austria. He remained a child of Choiseul and Madame de Pompadour. Even Tsarist Russia seemed too exotic to him, a country of “barbarians” from the snowy steppes. He still sees France as Baron de Besenval described it, during the reign of Louis XVI: “The most beautiful, the most powerful and the most flourishing empire in Europe. » He aims to do for the France resulting from the Revolution what he achieved for the revolutionary upstarts themselves, to have it accepted by the old society, to obtain from European monarchies what he called a “bourgeois right” ; but he will only achieve this goal at the cost of an irremediable weakening of French power. Napoleon was reluctant to reach out to the Habsburgs: “I don’t understand your penchant for Austria. It’s old-fashioned French politics,” he said to Talleyrand.

This old Europe and this old France no longer exist. They were swept away by the French Revolution, but even more by the geostrategic upheavals of the end of the 18th century, the unprecedented extension of the British Empire to India and Canada, the absorption of Poland by Prussia and Russia. , Russian access to warm seas, under Catherine II, the advent of Prussia as a great European power since the victories of Frederick II. Not to mention the birth of the United States of America, a giant in the making.

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Talleyrand does not see what Napoleon's piercing gaze reveals: "The partitions of Poland, the modifications of the political map of Germany, the conquests of England beyond the seas have modified the balance of the continent and require compensation for the benefit of France. When everything has changed around France, how could it maintain the same relative power by being placed in the same state as before? »

The prince is a blind man in revolt against a seer whom he serves. Before betraying him.

In Erfurt (1808), Talleyrand distinguished for the first time the interests of France and those of Napoleon before the Tsar: “The sovereign of Russia is civilized, but his people are not; the French people are civilized and their master is not. It is therefore up to the sovereign of Russia to be the ally of the French people. » Pressed by Napoleon, who wanted to enlist him in his crusade against England, the Tsar gave nothing in three hours of discussion with the Emperor. The latter, disappointed, confides in… Talleyrand. Napoleon wants to place Austria under the surveillance of Russia or obtain its disarmament after that of Prussia; but he will not achieve this Austrian objective due to Talleyrand's double play.

The prince is the grain of sand that disrupts the Napoleonic machine. Faced with Russian reluctance, Napoleon turned to Austria. The arrival of Archduchess MarieLouise at the Tuileries irritates the revolutionary base and republican of the French people; takes him away from “his” Emperor. Without the Austrian alliance having the strategic depth and military value of the Russian. Napoleon concluded

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a fool's bargain. He was fooled by Talleyrand and his accomplice, the Austrian chancellor, Metternich. He fell into the nets set by England, whose propaganda now continues to detach Napoleon, the “ogre”, from the French “people”.

After the fall of Napoleon, Talleyrand finally reached his goal; the provisional government of France resides entirely in his bedroom, on the mezzanine floor of his private mansion. He defeated an Emperor and made a king. He built the European order on the principle of legitimacy, the only one capable, according to him, of stifling the hydra of nationalism. He believes less than anyone else in the fictions he invents and suggests. It establishes as principles what is only conceptual tinkering, to respond to the urgency of the circumstances. The Europe of kings emerged shaken by the revolutionary swell. Napoleon showed that kings were appointed like prefects; and that their thrones were only “four pieces of gilded wood covered with velvet.” The Emperor transformed the sovereigns into wealthy and brutal usurpers who cover the crudity of their domination with a patina of History. They therefore enthusiastically adopted the principle of “legitimacy” concocted by Talleyrand.

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NOBLE LANGUAGE AND GREAT PRINCIPLES But by demanding the abdication of a Napoleon defeated by arms, they opened Pandora's box. No longer any sovereign, no longer any power will resist a military defeat: Napoleon III in 1870, the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns in 1918, the Third Republic in 1940, Pétain in 1944, Mussolini and Hitler in 1945. The principle of legitimacy will bow now faced with the fate of weapons; Louis XIV and Louis XV had not been overthrown after their military defeats.

Talleyrand doesn't care. He's already moved on. In 1832, he invented the principle of “non-intervention”, to avoid a clash between France and England around Belgium, which was demanding its independence. Sent on an embassy to London, welcomed as a hero and a messiah at the same time, old Talleyrand does what he has always done: compromises; but to the detriment of France. While the Belgians demand a French prince, they will have a German king. Who will marry a daughter of Louis-Philippe! The English will not see the French again in Antwerp. On the other hand, the French will see the Prussians on the Rhine. It is the fruit of the “skills” of Mr. de Talleyrand. During the countless negotiations in Vienna in 1815, between two dances or two receptions, it was decided that the King of Saxony, cousin of Louis XVIII, would keep his kingdom which the Prussians were eyeing; in exchange, they will obtain the left bank of the Rhine. They will bring their armies to Cologne, to Koblenz, to Trier, to Saarbrücken. They will make the Rhine a

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armed “barrier” against the imperialism and militarism of the “insolent nation”. A few more years and the barrier will become a springboard; defense will turn into attack; the Rhine road will become that of Paris. 1870 is written. France will live for a hundred and fifty years on a perpetual qui-vive. The English, once again, triumph. Castlereagh, the British negotiator, had written to Liverpool, then Minister of Foreign Affairs: "I am always inclined to resume the policy that Mr. Pitt had so dear to his heart and which consists of putting Prussia in contact with the French on the left bank of the Rhine. » Talleyrand, however, has no sympathy for Prussia: “The smallness of its monarchy makes its ambition a kind of necessity for it. Any pretext seems good to him. No scruples stop him. Its advantage is law. »

The prince has broader pretensions. HAS Madame de Staël, he writes: "Bonaparte's successes were not the only thing to be hated in him... It was his principles which were horrible: they must be forever rejected... I don't know what we will do here, but I promise you noble language. » During the negotiations, he pitted one against the other, England against Russia, Prussia against Austria, the “small” countries against the great powers. He proclaims himself “leader of the little ones and last of the great ones”. “The coalition is dissolved,” he wrote grimly, “to Louis XVIII, France is no longer isolated in Europe. » He exalts the “real France”, which, “ceasing to be colossal, would become great again”.

In a few well-written formulas, Talleyrand founded French rhetoric to this day. His “procedures”, which he made fun of in private, his “principles” which he invented at will

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necessities, everything that made Chateaubriand say that if Talleyrand “signed the events, he did not make them” have become gospel words of French diplomacy and historiography. France no longer ceases to speak to the world a “noble language”, whether it is that of “the right of peoples to self-determination” or that of “human rights”. France has not recovered from no longer being colossal, as Talleyrand said, from no longer being a “mastodon”, as de Gaulle said, but believes, or wants to believe, or wants to make people believe, that it can remain great , and “hold her rank”, even though she is no longer among the giants of her time. This French chimera that our leaders and our diplomats have pursued for two centuries, only Napoleon fought lucidly and gave himself the means to escape it. He alone was aware of the vanity of this position; vanity in both senses of the term: that which is vain and that which is fatuous. “If we stopped talking about the vanity of the French people; what if we talked a little about pride?

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BEST INTERESTS FIRST ! Reality catches up with illusions. Reality imposes itself on even the most blinded. Aware of their new and irremediable weakness, our leaders, torn by the fear of "isolated France", are ready to sacrifice its sovereignty and the essential interests of the country to the alliance of the moment, whether it is England between the two world wars, America during the 1950s, Germany and Europe since the 1970s. In his will, Talleyrand wrote: "I have never put the interests of any party nor my own in balance with the interests of France, which moreover, are in my opinion never in opposition to the true interests of Europe. » It is the final rhetorical lock which closes the catechesis bequeathed by the prince to his distant heirs. Europe presents itself as second nature, “an almost mystical community of states,” said the Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero, “which has the power to confer sovereignty.”

Europe, our “common home”, in the famous words of the Soviet Gorbachev; “Europe, our future, France, our homeland”, according to another famous word, from François Mitterrand. Europe, Europe, Europe, the kids once denounced by General de Gaulle are all heirs of the “Lame Devil”. When the complaints of Dutch traders, German merchants, French consumers of exotic foodstuffs, deprived of coffee or sugar by the continental blockade were transmitted to him, Napoleon lost his temper: “One would say that the whole policy of this poor Europe, that

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all its interests come down to the price of a barrel of sugar…” A perfect summary of the current European Union.

Talleyrand betrayed Napoleon in the name of Europe's higher interests. The lesson will be learned by our big bosses, our senior civil servants, our politicians and our intellectuals. Their personal interests may oppose those of France; there are so many interests greater than those of France. The Balzacs, Victor Hugo, Musset, all these “children of the century” born under the reign of the Emperor, knew what they owed to their “teacher of energy”, as Barrès would say.

They recognized their debt to the one who was their hero, and their model, the one who made them want to “finish with the pen what [the Emperor had] begun with the sword” in the famous words of Balzac. Over time, the recognition faded. Only vanity remained.

France is no longer capable of dominating Europe; the French elites, however, consider that they must continue to lead it as in the time of the young thirty-year-old state councilors whom Napoleon sent to govern the kingdoms of his siblings. It is the only heritage they have retained from this Emperor whom they abhor.

Talleyrand is their model. The holy prophet who must be imitated. To praise him is to praise himself. To glorify him is to exonerate oneself. They too defend their interests and those of France, by serving Europe and humanity. We remember the famous words of Jean-Claude Trichet upon his arrival as governor of the European Central Bank in the early 2000s: “ I'm not French. » We know that the French European commissioners

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in Brussels make it a point to express themselves in Globish in front of their peers. Happy men. And unfortunate French people.

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1. Father Goriot, Balzac, 1835.

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Madame de Staël

She doesn't talk anymore, she shoots! She speaks. Without stopping. She speaks to Benjamin Constant, she speaks to Madame Récamier, she speaks to the Prince de Ligne, she speaks to the Countess de Boigne, she speaks to Prince Auguste of Prussia; she sometimes speaks to her husband too, Baron de Staël-Holstein; she constantly talks to her favorite daughter, Albertine. She speaks for the pleasure of speaking, for the pleasure of listening. She speaks so as not to be alone. She speaks to ward off her fear of boredom. She speaks to everyone but not to just anyone. She speaks with an unparalleled art of conversation. She speaks to expose her brilliant mind.

Stendhal said that she had been “the most extraordinary woman we have ever seen, she who led the French conversation and brought to the highest degree of perfection the brilliant art of improvisation, on whatever subject it was” . “She talks about rags with as much interest as the Constitution,” said her friend the Countess of Boigne. She speaks to brighten up a languid conversation; she speaks to revive a failing passion. She speaks to charm, seduce, shine, please. She speaks for the sake of speaking.

You are missing only one being and everything is depopulated. The only one to whom Germaine de Staël would like to speak is the one who does not listen to her

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not. Don't hear it. Germaine de Staël thought she would seduce him with the charm of her conversation and the brilliance of her wit, but he has no time to waste on salon banter. He is a dominant Mediterranean male, who believes that women understand nothing about politics; she is a rich Protestant aristocrat from the North, capricious and imperious, vain and snobbish, who regards the Corsican “Buonaparte” as an “African”.

Madame de Staël embodies in the eyes of the new master of France the bygone time of the monarchy, when women reigned at court and in the salons; he embodies the man of new times, whom the spirit of the Revolution imposed in fury and noise. Bonaparte learned the lesson of the Ancien Régime which saw writers prepare the Revolution within it. He observed, under the Directory, the maneuvers of Germaine de Staël to push her lovers of the moment into government, whether their names were Narbonne or Talleyrand, then, under the Consulate, Benjamin Constant. This is the beating heart of his quarrel with Madame de Staël as well as with his great friend, René de Chateaubriand.

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I LOVE YOU, ME TOO… However, everything started well between them. Germaine de Staël could not help but be fascinated by the advent of the young prodigy. In 1799, she wrote: “It was the first time, since the Revolution, that we heard a proper name in everyone's mouth. Until then, we said: the Constituent Assembly did such and such a thing, the people, the Convention; now, we only talked about this man who had to put himself in everyone's place, and make the human species anonymous, by monopolizing fame for himself alone, and by preventing any existing being from ever being able to acquire it. »

Even after her fall, in her Considerations on the French Revolution, she still wrote with unparalleled analytical finesse: “Such a being, having no equal, could neither feel nor cause sympathy to be felt; he was more or less than a man... He does not hate more than he loves, there is only him for him; all the rest of the creatures are figures… Every time I heard him speak, I was struck by his superiority; it had no relation to that of men educated and cultivated by study and society such as France and England can offer examples... I felt in his soul like a cold and sharp sword which chilled while wounding... »

Madame de Staël does not hide her admiration for him. Tells him, proclaims it to him, sings it to him in every tone. Compares him to Washington. Do everything to seduce him. But Germaine

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only succeeded in annoying him: “What do you want,” she said to Joseph Bonaparte, “I am becoming stupid in front of your brother by wanting to please him. » After the time of admiration and seduction comes that of opposition and conflagrations. Her feminine vanity will never forgive the one who disdained her when she only dreamed of serving him.

It was the German writer Henri Heine who summed up the change in atmosphere with the most finesse: “When the beautiful lady realized that with her importunities she was losing her money, she did what women do. in such a case: she threw herself body and soul into opposition, declaimed against the Emperor, against his brutal and ungallant domination, and spoke so loudly that the police ended up sending her passports. » Each of the two protagonists then brings out the big words, the big principles, and the big means. For her, he is a despot, a “Robespierre on horseback”; she is for him a “blue stocking”, a learned woman of Molière, one of those intellectuals whom he describes with horror as an “ideologue”, and moreover from this caste of liberal theorists whom he vomits under the name of “idealists”. She is a woman of money, who never neglects to add to her fortune; he is a soldier who always has a battle plan in mind. He never had anything but contempt for his beloved father; and is reluctant to reimburse him for the two million pounds that this same Necker lent to the Royal Treasury; debt that his daughter claims from him with an insistence that he considers inappropriate.

But these personal quarrels would have remained venial if their confrontation had not taken on a political and even geostrategic dimension. Napoleon is the nation in arms;

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Madame de Staël is cosmopolitanism in words. He forges with his soldiers the “great nation”; she exalts with her words the “small nations”.

“Conquering the world and liberating the world are two forms of glory that are incompatible in fact, but which can be reconciled very well in daydreams,” wrote Simone Weil. The time of revolutionary reverie has passed; things have settled: Napoleon wants to conquer the world; Madame de Staël, free him.

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FRANCE IS THE MAN, GERMANY WOMAN Napoleon intends to dominate Germany for the benefit of France; Madame de Staël proposes to unify Germany for the benefit of Europe. Their quarrel is found at the heart of this “Western question” which has haunted the continent since the Treaty of Verdun of 843. Napoleon takes up the thousand-yearold task that France has set itself since Charlemagne: to bring Roman civilization beyond the Rhine . Madame de Staël believes on the contrary, Germany is the soul of European civilization, with its armada of professors, philosophers, artists, poets, musicians, writers. France has the attributes of power: State, territory, army. Germany is only a geographical entity, scattered into countless operetta principalities and duchies. France is a conqueror, Germany is open cities. France is a nation of thugs led by a tyrant who is setting Europe ablaze; Germany is a learned nation that honors culture and art. France is war, Germany is peace. France is the man, Germany is the woman.

In the summer of 1808, Madame de Staël brought together in her Swiss castle of Coppet a collection of brilliant minds and great names, coming from the four corners of Europe. She animates and dominates this coterie, infusing it with the words and thoughts with which she stigmatizes the imperial government; words and thoughts that his hosts hasten to spread throughout Europe. Prince Augustus brings them back to Prussia, to the great joy of the ministers who are secretly preparing the revenge of Jena. It's a real

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media campaign which reached all the courts and all the elites of Europe, a propaganda operation of well-born intellectuals, mobilizing the opinions of the continent against Napoleonic France, relaying with rare efficiency the tireless work of English agents. Napoleon, well aware of the importance of his own communication strategy, with his bulletins from the Grande Armée that he sometimes wrote himself, immediately understood the danger. He bans her from Paris and has her monitored by the Fouché police; even if the entire Empire remains open to Germaine, the prestige of the Emperor makes the slightest formalities vexatious to her. Some friends avoid Coppet; she joins them in Lyon or Aix, before the prefect sends her back in the first sedan to Switzerland.

In 1810, the proofs of his book entitled On Germany were destroyed by Fouché's henchmen. Napoleon ordered his minister to crush the ten thousand printed copies; to “take measures so that not a single sheet remains”, to ask the author for her manuscript, and to take back from the author’s friends the two copies that she had lent them.

The work nevertheless appeared in 1813 in London: the English were only too happy to protect such an operation against their feared adversary. The text of Madame de Staël was published the same year as the Battle of Leipzig, which allowed the Prussians, helped by the Russians and Austrians, to drive Napoleon from Germany.

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GERMANOPHILIA ACTIVIST OF MADAME DE STAËL TRIUMPHED Germany is to the war of ideas what Leipzig is to war itself. Its impact will be considerable; its immense and lasting influence. His vision of a learned and artistic Germany, bucolic and peaceful, would permeate the entire progressive elite of the French left of the 19th century. From Michelet to Hugo, they will enter Germany as "into a Temple", according to the religious image deliberately used by Ernest Renan in his memories of childhood and youth: "Everything I found there is pure , elevated, moral, beautiful and touching. Ah how soft and strong they are! I believe that Christ will come to us from there... Germany had been my mistress, I was conscious of owing her the best in me. » Germany is becoming one of those secular religions which regularly sweeps away our dechristianized Parisian intelligentsia. Gérard de Nerval will evoke in Lorely “the land of Goethe, of Schiller, the country of Hoffmann, old Germany, the mother of us all, Teutonia”. A mystical illumination for the “noble rebel of 1813, the nation which raised Europe through generosity”. The militant Germanophilia of Madame de Staël triumphed.

It will disarm the legitimate French mistrust in the face of the resistible unification of Germany and the irresistible rise in power of Prussia. Germaine's book inoculated into the national organism, and in particular that of its progressive elites, a disease, which nowadays we would say "self-

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immune”, which eliminates antibodies against a deadly threat. How can we distrust and why distrust the “most moral and cultured of all people”, as Ernest Renan still says? Traditional Prussian militarism torments certain minds; they are told that Prussia will have been a “Vendée du Nord”, the energetic means used by Germany to free itself from the threat of Bonapartist France.

Germany is Goethe, Kant, Beethoven. From now on, Germany's qualities are due to the Germans while its faults are attributable to France. When Bismarck's armies crushed the Austrians at Sadowa in 1866, Emperor Napoleon III finally became worried and tried to stop the Prussian mechanism, which he himself had fueled in the name of the "principle of nationalities"; but the Republican deputies refuse to vote for the credits to strengthen the French army. Kant's Germany will never make war on France, they say; that of Bismarck yes. Stunned by defeat, Renan wrote in 1871: “Everything I had dreamed of, desired, preached turned out to be chimerical. » It is said that Michelet died of grief. Victor Hugo writes The Terrible Year.

Our elites mourn their illusions, but never give them up. The defeat of 1870 like the victory of 1918 will paradoxically have the same effect: further strengthening the attraction for Germany. After the defeat, we must draw inspiration from the German model which defeated us: the high university, under the leadership of Gabriel Monod, great favorite of the new republican regime, praises German thought, the German method, the German university . After the victory, and the Treaty of Versailles, we must protect and pamper this Ger

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become a victim again. In these two post-wars, which each time turned out to be between the wars, the rare daring ones, in particular in Action Française, who dared to resist the prevailing pacifism and Germanophilia, were treated as "warmongers" and of “Germanophobes”. Once again, the English media, joined by the Americans, will join forces with our intelligentsia to denounce and destroy the imperialism and militarism of Napoleon's successors, whether their names are Clemenceau or Poincaré. Once again, France, disarmed morally, intellectually, ideologically, collapsed militarily in a defeat which was not at all strange.

After June 1940, the stereotypes born from the pen of Madame de Staël were reversed: France and Germany exchanged their roles and their images. Germany, peaked helmet, militaristic and brutal, France, grieving victim and land of arts and culture. Drieu la Rochelle concluded: “Since France has not succeeded in being the man, it will be the woman of Germany. » As the historian Simon Epstein demonstrated, in A French Paradox, the Collaboration is based above all on the desire of elites, mostly from the left, to preserve peace at all costs, even if this peace is German. . Germany is peace, Madame de Staël had said.

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THE FRENCH EMPIRES END STILL BAD

Germaine's will extends beyond Germany; beyond Napoleon, beyond the 19th century. This disease specific to the French intelligentsia mixes sincere generosity and narcissistic posture, love of the Other and self-hatred, universalism and class contempt, the Christian kiss to lepers and the rejection of Catholicism. In one of their conversations, Malraux said to de Gaulle: "Since the 18th century, there has been a school in France for sensitive souls, in which women of letters play a fairly constant role... Literature is full of sensitive souls whose proletarians are like noble savages. »

Germany had destroyed the chimerical hopes placed in it; she had not destroyed the quest for chimeras. The brutal fall of Napoleon had given birth to this crazy passion for Germany; the slow disintegration of our colonial empire will raise among our intellectuals a cohort of defenders of oppressed peoples. French empires always end badly.

The Countess of Boigne, a regular at the Château de Coppet, had confessed in her Memoirs: “I cannot remember without shame the anti-national wishes that we formed and the guilty joy with which the spirit of party made us welcome the setbacks of our armies. » A century later, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his famous preface to a text by the Third World revolutionary Frantz

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Fanon, will urge the murder of settlers in Algeria. Many communist and anti-colonialist activists will carry the suitcases of weapons and money of the FLN, which will assassinate French pieds-noirs and harkis who have chosen France. Liberal and progressive, cosmopolitan and humanist intellectuals, friends of Madame de Staël, allied themselves with the worst autocracies to call all European peoples to revolt against French imperialism. A century later, the Congress of the Peoples of the East organized by the Bolsheviks in Baku, in September 1920, denounced colonization, imperialism, the bourgeoisie, and called on the peoples of the Third World to join the camp of the communist revolution. . This is where the status of the immigrant as victim and the Muslim as the new proletarian is established. It is at this congress that the wedding of communism and Islam, of the proletarian revolution and jihad, is celebrated. “Islam is communism with God,” said the great specialist in Islam, Maxime Rodinson.

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COPPET EVERYWHERE

The Germany of poets and artists had been a religion; the peoples of the South became a new Christ-people responsible for the redemption of our old, tired nations. Even when Prussia showed itself to be brutal and threatening, our Parisian worshipers remained in denial: Prussia will pass, Germany will remain, we subtly distinguished. Likewise, their distant heirs, as good sophists, built a theoretical wall between Islamism and Islam, in order to preserve the immaculate image of the latter. Before the war of 1870, the rare French visitors to Berlin returned horrified, but cautiously kept silent about what they had seen. Similarly, when Simone de Beauvoir traveled to Algeria after independence, during the 1960s, our feminist took offense at the patriarchal practices maintained and even restored by her “progressive” friends; but the readers of The Second Sex knew nothing about it.

Islam is the Germany of our generation. Actors, singers, writers, journalists, presenters join forces to defend an irenic vision of this “religion of peace, love and tolerance”. They are all children of Germaine. His offspring proliferated. She recounts her moods and torments in her little autobiographical novels. As in Coppet in the past, everyone “expresses their talent” and is convinced of the global interest of their little pile of secrets. Germaine de Staël was heard ad nauseam, even if her distant heirs lost her writing talent and the charm of her light and lively prose.

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Her victory is total, as Sainte-Beuve had prophesied: “Was not her existence like a great empire that she [was] constantly occupied, no less than this other conqueror, her contemporary and her oppressor, in complete and increase. » Germaine de Staël returned to Paris and will never be exiled again. We praise her art of living and writing, her liberalism and her Europeanism, her cosmopolitanism, her Swedish husband and her Swiss father, her love of Italy and Germany; we denounce the nerdy people who mocked and despised her: vile misogynists. Napoleon and his last worshipers are condemned to live in SainteHelene until the end of their days.

On television sets, there are only talk shows, political spectacle and entertainment: Coppet everywhere and every day.

And Germaine talks, talks, talks…

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Monte Cristo

The Serpent's Revenge It's the story of a messiah who returned to earth for revenge. A holy story overturned, turned inside out, desecrated. Where the wrath of God becomes the law of retaliation; where the wicked are punished for their wickedness, where traitors pay for their treason; where if the powerful do not win, the weak and the poor do not lose. A moral tale full of immorality. A lie machine that churns out the truth. An epic of vindictiveness, a modern Odyssey , which fascinated the crowds from its publication in the Journal des Débats, from August 1844 to January 1846, in the form of a serial novel of one hundred and fifty episodes. The fifteen hundred page book then takes its final form; the Count of Monte Cristo becomes one of these fictional heroes that the whole world, beyond the differences of races and civilizations, appropriates as a brother, both romantic and real, carnal and eternal, foreign and close: a universal archetype. A myth.

Our hero destroys wickedness with wickedness, felony with felony, crime with crime. And money by money. The Count of Monte Cristo is the French and romantic version of the theses of Karl Marx: “The humiliated and the offended have until now only had indulgence for the bastards of this world under different pretexts. It's about getting revenge on them. »

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The bad guys wear all the “character masks of capital”, according to the Marxist expression: Caderousse, the scoundrel who embodies the henchman; Villefort, the corrupt judge turned attorney general, who condemned Dantès to protect his career even though he knows he is innocent; Fernand, jealous of the love that the beautiful Mercedes has for him, becomes general and peer of France, after marrying Dantès' former fiancée; and Danglars, ready to do anything to succeed, become a banker and a baron.

Edmond Dantès returned to Paris in 1838, under the July Monarchy. It is the reign of all possibilities and all injustices; of all fortunes and all miseries. The bourgeoisie has supplanted the nobility; it enslaved the proletariat. The Count of Monte Cristo uses ancient aristocratic attributes, strength, audacity, intrepidity, to avenge those who have nothing. He is the great comforter. The Italian communist revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci, explained a century later that, in his eyes, the philosophical figure of the “superman” forged by Nietzsche emerged fully from the novel by Alexandre Dumas. “Be that as it may, it can be affirmed that much of the so-called Nietzschean superhumanity has as its origin and doctrinal model not Zarathustra, but The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. »

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MONTE CRISTO, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT After having been the father of all the revolutionaries of the 19th century, the Count of Monte Cristo would become that of all the “guides” of the 20th century. The pre-Marxist will turn into a pre-fascist; he will move from left to right, from socialism to fascism, in the manner of Mussolini, Hitler and other Déat or Doriot.

Dumas will have imitators galore; his Count of Monte Cristo founded a large family, the Rocamboles, Arsène Lupin, Fantômas, Superman. The superman will become a superhero, will come out of the novel for the cinema or the comic strip. At the same time, it will no longer be as subversive, and will fall into the ranks of social conformism; the bourgeoisie no longer fears him but admires and praises him; she got it back. Sanitized. The social order is no longer to be undermined, but to be integrated. The superhero no longer accuses society, but sells sensation. The worker has given way to the bourgeois; the reader to the reader. Vindictiveness has become a feeling. Castor oil is become rose water.

Alexandre Dumas himself announced to us this apostasy. Sparing his final victim, Danglars, Dantès confesses that he has taken himself for God and wants to become a man among men again. He concluded his letter with his famous formula: “All human wisdom will be in these two words: wait and hope! »

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This ultimate humility, this oriental fatalism, is as little credible as the improbable happy outcomes in Molière's comedies. It is a double renunciation, a double fall. Alexandre Dumas abandons his hero and Count of Monte Cristo leaves the camp of the unfortunate to blend into that of the happy rentiers. But you shouldn't trust appearances. This casual reverence is a parable. A mystery within a mystery. A hidden prophecy.

Edmond Dantès was arrested in 1814 while Napoleon was still residing on the island of Elba. The beginning of the novel is full of rumors about his return. The royalists panicked and feared the sudden arrival of the “usurper”. Dantès is arrested under the false pretext of having served as an intermediary between Murat, the fallen Emperor and the Bonapartist networks. When he returned to Paris in 1838, he discovered that the July Monarchy was kind to the converted former servants of the Emperor. They are ministers, bankers, generals, peers of the kingdom. LouisPhilippe undertook a vast enterprise to recover men and imperial glory. In the name of national harmony, he

completed the work on the Arc de Triomphe – which had been interrupted under the Restoration – and repatriated the Emperor's ashes Victor Hugo recounts in Things Views the grandiose spectacle of this last journey to the Invalides, and the popular fervor, in particular of the survivors of the Grande Armée, which nothing stops, neither age, nor the snow, nor the polar breeze who chilled the Parisian atmosphere in December 1840, to spend the night at the foot of their “Petit Tondu”. Victor Hugo also does not fail to describe in detail the striking contrast between this spontaneous popular passion and the

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coldness, disdain, even the discreet sarcastic contempt shown by the ruling classes during the official ceremony.

Like Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas knows this story of the end of the Empire intimately. He is also the son of a revolutionary general who became a Bonapartist, before falling out with the future Emperor. He too is fascinated by the Napoleonic legend. At the beginning of the 1840s, Dumas became friends with Jérôme Bonaparte, ex-king of Westphalia, who was then staying in Florence. He accompanies his son on an Italian journey which takes them to the island of Elba, leaving from Livorno on a small boat. They then want to go to the neighboring island of Monte Cristo, but cannot approach it due to epidemics. Dumas insists on going around it, much to the surprise of the young prince, who asks: “What is the point of going around this islet? » Dumas responds enigmatic: “To give, in memory of this journey that I have the honor of accomplishing with you, the title of The Island of Monte Cristo to some novel that I will write more late. »

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MONTE CRISTO AND NAPOLEON III Alexandre Dumas also visited Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, then imprisoned at Fort Ham for his failed coup attempt; but he will never admit it. The fate of Monte Cristo and that of the future Emperor are mysteriously linked. Both were betrayed and taken prisoner in the name of the glorious Emperor. Both will escape and return to Paris in triumph to take revenge on those who disdained, despised and betrayed them. Both want to be the heralds of the lowly, the low-ranking, the poor. Both will be activists for the “extinction of pauperism”. Both have links with Italian plotters, half thugs, half revolutionary activists, half mafiosi, half Carbonari. Monte Cristo becomes the king of the capital, celebrated by all of Paris who sing and dance. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was elected President of the Republic in 1848, with an overwhelming majority, before becoming Emperor of the French, opening a twenty-year cycle of “imperial celebrations”.

Monte Cristo is Napoleon III and Napoleon III is Monte Cristo. Dumas' book announces the advent of the future Emperor. It adds an extra touch of romance and mystery to an already overloaded Napoleonic legend. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte fled from Fort Ham in 1846, the year The Count of Monte Cristo was published. Fiction and reality mix to an extreme, even disturbing, point. In this work, Fernand became the wealthy Baron de Montcerf as the price for his betrayal of Napoleon at the Battle of Ligny, the day before the Battle of Waterloo.

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In the biography of General Valence, Gabriel de Broglie recounts a meeting between the latter and Wellington in July 1815, a few weeks after Waterloo, while their cars crossed at the corner of rue d'Anjou and Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Valencia asks the Englishman how he dared to advance on Paris while his troops were waiting for him.

Wellington smiled: “From the moment Napoleon abdicated, we received from the Duke of Otranto up to four dispatches a day saying: Arrive. The provisional government guarantees that there will be no fighting, but come along. – And Marshal Soult? Valencia asks. “He had twenty-five millions in the Bank of England,” replied Wellington.

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THE FUNERAL IDEAL OF FRANCE The accounts will never be settled. The Emperor's supporters will never forgive the traitors who abandoned him. Just as the king's supporters will never forgive those who guillotined him. Just as the aristocrats will never forgive the buyers of national goods who despoiled them. Just as the workers will never forgive the bourgeois who exploited them. Just as the Communards will never forgive the people of Versailles who massacred them.

Just as the bourgeois will never forgive the popular front which frightened them. Just as Catholics and socialists will never forgive the Jews for having delivered their country into the hands of finance. As the Jews will never forgive Vichy for having given them to the Germans. As the pieds-noirs will never forgive de Gaulle for having betrayed them by selling out Algeria. As immigrants from Africa will never forgive France for having colonized them. Just like women will never forgive men for unloving them.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a prophetic masterpiece because Alexandre Dumas defines there the fatal ideal which will occupy France for the two centuries to come: the vengeance.

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Victor Hugo

Presumed innocent It's a trick that the slightest person uses and abuses sub-prefecture avocaillon. It is passed down from generation to generation, from courtroom to courtroom, from pleading to pleading. “My client killed, my client tortured, my client stole, but it’s not his fault, Mr. President. He had an unhappy childhood, his father raped him at 5, his mother abandoned him at 3, he was beaten, humiliated, lived in poverty, it was society that made him evil , he was good, we must give him a second chance, we can, we must re-educate him, he is a victim, the real victim, he is sick, he is crazy, the psychiatrist says that he must be treated…”

Lawyers, journalists, murderers, delinquents tirelessly sing this refrain. All the victims also know. They now know that they will be forgotten, evaded, denied, when they will not be ostracized, despised, even ridiculed or insulted. The double punishment.

Whether we are saddened by it or rejoiced by it, it is an irreducible fact that this climate of compassion and victimhood in which France has been immersed for decades, without us clearly distinguishing its sources, whether historical, religious, cultural, sociological, psychological.

However, his father is one of the most famous figures in French History. One of the best-known French people in

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the world too. His surname is an avenue or boulevard of all cities in France. Its formulas are blessing of politicians and students in need of inspiration.

This father of a large family made up of lawyers, journalists, writers, politicians, sociologists, psychologists, communing in the cult of the criminal, is Victor Hugo.

At the mere mention of this name, we must forget and prune the images and memories that flood in: the patriarch with the white beard, the crowd on Avenue d'Eylau for his death, the great old man in the Anglo-Saxon newspapers , the exile from Guernsey, the cake grandfather of When the Child Appears, and the immortal cantor of our past glories, the “Waterloo, Waterloo, bleak plain”. Forget the great lover and the turgid male, Juliette Drouet, the maids and the prostitutes. Forget the legend of the centuries. Forget Quasimodo and Esmeralda. Forget Cosette and the Man Who Laughs.

We have to go back to 1829. Victor Hugo is 27 years old. He is already a controversial poet and playwright. A romantic and royalist young Turk. He has not yet fulfilled the destiny to which he has dedicated himself: “To be Chateaubriand or nothing.” » That year, he published The Last Day of a Convict. This book is neither a novel, nor a poem, nor a play. It is well known to today's children, almost all of whom study it in college. The author speaks in the first person. He is a condemned man who confides a few hours before his execution: his fear of dying, his anxiety about the guillotine, his sadness at leaving life. The reader quickly develops sympathy for

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this cultivated, sensitive assassin, who knows Latin; and is touched when thinking of his adorable “little girl of three years old, sweet, pink, frail, with large black eyes and long brown hair”. The condemned man resembles Victor Hugo like a brother: his daughter is Léopoldine's age; he even has childhood memories of the Feuillantines garden. Nothing is known about the crime he committed. We don't know anything about his victim either. We know nothing about the trial, the testimony, the pleadings. Victor Hugo implemented the famous recommendation of JeanJacques Rousseau at the opening of the Social Contract : “Let us first get rid of all the facts. » He is not in justice, he is not in good and evil, in the just and the unjust, he is in emotion and compassion, the only compassion for the criminal. The crime and its victim are erased, obscured. Annihilated. The process is extremely effective: the author forbids us from

look into the faults of his hero; to compare his sentence to his crimes; to reflect, reason, rationalize, gauge, judge. To punish. Condemn. He disarmed all our defenses against unilateral compassion. The victim is doubly victimized, of murder and of the denial of compassion, while the murderer is crowned as the only victim worthy of interest.

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PUTTING THE DEATH PENALTY TO DEATH This reversal of perspective serves a single objective: putting an end to the death penalty. Make it illegitimate. In his preface of 1832, Victor Hugo openly admits that his book is “nothing other than a plea, direct or indirect, as you wish, for the abolition of the penalty of dead ". The Last Day of a Convict is a work of propaganda which places the literary genius of one of the greatest French writers at the service of an unprecedented enterprise of subversion. Victor Hugo is fully aware of this: he writes that “if the future one day awarded him the glory [of having delegitimized the death penalty through his book] he would not want any other crown”. He wishes, he adds, "to give his ax and widen as best he can the gash that Beccaria made, seventy years ago, in the old gallows erected for so many centuries over Christendom."

Victor Hugo is for once too modest. Following in the footsteps of the great Italian jurist of the 18th century and his Dei delitti e delle pene, published in Livorno in 1764, the first text in European history to call into question the principle of the death penalty, he conceals the audacity of his transgression. Because Beccaria himself foresees, in certain extreme cases, that the death penalty could remain. Apart from Beccaria, all the great authors of the Enlightenment defended the death penalty: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau.

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Victor Hugo is the first absolute abolitionist in History. Its slogan has the merit of simplicity which speaks to the imagination: “No executioner where the jailer is enough. »

Victor Hugo ended up winning. He never doubted it: “Besides, make no mistake, this question of the death penalty is maturing every day. Before long, society as a whole will solve it like us. » However, it took nearly one hundred and fifty years to enshrine his victory in law in France. One hundred and fifty years of controversies, invectives, anathemas. One hundred and fifty years to convince a majority of French people who will never be convinced. The socialist Minister of Justice who fulfilled Hugo's dream in 1981, the lawyer Robert Badinter, readily recognized that the abolition of the death penalty was contrary to "the general feeling of the French". But the intellectuals, the media, and all the progressive elites, nevertheless careful heralds of sacrosanct respect for democratic rules, will weave crowns to President Mitterrand, who had dared, in the middle of the electoral campaign, to assume his convictions, despite the majority hostility People.

This is because the abolitionists place their fight beyond democratic laws, in an empyrean which is more mystical than political. It is at this sacred height that Victor Hugo immediately placed his fight: he knows “no higher, holier, more august goal than this: to contribute to the abolition of the death penalty”. And promises, like a biblical prophet, that once the horrible punishment is removed "the sweet law of Christ will finally penetrate the

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encodes and will radiate through. We will look at crime as an illness, and this illness will have its doctors who will replace your judges, your hospitals who will replace your prisons […]. We will treat with charity this evil that we treated with anger. It will be simple and sublime. The cross substituted for the gibbet. That is all ".

In a short but brilliant text, entitled Hugo loved assassins, the jurist Jean-Louis Harouel links the poet's fight to all the millenarian temptations of past centuries, these heresies, regularly condemned by the Church, which wanted to divert Christianity towards the establishment of the reign on Earth of the law of Christ. However, Jesus had refused this role in advance with his famous phrase: “My kingdom is not of this world. » Secularized after the French Revolution, these millennialisms are the matrices of “secular religions” which, from socialism to communism, including fascism and Nazism, will promise happiness on Earth for a thousand years. For his part, Philippe Muray, in his book The 19th Century Through the Ages, vividly demonstrates the close links between socialism and occultism, recalling that Victor Hugo often turned the tables, to converse with Napoleon, Chateaubriand or Robespierre.

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THE TRUE AND REPUGNANT FACE OF CRIME Victor Hugo's plan is beyond human. The poet resides in clouds where we, mediocre rational beings, do not have the honor of being admitted. The abolition of the death penalty itself is in reality only a means at the service of a regenerated humanity. The evil that Christianity places in man, Victor Hugo places in society. This man was “pure” before killing, he tells us. “And yet, miserable laws and miserable men, I was not bad,” cries the condemned man. All his peers, from the pickpocket to the serial murderer, are thus touched by Hugo's grace: “Poor devils who hunger drives to theft, and theft to the rest; disinherited children of a stepmotherly society, taken to prison at twelve, the penal colony at eighteen, the scaffold at forty; unfortunate people who with a school and a workshop you could have made good, moral, useful. » However, those who have worked with or studied criminals are more reserved. In his Essays on the World of Crime, the Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, who lived alongside the worst underworld in Stalinist penitentiaries, laments: “Fictional literature has always represented the world of criminals with sympathy and sometimes complacency … The artists were unable to discern the true and repugnant face of this universe… Victor Hugo saw the world of crime as protesting against the hypocrisy of the reigning order. » Our poet describes to us a condemned man haunted by the guillotine, a psychology that the specialists who have approached

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death row inmates deny. The sociologist Raymond Boudon explained, in his book Why Intellectuals Don't Like Liberalism, that crime is not the mechanical result of social determinism: “Most people born into a criminogenic environment never commit any crime. crime nor misdemeanor… the causalist interpretation of delinquency is unacceptable. »

Victor Hugo doesn't care. His death row prisoner is, moreover, a refined bourgeois, not a poor wretch. Whatever their social class of origin, a criminal is necessarily a victim. For him it is a religious belief: society is alone to blame. The society of honest people. It is order that is disorder, and disorder that is love. Robert Badinter, as a good disciple, will not say anything else: “I don't feel deep down on the side of honest people, of victims. » Recounting one of his most famous cases, where he was unable to save his clients from the guillotine, Buffet and Bontemps in 1972, the lawyer describes the assize trial as a “hunt” and the assassins as “game that 'we force'. Only one thing matters to him: “Saving the assassin whose defense he is defending.” » An assassin who in his eyes is the only victim. Victim of justice and society. Victim, victim, victim. Victim who must be saved, who must be treated, who must be reeducated. Victim to be loved. Badinter is indeed Hugo's heir. Charles Péguy will not be mistaken: “Hugo loved assassins, that’s a fact. […] It must be said, he had a particular predilection for assassins. They are everywhere in his work at secret points of competence. At points of complacency... This great predilection for assassins is still Hugo's great innocence. His gross ignorance. Good and maybe especially bad. »

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This fascination with assassins is one of the common threads of his work. In Les Misérables, he exalts the figure of the escaped convict Jean Valjean, adorned with all the virtues, and paints the representative of the order, Commissioner Chabert, in the darkest colors. His masterpiece was to be called Les Misères. All those who call for our compassion, the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, even the worst criminals, are sanctified there. It is in this novel that we find the famous apostrophe, which has become the motto of all progressives: “A school that we open is a prison that we close. » The criminal is a victim of society, guilty of not having educated him or not having provided him with w

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THE SAME OBJECTIVE AS ROBESPIERRE Victor Hugo forged the absolute weapon, the weapon of mass destruction: compassion. The love he has for all assassins, and beyond that for all deviants, will shake to its foundations a French society already shaken by the Revolution. Hugo ultimately pursues the same objective as Robespierre: the creation of a regenerated humanity. What “the Incorruptible” tried to achieve with the guillotine, the brilliant poet accomplished through love.

In his Victor Hugo, Barbey d'Aurevilly gauges with rare lucidity the intention of the author of Les Misérables : "The The purpose of the book is to blow up all social institutions, one after the other, with something stronger than gunpowder, which blows up mountains – with tears and pity… Its audience, this are women and young people... It is for all these hearts, impetuously or tenderly sensitive, that he has combined the effects of a book arranged to always prove right to the being that society punishes against the society that punishes. »

Les Miserables, or the triumph of the lawyer over the public prosecutor, of sentimentality over common sense. Victor Hugo builds the sublime on the false. His falsehood becomes reality. Victor Hugo and all the writers who imitated him not only perverted the minds of young people, by presenting them with a mythologized and fallacious image of the underworld, but above all disarmed society in the face of their actions. By making the death penalty illegitimate, Victor Hugo and his followers made all

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sanction. By making criminals the victims, they have made the victims criminals, since deep down they are the unwilling representatives of this hated society. This “accusatory inversion” fuels the destructuring of modern societies and the savagery of delinquent youth who have made the “culture of excuses” second nature.

Victor Hugo meant no harm. He is a Balzac who displays his “big heart”, when Balzac hid his. He is, as Léon Daudet says, “the man who cannot fade away, who cannot go away, who remains attached to his metaphors by the I and by the me”. His mistress Juliette Drouet was an actress. She made him a great poet in representation before the universe. He allowed himself to be done with rare complacency. He had excuses. He lost or saw his four children sink into dementia. His wife cheated on him with SainteBeuve, who couldn't help but proclaim it all over Paris. To hide his suffering, Victor Hugo, in his drinking evenings, affirmed that it was the characteristic of great men: Napoleon had also been deceived by Joséphine. In the photos we have left of him, he always has his hand in his vest like his illustrious model. He wants to be Napoleon and Chateaubriand at the same time. He did not choose his place of exile at random: Guernsey is a mixture of Saint Helena and Grand Bé.

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A ROMANTIC BAROQUE AND BARBARIAN His failing was to want to amaze. He believed that it was more beautiful to let go of all his intuitions and impulses than to order them. Victor Hugo is a brilliant poet and a great lyricist. His words spring forth, luminous and powerful, under the influence of emotion. He confuses the extraordinary and the sublime, the monstrous and the admirable. Victor Hugo is a little-known baroque author. It was with its baroque that it seduced the crowds, who immediately took it for the sublime. His romanticism of the criminal is above all a romanticism. As Leon says Daudet with rare sagacity: “All romanticism comes from this confusion of the baroque and the sublime… This baroque literature corresponded to a baroque politics. All political and literary errors result in barbarism. What, in short, is barbarism? It is the extension of mental confusion. The glorification of instinct, and the false rule of the heart taking precedence over reason. »

It would take a century, and two world wars, for the Hugolian mystique to end in politics. The 1945 Juvenile Delinquency Ordinance prioritizes education over punishment. From the 1960s, young far-left magistrates united within the Magistrates' Union promised to judge not according to the law, but according to their consciences. Justice will be subversive or it will not be. This is the famous “Baudot harangue”, which was distributed to students at the National School of Magistrates, during the 1970s: “Be partial… to maintain the balance between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor , who does not

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don't weigh the same, you need to lean it a little to one side. It’s the Capetian tradition […]. Have a favorable bias for the wife against the husband, for the child against the father, for the debtor against the crusher's insurance company, for the sick against Social Security, for the thief against the police, for the litigant against justice. »

Many of them will keep their word. To the great dismay of the police and the victims, our “red judges” will imprison notaries and ministers, but will release illegal immigrants and repeat offenders. Our great left-wing consciences claim that prison is criminogenic; that we must do everything to avoid it. We are increasing the number of alternative sentences and sentence reductions. We refuse to build new prisons. The priority objective of our penal policy is the re-education of prisoners. We brag about the Hugolian formula about schools and prisons. Our schools have never been more numerous, but many have become the learning places for crime. From drug trafficking, some move on to organized crime, others to jihadism. After stealing, they kill, they slaughter, they massacre in the name of God. The reaction of our politicians, our media and our intellectuals is always the same: he is a madman who must be treated; a psychopath who must be locked up in a psychiatric asylum; a victim of our racist and colonialist society.

We live in the world dreamed of by Victor Hugo. The one of candles that respond to knives. “You will not have my hatred” which responds to “ Allahu akbar ”. The Christlike dream of the brilliant poet has become our nightmare.

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In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo makes the revolutionary student Enjolras say: “Citizens, the 19th century is great, but the 20th will be happy. » After the two world wars, the mass massacres, the genocides, the totalitarian dictatorships, the heirs of the great man amended and renewed the Hugolian prophecy: the 20th century was horrible , they say, but the 21st will be happy.

Let us have no doubt: the worst will come.

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Rothschild

“Are you Jewish, Jacob? » Nucingen is him. Balzac took everything from him: his title of baron, his colossal fortune, his unscrupulous cynicism, his wolflike rapacity, his international financial ramifications, his political influence; and his German accent which makes his slightest remarks grotesque, even the most austere or the most tender.

Nucingen is Baron James de Rothschild. One of the rare times, perhaps the only one, where the name of the model taken from reality is more famous than that of the character forged by the Balzacian genius.

However, it was not the first time that bankers had become so powerful that they could not resist the temptation to put political power under control. It was not the first time that “court Jews” made their fortune by providing the armies with their most precious assets, supplies and money, as we had seen during the Thirty Years' War, between 1618 and 1648.

It was not the first time that the “court Jews” consolidated absolutist powers. During the 17th and 18th centuries, they were the businessmen of despots

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Europeans and allowed them to build modern nationstates, without going under the caudine forks of the Assemblies of nobles and bourgeois. The Jews thus became the focal point in the battle between the governments and the Assemblies.

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FROM WANDERING JEW TO POWERFUL JEW Modern anti-Semitism was born from this attempt

long delayed from fighting against royal arbitrariness. The men of the Enlightenment despised the Jews. They saw them as survivors of the Middle Ages. Their only defenders were then conservative authors, such as Joseph de Maistre, who in Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg denounced hostility to the Jews, “one of the favorite theses of the 18th century”.

The Jews owned neither state nor territory; they became the symbol of the European “system”. In the article “Jew” in the Encyclopédie, written by Diderot, we could read: “They are like dowels and nails that are used in a large building, and which are necessary to join all the parts. » Old, very old story. Henri Pirenne recounts that already under Charlemagne, Jewish traders were the only ones authorized to break down the “wall” between the Western Empire, Christian, and the Eastern Empire, Islamized by the soldiers of Mohammed.

The Jews were for a long time the safest element in society, since they were not really part of it. They served the absolutist states which protected them. They were instinctively with the monarch, and distrustful of the plebs. Jews were always conservative in the France of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire.

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The Rothschilds have the formidable privilege of symbolically embodying this long and eventful history. They are both all Jews and all bankers, and all Jewish bankers. They are the Middle Ages and modernity. They are ostentatious wealth and occult power. They are the family folded into its endogamous enclosure, where the men marry their cousins or their nieces, and the allpowerful free individual. They are linked to the nation-state and cosmopolitan Europe. They are reaction and progress. They are the products of war and the archangels of peace.

Both “bankers of the whole world” and “kings of the Jews”, the Rothschilds are the richest family of the 19th century. More than a name: an emblem, a legend, black and gold at the same time, a myth. The name Rothschild comes from this red crest which lit the house that a family of small traders and pawnbrokers from Frankfurt, the Amschel Mayers, had acquired at the end of the 16th century, in Judengasse, the street of the Jews. In Frankfurt, Jews made up 10% of the population and had never been expelled, even in the Middle Ages.

His close relations with the Landgrave of Frankfurt, himself related to the King of England, gradually made Amschel Mayer the main banker of the European Coalition fighting against Napoleon. Between 1811 and 1815, half of English subsidies to the continental powers of the Coalition passed into the hands of the Rothschilds. They quite naturally become the high treasury of the Holy Alliance, which brings together the victors of Imperial France, English, Austrians, Prussians and Russians. The Rothschilds have

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now established in each of the major European capitals: Nathan is in London, Jacob in Paris, Salomon in Vienna, Charles in Naples; only Amschel remained in Frankfurt with his father.

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THE REAL WINNER OF NAPOLEON Jacob arrived in Paris in 1811, under the Empire. He is the youngest son of the siblings. After Waterloo, in 1815, his house, Messieurs de Rothschild brothers, became the most important in the place. In 1825, his fortune was estimated at thirty-seven million francs, when the capital of the Bank of France was barely sixty. He even acquired the castle of Ferrières, home of Fouché. The revolution of 1830 will hardly harm its interests; he already managed the private fortune of Louis-Philippe. He took part in all state bond issues during the eighteen years of the reign. The custom then was for each bidding banker to make an offer; the highest bidder, after opening the sealed envelopes, acquired the titles and resold them to the public. In 1823, Rothschild took out a loan of twenty-three million at 5% annuity against his colleagues Laffite and Lapanouze. But before submitting his final submission, he made a detour to the office of Villèle, Minister of Finance of Louis XVIII...

This is because Rothschild is not a banker like the others. He is a symbol, a representative, an ambassador: the symbol of the return of kings after twenty-five years of revolutionary “disorder” and imperial “usurpation”; the representative of the peaceful order established by the Congress of Vienna; the ambassador to Paris of the English master. The Frankfurt siblings made their fortune supporting the fight against Napoleon. The Emperor had everything to displease them: he refused all debt and despised war suppliers.

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The British Prime Minister, Disraeli, will never miss an opportunity to pay tribute to the “real” victors of the French Emperor. All of Paris knows the story of the famous “Rothschild couriers”; some even speak of carrier pigeons which on the evening of the Battle of Waterloo will inform them of the defeat of Napoleon, even though all of Europe is still convinced that the French armies are victorious, thus allowing the Rothschilds to buy at the fall of the British “paper”, which will soon rise again in the euphoria of the finally confirmed victory of the Anglo-Prussian armies.

The family's German origins and its privileged links with England also recall and summarize the fatal alliance between Wellington and Blücher. Their defense of European peace is seen by French patriots as maintaining the status quo resulting from the Congress of Vienna, which consecrates the degradation of France and British hegemony, what they call with horror the "halt in the mud ". As if to vividly mark his Anglomania, after Waterloo, Jacob Amschel took James de Rothschild as his surname.

It is rumored that he abandoned Charles X when the latter irritated England by seizing Algeria. We do not forget the long-standing links with the “perfidious Albion” of Louis-Philippe who already wrote in 1808: “I am a French prince, and yet I am English first and foremost and out of necessity, because no one only I know that England is the only power that is willing and able to protect me. I know this by principle, by opinion and by all my habits. »

James de Rothschild is the eye of London in Paris: “I know all the ministers, he boasts to Madame de

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Nesselrode, I see them daily and as soon as I realize that the course they are following is contrary to the interests of the government, I go to the king whom I see whenever I want... As he knows that I have a lot to lose and I only want peace, he has complete confidence in me, listens to me and takes into account what I tell him. »

In 1840, Adolphe Thiers, president of the Council of Louis-Philippe, attempted to overturn the order of the Congress of Vienna. He arms on the Rhine, to tear away this left bank of the river which the English had given to Prussia. The tone is rising between Paris and Berlin. London is worried, Rothschild is intriguing. In the name of peace, of course. Thiers is dismissed as a servant. “He was carried away by his stupid national pride,” comments James de Rothschild, laconic.

Modern anti-Semitism has found its preferred target and its path of expansion. He will recruit with full force from atheist, revolutionary, sans-culottes, anticlerical and republican circles. A certain Montmartre spirit then hums an “ anti-Jewish Marseillaise ”. Toussenel, the author of the famous The Jewish Kings of the Time, makes a virulent attack against the Rothschilds and financial feudalism. For him, the term "Jews" includes the English and the Protestants: "The French people, supposedly liberated by the revolution of 89 from the yoke of noble feudalism, have only changed masters... Jew, usurer, trafficker are for me synonyms... Who says Jew, says Protestant, know that. »

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PATRIOTIC ANTISEMITISM AND ANGLOPHOBE Jews and Protestants have been put from the start in the same bag as the enemies of France, and in the same bag of capitalist modernity. Protestants are elected officials without an elected people, who, like the Jews, have the worship of the sacred book. As the German writer Henri Heine said with humor: “A Scottish Protestant is a Jew who eats pork. »

Socialists and Republicans share a patriotic and Anglophobic anti-Semitism. Toussenel will impregnate Proudhon: “By iron or by fire, the Jew must disappear… Hatred of both the Jew and the English must be an article of our political faith. » And the be the 1 is vibrant cantor of the Revolution and the homeland, the great Michelet himself, says nothing else in his work entitled The People : “The Jews have a homeland, the London Stock Exchange; they act everywhere, but their root is in the land of gold. » This theme would continue throughout the 19th century. Clovis Hugues, first socialist deputy of the Third Republic, in 1881, celebrated Napoleon thus: “He was an Aryan, a soldier, and a son of France: he was not a German Jew! He didn't arrive from Frankfurt. »

The confrontation between the Rothschilds and Napoleon is one of the major, although often disdained, matrices of the 19th century. If old Amschel decided to internationalize his house, sending his sons to settle in the main

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capitals of Europe, it is above all to respond to the challenge launched by the emancipation of the Jews, proclaimed by the French Revolution and implemented by Napoleon. The Emperor had in fact ordered: “The Sanhedrin will establish this principle: the French and the Jews are brothers… the Jews must consider, as if they were in Jerusalem, all the places where they are citizens… The Jews must defend France as if they were defending Jerusalem. I wish to take all means so that the rights which have been restored to the Jewish people are not illusory, and to make them find Jerusalem in France. »

In all the countries where the Grande Armée passes, it opens the ghettos and transforms its inhabitants into “citizens”. By making Jews citizens of their respective countries, emancipation destroyed their European position and its advantages. The Rothschilds risk losing their domination over national Jewish communities who will now prefer religious and “tribal” solidarity to that of their fellow citizens within their chosen nation. The Rothschilds built a system of remarkable efficiency around a single firm present in all the major European capitals, which remains in close and constant contact with all the Jewish communities on the continent. As Hannah Arendt notes, with cruel finesse, in her book On Anti-Semitism : “No propaganda could have created a more politically effective symbol than such a reality. »

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THE BANK AGAINST FRANCE The economic development of France and the sociological structure of its working classes will accentuate this French specificity. The industrial backwardness that our country was experiencing gave bankers an even greater place than among its neighbors. The petty bourgeoisie, unaccustomed to credit, sees bankers as simple parasites and moneylenders. The pre-capitalist, Proudhonian and anti-Marxist socialist currents are powerful. They rely on a proletariat made up of artisans and small traders, who will experience their swan song during the Commune. There is no working class worthy of the name in France, unlike England or Germany, because there is no French industry, or very little; there is therefore no class struggle. English or German workers were hardly affected, at this time, by antiSemitism; their class adversary is the boss or the bourgeois, not the Jew. The French proletarians are patriots, not internationalists; they wrongly take the Jewish banker for the central character of the capitalist system. Their anticapitalism is archaic, far from the intellectual constructions of Marx and Engels, who have before their eyes the English working class enslaved to the machine and the bosses.

Jews are neither bourgeois, nor peasants, nor workers. Rich Jews like the Rothschilds are not yet part of the bourgeoisie. They are defined as Jews, not as a social class.

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From then on, any social category which has a conflict with the State immediately becomes anti-Semitic. Rich Jews stay away from key positions of capitalism. The Rothschilds, exclusively occupied with the issuance of state funds and the international movement of capital and currencies, hardly sought to create large companies. James gets drawn into railway financing for a while by the Pereire brothers; but the rivalry between Jewish bankers will soon become fierce... The Pereires are, however, former employees of the Rothschilds. By founding Crédit Mobilier, they appealed to the nation's savings. For the first time, bankers, even the richest, are no match. Napoleon III was seduced by this project of “democratic capitalism”, he who dreamed of eradicating the poverty of the people through the development of industry. But James de Rothschild has resources. He worries the imperial entourage about the inflation that the massive bond issues of Crédit Mobilier risk causing; they are immediately prohibited.

James de Rothschild fights the Pereire brothers in France, and in Austria too. In 1867, the financial crisis led them to bankruptcy. Final battle and final triumph, before his death the following year. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory. The progressive Saint-Simonian elite accuses, not without reason, the Rothschilds of maintaining the French bank in its speculative and Malthusian routine. The presence of his son Alphonse at the Banque de France proves that the Rothschild family will indeed continue its fight from the inside against the establishment of solid state credit. This same Alphonse also sets up an investment bank, the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, a consortium of high banking houses, which reserves the profits of

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industrial investment operations in the small world of big financiers. In 1882, the bankruptcy of the General Union, which ruined thousands of modest savers, was judged by observers, and especially its victims, as a new aggression by the Rothschilds, of the Jewish bank against the Catholic bank, of the high elitist and cosmopolitan banking against democratic and national banking; even if the real objective of the maneuver was above all to sink other rival Jewish banks and to destabilize the Republican leader, Gambetta.

The Rothschilds make their case worse: they are doubly the “foreign party”, the one which financed the wars of our enemies against the Emperor and the one which prevents the national economy from catching up. The identification of the Rothschilds with all Jews is more natural than ever. All Jews are lumped in with the big bankers, the incarnation of parasitic capitalism favoring foreign interests, James, like his brothers throughout Europe, never having agreed to relax his ostensible control. on “community”. Jews, whether rich or poor, submit, willingly or unwillingly, to this “Judaism of the notables” which took over from the old system of “court Jews”. Proudhon could say without being contradicted: “The Jew is by temperament anti-producer, neither a farmer nor an industrialist, not really a trader. » A few years later, a Boulangist profession of faith took up this same theme with even more vigor: “War! To the idlers, to the parasites, who live off society without serving it! War against the hoarders, the Semites, the Catholics, Protestants or Jews, who speculate without producing. War on cosmopolitan financiers, on gallophobic foreigners! »

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These vindictive reactions are a reflection of the transformations tellurics experienced in the 19th century. Industrialization and urbanization followed democratization to profoundly disrupt the oldest habits and situations. The peasant becomes a city dweller just as the subject has become a citizen. Farmers and soldiers are being pushed aside in favor of new professions, journalism, law, finance, medicine. This is what the Russian-American writer Yuri Slezkine will call in his book The Jewish Century the revenge of the nomads on the sedentary, of the men of money on the men of war, of the speculators on the producers. What he will conceptualize in the opposition of the “Mercurians” against the “Apollonians”. Since the Middle Ages, Jews have been the “mercurians” of Europe, from peddlers to pawnbrokers, professions both despised and indispensable. The Jew did not invent modernity. It missed the founding stages, whether the scientific revolution or the industrial revolution. But he seems to adapt to it better than anyone. All “Apollonians” are ordered to become “Mercurians”; all Christians, to become Jews.

Clemenceau joked about it with his inimitable gift of the formula: “There are two kinds of Jews, speculators and speculatives. » Others will use the prophetic formula, like Nietzsche: “The Jew is the revenge of the slave on the warrior. » Finally, others will use historical emphasis, like the Saint-Simonian Prosper Enfantin, in the Globe newspaper : “There was a time when the big questions were called “freedom of the press”, “individual freedom”; at another time, they were called Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram and Marengo, at others it was around Jansenius, Luther,

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Calvin that superior minds fluttered, today it is near Rothschild and Isaac Pereire that we must fly, and on the rails that we must walk if we really want to get involved in the great affairs of the world. »

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EVERYONE MUST BECOME A JEW Everything is head over heels! Everything that was sacred has become contemptible; everything that was despised has become sacred. Everyone must become Jewish. Nationalism itself tends to transform each nation into a Jewish people: all people are elected, all lands are promised, all capitals are Jerusalem.

France was the political paradise of the Jews, the first to have made them citizens. Full of their joy at having become French like the others, they will make enormous efforts to assimilate, to acquire French culture and to imbibe French morals, French customs, the love of French land, without realizing that the very success of assimilation became an obstacle to assimilation: the more Jews excelled at being modern and secular, the more modernity and secularism were now perceived as Jewish characteristics.

In his diary, Maurice Barrès noted sarcastically: “Degas having received a visit from Robert said: “How he loves art!” We can say of the Jews: “How they love France.” What more decisive way to mark than they are outside. »

Enough to make even the most measured minds feverish. Their incredible successes turn some of the best Jewish heads. The modern cult of individual success revives the very ancient biblical flame of the chosen people. But these minds, for the most part de-Judaized, only forget that the election and the messianic hope are linked to the divine plan of redemption of

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humanity. These exceptional Jews are too enlightened to still believe in God, but they remain proud enough to believe in themselves.

These modern and emancipated Jews oscillate alternately between a heroic or victimized vision of their destiny. centuries-old history, without realizing that these two views in truth only prolong the ancient myth of the chosen people. Jews and anti-Semites paradoxically commune in a fabricated story that suits them all, of a long and uninterrupted series of persecutions, unduly uniting Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism, and making the Jew the archetype of the scapegoat. A victim narrative to conceal the fact that community withdrawal, based on religious prescriptions and the concern to perpetuate a minority without a state or territory, was in reality inspired by the Jews themselves, from the 15th century onwards . The anti-Semites are outdoing it because they can thus suggest that the Jews were never accepted and that ancient France only knew its hours of past glory by keeping these foreigners by nature at bay. This “national novel of anti-Semitism” is fallacious and dangerous; but its accreditation by both camps ensures its success. Hannah Arendt again: “The scapegoat theory is one of many theories whose raison d'être is to escape from real problems. »

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EVERYTHING IS RACE

All of Europe is affected by this modern upheaval of mentalities. The same scientific discoveries, the same technological innovations, the same progressive ideologies, the same philosophical daring, the same political slogans spread like wildfire from London to Paris, from Paris to Vienna, from Vienna to Berlin and from Berlin in St. Petersburg. A man will embody and theorize for all of Europe this effervescence of “Jewish chauvinism”: Benjamin Disraeli. Having become Prime Minister of Queen Victoria, whom he consecrated Empress of India, Disraeli made his exceptional personal story the quintessence of the destiny of the Jews in modern Europe. Both chosen and rejected by the British gentry for his Jewish eccentricity, Disraeli pits “the pride of a race against the pride of a caste”; he is the first to describe himself as “the chosen one among the chosen race”. “Everything is race: there is no other truth. Race is the key to history,” writes His Gracious Majesty’s Prime Minister, a “pure and perfectly organized race. The Semitic element represents the whole spirituality of our nature... There is at present no race... which pleases, fascinates, elevates and ennobles Europe as much as the Jews do. » Others in the 20th century will remember the effectiveness of racial theories in combating feelings of social inferiority. Still others will know turn against them this vision that the Jews had of themselves of a large family united by blood ties.

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In a note dating from 1919, the young Adolf Hitler remarks: “Lord Disraeli is the one who formulated the fundamental law of race, as the key to history. » And in the program of the Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage of the Nazis in Berlin, we can read that this Institute for the study of the Jewish question “wants to be at the service of the living idea that a Jew, and the one of the greatest of all time, himself formulated it thus: “All is race.” Everything is race.”

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FAUBOURG SAINT-GERMAIN EXHIBITIONS The star of the Rothschilds faded, at the end of the Second Empire, in favor of that of Henri Germain, boss of Crédit Lyonnais, who rose to the firmament. They are not far from losing their power over the state and over other Jews. At the advent of the Third Republic, they entered into opposition to the regime for the first time in their history; entered the reactionary and anti-Semitic salons of the aristocracy of Faubourg Saint-Germain; approached Arthur Meyer, the director of Le Gaulois, a converted Jew, who would be one of the most virulent anti-Dreyfusards. The lack of enthusiasm of the Rothschilds themselves did not escape Clemenceau, who quipped ironically in an article published in the newspaper Le Spectacle du jour : “If Dreyfus is found innocent, they will not spit in his face. But from there to lifting a finger for justice and truth, there is an abyss. »

The Rothschilds no longer control their image or their destiny. However, they continue to embody democratic modernity, for the monarchist right as for the socialist left. At a time when religious beliefs are weakening, the need for “secular religions” is felt and “grand narratives” are multiplying, whether socialism or antiSemitism.

Tocqueville taught us that the aristocrats were attacked at a time when their power had been radically eroded by monarchical centralization. The splendor of their existence then appeared like an exorbitant privilege; wealth without function had become intolerable. Likewise,

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the Dreyfus affair broke out while the Jews and the Rothschilds were much less powerful than under the Second Empire. Like aristocrats, they are criticized for the importance they attach to family and heredity. Like the aristocrats, they are European and national elements that we mistrust. Both identified with power and withdrawn into the family circle, they are suspected of working towards the destruction of all social structures. Yet modern individualism and unbelief have begun to do their destructive work among them as well.

Young Marx's text on “The Jewish Question” foreshadowed the revolt of new generations, who were all the more attracted to the revolutionary left because their banker fathers had never entered into open class conflict with workers. These rebellious intellectuals lacked the class consciousness that a son of a bourgeois family naturally possessed. But “its history has poorly prepared the Jewish people for discernment and political capacity; it is the story of a people without government, without country and without language 1

».

After the war of 1914-1918 had brutalized the European peoples in an unprecedented way, the 20th century would give a disproportionate impact to everything that had been in the making in the previous century. The decline of the state apparatus, under the decadent Republic of the interwar period, ultimately caused the disintegration of Jewish society, so long

linked to it. Jews find themselves, not without reason, accused both of pulling the strings at the London or New York Stock Exchange and of wande in the streets of Moscow and Berlin, the Bolshevik knife between their teeth. Without forgetting the small Polish traders, the Russian doctors, the cosmopolitan artists and writers,

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who compete with their disconcerted and often overwhelmed French counterparts.

The “Jewish century” is turning against the Jews, just as the Christian Verus Israel of Saint Louis had once turned against the Jews of the 13th century. The Rothschilds will never again regain the splendor they had in James's time. However, they will remain the standard surname of Jewish destiny, for anti-Semites, but also for Jews themselves.

Strange fortune of a name that has become legend…

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1. Hannah Arendt, On anti-Semitism, Calmann-Lévy, 1973 (1951).

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Chambord

Primary colors The trap was set in tricolor. A little blue and red, a lot of white. Or a little white, a hint of blue, a lot of red. Paltry color quarrels that would change the face of France and the world. Quarrels over standards to serve as a screen for power struggles, money questions, diplomatic and geostrategic issues. Flag quarrels that we always tell partially and partially. Invariably to the detriment of the same. It is well known that History is written by the victors and the Count of Chambord is one of the great losers. No wonder that he comes out ridiculed from the national novel of the Republicans and that he is completely removed from the remarkable summary that remains for us.

Yet he had everything going for him. He ruined everything over a piece of fabric. They say. For over a century. As if we had wanted to veil a too heavy family secret with the tricolor.

Claude Mauriac reports in Le Temps immobile a conversation he had with General de Gaulle in Colombey, in August 1946. De Gaulle has just left power and Mauriac questions him about his possible return: “You see, replies de Gaulle, to the great surprise of his interlocutor, I think a lot of the Count of Chambord. I think of the real reasons

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of his refusal. Because the story of the white flag is naturally only a pretext. Well, I know this reason: it was that he no longer had confidence in France, that he knew that he could do nothing about France, that he preferred to see the monarchy dead once and for all. all and without having to participate in this decadence. The king could not accept the Treaty of Frankfurt. If the Count of Chambord had signed, he would have had to immediately prepare for revenge; he could not reign without that. However, the country did not want revenge and it had a presentiment of it, the country especially did not want to make the necessary effort. » And de Gaulle asks in conclusion: “What the Count of Chambord refused to be, is that really what you want me to be? »

The General's melancholy musings were not of great republican orthodoxy. He did not draw on the sources of the “national novel” still taught by the school of his childhood; he drew more on his youthful readings, his admiration for Jacques Bainville, the historian of Action Française, or the memories of his family. Today, it seems that the General is giving credence to “conspiracy” theories. Which at least deserves to delve precisely into the facts, into the smallest details, and to observe behind the curtain, even when it is draped in the tricolor.

On September 4, 1870, the Republic was proclaimed on the balcony of the Paris City Hall, upon the announcement of the defeat of the French armies at Sedan. Emperor Napoleon III is a prisoner of the Prussians, and Gambetta writes a new page in these “days” which made the Republic. The Republicans will never lose this lead again, even

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when their adversaries believe they have achieved their goal: the restoration of the monarchy.

Chambord resides at Frohsdorf Castle, Austria. Although in exile, the grandson of Charles X follows a royal etiquette there. He has not given up on returning to France. He too was proclaimed on a balcony, that of the Château de Rambouillet, while his family was fleeing Paris covered by barricades. He never abdicated nor ceased to consider himself the only king of France: Henry V. Was he not nicknamed "the Child of the Miracle", because his birth followed the death of his father , the Duke of Berry, assassinated by a republican who wanted to put an end to the dynasty? In his family, the question of legitimacy does not arise. In 1814, Louis XVIII was informed of the arrival of allied troops in Paris, telling him: “Sire, you are king of France”; Louis XVIII retorts: “Have I ever ceased to be? »

The hasty proclamation of the Republic suits the Count of Chambord. In any case, he is convinced of it. The Republic will have to negotiate the consequences of military defeat with the formidable Bismarck. The suitor has no desire to enter the "foreign vans", as his great-uncle, twice, had to resign himself to in 1814 and 1815. Contrary to what generations of revolutionaries, we have a patriotic fiber in the family. While the English ambassador overwhelmed him with protests, because France was preparing to conquer Algiers in 1830, Baron d'Haussez, Charles to your master that I don't care! »

The count is convinced that this proud patriotism undoubtedly cost his grandfather his throne; but he doesn't mean to

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deny. He cannot agree to carve up France from Alsace and Lorraine. This is the first paradox of the pretender: his supporters are for peace, while he only dreams of revenge; it is his republican adversaries who push, with Gambetta, the last fires of the “war to the limit”; and the country shows, by electing a monarchist assembly, that it is pacifist; that he's not ready for a rematch.

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WHITE IS NOT SO MUCH THE FLAG OF THE MONARCHY THAT THIS OF RESTORATION Chambord then has no particular prevention against the tricolor. Those close to him often heard him say: “Whatever color the flag is, I will kiss it.” » He knows that the three colors have traveled the world with the glory of France. He was educated by the Marquis d'Hautpoul, who had distinguished himself in all the Napoleonic battles and whose family never emigrated. His tutor told his illustrious student about the imperishable victories of the Great Army and the genius of the Emperor. The child has learned his master's lesson: “You must be a legitimate Napoleon. » The white flag was only introduced into the family by chance. Henry IV borrowed it from the Protestant militias when he fought at their head. Then, becoming king of France, he took up the blue fleur-de-lis banner. Louis XVI had no great difficulty in adopting the three colors; Originally, the red was closest to the pole: it was then a redwhite-blue canvas. The emigrants who fought in the allied armies did not take white as their standard either. It was Louis XVIII who imposed it. White is not so much the flag of the monarchy as that of the Restoration. During the Hundred Days, Napoleon draped himself in the tricolor. But it was especially during the days of July 1830 that bluewhite-red took on a revolutionary significance. In 1848, however, workers and socialists almost imposed the red flag. The tricolor has a lot of blood on the pole. Red of the Commune or tricolor of Versailles, Chambord refuses to choose between

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two symbols of civil war. He wants to reconcile the French. All the french people.

This ambition comes from afar. Chambord approved the 1864 imperial law authorizing the right to strike. In 1865, the pretender to the throne made public a letter to the workers in which he proposed limiting the power of the industrial boss, who, "holding the existence of the workers in his hands, found himself invested with a sort of domination which could become oppressive. His reign, he promises, will ensure “the worker the dignity of his life, the fruit of his work, the security of old age”.

The aristocratic officers, often monarchical, were upset by the ferocity of the repression of the Communards by the Versailles army. Two of them, Albert de Mun and René de la Tour du Pin, created the Catholic Workers' Circles. They hold their meetings in uniform. There Moral preaching is never isolated from social action. These officers are certainly loyal to the king, but hardly recognize themselves in the Assembly which was elected after the defeat and sits at Versailles. It is not the same monarchy, not the same king – some are loyal to the Count of Chambord, the grandson of Charles X; the others to the Count of Paris, the son of Louis-Philippe.

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THE REPUBLIC REASSURES THE OWNERS This division of the monarchist camp suits the republic, which in the famous words of Thiers “is the regime which divides us the least”. Thiers appoints Republican prefects and declares himself in favor of the presidential system of the United States. His repression of the Commune made him the herald of the Orleanist bourgeoisie and the big peasants. He gave the Republic a conservative image, a tough regime. For the first time, it is the Republic which reassures the owners and the monarchy which worries them. They know that they owe their fortune to the Revolution, which allowed them to acquire national property, wrested from the Church and the nobles. Since then, the bourgeoisie have dubbed every power that guaranteed their assets: the Consulate, the Empire, Louis XVIII, Louis-Philippe. They appear to be monarchists; but they will prefer a liberal republic which protects their interests to a social monarchy which threatens them.

Each side strives to be the smartest. We play hide and seek between Versailles (where the Assembly sits) and Frohsdorf (where the Prince of Chambord lives). A “republic without republicans” has been established. Marshal MacMahon is elected President of the Republic. A stopgap? No, a fool's game. “Unable to create a monarchy, we must do what comes closest to it,” said the Count of Paris at the time. Mac-Mahon, a sort of lieutenant general of the kingdom, is established at the Élysée to await the disappearance of the Count of Chambord (who has no heir) and install the Count of

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Paris. The Élysée is placed in life annuity. The parliamentarians want a Louis-Philippe II, whose reign would have originated not on the barricades, but on the massacre of the Commune. They did not understand that in the meantime, census suffrage was no longer in season.

The Count of Chambord has long understood that a new era has dawned. In a letter written from Vienna, dated February 6, 1843, he said to Chateaubriand: “If I returned to my country as a Prince, I would like to owe this happiness to the suffrage of the majority of voters who won the right to elect a king …I do not believe in the divine right of royalty, but I believe in the power of evolution and facts…” For the monarchist officers of the Circles Catholics of workers, the king is not an arbiter, as the Orleanists want, but the “first guard of the trades”. Chambord has no intention of being a king elected by the Assembly. He told the deputies: “I will not be the leader of a party; I will be king of all. » He distrusts them and they distrust him. He has not forgotten how the Chamber, in 1867, prevented Napoleon III from preparing for war against Prussia. He is thinking of a coup d'état and a plebiscite to relegitimize himself. The Orleanist parliamentarians understood that, having become king, Henry V would dissolve this Assembly, which was more pacifist than monarchist. Chambord intends to “reconstitute France”.

In this battle of reversed fronts, the flag was only a pretext. Chambord made the white flag the test of its freedom. He thinks he is clever, he is only clumsy. This is why he declared to the deputies: “I know that with the tricolor flag, I am no longer myself, and that I cannot give back to the

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country the services he expects of me by being the representative of order and freedom. »

He has not finished paying for this tactical error. The Chamber makes this pretender to advanced social ideas look like a retrograde, an old wig. Chambord can no longer turn back, for fear that the Republican press will immediately mock him: “He abandons his flag for a crown, he denies his past. »

He is stuck. The army refuses to give up the tricolor, which remains, in its eyes, the symbol of Napoleonic greatness. Chambord gives in. Too late. Always too late. The trap closes. The count stiffened: “My person is nothing, my principle is everything… I want to remain entirely what I am. Reduced today, I would be powerless tomorrow. »

For his part, Marshal Mac-Mahon has difficult moods. Installed at the Élysée to gently prepare for the monarchical restoration, he responded to the emissaries of Chambord on the subject of a possible coup d'état: “Monck, never. The sovereign now is not the Assembly? »

The indecisive Chambord finally cuts the Gordian knot; prepares a coup d'état; its date will be so symbolic: November 11, 1873, the anniversary of the 18 Brumaire which put Bonaparte in power. He is more than ever linked to the Bonapartists; went so far as to adopt the prince imperial to cut short the dynastic pretensions of the Count of Paris. This national fusion between the two dynasties, the Bourbons

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and the Bonapartes, receives the blessing of Empress Eugénie.

Faced with this agreement between the Legitimists and the Bonapartists, the Orleanists will little by little throw themselves into the jaws of the Republicans. It was their destiny. That of all the Orleanists, of all the moderates who always favor the left. The defense of “interests” brings the two camps together. The clever Republicans accepted everything, even a Senate which would not be elected by direct universal suffrage. The important thing is to get your foot in the door. They will slap it in the monarchists’ faces. Gambetta, long reluctant, finally adopted the conservative strategy of Thiers and Grévy. The Orleanist assembly will be driven out one day or another by the voters. Only the Republic will then remain. This is how Gambetta will lead the left and trap the right. The conservatives believed they were creating something provisional; They realize a little late that they have conceived something definitive in the eyes of the French. The republic “without republicans” is filled with republicans. She begins her long march to the left. An endless march.

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BISMARCK VOTES REPUBLICAN Conservatism changes sides. Gambetta in the 1877 campaign could accuse his monarchist adversaries: “Who wants to launch France, country of peace, order and savings, into dynastic and warlike adventures? »

He doesn't speak into a vacuum. As rumors of a coup d'état became clearer at the end of 1873, the German embassy announced that a forced resignation of Marshal Mac-Mahon and a monarchical restoration would immediately provoke an intervention by the German army. The Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph, receiving the Count of Chambord in Vienna, advised the pretender not to ascend the throne. He transmits to the Frenchman the message that William II, the recent emperor of Germany, gave him, warning “his cousin” that the accession of the king to France could only lead to a new war.

Chancellor Bismarck votes Republican without hesitation. In his eyes, it is the best regime for France; the most “dissolving” – that’s the word he uses –; which weakens France the most. Divides it the most. Isolates it the most within a Europe of monarchies. In a letter to his German ambassador in Paris, he confided: “France is divided into Bonapartists, Orleanists, Legitimists and Republicans. For us it is as if it were divided into four independent and even rival states. » His instructions are clear: “Work with all your

forces to prevent the restoration of the monarchy. There

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only the Bourbon monarchy can bring alliances back to France; notably that of Russia, and that Germany, caught between France and Russia as if in a vice, would be seriously compromised. »

The alliance is not just tactical; it calls into question the conception that France has of itself, of its place in Europe and in the world. The defeat of 1870 shook the patriotic certainties of many Republicans. France no longer has the means to dominate in Europe and must submit willingly to German hegemony. This is the conviction of Adolphe Thiers, who, after having been a fervent nationalist in his youth, later only dreams of a modest, humble Republic, frightening no one in Europe. A Republic which adopts as its new motto: “Point of business. Neither war, nor revolution.” Jules Grévy, who would soon become president in place of Mac-Mahon, remained until his death the careful guardian of Mr. Thiers' political line.

In his Memories of Youth, the Alsatian deputy ScheurerKestner recounted the unequivocal exchange he had in 1871 with Grévy: “France must not think of war,” the latter told him; she must accept the fait accompli; she must give up Alsace. » Before adding: “Don't believe the crazy people who tell you the opposite. » But little by little, even “the madmen”, that is to say Gambetta, stopped pleading the “opposite”. The fiery descendant of a Genoese immigrant understood, at the turn of the 1880s, that he would never come to power if he did not lift Bismarck's veto. He would only appease the latter by giving him pledges. That by denying the glorious memories of his

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“war to the limit”. That by renouncing, at least for a time, the romantic mirages of what he himself called “external action”. That by moving further and further away, in his own words, from the “spirit of conflagration, conspiracy, aggression”.

Contacts with Germanic eminences increased. We discover each other, we meet each other, we appreciate each other. We exchange books, glasses of champagne and sometimes even women. We often find ourselves at the home of Thérèse Lachmann, Marquise de Païva, high-flying courtesan and spy in her spare time, in the sumptuous mansion overlooking the Avenue des Champs-Élysées that her German husband, Count Henckel de Donnersmarck, has built for her. The latter was, however, close to Bismarck, who appointed him prefect of Lorraine annexed by Germany. But he is also the friend and advisor of Léonie Léon, Gambetta's mistress.

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BISMARCK IS READY TO DO ANYTHING TO KEEP FRANCE AWAY FROM EUROPE In his Memoirs entitled Across the Republic, Louis Andrieux, who was police prefect of Paris between 1879 and 1882, a man of order and a lifelong republican (and incidentally natural father of Aragon), recounts this edifying scene: «

…I received a visit from Madame Henckel. With her

thanks and exuberant expression of gratitude, she brought me an invitation to dinner. My first impulse was to refuse, citing a previous commitment. The first movement, it is said, is always the best; it's possible ; but it is the last that we obey. When Madame Henckel assured me that she would have Gambetta and Spuller in private that day, my police instincts, which had survived my resignation, prevailed over my repugnance. So it was true, what I was hesitant to believe?

“At the Hôtel des Champs-Élysées, as at the Château de Pontchartrain, where Païva succeeded Mademoiselle de Lavallière, the dictator of national defense frequented the agent of our worst enemy. While for the Alsatians, for ScheurerKestner, for the leaguers of Déroulède, for patriotic France, Gambetta remained the man of Revenge, he prepared its abandonment and, just as after Sadowa, defeated Austria , accepting his defeat, had become the ally of Prussia, Gambetta, after Sedan, after the siege of Paris, after the capitulation, combined a Franco-Germanic alliance in his mysterious confabulations with the husband of Païva...

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“When I arrived at the Hôtel des Champs-Élysées, Gambetta, lying on a sofa, smoking a cigar, was chatting with Henckel… A valet announced: Madame is served! La Païva, in full cleavage, carrying the relics of her beauty in a collection of jewels, took Gambetta's arm and climbed with him the porphyry and onyx stairs which led from the ground floor salons to the dining room. eating on the first floor, while Arsène Houssaye leaned towards me and said: Like virtue, vice has degrees. »

With his usual cynicism and skill, Bismarck understood that the Republican camp was ready to do anything to overwhelm its old enemy: the Church. Even if it means making a deal with the devil. The chancellor does not want at any price a French Catholic king who could renew old complicities with the Rhine countries, or even with Austria.

He had written to his ambassador in Paris: “Get the newspapers talking about the danger of reaction, the crimes of absolutism, the horrors of feudalism, the infamous right of the lord, the tithe, corvées, the inquisition, as if all this had really existed or could come back. Be afraid of encroachments and captures by the clergy. Say that with Henry V, religion would not only be protected, but imposed, that everyone would be forced to go to mass, and even to confess. »

Grand lord, the chancellor authorized Jules Ferry, during the Berlin Congress in 1878, to intervene in Tunisia. Bismarck is ready to do anything to distance France from Europe. Colonial expansion is the consolation prize that must

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compensate, in the eyes of the Republicans, the second role that France is now condemned to play in Europe. We must stop “hypnotizing ourselves on the gap in the Vosges”, justifies Jules Ferry. The Monarchists and Bonapartists storm, in vain. On the left, Clemenceau, clairvoyant, explains that his colonial policy made France “obligated to Germany”. An English ambassador, Lord Lyons, confessed in 1887 to a French friend: “It is useless to talk in Paris, since France has entrusted all its affairs to the Prussian government. »

The chancellor sees further, or rather, closer, much closer: “It is on the Rhine that Germany will conquer its colonial domain. »

Chambord will go down in history as the founder of the

Third Republic. We can imagine the fury and bitterness of his supporters who had done so much for a return which he wasted by inextinguishable obstinacy and pride. “Monsieur the Count of Chambord threw the crown out of the window,” said one of them. Basically, the heir to the throne made the desperate words of Louis-Philippe his own after his fall: “Such and such a pretender can succeed; none will survive. »

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A MATRIAL FAILURE FOR THE RIGHT Beyond the person of the count, even beyond the Bourbons and the restoration of the monarchy, this failure is emblematic, matrix even for the French right. This failure announces the defeats to come for this conservative movement which, at the same time, will flourish in Great Britain, in the shadow of the imperial reign of Victoria. The French right will be torn apart in futile quarrels between conservatives and reactionaries, between those who will remain the unwavering enemies of the republican regime, hoping for the advent of a utopian monarchy, and those who will rally to the regime of their former adversaries, but will not stop never to be always dominated, always despised, always humiliated, always suspected of seditious maneuvers, always threatened with being banished from the enemies of the republic by a sovereign and often sectarian left, which will henceforth issue certificates of republicanism and progressivism. Already… A fatal square will, however, constantly threaten this Republic: German question, institutional question, social question, religious question. The four sides of the square hold together and influence each other. Traditional historiography has taught us that there was a shift at the end of the century, after the Dreyfus affair, from nationalism from the left to the right. However, the ground had been undermined since the defeat of 1870 and the failure of the monarchical restoration, disturbing minds and sharpening mutual mistrust.

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The popular success of Boulangism buried the policy of understanding with Germany for the first time. The Republicans, even the most Germanophiles, understood that the passion for “General Revenge” meant that the people rejected their policy of understanding with the winner of 1870. The time had come for the Russian alliance (1892). Many conservatives then renounced in favor of the Republican regime. The Germanophile slope is, however, the strongest. Our new Russian ally first proves to be a friend of the Germans. At Quai d'Orsay, Gabriel Hanotaux is in charge. The one whom the newspapers nicknamed the “head of the French Foreign Office” undertook to give substance to the old republican project of reconciliation and alliance with the former winner. This June 18, 1895 – 80th anniversary of Waterloo! the French ships –, meet the Russian ships with the German squadrons in the waters of the Canal de Like.

The Quai d'Orsay developed the most brilliant plans around the Saint Petersburg-Paris-Berlin “system”. William II is jubilant. He himself designed a plan to unify the continent to bring down British hegemony. A Europe brought together under the leadership of the German Empire and in which it is not unhappy to place France. At the beginning of 1899, the German Emperor confided to the French naval attaché, Lieutenant Buchard: “The time is certainly time when the continent must defend itself against England and America, and I think that Germany and France must rely on each other. » The English are worried. If the French stupidly started to love the Germans, it would be the end of the

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British rule. This is exactly the German objective: “What I want,” said William II, “is for France to stop being governed by my uncle Edward VII. » Fortunately for the “perfidious Albion”, the grandiose plans of Hanotaux and William II collapsed like houses of cards. During the Fashoda meeting (1898), between French and English troops, the French realized that they did not have a navy worthy of the name to stand up to England in the colonial race. The Dreyfus affair, which broke out at the same time, revived the old animosity with the Germans. The Affair will end up breaking the domination of the right and sending Hanotaux back to his beloved studies. At the Quai d'Orsay, it is Delcassé who is now in charge and is rushing to overthrow the "system" of his predecessor: we will no longer swear by the new triangle, London-Paris-SaintPetersburg.

The German alliance, however, will always retain its loyalists. We will see them emerge at the time of the Tangier crisis, in 1905, when William II, threatening the Moroccan harbor with his famous gunboat, obtained the head of

Delcassé, or during the Agadir crisis of 1911, when the radical Caillaux avoided war through a colonial compromise with the Germans Caillaux will now embody within the Republicans this pacifist and Germanophile line, which will be pushed to the end of its logic by the socialist Jaurès. A line which will disappear as if by miracle in the first days of the war, in the enthusiasm of the Sacred Union – Jaurès himself, a few weeks before his assassination, was determined to join it – but which will be reborn like the phoenix of his ashes, during the hostilities, before outrageously dominating during the interwar period, with Briand, the man of peace, the man of friendship

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with Germany, and its political heir, its spiritual son, Laval, and its policy of “collaboration”. All these men, even Laval, were sincere patriots at that time. They all believed, even Laval, to be defending the interests of France. Everyone, and not just Laval, has made peace a supreme value. Everyone, especially Laval, fascinated by Germanic power, considers that France's role is no more than being the faithful second in command within a European order dominated by Germany. The cart of those condemned to death with which Péguy was already threatening Jaurès, on the eve of the conflagration of 1914, it was Laval who climbed on it in 1945.

We understand better the fierceness of political battles. For the monarchist right, the republic will always embody France's submission to Germany. For their part, the Republicans will never forget what they owe to the Count of Chambord. They will compensate for their weakness with unfailing solidarity “from the left” and implacable sectarianism towards any party that is not strictly republican. A sectarianism which will adorn itself with the flattering trappings of the “republican front” and will continue until today with regard to the National Rally.

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THE COLD CIVIL WAR The failure of Chambord caused this cold civil war that he had wanted to avoid; the endless war of the Two Frances. Religious war, social war, institutional war. On June 22, 1899, from the podium of the National Assembly, Henri Brisson suddenly crossed his fingers forward, threw his body back and shouted “Mine, the widow's children!” ". This posture and this cry, a sign of Masonic distress, will rally at the last minute the Freemason deputies present in session and will save the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry. The same Brisson constantly told Jews and Protestants that they were the “backbone” of the Republic, while his friend Waldeck-Rousseau declared in 1902: “There is an understanding

natural between the republican regime and the Protestant religion, because both are based on free examination. » Opposite, the right protested against the anticlerical policy of the Republic; and soon, in his editorials in L'Action française, Charles Maurras would fulminate and denounce the control of "the four confederate States, Jews, Protestants, Freemasons, Metics", over France.

This cold civil war ended in blood during the Occupation. So, part of the right took advantage of the military misfortunes of the Republic to settle scores with the “four Confederate States”. We also saw in the ranks of the Collaboration a significant part of this left, republicans and Orleanists who had rallied for a long time, who had ended up accepting being the brilliant second in command of a hegemonic Germany. It was the culmination of a

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centuries-old history, that of an intellectual Germanophilia, from Madame de Staël to Renan, via Michelet and Victor Hugo, which had little by little been converted into a political strategy.

It would be necessary to wait until 1958 for General de Gaulle to finally succeed in snatching France from the disastrous square of Third Republic. De Gaulle was this king elected by the people, under the tricolor flag, of which the Count of Chambord had dreamed, but which he had been unable and unable to achieve, due to a mixture of clumsiness and naivety.

The general had plenty of time to resume his melancholy musings after his departure from the Élysée in 1969. Once again, the country had not wanted to make the necessary effort; once again, hedonism, the right to individual happiness had prevailed over the concern for honor and national glory. After its disappearance, the national river would return to its republican bed. He knew it, had always known it. The relationship with Germany would, as usual, reveal the renunciations of our elites.

As Marx claimed to overthrow Hegelian philosophy, General de Gaulle had endeavored to put the Germanophilia of the republican elites back on its feet by in turn weaving a Franco-German friendship, but within the framework of a European whole. led politically by France; this is the meaning of his famous expression “France will be the jockey and Germany, the horse”. But once de Gaulle left, everything slowly, but inexorably, became like before.

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GERMANY AS HORIZON Our defeats in the economic and industrial war took the place of our former military routs. There German reunification of 1990 was our Sedan. Helmut Kohl had the granite giant physique of a Bismarck and François Mitterrand, the small size of a Thiers. The “Franco-German couple” was the rhetorical disguise which concealed the great return of the “brilliant second” Frenchman. German hegemony on the European continent was once again uncontested. Essential decisions were no longer taken without Berlin's approval; and our presidents never failed to go to the German capital, immediately after their election; as if the real coronation now took place in Berlin.

At V Republic revived the reflexes acquired under the 3rd century . It was found natural that a French politician hostile to European construction could never be elected President of the Republic. It was found natural that President Jacques Chirac refused to appoint Philippe Séguin as Prime Minister, because he had opposed the Maastricht Treaty, and was therefore subject to the “veto” of Helmut Kohl. Séguin thus knew of Gambetta's fate without anyone being offended. Séguin tried, like his illustrious model, to appease the German chancellor, by apostatizing his patriotic faith and pledging allegiance to the European Union, during a famous speech in Aachen in 1997. Nothing 'there it was. Like Gambetta, Séguin missed his destiny and died early. When he died, the press did not It is

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is full of praise for his innumerable talents. As she was full of praise for the deceased Gambetta. As she had not stopped praising the Count of Chambord when he died in 1883. These men were only great when dead. Alive, they had been too weak, too clumsy, too pusillanimous, faced with this obscure object of German desire of our republican elites.

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Renan

Renan's madeleine It is the most famous conference in the history of France. A sacred text of our political imagination, of which everyone rehashes the words that have become a slogan: “The nation is an everyday plebiscite. » A few words which offered immortality to its author, Ernest Renan.

When he presented himself at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882, he was fully aware of delivering an important message: “I have weighed each word with the greatest care; it is my profession of faith in what concerns human things and, when modern civilization has foundered as a result of the fatal equivocation of these words: nation, nationality, race, I want these twenty pages to be remembered. -there. »

He will be heard beyond his expectations. Beyond his wishes too. One of those great texts that we cite after having skillfully cut it up for our anachronistic uses. It is never Renan who speaks, but the one who quotes him. This text by Renan has become the standard of a modern conception of the nation, of all those who reject with horror essentialism, racialism, ethnocentrism, which they assimilate to Nazism; all those who defend a democratic, contractualist and individualist vision of a nation which makes itself, day by day, from the will of its inhabitants, here and now; all those who tore from its twenty pages

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densely a single fetish expression, which they display as a sign of recognition, the quintessence of their philosophical-political project, namely a verb degraded into a noun, an objective simplified into an incantation, a word chanted to better replace the thing that has disappeared: the " live together ".

Renan was enlisted in a Manichean war, he who was a model of subtlety and complexity. He was recruited into a progressive camp that he spent a whole part of his life fighting.

It is true that at the time of his conference at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan was no longer the sulphurous young author of a Life of Jesus which scandalized the Church and right-thinking people, because he was doing " son of God” a historical character placed in context. He is also no longer quite the passionate and erudite philologist who maintained a friendly correspondence with Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, the now cursed author of a book published in 1853: Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. However, it was Renan, and not Gobineau, who then wrote: “I am therefore the first to recognize that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, really represents an inferior combination of human nature. It has neither this height of spiritualism that India and Germany alone have known, nor this feeling of measure and perfect beauty that Greece bequeathed to the Neo-Latin nations, nor this delicate and profound sensitivity which is the trait dominant of Celtic peoples 1 .

»

Ernest Renan has since this date had the double misfortune of seeing his racial concepts leave his laboratory to make

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irruption into the political agora, before they were exploited, with vengeful arrogance, by a Prussianized Germany against the defeated and humiliated France of 1870. France is Renan's homeland, but Germany is his "religion" . We understand that the months which followed this “terrible year” were for him the occasion of an intense and cruel questioning. In 1882, he emerged from what our contemporaries would call a “depression”; he is ready to respond to the Germans, to the arrogance of their generals, their diplomats, their ministers, but also their philosophers. Renan is not the first to respond to German intellectuals. As early as 1870, Fustel de Coulanges told the historian Theodor Mommsen, who justified the annexation of AlsaceLorraine: “It is neither race nor language that makes nationality. » Renan does not have an unlimited passion for nationalism. He pleads for an alliance between the three great European nations, France, England, Germany. Like Victor Hugo, he dreams of the United States of Europe. He is more realistic: “Nations are not something eternal. They have started, they will finish. The European confederation will probably replace it. But it is not the law of the century in which we live. »

In his eyes, the nation is a restriction, a retrenchment, which contradicts the universal. The great nations are those which break away from this limited mediocrity to create the universal: the monotheism of Judea, the reason of ancient Greece, the artistic Renaissance in 15th century Italy, German spirituality with Luther or human rights

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with the French Revolution. Renan immediately adds that these nations which create the universal pay for their entry into the extraordinary with “long suffering and often with their national existence”.

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AGAINST TEUTON VINDICTION He admits, however, that Germany is exaggerating. That she abuses her strength. That it commits the same fatal error as that of which the France of Louis XIV and Napoleon was guilty. Renan loved Germany, a fertile land of Protestantism, philosophy and the arts; not that of spiked helmets. He adored it as a peaceful civilization and not as a booted nation. He defended weak Germany against abuse by French force. Renan now wants to protect defeated France against Teutonic vengeance. He proclaims: “The beautiful, the true, there is my homeland. France is needed as a protest against pedantry, dogmatism, narrow rigorism. » He does not mind playing the role of intellectual intermediary between the two nations. His Germanophilia is paradoxically a guarantee of lucidity in the eyes of the French leaders who listen, blissful with admiration, to explain to them that it was the German university which won the war.

The same people count on him to ensure philosophical resistance against the wrath of the winner. This exchange of good practices will make Renan the organic intellectual of the regime. He became an administrator of the Collège de France. He multiplies the conferences, immediately published in the form of separate essays. Even more than Victor Hugo, he embodies, in the last fifteen years of his life, the ultimate reference, the thinker of thinkers, the idol of the Republic: Saint Renan, think for us! His militant antiCatholicism and his admiration for Protestantism brought him closer to the anti-clericalism of the Republicans. Léon Daudet, the critic of

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l'Action française, which hardly liked him, wrote with humor: "Clemenceau's generation represented the supernatural world as a game of cards between Renan and the good Lord in which Renan had won the day. »

So here is this man, the official spokesperson for French doxa, who writes to a German friend: “Our policy is the policy of the law of nations; yours is racial politics: we believe that ours is better. » Renan in no way calls into question his youthful work on races. He only explains to the Germans that the time of pure races is over, that we are no longer in the era of tribes or cities, that the Roman Empire and Christianity mixed all races; that it is an error to confuse “race with nation, and to attribute to ethnographic or rather linguistic groups a sovereignty analogous to that of actually existing peoples”.

His demonstration is relentless: “What characterizes the great European states? It is the fusion of the populations that compose them… France is Celtic, Iberian, Germanic… Is Germany itself a pure Germanic country? What an illusion! Southern Germany was Gallic. The whole of the East, from the Elbe onwards, is Slavic… The noblest countries are those where blood is most mixed. »

The Germans also want to bring together all the

German-speaking populations. Hence the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. It is of course this battle around lost provinces which in the short term founded the Renan conference. He refuses to consider language as the only cement of a nation: after all, isn't Switzerland a

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united nation even though its population does not speak the same language? Even religion, since it has become an individual matter of conscience, and no longer a matter of the State, can no longer serve as a vector of national unity.

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THE SACRED TEXT OF OUR NATION REPUBLICAN SO ? Here comes the heart of this conference, of which Renan refined each word, each comma, and which will become the sacred text of our republican nation:

“A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, to tell the truth, are one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is current consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to assert the heritage that we have received undivided... The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of efforts, sacrifices and dedication. The cult of ancestors is the most legitimate of all; our ancestors made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory, this is the social capital on which we base a national idea. To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; having done great things together, wanting to do more, these are the essential conditions for being a people. […] The Spartan song “we are what you were; we will be what you are” is in its simplicity the abbreviated anthem of every homeland. […] »

But he also adds: “The existence of a nation is an everyday plebiscite. » Each element of his reasoning fits together; and each is dependent on the next like a welded chain. There are three links: a unit, a inheritance, a will.

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Unity is contained in a single spiritual principle: a soul.

Inheritance is based on the “possession of a rich legacy of memories”, the “culmination of a long past”. Will is expressed by “current consent, the desire to live together”, the “everyday plebiscite”. Inheritance is its central link. The nation draws its soul from its past; current consent must be part of its lineage, to glorify it, to prolong it.

In the political quarrel between past and present, between inheritance and consent, between conservatives and democrats, between the German thought of a historical right which is imposed from outside the nation and the French thought of an elective nation of herself, between the “earth and the dead” of Barrès and the “contract” of Sieyès, Renan is closer to the former but reaches out to the latter. At the same time, his friend Taine wrote nothing else in The Origins of Contemporary France : “Each generation is only the temporary manager and responsible depositary of a precious and glorious heritage that it received from the previous one with the responsibility of transmitting it to the next… Each individual is born in debt to the State, and until adulthood, his debt continues to grow… He knows it, he feels it; the idea of the homeland has been deposited in him at great depths, and will emerge on occasion in ardent passions, in shared sacrifices, in heroic wills; here are the real French... If we can speak of a contract here, their quasi-contract is done, concluded in advance. »

Taine speaks clearly and thickly when Renan negotiates. Taine remains on his conservative and anti-revolutionary Aventin, when the

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liberal-conservative Renan agrees with the democratic logic of the Republic. He does it with great care, but he does it. However, he does not deny himself. It surrounds its concession to will and consent individuals of a triple barrier which he believes to be insurmountable. He uses his great historical knowledge to recall that the French nation owes its miraculous birth only to the renunciation, by the Frankish invaders, of their religion and their language, for the benefit of those of their vanquished. He goes on to note that “the Burgundians, the Goths, the Lombards, the Normans had very few women of their race with them”. Clearly, they established roots with Gallo-Romans, and that like Clovis espousing the religion of Clotilde, these “mixed” unions greatly favored the assimilation of the “invaders” to the invaded people.

Renan follows his logic to its logical conclusion. If the nation is based on the mixture of races and peoples, they must throw into the common past their own stories, their own memories, their own memories, their own resentments, their own sufferings even: “The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that all have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows if he is Burgundian, Alan, Taifale, Visigoth; every French citizen must have forgotten Saint-Barthélemy, the massacres of the South in the 13th century... Forgetting, and I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and this is how the progress of historical studies is often a danger for the nationality. »

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THE TURKISH “MODEL” But the reality is irreverent. As soon as the master disappears, she will never stop denying him. Race, religion, language: the trilogy rejected with condescending contempt by Renan will establish itself as the matrix of the innumerable nations which, in the 20th century, rose up on the still smoking ruins of the four empires collapsed at the end of the First World War: Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman. Each ethnic group demands its nation, each nation defends its race, each race speaks its language, each language prays to its god, each god chases away that of its neighbor. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, the melee is general and deadly. Everyone is fighting everyone. Everyone massacres everyone without the slightest pity. Everyone seeks to impose their “living space” to the detriment of the “Other” who does not pray to the same god, who is not of the same race, who does not speak the same language.

Contrary to popular belief, Hitler was not the only one or the first to demand the gathering into the Reich of populations of German race and language, scattered in Central Europe. Even before the end of the First World War, the “Young Turks” in power exterminated the Armenians because they were Catholic and massacred the Greeks because they were Orthodox. The latter were not to be outdone and killed the Muslims they found on their way. To stop the massacre, the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923, negotiated under the sponsorship of the League of Nations, imposed a massive exchange of populations: more than a million

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Orthodox Anatolians left Turkey for Greece, while four hundred thousand Muslims abandoned their "Greek" residence for an Islamic land. This unprecedented transfer was a first in the history of peace agreements; he went to school. Religious and ethnic homogeneity clearly appeared, as the German thinkers, opponents of Renan, had theorized, the only guarantee of the unity and sustainability of nation-states. Hitler openly admitted to having been inspired by the policy followed by the Ottomans: “In 1923, little Greece was able to resettle a million people. Think of the biblical deportations and massacres of the Middle Ages and remember extermination Armenians » But when the time of the German debacle 2

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came in 1945, more than ten million Germans were in turn driven from lands where some had lived since the 18th century, under the implacable pressure of the nations who were taking their revenge on the Germanic eagle: Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Romania. The same causes produced the same effects in the East: in 1948 the Jews obtained the erection of a nation-state defined by religion and ethnicity, separated from the Arab populations who had surrounded them for centuries, while the birth of Pakistan , in 1947, torn from the forceps of his Indian mother, once again caused a mind-blowing crossing of millions of Muslims and of Hindus. The great cosmopolitan cities of the past, Vienna, Smyrna, Salonika or Alexandria, were emptied of their inhabitants and their glory.

Ultimately, it is only in France that Renan will be heard and listened to. Obeyed. Of his time. The leaders of the Third Republic will develop, under the leadership of Lavisse, a national novel which will drown past conflicts in exaltation

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heroic figures of the homeland, even striving to bridge the gap between the two Frances, the monarchist and the republican, the Catholic and the revolutionary, through the praise of ministers, or soldiers, or scholars or writers who had served our kings. And even though France was at the time the only immigration country in Europe, Republican leaders took care not to institutionalize the arrival of women, and even less of children, to encourage Belgian and Italian immigrants, then Polish, to French wives, best way to activate cultural assimilation. The balance desired by Renan between the three principles of unity, heritage and will was thus, no matter what, respected in our country. For almost a century.

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SERVING OUR “LIVING TOGETHER” The lesson of 1882 was, however, thrown overboard at the edge of the 1970s. It was at the very moment when this conference

became the alpha and omega of political speeches that its content was altered and distorted. Renan was quoted extensively to make him say the opposite of what he had thought. They buried him under the flowers. They kissed him the better to kill him. Of Renan's three principles, our era only favored one, highlighting only the "everyday plebiscite", the better to push into the darkness, the "spiritual principle" and the "heritage". ".

This is paradoxically the lesson that our progressive intelligentsia has learned from the bloody history of the 20th century. We are then obsessed with the Nazi repellent. Since Adolf Hitler waged war in the name of the "pure race" and ethnic homogeneity of the Germans, any nation based on race, language and religion will be demonized. The earth and the dead will be “Nazified”. We did not want to see that it was on the contrary ethnic and religious heterogeneity, inherited from ancient empires, which had caused the clash of peoples sharing the same territory without sharing the same cultural imagination. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc. wanted to be national states when they were miniature multiethnic empires, where only the hierarchy between ethnic groups had been disrupted.

We did not want to admit that the separation of ethnic groups and religions had ended up bringing peace – always peace.

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precarious, but better than permanent war – between Greeks and Turks, between Germans and Slavs, between Muslims and Hindus, and even between Jews and Arabs. Our old Western nations were called upon to open up to the Other, whoever he may be, without imposing the slightest renunciation of what he was, a constraint immediately deemed “Nazi” persecution.

It was the resounding revenge of the contract on inheritance, of the individual on the people. From the present to the future. The living over the dead. Chateaubriand had written: “The dead learn nothing from the living; the living have everything to learn from the dead. » Our times think exactly the opposite. The living emancipate themselves from the deceased. Men throw their ancestors over the windmills like feminists threw their bras in the face of the patriarchy. We lighten up, we free ourselves, without understanding that we are stripping ourselves. We are diverting the song of the Spartans that Renan had established as a cardinal principle of nations: we do not want to be what you were and we will not be what you are! We are and will be what we want to be. We are and we want to be self-begotten. Everyone reflects on their worries, their hopes, their resentments, their past sufferings, their memory; everyone wants to be a victim; everyone turns into a demands machine, a blame machine, a vindictive machine which, like a capricious child, rebels against the motherland now called “stepmother”. Everyone calls on France to celebrate the crimes committed by it against its own. Everyone is demanding that France repent. Commemorating has become synonymous with denouncing. We denounce and commemorate the Vél'd'Hiv roundup, slavery, the massacres of the Algerian war, and colonization. Each one has

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a grudge against France, everyone has a claim against France. Everyone believes that France owes them a debt and intends to have it paid “interest and principal”.

As Régis Debray aptly wrote, “we no longer celebrate the dead for France, but the dead by France”. Starting with President Chirac, successive governments, from the right to the left, instead of resisting this destructive trend, have led the movement. Paul Thibault will note, severely: “The men of power, experiencing the difficulty, even the impossibility, of governing have entered into a moralism of accusation aimed at the past. Failing to do better, they believe they are rising by denouncing what they are doing, regarding the Second World War as well as colonization. »

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EXALTING DIVERSITY FOR BETTER DENOUNCE UNITY The ancient nation, one and indivisible, returns its fury revolutionary against itself. It exalts to the detriment of its unity the singular and irreducible differences of each person; it exalts the diversity of memories and the diversity of stories. She makes a clean slate of the past, except for the past which does not pass. Renan returned like a glove to better disintegrate the nation he wanted to bring together. The “everyday plebiscite” serves to demolish “the desire to continue to assert the heritage that we have received undivided”.

The obsessive exaltation of “living together” is the screen under the shelter of which we bury the “single spiritual principle of the nation”. Renan had nevertheless warned his prodigal sons: “The principle which makes a nation is a principle of pride, of high self-affirmation, of pride if you like. A humble nation is quickly punished. »

It is a beautiful and disastrous work. To better accommodate Muslim immigration, unprecedented in its demographic importance and its cultural distance from the French matrix, we abandon and castigate all the lessons learned from the lessons of Renan and from our experience: we move from assimilation to integration, from integration to insertion, from insertion to

has

inclusion, inclusion

has

communitarianization. As Jacques Julliard ironically remarks: “For the new arrival to retain their identity, the former occupants must renounce theirs, or only retain what can be shared with others. »

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The ultimate paradox: Renan was abandoned and betrayed to favor the installation on French territory of an Islamic civilization that he had, during his lifetime, covered with opprobrium. Was it not he who said as an exceptional connoisseur of Semitic civilizations: “Islam is the indistinguishable union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of a dogma, it is the most heavier than humanity has ever carried… It is not only a state religion […]. It is religion excluding the State. Islam is the most complete negation of Europe: Islam is fanaticism; Islam is the decline of science, the suppression of civil society; the appalling simplicity of the Semitic mind, shrinking the human brain […] to confront it with an eternal tautology: God is God. » Before adding this formula, which would today earn him the wrath of the 17th chamber of the Paris court: “Emancipating the Muslim from his religion is the best service that can be rendered to him. » Formulas which will also provoke the vindictive fury of Edward Saïd, who hits him with “dishonor” in his famous book Orientalism.

The East created by the West.

Nothing will have been spared for our illustrious speaker. More than a century after his death, King Renan is naked. Ridiculed by the bloody history of the 20th century which proved his German opponents right; and betrayed by its so-called postmodern and post-Republican thurifers.

His lesson is both distorted and instrumentalized to better enable an Islam that he despised not to make it his own.

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the French heritage, for the simple reason that it is in the eyes of Muslims only the child of Catholicism, this hated religion of the “roumis” and the “associators”. A Catholicism of which Renan was not the last to tear the seamless dress, in order to distance the French from the faith of their fathers. “Man thinks and God laughs,” mocks the Talmud.

Catholics will undoubtedly see the curse of Christ on the man who only wanted to see in him Jesus of Nazareth.

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1. Ernest Renan, General history and comparative system of Semitic languages, 1855. 2. Interview dating from 1931 carried out by Richard Breiting, cited in Edouard Calic, Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, 1971.

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Eiffel

The infernal tower In the beginning was calculation. A learned, rigorous calculation. An engineering calculation. For a tower that is both light and strong, the pressure of which would be distributed over the four pillars with an area of two hundred and twenty-five square meters each. A calculation that had discouraged English and American engineers. A thousand-foot tower! They had dreamed of it. The French had done it. A three hundred meter tower.

One evening in May 1884, the young engineer Maurice Koechlin, collaborator of Gustave Eiffel, designed an iron pylon which, gradually becoming more refined, took the shape of the spire of a Gothic cathedral. Koechlin made the first drawings outside of working hours, at night, and sometimes at home, without the “boss” knowing. Koechlin represents his colossal pylon alongside a few Parisian monuments: Notre-Dame, Bastille, Vendôme, to better convince people. He asks his colleague Émile Nouguie to help him with his calculations. Their creation is presented to the “boss”, who poorly conceals his lack of enthusiasm and his technical reservations…

The legend of the tower born in the drawing boxes of the Eiffel workshops is well known. It has been told a hundred times, a thousand times, endlessly. Shameless. As is often the case, it was preferred to history. A lot of people were interested in it; important ones, amazing ones, oils with medals, with high hats

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form and frock coat; people shouted out of habit that the country was in danger; these pieces of iron weighed much heavier than their metal weight; it was therefore necessary to embellish, idealize, sublimate the destiny of a monument which almost carried the Republic itself into the muddy ground from which it had been taken.

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WORLD EXHIBITION The reality is, as often, less innocent. The Eiffel workshops depend on state orders for public works. Works of art like the Garabit viaduct brought fame and fortune to its owner. This easily opens administration offices, corridors of assemblies and ministries. Its links with the Alsace-Lorraine Masonic lodge – of which he is one of the eminent dignitaries – are a key to forcing the doors of republican circles. Gustave Eiffel is not only a rigorous scientist and an outstanding leader of men – today, we would say a “manager” – he is also an unscrupulousbusinessman, for whom rationality and profitability are one and the same. . He is ready to do anything to conquer markets and enrich himself, even to the point of influencing, trafficking, bribing, corrupting. His small size does not prevent him from impressing his interlocutors; he is in his fifties, proud and seductive; the firm and straight gait, the confident, even imperious voice, the saltand-pepper hair and beard.

In this year 1884, the President of the Republic, Jules Grévy, decided to commemorate the centenary of the 1789 revolution. For him, it was a matter of brilliantly celebrating the unexpected victory of republican institutions. He thinks of these Universal Exhibitions which have been fashionable since those in London in 1851. Grévy remembers the stunned admiration of foreign visitors discovering Paris transfigured by Baron Haussmann during the French exhibition of 1867. It does not displease the anticlerical who sleeps in

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any republican to build a tower that would be higher than the spire of NotreDame de Paris or the Sacré-Cœur of Montmartre!

Few people are in the know then. Gustave Eiffel is one of these privileged few. The decree establishing a Universal Exhibition was signed on November 8, 1884. A week later, Eiffel had the model of his tower given to the secretariat of the Paris industrial tribunal. The patent for the invention had been filed two months before. On December 12 of the same year, the “boss” offered each of his two engineers, in exchange for ownership of the tower, the sum of one hundred thousand gold francs.

Eiffel got wind of a competing project; a sort of lighthouse that would illuminate the City of Lights. But this rival is out of luck: the official regulations, taken for the occasion by the Administration in 1886, prohibit any building that is not made of iron, does not have four feet on a square base, each of one hundred and twenty -five meters on each side. Chance and necessity, Gustave Eiffel is a great friend of the new Minister of Industry and Commerce, Édouard Lockroy. The competition for an Eiffel Tower will therefore be won to everyone's surprise... by the Eiffel Tower!

We get to work. We're busy. We clean up a floor discovered flooded to a depth of eleven meters. We are concerned about the disproportionate additional cost. We joke in the newspapers about this tower which will float and drift slowly on the Seine before reaching the Atlantic and the American coasts, where the authorities will marry it with the Statue of Liberty, already a gift from France. It is said that it will fly away at the first gust of wind, or that it will be eaten away by

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rust in winter, that it will crash into neighboring houses, killing thousands of residents. We gossip, we meditate, we slash.

In September 1888, the workers went on strike: they protested against their working conditions made intolerable by the heatwave. For months to come, nearly two hundred men will climb each day, to one hundred and fifty, then to three hundred meters in height. Miraculously, there were no fatal accidents, with the exception of an Italian worker who returned to the site outside of his working hours. At the end of the year, the elevators are installed in each of the four pillars, those of the Frenchman Roux-Combaluzier and those of the American Otis. We also opened four restaurants, of which L'Alsace-Lorraine quickly became the most popular. On March 25, 1889, Gustave Eiffel unfurled a huge tricolor flag which he attached to the lightning rod. Eight days later, we change it; the wind tore it to pieces. This ritual was maintained every week until the German occupiers interrupted it in 1940. One night, lightning shattered the lightning rod at the top of the building.

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REVENGE OF THE FRENCH SPIRIT On March 31, 1889, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated by the President of the Republic, Sadi Carnot. Speeches, jokes, Republic, progress, knowledge, science, freedom, French industry, greatness of France, genius of French engineers, French science, French technique, French audacity, French perseverance, which has succeeded where the great AngloSaxon nations gave up. Revenge on past defeats, past misfortunes, past humiliations. Revenge of the French spirit! And twenty-one cannon shots. It is expected that in twentyyears the tower will be destroyed; then, the land loaned by the Ministry of War will be returned to the State. The Universal Exhibition opens its doors as planned on May 6. It will end in October.

Two months later, the Prince of Wales arrived with his family and without protocol. Arriving at the top of the eighteen hundred steps, he pretends to be surprised that Monsieur Eiffel has moved for “so little”. “Can we see London? » asks the prince. We proudly explain to His Majesty that, since the TSF connection created between the tower and the Pantheon by Eugène Ducretet, the Eiffel Tower has become one of the most powerful radio wave transmitters and receivers in the world. The Prince of Wales smiled: “But that is not worth a lace handkerchief that one would wave on either side of the sea with grace and, why not, with emotion. »

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It doesn't drag on. He goes to admire La Goulue and her friends at the Cancan, Grande Féline, Fleur de pavement, and Nini Paw in the air; he was told the best things about the very young Flammèche...

So, all’s well that ends well? No. All is well that begins badly. Gustave Eiffel's triumph is not without its stains. The businessman's schemes are about to tarnish the prestige of the engineer. Before the inauguration of his tower, at the end of 1888, Eiffel made a commitment to complete the drilling of the Isthmus of Panama. A mission which had a delicious taste of revenge for him. Ten years earlier, shareholders had rejected his ambitious lock canal project, on the grounds that it was too complex and too expensive. Ferdinand de Lesseps himself, from the height of his glory acquired with the Suez Canal, had insulted the insolent man. And now these gentlemen, and the great Lesseps himself, come to Canossa to beg him to save their blocked construction site! Our little man no longer feels comfortable. After the Eiffel Tower, the Eiffel Canal! An Eiffel Canal deeper, more gigantic than the Suez Canal.

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EIFFEL IN FREE FALL No one dares to remind the triumphant fool that the Tarpeian rock is close to the Capitol. The specter of Panama, and the enormous scandal that is looming, will never cease to haunt the glory of Eiffel. To complete the drilling of the Isthmus of Panama, he demanded one hundred and thirty million francs. The sum will ultimately be multiplied by six. Shareholders turn to the State; the Chamber votes to issue a national batch loan, to bail out the operation; but the loan does not meet with the expected success; the Panama company filed for bankruptcy on December 16, 1888. Thousands of modest savers are ruined. Eiffel is accused of having received enormous commissions and outrageous profits; he is suspected of having drawn on Panama's treasury to complete the construction of the tower. It is discovered that certain deputies received bribes to vote for the issuance of the loan. Names are given: Rouvier, Clemenceau, Floquet, Ribot, etc. All left. All Republicans. Joseph Reinach and Cornelius Herz are designated as corrupters. Both Jewish. Like Gustave Eiffel, they say! We recall that Gustave was born EiffelBönickhausen, before having the second element of his surname deleted in 1876, which sounded too Prussian: which clearly proves that he is Jewish! It doesn't matter that his family had been Catholic since at least the 17th century; and that his mother is a young lady Catherine Moneuse, daughter of Jean-Baptiste Moneuse and Jeanne Peuriot. The agrefin can only be Jewish! Robert Brasillach will write again in Notre avant-war, published during the 1940s: “The tower

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Eiffel inscribed in the night the coat of arms of a great Jewish house. »

Filing for bankruptcy has become a business; the affair, scandal; the scandal, crisis of the Republic. At the time, the memory of the trafficking in decorations by President Grévy's son-in-law is still fresh in everyone's minds. The monarchists boast: we told you that the Republic was a regime of thieves, an association of prevaricators and crooks!

A few years later, Maurice Barrès published Their Figures, the final episode of his trilogy devoted to the “novel of national energy”. He dedicates his book to Édouard Drumont, the antiSemitic pamphleteer. The Panama scandal is at the heart of the book. We witness the trial before the chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal, where Charles de Lesseps, Marius Fontane and Gustave Eiffel appeared, in January 1893: “Defendant of having jointly, by using fraudulent maneuvers to make people believe in the existence of a chimerical event and an imaginary credit, dissipated sums coming from issues, which had been given to them for a specific use and employment, and defrauded all or part of the fortune of others. »

The author cannot help but express a certain compassion for the desperate and glorious old man, Ferdinand de Lesseps. On the other hand, he has no pity for “the figures of Messrs. Eiffel and Marius Fontane [who] did not stand out in this environment of chicanery and procedure”. It is the future president of the Radical Council, WaldeckRousseau, who defends our man. He exalts the figure of Eiffel,

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who with his tower “gave to the humiliated poor of 1870 the alms of a little glory”.

On February 9, 1893, the first chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal declared Eiffel guilty of breach of trust and misappropriation of property, and sentenced him to two years in prison. That he will not serve. The Court of Cassation will annul his conviction. Eiffel will still be incarcerated for a few hours.

Maurice Barrès does not stop at the Panama scandal. It hits higher, bigger, further. It is the republic that he has in his sights. It tells how Cavour and then Bismarck bought French newspapers to promote the unification of their nations; and already shows the corrupting maneuver the Reinach and the Herz. He charges against Clemenceau: “It is to destroy that you have devoted your efforts. » He recounts the Homeric parliamentary debate which pitted the latter against the nationalist cantor, Déroulède, who did not hesitate to say: “Yes, Cornélius Herz is a foreign agent! What mourning and what sadness! A foreigner, a cosmopolitan of hostile race, of Germanic origin, whose accidental birth in France cannot make a Frenchman..."

Under the elegant and acerbic pen of Barrès, the Boulangist rebellion is adorned with the shimmering trappings of a popular and patriotic revolt against the culpable weaknesses of the Republic. A vitalist burst which goes well beyond the dim-witted personality of “General Revanche”, which his former comradein-arms describes without kindness or tenderness. It is the fight between abstraction and concrete, between the universal and the

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terroir, between intelligence and emotion: “Intelligence, peuh! We are deeply emotional beings. Emotionality is the great human quality. »

A very “fin de siècle” fight, said our teachers of the past; but of all the ends of the century. Everything has started again since the end of the 20th century: economic globalization, financial tyranny, great migrations, massive destruction of jobs, upheaval of the hierarchy of powers, the decline of France and the inability of the Republican regime to stop it. Gustave Eiffel was himself this mixture of engineer and businessman, of great calculator and great margoulin, which we find, a century later, among the kings of the Californian Internet, the Russian oligarchs, or the Indian or Chinese tycoons.

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A SYMBOL OF NATIONAL PRIDE The Eiffel Tower was built to break a record and to magnify French industry. It had to be unique and precarious. She earned her license for eternity. It has been copied and imitated. Towers that are ever taller, ever more disproportionate, ever more proud have been erected on the five continents. More and more ugly. With all the modern materials available, iron, but also steel and glass. Everywhere, the construction of a tower is the symbol of national pride, the emblem of an irrational belief in progress.

In Paris itself, the tower had turbulent and screaming offspring. Eiffel is the grandmother of the Beaubourg center and of all those warts of steel and glass which, in the name of modernity and triumphant technology, have made the capital ugly: the La Défense arch, the Louvre pyramid, the Opéra-Bastille , Porte Maillot, Seine front… All these constructions are the product of a cold, international and standardizing architecture, which imposes its leveling theories whatever the place: Paris, London, New York, New Delhi, Shanghai, Riyadh… At the time, a cohort of writers and artists saw the danger and immediately sounded the alarm: “We come, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, passionate lovers of the hitherto intact beauty of Paris , protest with all our strength, with all our indignation, in the name of little-known French taste, in the name of threatened French art and history, against the erection, in the heart of the capital, of

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the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower, which public malice, often imbued with common sense and a spirit of justice, has already baptized with the name “Tower of Babel”. » This column appeared in the newspaper Le Temps on February 14, 1887. The signatures were prestigious. There we found the names of Alexandre Dumas fils, Leconte de Lisle, the composer Charles Gounod, the architect Garnier and even Guy de Maupassant. Immense creators who were not accustomed to letting themselves be confined by conservatism dusty or a reactionary ideology. Every word had been weighed and struck just right. It is enough to still contemplate the “useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower” today to understand the aesthetic relevance of this uncompromising judgment. And yet, more than a century later, we can no longer read this vengeful prose without a mocking, even contemptuous, smile for the great minds who went astray in this way.

This gap between our instinct and our habit, between our deep taste and our social judgment, is the real mystery of the Eiffel Tower.

A mystery that turned it into a fairground attraction, which should have disappeared with its peers – who still remembers the Galerie des Machines or the Ferris wheel, other famous creations from the Exhibitions of 1889 or 1900? monument of Paris. THE

-, and

monument of Paris for millions of Asian tourists who flock to its iron feet. The one lit up with the tricolor to celebrate French sporting victories; and in the colors of the nations to whom we want to show our solidarity. The one we hug to express our compassion to the victims of this or that disaster. The Eiffel Tower in its final transfiguration has become a message

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universal policy of peace and love; it is charged with replacing with the summary language of the fairy electricity and iron the nothingness of the political thought of our leaders. A mystery that becomes clearer in the light of the eventful history of the tower and its protagonist, Gustave Eiffel.

History which imposes its iniquitous and imperious law: we no longer have the right to be against the Eiffel Tower.

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Meline

Nothing to declare We do not choose our way of entering History. Not everyone is lucky enough to find an Arcole bridge on their way. Some burst in with sword in hand, others prefer a feather or a test tube. Some have a talent for glorious words: “We lost a battle but we did not lose the war”; the others, ridiculous sentences: “How much water, how much water, how much water!” » The physique also counts to mark minds and memories: a flowery beard, a club foot, a scar. We die as best we can, on a stake or a battlefield, in our bathtub

or in the arms of a “creature”. We often remain saddled with never a fetish object, a vase from Soissons, a horn from Roncesvalles, a white horse, a wig, a hat. Méline is unlucky. Its name is a tariff. A customs tariff. The “Méline rate”. Eternal object of resentment and of shame.

Jules Méline has a triple handicap: he is a conservative in a country which only celebrates “friends of Progress”; he praised the “return to the earth”, immediately associated in the conditioned minds of our contemporaries, with the Pétainist formula “the earth does not lie”; he left his name to a protectionist economic policy, while our elites gave themselves body and soul to free trade. It is this last aspect which is, in their eyes, the most infamous. Even his stubborn anti-Dreyfusism and his famous cry “There is no

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Dreyfus affair! » have now been written off. Neglected, forgotten. Protectionism, no. Protectionism is the enemy.

Méline, and its famous tariff, is the name of this “economic identity of France”, which the historian David Todd talks about in a recent book that of a people of peasants attached to 1

,

their land, and of routine and pusillanimous industrialists, closed to technical innovations and the open sea, protected as they are by their consanguineous links with the State and the protection of borders. A French economic identity that our elites, economists, but also politicians, big bosses, senior civil servants and even editorialists, have sworn to uproot like quack grass, a weed, which constantly grows back on this damned soil of France.

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FREE TRADE FOR PROTECTION CITIZEN

The quarrel is economic, but also political and ideological. It is a vision of our country and the world. Free trade is not only a set of commercial and economic rules, but a philosophical conception of man and society. The man of free trade is the sovereign, rational and universal individual of the Enlightenment, more consumer than citizen, and more citizen of the world than patriot; he pushes back borders like objects of the devil, and distrusts states and the masses. The fundamental disagreement between the great theoretician of protectionism, the German Friedrich List, and his liberal adversaries, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Jean-Baptiste Say, is less economic than political. For List, the individual comes into the world through the nation; he is an emulator of Aristotle and his famous “Man is by nature a political animal”; he criticizes his liberal adversaries for their disdain for the economic history of nations.

By rallying around protectionism, the Republicans with Méline were moving away from their political and philosophical origins. They adopted a more traditional conception of the nation, where the individual did not destroy the collective. Although they received the notable support of Jean Jaurès, they moved to the right. They chose the small and medium-sized peasantry against the large wine growers of Bordeaux, the industrialists of the North-East against the Parisian financiers. They betrayed their environment.

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Jules Méline had nevertheless started under the best auspices. A young Republican lawyer under the Second Empire, he found himself elected by the Paris Commune in 1870, but resigned quickly enough to avoid being associated with the abuses and massacres of the Communards. With his gaunt face, eaten up by long sideburns, he is a typical representative of the Republic of Jules. He is a friend of Ferry, a member of this “Republican Left” which is slowly but inexorably leaning towards the right, under the effect of the famous movement of political “sinisterism”, which is orienting the political field ever more towards the left. He is an elected official from the Vosges, close to the spinners of his region, founder of the General Union of the French Cotton Industry. He alone embodies this coalition of agrarian and industrial interests which, throughout Europe, will tip the continent towards protectionism.

The commercial situation is then confused. Officially, our country still lives under the regime of the free trade treaty signed by Napoleon III with the British in 1860. At the time, a small team of resolute Saint-Simonians, grouped around Michel Chevalier, had negotiated in great secrecy with the English. They then pursued an authoritarian project of economic modernization, through external constraint. French economic players would be forced to adapt or die. The god of free trade would choose the lucky ones. Those who survived would be stronger, for the greatest benefit of France's industrial, commercial and financial position. In Myths and Paradoxes of Economic History, Paul Bairoch writes: “A group of theorists had therefore succeeded in introducing free trade in

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France and indirectly, on the rest of the continent, against the will of most of the leaders of the various sectors of the economy. »

The deputies described this treaty as a “new coup d’état”. The French industrial system suffered severely from English competition. The peasants also suffered, from 1865 and the end of the Civil War, from the influx of American cereals into Europe. The victory of the North, an abolitionist, over the South, a slave owner, nevertheless meant that an industrial and protectionist America definitively took precedence over another America, agricultural and free trade.

While American industry was developing at breakneck speed, well sheltered behind its customs protections, the whole of Europe was sinking into an economic slump which culminated with the crisis of 1873. For Paul Bairoch, the responsibility of the free -exchange on the recession of this period is beyond doubt: “Europe's liberal policies lasted only twenty years (1860-1880) and coincided – in fact caused – the most negative economic period of the 19th century . »

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PROTECTIONISM AT SERVICE WORKERS AND PEASANTS At the time, Bismarck reacted first and broke with European free trade. He publicly praises Friedrich List. In 1879, he established a new customs tariff which affected both agricultural and industrial products. It seals the indestructible alliance between the aristocracy of large agrarian owners and the industrial bourgeoisie. He also appeased the emerging class struggle: sheltered behind his customs barriers, he established a system of social protection for workers unprecedented in Europe.

French republican leaders appear more timid. They also take customs measures for raw materials or agricultural products, but always insufficient and always too late. Already... The situation of the peasants is becoming tragic. We have forgotten it today, but the depression of the years 1869-1873 was more serious, more painful than that of the 1930s. The unpopularity of free trade was at its height in all levels of society. In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, Flaubert, always sarcastic, notes in the article “Free Trade”: “cause of all our evils”.

Finally Méline came. General rapporteur and president of the general customs commission, he brings together in the House a heterogeneous majority of republicans and monarchists. It confirms the adherence of the Third Republic to protectionism. She remained attached to him until 1939. In 1931, after the crisis

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of 1929, it will not hesitate to place quotas on agricultural and industrial imports. Protectionism is marked on the right, but, as is often the case, this right-wing policy will save and consolidate the left. The Méline tariff of 1892 marks the definitive rallying of peasants, until then still suspicious, to the republican regime.

Méline is a lucky general. Its massive increase in customs duties in 1892 relieved French agriculture which, from 1896, took full advantage of the rise in world prices. Méline's protectionism remains reasonable; nothing to do with the disproportionate increases in customs duties that the world experienced during the 1930s. He is a skillful negotiator: by threatening to increase its rates, France obtains concessions from its partners, which promotes trade and the growth.

It was in 1892 – the year of the official establishment of famous tariff – that the liberal period is really ending. The Méline tariff also put an end to the commercial treaties which expired that year. However, as Paul Bairoch notes, the economic crisis of 1873 started at the height of liberalism and ended around 1892-1894 when the

return of protectionism becomes effective in Europe. A simple coincidence?

The adoption of protectionist measures has prevented neither the return of growth, nor even the acceleration of trade. The only country that has remained stubbornly loyal to free trade, the United Kingdom, is the only one experiencing stagnation! Contrary to what Marxist economists will claim, the First World War did not

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in no way been triggered by capitalism in crisis, with great imperialist powers in search of opportunities. Never has capitalism been doing so well as in these early years of the 20th century. Protectionism had it Safe !

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PORTUGUESE WINE AND ENGLISH SHEETS

This is what economic theory cannot forgive. There is a secularized religious faith at the heart of his passion for free trade. Its supporters are convinced that it leads to the development of trade, which not only accelerates growth, but also improves relations between peoples. And too bad if Paul Bairoch demonstrated that the entire history of the 19th century proves on the contrary that it was economic growth which led to the development of foreign trade and not the reverse, while during the period of free trade the slowdown in growth leads to a slowdown in trade.

The strength of the free trade argument (the famous law of comparative advantages) is that it is ahistorical and theoretical. This is also his weakness. With his famous example of Portuguese wine and English cloth, Ricardo is simply unaware that it is the balance of military power that allows England to impose favorable terms of trade. Some American economists today even go so far as to consider that Ricardo falsified his figures to make people believe in a balanced trade between the two countries. But nothing shakes the faith of our fervent believers.

These ideologues of peace through free trade boast of the “sweet commerce” dear to Montesquieu, even if their great man, much more prudent than his epigones, never mechanically linked trade to civil peace. They explain the Second World War by the rise of economic protectionism during the 1930s and the

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ensuing mass unemployment; they only forget that the growth of this decade of the 1930s approaches or even exceeds that which raged between 1830 and 1890. They emphasize the terrible crisis of 1929, which abruptly shattered the euphoria of the 1920s, forgetting that in 1927 and 1928 customs duties were lowered in almost all Western countries. And that the main cause of the crisis of 1929 was this disheveled liberalism and this greedy and brainless finance.

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THE FRENCH CONVERSION TOOK TIME As early as the 19th century, as David Todd notes, free traders already covered the defenders of protectionism with iron contempt: “They do not travel, do not know foreign languages, they would be more liberal if they were more educated. » The same arguments are rehashed today. The difference is that free trade now holds the upper hand. The French conversion took time. The Fourth Republic, which rebuilt the country after the war, was as protectionist as its predecessor. The 1957 Treaty of Rome was the tipping point; but which hardly has any short-term consequences. We know the famous reflection of General de Gaulle to the requests of bosses fearing German or Italian competition who urged him to abolish the treaty as soon as he returned to business in 1958: "They are strong and do not don't know it. »

The free trade of the Common Market is in reality a sham. The Treaty of Rome provides for the reduction of customs barriers within the Europe of Six, favoring the entry of German automobiles into France and French agricultural products into Germany; but the common external tariff, the community preference and the common agricultural policy in truth allow the maintenance of the French protectionist tradition.

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The six founding countries of the Common Market are, moreover, the almost perfect superposition of the Napoleonic Empire of 1811. A resurrection which did not escape General de Gaulle – “Europe is the Archimedean lever of France for allow her to regain the rank she lost in 1815” – nor to the English, who, through the mouth of their Prime Minister at the time, Macmillan, stormed and threatened the general himself: “This common market is is the continental blockade! You will have war 2

!»

Sheltered from this expanded but protected market, de Gaulle and Pompidou will both modernize agriculture and build an industrial power unique in the history of France.

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THE EUROPEAN AND FREE CHOICEEXCHANGER

The English will take their revenge. As soon as the General has left the stage, they will enter the Common Market to better tear down the walls of the “continental blockade” renamed for the occasion with all-British humor “Fortress Europe”. Allied with the Germans on the inside, and with the Americans on the outside, the British will convert the Brussels Commission to their free trade views, which the latter will put into practice during the countless and endless trade negotiations within the international Gatt bodies. , then the WTO. This will be the big return of Michel Chevalier. Like Napoleon III once with the English, Georges Pompidou also wanted to show the United States that the time of Gaullian hostility was over.

Republic The electoral and political logics of the V will prevent protectionist recriminations from below from crossing the precincts of Parliament. Large independent elected officials, like Méline, could no longer, in the new institutional framework, pursue an autonomous policy. Power was in the hand of the executive and the large administrative baronies. The deputies of the Second Empire who had criticized the Emperor for his “new commercial coup d’état” could not believe it: the V Republic was was indeed a “permanent coup d’état” in this respect. It is

It is

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Our economic and technocratic elites protected their free trade certainties from any popular challenge by entrusting the Brussels Commission with a monopoly on trade negotiations. Economic liberalism showed, as in the 19th century, its deep authoritarian and even autocratic tendencies (in the era of the Physiocrats, we spoke more openly of “legal despotism”). The European left pretended not to see anything. Trapped by her universalism, she could only submit. The left only compensated for the devastating effects of international competition – deindustrialization and mass unemployment – by reducing working hours and subsidized jobs, on the model of the “national workshops” of 1848. We were definitely returning to the middle of the 19th century .

Rare economists, in the wake of the Nobel Prize winner in economics Maurice Allais, have attempted to make the link between the establishment of globalized free trade and the slowdown in economic growth in Europe from the mid-1970s. But these Theoretical debates remained in vain, because France no longer had any influence on European trade decisions.

Our “national champions”, grown up under GaulloPompidolian Colbertism in the France of the Common Market of the 1960s and 1970s, are collapsing one after the other, swallowed up by foreign rivals or restrained by a European Commission in the name of sacred principle. of “free” and “undistorted” competition, which now prohibits any national industrial policy.

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Thrown into the global deep end from the 1980s onwards, French capitalism is changing face and regime. The industry is marginalized; banking and services dominate; exponential debt and a colossal social redistribution system fuel sluggish and artificial growth. Bankers, merchants and traders replaced engineers and workers. Large distribution, the Forges Committee. Financial, rentier, unproductive capitalism has replaced industrial capitalism.

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PROTECTIONIST RETURN PROHIBITED This industrial and social massacre – without forgetting the

ruin of many farmers – is explained and justified by the structural inadequacies of the French productive system: insufficient upgrading, under-qualification, lack of equity. These were already the arguments produced by economic theory after the fiasco following the Franco-English free trade treaty of 1860. The protectionist return is prohibited – beyond European rules – by the fallacious fear of war and by a empathy – as new as it is affected – for the poorest, who, deprived of jobs by the death of industry and largely dependent on income distributed by the welfare state, would suffer the most from the increase in the price of agricultural products. imported mass-market products that they acquire without counting in supermarkets.

Leo Tolstoy said mockingly: “Economic history is a deaf man who answers questions that no economist has ever asked it. » We refuse to admit that the great periods of measured protectionism were also those where French industry was the most inventive and dynamic. We let the glories of the 1960s die without regret; and we forget that between 1880 and 1930, French industry and science invented the automobile, the cinema, the airplane, the telephone, while French savings financed major projects throughout the world. It was then the time of the second industrial revolution: chemical, electrical, mechanical. Northern and Eastern France held the prize

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high to Germany. While liberal theorists still wonder how protectionism was compatible with these innovations, they can only stubbornly reject the idea that it was at the origin!

This is why Jules Méline is reduced by them to a reviled price. We do not criticize him for having been protectionist, but for having succeeded.

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1. David Todd, The economic identity of France, Grasset, 2008. 2. Alain Peyreffite, It was de Gaulle, Fayard/de Fallois, 1994.

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The Great Illusion

War and peace It's a war film without a battle. An escapist film without action. A film about men who never stop chatting in a confined universe. A French film where the German officer is neither cruel nor grotesque. The Great Illusion is an undisputed masterpiece that has long been contested. The French did not appreciate the romance established at the end of the story between Jean Gabin and the German widow, and censored certain scenes. Nazi leaders banned the film, and Goebbels designated it “cinematic enemy number one.”

The title remains a mystery. So what is this “great illusion”? Illusion of believing that the Great War will be the last? That it will lead to universal peace? Peace forever, peace between classes in France, and peace between nations in the world?

The film takes place during the First World War.

world, but was broadcast on the screens in 1937, on the eve of the Second. In the rooms, everyone understood that we were “going to war”. That we were “going to do it again”. The film is an ode to pacifism and human brotherhood; it is a desperate ode. Not the song of hope that the optimists wanted to see there, but the song of failure. Contrary to small and large illusions, it was not peace that came out of

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Great War, but war. Always more ferocious, always more deadly, always more inexpiable.

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FROM POLITICS TO MORALITY While the French celebrated the armistice of November 11 with cries of “We got them!” ", weapons continued to crackle all over the European continent, in the ruins of the four great Empires which were collapsing, the German, the Russian, the Austrian and the Ottoman. The war of 1914-1918 proved to be the catalyst for social and national revolutions which would shape the 20th century. A traditional conflict between States, although particularly deadly, had opened the way to other confrontations that were much more dangerous, much more savage, much more ruthless, where the class or racial enemy had not only to be defeated, but exterminated.

Ernst Jünger wrote, as early as 1928, in his superb work entitled War as an Inner Experience : “This war does not mark the end but the beginning of violence. She is the forge in which the world will be hammered to create new boundaries and new communities. These new molds are thirsty for blood, and power will be wielded with an iron fist. »

The French and the English had started the war to defend their homeland and their land and ended it to defend the rights and freedom of peoples. Germany started out as an adversary and ended up a criminal. War had for ages been a normal element of state politics: Ultima ratio regum (“ultimate argument of kings”), wrote Louis XIV on his canons; after four years of

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massacres, it became the forbidden horror. Peace was no longer the negotiated interlude between two wars, but an absolute that had to be imposed, including by force. We left politics to enter morality. We abandoned the realism of power relations for the idealism of good feelings. We were leaving Europe to submit to America. We were leaving the war to enter the crusade.

These staunch pacifists did not understand that by rejecting war in principle, by refusing the accommodations and rules of the past which had framed, circumscribed, regulated it, they would only generate a new type of conflict, more terrible. again, that of good against evil, which recalled the religious wars of yesteryear. By attempting to prohibit traditional clashes between States, they were going to resurrect those where the enemy became pirates and criminals, where one should not defeat the adversary, but destroy the one who embodied evil.

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THE ARISTOCRATE, THE WORKER AND THE BOURGEOIS

The Great Illusion is this, the cruel failure of pacifism; the victory of reality over illusions, of passions over reason; the 20th century which looms in all its horror. The storyline is, however, extremely banal. French officers, prisoners of a German camp, spend all their time, and throw all their energy, into countless and vain escape attempts. The three main characters, Boeldieu, Maréchal and Rosenthal, are played by Fresnay, Gabin and Dalio. The aristocrat, the worker and the bourgeois. The aristocrat pays homage to his wife and his mother; the worker prefers cycling to the theater; the bourgeois spoils the French prisoners with packages that make their German jailers, subject to the blockade of the English navy, green with envy. The aristocrat has a German cousin, the worker is Breton, the bourgeois the son of a Jewish banker. Bodies and voices, even intonations and syntax, everything exudes their social differences. The German officer von Rauffenstein, played with stiff distinction by Erich von Stroheim, never ceases to seek class complicity with the Frenchman Boeldieu;

and Rosenthal exasperates his companions with the vain ostentation of a nouvea Renoir sublimates the traditional values of altruism and of self-forgetfulness, so useful in times of crisis: Boeldieu sacrifices himself for his two friends; Maréchal rescues the wounded Rosenthal, who nevertheless delays their escape. The political lesson is clear: liberal society draws on the values common to Christian, aristocratic and working-class societies; but it squanders them and does not renew them. There

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Republic secularizes Christian values by destroying them in the name of individual freedom and the progress of reason. The crisis of capitalism is also that of the Parliamentary Republic, both entangled in injustice, corruption, and the perversion of the ideal in the vulgarity of mass entertainment.

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MAN IS NO LONGER A MAN Even the relationships between men and women are altered by this individualist revolution. There is of course no female presence in the prison camp, but the men cannot help but bitterly recall the pleasures of the rear: Maxim's full every evening, the women in skirts, without corsets and short hair. “When we're not there to watch over them, women only do stupid things,” says one of them, disillusioned.

Since the dawn of time, war had legitimized the power of men: the power of the protector, of the one who risks his life to defend the mother of his children. But the war of 1914 will change the situation and reverse its centuries-old function: it leaves women alone for the first time, without their man, without protection against basic needs or temptations. While at the back the women disguise themselves as boys, the men, in their prison, disguise themselves as girls, wrapped in soft guipures from Paris, which they touch and caress, ashamed of the trouble they cannot hide when one of their comrades appears dressed as a seductive dancer. The class and gender war inside the camp seems to supplant that of the nations outside. “Everyone would die of their class disease if there wasn’t a war to bring together all the microbes,” one character jokes cynically. But Renoir is too shrewd to submit entirely to the Marxist vulgate. Love of the country only asks to shudder, to overcome all divisions.

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When the capture of Douaumont by the French was announced, all the prisoners in lace petticoats stood at impeccable attention and sang a quivering Marseillaise .

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WAR IS NO LONGER WAR Faced with the democratic irruption into the world of war, the two nations did not react in the same way: France strives to instill the warrior values of the nobility in the best of the working classes, on the model marshals of the Empire, while the Germans favored the Prussian feudal lords among themselves. But in both cases, the caste knows itself condemned to death by the times. Their world disappears.

War is no longer war. It is no longer this fierce but exhilarating confrontation where young men tested their strength and encountered glory. It is no longer the crucible of virile and aristocratic values of courage, honor and sacrifice.

Anatole France, in his preface to a translation of Goethe's Faust , had prophesied: "Suppress military virtues and all civil society collapses..." He had no idea that war itself would abolish war. Industrialization and the massification of mobilizations transformed soldiers into a huge herd of men of all ages, crawling along the ground in the trenches like rats, rushing under enemy fire like sheep to the slaughter. Foch had foreseen this when he confided a few months before the start of hostilities that “the armies had become too big for the brains of those who commanded them. No man would be powerful enough to control these millions of soldiers. The leaders would hesitate and then sit, obsessed with their lines of action.

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communication, and the need to supply these vast hordes, which must be well fed…”

The First World War ended the model archetypal pitched battle. We say "battle of the Aisne", or "battle of the Chemin des Dames", because we can no longer designate the place of the battle, but we want to benefit from the symbolic and emotional, political aura and mythological, which the word carries with it. Later, the French, but also their adversaries, would speak of the “battle of Algiers”, to designate the bitter struggle in the casbah of Algiers between French paratroopers and FLN bombers.

In Germany as in France, military thought perceived this development as a change of scale, which did not call into question the very idea of the decisive battle. We sought a break, the "decision by arms" in the words of Foch, we advocated the "extreme offensive", we were nourished by the insurmountable models of the glorious campaigns of Bonaparte, for the French, or of the great Frédéric, for the Prussians.

The French ended up winning in the fall of 1918, after nearly losing in the spring of the same year. But his defeat on the battlefield was not enough to convince the German general staff that the war was lost. Since there were no more battles, there was no longer any definitive victory; there was no longer any definitive defeat either.

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In the case of a total confrontation, the belligerents have almost unlimited resources which make it possible to prolong the struggle and above all to overcome the consequences of a tactical failure. The general in chief of the German armies, Ludendorff, deduced the foundations of his theory of Total War, a work published in 1935. He explains that only the strategy of attrition worked, through the use of economic means. It was on this front that the strategists of the Central Powers lost the war. It is therefore on this front that they will be able to take their revenge. In 1940, withdrawn to London, de Gaulle would not say anything else after the French rout. France, defeated by an unprecedented deployment of tanks, planes and bombs, will be able to take its revenge thanks to its American ally, who will provide it with even more tanks, planes and bombs.

Progress has changed the face of war. According to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, progress should bring science, the end of ignorance, tolerance, freedom, peace. Progress will bring new ignorance, increased fanaticism, totalitarian oppression: total war. Verdun is progress itself!

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EACH CAMP EMBODYS THE TRUTH La Grande Illusion is the French response to the horror of war; Ludendorff's work is the German response. For the former, the worst is war; for the latter, the worst is defeat. For the former, the best response to war is peace. For the latter, the best response to defeat is revenge.

Each side believes itself to be the right side. Each side is waging a war for justice, for the people, for humanity. The Nazis avenge the Germans humiliated by the diktat of Versailles and herald the advent of the Aryan “Greater Europe”. Allies defend freedom and democracy.

Each side embodies good, and its opponent evil. Each side embodies the Truth. We returned to the Middle Ages, when the Church blessed only "just wars", made for Christ in the name of faith.

Everything happened as if the unprecedented development of modern technology, with its unprecedented capacities for destruction, forced the return of just war. To justify such means of destruction, capable of razing a city, exterminating a people, atomizing a country, the war had to be morally just.

Incredible and mysterious connection between the ideological developments of the times and the scientific discoveries of men. Hegel, in his Lessons on the Philosophy of

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history, had already noted: “Humanity then needed, in passing from feudalism to absolutism, gunpowder, and immediately it was there. »

Incredible collision of generations and aspirations. The sacrificed generation of 1914 who cried “Never again war!” » extended his hand to the following generation, who, born during the hostilities, had retained deep within themselves the frustration of not having been able to participate in the carnage, in the manner of the romantic youth of Musset who in La Confession d A child of the century, confided how much she had suffered at not having been able to continue the heroic gesture of her fathers in Napoleon's Grande Armée. France no longer knows who it is or who it wants to be. Between those who still dreamed of the return of the “great nation” and those who feared above all the horrors of the Great War, there is nothing more in common. The time returned from the just war is also that of the civil war; the one where the French will no longer love each other. The one where the Boeldieu, Maréchal, Rosenthal will tear each other apart, gut each other, under the mocking and contemptuous eye of the von Rauffensteins who will have won the war.

The time of great disillusionment.

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Clemenceau

Crime and Punishment He is the last. The last giant. The last of the sons of the Revolution. The last of the Jacobins. The last to have put on the boots of 1793. The last to have saved the “fatherland in danger”. Even the monarchists admired this intractable republican; even the Catholics ended up praising this priesteater. He was “the Father of Victory”. " The Tiger ".

This war had been his war; this victory his victory. He will have defeated his enemies but will be defeated by his allies. He will win the war but lose the peace. He had not given in to the Germans but would give in to the Americans and the English. The Tiger would emerge domesticated from the Congress of Versailles. His victory in 1918 paradoxically sounded the death knell for the “great nation”. Clemenceau was the architect of both. THE qualities that had allowed him to win the Great War became the faults that prevented him from winning the peace. He led alone, surrounded by his few advisors, like Mandel or Tardieu, the peace negotiations, just as he had led the war operations alone. Then President of the Republic, Poincaré noted in his diary: “No news from Clemenceau, who alone decides the fate of France, outside the Chambers, outside the government, outside me. »

However, he had taken care of his entry, solemnly opening the Peace Conference on January 18, 1919, the anniversary date

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of the founding of the Reich, in 1871, in the same palace of Versailles where Bismarck had proclaimed William II emperor of united Germany. And on this June 28, 1919, he said, in his dry and cutting voice, which resonated in the Hall of Mirrors, to the two German delegates, Muller and Bell, bundled up in their black clothes: “It is well understood, gentlemen German delegates , that all the commitments you sign must be kept in full and faithfully. »

He was Clemenceau the implacable. Clemenceau the avenging arm of France. Clemenceau who would make the Germans surrender. The hatred he bore them was legendary; he was proud of it. He explained to all his interlocutors the “gains” he had obtained from the negotiation: AlsaceLorraine, the mines of the Saarland, Morocco. He knew deep down that it was little compared to the million four hundred thousand dead (out of eight million able-bodied men between 20 and 50 years old) and the ten departments of the North-East ravaged by the Germanic occupation. . These results obtained were nothing to marvel at compared to those of the English, who had confined the German navy in British harbors. France had been given a bad border, drawn in 1815 to punish Napoleonic France, an invasion border which had been seen as a national humiliation for a century.

Alsace-Lorraine only put a little balm on our raw wounds. The defeat at Sedan in 1870 had been erased, not Waterloo.

Clemenceau guessed the taunts behind his back: England was paid in cash, France in term. He heard all those, Foch, Poincaré, Lyautey, Mangin, who denounced his renunciations, alerted to the faults of the

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treaty ; criticized him for not having signed a peace treaty, but a “twenty-year armistice”. Deep down, the Tiger knew they were not wrong, but his hubris would never recognize it. He was distraught, overwhelmed, disappointed. Peace had changed his friends into adversaries. The English had rediscovered their age-old hostility to French hegemony; they protected Germany against Gallic imperialism. Irish historian Robert Gerwarth, in his book, The Vanquished (2017), explains that for the British “the prospect of French hegemony was as serious a threat as German domination had been before the war”.

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PROPHET WILSON TAMED THE TIGER

France found its two centuries-old enemies: England and Germany. The British Empire made light of the land anxieties of France, which was trying to establish secure borders protecting it from any invasion from the East. As for the Americans, it was undoubtedly worse. Jacques Bainville had summed up the situation perfectly: "America would arrive at the end of the war in a tired Europe, and President Wilson would be master of peace as France had been under Richelieu by intervening only in the last period of the Thirty Years' War. » President Wilson paraded in Paris as a victor. The French and British lefts adored him. The Germans awaited him as a messiah who would save them from French ferocity. In Paris, American troops distributed food, cans and chewing gum. Jazz was played and the pretty French women danced with the black soldiers, surprised to be able to rub shoulders with white women in bars without segregation. 1918 had the air of 1945 before its time.

The American and French presses praised the troops who came from across the Atlantic to save La Fayette in great danger. The propaganda machine was running at full speed. Soon, Hollywood would take over. Clemenceau knew that at the height of the Allied offensive in the summer of 1918, there had never been more than six operational American divisions, while the French never fielded any

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less than twenty. He had discovered that the Americans were poor soldiers, to whom their French trainers often tried in vain to teach the art of not throwing themselves under German grapeshot. The Americans had bought their planes, cannons, shells, tanks, even spare parts, from the French. The real winner of the war had been the Renault FT-17 tank, and its pivoting turret, which had diverted and disintegrated the German adversary, while the French army, remodeled after Verdun by Pétain and Foch, had once again become the best in the field. world, regaining its luster of Austerlitz and Jena.

The decisive allies had not been the Americans, but the Italians, who, avenging their humiliation of Caporetto at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, had forced the Austrian army to request an armistice on November 3, 1918, leaving the German friend alone, helpless, facing his disastrous destiny. At the same time, on the eastern front, French troops, with their Serbian allies, led by Franchet d'Espèrey, broke through Bulgarian resistance, broke the Macedonian front and reached the Danube. To everyone's surprise, the Eastern Army had thus opened the route south from Berlin, through Bohemia, via Budapest-Vienna-Prague: two hundred kilometers, without even having to fight, since the armistice with Austria-Hungary made it possible to use all the means of communication of this State. The Germans could do nothing about it. But the indestructible anti-clerical Clemenceau had no desire for this Catholic royalist Franchet d'Espèrey to seize the capitals of the very Catholic Habsburg emperor, and take possible political initiatives there.

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The republican Clemenceau, who had a historical detestation of the figure of Bonaparte, was suspicious of any soldier who had diminished his role as civilian leader of the war through his prestige as a winner. On November 7, he ordered Franchet to stop his twenty-two divisions on the Serbian border. The Tiger was also under pressure from its allies, the Englishman Lloyd George and the American Woodrow Wilson, who refused to see France win the war too brilliantly, and French troops enter Berlin. Lloyd George was simply applying England's traditional pendulum strategy, supporting Germany when France was too strong, supporting France when Germany was too strong.

As for Wilson, it was a strange mess. Idealist and cynical at the same time. Steeped in universalist principles and racist prejudices from his native South, he was first and foremost a defender of the white race, and sharply criticized the English for their alliance with the Japanese. Wilson was a college professor who gave preacher sermons. A pacifist who had equipped his country with the most powerful navy in the world. Clemenceau thought, bitterly, that this Congress of Versailles was turning into a council and that the diplomatic treaty had become a moral lesson for readers of the Bible.

Everyone had remembered the famous speech of the President Wilson, of January 1918, and his “fourteen points” which had served as the basis for the establishment of future peace; but no one had remembered his speech of January 22, 1917 before the Senate, in which he announced the advent of American hegemony over the world for the century that was opening: a new geopolitical order structured around the star American was in the making. Wilson claimed

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name of America a superiority which would be economic, but also political and moral. His ambition was limitless. He wanted nothing less than to decenter the West, to tear it away from England and France, to become its inspiration and master. Becoming the new West, the new West, the New Europe. The new center of the Earth.

He claimed to bring together all the “liberal democracies” behind tutelary America, by merging the heterogeneous political traditions of France, Great Britain and the United States. As early as December 1, 1918, a Wilson memorandum had already proposed to his allies to set up a general supply directorate, whose boss would have been an American, which would have reorganized the economy of allied or enemy regions devastated by the war. The institutions that would emerge after the Second World War, to ensure American hegemony over the “free world”, in particular the IMF and the IBRD, were already in the cards of the American president. is

The Wilsonian project was prophetic and would be implemented by his successors throughout the 20th century. France and England would abandon themselves to the American yoke in 1919; Germany, broken in its turn by the Second World War, would return to the fold of “liberal democracies” in 1945. The fall of the Soviet Union would fill the Western hands of the countries of Central Europe. And America, insatiable, would still try to wrest from the Russian bear, after the dislocation of the Soviet Union, in 1991, shreds of its former empire, Ukrainian or Georgian, always in the name of “liberal democracy” .

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SUPPORT THE FRENCH TO SAVE THE GERMANS The devious Wilson had never declared his country “ally” of the Entente, but “associated”; never renounced his role as “mediator”, “arbitrator”. He had taken care, even after entering the war, to preserve his position of “neutrality”. Wilson had forged the unique posture of the bellicose neutral. The Americans had begged the Germans for months to stop their submarine warfare; but generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg did not want to hear anything; they had deliberately resolved to “globalize” this war just as, in 1914, they had already decided to open hostilities by supporting Austria-Hungary after the attack on Sarajevo.

America's entry into the war in April 1917 had been a personal failure; but Wilson made his French allies pay more than his adversaries. Germany was found guilty of "the greatest crime committed against the world", but for our moralist from across the Atlantic, it was all of Europe, and its archaic diplomatic system, which was guilty. Wilson had tried everything to obtain a “white peace” without winners or losers in order to better humiliate the belligerents and delegitimize the European order. Putting his best foot forward against bad luck, the American came to support the French to save the Germans.

He thus settled old accounts. A few decades earlier, when America was ravaged by a terrible "Civil War", France and England had

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recognized the Confederate States of the South, in May-June 1861. The objective was of course to break the wings of this giant from across the Atlantic before it took irresistible flight. Napoleon III had even sent an expeditionary force of thirty thousand men to Mexico in 1863, with the intention of constituting a union between Mexico and the southern United States, in a Catholic, Latin and Francophile whole, as a counterweight to a Protestant and Anglophile North. A French dream which was less stupid than the countless opponents of the Emperor claimed, but which he made the mistake of not pursuing with enough determination. He did not dare to send a French squadron to New Orleans to the aid of General Lee's southern armies, to break the blockade organized by the North. American leaders never forgot the affront. As soon as the Civil War ended, the French expeditionary force in Mexico had to leave. In 1870, President Ulysses Grant sent a telegram of congratulations to Emperor William II, who had just crushed the French armies of Napoleon III...

The Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero saw in the First World War the opposition of the “logic of perfection” to the “logic of power”. The first, carried by the Latin countries (France and its Italian ally), the second, by the Germans and their American successors. Efficiency America's industrial and technical structure was Germany's absolute model. Minister Rathenau nicknamed Berlin “Chicago-on-theSpree”. Germans loved Karl May's cowboy stories. Their conquest of the West would be that of the East, with its Eurasian lands. Hitler, himself a great admirer of America, will be

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convinced to the end that by exterminating Slavs and Jews, Poles or Russians, he was only repeating the great cleansing carried out by the American “pioneers” to the detriment of the Indian tribes.

This German-American complicity was the worst kept secret of the peace negotiations. In Grandeurs et misères d'une victory, Clemenceau wrote that the President of the United States “had dealt alone, separately, with Germany, taking care, ironically, to ensure the advantages of the battles that he did not had not been delivered.

The Germans understood the subliminal message being sent to them. With his ode to democracy, freedom and the principle of nationalities, Wilson decided which regime was acceptable and which was not. The Americans demanded that the Germans sacrifice Emperor William II, and their feudal autocracy, on the altar of the integrity of their state. After some hesitation, in the midst of the revolutionary torments of the “Spartacist” communists, the German social democratic leaders made an alliance with the army on a double compromise: the exile of the emperor and the repression of the “Spartacists”. The most idealistic among them saw it as an unexpected opportunity to pick up the thread of the history of another Germany, democratic, liberal, Rhineland, far from the aristocratic and militarist Prussian roughness, which had been broken during the failure of the revolution of 1848. The Social Democratic President Ebert promised that Germany would become the "greatest Republic in the world after that of the United States."

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A CATHOLIC TOGETHER AND FRANCOPHILE This “deal” between the Americans and the Germans was a death trap for France. A Europe divided into small nations, in the name of the principle of nationalities, was too tempting a prey for a condemned but preserved Germany. All of Europe had been balkanized, except Germany. It had lost everything, but saved the essential: its State and its unity. The diabolical pact between the Americans and the Germans had worked: the Germans had saved their most precious treasure, the fruit of the victories of Bismarck's Prussia, in the name of democracy.

Clemenceau was himself a child of the Revolution French, who had spread the ideals of freedom and nationalities. He had grown up in France during the Second Empire, which had turned Europe upside down in their name. Wilson brought us the principles of Napoleon III and Michelet. The French could not oppose it. We don't look back on fifty years of history! repeated the French negotiators. Germany's economy, its industry, its canals, its railways, everything should be dismantled!

Clemenceau had never included in his war goals the dismantling of German unity; but he had not envisaged the dislocation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire either; but everything happened as if this disintegration of the old Habsburg Empire had been the only political objective of this Great War. Clemenceau did not mourn the disappearance of the

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reactionary and Catholic power. A long time ago, in 1881, he had written to Gambetta, who was already seeking rapprochement with Germany and Austria: "All emperors, kings, archdukes and princes are great, sublime, generous, superb, their princesses are whatever you please, but I hate them as they hated them in 1793.”

He had, however, understood the interest for France in detaching Bavaria from Germany, to link it to Austria, in order to constitute a Catholic and Francophile group which would have acted as a counterweight, in the center of Europe, to the Protestants of North, close to the AngloSaxons. The project would have looked great. This German kingdom on the Danube had, in the past, celebrated the wedding of art and music. It would have been protected by the French army and would have served as a march to protect our border from any Prussian offensive. France already occupied the Rhineland (but only for fifteen years);

if Vienna remained outside the German whole, if the Sudetenland (with a German population) came under the control of the new Czechoslovakia, nothing prevented other Germanic pieces, Bavaria, the Rhineland or Württemberg, from being detached them too. If German negotiators had sacrificed their monarchy for peace, they could also have sacrificed the unity a We would have returned to the fundamental principle which had guided French policy for centuries, and which Adolphe Thiers had again recalled in 1866: "The greatest principle of European policy is that Germany is made up of independent states, linked together by a simple link federal. »

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THE OFFENSIVE OF NOVEMBER 13, 1918

Without ever recognizing it, Clemenceau must now have regretted having blocked the dazzling advance of Franchet d'Espèrey's troops on the Danube...

As early as December 4, 1918, Hanover, Schleswig and the Rhineland had demanded the right to decide their fate. Bavaria had seceded. A federalist manifesto then proclaimed: “The German people are not a shapeless and united popular mass. It is a people of is peoples. » February 1919, the mayor of Cologne, a The first Catholic personality by the name of Konrad Adenauer, summoned the deputies from the left bank of the Rhine to draft the Constitution of an autonomous Rhine Land. Others Catholic figures, like Dr. Dorten, wanted to proclaim an independent state. They met General Mangin to ask him for the protection of the French army. He granted it to them.

But when French negotiators demanded Bavaria's participation in peace negotiations, the Anglo-Saxons refused. When the French army services offered to give priority to supplying the Bavarian populations, the allies were scandalized. When socialist Kurt Eisner overthrew the Bavarian monarchy in 1918 and turned to France, he was assassinated by a German officer. Later, in 1923, it was again the Bavarian separatists who prevented Hitler's famous putsch at home.

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Munich brewery, November 9, 1923. It was only a postponement.

Clemenceau did not insist. He hadn't thought about peace as much as he had about war. On November 6, 1919, Lyautey judged him harshly in a letter written to his friend Wladimir d'Ormesson: "And once in power, while circumstances put all the trump cards in his game, did he not [have] the terrible responsibility, heavy among all, for the Austrian collapse, and of this anarchy in Central Europe from which we will not escape and from which we will die. He has no external view, no statesmanlike scope, in the sense of Richelieu, Talleyrand and Cavour. He is incapable of conceiving of tomorrows and preparing for them. He leads us from day to day, from hour to hour, punching his fists, making words, and insulting his opponents for every argument. It's to cry. »

His hatred of the Germans, without limits or nuances, now weakened France, which would have had an interest in distinguishing between good and bad Germans, potential allies and irreducible enemies. By an incredible paradox, Clemenceau's unmitigated Germanophobia and his revolutionary heritage saved the great work of the reactionary Bismarck. Disgusted, Poincaré wrote in his diary: “Well, we ourselves are bringing about German unity. »

French ingenuity proved to be very imprudent: if the Germans had won in 1918, they had a plan to dismember the defeated French, which Blücher had not been able to implement in 1815, and which Hitler put into execution in 1940. The destruction of Bismarck's work and the separation

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of corps between the Prussians and the Rhinelanders, dreamed of by the French nationalists, were achieved later, but by the Americans and the Russians, after the Second World War, for the benefit of the two great ones, and guaranteed Europe a peace of half a century, until German reunification in 1990. The lessons of the old French monarchy had not been lost on everyone... On the other hand, the revolutionary principles of France, as during the reign of Napoleon III, when they forged two great rival nations on our doorstep, Italy and especially Germany, still turned against our country. France would indeed be this “Christ of nations” that Renan had announced, which sacrificed itself on the altar of its own principles which it gave to the world. “France, once a soldier of God, then a soldier of human rights, will always be a soldier of the ideal,” Clemenceau proclaimed. This ideal would kill her.

Clemenceau lacked, it is true, means of pressure. French troops did not occupy an inch of German soil. From August to November 1918, the Allied soldiers had advanced two hundred kilometers, but the German population had not seen its territory invaded. The armistice came at a time when General de Castelnau, under the orders of Pétain, was preparing to launch a vigorous offensive in Lorraine with the 10th and 8th French armies, twenty divisions and six hundred tanks. The invasion of Germany would not take place. This offensive was planned for… November 13, 1918.

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THE REPAIRS But Foch refused. He feared unnecessary losses, not having much information on the advanced decomposition of the Reich. He did not want to give the “wait-and-see Pétain” the halo of winner on the Rhine, which would have been added to that of savior of Verdun: “I regret for you, but we must mourn your offensive”, Foch told him. Pétain would recount years later: “A unique thing happened to me in my life as a soldier, I cried in front of my leader. »

Showing a map of France in the spring of 1919, after the failure of the Rhine separatist movements that he had sponsored, General Mangin exclaimed in front of his officers: “My children will see this again in twenty years! » He had spoken at length to Clemenceau. Mangin was one of the few generals the Tiger trusted. While he was preparing to become President of the Council, in November 1917, Clemenceau had begged his friend to take over an army corps. You have to imagine Clemenceau on his knees, tears in his voice, imploring General Mangin to return. After asking to think about it until morning and walking up and down all night, the general told him he accepted. And Clemenceau exulted, as Madame Mangin later recounted: “You are the chicest!” We're familiar with each other! »

But the French troops had not returned to Berlin, had not marched under the Brandenburg Gate, in the manner of Napoleon and Davout, after Jena, in 1806. This is

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well in memory of this Napoleonic triumph that the English, and their American allies, had pressured Foch to make Pétain renounce after having arrested Franchet d'Espèrey. Bismarck, for his part, had the German troops march on the ChampsÉlysées, under the Arc de Triomphe, after his victory in 1870.

So, Clemenceau undertook to pay off the beast; and opened Pandora’s box of “reparations”. This French requirement was, however, neither illegitimate nor unfair. The north-east of the country had been occupied, ravaged and pillaged by German troops for four years, who had also sabotaged numerous factories upon their departure. France no longer had any industry (concentrated in this region), while Germany's industrial treasure, in the Ruhr, was intact.

The amount of the sum claimed – one hundred and thirtytwo billion gold marks! – appeared colossal. French public opinion was reassured, and henceforth believed, not without naivety, that all madness was possible: “Germany will pay! » The Germans were at first stunned, then revolted; this was added to the significant losses of territories of the Reich, a fifth of its surface area, but especially in the East of the country, in an area in their eyes iniquitous, which they took the habit of qualifying as the “diktat” of Versailles. . As if the Treaties of Vienna had not been dictated to Napoleon's France, even if the English, clever and complicit, had allowed Talleyrand to make people believe that he was manipulating everyone! As if the Treaty of Frankfurt had not been dictated by Bismarck to Adolphe Thiers in tears!

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A great English economist, John Maynard Keynes defended them in a vigorous polemical essay entitled The Economic Consequences of Peace, in which he targeted the French in general and Clemenceau in particular, whose indistinct hatred of the Germans served as a foil, evoking the “Carthaginian peace” (in other words the destruction of Carthage by its Roman conqueror) imposed by the infamous Gallic rooster. The Spartacist revolutions in Berlin, the threat of the Soviet Union, gave alarmist credence to Keynes's thesis. If Germany were ruined by excessive demands, communism would take hold everywhere, and would soon even win over the French and English victors.

This association, very Anglo-Saxon, of morality and economics, was formidable, well relayed by the English and American media, which would no longer let go of their prey: the odious French warmongering. Clemenceau, then, after him, Poincaré, thus entered the bestiary of Gallic horrors, of the “monsters” Napoleon and Louis XIV.

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A HISTORY TEACHED WITHOUT NUANCES

At the time, only the historian of Action Française, Jacques Bainville, dared to denounce a “pamphlet with an economic appearance”. Since then, generations of French historians and essayists have relayed the thoughts of the British master, blackening thousands of pages which denounce these intolerable "reparations", this odious diktat, product of the vengeful ire of Clemenceau, this vengeful nationalist , guilty of everything, of German misery and fury, of Nazism and Hitler, of war and defeat. This version of history has been taught without nuance in the school curricula of the French Republic for decades. Only a few rare historians, mostly Anglo-Saxon, have since then set the record straight. The French had, in the past, paid rubbish on the nail the war indemnities demanded by their victors in 1815 and 1870. No British economist had then spoken of a “Carthaginian peace”.

Robert Gerwarth specifies that the one hundred and thirty-two billion gold marks were divided into three categories, A, B, C. “It was planned that the C bonds, eightytwo billion, would never be paid. The Germans only had to pay bonds A and B, or fifty billion gold marks over thirty-six years, which was entirely reasonable in the eyes of the German experts themselves. »

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We were far from Carthaginian peace. Especially since the Germans, supported by their Anglo-Saxon sponsors, were reluctant to pay what they owed. Faced with the ill will of Berlin, Poincaré, successor to his “enemy” Clemenceau decided to send the French army to occupy the Ruhr on January 11, 1923. The German government called a general strike, paid for with public funds; which caused hyperinflation (the famous wheelbarrows of notes to buy bread) which still obsesses the German unconscious.

Wall Street and the City of London retaliated against the French currency on the foreign exchange market. France had inherited from the war a colossal debt to the Americans, and inflation which was eating away at the old gold franc, once so stable. This financial war caused Poincaré to capitulate, like his predecessor Clemenceau. The Dawes (1924) and Young (1929) plans, established under the leadership of English and American “Keynesian” experts, further reduced the German burden. This was suspended after the crisis of 1929. Between 1919 and 1932, Germany had paid only twenty billion out of the hundred and thirty-two demanded. In 1931, the Hoover Moratorium (1931), followed by the Lausanne Conference (1932), put an end to French demands.

In a book which caused a sensation at the time of its publication, in 1931, American Cancer, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu revisited the Great War as the glacial and terrible product of economic and financial determinism: “It must be said that the important dates of the conflict between nations are neither Verdun nor Versailles, but are beyond or below the limits of the war, in the financial enterprises which preceded it or wanted to liquidate it (1913, creation of the

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American central bank and 1929, Young plan) – that the war only spilled the wine that was drawn –, that the war is not the whole story, but above all a gigantic anecdote that historians will be right to neglect …”

A few months later, on June 10, 1932, a parliamentarian from the Republican Party, Louis T. McFadden, delivered a speech before the House of Representatives that would go down in the annals of the American Congress: “On the instructions of the Federal Reserve Board, more than thirty billion dollars of American money was transferred to Germany... their modern homes, their large planetariums, their gymnasiums, their swimming pools, their modern highways of such high quality, their impeccable factories. This was all made with our money. All this was given to Germany thanks to the Federal Reserve Board. He transferred so much money to Germany that they don't dare say the total. »

The funds passed through the Thyssen banks, whose agents in New York were named Harriman and Bush! These funds continued to flow even after the Nazis came to power and during the war, through the networks of numerous industrial groups and banks: Standard Oil, ITT, Ford, Chase Manhattan Bank.

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END IT ONCE AND FOR ALL FRENCH HEGEMONY IN EUROPE The entire interwar period was marked by Clemenceau's defeat against his two allies, the American Wilson and the Englishman Lloyd George. Whether the French are intransigent or conciliatory, warlike or peaceful, whether they use military or financial weapons, whether they plead for a “League of Nations with teeth” or for “European peace”, which they occupy the Ruhr (1923) or renounces, under British injunction, to enter the Rhineland (1936), the Frenchman would be shot like a dog, because his Anglo-Saxon masters had decided so. It was necessary to definitively settle the accounts opened with Louis XIV, Louis XV and Napoleon. Put an end to French hegemony in Europe once and for all. It was done and done well. The events don't matter. “Destiny, to follow its inevitable plan, had found it simpler to carry out page by page The Political Consequences of 1

Peace by Jacques Bainville,

.

» Bainville's work had

published in 1920…

As the American historian Caroll Quigley recounts in The Secret History of the Anglo-American Oligarchy, the English elites shamelessly sacrificed Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. When Laval's France rebelled in 1935 by moving closer to both Italy and the USSR, resuscitating the good old reverse alliances, the English stabbed their dear ally by signing a naval agreement with Nazi Germany which transgressed the rules of the Treaty of Versailles by authorizing Germany to acquire a navy

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which could threaten the French colonies. In 1939, the English Chamberlain and Halifax were preparing a new Munich conference on Poland...

Twenty years after the end of the Great War, the “best army in the world” of 1918 was nothing more than a distant memory. It had been torn up by the legal measures of disarmament and the pacifist illusions of Franco-German reconciliation. “To this admirable people, we gave the soul of the vanquished. Yet he was victorious,” wrote André Suarès in Vues sur l’Europe in 1938.

France had been the docile toy of its Anglo-Saxon allies. In 1914, it had served as a praetorian guard for English imperial power, which was being shaken up on world markets by Germany's industrial, scientific and commercial dynamism. The important thing for the British was not that the French won, but that they defeated the German machine. England needed our army, but not our victory. Likewise, they had previously thrown the Austrians (but also the Prussians, even the Russians) into the hands of Napoleon to prevent the latter from threatening the English coasts, without the British leaders actually worrying about the outcome on the battlefields of Ulm or Austerlitz. It is this Austrian role that England gave us in the 20th century. And when, by a miracle, in 1918, French military power regained, for the last time in its thousand-year history, its former glory, it was to better pave the way for the advent of American hegemony over Europe and the world.

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Clemenceau had bet everything on the alliance with England and the United States. He had sacrificed everything. He had lost everything. In April 1919, he had again gone all out. He had presented a customs union plan, proposed by Marshal Foch, which would have grouped the Rhine States, detached from Prussia, with Belgium, France and even England. The two Anglo-Saxons, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, had refused in concert. In exchange, they promised “assistance” from their two countries in the event of new German aggression. This “guarantee” should, according to our two allies, “calm France’s legitimate concerns”.

This contemptuous condescension angered Clemenceau, who became the Tiger again for the last time. He refused. Wilson then ordered the ship the George Washington to set sail to take him back to the United States. Clemenceau gave in. In his Memoirs, Clemenceau wrote: “I am bitterly blamed for not having wanted to give our country a strategic border. I couldn't do it without breaking the alliance. » To a friend, he will say, in despair: “England is the disillusionment of my life!” »

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“ THE GREAT NATION MEETS WITH DEATH » Our defeat in 1940 was not strange. It was predictable, inevitable. It had been planned, premeditated. By 1919, everything was written. France had been placed on the front line to suffer, alone, the assault of the German war machine which had been complacently allowed to reconstitute itself. As the American historian Philip Nord writes in his book on 1940: “No country was better prepared than France. They had all offloaded the major work to France, hoping to save themselves this kind of effort, and they were taken by surprise when the situation did not turn out as they had hoped. If we had to pass a judgment, it is not so much France that we would have to accuse, but all these other countries which 2

saw it as their first line of defense

.

»

Alan Seeger, an American poet who came to fight in 1917 alongside the poilus, wrote prophetically: “The great nation has an appointment with death. » From then on, France would never stop replaying the same scene. After Clemenceau, it would be Poincaré, and then Pétain, and finally de Gaulle. Throughout the 20th century, France would seek in the generation born before the war of 1914 the last giants it had left, the last to have known France before this deadly embrace; these famous providential men who, shamelessly tearing off the corset of republican legality, would restore to it the illusion of its immortal ambitions and glory.

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1. Robert Brasillach, Our Before-War, 1941. 2. Philip Nord, France 1940 – Defending the Republic, Perrin, 2017.

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Simone de Beauvoir

Mrs Jean-Paul Sartre All her life, Simone de Beauvoir was Madame Jean-Paul Sartre; but since their disappearance, Sartre has become Monsieur Simone de Beauvoir. In 1980, it was he again who received from the people of Paris a funeral worthy of that of Victor Hugo. It is now her whose magisterium we constantly evoke, her thoughts which we claim, her worship which we celebrate.

During his lifetime, we listened to Sartre speak; Since his death, it is Beauvoir who has been talked about. Jean-Paul Sartre said that “Marxism was the unsurpassable horizon of our time”; feminism has since replaced it as the religion of our time. The proletarian was the Christ of the 20th century, both victim and God, God because victim; the woman is the Christ of today, both victim and God, God because victim. Sartre was a bourgeois who did not want to “drive Billancourt into despair”; Beauvoir is a bourgeois woman whom women have always despaired of.

Simone was born into a wealthy family who lived in a comfortable apartment on Boulevard Montparnasse, facing the Coupole, amid velvet curtains and a red carpet. Dad wears a boater hat and panama hat, mom wears a long dress;

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the dining room is designed by Henri II; the child plays in the Luxembourg gardens under the good-natured supervision of Louise, the charming maid. For the child, workers are only characters from Dickens' novels or Hector Malot's Sans famille . The little one is a pretty brunette with blue eyes, a lively intelligence and an obstinate character. Without intending it, in her Memoirs of a Tidy Young Girl, with this diligent and academic style of a good student that she puts into everything, the author makes a touching and paradoxical eulogy of the sweetness of life before the war of 1914, this famous “yesterday’s world” dear to Stefan Zweig, a quiet and safe

universe, opulent and stable, which the patriarchy of the white European man ha

The father is the child's hero. The only person she desperately wants to seduce, interest, charm. This Proustian character, who would have loved to be an aristocrat, admires Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet; this amateur actor and lawyer, cultured and funny, judges that he is nothing since he is not Victor Hugo, and reads texts by Taine or Gobineau to his daughter. Simone immerses herself in books to please him; is a good student to please him; looks with commiseration at the other women in the house, first and foremost her mother, to imitate her; will lose his faith in God to leave the skirts of women and priests and be accepted into the clan of men. Simone is not a tomboy, however; but she dreams of herself as a pure disembodied spirit to integrate the virile holy of holies. She can't stand being confined in the "nursery" for long. Through knowledge and talent, she wants to carve out a place for herself in this sacred universe; to be recognized, respected, dubbed. Men, this Grail. She is proud when her father says: “Simone has the brain of a man. Simone is a man. " A

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consecration. Her destiny is mapped out: she will be a writer, these demigods that her father reveres.

The Great War will turn his world upside down. His father is ruined, like millions of French savers, by Russian loans. Inflation is eating away what little he has left. His mother dismisses the maid and gets busy with the housework: it feels like La Parure, Maupassant's famous short story. The two daughters of the family will not have a dowry to marry. They will have to work to live. His father is overwhelmed; he sees in the thwarted fate of his offspring the reflection of his own downgrading; and the girl is also lowered in the eyes of her father to the subordinate rank of female, from which she believed she had torn herself away. “What a shame that Simone is not a boy: she would have gone to Polytechnique! » Between father and daughter, it is the time of mutual disillusionment.

Schoolchildren are taught that the 20th century began with the First World War; and that relations between the sexes have been forever transformed by the obligation imposed on women to take the place of their mobilized men in factories, fields, and offices. Simone's fate shows that it is even deeper. The upheaval caused by the war destroyed all certainties, all hierarchies. The victors are ruined, the heroes are cuckolded, the slackers are rich. The inflation of the interwar period and the defeat of 1940 further aggravated this upheaval of benchmarks and models. The young people no longer respect the elders, because they led them to the slaughterhouse in 1914; soon, the old will despise the young, because they will be crushed in 1940. The victors of 1918 will be the vanquished of 1940. The vanquished in 1918 will be the victors in 1940, but

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will be the vanquished of 1945. America's final triumph is that of the new over the old, of the machine over the earth, of money over the sword, of consumption over savings, of hedonism over heroism. Our old civilization, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, had been based on Roman law and the Christian religion, on the pater familias and God the father. These two pillars collapse at the same time in a crash of intellectual irreverence and destruction bombs massive.

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THE REAL BIG BANG OF THE 20TH CENTURY This historical and symbolic hustle and bustle comes head-on into the age-old anthropological framework of relationships between men and women, which has seen since the dawn of time women seek in men the protector to raise their offspring. Our symbolic and cultural benchmarks and our material conditions of existence will never have been transformed

as profoundly as during this 20th century; but our genes have remained the same for thirty thousand years! This clash between the time of History and the time of Evolution, between reason and instincts, between culture and nature, between the head and the guts, between speeches and hormones, is the real big bang of the 20th century which will tear apart relations between men and women. They continue their tireless quest for the protector, but in the confusion of disrupted criteria. Simone de Beauvoir, like all the women of her time, and like all women of all times, aspires to the same thing: “I would like the day when a man would subjugate me with his intelligence, his culture, his authority…

To recognize him as my equal, he had to surpass me... Neither inferior, nor different, nor outrageously superior, the predestined man would guarantee my existence without taking away his sovereignty 1 .

»

But its original sovereign, his father, saw his crown fall and his head fall like a common Louis XVI; hence his disdain for his overthrown former lord and his frantic and messy quest for a new winner. He will no longer be the father so revered, no longer the husband chosen by the father, even

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no longer the lover designated by his social environment. It won't even be the French if he is defeated, but the German, and then the American. And why not one day the Soviet? And tomorrow Fidel Castro? The Viet Cong? The fellagha?

In the summer of 1940, Simone de Beauvoir tirelessly admired for hours a detachment of the Wehrmacht through the shutters of the house in La Pouëze (Maine-et-Loire) where she took refuge after the debacle; this admiring contemplation inspires him with long descriptions in his autobiography, The Force of Age, of these men who give an “impression of youth and happiness” contrasting with that which emanates “from the hundreds of fearful and miserable refugees who could not wait that these fine soldiers have food, fuel and transportation, a remedy for their immediate misfortune.” Repatriated later in a German army truck, she confided having been sensitive to the “very spontaneous and friendly and round kindness” of the victors.

She's not the only one. Another writer, another feminist, Benoîte Groult, also likes to contemplate German soldiers: “They are beautiful and they don't seem in a hurry, since they have arrived at the end of the continent. » But this one has moral limits that others do not have: “Young girls climbed on the steps and smiled at our enemies as if they came from an allied country, they watched while standing on tiptoe feet inside the cars, the look they have for the caravans of the Pinder circus. Shameful shamelessness of these cranes. They offered them oranges and I would have liked to stab them with a fork,

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these female dogs in heat. How can we not have more patriotism? 2

Beloved France, you are betrayed

.

»

But the French women of the highest birth had also thrown themselves at the necks of the Cossacks who paraded on the Champs-Élysées in 1814, just as, a few years earlier, the Italians and the Germans had thrown their sights on the handsome officers of the Napoleon's Great Army. The two Groult sisters themselves made up with the Americans, like many young French women for whom the “hunt for Americans” would become the main amusement at the Liberation; It is true that Uncle Sam's soldiers were not enemies but allies.

“Cities are women and are only tender to the winner”, wrote, as a connoisseur, the German Ernst Jünger, in his Parisian Journal. And an Israeli army officer, Van Creveld, in his book Women and War, would later laugh at his mother's disillusioned but profound witticism: "There will be no more war when women stop fighting." love the winners. »

What to do when the winner changes all the time? What do you do when you don't understand what's going on? “The problems that agitated them – the recovery of the franc, the evacuation of the Rhineland, the utopias of the League – seemed to me of the same order as family affairs and money troubles; they didn't concern me. " History doesn't interest him any more than politics: "I didn't want to stick my nose into this dark confusion. »

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“ MY DEAR MORGANATIC WIFE” Finally, Sartre came. To enlighten it, edify it, educate it. To take over from her father and lead her even higher to the heights of the spirit. To Taine and Gobineau, to Voltaire and Victor Hugo, Sartre adds Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, the common fund of German philosophy of those years; but also Gide, Breton, the surrealists, the subversive French literature of the interwar period. The rough-hewn little prude learns to think and live. To philosophize and transgress: “I had principles: to live dangerously. Don't refuse anything. » She does everything with good will and

the application of the good student that she will never cease to be. With her, even debauchery takes on the appearance of a dissertation in three parts: “Theoretically accustomed to all depravity, I remained in fact extremely prudish. »

One evening, in a bar, she strikes the poses of a wanton girl, of a “bad type” girl. A lame man, not fooled, says to him: “You don't have the right touch. You are a middleclass girl who wants to play bohemian. » He puts an obscene drawing before her eyes; then, opens his fly to show him that it's similar. Shocked, she looks away. The man laughs: "A real whore would have looked and said, 'There's nothing to brag about!' »

The École Normale Supérieure extends its arms to him. With Nizan, Herbaud, Aron, she discovers that the boys are formidable comrades, who dominate her intellectually,

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she humbly acknowledges, but who, good princes, make her benefit from their knowledge and their intellectual ease. In this game, Sartre is both the strongest and the most generous. He demolishes, in the name of dialectical materialism, what remains of the idealism of his Christian youth. “I am no longer sure of what I think, or even think. » Simone is seduced, fascinated. Sartre never stops thinking: “If I compared myself to him, how lukewarm my fevers would be! I thought myself exceptional because I couldn't imagine living without writing; he lived only to write. »

She found her master, her king. She found her man: “It was the first time in my life that I felt intellectually dominated by someone… Every day, all day long, I measured myself against him and I was no match. I sometimes tried to chat; I contrived, I persisted… But Sartre always had the upper hand. Impossible to blame him: he went out of his way to share his knowledge with us. »

In their correspondence, Sartre calls her "my dear morganatic wife", as if he wanted to mark his superiority as overlord. He proves to be a charming companion; he sings, even dances sometimes; has a real comic gift. We end up forgetting its ugliness. But not that he's a bad lover. The historian Gilbert Joseph, in Une si sweet Occupation, speaks of Sartre as more “inclined to indolent and caressing loves than to assertive virility”. Simone de Beauvoir puts up with it. His relationship with Sartre is beyond a traditional one

sexual fusion; it is an intellectual friendship that doubles

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of dangerous liaisons: a touch of Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet, a zest of Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil. Their famous pact of essential and secondary loves, which would later be naively celebrated by generations of devout feminists as the height of freedom and equality, is based above all on this sexual atypicality: on the one hand, Sartre is a bad lover who does not satisfy his mistress; on the other hand, she discovered a pronounced taste for young females, whom she got into the habit of finding among her colleagues at the Sèvres Normal School, then among the students in her philosophy class. . It recruits, selects, consumes, offers, plans. “I discovered that Simone de Beauvoir drew fresh flesh from her classes of young girls which she tasted before passing it on, or should we say even more crudely, passing it on to Sartre 3 .

»

Simone is the boss of this Fourierist phalanstery that she calls the “family”. Everyone has their hours, their days, their evenings. In his Memoirs, The Hare of Patagonia, Claude Lanzmann will recount that, much later becoming Simone's lover, he shared his mistress every other evening with Sartre. This is libertinism within the framework of Gosplan. “You are a clock in a Fridge,” one of his conquests will tell him. Another, of Russian origin, Olga, nicknamed Sartre “the Powerless Genius” and rudely refused his advances. We are in a playground with its sweetness and its brutality. THE two lovers have in common not wanting to move on from childhood. Simone found in Sartre a double oversized of his father which allows him to access the empyrean world of the spirit. Jean-Paul found in Beauvoir a mother who overprotected him, making him forget the

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cruelty of the adult world: “I would have done anything to prevent him from coming up against a painful reality,” Simone confided to one of her friends; to the idea he had of her ugliness. Perhaps we did him a disservice by letting him live in perpetual childhood, giving in to his desires. »

They haven't made love since 1935. You don't sleep with your dad or your mom. But within the “family” we have fun. We spend our nights in a large apartment on Quai des GrandsAugustins, having a “fiesta” at Michel Leiris’s house. We glance distractedly at the paintings of Picasso and Miró which adorn the walls, while emptying great wines. We read and perform plays, we dress up; Sartre sketches a solo tango parody; Camus rolls his hips with the “professionalism of a worldly dancer”, Queneau declaims his fantasies. “I had a lot of fun at times: but it was only during these nights that I knew the true meaning of the word “party”,” confided Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre will admit, completely ashamed: “We have never been more free than under German occupation. » Mouloudji will admit, more embarrassed or less obscene: “We were closer to Feydeau than to Hegel. »

However, outside, there is war, the Occupation, Vichy. There is the Resistance, Here London, Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris is German. There are deprivations, massacres, genocides. Sartre and Beauvoir seem to see nothing, to understand nothing. They are outside of History, outside of life, outside of death.

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“ THE ABSURD FERTILITY OF WOMEN” After the war, Simone de Beauvoir justified herself: “We were not kidding ourselves; we only wanted to snatch a few nuggets of joy from this confusion and delight ourselves with their brilliance in defiance of the disillusioning tomorrows. » Their friends will try, once peace has returned, to sublimate the couple's hedonism into a challenge to the moral order of Vichy. They will rely on the report of the rector of the university, Gilbert Gidel: “The maintenance of Mademoiselle de Beauvoir and Monsieur Sartre in the chairs of philosophy in secondary education seems unacceptable to me at a time when France aspires to the restoration of moral and family values. Our youth cannot be handed over to masters who are so obviously incapable of leading themselves. »

The anecdote is piquant but hardly flattering. The mother of one of Beauvoir's students filed a complaint against her for “inciting a minor to debauchery”. An administrative investigation was launched by the Paris rectorate with the director of the Camille-Sée high school and the principal of the Pasteur high school, where Beauvoir and Sartre teach. On June 17, 1943, Beauvoir was relieved of her duties, while Sartre was not subject to any sanction.

But the “resistance” counter-offensive was cut short. He There were limits to indecency, even in those post-war years when everything was permitted on the left. Too difficult to explain and justify the job that Simone de Beauvoir found at the Parisian studio of national radio broadcasting, where

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The famous collaborator Philippe Henriot would soon come under attack, while Sartre wrote his play Les Mouches. We preferred to sweep the dust under the carpet. The Resistance and the Revolution, Sartre and Beauvoir only discovered them once peace had returned. Sartre became a fellow traveler of the Communist Party, which dominated the world of letters and culture, while Simone de Beauvoir wrote her famous Second Sex, which would make her a global icon of feminism.

No one knows today that this book was very poorly received. From the right to the Communist Party, from François Mauriac to Albert Camus, there was nothing but insults, sarcasm, and taunts against the “poor neurotic, badly fucked, frozen girl.” Today we have turned these brocades into titles of glory. The revolutionary could only be insulted by the conservatives; the free woman could only be vomited up by males bent on their privileges.

But France in 1949 was first and foremost outraged by the harsh criticism of motherhood. Simone does not have and does not want children. She does not have words harsh enough in her essay to condemn “the absurd fertility of women… Generating and breastfeeding are not activities, they are natural functions; no project is involved... With menopause, the woman finds herself finally freed from the servitudes of women ". This violent rejection of motherhood is scandalous because France is barely beginning to recover from the long demographic winter of more than a century which weakened it, downgraded it, offered it to the invasions of a vigorous and prolific Germany. The energetic family policy, pursued successively by the Third Republic (during the years

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1930), Vichy and the Fourth Republic, bore unexpected fruits. In March 1941, Vichy created the single salary allowance. In 1947, this single salary allowance (in addition to family allowances) represented 90% of a worker's salary for a family of two children and 150% for a family of three children. The French birth rate has become exuberant again. Demographers are stunned and politicians are exultant.

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“ THE ICE WATERS OF CALCULATION SELF-CENTERED "

If we continued the demographic pace of the baby boom for a few decades, some like Michel Debré are enthusiastic, we could arrive by our own strength at France with a hundred million inhabitants; and thus reconquer our demographic hegemony over Europe, especially since Germany, broken by the defeat of 1945, is in turn entering its demographic winter. The challenge is geostrategic: to recover our dominant position from the 18th century, without the need for immigration from the south. But Simone doesn't understand anything about these political questions which bore her!

In one of these last books, published shortly before her death, the feminist Évelyne Sullerot, founder of Family Planning, will recall that the full employment of this period known as the “Trente Glorieuses” was based above all on the massive withdrawal of women from the labor market. From the moment they returned, at the end of the 1960s, unemployment would increase, thus giving employers tremendous leverage over workers. The communists were not wrong to denounce, at the release of The Second Sex, the author's “bourgeoisism” and “this diversion of capitalism to divide the working class”. Communists instinctively understood that feminism would be the useful idiot of capitalism.

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They don't know then how right they were. Since the 1920s, American capitalism has begun its transformation, exchanging an economy of production and savings for a system based on consumption and credit. If we are to believe the remarkable work of sociologist Christopher Lasch, American bosses used the commercial propaganda of advertising to create new needs, and the speeches of experts, psychologists, psychoanalysts, to impose a new philosophy of happiness, individualist and hedonistic, thus undermining the traditional foundations of the Protestant patriarchy of the American working class, which until then had been based on puritanism and austerity of morals.

They thus established a very subtle alliance with women against men, and children against parents.

The 1920s date the first signs of what will be called the “emancipation of women”, boyish haircuts and demands for the liberation of morals. The legislator and the priest are gradually being replaced by the advertiser and the psychologist. Interest, these “icy waters of selfish calculation” (Marx), then enters the family, the last den of pre-capitalist mentalities.

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“ ONE ARE NOT BORN A WOMAN, WE BECOME IT » However, it was up to a French mind to conceive, through a clear and sharp formula, the recognized genius of our language, the ideological covering of this new organization of society: “We are not born a woman, we become one. » The formula sounds like a slogan. It once again embodies the irrepressible predilection of French intellectuals, since Descartes at least, for an abstraction disconnected from reality, already denounced by Burke and Taine.

The rules of Darwinian evolution and biology, however, repeatedly demonstrate that we only become women because we are born women. The natural and the cultural, the biological and the social, the instincts and cultural constructions, which over the centuries have become the famous and much denigrated prejudices and stereotypes, do not contradict each other, but complement each other; do not confront each other but reinforce each other, as Pascal noted, in an exercise of rare lucidity, in his Pensées : "I fear that what we call nature is already a custom, as custom is a second nature. »

There is no plot by man to impose his hegemony on woman; only basic needs in situations of great danger, war, famine, threat of predators, which can only be satisfied by protective and saving inequalities, as much for men as for women. Simone de Beauvoir is therefore completely wrong, but it is

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for this reason, in this century of upheaval that is the 20th century, that his formula will hit the mark and establish itself as a revolutionary truth. It took a Frenchman – a Frenchwoman – to conceive and impose this chimera.

We think of the famous sentence of Joseph de Maistre on the France in his Soirées de Saint-Pétersburg : “No doubt, there never existed a nation that was easier to deceive nor more difficult to undeceive, nor more powerful to deceive the others. »

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1. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Tidy Young Girl, Gallimard, 1958. 2. Benoîte and Flora Groult, Journal à quatre mains, Denoël, 1962. 3. Bianca Bienenfeld, Memoirs of a Troubled Girl, Balland, 1993.

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Jean paul Sartre

Mr Simone de Beauvoir She hesitated before getting to work. The idea didn't come from her, but from him. The concepts used are not hers either, but his. Simone de Beauvoir laboriously applies to women the philosophical categories of existentialism dear to her companion.

The Second Sex is today read as the manifesto of the emancipated woman. But is it read? The work gives women the sole objective of becoming a man like any other; to assimilate to men, to their way of thinking, of living, of loving, of working, of writing. Simone de Beauvoir despises and hates women. She writes a misogynistic book which urges women to come out of themselves, to better abandon the hated shores of femininity. Entirely involved in demolishing the “myth of femininity”, she preserved and glorified “virility”.

Simone read and internalized Hegel, who wrote: "Women can be cultivated, but they are not made for the higher sciences, for philosophy and for certain productions of art which require a universal element... If women are found at the head of government, the state is in danger, because they do not act

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only according to what requires universality, but according to contingent inclination and opinion. » She considers that genius belongs to men: “A woman would never have painted Van Gogh's sunflowers; a woman could never have become Kafka... There are women who are crazy and there are women who have talent, none of them have this madness in talent that we call genius. » The lucidity and intellectual honesty of Simone de Beauvoir are to be praised, but it is not generally for these reasons that posterity praises it. Sartre is at the origin and conclusion of the work; he is not only the inspiration, but the recipient.

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THE “LITTLE FROG” AND THE “SWEET CROCODILE »

At the time, the “morganatic husband” took to his heels. He became infatuated with Dolorès Vanetti Ehrenreich, a French woman married to an American doctor, a beautiful woman, full of liveliness and charm, with whom he was madly in love, and who introduced him to the French colony in New York. Simone staggers, panicked. With The Second Sex, she plays her sentimental all-out role, by renewing intellectual contact, the only founding and fundamental bond she has left with her man. Sacrificing all women to his on profit, she strives to safeguard her privileged position as a female recognized by her male. Beauvoirism is first of all a Bovaryism.

The impact of his essay changed his life. She no longer depends on the money that Sartre lavished on her without counting; and she travels throughout the world, with, but also without him. In the United States, she became the mistress of a writer, an American Jew from Chicago, Nelson Algren. It is a passion that carries them away, made of literary complicity and sexual pleasure. With her “sweet crocodile”, an accomplished lover, Simone “the little frog” is transformed. Her letters to Algren, published in 1997, show a submissive woman happy to be so, a sentimentalist who only dreams of serving her man, transfixed with love, anxious to satisfy her new master. Jean-Paul becomes “poor Sartre”, as Emma Bovary said of her husband, biting her lips: “What a poor man. »

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The intellectual who cared so little about her appearance that she had only slipped two poor dresses into her suitcase for her American trip now takes care of her outfits and her trinkets. The chrysalis becomes a butterfly. The “virile heterosexual” becomes a woman. The secret seductress of young girls, who shared them with Sartre, turns into a jealous wife who begs her man not to introduce a friend into "their nest" where "she would drink my whiskey, eat my rum cake, sleep in my bed, perhaps with my husband.” The woman who ordered her peers to become men like the others, submitted “her male brain” to “her female heart”. Do as I write, not as I do!

Simone de Beauvoir had opened Pandora's box. This is even what his grateful heirs, like Élisabeth Badinter, will be eternally grateful to him for. She would have unearthed the miraculous key that opened the golden prison of nature, in which women had languished for millions of years, in order to escape the surveillance of their infamous jailer, their father, their husband, their lover. The man. Nature is the enemy. And more particularly heterosexual nature, this “sadomasochistic” machine which made women prey and men, hunters.

The “woman passively undergoes her biological destiny”, Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex. His young students of the 1960s were eager to show him that they had learned his lesson.

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As historian and activist Marie-Jo Bonnet attests with great honesty and undeniable analytical finesse, in her book of memories entitled Mon MLF, this small feminist group was first and foremost a meeting place between women. Hidden homosexuality and shame of Simone de Beauvoir had mutated, with these young activists, into an uninhibited and ostentatious lesbianism. History fulfilled the sarcastic formula of American “male chauvinists”: “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism, practice. »

The MLF turned Beauvoirism around like a glove. It was no longer necessary to imitate men to be free, but to move away from them to better free ourselves from them. The MLF gave initial feminism its power of non-differentiation and separation of the sexes which it carried like the cloud carries the storm. The feminists first attacked their fellow travelers, the activists of the extreme left who, like the good soldiers of the MarxistLeninist revolution that they believed themselves to be, displayed a puritanical and misogynistic militarism pure and simple. In the backlash of the political failure of these leftists of May 68, the last political movement which dared to proclaim "Power is at the end of the phallus", the feminism of the MLF imposed a "sororal" vision of society which brought together women, all women, whatever their sexuality, to better oppose them to males. They invented meetings forbidden to men, reproaching (rightly) the latter for not letting them speak. Initially, they spared only homosexuals from their vindictiveness, in an alliance of “victims” of heterosexual oppression. Then, very quickly, dissensions between the two groups emerged. Like the tale with

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verve Marie-Jo Bonnet, the boys only thought of “enjoying without hindrance” and covered the need with sarcasm sentimental attachment of lesbians. As a parody of the heterosexual behavior that both groups decried...

Another notable difference: gays gradually organized themselves into a counter-society with their newspapers, their networks, their culture, their shops, and isolated themselves from the heterosexual world, both masculine and feminine, to better subvert the majority law through minority activism. Gay power was in the making, and it was to take off during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and to reach its apotheosis with marriage for all in 2013. “Power is at the end of the phallus »… Simone de Beauvoir was both annoyed and seduced by her iconoclastic heiresses. Never admitting her former homosexual inclinations, delaying adorning herself with the name "feminist", she had lost the initiative at the same time as she was becoming a living icon. She followed Sartre in his anti-Western and anti-capitalist fight, which led it from Algiers to Cuba, via Moscow to Beijing. She pretended not to see that the progressive Algerian FLN, from its brutal takeover, had placed women's rights under strict Islamic submission. She proclaimed that the Soviet, Cuban and Chinese communist regimes, which locked up women in factories and regimented them with men in an iron regime, were the radiant future of freedom that she had dreamed of. He is true that communism had, according to an inspiration worthy of the Second Sex, made all women men like the others in an asexual and puritanical egalitarianism...

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GETTING OUT OF “PHALLOGOCENTRISM” It was after her death, in 1986, that the machine she had set in motion went into overdrive. Since the 1960s, American campuses had gotten into the habit of feasting on the great French theorists, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Lacan, whom they brought together under the name of French Theory. Supported by these French thinkers, the American academic left undertook the methodical and radical deconstruction of all the traditional notions that had founded the West: reason, person, family, nation.

Everything was shattered. Jacques Derrida had explained that it was necessary to move away from “phallogocentrism” (contraction of “logos” and “phallus”), thus defining this mixture of Western ethnocentrism and male domination that he intended to destroy. The works of Simone de Beauvoir were therefore included in this nihilistic caravanserai. From the 1970s, certain American universities only included authors from minorities, women, blacks, homosexuals, in their programs, and eliminated white dead men, whose misogynistic “blunders” they tracked down.

The fishing proved fruitful: Montaigne, Molière, La Bruyère, La Fontaine, Perrault, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Proudhon, Balzac, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Apollinaire, Montherlant. All these authors could be shelved in the new hell of self-righteous university libraries. The most lenient considered them “victims of the prejudices of their

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era ". These authors, often iconoclastic and non-conformist, would therefore not have been victims for all other subjects, God, religion, State, politics, war and peace, organization of society, except for women. When Spinoza finishes his masterpiece on politics, he concludes with an incompatibility between women and politics in the name of the passions that women do not know how to evacuate. Admirers of the great Dutchman are embarrassed by this conclusion which, they judge, leaves a stain on the work of their genius. So, Spinoza would have been right about everything, would have been centuries ahead on all subjects, except women? And this oddity surprises no one. And no one wonders if it is not our time that is the victim of its prejudices. When these are not hostile but favorable to women, do they cease to be prejudices?

In reality, these much-maligned “white males” forged Western civilization. They shaped the concepts of humanism, freedom, progress and the emancipation of individuals. They were universal, because they were the diamond points of a patriarchal civilization. In today's American universities, it is impossible to start a dialogue with a student because he begins each of these sentences with "As a [Black, female, gay, Latino...], I feel that... ”, thus invalidating the point of view of anyone who does not share their identity.

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THE THEORY OF GENDER FUT IN THE SECOND SEX WHAT THE INTERNET WAS AT MINITEL

Certain American theorists have used the formula famous by Simone de Beauvoir to its extreme logic. Since one is not born a woman, but becomes one, then biological reality does not exist; being a woman is only a cultural invention and a linguistic injunction. For Judith Butler and her famous queer theory, the mere act of calling a small child “a girl’s name” makes her a female person. The Americans are used to giving an industrial and commercial scale to the inventions of artisans. French. Gender theory was to the Second Sex what the Internet was to Minitel. We refine endlessly: there is sex (biological), gender (cultural), orientation (sexual). You can be male, but female, and of homosexual orientation. You can be female, male and of homosexual orientation. You can also be male, of masculine gender and of heterosexual orientation, but this is rather frowned upon. You can finally be female, of feminine gender and of heterosexual orientation, but that seems old-fashioned!

All combinations from this ternary framework are possible. Freedom, equality and respect are at this price. This theoretical and lexical hodgepodge worthy of Les Précieuses ridicules has in truth only one ideological objective: to ruin the conceptual and normative hegemony of the heterosexual male. It does not matter that for most human beings sex,

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gender and orientation merge without major existential question, the mere presence of the margins, even if ultraminority, allows us to challenge the majority norm. Thus we oppose in an egalitarian linguistic balance the transgender and the cisgender, pretending not to see that this cisgender (the man or woman whose gender corresponded to the sex) constitutes the enormous majority, while the Transsexuals are only a handful of individuals. Since language created reality (which created men and women), language must submit to the new egalitarian ideology. The French language must remove these scandalous masculinist generalizations (“human rights” replaced by “human rights”) and its misogynistic grammatical rules (the masculine prevails over the feminine), even if it means transforming it in a grotesque manner, in the name of a so-called “inclusive writing”, the words and sentences of our language in trains which transport tourists with their little wagons in single file. We thus return to the world of Molière and his learned women, so keen to master language and purify it of its improper words...

Beneath the seemingly egalitarian discourse, a secret hierarchy is revealed: the person of female sex, of feminine gender and of homosexual orientation is at the top of the ladder; that of male sex, masculine gender and heterosexual orientation is the dregs of the new society. The new ones Untermensch. A subhumanity. The “deplorables”, would say the Democratic candidate for the American presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton, about the voters of her opponent, Donald Trump.

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Contempt for class meets contempt for sex and contempt for orientation. Contempt which is based on the new economic and social organization of Western metropolises, a place where wealth is created from which workers have been excluded (deprived of work by the relocation of their old factories), while female employees occupy en masse tertiary sector positions. The white workers, unable to maintain their homes on their income alone, are humiliated and furious. They have the justified feeling that their companions despise them Besides, they leave them.

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“ DESTINY IS ANATOMY” For the first time in history, more young women are educated than young men. This quantitative aspect must, however, be qualified by a general decline in the cultural level of diplomas, and especially by the superiority of boys in higher-level scientific studies, which, in France, remain the paths of excellence and power. In these same large cities, mass divorce, often requested by women, and social assistance linked to the presence of children, encourage the emergence of numerous single-parent families. It does not matter whether these mothers are heterosexual (the majority) or homosexual (laws favoring same-sex marriages and tolerating the sale of sperm to impregnate those who refuse all sexual contact with men).

This de facto matriarchy, supported by the State, produces new generations of boys who, deprived of a father, physically or symbolically absent (no longer daring to impose his authority on the mother and child), can no longer benefit from of these formative oppositions with their progenitor which allowed previous generations to become emancipated and responsible adults. Society now consists of eternal children and mothers who rule the entire family with an iron fist in a velvet glove, while complaining bitterly about "double days" and "mental load." We can thus observe our Presidents of the Republic, once the incarnation of the father of the nation, holding their wives' hands like children who fear being abandoned.

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While Simone de Beauvoir only imagined liberation for women in assimilation to men, her heirs only saw a way out for men in assimilation to women. Some detect an opposition between the two generations, between a universalist feminism and a differentialist feminism. This opposition is artificial. So-called “universalist” feminism forces women to become men ; so-called “differentialist” feminism forces women to separate from men. In both cases, women are cheated and lose.

This artificial distinction is of the same order as that which the communists had formerly established between Stalin and Lenin, to protect the latter from the crimes of the former. There is a direct line between Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, culturalism: the refusal to see ourselves also and firstly as animals with animal needs and desires; the refusal to admit that the difference between the sexes is not an invention of vengeful and misogynistic males, but the creation of Evolution to perpetuate the human species; and that reproduction is the striking and founding proof of this difference between the sexes.

The most scholarly studies, in Scandinavian countries, the most egalitarian countries in the world, demonstrate over and over again that the arrival of a child within couples immediately imposes the The return of traditional roles woman considers that she is 1

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wasting her time as soon as she no longer takes care of the baby; the father considers that he is wasting his time when he takes care of the baby. This differentiation is not due to any ideology, nor to the weight of stereotypes, but to the differential programming of hormones. The man has millions of spermatozoa, which it produces easily; the woman has

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one egg per month and a reduced number of oocytes; this difference induces a founding inequality, dissimilar behaviors, “gendered” as we say today – a sentimental overinvestment for women, forced to choose the right sire, a hunting behavior for men, who are pushed to conquer the most of possible prey – which relate to biology and not sociology.

Stereotypes, hunted down today like criminals, are themselves only simplified cultural projections, lessons that our ancestors, not without finesse, have learned over the centuries from the observation of reality. They also had the great advantage of softening relations between the sexes, by limiting reciprocal demands: “A daily and tolerant contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex – incompetence on the emotional level in men and lack of rationality in women – passed for popular wisdom; these stereotypes set limits to the antagonism of the sexes which, from then on, could no longer turn into obsession

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“Destiny is anatomy,” Freud warned. Simone de Beauvoir was right when she refused to procreate in order to become a man like the others. Contemporary feminists are right to campaign for the artificial uterus, which would prevent women from becoming pregnant. Feminism is indeed an ideology of death since it denies life to impose its obsession with egalitarian undifferentiation.

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“ WOMEN CONFUSE THEIR HEARTS WITH THEIR ASS »

Since women have not succeeded in becoming men like others, men must become women like others. We must believe that men's desire is symmetrical to that of women. We must uproot centuries of reflection around desire and its deep asymmetry. “Men love what they desire, and women desire what they love,” said Sacha Guitry, or even more sarcastic, Flaubert who wrote to his mistress Louise Collet: “Women confuse their hearts with their ass, and believe that the moonbeam was invented to light up their boudoir. » Such sentences – like so many others exhibited as traces of a reviled and odious past – do not have a historical basis, but an anthropological one. They are not linked to the cultural context of the 19th century but are the consequence of the laws of evolution which have governed human destinies since the dawn of humanity. It is amusing to see that the progressives who exalt Darwin among the “creationists” – those Christians, Jews or Muslims who believe in the Genesis account of the creation of the world – disdain the same lessons from the British scientist when it comes to relationships between men and women. But feminism mocks the principle of noncontradiction, mocks reason; feminism is of the order of dogma, it is sacred, it is in the divine order of faith. Derrida can rejoice: we have moved from logos to pathos.

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In the time of Simone de Beauvoir, young girls were ignorant of sexual matters. A century later, young girls watch pornographic films and know nothing about fellatio, or even double penetration, but know nothing about male desire.

Males of all species are programmed to desire by looking and thus gauge the fertility of a possible partner. As the American writer Nancy Huston showed in her beautiful book Reflections in a Man's Eye (2012), “our biology imposes asymmetry and inequality in sexuality. The man looks, the woman is looked at, but also watches herself being looked at. » There's nothing symmetrical about it. This illusion of reciprocity is the new sexual ignorance of our time. It causes havoc. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the animal part in us and our desires for legal equality.

Sexuality is the shadow of our death, and we refuse that part. Spectacular trials of dominant males became the law of the time. They are a prime target. To the question that torments the modern woman, “Do you have to have sex to succeed?” ", they have known since the dawn of time that they had to succeed in order to sleep. From Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Harvey Weinstein, they are the new Don Juans, the “big bad men” who took extreme advantage of the “sexual liberation” of the 1960s.

The revenge of feminism must be striking in order to

to edify and intimidate subsequent generations. The media pillory precedes the legal question. “The desire for the penal has replaced the desire for the penis”, according to the very relevant formula of

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Philippe Muray. Everything is deliberately mixed up, from the hand on the thigh to rape and crime. It is imperative to criminalize male desire to better “denaturalize” it. “Contractualize” it to nip it in the bud. In Sweden, any sexual act without proof of “explicit consent” is condemned as rape. Rape crimes currently occupy half of the court sessions in France. All coitus must become rape in the public mind. This is how the “rape culture”, denounced by feminist activists, and the “culture of lesbianism”, which they constantly propagate, confront each other in our society. Simone de Beauvoir promised in The Second Sex that female emancipation would lead us “towards carnal and emotional relationships whose We have no idea.” Alfred de Vigny had been more precise and more

lucid: “Soon, retiring into a hideous kingdom, The Woman will have Gomorrah and the Man will have

Sodom, And, casting an irritated look from afar, Both sexes will die separately. »

Women's bodies once again become a sanctuary of identity, a holy ark that must be preserved from any sacrilege in spite of itself if necessary. He is no longer threatened by the loss of virginity, but by rape. We return to the time of the duennas: we must protect the female body from the expression of male sexual desire. This feminist neopuritanism is worse than that which Simone de Beauvoir experienced in her youth: there has never been, unlike Spain, a duenna in France! The body of the modern woman is sacred in the name of her freedom and her dignity as a free woman, like the body of the

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Catholic woman was sacred in the name of her purity as a girl.

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“ I BELONG TO MY FAMILY, TO MY RACE, TO ISLAM” Two categories of males, however, escape this criminalization of desire: “gays” and immigrants from Muslim countries. The old alliance between feminists and gay men has extended to movements anti-racist. Here too, America has shown us the way, both on college campuses and in the Democratic Party. The American writer Chester Himes already said, fifty years ago, that the two central characters of the American sexual imagination were the white woman and the black man. Dominated yesterday, they dominate today. To the great dismay of their elders, the most prominent young feminists are putting the anti-racist fight before the battle for female emancipation. They are joined by black, Arab and Muslim activists, who support them in their fight against the white Western male, with all the more vigor as they protect and preserve the sovereignty of their men. As Houria Bouteldja, muse of the Indigènes de la République, writes bluntly: “My body does not belong to me, I belong to my family, to my clan, to my neighborhood, to my race, to Algeria, to Islam. I belong to my history and God willing, I will belong to my descendants. »

The indigenous male embodies triumphant and feared virility. Hence the admiration of Houria Bouteldja and many others, including among French feminists: “The white democrat is paralyzed by the formidable and insolent Islamic virility. » Black, Arab, Muslim activists

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do not want to kill their males who have not failed in their eyes; they are victims of History; they are not defeated.

They only want to finish off the dead white European male. We see the heavy responsibility of white feminists who are just beginning to understand that they are the toys of a war of races and civilizations that goes beyond them. When they become fully aware of it, the feminist fight will fade away as it is secondary in essence. It only imposes itself among decadent peoples who naively believe they have emerged from History like ours; it is the product of periods of peace, where immemorial dangers, famine and war were warded off. It will return to its natural, subordinate place, when the time returns for essential and vital struggles between peoples, nations, races, religions, civilizations.

Feminism is narcissism taken to the extreme under the pretext of freedom, to the point of whim. Feminism disintegrates societies and disarms them in the face of their enemies. It is the quintessence of individualism become totalitarian, which demands all rights, all powers. “I dreamed of being my own cause and my own end,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in her Memoirs of a Tidy Young Girl : a will of almost divine omnipotence.

Feminists praise men in their speeches soft and weak; However, women's unconscious pushes them to prefer a tough and strong man. In Le Père Goriot, by Balzac, Vautrin already taught Rastignac: “Ask women which men they are looking for, the ambitious ones. THE

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ambitious people have stronger kidneys, blood richer in iron, hearts warmer than those of other men. And the woman finds herself so happy and so beautiful in the hours when she is strong, that she prefers to all men the one whose strength is enormous, even if she is in danger of being broken by him. » Men, intimidated by the feminist discourse, which now has the value of the dominant ideology, also take egalitarian poses and make progressive speeches. This is the “twisted virility” that Nancy Huston speaks of. But they are mercilessly chased away by their wives. The modern notes: “The woman American sociologist William Waller 3

cannot resist the temptation to want to dominate his husband; and if she succeeds, she can't help but hate him. »

Men are ordered to be gentle and docile at home, with their wives and children, but strong and powerful at work, in the struggle for life, the professional struggle of all against all. But the two are intimately linked. The man dominant in his professional life will attract young and beautiful women. As Waller says, “the tendency to use women as a symbol of their success is the basis of the social system.” It is towards these “alpha males” that the youngest and prettiest women are irresistibly attracted. On the contrary, women at the top of the social ladder worry and scare away many males.

The death of the patriarchy of the little Western heterosexual white male signals the death of the West. Behind the great words of “freedom” and “equality”, new patriarchates have been erected on its ruins. Patriarchates constituted in archipelagos, new feudals of our time, which despise and

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marginalize women much more brutally than their predecessors. The patriarchy of the last traditional dominant males adapts: bosses of the CAC 40, financiers, mediacrats, artists, who use the facilities of mass divorce to fulfill the masculine fantasy of polygamy, the young mistresses of the novels of Balzac and Zola becoming the second or third wives. Gay patriarchy is based on the financial power of big bosses and senior officials, who use technological advances and the strength of networks of influence LGBT to fulfill the age-old dream of men to have children without women, whose wombs they rent as the labor force of workers in the factories of their ancestors.

The patriarchy of the suburban bosses, and other big brothers, relies on drug trafficking and Koranic precepts, following the example of their Barbary ancestors, to seduce or rape the young women of the white working classes, fascinated by by their lifestyle as great lords of the underworld or terrorized by their brutality or their threat.

These patriarchies have in common that they are revered by small feminist groups who spare them and fear them, spare them because they fear them, fear them because they fascinate them, in this “sadomasochistic” relationship that feminists previously denounced in heterosexuality, while they concentrate their blows on the poor heterosexual white male, the donkey of the fable, eternal prey of their vindictiveness, not because he is powerful and abuses his power, but because he has become weak , and that we can thus complete it.

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Simone de Beauvoir would never have imagined such a destiny for her book. She wanted to become immortal through her literary work; she succeeded beyond all her hopes. The price to pay was high. At the end of her life, she railed against this brilliant and haughty young man, Benny Lévy, this “elite young Jew, confident and dominant,” as General de Gaulle had said, who, having become the secretary of a blind Sartre, had brought him closer to God and further away from her. Sartre had also adopted a daughter, Arlette Elkaïm, who had taken up all the space in the old man's heart. Simone found herself surrounded by women who loudly admired her and whom she secretly despised. She railed against old age which isolates you and feared more than ever this death that she had fought all her life. She sometimes wondered if she had chosen the right weapons. To paraphrase Sartre's famous formula in Les Mots, Simone de Beauvoir discovered late in life that she had been nothing but a woman made of all women and who is worthy of all of them, and worthy of any one.

Simone de Beauvoir, or the eternal feminine.

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1. See Peggy Sastre, How love poisons women's lives, Anne Carrière, 2018. 2. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, Flammarion, 2018. 3. Quoted by Christopher Lasch, in A Refuge in this Unforgiving World. The besieged family, François Bourin editor, 2012.

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Petain

The man to hate They loved each other so much. So much alike. So admired. So much supported. So much understood. They were the general and his aide-decamp, the author and his “negro”, the master and his disciple. They looked at each other as if in a mirror. As aware of their worth, as proud, as independent, as hated by their superiors and their peers, as ironic, as insolent, as arrogant. The same pride, the same contempt, the same cynicism. The same insensitivity.

Pétain remained a colonel for many years, because he was the only supporter of the defensive strategy, while the doxa of the general staff was favorable to the offensive. De Gaulle remained a colonel for many years because he was the only supporter of the offensive while the doxa of the general staff was favorable to the defensive strategy. It was the war of 1914 that proved Pétain right and covered him with glory. It was the war of 1940 that proved de Gaulle right and covered him with glory.

They had lunch together, they worked together, they talked together. The old man looked at the young man with the infinite tenderness one has for a son one did not have. THE

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The young man looked at the old man with the tender respect one has for a father, this hero. Philippe took Charles to visit the battlefield of Verdun where he had acquired immortal glory. Charles only dreamed of rendering such a signal service to his country. Contrary to legend, Philippe was not the godfather of Charles' son, but his name was still Philippe and he had a signed photo of the great man. Charles wrote, Philippe corrected; crossed out, annotated, deleted superfluous adjectives and adverbs. Charles could not stand anyone touching his talented prose, imitated from Chateaubriand; he discussed, protested, negotiated, step by step. Philippe said of Charles that he was the “most intelligent officer in the French army”. Philippe was for Charles the incarnation of the ideal leader, the outlines of which he had traced in his first books. It is said that Philippe intervened so that the jury of the war school raised the score of his young protégé. He imposes it in this same school, as a lecturer. The young de Gaulle often recalled that he was from “Pétain’s entourage”.

When de Gaulle was sentenced to death in absentia on August 2, 1940, Pétain wrote by hand in the margins of the court's judgment: “It is obvious that this judgment in absentia can only be of principle. It was never in my thoughts to give it a sequel. » De Gaulle commuted Marshal Pétain's death sentence at the Liberation to life imprisonment at Fort du Portalet, then in a cell on the island of Yeu. In his Memoirs, he criticized the men of the Fourth Republic for having cruelly prolonged the detention of the old soldier.

Their initial quarrel is a classic of the Republic of Letters. A project manager who uses several “ghosts”; THE

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abandoned “negro” who rebels; paternity dispute: who owns the work? The tone rises, the words thin like rapiers. De Gaulle by Pétain: “An ambitious and a man lacking education”; “a proud one, an ungrateful one, an embittered one”. Pétain by de Gaulle: “Old age is a shipwreck”; “Marshal Pétain was a very great man who died in 1925 without the knowledge of those who were not part of his entourage.”

The two men met for the last time in 1940. On June 11, at the Château de Briare, de Gaulle had just been promoted to general: “You are a general! Pétain tells him. I do not congratulate you. What good are ranks in defeat? » On June 14, in Bordeaux, at the Splendid hotel, Pétain had lunch at a table, a little further away. De Gaulle gets up to greet him in silence: “He shook my hand, without a word. I was never to see him again, ever. »

On June 16, de Gaulle returned from London to Bordeaux. As soon as he disembarks at Mérignac airport, he learns that Paul Reynaud has resigned and will be replaced by Marshal Pétain. He arrives just as Paul Baudouin, leaving Pétain's office, holds the government list in his hand. Baudouin confided to Pierre Ordioni: "General de Gaulle appeared from the shadows and asked me if he was in the government... I knew full well that no, but to save time, I pretended to consult my paper that he came to read over my shoulder... Barely had he, like me, finished going through it, when he whispered, still over my shoulder: “I know what I have left to do .” And without even taking leave of me, he left 1 .

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When he became head of state, Pétain was the last of the living giants of 1914: Clemenceau, Foch, Joffre, Ludendorff and Hindenburg were dead. When Marshal Franchet d'Espèrey died in 1942, Pétain said: “From now on, I will no longer be called Marshal Pétain, but Marshal. » During the 1960s, De Gaulle would be the last of the giants of 1940, after the disappearance of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. Pétain achieved supreme power at the age of 84, and he then had eleven years to live until his death on July 23, 1951. De Gaulle will return to power at the age of 68, and he will then have barely more than eleven years to live. Their two late destinies prove, if necessary, that old age increases ambition rather than appeases it. The two men contemplate their contemporaries with a mixture of haughtiness and irony, pride and courtesy. “He is the greatest actor in the world, his taste for fair terms, his contemptuous clairvoyance towards people, his pride strong enough to warn him most often against the temptations of vanity, his astonishing capacity for silence, patience and of concealment. And age had further increased his appetite for power…” This portrait of Pétain by Emmanuel Berl could have been that of General de Gaulle.

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PÉTAIN AND DE GAULLE ARE OF THE SAME FAMILY, THE MOST FRENCH OF THE FRENCH Pétain sincerely believes that he “gave himself to France”. De Gaulle “identifies with France to the extent where he considers himself to be France's last and only 2

chance. Today's historians do not like people to talk about their closeness, even less about the complicity between the two men. They are right, we must go further: they are from the same family. In his novel Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX, Mérimée imagined two brothers from a Protestant family, one of whom converted to Catholicism during the Wars of Religion. They will tear each other apart and fight each other until death. De Gaulle and Pétain are these enemy brothers, caught in an inexpiable quarrel, which goes beyond them.

Pétain is a peasant from Artois; de Gaulle, a northern squire. They are both rooted in the land of France. They are the most French of the French. They are both Catholics, although Pétain has a less deep faith. They are not of the same generation, but both are branded by the defeat of 1870 and thirsty for revenge. They are neither Germanophobic nor Anglophobic; but neither Germanophiles nor Anglophiles. Pétain will always say the “Boche”, never the “German”; de Gaulle will say the “Anglo-Saxons”, not the “English” or the “Americans”. Pétain's military doctrine is to have none; de Gaulle theorizes the refusal of all theory; they both imitate Napoleon and “his highly executed art of war”. Petain

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is a fan of defensive strategy, but who praises, from the end of the First World War, the major role of planes and their bombings, to “demoralize enemy troops on the ground and prevent any concentration of forces among the enemy” . De Gaulle advocated the armored offensive, but wrote articles during the 1920s on the importance of fortifications and the continuous front.

Pétain is the figure of the heroic generation of Verdun who despises the grotesque vanquished of the “debacle”, fleeing in disorder before the German advance. A few years after the end of the war, de Gaulle exclaimed to Claude Guy: “In 1940, it was the first time that we were beaten into shame! You hear right, beaten in shame! We had certainly been beaten, but not in shame! In 1940, for the first time, we acted as if we were no longer a great power. This is the origin of the moral and mental drama that we are going through today. Even more: beaten in shame, we are aware, all of us, of having put up with this shame. This is what is serious. This is why hope will not be reborn so » easily in us 3

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Pétain like de Gaulle inscribe their action in a providentialist logic. The two men blame the French, Pétain for the hedonism of the Popular Front and the “lies which have done us so much harm”; de Gaulle for not having joined him en masse in London or in the Resistance. François Mauriac wrote in 1946: “The French whose essential fault, whose only fault was to despair of France at the hour of its greatest degradation, and through remarks spread everywhere, to overwhelm their humiliated mother,

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are judged, whether they like it or not, by this solitary leader sitting on the sidelines and who is no longer anything in the State... these four years continue to judge us. We struggle in vain: we all now have on our front a mark, a sign, that destiny has given us, that no complacency will erase and that we will carry into death. »

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A NEW THIRTY YEARS WAR Pétain confided in 1938: “The French have not yet suffered enough. » De Gaulle said in 1956: “The French people don't know what misfortune is. They must experience disaster and personal suffering. » Pétain and de Gaulle are men of the 19th century, patriots, anti-moderns: they believe in the primacy of States and nations over ideologies. Marshal Pétain is always criticized for not having first seen in Hitler's brown uniform the Nazi ideology behind German nationalism. But what does General de Gaulle see under Joseph Stalin's red jacket, if not the Russian nation "which will absorb communism like a blotter drinks ink"?

Pétain and de Gaulle are Machiavellian realists who only know reasons of state, which prevents them from being seduced by these ideological myths which will be rampant during the war, all these Internationals, whether fascist, communist or liberal, which are in reality only the trappings of a national hegemony, those of Germany, Russia or the United States. We rightly praise the insight of the General, who quickly understood that 1940 was only the continuation of 1914 within the framework of a new Thirty Years' War. But it is for the same reason that the Marshal asks the Germans for an armistice. An armistice is a truce, which does not end the state of war. The armistice is not a capitulation. He does not deliver the vanquished to the victor. He gives him a break. On December 12, 1941, de Gaulle entrusted Ge

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Odic: “Never admit that the armistice could not be avoided. »

A memory then haunts Pétain's memory:

Germany of 1918 and the armistice of November 11. Defeated, deprived of part of its territory, Germany was able to rebuild itself and prepare for revenge. Pétain takes his example from Stresemann, the German chancellor of the 1920s, whose motto was to “finish” with his winners. In Pétain's eyes, France saved the essentials, like Germany at the time: its State, its territory (at least part of it), an army, even if it was limited to one hundred thousand men (the same figure than the German army in 1919!). The worst was avoided: France was not wiped off the map. Pétain has, on his bedside table, a book on Prussia in 1806, after Napoleon's brilliant victory at Jena, which is so similar to that of the Germans in 1940. Then, Napoleon had taken half of his territory from his vanquished , but made the mistake of not decapitating the Hohenzollern dynasty. Remarkable ministers, Stein and Hardenberg, had rebuilt Prussian power by imitating Napoleonic France in every way – the army, the Administration, the Civil Code. Seven years after the rout of Jena, the Prussians took their revenge at Leipzig, with their Russian and Austrian allies. In Vichy, we read and reread the history of Prussia after Jena.

For the defeated French, the question is not: should we imitate our winner? But: to what extent can we imitate it? Forge a single party? A totalitarian regime? A statute discriminating against Jews? What gave the Germans victory? What should France do to prepare its revenge and turn its own weapons against its winner?

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Already, in 1870, Ernest Renan had explained that the “intellectual and moral reform” of France must be put in the Prussian school. In a few years, after the American victory of 1945, the reasoning will be the same: we must imitate the winner again and again, but this time, embrace the strong points of American power: industry, business, consumption. , culture, law, freedom…

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RETURN ENGLISH AND GERMAN DOS TO DOS

Pétain was born in 1856. For him, this whole story is not a distant past, but a present that is still relevant today, like childhood memories. With his bougnatian ease, convinced that he “would possess anyone”, it is Laval who expresses this strategy with the most presumption, when he says to Pétain: “In 1918, Mr. Marshal, you won war, France, around the green carpet, lost peace. In 1940, we just lost the war, but this time we will win peace. » Pétain and, even more so, Laval do not measure the difference in situations. The defeated Germany of 1919 was protected by the English and American allies. The Prussia of 1806 is not being torn apart by a 20th century totalitarian tyrant. Paul Reynaud had warned Marshal Pétain: “You believe that Hitler is like William II. You are wrong. Hitler is Genghis Khan. »

But the French armistice is an element in a strategic poker game where all the players are bluffing. After the Munich conference in 1938, the Western powers wanted to divert Germanic aggression towards the Russian bear; by signing the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact by surprise in August 1939, Stalin achieved a masterstroke: sending Germany into the hands of the “imperialist” powers. It was therefore France which suffered the first shock. His Maginot line was less watertight than the English Channel, the Russian steppes or the American Atlantic. It's all in geography!

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Coming out of the war, France returns the German boomerang towards the English and the Russians. For all those, and there are many on the right, but also on the left, who have not forgotten what France's allegiance to the "English governess" during the interwar period cost our country, it is an explosion of joy: “I exulted. It was splendid. I saw the rage of the English, to whom the docile slave was finally leaving company, refusing to let himself bleed to death to prolong a little the agony of the tyrant. I was moved to tears of enthusiasm and tenderness for the old chef who had just succeeded in this “dropout”. Through his grandfather's voice, France, for the first time in so many years, demonstrated national sovereignty. What had been forbidden to us during ages of prosperity, defeat allowed us. All was not lost. After such words, the atrocious Marseillaise of Reynaud's speeches nevertheless became the anthem of France again.

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For Pétain, as for many French people, England will deal with Hitler since since 1919 it has not stopped negotiating with Germany behind our backs. Hitler doesn't think otherwise. He proposed several times, on June 22, 1940, then on July 21, the opening of negotiations with England. The French Empire could even be an object of exchange that Hitler is quite ready to deliver to England. This is also one of the major reasons why Hitler accepted the armistice requested by the French. It was the dream of an Ausgleich (an “arrangement”) between the “German race” and the “English race” that would haunt Hitler throughout the summer of 1940; and which is perhaps the origin of its final defeat: "Contrary to the months preceding the invasion of France, this time the soldiers feel in

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facing them an indecisive, hesitant man, who still believes in an 5

arrangement with England and does not want to spoil anything .

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A year later, when Hitler understood that Churchill was definitely not of the same caliber as the rest of the British aristocracy, he rushed to Africa in pursuit of the essential oil fields. Too late. By his procrastination in the summer of 1940, he squandered the benefit of his victory over France. Pétain, from May 1941, understood: “Hitler runs from victory to victory after victory. »

When Hitler launched his Russian campaign in June 1941, the old marshal found his fundamentals from the First World War, this war on a double front, in the West and in the East, which had then lost its influence. Germany, and which will again prove to be its tomb. What de Gaulle had brilliantly intuited a year earlier.

Pétain returns to his analysis of Verdun: fire kills. We must save French blood. In 1789, France was as populous as England, Germany and Italy combined. In 1940, the forty million French people represented only half of the eighty million Germans. In six weeks, the May-June campaign killed ninety thousand French people. The massacre is worthy of the worst hours of the First World War. France can no longer endure such bloodletting, under penalty of disappearing. This is what gives the quarrels around the armistice their tragic character. The “Breton redoubt”, where some thought they would continue the fight, would have been swept away by the formidable German machine, without a rival in the world at that time. The continuation of the war from the Empire would have been possible, but it would have delivered the entire French population to the German yoke.

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France, subject to a gauleiter and the SS, would have been “polonized”, according to the expression then used by Pétain himself. The fate of Poland, or Ireland, these martyred nations which disappeared for centuries from the map of Europe, haunts the minds of the French elites who saw the "best army in the world" disintegrate in a few weeks. This is why Pétain refused to declare war on England, even after Mers elKébir, as in November 1942 he refused to declare war on Germany.

This “wait-and-see attitude” that Foch and Mangin already criticized him in 1916!

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VICHYSSO-RESISTANT As soon as the armistice was signed, weapons were camouflaged. The Marshal encourages and finances the Hector network, the first military intelligence network, founded by Colonel Heurtaux. When de Gaulle sent his first three emissaries to France in 1940, Rémy, Fourcaud and Duclos, they were hosted by relatives of the Marshal such as Gabriel Jeantet. De Gaulle admitted in

his War Memoirs that the first acts of resistance, from the summer of 1940, were carried out by the secret services and the Vichy army. But he was careful not to specify that it was with the approval of Pétain. We understand: the men of Vichy also hunted the Gaullists. The fact remains: from July 1940 to November 1942, one thousand three hundred Axis agents were arrested by Vichy services in the free zone and in North Africa. Forty-two will be shot, and four hundred and eightythree condemned to forced labor in Algeria.

For his part, Weygand reconstituted the African army clandestinely in agreement with Pétain. This African army will resume the war in Tunisia against the Axis on November 20, 1942, under the command of generals Giraud, Juin and Barré. On November 8, 1942, AngloAmerican forces landed in North Africa. Marshal Pétain ordered the French forces to resist; forty-eight hours later, Admiral Darlan ordered a ceasefire and we learned after the war that a secret telegram from the Marshal had authorized him to take the decisions he deemed necessary.

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On General Weygand's 90th birthday, on January 19, 1957, Marshal Juin delivered a solemn speech: “By taking this post, I inherited the instructions that you had given. These instructions were admirable, there was nothing to change, and I was careful not to change anything during the entire time of my command. I also inherited the tool that you had forged in a year, this admirable tool that you bequeathed to me and which I then took to Tunisia, then to Italy, to victory! He was incomparable. » Paradoxically, the troops of Free France will never be as imposing and decisive as those of Weygand's army. There are four hundred men in Koufra, three thousand three hundred in Bir Hakeim...

This is because the balance of power between de Gaulle and Pétain was initially unbalanced. Pétain applies the traditional rules of European international law: one state, one territory, one army. Everything else is an illusion. Everything else is a pipe dream. Everything else is romantic. Paul Reynaud, whose advisor de Gaulle was at the time, did not think otherwise; on June 15, 1940, he declared: “The departure of the government [outside France] would be considered by the people as a desertion. »

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CIVIC HONOR AND HONOR MILITARY De Gaulle had the prescience that another role was possible, and even essential: the hero who does not give up the fight and does not lay down the sword of France; the government in exile which maintains contacts with our allies: “There must be an ideal. There must be hope. The flame of French resistance must shine and burn somewhere. » It is, as Robert Aron very rightly says in his founding History of Vichy – a completely remarkable work published in 1954 and very wrongly denigrated today by the university doxa entirely converted to the work of Robert Paxton: “The clash of two conceptions of honor, both of which were necessary for France. The civic honor of Pétain, who protects the populations, and the military honor of De Gaulle who refuses to admit defeat. »

François Mauriac later wrote in his notepad: “I was thinking last night that we could explain two destinies: that of Marshal Pétain and that of General de Gaulle, by saying that one preferred the French to France and 'other France to the French. » The Vichyists plead the services rendered to the population and the reforms undertaken for the good of the country. The Gaullists respond that we cannot reform the country under the eye of the occupier. But in 1814, in 1870, in 1914-1918, France was also occupied. Even in 1944, there were foreign troops on its soil, the American military administration, AMGOT, was ready to manage France; and no one is unaware that the superbly literary fiction of “Liberated P

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by himself” of General de Gaulle is only a historical myth, which allows us to repel American pretensions. Pétain was dependent on the Germans, on their demands, always haughty, often criminal. When Pétain talks about his “halffreedom” on the radio, his Minister of Justice, Joseph Barthélemy, comments mockingly: “He boasted. » But de Gaulle is also dependent on the English and the Americans, and they sometimes hold the halter very tight when they cut off gasoline deliveries to stop the advance of his troops. Likewise, during the interwar period, republican governments had been closely subject to the "English governess", against the interests of France. Without forgetting the communists, resistance fighters and patriots, but only when Moscow decides.

We know the Homeric quarrels between Churchill and de Gaulle, which the Englishman relates in his Memoirs: “My general, if you obstruct me, I will liquidate you! »

We know less about the equally harsh clashes between Pétain and the Germans, as during this interview with Marshal Goering, in SaintFlorentin, the 1st understood that

is

December 1941: “I

collaboration implied dealing as equals. If there is a winner and a loser at the bottom, there is no more collaboration, there is what you call a diktat and what we call the law of the strongest.

– Finally, Mr. Marshal, who are the winners, you or us? »

German soldiers noted in a report dated June 20, 1941: “The collaborationist phraseology is not

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used only to camouflage the wait-and-see attitude practiced by the Vichy authorities. »

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AS IF WE WERE IN 1815 Both Pétain and de Gaulle are playing a double game. This is not so much the consequence of their choice or their temperament as of their weakness. On the very day of the Montoire meeting, October 24, 1940, between Hitler and Pétain, Professor Rougier, friend of the Marshal, discussed

on his behalf with Churchill, providing the latter with "assurance that France would not undertake never anything incompatible with honor against its former ally.” On December 4, 1940, Jacques Chevalier, Secretary of State for Public Education, received a visit from Pierre Dupuy, Minister of Canada, carrying a message from Lord Halifax, English Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs: “Say well to our French friends that we are in an extremely delicate situation. We can't jump on each other's necks. We must maintain a state betw of artificial tension... But behind a facade of disagreement, we must understand each other. » Pétain will replace the words “artificial tension” with “artificial coldness”. And the 1 is February 1941, he confided to the same Knight: “I am loyal and friendly with the English because within the limit of the field left to me – it is not very large – I do everything in my power to prepare their victory which will be ours. »

Pétain will keep two unique papers in his safe: one is Montoire's report, the other is the Rougier protocol. And Robert Aron clarifies: “For Pétain, the commitments made to the English are more substantial than those formulated at Montoire. » But it’s Montoire, and the

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handshake with Hitler, who will remain. In memories, in minds and in History. Pétain will experience the drama of what Blaise Pascal called the “clumsiness of the half-skilled”. French public opinion is only aware of images and declarations favorable to collaboration with Germany. She knows nothing of negotiations, procrastination, rebuffs, dissimulations, double, triple, quadruple games. She takes at face value what she sees and what she hears. And even those most favorable to the Marshal will end up rejecting this regime which seems to betray the homeland when it was supposed to defend it.

Paul Marion, Secretary General for Information at that time, later made his mea culpa : “We acted in front of the Germans as if it had been 1870 or in 1815, at the time when the great human masses, when men were not yet citizens. We believed that we could make a policy in the secrecy of political chambers and staffs, while there was radio, while there was propaganda, while entire people were passionate about politics. . We believed that we could resist the Germans, deceive them and protect our country under conditions that were not the conditions of the modern world. »

De Gaulle is both the ally and the obligator of the AngloSaxons. He will do everything to get rid of their influence by getting closer to the Soviets. In May 1942, in London, during a violent altercation with the American envoys whom de Gaulle called "idiots and idiots", he told them the depths of his thoughts: "The Soviets are the only ones who understand! It's with

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them that I will rebuild France and Europe. » He will rebuild France, but with the Americans' Marshall Plan.

The sharpest critics of the Marshal's policy of "wait-andsee" are found in Paris in the ranks of French collaborators, who accuse him of "taking his orders from the Americans", during his frequent interviews with the ambassador of the States. -United at Vichy, Admiral Leahy. In his book written at the end of the war, Loving de Gaulle, Claude Mauriac recounts this edifying scene: “One of Bidault's first sentences before we sat down at the table came back to my mind, which finally enlightened me: “There are two things that exasperate de Gaulle, two things that he cannot tolerate: the Allies and the Resistance…” Allies and resistance fighters who distrust De Gaulle see him as a potential dictator. A new Pétain. A new Bonaparte. One of those soldiers thirsty for personal power and who have nothing but contempt for the Republic. They're not entirely wrong. Once again, if Pétain and de Gaulle are republicans, it is with many ulterior motives and mental restrictions.

Pétain, like his colleagues from the Great War, Foch, Joffre, Lyautey, never loved the republic even if he served it loyally. In his captivity notebooks, the former President of the Council Édouard Herriot, imprisoned in Germany with Blum and Daladier, recounts the conversation he had with the general's sister, Marie-Agnès Caillau, on April 24, 1945, also imprisoned. : “Very frank, intelligent and good [she] tells us that Charles was a monarchist, that he defended Maurras against his brother Pierre to the point of having tears in his eyes during a discussion…”

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Pétain like de Gaulle are above all soldiers; and the army, since the advent of the Third Republic, has been the refuge of Catholics and monarchists who want to serve France, but feel like a foreign body in the secular republic; are experienced as in a besieged citadel. In 1940, the royalists were convinced that the Marshal was preparing the monarchical restoration. In 1958, the Count of Paris was convinced that he had received assurances to this effect from General de Gaulle.

Historians today unanimously claim that Pétain killed the republic, while de Gaulle reestablished it. But it was the parliamentarians of a “popular front” majority who abolished the Third Republic, just as those of the “Republican front”, elected in 1956, brought down the Fourth . When General de Gaulle obtained full constituent powers on June 3, 1958, the analogy with July 10, 1940 was obvious to everyone. “In Parliament, what is striking,” notes the socialist Félix Gouin, “is a state of mind comparable to that which emerged during the hours experienced in Vichy in 1940. Fear is creeping into the minds of certain colle

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUP D’ETAT The worry and anguish are even worse than at Vichy, because Pétain's coming to power had been the product of an external situation, the military defeat, while behind de Gaulle, the soldiers of Operation Resurrection threaten to disembark. The threat of a military putsch is de Gaulle, not Pétain. “A successful February 6 [1934]”: this is how the great republican political scientist André Siegfried defined Republic. the transition from the 4th to the 5th He could have said more aptly about the 18th of Brumaire, which did not need the 19th, when Murat shouted to his hussars in front of frightened deputies: “Kick all this out!” » A coup d'état which received a republican dub at the last minute . A psychological coup d'état. Or how to force President René Coty to call de Gaulle without firing a shot. It is

De Gaulle does not want a pronunciamento. He later confided to Jean-Raymond Tournoux6 : “Obviously in 1945, I could have called Leclerc and kicked out the Assembly! This can't lead to anything! We cannot serve and marry a popular movement! » But everything must be done to bring him back to power. In these few days of May 1958, we see appear, like crocuses in spring, former secret services, former resistance fighters and veterans who crisscross the capital and the big cities, where the armies of the metropolis are already ready to rally the panache white of the Gaullists. The military plan is precise, concise, effective. De Gaulle is informed hour by hour of what is going on. One of the main leaders, Jacques Soustelle, former boss of

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Gaullist secret services during the war, said: “De Gaulle was aware of everything. We did not ask him for instructions, since the aim of the whole operation was to 7

be appointed by the President of the Republic

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Debré, Foccart, Guichard, Chaban-Delmas, Soustelle, Delbecque, Neuwirth, the chain of conspirators is active in front of everyone. In his book on The Return of General de Gaulle, Georges Ayache, stunned by so much ostentatious cynicism, writes: “Never has a coup d'état against a legal regime been fomented in such total transparency. » He is wrong, and this is another point in common with 18 Brumaire 1799: everyone in Paris knew then that Bonaparte was preparing a coup d'état! During his famous press conference on May 19, de Gaulle blessed all these maneuvers and plots: “The army deemed it its duty to prevent disorder from establishing itself. She did it and she did it well. » François Mitterrand, then the only opponent with Pierre Mendès France, shouted but in the desert: “De Gaulle once had two companions around him: Honor and the Fatherland. Today these companions are called coup de force and sedition. » De Gaulle can be jubilant: “Bravo Delbecque, you played well… but admit that I played well too! » Great art. And luck. A lot of chance.

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THE 1944 CONSTITUTION IS THE OLDER SISTER OF THE ONE FROM 1958

De Gaulle has the chance to come after Pétain. The chance to have in Guy Mollet a man of the left who, unlike Laval, also knows how to manipulate his parliamentary colleagues, but without despising or hating them. De Gaulle will skillfully make the gestures that Pétain did not accomplish in his time, to clearly mark his difference. He undertakes to respect the fundamental “republican principles”: universal suffrage, the separation of powers, the independence of the judicial authority. Finally, and above all, he will submit his Constitution to a referendum, which Pétain had promised but never did. He was very wrong. Not only would the Constitution of 1944 – which the Marshal wanted to bequeath to France but which will never see the light of day – have been acclaimed, but it resembled like an older sister to that of 1958: election of the President of the Republic by an enlarged college, reinforced power of the executive, right of dissolution in the hands of the president, who appoints the Prime Minister, universal suffrage extended to women, creation of a true supreme court of justice. If the transformation of the Senate into an economic and social chamber and regionalization had not been refused by voters in 1969, de Gaulle would then have celebrated – in his own way – a partial return of the corporations and provinces dear to the Marshal. This was not as surprising as we might think today. Pétain like de Gaulle embodied the late entry into the Republic of these social classes, Catholics, officers, but also technocrats, who had long

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camped at the gates of the regime, and who ended up penetrating there by bringing their culture and values. Their entry into force had been favored by the return of Alsace and Lorraine to the national fold. France, deprived of Strasbourg and Metz, after 1871, was unbalanced. It was thanks to this amputation that Masonic radicalism flourished in Toulouse and imposed the Third Republic on all of France.

The arrival of the eastern provinces, conservative and Catholic, from 1919 onwards, would change the political face of France, undermine the foundations of the traditional Republic, undermine its geographical base, challenge its ideological foundations, and ultimately make the possible Gaullism.

It was beautiful work. Like brutal and cynical real estate developers, they kept the facade but completely revamped the interior. The work lasted a long time – twenty years! – but the operation will be very profitable, since it has made it possible to adapt France to the times new.

De Gaulle and Michel Debré, well helped by the socialist Guy Mollet, emptied parliamentary democracy of its substance, the only one which deserved, in the eyes of traditional “republicans”, the title of “democracy”. This parliamentary Republic, which had turned to "absolute parliamentarism", which the monarchists nicknamed "la Gueuse", this "democracy" which they dreamed of destroying, was indeed completed by General de Gaulle, who removed most of the legislative power in Parliament and transmitted it to the executive, marginalizing judicial authority, establishing this “personal power” which had haunted the republicans since 1789 and the fall of the monarchy. The triumphant referendum of Octobe

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of course a frank and massive yes to de Gaulle, but above all a frank and massive no to this parliamentary democracy that the French had ended up hating. But de Gaulle, unlike Pétain, carried out the euthanasia under anesthesia, with palliative care, without excessive pain, before nimbly disconnecting.

He will therefore be considered the restorer of the republic.

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1. Pierre Ordioni, Everything begins in Algiers, 40-44, Stock, 1972. 2. Claude Mauriac, Another de Gaulle, Hachette, 1970. 3. Claude Guy, Listening to de Gaulle, Grasset, 1996. 4. Lucien Rebatet, The Debris, Denoël, 1942. 5. August von Kageneck, Occupied France, Perrin, 2012. 6. Jean-Raymond Tournoux, State Secrets. De Gaulle in power, Plon, 1960. 7. Jacques Soustelle, Twenty-eight years of Gaullism, The Round Table, 1968.

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De Gaulle

The man to love The accounts were finally settled. Lately, but completely. The accounts of the 1930s. The accounts of the war and the debacle. For the Marshal as for the General, it was the Republic which lost the war. She has to pay! When the Bonapartes were defeated militarily, their imperial regimes immediately collapsed. It is right, it is legitimate, that the Republic in turn loses the war – and in what way! – disappears body and property.

“I thought that we, the heirs of a hundred and fifty years of error, were hardly responsible,” wrote a young man of 26, in an article published in December 1942, in France, journal of the New State . His name was François Mitterrand. And de Gaulle himself, during the 1950s, still railed against Claude Guy: “To hear them [the Republicans] France began to resound in 1789! Incredible derision: on the contrary, since 1789 we have not stopped declining. »

The Republic was unable to define an independent foreign policy and a coherent military strategy. The Republic and its small staff of local and national elected officials,

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short-sighted borough officials whom they both despise. Like Pétain, de Gaulle surrounded himself in power with unelected technicians, even if – like Pétain – he had to tolerate the presence of old parliamentary staff. De Gaulle makes no mistake when he talks about the motivations of his adversaries. He confided to Claude Mauriac: “It is the State that they had recognized in me and it is the State that in my person they were fighting. And note that they only fought Marshal Pétain for precisely what he offered them that was good. Those who opposed Pétain only accused him of attacking their prerogatives. parliamentarians ! » 1

Nobody was fooled back then. Claude Mauriac continues: “De Gaulle explained to my father [François Mauriac] that there had been two kinds of Resistance – between which no agreement, after the Liberation was possible: “Mine – yours – which was resistance to the enemy – and then the political resistance – which was anti-Nazi, antifascist, but in no way national…”

After the return “to business” of General de Gaulle, François Mauriac wrote in his notepad: “If I surrendered arms so easily to the new institutions of the IN Republic, is that for forty years of my life, I followed every morning, It is

like de Gaulle himself no doubt, in L'Action française, the implacable analysis of French parliamentary life and its slow corruption [...] ] what must be said is that de Gaulle continued in a way, no longer on the blackboard, but on this crucified body of the homeland, finally taken down from the cross, the demonstration begun by Maurras. » Maurras, who saw the advent of Pétain as a “divine surprise”. Maurras, of whom Raymond Aron wrote, in Le Figaro of December 17, 1964: “Charles de Gaulle would have

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accomplished, within the republican framework, many of the transformations that Charles Maurras would have been wrong to believe impossible without the Restoration. »

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THE COMPROMISE BETWEEN THE MONARCHY AND THE REPUBLIC

De Gaulle, after Pétain, ended up finding, after tirelessly searching for it, a compromise between the monarchy and the republic; and established a personal and authoritarian regime which was neither tyranny nor totalitarianism. Pétain had refused the establishment of a single party, but could not help seizing all the powers, executive, legislative and judicial, in culpable confusion. De Gaulle will be more skillful, will maintain appearances better, even if the reality is indeed a concentration of powers unprecedented in the Republic. A consular republic.

Neither Rome, nor Berlin, nor Moscow. The challenge runs throughout the 20th century: how to imbibe the strength of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, born after the First World War, to regenerate France, while preserving its “soul”? As early as July 10, 1940, the terms of the equation had been set out in a remarkable speech by Pierre-Étienne Flandin which aroused general approval, up to and including that of “his friend” Pierre Laval himself: “Nothing would be worse... than a servile copy of institutions from which we would perhaps only take what is mediocre or bad, from which we would not assimilate, on the contrary, what is strong in them. We must take their strength, but clearly eliminate their weaknesses, and, if the term is not too broad, this sort of contempt for the human personality... There is something in the freedom of our villages and towns that enchants

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the one who sets foot on the land of France. The land of France must remain the land of France 2…”

Neither Rome, nor Berlin, nor Moscow. Neither London nor Washington either. Rather Rome and Berlin and Moscow and London and Washington. A “French” synthesis of authoritarian regimes which would spare essential freedoms. Even the most determined collaborators, those who did not hesitate to call themselves "fascism", felt at the end of the war that they had failed to safeguard the "soul of France". In January 1944, Robert Brasillach explained to a group of students "that the ideal regime would be one which would reconcile the ideas of grandeur, of national socialism, of the exaltation of youth, of the authority of the State, which [him ] appear included in fascism, with that respect for individual freedom which is the undisputed prerogative of the English Constitution.

How can we bring down the Third Republic, and its chronic incapacity to govern the nation, while respecting these freedoms that this Third Republic, for its glory, had inscribed in stone with its great laws? Carried away by its vindictiveness, and the still bitter memory of the military defeat, the Vichy regime will destroy one without safeguarding the others. Better taught by experience, the Gaullist power will succeed in sorting things out, although at the time its opponents spent their time denouncing the Gaullist “dictatorship” and its contempt for freedoms.

Both Pétain and de Gaulle sought a

synthesis between the liberal order and the socialist order, between values

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right-wing and left-wing values, between national reality and social reality. Between nationalist Maurrassism and Christian personalism. General de Gaulle himself acknowledged this half-heartedly in his War Memoirs : “If, in the financial and economic domain, these [Vichy] technocrats had conducted themselves, despite all the difficulties, with incontestable skill, on the other hand, the social doctrines of the national revolution, corporate organization, labor charter, family privileges, included ideas which were not without attractions. »

Since the beginning of the 1930s, the country's elites, polytechnicians and Sciences Po graduates, have been fulminating against the inability of the Third Republic to respond to the challenges of modernity. They believe that the liberalism and parliamentarism of the 19th century are no longer adapted to the times; and curse a regime paralyzed by selfish individualism and party schemes. In Vichy, as in Paris, they denounced the “decadence” of a society of small traders and small farmers, and promised to revive anemic growth through a “concerted economy”. They will demand – and obtain – a takeover of the economy by the State, of the State by the executive, and of the executive by technocracy. Patriots, these iconoclastic spirits seek a French way that rejects communism, fascism, Nazism, but also American mass consumerism. They reject both totalitarianism and individualism, forging a synthesis which combines both efficiency and spiritualism, integration into

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large economic groups and patriotism, the free market and planning. These syntheses will not be found in a day; there will be developments, trials and errors, sometimes tragic ones. They will call themselves “non-conformists”, “Vichysts”, “resistants”, “Gaullists”, “socialists”. Their bosses will successively be named Daladier, Reynaud, Pétain, de Gaulle. The same men will pass through Paris, Vichy, London, Algiers. There is a “Vichy before Vichy” in the authoritarian turn that the Third Republic took at the end of the 1930s, and there will be a Vichy after Vichy, at the Liberation, and in 1958, during the return of General de Gaulle.

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TRANSGUERRE At the time of the Papon trial, in 1997, Olivier Guichard pointed out that three of the four Prime Ministers of General de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou had been civil servants of the “French State” (Debré, Chaban-Delmas, Couve de Murville). Until November 1942, the civil servants all obeyed Marshal Pétain, whose power was not contested neither by the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Édouard Herriot, nor by the President of the Senate, Jules Jeanneney, nor by the representatives of the powers foreign. Japanese historians use the neologism “transwar” to designate the period 1930-1950. We could easily attach this notion to the French situation. It’s the same men, the same ideas, the same policies that come together. The economic planning developed from 1941 became the planning commission in 1945. François Perroux and André Vincent founded the ancestor of INSEE, the statistical tool of national accounting, and introduced Keynesian ideas in France. The laws of 1940 on the board of directors of public limited companies and of 1943 on the liability of the presidents of public limited companies prepared the reform of company law of 1966. The creation in 1945 of the works council, the great social conquest of the Liberation, is a copy of the works social committee, provided for by the Labor Charter of October 26, 1941. The Carrel Foundation prefigures Alfred Sauvy's INED. The head of the foundation, Adolphe Landry, is Alfred Sauvy's master. He is also a friend of Robert Debré, Michel's father, whom he will introduce to demographic questions.

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The family policy established in 1938 by the Third Republic was not modified in any way by Vichy and was reinforced at the Liberation. The famous “baby boom” of births, this surprising French demographic spring after the long winter of the 19th century, began despite its American nickname, in 1941. As if France, which had almost died from its victory of 1918, was resurrected of his defeat in 1940. The founder of Social Security at the Liberation, Pierre Laroque, worked for Vichy before his Jewish origins forced him to leave. Raoul Dautry and Jean Lacoste, who passed through Vichy, became ministers under the 4th century . Michael. Paul Debré under the V Baudoin, Jean Bichelonne, Yves It is

Bouteillier, Henri Dhavernas, Robert Garric, Georges Lamirand, François Lehideux will work for Vichy. Paul Delouvrier, who developed the La Défense district under the orders of General de Gaulle during the 1960s, had been trained by the Uriage executive school, created by Vichy. This same school where Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of the newspaper Le Monde, cut his teeth. The peasant corporations and the professional orders of doctors and architects will be maintained at the Liberation, as well as all the social policy of Vichy3 : compulsory identity card, protection of delinquent children, creation of the minimum living wage, implementation retirement by distribution, development of family allowances, emancipation of married women, implementation of the Highway Code and the Town Planning Code, occupational medicine, compulsory medical examination at school, etc.

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THE VICHY TECHNOCRATS , THESE UNKNOWN FATHERS OF THE “ THIRTY

GLORIOUS » Contrary to the carefully maintained doxa, there was no break at the Liberation, but continuity. The Vichy technocrats are indeed the unknown fathers of the “Thirty Glorious Years”. And the reviled fathers of post-war French culture. The masters of the great popular theater, which took off at the Liberation, Jean Vilar, Jean Dasté, André Clavé, all began their careers at Jeune France, the artistic group sponsored by Vichy. At the Liberation, the veterans of the Popular Front and the communists reached a compromise with the former members of Vichyism around an ideology that brought them together, a mixture of pacifism and anti-Americanism. In the theater, in the cinema or on the radio, and later on television, during the 1960s, it is the same aesthetic, the same concern for “French quality”, rooted under Vichy, which dedicates the “stage” to vilification. of the 1930s, dominated by Hollywood productions and boulevard theater. The ideology now leans to the left, but the executives come from the Occupation. Public organizations, such as the CNC (for cinema) or Sofirad (for radios), had their first version in Vichy. State radio takes a decisive place on the airwaves, whatever the regime. Institutions, economy, social, culture, media: everything passes through Vichy, undergoes the imprint of Vichy, an indelible imprint although hidden. As the American historian Philip Nord explains with finesse: “Vichy fulfilled a function of

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relay station, selecting a certain number of causes and principles which appeared in the last years of the Third Republic and transmitting them to the Fourth Republic

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Of course, the condition of the Jews radically isolated Vichy. Of course, the two statuses of Jews and the professional prohibitions were abolished upon the Liberation. Of course, we know from the testimony of a Vichy minister, Paul Baudoin, that Marshal Pétain insisted, during the Council of Ministers of 1 is

October 1940, so that there would be no more Jews in Education and Justice. But the same Marshal Pétain will refuse that Jews wear the yellow star in the free zone and that mixed marriages be, in the German way, prohibited. A discriminatory policy towards Jews satisfied those around Action Française, who felt that the power and social success of Jews had been excessive before the war. That they behaved towards the French population like a “governing race installed in the middle of an indigenous and inferior population”, in the words of Pétain's Minister of Justice, Joseph Barthélemy.

Our contemporary historians believe that Vichy took these antiJewish measures of its own accord, without any pressure from the occupier. But no one notes that the same Paul Baudoin, whose testimony is so useful in attesting to the rigor of the marshal with regard to the Jews, thus evokes the Council of Ministers of September 10, 1940: “It is becoming more and more obvious that, despite the repugnance of the almost unanimous council - and Laval is one of the most opposed to anti-Jewish measures - if we continue to abstain from any intervention in this question, the Germans will take brutal decisions in the occupied zone, perhaps even

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purely and simply extend the application of their racial laws to occupied France. » Everyone is no longer unaware that the French police arrested foreign Jews during the Vél'd'Hiv roundup of July 1942. But everyone ignores or wants to ignore that the first Vél'd'Hiv roundup was carried out by the government of Paul Reynaud, from May 15, 1940: five thousand German women, Jewish, who were taken to the Gurs camp. Previously, the decree-laws of November 12, 1938 and November 18, 1939, taken by the Daladier government, had caused the internment in camps of foreign Jews, especially Germans and Austrians, which Serge Klarsfeld estimates at seventeen thousand .

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FRENCH ISRAELITES AND FOREIGN JEWS To fully understand the situation, you should know that the Jewish population in France amounted to three hundred thousand people in 1939, whereas it was only ninety thousand at the beginning of the 20th century . Most live in the Paris region. This immigration from Germany, Poland and Russia worries and exasperates even French people of Jewish faith. The president of the Israelite Consistory himself, Jacques Helbronner, from an old Alsatian family, a senior civil servant and patriot, also carefully distinguished between foreign Jews and French Israelites. At the end of 1941, in front of Father Glosberg and Father Chaillet who organized the protection and rescue of foreign Jewish refugees, he dissuaded Cardinal Gerbier from intervening in favor of these last internees in transit camps: “You do not understand that if we raise this question, tomorrow we will be able to take similar measures against the French Israelites. The cardinal must not intervene on behalf of foreigners. This can only make our situation worse. » Helbronner will be deported and murdered at Auschwitz in November 1943.

Son of an Italian Jew from Livorno, André Suarès wrote bluntly in 1938 in his anti-Nazi pamphlet entitled On Europe : “I am against the Jews if they stand apart and if they are not incorporated, soul and flesh, honor and interest, to the nation where they claim to live: are they or are they not? Let them think about it and choose. It depends

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of them, as much and sometimes more than of those who insult them, praise them or hate them. When the choice is made, if they want to be a people within the people, a State within the State, they will not have to complain that they are treated like foreigners and rejected. To be loved, one must be lovable; you have to make yourself tolerable to be tolerated. » In the fall of 1940, when the status of the Jews had just been made public, Jacques Helbronner sent Marshal Pétain a “Note on the Jewish Question”, which it is worth quoting at length: “From the end of the 19th century, a danger appeared in the eyes of the French Israelites who did not see without concern the successive governments opening the borders of France to foreigners persecuted in their country and giving them greater and greater facilities to access nationality. French. However, among these refugees driven from their country by a shadowy nationalism, the Jews constituted the majority of those who took refuge in France […]. The invasion took on increasingly worrying proportions as Nazism developed and conquered Europe. Despite the warnings of French Judaism, the governments of France did nothing (on the contrary) to ward off the danger. The reaction against the invasion of foreigners resulted in a normal anti-Semitism whose victims today are the old French families of the Israelite religion. »

The failure of the Evian conference (July 6-14, 1938) showed that no European country, no more than the United States, wanted to welcome these Jewish immigrants, provoking the hateful sarcasm of Nazi dignitaries. When, on the eve of the Vél'd'Hiv roundup, on July 17, 1942, the American ambassador in Vichy telephoned Laval to dissuade him from

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delivering these Jews to the Germans, the latter offered to send them to the United States, which the American politely refused. The status of the Jews in October 1940, the discrimination, the professional prohibitions which hit them, goes unnoticed. Those in the population who are interested in it, despite the debacle, the anxiety of prisoners not returning and of the food supply, approve of it. In London itself, the rare supporters of the Gaullist panache, mainly from the ranks of Action Française, do not think differently on this subject from the rest of the French population, and the Jews who share their tables have to endure their ridicule, which sometimes turn into insults.

This is why Radio Londres hardly attacks Vichy on this issue. In London as in Vichy, the distinction between French Israelites and foreign Jews is an obvious truth. Only the Germans and the fiercest anti-Semitic collaborators put all Jews in the same basket of opprobrium. De Gaulle did not mention the fate of the Jews in his War Memoirs, nor did Churchill. At the Pétain trial, no one blamed him, neither the High Court nor General de Gaulle, for the surrender of foreign Jews.

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“ A SHEPHERD, SIR THE MARSHALL " For the Germans, this distinction is only a first step. After the foreign Jews would come the turn of the French Jews. They therefore urged the Vichy government to transform the French into foreigners. A law for the denaturalization of French Jews naturalized since January 1927 was prepared by René Bousquet, signed by Pierre Laval; but Pétain, after a 1

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discreet but effective intervention by the Church, refused to ratify it on

August 14, 1943. In the process, he now prohibited the French police from participating in the arrests. Keeping the promises made to Helbronner and other notable Israelites, Pétain warned that he would oppose similar treatment between “rooted” Jews, “war decorated” and immigrant Jews. The Germans didn't want to believe it. Then begins a hunt for Jews, by the SS and the Militia, furious as well as disorderly, which no longer distinguishes between French and foreigners. It is the “polonization” so feared by Pétain, which clearly proves on the contrary the protective role played by a State, whatever it may be, as confirmed by the examples always cited – rightly – of Denmark or even from Italy.

At the Liberation, the SS representative in Paris who negotiated with Bousquet, Karl Albrecht Oberg, was arrested by the Americans. Extradited to France in June 1954 and sentenced to death. His sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. Interned in Mulhouse, he was discreetly released by decision of General de Gaulle on November 28, 1962. The measure was part of

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the framework of Franco-German reconciliation. Oberg died a free man on June 3, 1965 in Flensburg… Neither Pétain nor de Gaulle will immediately understand that this old “Jewish question” of the 19th century is changing its nature. The Maurrassian vituperations against "the State within the State", the denunciations of the excessive influence of the Jews, but also of the Protestants or the Freemasons, who for centuries were seen as a fierce defense, in the manner of Richelieu against the Huguenots, of the integrity of the State against the "lobbies" and the minorities, all this verbal and largely rhetorical violence is no longer relevant at a time when the Nazi exterminator is implementing his “final solution”, from January 1942. In Vichy, but also in London, as in Washington or Moscow, few people understood what was really happening. Also in 1914, old-timers recall, the propaganda claimed that the Germans were killing children! But one of Pétain's pens, René Gillouin, particularly perceptive, undoubtedly because of his Protestant origins, nevertheless warned Pétain in August 1941: "The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which remained like a stain on the glory of Louis XIV, will appear like a sheepfold next to your Jewish laws, Mr. Marshal. »

The Marshal's Cassandra will end up being right, but years, even decades, after the war. There too, there again, there above all, the equivocal finesse of the games in troubled waters and of the double discourses, which the Vichy regime favored, will be swept away by the Manichaeism of passions. As the historian Annie Kriegel noted, with powerful intuition, on March 25, 1991: "There is a young historical school which wants to wage a sort of private civil war and

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described as heroic against the Vichy government. It seems absurd to me to reverse things to the point of saying that not only was the government complicit but that it took the initiative in repressing the Jews. I sometimes wonder if, contrary to common belief, the part of sacrifice in the policy and conduct of Marshal Pétain did not have more certain and positive effects on the salvation of the Jews than on the destiny of France.

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At the Liberation, the High Consultative Committee of Population and Family (HCPF), led by a former member of Doriot's French Popular Party (PPF), Georges Mauco (sitting alongside him were Robert Debré and Alfred Sauvy), further recommended immigration services to take into account “ethnic, health, demographic and geographical considerations”. The committee then pleads in favor of family immigration of European origin, close to what it calls the “French ethnicity”. The Minister of Public Health and Population, Pierre Pflimlin, approves. De Gaulle, who had become president of the provisional government, in a letter to René Pleven, found that there were already far too many Mediterraneans in the composition of the French people, and wanted immigration from northern Europe to be encouraged. It was the Council of State, then chaired by René Cassin himself, which rejected the opinion of the High Committee. The author of the future Universal Declaration of Human Rights

could tolerate that France wanted to choose, among the foreigners it welcomed, those who were most easily assimilated. This is how the immigration of workers from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, etc. will begin.

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This quiet but virulent confrontation announces the evolution of this high administrative authority which, in the name of principled humanism and militant anti-racism drawing its source from the Nazi trauma, will become the

bastion of immigrationism for all. horsehair, of an extremist universalism which no longer wants to know anything about the ethnic, even cultural, specificities of the French people. It was the Council of State which prohibited the Barre government, in 1976, from suspending family reunification of immigrants. The same Council will authorize polygamy among Africans, the Islamic veil at school, and will end, in a 2013 report, with an ode to unbridled multiculturalism which disdains any principle of assimilation of foreign populations to the Fren

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NEED FOR ALLIES This detour via the Council of State is useful for measuring what will be the unacknowledged and unspeakable drama of Gaull's gesture. In order to oppose Marshal Pétain, with whom he shared most of the ideas, in order to delegitimize the Vichy regime and to fight it victoriously, to replace him as legitimate and then legal power, General de Gaulle needed allies , even if they were the furthest from what he was and thought. Even if they were his adversaries, even his political enemies. He could refuse nothing to this great jurist that was René Cassin, who had found the legal trick to make “null and void, the acts of the de facto government known as the Vichy government”. He also had to accept the return of the hated political parties of the Third Republic, within the Council of the Resistance, to the great dismay of his first supporters. He had to show his suspicious American godfathers that he was not the fascist dictator they suspected him of being. From 1941, he agreed to add to the proud motto of the original free France, Honor and Fatherland, the republican trilogy that he had initially disdained: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

The worst was yet to come. He had to ally himself with the communists who only joined the active resistance after the big Soviet brother had been attacked by the German army, from June 1941. The entry of the “Party” was resounding, on August 21 1941: one of its militants, who went down in history under the name "Colonel Fabien", assassinated the German officer Moser, with a bullet in the back, at the Barbès metro station. This crime was no

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only contrary to the rules of the armistice, but above all to the code of honor of war. Pétain like de Gaulle, but also the leaders of the Resistance, Henri Fresnay, Emmanuel d'Astier and Jean-Pierre Lévy, all condemned the act of Colonel Fabien. The Germans, mad with rage, murdered a hundred hostages in retaliation. Even as Admiral Darlan was on the verge of obtaining a pardon for the great resistance fighter Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves, arrested shortly before, he was executed.

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“ A MAN ADRIFT” The communists were engaged in the spiral of civil war. They murdered German soldiers, but also and above all French people, magistrates, trade unionists, police officers, all those they deemed “collaborators”, “enemies of the proletarian”. In 1942 alone, the communists committed fifty attacks. This communist activism would provoke both the creation of the Militia by the Laval government, in January 1943, and the arrival of the SS, sent by Hitler to ensure the security of the German troops, whose senior officers did not want to alter “correct” relations. that they had until then maintained with the French population.

1944 would therefore be the year of the civil war. Between resistance fighters and collaborators, between Gaullists and Pétainists, between communists and fascists. The communists had succeeded. Pétain like Gaulle were overwhelmed, no longer controlled anything. Since November 1942, and the invasion of the free zone by the German army, Pétain has embodied a puppet power. Already on April 20, 1942, receiving a few ministers who had resigned from the Darlan government, even though he was forced by the Germans to take back the Laval he vomited, Pétain confided to them: "Pity me, because you know, now, I don't am more than a man adrift. »

Its drift comes from afar. From its lack of audacity, its wait-and-see attitude, its opportunism elevated to a principle of political survival. On December 13, 1940, to everyone's surprise, he

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got rid of Pierre Laval and put Pierre-Étienne Flandin in his place as head of government. Laval embodied the integration without ulterior motives – up to a formal military alliance – of France in a new

European order dominated by Germany. Flandin wants to resist the Germans and guarantee the French independence provided for by the armistice. The two lines have their coherence and an undeniable breadth of views; but Pétain refused to choose between the two and ended up on February 9, 1941, under pressure from the Germans, by getting rid of Flandin.

But it was on November 11, 1942 that he himself signed the end of his regime, his political death, and his tragic destiny in History. The Germans are preparing to invade the free zone, in order to respond to the American landing in North Africa. Pétain will no longer have sovereign territory. Soon, he will no longer have either a fleet that will be scuttled, or an empire that will willingly submit to Uncle Sam. Those close to him urge Pétain to leave for North Africa. A plane is ready.

Pétain hesitates, then refuses. We will never know what was decisive: his great age, his panic fear of flying (Stalin took the plane for the first time to go to the Tehran conference in 1943; and never took it again), his desire to protect the French to the end, his enjoyment of the gold of power, even artificial. “A pilot must remain at the helm during the storm,” he explained later, “if I had left, it would have been the regime of Poland for France… You don’t know what that is.” the regime of Poland. France would have died 6 .

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It was he who died from it. He will no longer protect the French or the Jews, French and foreigners alike, who are harassed by the SS and the militia, under the exclusive orders of Laval, who returned with

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all powers. He does not avoid the civil war he claimed to ward off. He associates his name, his aura as winner of Verdun and his regime with Laval's policy of frank collaboration. He is startled, frightened, repulsed. One day, he calls out to Darquier de Pellepoix, the Commissioner for Jewish Questions, whom the Germans and Laval imposed on him, to replace Xavier Vallat, in a sad tone: “Monsieur torturer…” Yet he had foreseen it. He had confided to Admiral Auphan, his Secretary of State for the Navy from April to November 1942: “It will be fine if the war only lasts three months, but if it lasts another three years, we will be Polonized. » The entry into the war of French Africa, alongside the allies, under the orders of Darlan, Pétain's heir apparent, had definitively opened German eyes to Vichy's double game; but Darlan would be assassinated by a young Gaullist activist. Pétain's last card had fallen.

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THE BLOOD PACT De Gaulle triumphs. From November 1942, for many French people, Pétainists in July 1940, de Gaulle became what the Marshal was: the symbol of the French renaissance. But to ensure his fragile power over the Resistance, which guarantees his legitimacy among the allies, de Gaulle is obliged to give pledges to the communists. This is the reason why he refused the pardon of Pucheu, the very type of the technocrat who became a minister under Vichy, and of Darnand (the founder of the Militia). Each time, de Gaulle conveys his respect and personal consideration to the condemned men he could not save.

These two executions announce the “purification”, its exceptional justice, its sordid settling of scores, its condemned to death not because they are guilty but because they are defeated, or because they bear an aristocratic name , or possess necessarily ill-gotten wealth, these women shorn and molested, raped and murdered. The purge was the blood pact that de Gaulle was forced to conclude with the communists, just as Napoleon was obliged to execute the Duke of Enghien to ensure the support of the regicidal Jacobins on the eve of his imperial coronation. De Gaulle recounts in his War Memoirs how he stopped the spiral of civil war, by disarming the communist militias, in Toulouse in particular. But it was in Moscow, with Stalin, that he sought an end to hostilities. The price to pay is high. It is the return of Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the Communist Party, deserter in 1940,

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minister in 1945. De Gaulle was forced to offer those he In a few years as "separatists" inexhaustible would describe for cornucopias like EDF and, more seriously still, the leadership of youthful minds through union control over the 'National Education. By controlling schools, universities and culture, the communists will be able to format the brains of the generation which, two decades later, will call de Gaulle a “fascist” and a “Petainist”.

This is the paradox of De Gaulle, but also of Pétain: two men of order who take the lead in revolutions, even if they want them to be national. If the two men are not fooled by the words, the words were indeed spoken. As Emmanuel Berl notes, “the words would accomplish their work”. Pétain's left, around Laval, child of Briand and Caillaux, led him despite the marshal into "a collaboration which desired the victory of Germany", in the name of peace and Europe. De Gaulle's left brought him back to party rule in a Fourth Republic which proved to be little better than the Third by a few months. and who ejected his guardian at the end ,

The left had long had a weakness for Pétain. At the Marshal's trial, Reynaud said: “Pétain had the audience of the left because he was the man of the defense and the defense was of the left. » At the time, the left was, however, wary of de Gaulle who advocated both the offensive and the professional army. When Pétain became ambassador to Madrid, Léon Blum declared: “The noblest, the most humane of our military leaders is out of place with General Franco. » It is the left, as the historian demonstrated

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Simon Epstein in his master book, A French Paradox, who will join Vichy en masse, to forge a Europe finally pacified and united under the leadership of Germany. This left which, allied with the technocrats, keen on efficiency above all, will give economic reality to the policy of collaboration.

In February 1941, the Darlan cabinet brought into the government Jacques Benoist-Méchin, François Lehideux, Paul Marion, Pierre Pucheu, all members of the Worms bank. They transmit a report to Berlin on the European economic organization. For our dashing technocrats, the modernization of the French economy requires its integration into an entity led by Germany. Pucheu then declared: “We are convinced that it is our duty to bring victory from France’s defeat. from Europe. »

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THE TALLEYRAND ARMCHAIR AND CHATEAUBRIAND Voluntarily or not, the so-called “national” revolution contributed to integrating France into the new European order, established by Germany. But de Gaulle loses nothing by waiting. Voluntarily or not, entry into the Common Market in 1957, ratified by Gaullian France in 1958, would also contribute to integrating France into the European order established by the United States. The Allied victory over Germany snatched France from its destiny as a large region of the German Empire; but it was to ensure its destiny as a French-speaking dominion in the new Western empire which was established in 1945, under American hegemony. An America which immediately sponsors an integrated Europe where German economic power would soon assert itself. One evening in 1969, during a reception at the Élysée, Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's minister, teasing his old host, asked him how he intended to contain the irresistible domination of German economic power over Europe. De Gaulle replied straight away: “Through war! » Another day, he will blurt out to Admiral Flohic: “We will have to get in their face!” » Pétain no longer mattered to Hitler from the moment the war became global. De Gaulle no longer mattered to the Americans from the moment the competition with the Soviet Union turned into the Cold War. All historians explain that the iconoclastic audacity of General de Gaulle in June 1940 ensured France's presence at the victorious table, and its permanent seat on the Security Council.

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of ONU. But de Gaulle was not invited to the Yalta conference in February 1945 by the big three, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.

Mauriac wrote with a melancholy pen that, for the first time in history, including after our worst defeats, the chair of Talleyrand and Chateaubriand had remained empty. “When we are not at the table,” say the Poles, accustomed to suffering the cruel whims of the Empires whose neighbors they are, “it is because we are on the menu. » General de Gaulle, at Yalta, was not at the big table. He was also not informed of the landing of allied troops on June 6, 1944 on the Normandy coast. And had to fight like a man devil to discard the American currency that the American military administration, AMGOT, was preparing to pour into occupied France.

De Gaulle like Pétain did what they could to save France's place in the concert of the great powers. Each in their own way, they refused to mourn the France of 1918. Each in their own way, each in their place. Knowing very well what the other was doing. In all conscience, even if they said the opposite. They both failed. They both pursued an illusion: the illusion of power for Pétain, the illusion of grandeur for de Gaulle. “The real tragedy of 1940,” explains Guy Dupré in his masterpiece, Le Grand Coucher, “is that it was performed like an opera buffa, where we saw a providential general taking over from a providential marshal to prevent a truly bloody fifth set. The shield marshal (pierced) allowed the French to endure the Occupation in a rather gentle way

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and General Section (of the sword) persuaded them that they had 7

participated in the victory of arms

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THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD Before being forcibly transferred by the Germans, to Sigmaringen, Pétain delivered his final message to the French on August 11, 1944, which sounded like his testament: “The intractable patriotism of some has deprived me of the only had left me. Fanaticism weapons that the collaborationist armistice of others has continued to stimulate demands and to alert the Germans' mistrust. On the one hand, when I negotiated for France, I was denounced as an auxiliary of Germany. On the other hand, men who saw the salvation of France only in German victory denounced my wait-and-see attitude as a betrayal... If it is true that de Gaulle boldly raised the sword of France, history does not will not forget that I patiently held the shield of the French 8..."

In 1947, de Gaulle confided to Colonel Rémy: “France must always have two strings to its bow. In June 40, he needed the Pétain rope as well as the de Gaulle rope

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The sword and the shield, in fact. In the facts. The sword and the shield in the heads. In their heads. The quarrel between Pétain and de Gaulle is philosophical: what is a nation? A territory, a people, an administration, or a spirit, values, an idea? The vast majority of France in 1940 responded “one territory, one people, one administration”; today's France, in its vast majority, and in any case through the voice of its political and intellectual elites, responds with “a spirit, values, a certain idea”.

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Raymond Cartier writes in his book on The Second World War : “Two patriotisms are face to face. One thinks it is possible to carry the flame of the homeland outside the homeland. The other believes that there is strength and truth only in the native soil... The facts do not prove one or the other right. Those who left returned with the halo of victory – but what would they have found without the conservation work of those who stayed? The fierce accusations with which they have been pursuing for a quarter of a century will lose their meaning for later generations. They will not see traitors and heroes, capitulators and adventurers, but only French people torn apart by a tragic conflict. »

He was wrong in the judgment of posterity. Modern France forged together, beyond hatred and ideological opposition, by Pétain and de Gaulle, would be brought down by this new generation of which they had been the tutelary fathers, this famous generation known as the “baby boom”, which would become soon the ungrateful generation 68. This began by putting its two mentors in the same bag of insults. To throw down de Gaulle, then in power, the youth of the left assimilated him to Pétain. To better demonize it, fascisize it and overthrow it. It was de Gaulle = Pétain, like CRS = SS. Then, on the contrary, came the time when left-wing intellectuals rediscovered the General. After his departure from power and his death in 1970. With his 1984 biography, Jean Lacouture is a milestone. De Gaulle is no longer the putschist general, with reactionary ideas, with authoritarian tendencies, agent of the “trusts” and the bourgeoisie. He is the man of all daring, of

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all the rebellions, the man who says no. He became, with Régis Debray, the standard bearer of the revolt of nations against empires, a sort of Richelieu fighting the last Holy German-American Empire. With Bernard-Henri Lévy, he embodies the man with the soles of wind who takes his homeland with him into exile, a sort of sublime wandering Jew, while Pétain is the name of the odious homeland of the earth and the dead, fascist because than rooted. This last analysis is the furthest from the will of General de Gaulle; the one that most distorts his message, what he was and what he said. This is undoubtedly why it stood out. The rooted man, the unwilling emigrant, has transformed into a paragon of uprooting. The fervent Catholic and lukewarm republican into a secular and cosmopolitan republican. The man who said to Claude Guy "You see, Blum is a man who has never been able to pursue any national end, applying himself in everything to remaining foreign to France" is designated as the standard bearer of a universalist anti-racism.

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SPEECH BY JACQUES CHIRAC AT THE VEL’ D’HIV

France forged between the decades of the 1930s and 1950s was destroyed culturally in 1968, and economically in 1983, with the great European and liberal turn of the left. Then returned everything that had been denounced and fought by these “non-conformist” elites who had ended up building modern France: economic liberalism, party rule, individualism, internationalism, pacifism, the submission of society. France to the Anglo-Saxon ally (America having replaced England), the fascination with the successes of Germany, the sanctification of Europe in the name of peace, the domination of finance and the disdain of industry, until the death of “French quality”, defeated in theater, cinema and television by the boulevard, Hollywood productions and the stupefication of mass vulgarity.

Since Jacques Chirac's speech at the Vél'd'Hiv in 1995, recognizing the responsibility of the French state in the roundup of July 17, 1942, the Gaullian fiction of an illegitimate and illegal Vichy has lived. Pétain has once again become the head of the French state for eternity, but it is to better demonize them, Pétain and the French state, the state and France. De Gaulle is for eternity the rebel general in exile, but it is to better empty his meaning, and even to better destroy everything he wanted to accomplish. This is the great inversion. It's 1940, but in reverse. Pétain is the man to be hated, de Gaulle, the man to be loved. “France finally has a man to

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to love”, we read in a 1940 newspaper… “Pétain, it’s France”, we proclaimed in 1940. “De Gaulle, it’s France”, we say today. “The words of Marshal Pétain,” wrote François Mauriac, on the evening of June 25, 1940, “made an almost timeless sound. » A few years later, the same Mauriac wrote: “General de Gaulle remains today what he was, from our collapse to our liberation, a timeless voice…”

Pétain is buried under stones, de Gaulle under flowers. Pétain is the cursed soldier, de Gaulle, the father of the nation. Pétain is the name to be hated at city dinners; de Gaulle is the name that must be glorified if you want to be invited to dinners in town.

This is the great inversion. It is 1940, but upside down. Pétain is Gaullized, de Gaulle is Pétainized.

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1. Claude Mauriac, Another de Gaulle, Hachette, 1970. 2. Robert Aron, History of Vichy, Fayard, 1954. 3. Cécile Desprairies, The Legacy of Vichy, Armand Colin, 2012. 4. Philip Nord, The French New Deal, Perrin, 2016. 5. Interview in Valeurs Actuelles, March 25, 1991. 6. Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy, op. cited 7. Guy Dupré, Le Grand Coucher, The Round Table, 2013. 8. Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy, op. cited 9. Colonel Rémy, In the shadow of the Marshal, Presses de la cite, 1971.

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De Gaulle and Soustelle

France in the land of Islam It was the last. The last of the last. The final Franco-French war. The one that summarized them all, contained them all, repeated them all, parodied them all. Tragedy and farce at the same time. The one which pitted the General and the intellectual, the SaintCyrian and the Normalien, the first of the French and the first to take the philosophy aggregation, the Catholic and the Huguenot, the monarchist and the Republican, the Maurrasian and the socialist, the stake and the big tomcat, the great Zohra and the hummingbird brain, the North wind and the South wind, the Lille and the Lyonnais, the land and the sea, history and geography, politics and the ethnologist, the 1940s exile and the 1960s exile, the cynic and the romantic, the Machiavellian and the utopian.

Their names are Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Soustelle. We have the impression of having seen them before, of having already known them, under other names, other features, in other situations, never the same, yet always the same: Bonaparte and Chateaubriand, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo, the army general staff and Zola, Richelieu at the siege of La Rochelle, Louis XV and Voltaire, Louis XIV and Fénelon, the Wars of Religion and Montaigne...

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“The Franco-French war, declared by young France to old France since the Revolution, the Restoration and the Empire, resurfaced comically at the time of the Dreyfus affair, to smolder and rot under the flesh of the “dead for the ” from 14-18, and reappear in 40-45 in the fight between marshalists and generalists, recalls Guy Dupré. It shined with its last brilliance in the 1960s between the Algiers putsch and the Petit Clamart. Sixty-year FrancoFrench War which began with the degradation of Captain Dreyfus in the courtyard of the military school on January 5, 1895 and ended with the execution of Colonel Bastien-Thiry at Fort Montrouge on March 11, 1963 . »

De Gaulle like Soustelle, like all the actors in this final struggle around French Algeria, are imbued by this history which haunts them. When Soustelle “buries” de Gaulle prematurely, “he died in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises between 1951 and 1958 without anyone realizing it”, it is in the acerbic and sarcastic manner of the General signing the famous epitaph of the Marshal already mentioned: “Pétain died in 1925, without the knowledge of those who were not part of his entourage. » When all the supporters of Algerian independence, his former friends on the left as well as his comrades in the Resistance, call him a “fascist” because he supports the violent methods of the OAS, Soustelle responds with a certain nobility: “ If all people who act violently are fascists, then we were fascists during the war. »

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" THE INTEGRATION

IS A TRAGIC ANTONY » It was the war that brought together these two men who nothing should bring together. Soustelle joined General de Gaulle in London in December 1940. He became an essential part of the system there, going so far as to take the head of the secret services of Free France. The philosopher has gotten his hands dirty; the intellectual has dabbled in politics; the man on the left became a Gaullist.

After the war, Soustelle continued to live all his lives at once. Between two trips to Mexico, and two works of ethnology, he annihilates the Fourth Republic with his sharp philippics. But when François Mitterrand, then Minister of the Interior, asked him in January 1955 to become governor of Algeria, he was unable to refuse. He immediately consults de Gaulle, who says “oh”, “ah”, before telling him: “After all, why not!” This is not a ministerial position, maybe you can do something useful... Go for it! » Soustelle still believes himself at that time to be the great man's favorite even though the latter has not forgiven him for his turn of events in January 1952, when he almost accepted the position of President of the Council offered to him by Vincent Auriol, precipitating the dislocation of the RPF group which supported the General's political action.

He falls in love with Algeria: “Poor Algeria! Divided between the past and the future, torn by desires and resentments. How can you not love him in his ordeal? »

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Algeria falls in love with him. On February 2, 1956, he left it like a Roman emperor, on a chariot. Soustelle confided, in despair: “Algeria is lost. » He is very angry with this Fourth Republic which has been incapable of moving away from a short-sighted policy. The Republic will lose Algeria as it lost the Second World War, as it almost lost in 1914, because of the incompetence of a parliamentary regime, incapable of deciding, of making choices and sticking to them. . His diagnosis then joins that of General de Gaulle. When Soustelle sent him his book Loved and Suffering Algeria, de Gaulle replied that he “writes very well, which adds a lot to the arguments”.

The “big cat” is found at the heart of all the plots of May 13, 1958. Operation Resurrection pursues three objectives: the return of the General to power, the reform of institutions and the maintenance of Algeria in France. Soustelle will later evoke “the contract concluded between him and the nation after May 13”; but de Gaulle will feel that he owes nothing to anyone. In 1962, de Gaulle spoke of the May 13 movement as “an enterprise of usurpation coming from Algiers”. Ingratitude of great men. Soustelle, Debré, Bidault. For Raymond Aron, sarcastic, these are the last three political leaders who still sincerely believe in French Algeria. They are also three Gaullists and resistance fighters from the start. “The integration of Jacques Soustelle is a tragic buffoonery,” writes Raymond Aron.

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“ LONG LONG LIVE FRENCH ALGERIA” De Gaulle does not yet speak like this. In public, during his first trip to Algeria after his return to power, he uttered the words that exalted and reassured: “I understood you. » “All French people in Algeria are the same French people. » Without forgetting: “Long live French Algeria!” » The Algerian crowds exasperate him with their imperious dishevelment and their passion for Soustelle, whose name they constantly chant, but he still knows how to contain his irritation.

In private, he is more undulating depending on his audiences, talking about independence to the progressives, and French Algeria to the Gaullists. When he received Léon Delbecque, a great supporter of integration, the day before his departure for Algiers and his famous “I understood you”, he told him mockingly: “Integration, Delbecque, that has never held standing. »

Delicate to follow the twists and turns of his thoughts. Behind the apparent monolith, there are so many procrastinations and reversals. Well worth making fun of the zigzags of a Fourth Republic which varies according to the majorities and the whims of opinion in mainland France, and especially in Algeria! De Gaulle will embody all the presidents of the Council and all the policies at the same time. He will successively defend French Algeria, Algeria in France, independent Algeria associated with France, Algerian Algeria.

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He initially believed in good faith that his immense personal prestige would convince Muslims to stay in France. At the time, only the king of Morocco dared to tell him that he was feeding on illusions. For French Algeria, he said the words that pleased him, and above all emptied his purse. This is the famous “Constantine Plan”, a vast undertaking of schooling, industrialization and construction. One hundred and fifty billion francs per year! At the same time, he instructed General Challe to crush the insurrection while offering the rebels the “peace of the brave”. De Gaulle pulls all the strings at the same time; and realizes that Algeria is similar to the barrel of the Danaids. A bottomless pit. He confided to Peyrefitte: “Colonization has always entailed sovereignty expenses. But today, in addition, it entails gigantic expenses for economic and social upgrading. It has become, for the metropolis, no longer a source of wealth, but a cause of impoverishment and slowdown... The civilizing mission, which was at the beginning only a pretext, has become the only justification for the pursuit of colonization. But since it costs so much, why maintain it if the majority of the population doesn't want it? It's a terrible burden. You have to untie it. This is my mission. She's not funny.

– And oil, and gas? » asks his interlocutor. De Gaulle brushes aside this final argument: “Oil and gas will not be enough to pay for the effort that Algeria demands of us… Empires will collapse one after the other. The smartest are those who will do it the quickest. The English, then the Dutch,

removed first; they found themselves well

2 .

»

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“ BYE, BYE, YOU COST US TOO MUCH DEAR " At the time, oil and gas were acquired at ridiculous prices. De Gaulle could not anticipate the crisis of 1973 or the quadrupling of oil prices. His analysis, however, is structural. The history of colonization is a immense deception, whether written by his supporters or his adversaries. From the 19th century, as economic historian Paul Bairoch notes, countries that did not have colonies, the United States, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, experienced greater growth than countries that did: United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands. By becoming a colonial country at the beginning of the 20th century, Belgium changed sides. As soon as they abandoned Indonesia in 1947, the Netherlands benefited from unprecedented development. This “Dutch model” was analyzed at the time by all French economists who urged the general to abandon Algeria and the rest of the empire.

De Gaulle has no economic culture, but he knows how to count. In front of Peyrefitte, he jokes again: “So, since we cannot offer them equality, it is better to give them freedom. Bye bye, you cost us too much. » In January 1959, he changed course and resolved to put an end to what he called the “sorrow box”. He wrote to General Ély, chief of staff: “We must kill a thousand combatants per month. The insurrection is intact... Integration is currently just an empty word, a kind of screen..." The General has no humanist preconceptions against

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colonialism. His son recounted in his Memoirs a conversation in which his father told him, exasperated: “Only imbecile peoples do not recognize colonization, even if it was not always kind because of their own barbarity. They forget that they themselves were colonized because they themselves were incapable of doing so. » And to exclaim: “Long live the Romans!” »

However, he judges that the republican project in Algeria of the assimilation of colonized populations was “not very clever”. He does not endorse the famous phrase of François Mitterrand, then Minister of the Interior of the Fourth Republic: "Algeria is France... from Flanders to the Congo, there is one law, one nation, one only Parliament. » However, he knows better than anyone that this Algerian dream was born among the Republicans to compensate for the military defeats of 1815 and the demographic decline of the country in the 19th century. In their minds, Algeria is the antidote to the loss of the Napoleonic Empire in Europe. It will be what America was to England. Already, Thiers, in 1836, spoke for Algeria of the destiny of "one of those great and noble asylums that in the 16th and 17th centuries were found in North America." Prévost-Paradol, in 1869, counted on Algeria to forge a France of one hundred million inhabitants which alone, according to him, could compete with the giants who were arriving: the United States, Russia, and what he called the United Germany.

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ARAB KINGDOM This republican project is universalist and humanist. It is a policy of greatness for France based on human rights. No races or religions, just one man, just one Frenchman. Bugeaud and his officers trained in the Grande Armée. They are the children of the Revolution and of the Civil Code. They have no thought of converting the Muslims they subjugate to Catholicism. They are certainly merciless swordsmen; but, upon coming to power, Napoleon III gave strict instructions so that the Arabs would not “know the fate of the American Indians”. Unlike the Republicans, the Emperor was thinking of an independent Arab kingdom, governed by "Muslim law", but protected by the French army, where the colonists would not have been privileged over the indigenous populations; but where they would only have become French citizens by abandoning their “personal status”, that is to say the legalpolitical code of Sharia. The imperial decrees of April 21, 1866 therefore proposed that Jews and Muslims, who were ready to abandon this “personal status”, acquire French nationality; but the religious authorities of both religions then put pressure on their flock to refuse this tempting offer. Four years later, the Republic, barely established, generalized this imperial policy, but for the benefit of Jews only. Meanwhile, Jewish leaders in the mainland had exerted strong pressure on the overseas rabbis to yield. The imams had not changed their minds…

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The defeat of 1870 consigned this grandiose project to the dustbin of History. To the great desolation of De Gaulle, who, a hundred years later, still in front of Peyrefitte, paid him homage: “Only one understood the impasse we were sinking into: Napoleon III. He wanted to create an Arab kingdom... The Europeans would not have been the dominators, but the leaven in the dough... We missed the only formula that would have been viable. » A century later, the Muslim population is ten million people, while its European counterpart totals only one million. Mass has been said. The pieds-noirs will never be able to accept that Muslims have the same rights as them, because that would mean submitting to the law of numbers.

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ISLAM IS THE GORDIAN KNOT Algeria will be neither North America, purged of its first inhabitants, nor Mexico and South America, where the Spaniards mixed with the Indians after they had converted them to Catholicism. Islam is at the same time an identity, a religion, and a legal-political system. Islam is the Gordian knot of this Algerian affair that France has never dared to resolve.

Humanist and revolutionary France remained in the middle of the ford. Jacques Soustelle still wants to believe in the “fraternization” of the two peoples, the pied-noir and the Muslim. There is sentimental naivety in Soustelle, that of the scholar seized by politics, when he titles his book on Algeria Hope Betrayed : as if the characteristic of a political hope was not to be betrayed! But there is also great lucidity when he explains that the FLN assassins primarily attack their Muslim co-religionists – and in the most savage way – to impose on them the “domination of a group of racist adventurers, totalitarian and communist-inspired.

Soustelle is too subtle an ethnologist to believe in the mirages of pure and simple assimilation – and in this he is not the direct heir of Jules Ferry – but he remains a left-wing republican who believes in Man. In the quarrel masterfully carried out by Joseph de Maistre in Considerations on France (“There is no man in the world. I have seen in my life Frenchmen, Italians,

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Russians; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian; but as for the man I declare that I have never met him in my life; if it exists it is without my knowledge. ), de Gaulle is on the side of the reactionary de Maistre, Soustelle is with the universalist revolutionaries for whom, as he himself said, “there is no difference between a Cévennes peasant and a Kabyle peasant”. Note, however, that he speaks of the Kabyles – Berbers forcibly converted to Islam centuries earlier – and not of the Arabs. Full of his romantic Mexican mirage, he only forgets that in one hundred and thirty years of colonization there have been practically no mixed marriages between the pieds-noirs and Arabs.

De Gaulle, for his part, is ruthlessly realistic: “We can integrate individuals; and then only to a certain extent. We do not integrate peoples, with their past, their traditions, their common memories of battles won or lost, their heroes. Do you think that between the pieds-noirs and the Arabs, this will never be the case? Do you believe that they have the feeling of a common homeland, capable of overcoming all divisions of race, class, religion? You believe that they really have the will to live together 3

?»

De Gaulle received a visit from the great French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who showed him his implacable curves. The General recites his lesson to Peyreffite: “Have you considered that the Arabs will multiply by five and then by ten, while the French population will remain almost stationary? There would be two hundred then four hundred Arab deputies in Paris? Do you see an Arab president at the Élysée? »

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“ THE SAME DJEBELS, THE SAME STARVING » At the beginning of 1960, everyone finally understood that de Gaulle would not be who we thought he would be. The army understood. The army especially understood. Massu, in January 1960, expressed himself in a German newspaper: “Our greatest disappointment was to see General de Gaulle become a man of the left… de Gaulle was the only man at our disposal. The army may have made a mistake. » It's bad for him. Massu is summoned to the Élysée: “General de Gaulle banged on the table, he broke his watch, he was hot, he had a sticky hand Massu replies that

4

», said Massu of his interview with the general.

Napoleon at least let his grunts speak and concludes: “You are surrounded by a gang of cons. »

For the officers of the Algerian army, in particular the colonels who fought alongside their men and know that they are winning the war on the ground, by avenging the bitter defeat of Diên Bien Phu, the disillusionment is immense. Fury too. For them, de Gaulle is now Pétain. The hero of yesterday's war who refuses to continue today's struggle. The man of honor who betrays his word. The incarnation of the supreme values of sacrifice who acts as the herald of a slumped and spineless France.

During the week of barricades in Algiers, in January 1960, the atmosphere was tense within the government itself. During

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of the Council of Ministers, Malraux says: “After all, we have tanks, why don’t we use them? ", Soustelle replies with cold irony: "The atomic bomb is ready in Regane, why wouldn't we use it in Algiers too? »

Soustelle no longer has his place in the government. He resigns. De Gaulle received it for one hundred and fifty seconds. Later, on television, in 1989, Soustelle recounted the scene: “In essence, he told me that our positions are too different for us to be able to stay together, in fact. I told him it was a shame you didn't wait a few more days, it would have been twenty years since I was with you. He made the gesture one does to shoo away a fly. »

During the referendum on self-determination of January 8, 1961, de Gaulle obtained a 75.25% yes vote in mainland France. De Gaulle won. However, nothing goes the way he wants. Nothing goes as fast as he wants it to. The FLN plenipotentiaries proved to be formidable negotiators. They are not giving up anything, and especially not this Sahara, with its oil reserves discovered by the French, who are testing their atomic bomb there. Exasperated, he thinks of an as yet unpublished way out: sharing. Bring together Europeans, three-quarters of whom already live near the coast, between Algiers and Oran. With the Sahara in an autonomous Republic, directly connected to French Algeria. He confided to Peyrefitte: “The important thing for a minority is to be in the majority somewhere… The two million Israelis held up well against the hundred million Arabs surrounding them. » He charges the latter with spreading the idea. Articles, forums, meetings, conferences.

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Supporters of French Algeria, like Debré, cling to the idea like the last raft before the drowning. Couve de Murville and Malraux predict his failure to Peyrefitte. Malraux: “It is probable that your formula would amount to continuing the war in another form, which for us would be to support someone else, but which would be a war all the same. » Couve is even more hostile: “It is impossible that Morocco and Tunisia are independent and that Algeria is not. They are the same djebels, the same hungry people, the same intelligentsia formed by us and who hate us. »

Alain Peyrefitte will never know if he was used by the General to put the sword in the kidneys of the FLN negotiators or if de Gaulle really believed in his “sharing” plan. Probably both. His contempt for the pieds-noirs, as for most of the Mediterranean "peoples", inclined him to see the crowds of Algiers and Oran as vociferous bawlers, incapable of taking up arms to defend their territory. What was a basic idea becomes a tactical means, and vice versa, depending on the needs.

As always with de Gaulle, it all depends on the moment.

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1. Guy Dupré, Le Grand Coucher, op. cit. 2. Alain Peyrefitte, It was de Gaulle, op. cit. 3. Alain Peyrefitte, It was de Gaulle, op. cit. 4. Quoted in Marc Francioli, Jacques Soustelle, 2015.

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Soustelle and De Gaulle

Islam in France Until the end of his days, Jacques Soustelle wondered why General de Gaulle had given up on Algeria. He should have asked Couve de Murville. Or read Charles Maurras. This “great foreign policy”, which his Minister of Foreign Affairs spoke to him about, is in fact the fundamental reason why de Gaulle made the choices he made. It is foreign policy which determines domestic policy for him. Not the opposite. However, the General's “great foreign policy” is recorded in a few pages of a work by Charles Maurras, Kiel and Tangier, written in 1895, taken up and completed in 1910.

In 1972, during a famous conference in front of Sciences Po students, President Pompidou exhumed, admiringly, a sentence taken from Kiel and Tangier, in which, prophetically, Maurras announced: "The world will therefore have the chance to present itself for long… as a composite of two systems: several empires, with a number of small or medium nationalities in between. The world thus formed will not be the most peaceful. The weak will be too weak, the powerful too powerful, and the peace of all will be based on the terror that the colossi will reciprocally inspire. Company

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of mutual terror, alternating company of intimidation, organized cannibalism! »

At the time, of course, Maurras did not know about the atomic bomb, and Albert Einstein had barely been born. He still guessed the future, with these colossi who terrorize the world and France which is not one of them. What to do ? Maurras proposes an alternative solution that he can summarize with a single word, influence: “…A France could maneuver simply because it would find itself, by its size and its structure, very fortunately established equidistant from the empires giants and the dust of small nations jealous of their independence. The circumstances are favorable to the interposition of a State of average size, with a robust and firm constitution like ours... We will perhaps not have on the map the volume of the greatest powers: we will have the moral authority founded on a greater living force. »

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DE GAULLE MAKES MAURRAS WHO MAKES YOU GUARDIANS The entire Gaullian “great policy” is announced. Even the General's most spectacular moves, the most surprising, the most unexpected are already revealed there. Thus his speech in Phnom Penh in 1967 against the intervention American in Vietnam: “[We must] watch out, in others, for the inevitable excess of proud politics from which the Germans, the Russians, the English and the Americans cannot now escape…” Or even his great speeches in Mexico ( Marchemos la mano) and in Quebec (“Long live free Quebec!”): “And, if we are tempted to believe ourselves isolated, let us remember everything that still speaks French and Latin in the world, the immense Canada and this infinite career that Central and South America opens up to us! This is not the material that will refuse French audacity. » Maurras himself did not invent anything, he readily admits, but rediscovered the advice that Vergennes gave to King Louis XVI: “Grouping the secondary States around you, their interest will guarantee their alliance, and it [France] will be at the head of a defensive coalition strong enough to push back all the ambitious. » De Gaulle makes Maurras who makes Vergennes. With African heads of state, he applied the methods that Louis XIV used with the German kinglets. He is trying to regain a foothold in the Middle East within the framework of a “great Arab policy”. The “third world” then falls apart in the disorder and confusion of the “non-aligned”: it is not up to Nehru’s India or Nasser’s Egypt to take the lead.

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this league of beggars, but to the France of De Gaulle. The General revives France's ancient policy against the "universal monarchy", which he modernizes by adjusting it against the "politics of the blocs". If he is also sensitive to the pressures exerted on our country at the UN regarding Algeria, it is not out of respect for the "thing", but because the United States and the USSR take advantage of this to indict France to those who should be its friends, its allies or its clients.

French Algeria is the lock that prevents it from deploying its “major foreign policy”; he will blow it up with dynamite, regardless of the damage. The exile of the pieds-noirs and the massacre of the harkis will be the collateral damage that he will pretend not to see. When Alain Peyreffite informed him at the Council of Ministers that eight hundred thousand French people had found refuge in mainland France, an icy silence fell around the table, which de Gaulle broke in a stiff tone: “I wonder if you are not exaggerating not a little. »

Privately, he accuses the OAS, which “sabotaged the Evian agreements”; then loses his temper in front of a Peyrefitte moved by the dismay of the pieds-noirs and the vindictive and savage fury of the FLN against their Harki co-religionists: “Don't try to pity me. This page was as painful to me as it was to anyone. But we shot it. It was necessary for the salvation of the country. »

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“ HIS SENTIMENTALITY WAS ATROPHY » We often believe we have found the cause of the insensitivity of the

General in his resentment against the pieds-noirs, whom he had discovered as Pétainists in Algiers in 1943, and in his refusal to see unassimilable “Muslim Arabs” arrive in mainland France. This is true, but comes in a superfluous way. De Gaulle is in the lineage of statesmen like Richelieu: public morality does not have to conform to private morality. It is often even dangerous for it to do so. Their Christian faith is sincere, but it does not apply to the rules of political power relations.

From the 1950s, when de Gaulle was no longer in power and was less and less likely to return to power, Claude Guy made a judicious observation about his great man: “I note once again how detached he is: renunciation of all sentimentality about oneself or about others... I have come to the conclusion that, if what surrounds him does not touch him, it is because he hardly cares to think about what is around him. 'surrounded. It is only by accident that the living part of him suddenly comes into contact with an individual destiny... Everything around him that moves, breathes, is moved, suffers, instinctively overwhelms him with boredom and would gladly re eyes of the trivial. If there were no need to “test” his theses and sharpen his thoughts on the interlocutor, I believe he would prefer never to see anyone… How many times have I heard it from a voice greedy longing for the monk's cell.

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This law weighs on his destiny. His sentimentality has atrophied 1 .

»

Blackfoot and harkis today; tomorrow English, Czechs or Israelis: de Gaulle dismisses everything that hinders at any given moment the implementation of his “major foreign policy”. He doesn't care about trampled feelings and crushed passions. Even his most loyal supporters sometimes have sore muscles and bruises to the soul. When Malraux celebrates a little too loudly in the Council of Ministers the “victory that constitutes Algerian independence”, the Prime Minister, Michel Debré, corrects: “A great victory over ourselves. » When General de Gaulle announced his great reversal of alliances to the detriment of Israel, even though France's ally seemed in mortal danger on the eve of the Six Day War of June 1967, François Mauriac wrote in his notepad: “This is perhaps where I am struggling to defend myself from a certain unease: we feel too much that for de Gaulle, in this debate where it is the survival of Israel that is at stake , and the destiny of the Arabs, it reduces everything to a question of rank for France. But what ! This is his vocation. He came into the world, judging by the history of which he is the hero, for nothing other than for this restoration of a defeated nation to the place it occupied before its defeat, and in spite of the atomic empires which have since arisen. »

But at least he succeeded? Since the price to pay did not matter, were his choices successful? Has Gaullian France managed to once again rise to the rank of giants of the planet? Equipped with atomic weapons and

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its third world clientele, the dear old country, without its old assets, a vast territory and a large population, which had previously made its power, had it managed to compensate for the shortcomings, to establish itself as the third major, and thus to “regain the rank he had lost since Waterloo”?

To ask the question, is to answer it. We can of course, in the manner of the enamored Gaullists, accuse the French people of no longer living up to the vision that the great man had for France: "During these ten years, French policy will not have -it is not held in a disproportionate effort to make France resemble a certain image that a man carried within him and which no longer corresponds to the possibilities of ?» this old people at the end of their breath 2

We can also accuse his successors of pusillanimity and treason. However, none of them, even his old adversary Mitterrand, dared to openly deny his heritage, to the point that there was talk of a “Gaullo-Mitterrandian” foreign policy! Everyone, even the least skilled, tried like their glorious precursor to play on all fronts, European integration and the independence of the great nation, the Western alliance and friendship with the Third World.

But over the years, the "great foreign policy", to which de Gaulle had sacrificed Algeria, was gradually reduced to the maintenance of clientelist links, increasingly corrupted by businessism, the famous "Françafrique ", while the "Arab policy of France", to which he had

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sacrificed Israel, was limited to simple support for the Palestinian cause and the guarantee of oil supplies.

Even Quebec renounced the independence he had invited it to take with panache, to drown itself in a large multiculturalist Canadian whole, thus announcing the tragic destiny of its unworthy mother, the “great nation” of which de Gaulle had dreamed. return, and which also transformed over the decades into a “beautiful province” attracting tourists from all over the world, a sort of greater Quebec in a Europe under German hegemony and in an Americanized universe.

We can be sure that General de Gaulle would not have allowed himself to be confined or “provincialized” within this narrow geographical and symbolic perimeter. But had he left the choice to his successors? As soon as the General died, Soustelle did not hesitate to put his finger on the wound: “France exhausted itself in showering Third World countries with gifts, in the always disappointed hope of building up a clientele whose she would become the leader 3 .

»

When the General left, the hummingbird brain entered. When the death of his old enemy was announced on November 10, 1970, Soustelle was in residence – strength of symbols! – in London, where his forced exile had led him. Foccart's henchmen and goons had pursued him, stalked him, chased him for years, wherever he found refuge. He was treated like a pariah, a high-flying criminal, even though, contrary to persistent legend, he had never been condemned for his friendships with the OAS. Never convicted, he was therefore never pardoned. He returned to France after the General's death and was even inducted into the Academy

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French, where Jean Dutourd, a lifelong Gaullist, delivered a beautiful reconciling eulogy: “A national tragedy had brought them together, another national tragedy divided them. » Soustelle confided to friends that he regretted that death had deprived him of an explanation, or even a reconciliation, with his great enemy.

Time would give them the opportunity to meet again, History would wink at them ironically.

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QURANIC FIRST NAMES From the 1970s, the arrival of populations from the Maghreb and Africa once again posed the burning questions that de Gaulle believed to have settled forever. Soustelle lived long enough (he died in 1990) to see with pleasure his original political family reconnect with the concept he had forged to save French Algeria: integration. This term found a new lease of life: left-wing elites, in concert with North African families, refused to have the rigorous precepts of republican assimilation imposed on them. It was difficult to precisely define what integration was, except that it was not assimilation. These immigrants were tacitly authorized, unlike their Italian, Spanish, Russian and Polish predecessors, to give “Koranic” first names to their children, and to retain many of their customs, even when they contradicted French traditions. We celebrated the “mixture”, the “crossbreeding”; it was almost as if the mothballs did not bring out “fraternization” between the French and the Arabs. The “big cat” had his revenge on the “big Zohra”.

Soustelle died in time. He did not see his great idea of “integration” liquefy as populations from elsewhere crowded into the French suburbs, hunting through the ostentatious affirmation of their way of life, and sometimes through violence. delinquency, “native French”, as well as the descendants of European immigration, who no longer felt like they were in France. These neighborhoods lived more and more under the regime of a

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“de facto sharia” stated by imams, most of whom come from abroad, and imposed willingly or by force by the “big brothers”; mixed marriages were dwindling: young people went to look for their bride “in the countryside” with a complacent cousin.

Soon, Koranic first names were no longer enough to assert their pride in their identity: there were also Islamic outfits, hijab for women and djellaba for men, Koranic schools where the Arabic language was taught through recitations of verses from the Koran, the shops and supermarkets full of “halal” products, the cafes reserved for men, the streets forbidden to women in short skirts or “indecent” outfits. As the philosopher Rémi Brague, a specialist in religions, explains, “Islam, behind all its varieties, is a legal system which presents itself as of divine origin and where everything, consequently, is not negotiable”.

If General de Gaulle returned to his “dear old country”, to Saint-Denis or Saint-Étienne, Roubaix or Marseille, and to so many cities and suburbs of France, he could today as yesterday exclaiming in front of Alain Peyreffite: “Let us not tell stories!” Have you gone to see the Muslims? Did you look at them, with their turbans and their djellabas? You see clearly that they are not French! Those who advocate integration have the brains of hummingbirds even if they are very learned. Try to incorporate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a while, they will separate again. Arabs are Arabs, French are French. You think

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that the French body can absorb ten million Muslims, who tomorrow will be twenty million and the day after tomorrow forty

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The two fighters had each won a battle, but they had both lost the war. The integration of Soustelle was proving to be more and more the myth that de Gaulle had denounced. But the General, by selling off Algeria “to the criminals of the FLN”, as Soustelle rightly said, had first and foremost wanted to prevent his village from becoming “Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées”. » There were one hundred mosques in France in 1970, five hundred in 1985, two thousand three hundred in 2015!

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ONE HUNDRED MILLION INHABITANTS

De Gaulle had sacrificed the Sahara and its oil, renounced making the Mediterranean a “French lake”, abandoned the elements of traditional power – a vast territory and a France populated by a hundred million inhabitants – to avoid the demographic submersion of Islam. He had adopted modern conceptions of power: the atomic bomb and industrial development; he had released the prey for the shadow. Fifty years after his death, the old powers are emerging from the hell of their past decadence thanks to the weight of their numbers and the scale of their territories: Germany reunified in Europe is no longer the horse that de Gaulle prided himself on. 'be the jockey; China, India, Turkey, even Nigeria or South Africa or Brazil display the strength of their demographics at more than a hundred million inhabitants, and their metropolises at more than ten million!

De Gaulle had refused to support an eternal war in Algeria, in the Israeli manner. The man who had embodied the honor and greatness of France since June 18, 1940 had exchanged the ancestral and virile values of the French army for the prosaism of economic development and consumerist materialism. As punishment, a few years later, he received the hedonistic and spiritualist revolt of a pampered and pampered generation to whom he had spared the horrors of war, but who refused to "fall in love with a rate of growth". ". The privileged relationships he had maintained with his “African clients” in the name of his “great policy

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"foreign" favored the penetration of an African population, which was belatedly experiencing, thanks to the care of the former colonial power, an unprecedented demographic explosion. Likewise, the Evian agreements had planned to open the doors of France as a priority to immigrants from Algeria, to whom the General had nevertheless wanted to prohibit entry, by separating them from the motherland!

We no longer knew, between French and African leaders, who was the client and who was the boss; who was holding who. Oil and businessism, even corruption, made the links murky. Africans asked for help from the army French when they were in danger, but refused to take back their nationals who had entered our soil illegally, without French officials protesting.

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THE GRIEF BOX OPENS Since the beginning of the 21st century, France has been responsible for fighting the Islamic offensive in Africa. It thus regains its colonial role as protector of the black populations of southern Africa against descent from the Arab-Islamic North; a role that de Gaulle believed he had gotten rid of by leaving Algeria; but by abandoning its role as advanced watchdog of Christianity, it was its own territory that it opened to the Arab-Muslim invasion.

Jihadist attacks have bloodied the country like the precursors to a new Algerian war. The historian Pierre Vermeren showed that most of the jihadists who struck our soil were from the Rif, this Moroccan region which was the first, in 1925, to revolt against the colonizer; rebellion that only Marshal Pétain had succeeded in putting down. The History of France always repeats the same dishes. The “sorrow box” reopens. President François Hollande privately admitted to journalists that he was convinced “that all this would end in partition”. Oil and vinegar, the General had predicted. The hummingbird brains didn't want to hear anything. In "Daddy's Algeria", as we have seen, Muslims were unable to obtain French citizenship because they had refused to abandon their "personal status", that is to say their mode of life governed by religious laws. Integration in France had reversed priorities and turned into a fool's bargain: Muslims, having become French, had legally obtained the rights of every citizen; but no-one

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had not anticipated that many of them would return to their immemorial “personal status”.

At the end of the day, they won over Soustelle and de Gaulle. A counter-society gradually forges a counter-people within the framework of counter-colonization. Once again, the Republic finds itself facing Islam, and still does not know how to cut the Gordian knot. Once again, the nation reconnects with its eternal demons of division, of hatred between French people, of civil war. In the name of integration and French Algeria, Soustelle would have kept us in a permanent, cruel and degrading war. With the independence of Algeria, de Gaulle gave us a half-century respite, which we made the great mistake of believing would last forever. Fifty years of peace is a lot for a country always at war with its neighbors or with itself; but this is nothing on the scale of History. France seems condemned to constantly relive the same history, to constantly relive the same deleterious passions. Regarding the period of the Occupation, Emmanuel Berl wrote: “France, I am afraid, is made in such a way that the French do not know how to love it without hating a part, often even the majority of their fellow citizens; when they have not insulted, incarcerated, disqualified, proscribed, deported, massacred enough to satisfy

the demands of their zeal, they accuse themselves of moderationism, of lukewarmness. A good Frenchman only considers himself as such if he has caused death in hard times, in calm times shame, ruin, the loss of a sufficient number of his compatriots to calm his fear of not giving to his homeland all the love he owes it. If he did not hand himself over to the inquisition, to the police, to the

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executioners, gravediggers, other French people, his lack of fervor disgusts him with himself..."

When passions are finally calmed, when the history of the Franco-French wars has been closed with great difficulty, France invents its own misfortune. In the name of her humanist dream, her dream of universal love inherited from Rome and Christianity which pushes her to introduce politics into the order of feeling, she herself forges, through her crazy ingenuity and her crazy impetuosity and her crazy arrogance, the milestones of what will be his next civil war.

Implacable and tragic French destiny.

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1. Claude Guy, Listening to de Gaulle, op.cit. 2. François Mauriac, Notepad, December 4, 1968. 3. Marc Francioli, Jacques Soustelle, op. cit. 4. Alain Peyrefitte, It was de Gaulle, op. cit.

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Thanks I thank Lise Boëll, my editor, for her ideas and wise advice, Jacques and Barbara, for their reading which is both demanding and caring. I also thank Francis Esménard and Richard Ducousset for their constant and unwavering support.

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FROM THE SAME AUTHOR TESTS Balladur, motionless with long steps, Grasset, 1995. The Black Book of the Right, Grasset and Fasquelle, 1998. The Coup d’Etat of the judges, Grasset and Fasquelle, 1998. A certain idea of France, Collective, France-Empire, 1998. Les Rats de garde, in collaboration with Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, Stock, 2000. The Man Who Didn't Love Himself, Balland, 2002. The First Sex, Denoël, 2006. French melancholy, Fayard/Denoël, 2010. Z like Zemmour, Le Cherche Midi, 2011. The Bonfire of the Conceited, Albin Michel, 2012. The Bonfire of the Conceited 2, Albin Michel, 2013. French Suicide, Albin Michel, 2014. A Quinquennium for nothing, Albin Michel, 2016.

ROMANS The Red Dandy, Plon, 1999. The Other, Denoël, 2004. Little brother, Denoël, 2008.

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Contents

Title Copyright Introduction First part - THE TIME OF FOUNDATIONS Clovis - Tare nationale Roland - Sincere condolences Urban II - Return to jihad Brother Guérin - France on the Move! Saint Louis - The Jewish King

Nogaret - The slap of the century Le Grand Ferré - To the Unknown Soldier Charles VI - Don't touch my king Bishop Cauchon - Together we will be stronger Charles VII - The Canon State Notre-Dame de Paris - Under the cobblestones… grandeur Francis I - Our Kennedy Catherine de Medici - We are all Catherines Part Two – TIME FOR GREATNESS Richelieu - Touched, flowed Bossuet - A god, a master Racine - Soft power Saint-Simon - The sublime spy The Pompadour - And this century created the woman

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Voltaire - The flattery of grandeur Rousseau - Nose in the stream Maupeou - The wall of idiots The Palais-Royal - The center of fantasies Mirabeau - And at the same time… Robespierre - The Stoned Man Charette - Everything must disappear! Sold out! Captain Coignet - Elevator to the scaffold Napoleon Bonaparte - The man to be killed Part Three - TIME FOR VENGEANCE Talleyrand - The Devil's Hand Madame de Staël - She talks more, she guns! Monte Cristo - The Serpent's Revenge Victor Hugo - Presumed innocent Rothschild - “Are you Jewish, Jacob? » Chambord - Primary colors Renan - Renan's madeleine Eiffel - The Infernal Tower Méline - Nothing to declare

The Great Illusion - War and Peace Clemenceau - Crime and Punishment Simone de Beauvoir - Madame Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre - Monsieur Simone de Beauvoir Pétain - The man to hate De Gaulle - The man to love De Gaulle and Soustelle - France in the land of Islam Soustelle and De Gaulle - Islam in France Thanks