Iten years ago, Régis Debray published The Calculation Error. A response to the Prime Minister at the time, Manuel Valls, who declared at the Medef summer universities: “I like the company. » The writer was more generally indignant at the State's submission to the policy of figures in all matters, including cultural and heritage matters.
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He wasn't wrong. The controversy relating to the removal of November 11 as a public holiday is part of this decadence of public power. And Michel Barnier has already made history by refusing to subscribe to this antics.
Why bother with flags?
Remove a holiday that no one cares about to make money. This is why November 11 should be, according to some, “worked”. Let us take this argument seriously in the time of a text to reveal its absurdity. It is not only an attack against the symbolic order of the Republic, it is an attack against the symbolic order tout court. Or, to put it better, against the usefulness of symbols.
Doing without a public holiday because it brings in money amounts to asserting the superiority of an Excel table over the figurative universe. A reasoning not devoid of embellishment, but, well, let's admit it. If the Republic only needs money, why bother with flags, the Republican Guard, processions, company cars, red carpets, July 14, in short with the heavy and, moreover, costly protocol of the state?
If the fluff of public power is useless, we might as well eliminate it immediately. We would be the first country in the world to consider that it is self-sufficient to continue. Coming from France, which has never been sober in this matter, this would not lack flavor. If Louis XIV heard that…
“At least don’t do it again.”
Even more serious, this idea is ignorance. The economic power and influence of France are not coupled. This is a lesson from history: fame and growth rates are different subjects.
For example, the state was never as reformed as under the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte (1799-1804), at a time when France was not notoriously prosperous. It even emerged from its last payment default in 1798. Assuming that it concerns a country which lives by brilliance, panache and its reputation, the economic argument does not hold up.
What about the point of a public holiday, and the moral aspect attached to it? Should we, as the Prime Minister suggests, respect the memory of the fighters who died for France? Asking this question is already insolence.
But let's admit, once again, that we do without it. The Republic would be ungrateful. After having sent millions of French people to be killed in its name, it would today take away from them the only thing they gained there, their last payment, not glory, but the testimony of a massacre whose only usefulness is that it no longer reproduces.
If the First World War was nicknamed the “Der des Der”, it was because it had not left good memories and the first wish of a combatant, even if he was dead, was not to see his children suffer the same thing. Dead, therefore, without having the right to say: “At least, don’t do it again.” »
As for the message sent to the younger generations, who, one day or another, might have to fight for this abstract thing called France, it is deleterious to say the least. They are guaranteed in advance ingratitude and oblivion. That doesn't make you want to be patriotic.
Commemoration supplants trauma
Finally, it's bad manners for the families of the furry ones. As Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker showed in 14-18, rediscover the warthe State deprived families of the mourning of their deceased. Memorials to the dead, public ceremonies, national tributes were useful to the homeland, but they prevented widows, children, parents from taking ownership of the death of the loved ones they had lost.
After having devoured its children, the State also demanded to digest them. “In the name of the “duty to remember”” there has arisen a “frequent forgetting of the “duty of History””. Commemoration supplants trauma. Individual tragedies were ordered to disappear behind national interest.
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
Incapable of assuming its sovereign functions, anachronistic in its methods and its functioning, the State is a daily handicap, not to say a plague. France is in the process of feudalization and the fragmentation of its forces is worsening on a daily basis.
After decades of deleterious administration, the Republic cannot destroy the last of its redoubts, its history and its memory. Without that, nothing will remain, and the French will leave, without even looking back, without even remembering that the floating shadow under which they had lived had once been a nation.
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