Marc Bloch will enter the Pantheon. The resistant historian, tortured and shot by the Gestapo, has his place in the household of great men. For “his scathing lucidity and his physical courage”, justified Emmanuel Macron. But also for his penetrating work, The strange defeat . Symbolically, as a France on the verge of bankruptcy approaches the tumult of censorship, it is also this acid analysis of the mediocrity of the French elites before the debacle which takes hold in the Republican Temple. Abysmal resonance…
Half a century of deficits, a debt out of control, a national representation incapable of sacrifices, a financial disorder the beginnings of a political crisis and military impotence when the war bleeds Europe… It is difficult not to see in this new disaster an “incapacity of command” described eighty years earlier by Marc Bloch. Even “intellectual and administrative bankruptcy”. Same “party machinery” with “its musty scent of small coffee”. Same executive locked behind “a wall of ignorance and errors”. Even intelligentsia from the great schools prisoner of “routine, bureaucracy and collective arrogance”. Same unions focused on the “little money” and welfare state renters on the “profits of the present”. Same defeatism and renunciations…
The President is aware of this autopsy of the nation, he who has made the hero's work “a bedside book”. No doubt underestimating its cruel echo, he believes, through a single ceremony, to capture its spirit – “to do great things against the strange defeat”. In a France damaged by dissolution, it risks on the contrary underlining its failure to awaken a French will “blunted by conservatism, asleep by conformism, softened by its elites”. Enter here, parable of French subsidence!
France
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