EDITORIAL – It is not always enough to wait for a problem to be solved. Letting people believe that things will eventually get better encourages a cynical conservatism that risks leading to disaster. That is why we need a government to reform what needs to be reformed.
“There is no problem that the absence of a solution does not eventually solve.” The often-quoted phrase is attributed to Henri Queuille (1884-1970), who was a minister or president of the Council several times under the Third Reich.e and IVe Republics. Nothing guarantees or excludes that he is actually the author (those who attribute it to him never indicate a precise reference to any book or speech whatsoever), and in the end, it doesn’t matter. It is not the respectable Henri Queuille who interests me, but what this joke, if it is one, suggests.
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It is too pleasant to be absolutely false. What it suggests is that sometimes it is enough to wait (to “give time to time”, as François Mitterrand said) for a given problem, which one believed to be urgent, to be resolved or eliminated. Not by any reform whatsoever but by the natural or spontaneous evolution of things.
Jacques Chirac, disciple of Queuille
For example, it was a serious problem in the 19th century.e century, that the accumulation of horse manure in our streets: people complained about the smell, doctors worried about this “poisoning of the atmosphere”, experts calculated its predictable worsening, everyone called on the government to act… We know what came of it: not a reform but an invention (that of the automobile), and the virtual disappearance of horses in the city.
Conversely, how many reforms or revolutions could one cite that have actually aggravated the problems they claimed to solve? Montaigne, who was wary of “novelties” (those of Luther were at the origin of the Wars of Religion), professed that “abstinence from doing” – what Confucius and Lao-tzu called “non-action” (Wow) – “is often as good as doing it”, and less dangerous. He is therefore pleased that, when he was mayor of Bordeaux, he only had to “conserve and last” (TestsIII, 10). And it is not excluded that Jacques […]
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