by JEAN-EMMANUEL DUCOIN
La faute à Rousseau! [1] – so goes the refrain of the famous song of Hugo’s famous heroic street urchin Gavroche in Les Misérables, the first part of which runs like this: “Je suis tombé par terre,/ c’est la faute à Voltaire/ le nez dans le ruisseau,/ c’est la faute à Rousseau” [2]
“Free peoples, remember this maxim: freedom can be conquered, but it can never be retrieved. » These times have much to learn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, more than they ever have! As though from the depths of his sepulchre in the Panthéon, swept by the current tempest, as France is beginning to celebrate the tri-centenary of his birth, he was reminding us of our obligations as heirs of the Enlightenment. At what stage is a symbol socially efficient, operative, energizing? Pierre Laurent, the French Communist Party’s secretary, yesterday brought the clearest, most startling, answer to this haunting question. Speaking first in the Senate, then on the square of the Panthéon, renamed square of the “great persons”, he anchored his very topical homage to the author of The Social Contract in the Left’s collective imagination and in the paradigmatic heritage of the story of “the France that suffers”. And in doing so he hit the mark. Is a democracy still alive, is it still modern, when it is no longer in the service of the people?
Has Nicolas Sarkozy read but one page of Rousseau’s Confessions or of his Reveries of a Solitary Walker? We know that for him (and for his scribe, Guaino) any opportunistic eulogy is worth all the symbols. For five years he has himself “done his shopping” of historic symbols from a long list of vending machines, exploiting these symbols for contrary purposes, distorting to the point of absurdity all the representative poles of collective consciousness, and in the process de-contextualizing all figures, signs and meanings. And more is to follow. Even though he has lost all his money, the CEO of the France Inc. has once more adopted the worst of symbols by requisitioning five TV channels on Sunday night in order to announce “the strong and structural measures” he has decided to impose on all of us following the so-called “social” summit. This hold-up of the media doubles a social hold-up. But what about the people in this affair?
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