In a few days, France has experienced two events of such emotional intensity that it is difficult to resist comparing them. On April 15, 2019, the French and the whole world saw with dismay the spire and framework of Notre-Dame collapse and the fire moved closer to the facade at the risk of bringing down the bells and, by contagion, the towers. A centuries-old monument, integral to the Parisian landscape, burned to ashes.
Its rescue and spectacular reopening result from the conjunction of a bundle of energies: the courage of firefighters, the know-how of artistic professions, the generosity of civil society, the agility of civil servants, freed by a law dedicated to the administrative complexities of common law, and the presidential impulse. As for the Church of France, deeply discredited by abuses and eaten away by the fall in vocations and the decline of the faith, it delivered a grandiose liturgy.
It is with the same amazement that the French saw, this Wednesday, December 4, the faltering of the institutions designed by General de Gaulle, and which seemed to us, like Notre-Dame, solid and likely to protect us sustainably from impotence. and inconsistencies in the party system. However, within a few hours, the inconceivable happened. A coalition of opposites brought down the government and put France face to face with a situation that our Constitution, although so brilliantly thought out, had not even envisaged: the absence of a budget. If several constitutional mechanisms are likely to ward off the risk of shutdown, the appointment of a new government, capable of acting for at least a few weeks, is much more uncertain as that of Michel Barnier has already gone to the limits of political balancing. In forty years, France has lost its industry, its international prestige, control of its borders and that of its finances. It has tumbled down the hierarchy of the wealth of nations. Its school and hospitals are in disrepair. Its prisons are more criminogenic than the Bronx in the 1980s. And now it can no longer even count on its institutions. It’s astonishing.
The most optimistic might think that, like Notre-Dame, the aggregation of the deep springs of French society to the will of those who do not give up, will end up allowing the resurrection of our national political life. Nothing is less certain. Firstly because, behind the miracle of Notre-Dame, there are two powerful driving forces which, by contrast, are sorely lacking in political action today: faith and beauty. Then because, on the wave of the French political disaster, a substitute institution is riding: the European Union and the President of its Commission who dreams of herself, more and more openly, as President of the United States of Europe.
A real government
Too preoccupied with our national setbacks, we paid little attention to the composition of the new European Commission. It is a real government ostensibly attributing to itself powers that the treaties do not confer on it, such as housing or defense. Pushed by the Germans and taking advantage of France’s weakness, the President of the Commission has just signed the Mercosur trade treaty with a communication from the Head of State. Aware that the Green Deal has turned into normative delirium, Ursula von der Leyen now wants to make Europe’s defense her dress of light to enter History. Under the guise of strengthening the defense of Europe, it intends to give pledges to the United States of America by sacrificing the French military industry and our strategic independence on the altar of purchases of American equipment.
It must be said that Emmanuel Macron greatly encouraged it on this path by proposing that the Union acquire, in defiance of the text of the treaties, the military equipment that France, ruined, can no longer afford and can no longer demand. of others, and by offering to share atomic weapons. Nothing will remain of the work of General de Gaulle, not even our nuclear sovereignty. The fire will have reached the bells and the towers will fall.
* Emmanuelle Mignon is a lawyer and vice-president of the Republicans (LR)
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