Throw a stone into the pond and listen to the sound of the “splash”. Emmanuel Macron likes provocation, words that ring and resonate, which leave neither his interlocutors nor the French indifferent. Thus his interview at Parisian at the beginning of the year 2022 in which he pranks: “I really want to piss off the non-vaccinated.” This time, it is in the closed session of the Council of Ministers that he ventures, as revealed The Parisian again, to spur: “No violence is legitimate, whether verbal or against people. We must work in depth to counter this process of decivilization.” Repeated desire to “get out of the gray suit”, as a former adviser put it, desire to inject, thanks to a strong term, a little emotion into a macronism regularly accused of lacking so much.
It would be wrong, however, to compare the two projections too much. “Decivilization” is not a swear word, it’s quite the opposite, a concept which – it has already been written and repeated – refers to the thought of the sociologist Norbert Elias. At the Elysée, since Wednesday May 24, we insist on this point in order to try to destroy the story according to which the Head of State would have liked to refer to the theoretician of the “great replacement” Renaud Camus, author of a titled book decivilization.
“Decivilization” is not, either, an expression which escapes from the presidential mouth and leaves his advisers horrified. In private, during the previous five-year term, he often shared his concern at “the almost anthropological rupture and the return of violence” largely linked, according to him, to screens and social networks. The feeling of a degradation of our behavior, our morals, at Emmanuel Macron, seems deep. Already, in December 2020, in L’Express, he warned of the return of violence (“sometimes incredible street violence”) and deplored “the crushing of hierarchies” induced by social networks and “the society of permanent commentary “.
“Melenchonization of the debates”
Today, his observation has not changed, why would the president change it? The latest events cited by his entourage, – the resignation of the mayor of Saint-Brévins, the police killed in a road accident, the stabbed nurse in the hospital grounds and even the attack on the nephew of Brigitte Macron – illustrate in his eyes this “wildness”, as Gérald Darmanin would have formulated it without receiving presidential support at the time, from French society.
And Emmanuel Macron considers that the time has come “to mark the occasion”, announces one of his strategists. “It is important to put a name to a societal context, we confirm at the Elysée. ” Ouch, “what about the extreme right?”, will soon retort his critics. Because this painful and anxiety-provoking climate often seems fueled by the extremes on both sides of the chessboard.
But isn’t the evil even deeper than a “simple” story of opposing political forces? Education, civics, morals, humanist values, the so obsolete elementary rules of politeness… Many are those who every day, in their daily lives, note their erosion. It’s not about “street violence” or spectacular demonstrations of fury, it’s not even about incivility but often tiny facts that slowly outline our growing inability to live together. This, too, is something to worry about. This, too, a president should speak about.