The President of the Republic in Pip the mag, a secretary of state Playboy, a deputy in a student assembly… It seems that the trend is towards blurring, the explosion of borders (public/private, serious/futile, inside/outside). In the 18th century, the libertine century was defined as “the great disorder”, the title of the formidable essay by Patrick Wald Lasowski: “The values of the Grand Siècle are ridiculed. The liquidation is general. There is no more glory. There is no honest man. We deceive ourselves about the integrity of the self. We must live in tumult and excess.” But we are not at the dawn of the Enlightenment, the stakes seem grotesquely “small” in comparison, and the impression is not at the birth of a modern, consoling, visionary thought. What is this little disorder the name of?
Failing to make himself understood and convince adults, Emmanuel Macron chose to talk to children about Pip the mag. Whatever the tenor of the interview, the symbol is sufficient. In the midst of a political crisis, the moment, the media, the tone, nothing is right. While the president is criticized for his arrogance, he drives the point home by adopting paternalistic language – interlocutor obliges. Since François Hollande, familiarity has settled at the Élysée, the respect due to the function has evaporated in an illusory proximity to the “people” – a term which since it flourished on all political lips sounds like a empty shell, like living together as soon as it has become a political program tells us above all about its disappearance. A President of the Republic does not transgress, nor does he bring anything to the hoped-for democratic renewal, nor does he convince abstainers to reclaim politics by talking to young bloggers at the Elysée or by talking about democracy to children. old enough not to think about it. It stupidly damages the function it occupies a little more.
Marlene Schiappa in the magazine Playboy was the occasion of an unbearable indignation “mother morality”. From the Minister for Equality between Women and Men to the monastic feminists, we strangled ourselves – by specifying that this has nothing to do with morality as of course – of the presence of a Secretary of State, who is moreover a feminist, in the columns of a newspaper where young women have forgotten to dress in the morning, according to the established formula. If I doubt that the presence of Marlène Schiappa is welcome in Playboy – which, in its American version, received a good number of (serious) statesmen -, it is not because of the nudity of the young women who pose there, but more because of the opportunity of the moment.
The function is broken to the point that it no longer prints
It is the discrepancy between social movements – and although the speeches to strangle with cries from the heart of the type “France has never been so unequal” or even “we are dying in France of uncontrolled capitalism” are of the order of disinformation – and a secretary of state who poses in a magazine connoted sex and power which is in question. Marlène Schiappa does not have to be ashamed to cause feminism – even though her assertions are exaggerated, biased and ultimately serve the cause – in Playboy, she is wrong to do so today and even though a journalistic investigation calls into question the distribution of subsidies from her former ministry. Time and timing should be the spur to any initiative of public figures.
The new politicians generally tend to confuse private life and public life, a confusion maintained by their compulsive need to exist on social networks, where everything is good to attract “likes”. When Louis Boyard still takes himself for a student by skimming the general assemblies of the universities and pushing them to strike while organizing a contest for the best blockage on social networks with the promise of a visit from the National Assembly (also accessible to all), he proves that he has not changed from an agitator from TV-Hanouna to a deputy. The function is damaged to the point that it no longer prints, Boyard wanders from lecture halls to the Assembly, passing through television sets, without varying, without feeling the breath of responsibility.
State service engages. This is not a guarantee of sincerity, but of lightness. This does not make people, but contempt for the people he is supposed to represent. The president, the secretary of state and the deputy are in error: transgression is an art, not a recreation.