While our society seemed immutable to us, the violence we have experienced reminded us with particular insolence of its fragility. Scorned. Burnt. Looted. The awakening was terrible for the whole of France, which got up each morning, its face a little more bloodied than the day before. This is how any moral, civilizational or cultural landmark disappeared each evening a little more, under the smoke of Molotov cocktails thrown to burn down our town halls, of mortars used to kill our police forces. There will undoubtedly be a before and an after June 27, 2023. There will be a France before this violence and one that will necessarily succeed it; the hearts and minds of the French have thus been touched by the incredible and violent questioning of this group that we call the Republic.
If the intensity of this violence has exceeded understanding, it is the youth of their author who has certainly chilled our blood. How can we imagine this young person, like the one arrested at the age of 10 in the Loire, integrating into our society and sharing its codes? How can one conceive that a teenager can hate us so much, he who has received so much from us, from his birth, to the incredible sweetness of life in our country, to the free school he was able to benefit from, and yesterday burnt down? Behind these questions hides the pursuit of a deadly ideal that we have followed for too long: that of believing that a child can fully become a French citizen, love his family and his country, without ever having known the existence of a framework During his life.
Beware of imperfect and incomplete solutions
If a part of the political class is certainly at the origin of this ideological defeat, those responsible are also the parents who have shamefully chosen to abandon their primary function; that of giving their children a necessary and healthy framework. From this resignation arose chaos, plunging our country into manifest decadence. “Order, and order alone, ultimately creates freedom”, recalled Charles Péguy. The news is certainly proving him right. If this quest for freedom is necessary, it must therefore be conditioned by respect for order and therefore for a framework. We cannot therefore make freedom our national motto at the same time, without bearing in mind that order is a necessary condition for its enjoyment.
To these parents, the State must remind them of their responsibility and, in this case, of their failure. From the suspension of social assistance to the imposition of heavy fines, including the threat of prison, the State must do everything possible to remind these parents that their children cannot be the burden of society as a whole. However, a principle of reality will quickly catch up with us: what to do with the child? It is indeed this social reality which imposes itself on us and which, by nature, will continue to be so for many decades. The challenge of saving our country from this announced chaos is too great to be limited to imperfect solutions, because they are perfectly incomplete.
Second chance
This is why faced with these new phenomena, we must think of new sanctions, which will affect both parents and children. It is appropriate here to remember the logic of the boarding schools of excellence set up under the five-year term of Nicolas Sarkozy. The logic was simple: welcome deserving students, eager to succeed and get out of a difficult environment.
The problem is that today there is a mechanism allowing these well-meaning young people to get out of the neighborhoods pulling them down, but there is nothing on the other hand to extract them in a forced way from this same environment. However, it seems obvious that too many young people are under the influence of “big brothers” and whose trajectory towards prison is already traced. It is therefore here that innovation in judicial matters would come into play, with the creation of the Republic’s boarding school, whose supervision would be the keystone.
Placement in these boarding schools of the Republic would be a condemnation when the act committed by the child is of a particular gravity, and that obviously, his parents seem totally absent. This logic would thus bring many advantages: that of dismissing the excuse of minority; to give back a necessary framework to these children; to give them a second chance.
Models other than the “big brothers”
Through these boarding schools of the Republic, these young people will learn that society can, and must, say no to them. These boarding schools will also allow them to benefit from models other than the “big brothers”, through daily proximity to the authorities. At the same time, they will be able to come to terms with the history and greatness of their country. These boarding schools, finally, will necessarily and symbolically have to be partly financed by their resigning parents and whose resignation imposes a financial burden from which they cannot detach themselves.
While our country is going through a period of uncertainty more than ever, these boarding schools of the Republic can constitute this outstretched hand, the last, and thus an attempt to remake society. Because to think that the recipes already implemented in the past, like the billions poured out by the suburban plans, will produce different effects this time is pure utopia.