Something has not been said about the milestone of “100 days” designated by Emmanuel Macron. Oh, of course, there was something ironically reminiscent of the Emperor’s Hundred Days, that triumphal march towards the disaster of Waterloo. Others to repeat that the “hundred days” are these weeks of grace and euphoria during which a newly elected president can act almost as he pleases. But we haven’t heard much thought about the fact that a hundred days is about fourteen weeks, or even two thousand four hundred hours. In short: it is a raw duration. Not a symbol or a historical reference, but a measure of the time required to change the situation. A duration to be compared to the two hundred and sixty weeks that lasts a five-year term, and which already seem so short to engage the nation in a path of the future. But are we still capable of understanding what political time is? In truth, we swing. Do we have to act very quickly, very forcefully, to upset the established order? Or should we rely on time management taking into account the inertia of our country-liners whose old mechanics take a long time to turn around? What is more effective: the short time of political confrontation or the long time of pedagogy and sometimes imperceptible changes?
In recent years, our political leaders seem to say that the country is so becalmed in its sclerosis that it is better to act quickly, strike hard, pass the bitter potion without hesitation, and that it will be better afterwards. Hence our French polarization on “reform”. Because in France, the reform is not simply the change, the amendment, the adaptation. The reform is tinged with something resolute and bravado, muscular and also uncertain. Reform is to political art what coming out of a trench is to military art: whoever loves me follows me, the survivors will be counted at the end of the assault. It is the contrary, always in the military art, of this favor which certain of our kings had for sieges. We loved these very long periods when, having surrounded a city, we waited for weeks for it to fall, and when the daily skirmishes were only the frieze of a patient and obstinate use of time. Politics in France is conceived as a series of heroic deeds, the memory of which we then preserve as so many pitiful defeats (retirements 1995, CPE), brilliant victories (splitting of primary classes, flat tax). It’s the Pont d’Arcole every day.
Across generations
Any political leader sees himself as a kind of conqueror who must step by step expand his territory in the face of the adversity that opposes him the acquired folds and the conservatisms. Political time is fragmented into so many battles, fights, scuffles from which everyone emerges more or less bloodless; but always one camp will have triumphed over the other. Long time is no longer this assured trajectory towards the future, but an accumulation of advances and setbacks, stages and bifurcations. The French are used to this and know that, depending on the battles offered to them, it is important to be in the camp of the pros or the camp of the cons. Consensus, acceptance, the rational measurement of ends is no longer part of political grammar. They also integrated that these warlike episodes are generally quite brief, and that the best that can happen is that no one emerges frankly victorious. So our horizons are shrinking. Our hopes are narrowed. Our resignation grows. One hundred days is the duration that we can still apprehend, because it is more or less the temporal norm of our lives (who hasn’t already started to organize their summer vacation?). But a hundred months? Or even a hundred years? Anyone in politics who would dare to project themselves into such a temporality would be greeted with sneers.
Strangely, however, this is the time horizon that a number of countries have set themselves, particularly in Asia. They think on a generational scale. They stake less their immediate comfort than their future power. They are convinced that long time is their ally, that their time will come, and that it will be brilliant for their children’s children. Chapter after chapter, many countries in this world write, sometimes not without difficulty, their national novel. Let’s fear that ours will become a banal soap opera.