Sophie Sachnine’s book Thank you Elisabeth Badinter made me think of a short story by Borges – or did I dream this short story like of Borges? There is a global club whose members never meet. They don’t even know that they are part of it, until the day when, on a train, in a bar, in a dinner, through a chance conversation, they discover that they are linked by belonging to the same community. , that of the Elisabethbadinterrians.
The vast majority of club members know nothing about Elisabeth Badinter, apart from her books and her rare and precious public statements. They also have his face, his eyes and his voice in mind. When two members of the club discover each other, they may be of different ages, genders, origins, and even opinions, a complicity and brotherhood are immediately established between them: on very deep things – like the human freedom and its price – they know they agree. It emerges from Sophie Sachnine’s book that for this strange brotherhood which ignores itself, the more than discreet existence of Elisabeth Badinter – her power flees power, her authority is exercised over no one other than herself – is a motivation for their fight and their courage. Although she never asks anything from anyone, the members of this secret society cannot imagine disappointing Elisabeth Badinter.
Clarity and consistency
Sophie Sachnine has worked a lot. She read a lot, researched a lot. Even I, who am a very old member of the club, I was able to measure all the premonitions, the constancy, the clarity, the coherence of the work of our president as an eighteenth-century historian and timeless philosopher. Thank you Elisabeth Badinter is not a book in keeping with the times, which is about praise, then abandonment and lynching. It is a book of gratitude and admiration, very supported, very argued and very documented.
I would have a criticism. Sophie Sachnine’s readers will become members of the club. And that bothers me a little. Each of us would like to be rare. It’s like a romantic relationship. We don’t want to be a crowd. We are afraid that Elisabeth Badinter will fall into the wrong hands.
Thank you Elisabeth Badinter, by Sophie Sachnine. The Observatory, 288 p., €22.