Positivism according to President Macron

2023-04-22 07:15:00

At the beginning of the week, the sentence pronounced by Pierre Rosanvallon during a prime time television interview was transformed in a few hours into a political fact. For the intellectual, who is it worth recalling, was one of the co-founders of the Saint-Simon foundation (and its secretary general), France is currently going through the “most serious” democratic crisis in its history “since the end of the Algerian conflict.

According to him, Emmanuel Macron “does not see the democratic crisis, for him there is none”. And this close to the CFDT to deplore that the president has lost “the spirit of the laws” and of the Fifth Republic, even of democracy. The load is heavy, the tone is serious. And on the television set more accustomed to the jokes of the respective promos of artists and journalists, the animators are surprised, seeming overwhelmed by the situation.

In fact, the video extract will be shared millions of times on social networks. Immediately, the president’s entourage will try to minimize the scope of the event. Without success. Some will go so far as to explain that these words first arise because of the enmity of Laurent Berger, boss of the CFDT, for Emmanuel Macron.

Above all, to return to personal territory, to present this intervention as being a settling of scores. It is that in 2015, the trade unionist leader had opposed at the Elysée the attempt of Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy, to recover in addition the Labor portfolio, while his holder of the t the time, François Rebsamen had to resign due to illness. Macron will fail and will have to wait for his presidential victory in 2017 to transform the labor market and the unemployment insurance system according to his views.

Political fact and journalistic fact. Throughout the week, at each of his trips, his press conferences, his interventions, the journalists present will ask Emmanuel Macron what he thinks of the words of Pierre Rosanvallon. Traveling to a factory in Alsace, the president will salute the “intellectual” but will immediately regret that the latter can become “militant”, once again using this word as a tool of disqualification, almost of excommunication. As if there was always only one possible line, only one possible view.

It was not, however, the first time that Rosanvallon had criticized the president. From 2018, he had regretted his “conservatism” and noted at the microphone of France Inter: “Neither social nor liberal, Macron has aspects of authoritarianism”. Strong words. Macron actually has a much less Rocardian relationship to the state than some might have originally thought. Moreover, as early as 2015, Emmanuel Macron explained to me that he considered that the second left, from which Pierre Rosanvallon came, had a “complex” relationship with the state.

It is in any case a symbol: Monday, the intervention of the intellectual almost eclipsed the presidential speech which had taken place a few minutes earlier. During the latter, Emmanuel Macron announced his new priorities after the promulgation of his pension law, in the form of the Coué method. The president ended up identifying three areas of work for the next 100 days…

These new priorities were then summarized by Olivier Véran, the government spokesperson, in an expeditious formula: “Work, Order, Progress”. Strange triptych which will be the subject of many criticisms on social networks. “Order and Progress” or in Portuguese “Ordem e progresso”, motto that appears on the flag of Brazil, inspired by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte who proclaimed in the 19th century: “Love as a principle, order as a basis , the goal of progress”. The positivist religion, the dominant philosophy under the Third Republic, proclaimed in particular: “We sociocrats are no more democrats than aristocrats”. However, given the chaotic nature of the last presidential trips on the roads of France, this call to order (positivist) seems for the moment very illusory.

Marc Endeweld