A country can be judged by its political class. For a very long time, France boasted a high-level political class, and parliamentary debates were generally of a high standard. When this was not the case, it heralded democratic disasters.
Today, if you follow the debates on television and on social networks, you hear a lot of shouting, insults and summary arguments; you see elected representatives coming to the session ostensibly badly dressed, taking photos, broadcasting the debates live on their phones, shouting their comments.
And yet, despite the image portrayed by these people, France is not a vulgar, violent, anti-Semitic or Islamophobic country; nor is it populated by people shouting their hatred of France as it is, and of the French as they are; it’s not made up of ignoramuses, vociferous thugs, professional parasites, drug addicts, stalkers, embezzlers of public funds, swindlers, S-files, convicts and delinquents of all kinds, more numerous than ever in national representation.
And the less competent they are to fulfill the mission for which they were elected, the more they shout, insult and paralyze debate.
The French don’t recognize themselves in these elected representatives. They know that those who speak loudest usually have only their screams and insults to fall back on. They work, they create, they innovate. They love truth, effort, hard work, the French language, the sciences, rigorous trades, literature and the arts; they like to build projects with others who are not like them; they know that their country, which they adore, would not be so great without all those who were not born here and have chosen to live here; they want to join forces in the face of the formidable challenges of the future; they also want their elected representatives to find compromise solutions, as they, the citizens, do every day in their private and professional lives.
This gap between parliamentary debates and the reality of the country creates a deep-seated malaise. And when it has happened, it has always ended badly.
The causes of this discrepancy are numerous and cumulative: more and more, parties are choosing as candidates people whose only claim to fame is their devotion to their leaders, and who are capable of causing a scandal in parliament and in the media. Competence, experience and hard work no longer count. And this will be cumulative: the more the parliamentary function is discredited, the fewer honest people, from all professions and social backgrounds, will want to stand for election. And democracy will sink.
This distinction between serious elected representatives and thugs is not the same as the difference between social classes: we have known, and still know, many political thugs from well-to-do backgrounds. Even very well-to-do. In fact, it’s primarily from these backgrounds that political hooligans are recruited.
While there are, as in the past, many teachers in Parliament, on both the left and the right, both in the public and private sectors, lawyers and doctors, too few, until now, were or are workers, farmers, employees, or even children of these working classes. Those who do are generally the most serious, the most attentive, the most respectful of institutions.
Some of the greatest leaders, in France and elsewhere, have come from working-class backgrounds. Some have been adulated, like Jean Jaurès, whose paternal family came from a modest peasant background. Others, from working-class backgrounds, were driven to suicide by slander, like Roger Salengro and Pierre Bérégovoy. It’s no different elsewhere: in Great Britain, political life is reserved for the elite bourgeoisie and nobility, with rare exceptions such as James Callaghan and, in a way, John Major. In Germany, almost no one either, apart from Willy Brandt, born of an unknown father, whose mother was a shop assistant and who began his extraordinary life as an apprentice to a shipbroker. In the United States, very few presidents have been of popular origin, until very recently, other than Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, then Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
From the earliest times, in the Indian, Chinese, Hebrew and Greek worlds, this question has been asked: should all inhabitants of a country have an equal right to represent the people? Whatever their social class, certainly. Whatever their behavior and skills, certainly not.
Terracotta busts by Honoré Daumier