The tragic fight that led to the death of a young antifascist activist, who was involved in a fight with skinheads from a far-right groupuscule, is in itself just an isolated incident. And, like all weak signals, they are very difficult to interpret. We can see there, depending on how you look at it, the footprints of the violence initiated by extremists grafted onto protests against the marriage for all. Or, on the contrary, the mark of the drift of the discourse of the extreme left, who in both tweets and forums, sometimes engages in a civil war discourse, littered with calls for murder, which is reflected in its watered down version in the rhetoric of the leaders from the parties of this camp.
We can also see there, the mark of a society where poverty is increasing where the have-nots fight for crumbles, much to the delight of the haves: indeed what could be more ecstatic, for the powerful, than seeing the youth, who could gang up against them, choose to kill one another?
Still there we can see the most pathetic display of what all the polls and all the opinion polls keep telling us week after week, year after year, and that we prefer not to see: the French do not love one another, and they find every opportunity to be aggressive with one another. This takes the form of countless acts of incivility: there is no respect for queues, an unwillingness to give up one’s seat for a woman on public transportation, drivers are violently insulted when driving too close to another car; we do not look at and we do not help beggars who are increasingly more numerous on the streets. More specifically, the increase of fights among groups of young people, and not so young, the rise of altercations at work, in the street, in overcrowded trains, in the endless queues of public administrations, are all proof but they tend not to be taken into account.
We are at a point where our western society, called modern, is encouraging the most unbridled individualism, disloyalty, misanthropy, in contempt of others; in a time when everyone sees others as the source of his problems; and where nobody wants to take any responsibility for anything. Old people do not care about the younger people by going into debt. Young people are ungrateful to the generations who have funded their education by leaving the country.
France is more sensitive to this climate than other countries. The country is now entering a very particular stage: exasperation. France is exasperated by the world, which seems increasingly hostile; exasperated by Europe, which imposes constraints; exasperated by her politicians, who are low on performance; exasperated by her entrepreneurs, with less and less legitimacy.
The French are exasperated with each other’s exasperations, even their neighbors; and even in the most extreme cases, by their own family members, that they only see, sometimes, as barriers to their own freedom.
It is without a doubt a very dark picture, that must be taken seriously. When a country can no longer come to terms with itself, anything can happen. It can vote for anyone, support anything, do anything.
And at the same time, this frustration can be beneficial: it is an energy. If you know how to channel it, it can be put in the service of a useful revolt, constructive, benevolent, altruistic, positive.
It is the role of today’s ruling class – if it still exists -, from teachers to politicians, from journalists to senior officials, from business leaders to union leaders, to meet this challenge: channel the exasperation to transform it into a will. This would obviously need, at each level of society, a project to be shared.
j@attali.com