Every country of the West, including France in particular, and many other countries in the world, are on the brink of brutal revolutions, the consequences of which will either be disastrous for decades to come, or very positive, depending on whether we know how to anticipate these revolutions and intelligently solve in advance the contradictions they reflect.
A revolution (I am not talking about a scientific, artistic, or intellectual revolution here, though they are always welcome; but about political revolutions) is always triggered when a regime no longer knows how to guarantee the well-being of the people it claims to serve and who believe they are entitled to such well-being, and when the regime is no longer feared enough to survive by sheer force. In such cases, revolts become revolutions.
These revolutions begin by inspiring hope that is maddening, often slipping into bloody abuses, which lead to even bloodier counter-revolutions; that is until, years, or decades later, the ambitions of the original revolution are regained, and its ideals are served, in a reasonable and balanced context.
Few people have managed to avoid revolutions and counterrevolutions in order to arrive directly at the most realistic regime, reconciling the desirable with the possible.
Today, all the conditions are in place for the outbreak of extremely violent revolutions in several countries in the near future.
The regimes in place seem incapable of resolving the difficulties and frustrations, real or perceived, by a large number of citizens: jobs are either non-existent, pay low wages, or prove to be alienating; public services are dilapidated; rural territories are forgotten; the agricultural sector is distressed; the environment is degraded; increasing precarity; and personal lives in pieces.
These regimes are tightening up and granting more and more privileges to the ruling classes and their children because they feel threated, which in turn drives those who feel excluded even crazier with anger.
When these types of anger emanate from those who are the poorest, submissive and weakest, nothing happens. When they reach the middle classes, as they have today, and when people believe they have nothing more to lose, a revolution becomes possible.
We can see very clearly that this anger will take a different form, in France and in other Western countries: the people will no longer be satisfied with a “soft dégagisme,” which led to a discredited political class replaced by another one, which had claimed to be new, but which was in fact only another avatar of the previous one, and did not succeed in doing any better. The people will revolt against everyone perceived to have power, whether in corporations or in cities; and in particular against their capital. They will then surrender to authoritarian leaders, who will emerge from the ranks of the people, (or to populist pseudo-stars, combining travesty with reality) with the promise to grant privileges to the people, which were formerly reserved for the elites and to protect the people from global threats. It is a combination of what has already been announced in Italy, Ukraine, and Hungary.
We can be sceptical and refuse to think that such revolutions are possible. My intuition is that everything is being put in place to make them a reality. Very soon. Today’s revolts, anger, and strikes are not a substitute for what is to come. They are rather the early signs of it.
As with every revolution of this type, today’s powerful people who manage to escape the wrath of the new leaders will emigrate, waiting for these revolutions to fail, which will certainly happen, after a more or less long period of time.
The counterrevolution will once again be terrible, all the more so because the privileged will be afraid, or because they will lose people in their ranks, as well as their property in the revolution.
Even if we never learn anything from history, we could avoid these announced disasters by already organizing the nation like it will be, no matter what happens, after the devastation of the revolution and counterrevolution: a fairer, much more empathetic nation that is more open to the world and capable of thinking about the interests of the next generations.
To achieve this, the arrogant elites of today would have to leave a significant part of power to those who are most deprived of it; in particular, to women from the fragile territories of the republic, the countryside and the disadvantaged neighbourhoods: they carry, better than anyone, the hope for the future. Without violence, without concession.
j@attali.com