About the author
Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.... For more
than two centuries, since the revolution of 1789, this motto has been
carved on the nation's coat of arms and on the façade of public
buildings all over France. Amid the revolution's rich cultural and
imagistic repertoire, it is still considered the symbol
of the motherland of human rights. Many French people believe it to be
one of the most honourable legacies of an intermittently glorious past. But what remains of these noble ideals in the France of today?
A glance at current political realities suggests the answer is "not much".
Liberty? A cluster of fears - of immigration, of globalisation, of
crime - has fuelled successive governments' efforts to centralise
power, and trade an increasing number of long-taken-for-granted civic
rights for a law-and-order strategy. The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy - who on 6 May 2009 celebrated the second anniversary of his election - has gone further than any previous one in this respect.
The grand ideal looks equally fragile abroad. Realpolitik leads France to trade with and indulge unsavoury leaders and authoritarian states. Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde
Equality? This is a period of economic crisis where much of the
population lives in insecurity and near-despair. There is high
unemployment; half of France's households
live on less than €1,470 a month ($2,010); 13% of the population lives
below the poverty-line. Millions of French people believe, for the
first time in decades, that their children will be worse off than they
are. The immigrant population and its children are ghettoised, more
prone to unemployment, and victims of job discrimination.
There is a chasm between rich and poor. The notion of equality of
opportunity and a "social elevator" based on merit shows its limits in
an education system of which France was once proud. Today the
university sector is starved of funds and packed with students who have
meagre chances of finding a good job, while the successful business
schools and grandes ecoles for the crème de la crème guarantee career-track progress for a favoured elite.
Fraternity? Nicolas Sarkozy describes the scions of two of France's wealthiest families - Arnaud Lagardère and Martin Bouygues,
each of whom controls a media empire - as his "brothers". The French
president, living symbol of the nation to the world, seeks his friends
in the bling-bling world of opulence, greed and power. Another crony,
the advertising tycoon Jacques Séguéla, captured the spirit of the age
in the comment: "If you don't sport a Rolex watch at 50, you've wasted
your life"! Too bad for the legion of "losers".
The response to an appeal by Ségolène Royal - the socialist candidate who challenged Sarkozy in the presidential election of 2007 - for her audience to echo her chant of Fra-ter-ni-té was revealing; she was vilified on all sides, called mad by some and silly by others for embracing such passé mantras.
After the fall
The social corrosion and political manipulation of the principles
that underpin modern France make it hard for the French to reclaim
them. Yet in face of these depredations, there are signs of a struggle
both to invigorate them and to reorder their priorities.
A survey recently published by two researchers of the Association pour la recherche sur les systèmes de valeurs
(Arval) suggests that over the 2000s the French public's commitment to
equality has for the first time become more important than that to
freedom (see Pierre Bréchon & Jean-François Tchernia, La France à travers ses valeurs [France through her values],
Armand Colin, 2009). The notion that social competition is itself
valuable has retreated, while the idea that the state has a key role in
guaranteeing welfare and regulating or directing business has advanced.
At the same time, the idea of fraternity has in some areas returned to
prominence. In everyday life, for example, where local solidarities -
nurtured at grassroots level by community groups and occasionally
helped by municipal authorities - are helping some to survive the
crisis. Indeed, when the economy is failing, life is getting harder,
social distances widening and an ethic of individualism spreading,
"solidarity" might look like an appropriately updated version of the
classical "fraternity".
Such a modernisation of the founding ideals of modern France is
reflected in another recent publication by one of the country's best
known intellectuals, Régis Debray. In the latest episode of a colourful career - Debray followed the trail of Che Guevara to Bolivia in 1967, advised Francois Mitterrand
in the 1980s, rallied to Jacques Chirac in the mid-1990s, all the way
pouring out books on the media and political or religious affairs - the
author breathes new life into the debate on "fraternity" and veers back
to the left in the process.
Régis Debray's book - Le Moment fraternité (Gallimard, 2009) - wants France's embarrassed silence on this value to be lifted. He advocates a fraternité
with a fighting spirit - a concept where the collective "we" overcomes
narrow egoism, and a society disfigured by fragmentation and crazy
numbers (shares, price indexes, polls, profits, debts) and is returned
to human scale and sanity.
For Debray, fraternité today involves not bland
sermonising, far-left sloganising, nor nostalgic reminiscing. It means
going beyond the intellectual comfort of social and intellectual
bubbles, creating networks to build a new and better society. At a time
when the increasingly unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy has expressed his loathing for "egalitarianism", Debray offers a way ahead on another flank for a left divided
by personal rivalries and seeking a convincing substitute to the
presidential regime. When each of the three "pillars" are in their own
way under assault, and the painful economic recession threatens greater
social violence, a coherent model of change is desperately needed.
Régis Debray offers one way forward.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ou la mort...in their own way the
French may, after all, be seeking neither to live in the past nor
abandon it, but to infuse its ideals with new life.
Also in openDemocracy on French politics:
Johannes Willms, "France unveiled: making Muslims into citizens?" (26 February 2004)
Patrick Weil, "A nation in diversity: France, Muslims and the headscarf" (25 March 2004)
Henri Astier, "We want to be French!" (22 November 2005)
Alan Lentin, "The intifada of the banlieues" (17 November 2005)
Henri Astier, "France's revolt against change" (23 March 2006)
Henri Astier "In praise of French direct democracy" (12 April 2006)
KA Dilday, "Zidane and France: the rules of the game" (18 July 2006)
Henri Astier, "France's banlieues: year of the locust" (8 November 2006)
Henri Astier, "Jurassic Left: the strange death of France's deuxième gauche" (25 March 2007)
KA Dilday, "France's two worlds" (7 May 2007)
Hector Andrieu, "A lost left: the soul of French socialism" (5 June 2007)
James McDougall, "Sarkozy: big white chief's bad memory" (7 December 2007)
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