The presidential regime is a “French abnormality”, analyzes the historian. A singularity which explains the recurring failure of social democracy and centrism.
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Elected to the French Academy in 2021, Pascal Ory is a professor emeritus at Paris-I University (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and has just published this dark side of the people (Bouquins, 959 pages, 32 euros), work at within which are notably gathered its texts devoted to popular sovereignty, fascism, collaboration, right anarchism and the “good use of disasters”. In an interview with the world, the author of Sovereign People (Gallimard, 2016) and what is a nation? (Gallimard, 2020) returns to the historical roots of French “authoritarian tropism”.
by renewing Emmanuel Macron as president of the Republic, did the French elected a republican monarch?
Throughout the electoral campaign, an absence struck me: that of a reflection on French abnormality. Let us simply consider the border countries: all live under a fundamentally parliamentary regime, where the executive power lies in the government. We are the only presidential country in Western Europe. It is the own genius of the institutions of 1958, in -depth by the election of the Head of State by universal suffrage, from 1965, and the reforms of 2000 (five -year period) and 2002 (inversion of the electoral calendar): one ” Republican monarchy “transforming into anomaly the non-decency of the parliamentary majority and of the president, all based on a bipolarized political society.
Let us add a centralist structure, which clearly distinguishes us from German, Belgian or Swiss federalism. In a word, the great French political tradition is authoritarian. Besides, the absence of any real reflexivity on this national particularity leads to questioning the share of collective consent which enters this state of affairs: it is undoubtedly high.
to what extent our is political life still marked by this authoritarian tradition?
The great political revolution of modern times is based on popular sovereignty – except that no one seems to have noticed that in this definition there is no place for freedom: democracy which integrates freedom in its principles is the Democracy… liberal. But that also means that there are two other modalities: authoritarian democracy, Putinian Russian way, and totalitarian democracy, popular China way.
France undoubtedly remains by its institutions a liberal democracy, but its history testifies to a recurring authoritarian tropism. Thus it was in France that modern authoritarian democracy was born, in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte, which M me of Staël subtly said that he was a “Robespierre on horseback” (everything in the times heir to the revolution and restorer of the monarchy). It is also France which, eighty years later, invented the first movement that can be retrospectively qualifying as “populist” – to be defined as a radical right in a radical left style – with the baker movement: Boulanger , republican officer marked on the left, brings together monarchists and communards in his staff.
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