On knows the Chinese proverb (or supposedly such): “When the wise point to the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. » Condescending, but often verified apologia. Translation into contemporary French: instead of looking hypnotically at pension reform, we should look wider – comparing ourselves to the near abroad – and deeper – going back to the source of our political institutions. For it is there, in the specific genius of our national political culture, that lies the crux of the problem, in other words its solution, in other words its irresolution.
It is that we are a unique country in its category. Let us call this category “Western Europe” and start from the fairly defensible postulate that the citizens of the said Europe − which can be extended without difficulty to Northern Europe, or even beyond − are nevertheless not, in relation to to the French, pure and simple Martians.
Let us limit ourselves, for the beauty of the demonstration, to the neighboring democracies: Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain. What do we see? That all these countries have chosen – for three of them after a violent authoritarian, even totalitarian experience – an essentially parliamentary regime. By this we mean a regime where the Head of State is structurally weak and the executive power is in constant dialectic with Parliament, it being understood that within the latter the dominant party – if there is one – must permanently play the coalition map. The result is a political culture where figures predominate – if not always reality. − contract and compromise.
Institutional rigidity
France is clearly foreign to this standard mode. Without going so far as to speak, as some have done, of “republican monarchy”, it is clear that this dear and old country, which invented modern authoritarian democracy (Napoleon Bonaparte) and populism in the no less modern sense ( General Boulanger’s “appeal to the people”) continues to stand out from its neighbors by the structurally authoritarian character of its political culture: centralized and presidential, unitary and bipolarized. The result is an institutional rigidity that makes it like the oak of the fable, surrounded by political systems that tend more towards the reed.
Undoubtedly the French have, on two occasions, durably tested the classic parliamentary system (the IIIe and IVe Republics), but we also know that they gave it up, under dramatic (1958), even tragic (1940) conditions. Let us note, in passing, that these two crises were of geopolitical essence (Hitler and the war in Algeria) and that, if we generalize on the scale of the vast world and of the very long duration, the great mythical experiences of democracy (the city of Athens, the Roman Republic…) all ended in their fall and their replacement by authoritarian regimes; but this – isn’t it? − is another story.
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