“Western societies are extraordinarily fragile, they are in pieces, and it is not at all certain that an external threat is enough to bring them back together in the long term”explained to L’OLJ former UN Deputy Secretary General Jean-Marie Guéhenno a week after Russia invaded Ukraine. The fragmentation, sometimes even the decomposition, of these societies has been a phenomenon that has been observable since the beginning of the century, but which has greatly accelerated over the past ten years. And if the dynamic is still ongoing, its main effects are already deleterious.
First, there is the erosion of social and political ties. On the one hand between citizens, who are now united only on the lowest common denominators, on the other hand in their relationship to the State, marked at best by disaffection, at worst by detestation. There is then, in the same vein, a loss of meaning and a disruption of the hierarchy of values which leads to the construction of a semantics where everything is equal and where, consequently, the words no longer have any meaning. We can thus hear citizens denouncing the “health dictatorship” and intellectuals talk about “soft totalitarianism” – as if the two words were not fundamentally antinomic – without this detonating excessively in the public debate, itself poisoned by the venom of conspiracy. Finally, there is the sharp rise of populism, especially of the far right, which is based on the feeling of decline, real or supposed, and on the demographic changes, also real or imagined, that run through and change these societies.
The Frank
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For a long time the French-speaking daily newspaper of Beirut, born in 1970 from a merger between the east and The day, was the perfect illustration of the French-speaking and Christian “Lebanon of Dad” that the civil war would make fun of. The departure of the elites fleeing the violence of the war and the decline of the French language in the country of the Cedars should have dealt the blow of the club to this newspaper.
Fortunately, these dire predictions did not come true. Not only thanks to the return to the country in the 1990s of thousands of French-speaking families fleeing an Africa torn by wars or a Europe in the grip of the economic crisis, but thanks to a real editorial dynamism and the arrival of a new generation of journalists who use a lively and hard-hitting French without preciosity, trickery, or conspicuous self-censorship… And it is no exaggeration to affirm that The Orient-The Day is today the most interesting Lebanese daily and one of the best in the Arab world.
The daily’s website also testifies to this dynamism, since it is one of the few in the region to update its information several times a day. Admittedly, the old habits have not disappeared and the articles “of convenience” still occupy a small space, but this remains quite acceptable in the face of the distressing editorial decline of a certain Lebanese press. Even the worldly gossip of The Orient-The Day keep a second degree that can make us smile.
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