Libraries everywhere, books by the hundreds, from the entrance to the living room of his Parisian apartment. With a mischievous eye, Michel Winock unveils the most personal part of his collection: some forty bound volumes, his name engraved in gold letters on each spine. But the historian denies being a fetishist: “I do this for my children. It’s their legacy! »
His new work, a beautiful volume from the “Quarto” collection, published by Gallimard, is welcome for anyone who wants to understand the political turbulence of times past and present. The title Govern France represents, he acknowledges, “an antiphrase” : “Behind this formula is the idea of ungovernability. Governing France is a permanent challenge! »
We find there Hexagonal Fever. The major political crises from 1871 to 1968 (Calmann-Levy, 1986), which, in the political history of contemporary France, is regarded as a classic. The historian had shown there that between the red fever of the Commune and the student fever of May 68, that is to say in barely a century, France had fallen ill eight times. Like a forensic doctor, he established that two crises had been fatal to the regime in place: that of July 10, 1940, which ended, after the defeat, the Thirde Republic, and that of May 13, 1958, which, under the weight of the Algerian war, completed the IVe Republic.
Political divisions between the French have continued to grow
At the border between history and literature, as often with him, Winock had placed in highlight of the conclusion these words written by François Mauriac in 1968: “I don’t think there’s more hate today among us than in the good old days. The civil war there was cold or hot depending on the era, but perpetual. » In the wake of the writer, the historian has come to the conclusion that the political divisions between French people took their momentum under the monarchy and have not ceased to grow since the Revolution.
For him, the cause of these divisions is to be sought, on the one hand, on the side of the State, very centralized, very powerful, from which everything is asked, but which, because it is too far away, is the target of all our protests. On the other hand, on the side of the Catholic Church, which, very hierarchical, favored the spirit of submission and its opposite, the spirit of revolt. “In England, the monarchy gradually evolved towards liberal democracy, while in France the radicalism of absolutism was overthrown by the Revolution, which, by its search for unanimity, engendered extreme divisions from which one cannot escape. not “he analyzes today.
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