2024-03-09 19:41:52
TRIBUNE – In conclusion of my column “Immigration law: the devil and the spoon”, published on February 1 in the columns of France-SoirI wrote that “on abortion, which has absolutely nothing to do with the organization of public powers (the implication added here: primary object, and quite simply object of a Constitution), Mr. Macron wishes summon deputies and senators to Versailles to revise the Constitution. It is up to opponents to oppose this diversion and refuse to satisfy the prince’s whims.”
Since the President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, declared on January 22: “I think that the Constitution is not a catalog of social and societal rights”it was reasonable to think that the “beautiful trip” to Versailles, dear to Joachim du Bellay, would not turn into this facade and circumstance unanimity to which it gave rise on Monday March 4.
Especially since no one in our country thought of calling into question the legacy of Simone Veil on voluntary termination of pregnancy. And because the Constitution, as Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet, professor emeritus of public law, so amusingly wrote in Le Figaro of January 25, “is neither a Christmas tree nor a La Redoute catalog”.
But the opposition of the opponents fizzled out – a little, or even a lot, as in the time of Covid – and the adoption of the constitutional revision, by 780 votes for and 70 against, gave rise to acclamations and congratulations like the Parliament experienced them at the end of the two world wars.
The moral of this story is simple. It is the characteristic of any power which is no longer able to bring material satisfaction to its people – economic growth is more than weak, unemployment is increasing, purchasing power is declining – to go into the field societal: it costs little, and it gives a clear conscience at little cost. Although in these times of scarcity, we would like to know the Versailles bill.
The famous poem by Joachim du Bellay, dedicated to Angevin “sweetness”, is not only an ode to departure, it also celebrates the return: “Happy who, like Ulysses, has made a beautiful journey, and then returned, full of custom and reason, to live between his parents the rest of his age”. How we would like these hundreds of travelers to have returned to their homes at the Palais du Luxembourg or the Palais Bourbon, “full of use and reason”!
This is, unfortunately, unlikely. Firstly, and this is well known, because we develop a taste for traveling. Then, and above all, because it is the finger in the gear. A completely different subject, fraught with the most serious dangers, will now be included in the “revisional” agenda of power, since Mr. Macron has already announced his intention to include Corsican identity in the Constitution.
“He is shamelessly preparing to directly contradict the unitary principle of equality before the law enshrined in the preamble and in the first article of the 1958 Constitution”, indicated Ms. Le Pourhiet on January 25. Even more severely, Manuel Valls warned against a “shipwreck” in Le Figaro of March 5: “By proposing to recognize a Corsican cultural community and its own legislative power in the name of certain particularities, the Minister of the Interior promotes communitarianism and even proposes to constitutionalize it (…). If those who believe in republican universalism and who think that France is not a collection of communities or tribes do not mobilize on Corsica, then it will be impossible to stop an irremediable shipwreck”.
It is high time, in fact, that the opponents do their job which is, by definition, to oppose (and, from this point of view, they could usefully take the model of François Mitterrand, opponent of the first years of the Fifth Republic, which has always refused everything), instead of finagling and letting oneself be made guilty by the spirit of the times.
I borrow my conclusion from Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet: “We must stop damaging General de Gaulle’s Constitution with narcissistic and tribal symbolic demands.”
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