2023-05-24 14:00:13
“Decivilization”. The concept is strong. It aims to make an impression and will not fail to make people talk. This is the one that Emmanuel Macron chose to ask about the climate of the moment during the Council of Ministers, this Wednesday. In his introductory remarks, the chairman indeed focused on attacks and threats against elected officials and on the climate of violence in general in recent days.
“You have to be intractable on the merits. No violence is legitimate, whether verbal or against people. We must work in depth to counter this process of decivilization”, thus enjoined the Head of State before the ministers gathered at the Élysée.
While recalling that the recent tragedies (nurse killed at Reims hospitalpolice officers killed in a collision in Roubaix by an alcoholic and drugged driver, fire at the house of the mayor of Saint-Brevin, etc. were not of the same nature, Emmanuel Macron made a point of emphasizing, summarizes a participant, that “he there is no violence that is justifiable, ever, in a society, whatever the cause”.
And the president to develop, summarizes another, the idea that “for some time now and in all countries, there has been a form of decivilization movement”. And that if “the meaning of the history of societies has always been to reduce the share of impulses in order to increase respect for others, throughout the world, for a certain number of years, it is the opposite movement which seems to be beginning”, reports this participant.
His busy schedule
The president has also shaken up his agenda, canceling at the last minute a planned trip to the Var to go pay tribute, this Thursday, to the police officers killed in Roubaix. There he will meet the families and colleagues of the three victims.
His remarks this Wednesday are reminiscent of the “work of civilization” that he had called for, in November, during the Congress of the Association of Mayors of France. A way, according to a relative, to evoke “the look that society must have on itself”, “a questioning of society”, believing that “politics is not the only one responsible” in the matter.
This time, the president still supports the feature by evoking “decivilization”. A concept both developed by researchers, but also acclaimed by the right and even the far right. It has been widely exploited by sociologists in the wake of Norbert Elias and his theory of the process of civilization developed on the eve of the Second World War. But this term “decivilization” is also the title of a book (published in 2011) by Renaud Camus, theoretician of the “great replacement” and figure of the far-right identity in France. “Decivilization”, the word is also dear to the boss of the Les Républicains senators, Bruno Retailleau, who again denounced, on May 1, a “show of decivilization” by evoking “the hatred and violence to which our forces of order on the sidelines of demonstrations”.
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