Macron resets French government with a pitch to cultural conservatism

Like every other country in Europe, and many further afield, including the United States, France has been much engaged of late in extended navel-gazing. How did it come to this? How did we get from where we were six months/six years/six decades ago to where we are today?

It barely matters which measure is chosen to register the public mood, les trentes glorieuses – the thirty years of plenty between 1945 and 1975 – feel as if they were a long time ago, almost as far off, in fact, as the dark days of the Nazi Occupation.

Outsiders could be forgiven for supposing that Covid-19 is the principal cause of what has proved to be a particularly melancholy bout of introspection. With a second wave of the virus seemingly about to burst, the people are wandering the streets like zombies. But it’s not as if the pre-Covid days were exactly bursting with promise. Last year, when the nation’s primary health concern focused primarily on how much, or how little, doctors and nurses were paid, public sector protests, led by the railway workers, the legendary cheminots, had echoes of the student rising in 1968.

In 2018, it was the gilets-jaunes – left-behind France versus the élite – who brought Paris to a standstill each weekend for what felt like a lifetime. Only in 2017, an election year, with Emmanuel Macron proclaming himself to be the “Jupiter President,” was there a brief spell of relative calm. Previously, in 2015 and 2016, with the country virtually leaderless, islamist terror gripped the populace, with everyone and anyone a target.

In America the adverse events that have mounted up in the Trump years, have, inevitably, given rise to a spate of End Times madness. From Portland to Megido is in the eyes of the evangelical Right but a hop and a skip. Not so in France, in which la laïcité is not so much the de facto rule as the default religion. Here, it is the State – not to be confused with the Republic (a sacred institution) – that is felt to be out of joint.

Believing that liberty and equality have largely gone by the board, millions of citizens from all walks of life are withholding the fraternity that supposedly binds rich and poor, metropolitan and provincial, believer and unbeliever to that “certain idea of France” of which De Gaulle spoke so powerfully in his memoirs. The neo-Communards may not presently be on the march, but there are many on the extremes who claim that it would only take someone somewhere to strike a match in the wrong place for the country to go up in flames.

We have, of course, have been here before. France’s history of internal disaffection runs long and deep.

It was on September 4, 1870, 150 years ago last Friday, that Léon Gambetta, the son of a Genoese grocer, stood at a balcony of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris and proclaimed to a delirious crowd that France was once more a Republic. The Prussian Army was about to complete its humiliation of French forces after the latter’s defeat at Sedan. Ahead lay the stench and horror of the Paris Commune. But Gambetta, at the head of a provisional Government of National Defence, seized the moment, declared the Second Empire null and void and reminded France that, even in the midst of a ruinous conflict, the security of the nation required the solemn acceptance of constitutional democracy.

Having done so, he took off in a hot-air balloon and wafted south to Tours, where he raised an army that was just too late to prevent capitulation to the forces of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke and his boss, Otto von Bismarck.

The Third Republic established by Gambetta lasted for the next seventy years, until July 10, 1940, when, following the Nazi invasion of France, the National Assembly handed over constitutional authority to Marshal Philippe Pétain, who promptly sued for peace at the head of what would become Vichy France.

If the French of 2020 think they have had it hard, they would do well to remind themselves why it is that every other street in France that isn’t named after Victor Hugo or the Resistance leader Jean Moulin owes its provenance to the grocer’s son from Cahors. Gambetta, who died unexpectedly at the age of 43, lived through more turmoil than a season of Game of Thrones.

Born in 1838 during the reign of the last of the Bourbons, Louis-Philippe, he lived through the Second Republic, the 1848 Revolution, the Second Empire, the war with Prussia, the Commune, and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, from the grandiloquence of Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon and the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussman to the beginnings of the Belle-Époque. Had he not died prematurely, he would have looked on with displeasure at France’s role in the Scramble for Africa, the Dreyfus affair and the mass slaughter of the First World War.

Last Friday, speaking in the Pantheon, the grim, eighteenth century mausoleum that houses the remains of 87 of France’s heroes – many of them removed from their previous resting places – President Macron looked back on Gambetta’s achievements while assessing where, in terms of liberty, the nation stands today. Taking a break from the hard economic agenda advanced earlier by his prime minister Jean Castex, he chose not to dwell on the pesky issues thrown up by Covid-19 or the jobs crisis it has spawned. Instead, he concentrated on the sorts of higher questions that French intellectuals have preferred to wrestle with down the ages.

“The Republic,” he told the assembled members of France’s Great and Good, “is not given, never simply passed on, it is a conquest, forever to be protected or won back. To be French is first of all to love freedom with a passion.”

Reprising remarks he had made earlier in the week during a visit to Beirut,  he went on: “In this anniversary year, it is less with joy than with a clear sense of the gravity of the situation facing us that we consider the threats that weigh on the Republic.”

The list that followed was not Woke, but classically liberal. Prominent among the threats currently keeping the President awake at night are, we are assured, calls for the removal of statues; attacks on freedom of speech and on the separation of Church and State (including the right to blaspheme); disputes over identity (who is French and who isn’t); which parts of history to accept and which to reject.

Noting that the Pantheon contains the remains of citizens as diverse as the physicist Marie Curie, the entertainer Joséphine Baker, the black colonial administrator Félix Éboué and the three-time prime minister Léon Blum (as well, in future, he seemed to suggest, as Gisèle Halimi, the recently deceased feminist lawyer and essayist), he went to observe that “we don’t choose which parts of France we accept, we choose France”.

All very well and all very true. Gambetta, a Frenchman of mixed heritage, would surely have applauded, even if he found Macron’s concerns a little less pressing than the shelling of Paris and the imminent arrival of the Prussian Army. But Gambetta would also, one suspects, have endorsed the editorial in Saturday’s edition of Le Monde, which looked back on the proclamation of the Republic in 1870 in which the current French leader is reminded of the pledge he gave when elected to the Élysée to make equality of opportunity the keystone of his period in office.

“This pledge,” Le Monde concludes, “seems to have got lost in limbo, risking a further increase in the disillusion of citizens. Today we need firm action in response to the economic and social crisis through which the country is going.”

As Macron embraces his inner conservatism, so he continues to tap more and more into France’s radical and restless history.