Voters sometimes create the conditions for their disappointments. Better, they have the capacity to condemn their candidates to the defeat, which would be nothing if that did not imply the sterility of their fight. This weekend, Bernard Cazeneuve engaged in a thankless but courageous exercise: playing politics.
La Nupes and its supporters have since sneered and derided the former Prime Minister of François Hollande, convinced of having demonstrated their power for a year, when they were in fact content to lessen their ambitions. . Are they any different from a hundred meter runner throwing up their arms after the first fifty? Remember: there was a time when the left wanted power.
However, and despite this success, the electoral equation is ruthless: the first round of the presidential election seems unattainable and, assuming it is, it would find itself, even in its Nupes form, confronted either with a Liberal candidate, or that of the Rassemblent national. In one case as in the other, it is a badly kept secret of the pollsters, it would be clearly beaten.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon impressed by his talent, but also by his weakness or, to put it better, by his inability to moderate his remarks, a mania which has not only media but political consequences, as evidenced by the chaos in which his etiolates the Nupes. This is why Bernard Cazeneuve is less a solution than a proposal to which the left will sooner or later have to agree, under penalty of flourishing on the margins of a less adventurous democracy, and above all much more bourgeois than it seems. .
To denigrate liberalism, to praise the merits of authoritarian regimes, to prefer the rabble to the police, to the army, to the Republic are not very lucrative qualities in a civilized society, where the rule of law commands coexistence. As for his parliamentary group, he heckles with a lot of talent, that’s not nothing, but his sterility appeared in an embarrassing way during the pension reform.
Georges Clemenceau will have been the defender of the communards, the destroyer of colonization before becoming the guarantor of the republican order and a warlord with exemplary determination. Léon Blum admired, in considerable proportions, Maurice Barrès before becoming a Dreyfusard and close to Jean Jaurès. At the Congress of Tours (1920), he refused to join the Third International, invoking, with incomparable intelligence and elegance, the need to “keep the old house”.
According to Jean Lacouture’s opinion, Blum was neither intellectually nor ideologically convinced by the Soviet turn, but he did not agree with this strategic turn either. His sense of moderation will not favor, at first, either his career or his quality of life. He was the victim of an anti-Semitic campaign led by Action Française and its cohort of imbeciles, which nevertheless resulted in a lynching of rare violence on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. In 1936, he came to power at the head of one of the most memorable coalitions in the history of the left, to which we owe unprecedented social progress. Would all of this have been possible without the conquest of power?
Book Reference:
Jean Lacouture, Léon Blum, Paris, Seuil, 1977.
* Born in 1990, Arthur Chevallier is a historian and editor at Passés Composites. He curated the exhibition “Napoleon” (2021), produced by the Grand Palais and La Villette. He has written several books devoted to the political and cultural posterity of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empire, Napoleon told by those who knew him (Grasset, 2014), Napoleon without Bonaparte (Cerf, 2018), Napoleon and Bonapartism (Que do I know?, 2021), or Napoleon’s Women (Grasset, 2022).
