Nothing is more painful than failing to become yourself. Despite efforts and certainties, energy concentrated in a fixed and determined point, life sometimes resists. La France insoumise discovers the parodic version of a revolutionary party. Her ambiguity about the use of violence pushes her to become either immoral or inaudible. Emmanuel Macron denounced, this weekend, a party whose project consisted in delegitimizing the institutions. It was doing him a lot of honor. In reality, the Insoumis deputies will soon be the last in France to believe that they are involved in politics.
By voluntarily putting themselves on the margins of the Fifth Republic – they are also calling for its end – they have bet on the insurrection. In other words, their leader, on the lookout, cultivated dissent in order to be certain of recovering a popular movement whose magnitude would have allowed a reversal of power. The pension reform is one example, the young vests are another. He is, despite these efforts, rejected by a street of which he dreams of being the champion. For what ? The disciple of revolutionary militant Pierre Lambert has actually forgotten the most basic lessons of Trotskyism. In a curious and exciting way, the causes of these failures alone reveal the failure of the ideological software with which the left has equipped itself to conquer power again. They also show how far France is, very far, from a revolution.
In My Life, an autobiography published in 1930 (ten years before his death), the first book written during his exile, Leon Trotsky returned to the first thirty years of his commitment, during which he spent a lot of time in prison, in deportation in the extreme northeast of Russia, in exile. Surprisingly, it wasn’t proportionately so bad. He took the opportunity to read, write, learn. He himself admits that he did not suffer unduly: “The cells were not closed during the day; walks were taken in common. We spent hours playfully playing leapfrog. »
When the Tsarist regime was far from lax, why did the police, the jailers, in short the officials whose mission it was to guard the prisoners, show themselves to be if not benevolent, at the very least conciliatory? The monarchy continued its course in silence and isolation while the public force it was supposed to have disappeared. In 1907 he wrote: “The non-commissioned officer who was on duty […] declaimed revolutionary poems which had recently appeared. […] The prison authorities treated us with the greatest consideration: for the weights of revolution and counter-revolution were still oscillating and it was not known which pan of the scales would take on the other. The officer in command of the convoy began by showing us a paper from his superiors authorizing him not to handcuff us, a measure nevertheless required by law. He goes on like this for lines and lines. Which leads to a natural conclusion: before it happened in the streets, the revolution had, ten years before 1917, happened in people’s minds. Nothing of the sort in France, where the police, the gendarmerie, the army and in general the bodies of the administration pursue their task with conscience and devotion.
The Republic, even when put to the test, continues to exercise a considerable power of seduction, for good and obvious reasons. Emmanuel Macron is right to designate Jean-Luc Mélenchon as an individual eager to divert the legal paths to accession to power, even if it is to make a big deal of it insofar as we are witnessing precisely the failure of his strategy. The reason for this is simple: he has not succeeded, despite electoral and media outbursts, in constituting the slightest homogeneity in the nature of the demands, again forgetting the elementary lessons of his teacher Trotsky. This explains the scattering and fragmentation of mobilizations.
Book reference: My Life by Leon Trotsky (Gallimard, 1953).
* 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).
