World News: French President Macron Determined to Restore Order

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Category: World News - Europe

Published on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 13:03

Written by Olivier Longhi

President Macron's desire to restore order in French society responds to a punctual popular injunction that offers the advantage of freeing himself from the settlement of underlying but nevertheless imperative questions. Explanations.

By declaring during his last televised speech that he wanted to restore order at all levels of French society, the President of the Republic is taking the risk of opening Pandora's box. What for? Because the notion of order is both simple and multifaceted, which makes it a paradox in itself, hence the complexity of applying or decreeing it as an objective.

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Order, in the eyes of the President, would therefore be a means of accessing another state, another situation that remains to be defined but different from the one that prevails to date. However, invoking order, whether family or school, to name only those invoked by the President of the Republic, refers to decreeing it like any other fundamentals such as economic growth, full employment, the end of poverty or inequality. Moreover, implementing the order also implies new resources that, for the time being, are neither available nor financed.

Education and Skills

Let's take the example of school. Often cited as an illustration of the disintegration of the order, it is confronted with increasingly thorny situations: insolence and contempt of students towards teachers, taken to task by parents themselves often at odds with the school institution, mistrust and contestation of the sanctions applied... Brief!

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The list is by no means exhaustive and naturally calls for action capable of restoring a calm situation conducive to the dissemination of knowledge. But does this situation deserve the term order? The solution is certainly to be found elsewhere, particularly in the question of the education of parents, and consequently, of pupils.

Understanding that the school is a space for learning and emancipation of the individual through knowledge so that the latter becomes a citizen of the Republic respectful of the rules that govern it is not a matter of order, but more simply of the vision and role that everyone confers on the school.

Thus, if the school were perceived as the first layer of a global process of training the student, a process that begins in primary school and ends with graduation or via other learning paths (higher education is part of a different logic but which is nevertheless based on previous achievements), the School would not be confronted, or to a much lesser extent, the need to restore order since its authority and formative competence would be respected and recognized.

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Relationship between Right and Duty

The same may apply to the relationship to justice, the forces of law and order, and more broadly, to the rules around which the Republic is articulated. Here again, there is a question of education. What is the Republic? Legislative framework or space for living together?

Both, the first allowing the second. But to date, it is clear that this report is deficient because many individuals have forgotten, if they have already learned it one day, the meaning of the notion of Republic thus seeing in the institutions it carries (School, Police, Justice,...) organs of constraint that would reduce their individual freedom and their fundamental rights.

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Finally, the call to restore order is perhaps also the conclusion of a historical reality that dates back to the early hours of the French Revolution. By rightly glorifying the notion of law that had been undermined by the Ancien Régime, an era of various obligations and dull obedience, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, without wishing to indict any accusation of intent, neglected in their reflection the notion of duty, yet indispensable in the relationship between law and duty conditioned by the Republic.

By demanding ever more rights in the name of individual freedoms, a claim at the origin of a form of verbal or physical violence (it is enough to count the attacks committed against hospital staff), many have forgotten that a right, whatever it is, can actually be exercised provided it is preceded by a duty fulfilled. Again, it is a question of education and not necessarily of order.

Bio: Olivier Longhi has extensive experience in European history. A seasoned journalist with fifteen years of experience, he is currently professor of history and geography in the Toulouse region of France. He has held a variety of publishing positions, including Head of Agency and Chief of Publishing. A journalist, recognized blogger, editor, and editorial project manager, he has trained and managed editorial teams, worked as a journalist for various local radio stations, a press and publishing consultant, and a communications consultant.