Pascal Bruckner on the “gigantic national banquet”, decadence and the “creeping civil war”

In May 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville attended a grand allegorical festival in honour of harmony on the Champ de Mars. Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy had collapsed three months earlier, and the April elections had failed to produce a clear result. Discontent was growing in the suburbs: the workers, who had hoped for a social and democratic republic, were rebelling against the closure of the national workshops – those institutions created to alleviate unemployment. On the Champ de Mars, Tocqueville saw twenty thousand bayonets swaying, ‘like a lake of steel’. Tocqueville notes in his memoirs: ‘I watched this lengthy spectacle with a heart full of sadness; never, in any other era, had so many weapons been in the hands of the people at the same time. I foresaw that all these bayonets I saw glinting in the sun would soon be raised against one another, and I felt that we had just reviewed the two armies of the civil war’”. So writes Pascal Bruckner in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “Barely a month later, General Cavaignac, at the head of an army composed mainly of peasants’ sons, clashed with the workers. They had erected barricades in the eastern part of Paris. It was a massacre: five thousand insurgents were killed, 1,500 shot without trial, and 25,000 deported, mainly to Algeria. Karl Marx was enthusiastic and saw the uprising as ‘the most formidable event’ in the history of European civil wars. A further 22 years later, in 1871, France – having just been humiliated by Prussia – experienced the Paris Commune uprising.”

An even more brutal episode, mercilessly crushed in a bloodbath by Adolphe Thiers. In 1961, Paris was on high alert when generals in Algeria attempted a coup to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle. In May 1968, France came close to civil war. The riots of 17 October 2026 took place at the end of my street: throughout the day, the explosions of tear gas canisters and firecrackers could be heard. At around 6 p.m., when I ventured out to run errands, the streets were in shambles: rubbish bins ablaze, mopeds and benches burnt out, the tarmac torn up, charred cars, and shops demolished and looted. Gangs of young people were shouting with joy as they poured in from Place de la République. Throughout the day, three types of demonstrators took turns: university and secondary school students, then representatives of the far left – disciplined and determined, ready to set fire to all the symbols of the ‘bourgeois state’ – and finally looters from the suburbs who had come to go ‘shopping’. They were not Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’, nor were they the oppressed, but greedy hyper-capitalists. It was a gigantic national feast, in which terrified shopkeepers faced off against furious rioters. The same apocalyptic scenes were repeated in every French city, but compared to previous riots there was one difference: the sheer scale of the unrest and the virtual absence of the police. To understand the mood that pervaded the country, one must look at France’s financial situation: public debt stands at 3,640 billion euros, equivalent to 117 per cent of GDP. Interest payments amount to 74 billion euros a year, equivalent to defence spending. At this rate, by 2030 interest payments alone will exceed income tax revenue.

French society is becoming increasingly fragmented and disintegrating. The unrest on 17 October revealed a youth gripped by panic over the future, over the prospect of war in Europe, over right-wing extremists, jihadists or the decline in educational standards. Amidst this confusion, charlatans—whether from the right or the left—are thriving: foremost among them Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, bitter rivals yet secret allies, who lull the population with unrealistic promises. To this is added the failure of the authorities. The gulf between the idyllic vision of France cultivated in the Élysée Palace and the reality on the ground is vast. For years, attacks on police officers – even when off duty – have been on the rise. Their addresses are published online, and they are lured into traps to be beaten up. School headteachers receive death threats, and the police seize thousands of bladed weapons from schools. Social divisions are glaringly obvious, as is the risk of widespread unrest in certain suburbs. France presents the spectacle of a country in full decline, obsessed with the idea of making its own situation even worse. People invoke 1793, 1830, 1848 or the Paris Commune to repeat, on a smaller scale, all the failed utopian ideals of past centuries. In the absence of a culture of compromise and dialogue, the country has resigned itself to systematic strikes, devastation and vandalism carried out in the name of the people. We have become so accustomed to destruction, arson and the refusal to work that they have become the norm. We are sliding towards a creeping civil war that has not yet broken out openly. The ‘Grande Nation’ is imploding.” (Translated from the English by Giulio Meotti)