Dominique Moisi: The French Reactionary Revolution
[Dominique Moisi, a founder and senior advisor at the Ilfri (the French Institute for International Relations), is currently a professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw. His work for Cif is copyright Project Syndicate.]
...[The] "French exception" is the product of an encounter between a peculiar political and intellectual history and the rejection of the elites currently in power. In front of a bemused global public, the French are once again demonstrating their bizarre tradition of using revolutionary means to express extreme conservative leanings.
Unlike their predecessors in May 1968, today's demonstrators are not out in the streets to create a better future. They are out there to protect the status quo and to express their nostalgia for the past and their fear of the future.
And yet the reactionary/revolutionary movement of the type that we are witnessing – a backlash against the inevitable consequences of globalisation – remains unmistakably French. It is driven by the extreme Cartesian rationality, verging on the absurd, of a country whose citizens continue to view their state in the same way that adolescents view their parents.
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
...[The] "French exception" is the product of an encounter between a peculiar political and intellectual history and the rejection of the elites currently in power. In front of a bemused global public, the French are once again demonstrating their bizarre tradition of using revolutionary means to express extreme conservative leanings.
Unlike their predecessors in May 1968, today's demonstrators are not out in the streets to create a better future. They are out there to protect the status quo and to express their nostalgia for the past and their fear of the future.
And yet the reactionary/revolutionary movement of the type that we are witnessing – a backlash against the inevitable consequences of globalisation – remains unmistakably French. It is driven by the extreme Cartesian rationality, verging on the absurd, of a country whose citizens continue to view their state in the same way that adolescents view their parents.