Journey to the Heart of French Specificity

Journey to the Heart of French Specificity

by Christian Decoeur

The story of the Chevalier de La Barre, a young man keen on philosophy who was beheaded in 1765 for not having uncovered his head before a religious procession, has become the symbol of certain holders of a “hard and pure” laïcité. But in 2003, awkwardly, it is two young girls who are expelled from their lycée for having refused to uncover their heads. This shortcut illustrates well the complete reversal of “dominant culture” that has taken place in two centuries. We are putting our finger there on what the historian Olivier Dupont calls “Republican sacrality”, which wanted to and did succeed in replacing the Catholic Church of former times, notably with its “educational temples” and its taboos.

Certainly, France has fine resources… behind it; but today, when France readily sets itself up as champion of Democracy, as the “country of Human Rights”, indeed as the “Country of absolute freedom of conscience” (MIVILUDES dixit), other countries grimace. When some wish to justify the at best obscurantist behaviour of certain institutions, they invoke a certain “French specificity”, linked to a French “history”, which would be applicable to numerous domains, among them that famous laïcité. Now, if one reviews this French specificity, is it so glorious?

French historical specificity

If the American Constitution, bearer of all our modern values, came into being peacefully in 1797, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen engendered a veritable bloodbath, engulfing the aristocrats, followed by nearly 5,000 refractory priests executed, by the political opponents, and finally by the revolutionaries themselves who ended up killing one another (Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just). Anyone who has seen the film “Danton” will recognise in this collective psychodrama a rehearsal of the future great totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. There followed the turbulences of one of democracy’s worst pupils: Napoleon sacking Europe, the Restoration, a few revolutions, the Second Empire, “modern” colonialism, the Third Republic under “fraternal” influence, the expulsion of the congregations in 1909, the anti-Semitic campaigns in the press, Vichy, torture in Algeria, ballot-stuffing, the atomic tests in Oceania, radio and television news under tutelage until 1980, the repeated parliamentary self-amnesties. All in all, a veritable free-for-all, including between “secular” groups, rather than the appeased reign of reason. All this has created an almost pathological relationship of the French with politics, a domain where the irrational and bad faith seem entirely legitimate, to the stupefaction of our neighbours who look at us with a mixture of incredulity, zoological curiosity and sometimes rejection, so much does the real resolution of problems seem the last of the objectives. To cap it all, France is one of the only developed countries not to be a true Democratic regime, according to article 16 of its own Declaration of the Rights of Man. Indeed, by leaving Justice under the control of the executive Power, the Constitution of 1958 violates the rule of the separation of powers. One then sees a Minister of Justice send a helicopter into the Himalayas to save the skin of a politician; sanctions are taken against magistrates who dare to raise their heads and break the “instructions” — see L’Omerta française by Sophie Coignard and Alexandre Wickam. By its constitutional status, French justice is therefore not independent: another French specificity.

When one looks further, one finds yet other French specificities:

The country of artificial happiness: France is the country of record consumption of “legal” psychotropic drugs. That nine million French people (including children, indeed babies) should be placed in a chemical straitjacket is less important than two hundred adolescent girls’ headscarves. The manoeuvres to close thousands of alternative psychotherapists’ practices would only reinforce this absurd consumption. The anaesthesia of consciousness raised to a national sport!

Neo-colonialism and double talk? It is easy to denounce American economic imperialism and its oil interests, but what are we doing in Africa; what regimes have we supported for decades, under the banner of “Human Rights”? And still today?

Drug circuits and politics: More and more investigations bring to light the relations between drug trafficking — to which are added the trafficking of recycled arms from the East — and the financing circuits of “Republican” parties (the famous “circle of reason”). See the excellent film “Le Cousin”. Reason of State?

A dogmatic medicine, withdrawn into itself: Certainly, our “national” medicine has had its moments of glory; however, one observes that it is today more occupied with defending the dogmas established by its Nobel laureates, with financing dubious research on the “all-genetic” and with chasing royalties. When the Institut Pasteur affixes its seal to a brand of washing powder, one measures how far the initial spirit has degraded. Instead of taking a sincere interest in the good that new research and all the new medicines can bring to humanity, by testing them honestly and by seeking to integrate all the therapies that heal (is that not the primary aim?), orthodox French Medicine hurls anathemas; and one saw for example in 2000 the President of the Ordre des Médecins come and testify in a trial in which a doctor, Professor Hamer, was convicted for “refusing to abjure the New Medicine and to return to school medicine” (sic). Other totalitarian methods are sometimes employed to reduce certain independent researchers to silence. In the majority of cases, this medicine denies the links between matter and mind, whatever definition one may have of them.

Science without conscience…

The school, witness to a civilisation in collapse

The school is indeed sacred in France ever since Jules Ferry assigned it the mission of educating the people to give them access to culture (our neighbours did the same without trumpets). In what Christian Coten names “the Great Cult” (whose clerics, entered by force at the age of 4, never leave, except in a coffin ordered from the CAMIF), these temples of knowledge are sacralised in long, flowing speeches, ignoring the terrible reality of this ship that never stops sinking. But instead of making sanctuaries of them, temples of the Republic, ought one not rather to advocate a simple application of the law “of the Republic” in school establishments? Why accept inside what is sanctioned outside? (Violence and rapes against pupils and teachers, racism and/or sexism, fires and vandalism?) What is this hyper-abstract “school” content, amputated of knowledge essential to life, cut off from social exchanges, demanding a sort of hypnotic fixation on tons of information to be swallowed? “The pupil”, for more than 15 years, will be diverted from the direct observation of life, from responsibilities and from social exchange. One prefers to fire on all cylinders at the alternative schools that offer a framework permitting the apprenticeship of liberty, responsibility and conviviality, because their mere existence and results constitute an unbearable calling into question.

…Is but the ruin of the soul

Ecology, gentle medicines, and pesticides

Let there be no mistake: against these new sensibilities and visions of the human, one finds the same people who fight against “the irrational”. The ADFI, Dr Abgrall, Dr Grunwald, many of whom are present within the MIVILUDES Steering Council, attack without restraint naturopathy, agro-ecology, essential oils, massage, meditation, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, yoga, sophrology, aromatherapy, prayer, etc., etc. None of these activities escapes the guillotine sanction: “dérive sectaire”! Meanwhile, France is the second consumer of pesticides after the United States, with a record rate of contaminated foodstuffs (50% against 39% for the rest of Europe). The links with different types of cancer are now statistically proven, often generating a “genotoxicity” transmissible by cell reproduction (Le Monde, 30 October 2003). Meanwhile, France is the European country where the male mortality rate from cancer is the highest, and where the increase in the number of cancers is the greatest! The organic sectors, since 1970, were born of a concertation between producers, consumers and associations of enthusiasts, centred on the sciences of life. The French State has just carried out a veritable hold-up, by planning to merge the control bodies for “organic” and for “reasoned” farming — “moderate chemical” — a sector under the thumb of the pesticide producers (science of death)!

Hands off my shrink!

The cancer of intolerance is gradually spreading through the whole activity of personal development and psychotherapies. Illustration: in 1998, Alain Vivien said that “the cults” used valid techniques, such as NLP, in order to “recruit”. In 2003, he asserts that NLP constitutes in itself a dérive sectaire “at the limit of democracy”. Eloquent! Who is next on the list? The general tendency has moved from the denunciation of supposed offences (theft, murders) to pure offences of opinion and of heresy. The idea itself and its propagation constitutes an unbearable offence. To assert that one has been healed by this or that practice is an offence (see the Beljanski trial). Soon, the mere fact of existing will constitute an offence. Which is moreover what the communist-affiliated deputy J.P. Brard advocates. Through opportunism, through the influence of “transversal” lobbies or through concern for doctrinal coherence, one makes sure to put into the same bag everything that, from the most “scientific” to the most “spiritual”, by way of ecology (the health of the earth and of nature) and physical and/or mental healing, does not follow the few official dogmas often inherited from the nineteenth century — poorly understood and systematised.

An absurd contradiction: one insists on the equality of citizens, exempt from differences inside the frontiers, and one claims a French specificity outside them, demanding a treatment and rules different from those of others. These French “cultural” specificities, which constitute subtractions rather than added riches, often lean on a last redoubt of “rationalists”, thus justifying the arbitrary by a pseudo-rational philosophy that is losing ground, if only in Europe.

A very strange national-philosophy:

Let us observe closely one of these currents at work. If one studies attentively the theoretical foundations of the Union Rationaliste and its various writings, which welcomes into its journal people such as Alain Vivien or Anne Fournier, one finds from the outset a direction: “to fight against all the forms of the irrational, ancient or modern”. At least, that is clear. Yet the same people regularly lose themselves in circumlocutions during their interventions, hand on heart, to explain “that they respect all beliefs”, etc. For the “fundamentalists of laïcité”, the child born on French soil is not really French; he becomes so in the course of a process of schooling in the “Temples of the Republic” that the teaching establishments are. This process has as its mission to “tear him from his milieu of origin” (sic) — in order to combat the “communitarianism that would enrol the individual by force”. There is therefore indeed a catechism, and the wholly theoretical affirmation that parents have the right to educate their children according to their convictions belongs to pure wooden language in view of recent years (social harassment over vaccinations, removal of children, etc.). What remains is a naive faith, of another century, in a happiness brought by scientific progress alone and by an ultra-reductive conception of “reason” — a materialist method of explaining the world. One has to have discussed with the holders of this philosophy to see how narrow their intellectual framework often is, incurious and unopen, a canvas from which creation is absent, wholly absorbed in the defence of a few certainties of former times. This current does not hesitate to present itself as an option on the same footing as other religious options. In this, when they claim to monopolise the debates on laïcité, they are at once judge and party. Recently, the Grand Orient, which claims paternity of the 1905 law, asserted that, since that law, France is the “Country of Absolute Freedom of Conscience”! An expression curiously found again in the introduction to the seminar that the MIVILUDES is organising over 6 months, baptised “cults and laïcité” — knowing that this body counts within it several holders of that particular fundamentalism. In any case, one gathers that this conception of liberty is not troubled by scruples, when one sees the difficulties numerous movements or associations have in expressing their opinions or practices without reprisals.

The cultural creatives:

One may very aptly cite Pascal, one of the “inventors” of the experimental method, showing that only concrete experience of material and spiritual events, and fidelity to the facts, can advance personal and human knowledge. On this point he opposed Descartes, who advocated the superiority of reasoning over facts. That too is the Age of Enlightenment. In the United States, 20% of people are considered “cultural creatives”, who create their own references and ways of life without waiting for “instructions” and prohibitions from the State, experimenting and advancing culture “in the field”. The future of our civilisation lies with these pioneers.

Conclusion

Far from the proclaimed French-style universalism, which nobody wants beyond our frontiers, we discover rather a besieged fortress which, according to a wholly Pasteurian theory, wants to protect itself from microbes and viruses coming from abroad, indeed from the “internal enemy”, each country being affected by “defects” liable to damage our secular genetic heritage. Every person born on French territory must be vaccinated by 15 years of school — knowing that there exists in parallel a systematic attack against all the schools taking other paths, such as the Steiner schools. A stiffening similar to that of the Catholic Church of the nineteenth century, besieged by modernity, which hurled anathemas and excommunicated by the cartload.

Blacklists, witchcraft trials, charlatanism, convictions for “thought outside the norms”, broken families and businesses, confiscation of research material, are the modern paths of the French inquisition.

Specific? Yes, this society, and those who have seized the levers of power in all the brotherhoods and bodies that count, has numerous specificities that are often liberticidal. But one cannot silence liberty and truth indefinitely. Let us recall this sentence of the chemist Paul Bert, in 1872: “We are in the domain of conscience, at whose threshold the law of the majority stops.”

As in the time when the Protestants, Voltaire and Rousseau had to take refuge abroad in order to continue thinking freely, while some died on the scaffold, were sent to the galleys or were imprisoned in the Bastille for a play or a pamphlet, one sees more and more today all our best philosophers, educators, researchers and doctors, a few agrarian or spiritualist communities, therapists and educators constrained to leave their countries — not for lack of love, but simply in order to exist and to live according to their conscience and to what they know.

France, country of the enlightenment (today extinguished), wake up!