Has France earned its purge ?
We don’t believe in the tragic — but the tragic doesn’t care.
It is a healthy habit to question one’s thoughts. These days, the atmosphere of the country brought one to my mind :
Why not purge French society of all its noxious elements ?
It is an incredibly seductive, simple and natural idea. When you see people behaving poorly, you wonder, “Why not just remove them ?”. To wish for a so-called purge is to wish for simplicity and clarity in a world that offers mostly ambiguity.
But the more you think about it, the more you understand why it may not be such a good idea :
Once unleashed, fire burns indiscriminately. An individual may decree who is noxious and who isn’t. But when a group takes over that judgment, it is only a matter of time until this mechanism gets weaponized against more and more people.
This desire for a purge betrays an almost pathological obsession with purity and absolute control. It reveals a childish vision of society, and a refusal to acknowledge the immanent presence of aggressiveness within it. A conflictless society is an illusion. Long-lasting societies are the ones that channel the tension, not erase it.
How do such “extreme” thoughts come to my mind ?
It came to me after I read about a teenager stabbing another to death, and then being sentenced to… eight years in prison. A sentence that seems to say that life is negotiable. That murder can be administratively diluted. A teenager can kill another one and walk free before he turns twenty-five.
That sentence is entirely compatible with French law. But French law was born from the ashes of sacredness and moral absolutes. Nothing is sacred, everything is negotiable. It seems that something in the moral structure has collapsed. Or perhaps, that we have collectively agreed to pretend it never existed.
The civilization of amortization
The French Republic is that schoolteacher who wants you to succeed, but just not too much. It wants you to have good grades to flatter its own ego, but withholds real knowledge to ensure you never outgrow it. This quiet sabotage has a name : equality.
Since the Revolution, inequality has been seen as a mortal threat to stability. Which is why France lives in constant fear of liberty. For liberty makes inequality inevitable.
Freedom and equality aren’t twins. They are rivals.
To keep things from spinning out of control, the Republic lightens the burdens of the weak with subsidies, with lenient justice, and holds the strong in check, through progressive taxation and bureaucratic drag.
This produces frustration on both ends. But this frustration is not an error. Because the goal lies elsewhere : mitigating the risk of internal disorder.
Like any living organism, a political regime seeks self-preservation above all. Totalitarian systems do so through violence. Modern France does the opposite: it suffocates conflict under layers of softness. It keeps the pot from boiling by keeping the flame perpetually low.
This is the civilization of amortization. A soft control structure in which everyone is both protected and paralysed. A civilization that doesn’t pursue true justice (of any kind) per se. It does only as long as justice aligns with stability. Otherwise, it is largely willing to walk all over it.
To believe or not to believe in the tragic
The civilization of amortization has both advocates and critics. The difference between the two is not political. They differ in their philosophical, if not metaphysical, views of the world.
The “amortizer” believes in comfort.
He is no lover of power or glory. A cautious humanist, willing to sacrifice greatness for comfort and humanity. The world is harsh enough already, let’s make existence as comfortable as possible for the greatest number and ease their suffering. He sees the flaws of the civilization of amortization, but also sees it as a system of dignity : you might hear him say : ”We don’t let people starve on the streets !”.
His views are actually legitimate. They may stem from experiences of devastation (the welfare state is a child of WWII), and a side of Christian compassion (in which the most fragile individual is as good as a king).
Others (like me), believe in the tragic.
They also see the world’s ruthlessness. Yet they discern an underlying sense of order beneath it. The suffering on our paths are not just things to avoid or erase, but obstacles to overcome that lend meaning to our lives. There is no bliss without hardship. No beauty without struggle. That is just the way it is. It is the essence of human adventure.
They do not believe in this ideal, sweet, equal, and safe world. And say : “I want my life to have meaning, not to be easy”. And if it’s easy, it probably won’t have any meaning at all.
This is the legacy of the Greeks — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Heraclitus — and of Nietzsche. The spirit of tragedy. Its characters are faced with the unrelenting will of the gods, which simply can’t be thwarted, and they end up being crushed. Tragedy teaches that no one, king, queen, or warrior, can escape hardship.
I honestly wish the civilization of amortization would bring eternal peace to human societies. But deep down, I believe that it’s like trying to hold back a river with a dam.
After years of good service, the dam is full of small cracks (massive debt, declining international power, confiscatory taxation, internal violence…). It holds, until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, it kills, reminding us that the river was never tamed.
On the day that the civilization of amortization collapses, it might not look much better than a purge.
Paul
