the rigor that scares

The news put into perspective every Saturday, thanks to the historian Fabrice d’Almeida.

Rigor has long been considered a right-wing value, a mark of seriousness of conservatives and liberals. The left was the cicadas, with social measures, the left bloc, the left cartel, the Popular Front. Each time there followed a right-wing government which was to restore the balance: Clemenceau, Poincaré, Laval… Léon Blum’s break, even, at the end of the Popular Front, was a return to budgetary rigor. Rigor was a positive idea, but classified on the right.

This was still true at the start of the Fifth Republic, with Antoine Pinay, De Gaulle’s first minister of Finance and Economic Affairs. For him, rigor goes with economic success, it is the prerequisite. We found this idea in 1976, when Raymond Barre succeeded Jacques Chirac. Commentators speak of rigor in the face of his predecessor’s relaunch, even though it is one of the first supply-side policies. We are talking about putting the accounts in order.

Curiously, the socialists and Pierre Mauroy, in 1981, shifted the word to the left. The new alternating Prime Minister uses this vocabulary to reassure. But in fact, it is far from playing the game of reducing spending. Even the Minister of the Economy Jacques Delors uses the word, while the currency is falling and deficits are exploding, from September 1981.

So much so that in 1983 it was no longer about austerity that we were talking about, but about austerity policy. The situation is serious but the president seeks to minimize the turning point. François Mitterrand is in full denial, wanting people to believe that nothing has changed and that he is pursuing the same policy… But everyone understands. The turning point triggers strikes and causes the popularity of the left to fall. Just afterwards, she lost the legislative elections. A sign that we must not give the impression of rigor, unless we annoy the French.

Since then, it has been impossible to talk about rigor and austerity without feeling like weaving the rope to get ourselves hanged. Balladur, Juppé, Valls: all hide the word.

Basically, the return of the word rigor with Michel Barnier today manifests the old belief that a right-wing government will put an end to the expensive practice of a cicada president. A return to the sources of vocabulary and decisions after a centrist eclipse.