Nineteen degrees! Not one more, take it for granted! This is how President Emmanuel Macron solemnly announced to the French that they should spend the winter in down jackets and turtlenecks. Young or old, chilly or not, we should not, he says, heat above 19°C this winter. Energy crisis obliges!
Strangely, the word “rationing” was not mentioned. Unlike the oil shock era of the 1970s, it is probably too harsh for the frail ears of today’s citizens. Under the mild euphemism of “energy sobriety”, it is however the first time that a president has told his fellow citizens how to heat their homes and at what time they should take their shower. The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, pushed the ridicule so far as to encourage taxpayers to bring out their turtlenecks. And the minister to exhibit hisprobably paid 300 euros in a shop in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
You can’t imagine de Gaulle or Mitterrand lecturing voters and telling them how to adjust their thermostat or what to wear in winter. Firstly because, thanks to nuclear power, they had made France, like Quebec, an energy fortress that produced the cheapest electricity in Europe. Then, because in these not so distant times, politicians hesitated to venture beyond the doorstep of citizens.
This era is now in the rearview mirror. Hardly a day goes by without a minister, a mayor or a dark civil servant telling us what to eat, what type of car to buy, how to recycle our waste or how many hours of sport to do each day.
The slogan of the 1980s, “moderation tastes better”, has long since passed. In France, the law forces food manufacturers to end their messages with these injunctions: “avoid eating too fatty, too sweet, too salty”, “eat at least five fruits and vegetables a day” or “practice a physical activity regular”. Even car manufacturers must, under pain of sanctions, go there with a moral of the kind “for short journeys, favor walking or cycling” or “on a daily basis, take public transport”.
This way of infantilizing the citizen perhaps explains part of the anger that our governments have aroused during the pandemic. Many of the disgruntled people encountered in these demonstrations were not protesting so much against the vaccines as against this way of speaking to the people by telling them twenty times a day to go and wash their hands. As if the normal citizen needed to be told all day long that you have to drink water when it’s hot.
Basically, the pandemic has only been an indicator of this propensity of modern states to interfere in the smallest recesses of our lives. Tocqueville had warned us against what he called “soft despotism”. He was referring to the propensity of democratic governments to transform each nation into a “herd of timid and industrious animals whose government is the shepherd”. Big Mother being basically just the mild version of Big Brother.
Didn’t eco-feminist MP Sandrine Rousseau recently propose creating “a crime of ‘non-sharing of domestic tasks’”? It is difficult not to see in this omnipresent mothering a form of contempt, that of a child-people whose every suspicious behavior should be scrutinized.
But it could also be seen as a way of concealing the growing impotence of the state. Because it will always be easier for a president to tell everyone how to keep warm than to admit that the closure of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant, in Alsace, which could have operated for another decade, was a major error motivated by reasons essentially electoralists. It is also difficult to admit that, without the alignment decided by Europe of the price of electricity on that of gas, France would enjoy, thanks to nuclear power, a decisive advantage over its neighbours.
The less states seem to have a hold on globalization, the more they seem inclined to take care of our private lives, to multiply societal reforms and to lecture us. Failing to control the essential levers, the empire of good will prefer to mother the voter. Since “the gods fell to earth”, as Philippe Muray said, morality has moved from the confessional to the ministerial cabinets, from the parish weekly to the television news.
Between the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, while little Armenia is being swallowed up by its Islamist neighbors and Iranian women are tearing their veils at the risk of their lives, what the Council of Europe this week? The director of its children’s rights division, Regina Jensdottir, wanted to banish this abominable punishment which consists of sending a child to think in his room! A punishment deemed too “violent” for the tender cherubim of the XXIe century.
By dint of dancing on a volcano, waking up will only be more painful.