Jocelyn Coulon’s autobiographical essay, entitled My Franceis filled with fine analyzes by the renowned political scientist, born in Quebec in 1957 to a French-Canadian mother, Andrée Deschênes, and a French father, Jacques Coulon, who arrived in Montreal in 1953. His parents married, specifies- he, amused, “not without my father having been baptized a few hours before, a requirement of my very Catholic maternal grandfather”!
Jacques Coulon belonged to that minority of French people whom some of their compatriots, looking back on the past, qualify with a smile as “impious”. The scoffers often call a completely different minority, which includes the Catholic left, a very different minority, whose great figure, Jean-Marie Domenach (1922-1997), sees the French, faced with decline, as “a “drained people”, to use, he wrote, the terrible expression that Gaston Miron applied to Quebec”.
Like Domenach, who harshly judged French domination in Algeria before this country became independent in 1962, Jocelyn Coulon calls into question “the golden legend of paternalistic and civilizing colonization”. If, before being elected President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron admitted in 2017 that colonization “is a crime against humanity”, once elected, he “never, deplores the author, presented apologies” to the peoples who have suffered because of France.
Again like Domenach, who was worried, from 1995, about the “twilight of French culture”, to the point of thinking that “on the scale of the world, France is beginning to resemble Quebec on the scale of America du Nord”, Coulon endorsed the fears of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. He uses the words of the French historian and politician: “The invasion of the Anglo-American puts our language in peril of death. »
The decline of France, Coulon has the intelligence to relativize it by referring to Pierre-Antoine Delhommais, one of the experts who justify the subtitle of his essay: Portraits and other considerations. This French economic journalist attacks the “overvaluation of the past” which, on television and in the cinema, embellishes the history of France. He corrects this vision by mentioning, among other things, “the appalling famines of the great century of Louis XIV, the appalling conditions of the miners” around 1900.
As if to console himself for this sad picture, Coulon strives to emphasize that today France remains, despite everything, in his words, “a great power”. It “has, he specifies, the second operational army in the world after the United States”. But does Coulon’s emphatic pride manage to dissipate a sneaky shudder of horror in him?