This is the expression that all the ministers have had in their mouths since the start of the school year: energy sobriety. Words are never meaningless. They always carry within them a history, connotations, presuppositions that influence our way of thinking. And when a new word imposes itself, it is never in an obvious way. It always does this by eclipsing other concepts which often supported competing propositions. Winning the battle of words is already gaining the upper hand in the war of ideas.
In this case, we could have found other words than “sobriety”: we could have spoken of “effort” or “responsibility”, quite simply. Or “moderation”, “weighting”, “parsimony”, “savings”… But no: it is the word “sobriety” that has imposed itself, and it does not come from nowhere.
Sobriety is an ideal that emerged in the anti-globalization sphere at the start of the 21st century. The idea is that we could live by taking fewer resources from the environment. And not just in terms of energy: it is also about using less plastic, consuming less clothing, artificializing less soil, traveling less far, etc. Basically: living with less, but being happier.
Sobriety is, for example, one of the levers put forward by IPCC scientists to respond to the climate crisis. And their definition is directly linked to the origin of the word: for them, sobriety is a set of practices to avoid energy demands. That is to say, concretely, to do without certain things. Replacing plane lines with train lines, abandoning individual cars in the city, possibly giving up on certain energy-intensive technological innovations: 5G, ultra HD video streaming, cryptocurrencies, etc.
Is that what the government has in mind when it comes up with a big sobriety plan? One can doubt it, listening to the President of the Republic, at the beginning of October, during the Salon des entrepreneurs organized by the BPI: “That doesn’t mean producing less, I haven’t changed my opinion on that! Anything you can do to produce the best quality, even more but spending less, that’s good sobriety We must accelerate efforts on energy. Sobriety just means gaining in efficiency.”
It is therefore not at all a question of reducing demand, but just of using less energy to satisfy the same uses. For the IPCC, this has a name: energy efficiency. And moreover, Emmanuel Macron says it himself, in a marvelously confusing sentence: “Sobriety just means gaining in efficiency”. No: gaining in efficiency means efficiency, but not sobriety at all!
I don’t think so: I think he knows exactly what he’s doing. Because, in this war of words, concepts don’t just lose or win. They can also be captured, reinvested, redefined. Emmanuel Macron is currently carrying out a hold-up on the word sobriety: he found it among his adversaries, emptied it of its content, changed its meaning and, in the end, made him lose all his power of subversion. And besides, it’s far from being the first time: universal income, ecological planning, revolution… He spent his time depriving his opponents of their rhetorical weapons.
This is a risky strategy: the original meaning of the word never completely disappears behind the redefinition, and there is always the risk that it will reappear later. Will Emmanuel Macron’s strategy ultimately help popularize the objective of sobriety defended by the IPCC? It’s possible. In the meantime, the Head of State has won a victory in terms of the lexicon: this is not the least of the political assets.