Harassment, insults, attacks France in the face of violence

Saturday, August 31, 1974. Jean Lecanuet, Keeper of the Seals and Mayor of Rouen, back in his city, walks the rue de la République. He is flabbergasted. In front of a war setting, his throat knotted, he improvises a few words on "the escalation of violence". The Norman capital had organized the day before a popular ball celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of its liberation. The mayor visits the traders, traumatized. We are talking about dozens of young people – or hundreds, we don't know, we don't know anymore. Angry and drunk.

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“I find it lamentable, continues the mayor, that a ball given in honor of freedom and offered by resistance fighters and deportees is thus distorted. Violence is inexcusable and is even more intolerable at a party of this nature. Those responsible for these acts of vandalism must be prosecuted. Order and freedom must be maintained. »

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"Le Monde" dated Monday, September 2 relates the events: "The surroundings of the town hall offered, Saturday at dawn, the appearance of a square devastated during the night by a violent tornado: poles torn signs, bent parking meters, broken windows, overturned newsstands. It all started, it seems, with a classic brawl between two rival gangs that broke out just before midnight. The intervention of the police then generated another scenario, just as classic. The young people, forgetting their quarrels, united against the police. The confrontation was going to be violent: stone throwing on one side, truncheons and tear gas canisters on the other. Calm was not restored until after 1 a.m. Some demonstrators, whose exact number is unknown, were injured. Twenty-six arrests, half of which were minors, were made. »

In this society at the end of its tether, of breath, of nerves, at the end of everything, the slightest incident is a pretext for invective

Okay. The violence has always been there. Even in Giscardian France. But she has changed. She no longer resembles herself. We don't recognize her. To claim that we did not meet her anywhere in 1974 would be false; to say that we are experiencing it everywhere in 2022 is true. Violence is no longer an exaction that detaches itself from this backdrop of civil peace. Violence has become this backdrop. It is now the setting of our lives, it forms the landscape of our existence. It is not part of our daily life: it is our daily life that is now part of it.

This country – France – full of intellectual, cultural and economic wealth, has metamorphosed into a stairwell of monstrous dimensions. This French-style violence is not one of these frank and clear violences, tied to hunger, famine, misery, dictatorship, war as there are too many around the world (Brazil, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, etc. .). This is in no way a "question of life or death", but a gratuitous, cowardly violence, above ground and as if fallen from the sky - it has in fact made its breeding ground on incivilities like we don't. found nowhere else; an aggressiveness now more representative of “home” than the Moulin-Rouge, the baguette and our cheeses.

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French-style violence is the continuation of depression by other means, the incessant manifestation of a malaise that has been brewing for a long time and which, abandoned to its logic and restrained by no authority – which it has finally understood – is in the process of establishing itself as a natural modality of Frenchness. The ecosystem of the French is no longer peace, but confrontation. This chaos of each moment, and of each city, each district, each street, is due – among other things – to the pollution of the real by the virtual. There are now two parallel realities, each almost equally legitimate: the reality of existence and the reality of computers. Alas, the provocations unleashed on the second find their conclusions, often catastrophic and sometimes macabre, in the first.

I'll be teaching how to write a SOAP note today! DM me if you want to join

— 🍯🍯 Wed Jul 07 20:54:24 +0000 2021

Maëva Frossard, alias "MavaChou", 32, mother of four, committed suicide three days before Christmas: she was a "youtuber", which is neither a job, nor a function, nor a status , but the simple title of those who seek at all costs to exist, for better or for worse, in this society that crushes them. Maëva had raised a campaign of unanimous detestation against her – possibly orchestrated by her ex-husband, Adrien Czajczynski, guru of her community of “Internet users” – without, of course, the platforms concerned intervening or not being moved. For years, the couple shared the slightest episode of their marital intimacy with anonymous people via videos (outings, pregnancies, report cards, shopping). Sponsors are found. Better than a series on Netflix. When the couple explodes, the comments turn malicious; we interfere in this private cosmos that has gradually become public. Each subscriber believes he is authorized to judge what, "addicted", he attends. Above all, what begins on the screen continues in the street: strangers have come to Maëva's house, filmed her house, tracked her whereabouts.

Cyberbullying is not cyber; even dematerialized, it is indeed a pack of rabid dogs that enters your home

“Celebrity for all”: this is what the Internet promises and allows for men and women who do not have the psychological means to assume the consequences of this (false) light – celebrity is the aristocracy of Today. Someone who begins to "exist", to emerge from the mass, immediately sees a swarm of furious wasps buzzing around him, ready to sting. We call "online hate" the blind, instantaneous, panurgic and unhinged, exponential and mad violence that descends on a prey whose pseudonymous abstraction conceals a person of flesh and bones who, overwhelmed by the deluge of intimidation that she started alone, gets scared, panics and goes haywire. “Cyberbullying”, a silly word for an atrocious concept, ultimately has nothing to do with “cyber”; even dematerialized, it is indeed a pack of rabid dogs that enters the living room, the bedroom, the office. We went after MavaChou, but it was Maëva that we found dead.

In this France at the end of its tether, of breath, of nerves, at the end of everything, the slightest incident is a pretext for invective; the most insignificant annoyance translates into a physical threat, if not of death. Medical laboratories, exposed to the health crisis, are doubly immolated: on the port side, by disgruntled patients, whose anguish is reflected in insults towards the counter secretaries; to starboard, by the "antivax", who, fist raised, call the staff "collaborators". Because yes, another French specialty: no sedition without a Godwin point, no belching without Vichy miasmas – whether to draw inspiration from it or to defile its victim. The French love France. But the French hate the French. Abroad, they miss France, but as soon as they meet a compatriot, they frown, looking disgusted, ready to prank.

In the France of 2022, the most harmless pharmacy calls for its security guard – as in the past at the entrance to concerts and nightclubs. We have unknowingly entered the era of “security guards”. We had known the police officers and the wardens and the peacekeepers – they were official, state and listed. The “security agents”, coming out of nowhere, are the immune response of the social body to its irrational fears that our institutions no longer know how to contain. A number of pharmacists, already exhausted by the antigenic tests they carry out and the self-tests they provide, find themselves forced to post reminders of the law on their shop windows (but isn't a law a deterrent only at the only condition that the penalty it contains does not remain in the vaporous contours of the theory?), specifying the fine and the penalty punishing any contempt. A pharmacist testifies: she locks herself in the toilet several times a day to cry. Among patients, self-proclaimed customers kings: zero compassion, unlimited demands.

Sweet France: a country ruined by spoiled children, where everything constantly threatens to degenerate. Nothing ever works; nothing is ever fast enough. Douce France – ask foreigners – in permanent burn-out. Under pressure. Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Rennes are pressure cookers. Every once venial dysfunction is a ticking time bomb.

Any word, any writing, any remark, any opinion, any opinion, any reflection, any thought, any position that does not please is immediately sanctioned, with the help of an “internet” pack, by the promise of swift punishments. In this backwater of national resentment, everything constantly demands reparation; everything is seen as a provocation, everything is perceived as an attack, everything is read through the unbearable prism of “lack of respect”. No nuance is possible: everything is transformed into a definitive statement, into a threatening sentence. The context ? What context? You have to explain yourself, apologize, make amends, ask forgiveness on your knees from people you don't know. Otherwise…

The sacrosanct notion of “respect” is so brandished that it no longer means anything. The non-vaccinated are unaware of civility, their despisers are unaware of the measure. So it's the algarade, the insult, the fists, sometimes the blade. In this France that has become immature, even spitting overflows the terrain of early childhood; this means of expression, by which, alas, the contempt that everyone has for everyone is summed up. On January 10, a traveler refusing to wear the mask, and outraged on the pretext that he was reminded of the rule in use on the territory, projected his oral liquid against the face of the controller. “Tell your family that they won’t see you again” was the sentence – sadly banal these days – with which the clash ended. The saliva attack is a great classic of Covid-19 France. Obviously, the author, rather than serving a sentence worthy of the name, is walking around at this hour at home, an electronic bracelet on his foot. There is a God for spitters, no doubt.

I admit that I didn't understand the "controversy" (a word more often pronounced than "hello", "thank you" and "please") Camille-Mbappé the first time I discovered his report in the press. Or rather if: having understood for the first time what he had read, my brain convinced itself that it was not possible. But that was it. " The case ? “: an 8-year-old girl, stricken with a serious congenital disease, was lynched on social networks because she implored Mbappé to stay at PSG: “Little one, you are going to eat yourself a right! » ; “He doesn’t give a fuck about you Camille. I swear he doesn't care. Let's not believe that Twitter has the merit of highlighting what people once thought that would now be visible. It is visibility, precisely, that creates these new impulses from scratch: in the past, we would have smiled, laughed at the football analyzes of a little girl; today, behind a screen, individuals aged 20, 30, 40, 50 are typing on their keyboards that they wish him dead.

But all that is nothing. For the moment, we are only in the realm of XXL incivility. The best is yet to come: gratuitous violence, playful exactions, pastime barbarism. Most often filmed, otherwise it's not funny. Ali, 67, with a broken shoulder and bruised face, was dragged – for no reason other than kindly agreeing to offer a cigarette – by a car with the laughing passengers. His heartbreaking pleas, everyone will see on the viral video (these are the videos that today serve as cinema and entertainment) did not trigger an ounce of empathy in his torturers; as for remorse, let's not count on it too much: what the victim risks is to be a victim again, a victim squared - if he takes the molestation's audacity to assert his rights. reckoning, not the slightest trace of affront to wash away, or law of retaliation of HLM: only the enjoyment of evil for evil's sake. Fun bestiality. Funny inhumanity. Twisting abjection. The culprits identified, hordes of anonymous avengers have obviously planned to pay a courtesy visit to the families. And so on. It's endless. Do social networks play a role in this urban primitivism? Obviously: not only do we take action to film, but, above all, we film to take action.

The death threat has become the trade union fare in the land of freaking out

In the past, the Presidents of the Republic (Sadi Carnot, Paul Doumer) were assassinated; today, violence has become more democratic: the most modest of elected officials, local or national, see themselves taken to task, denied their right to think what they think, becoming the target of madmen. Stéphane Claireaux, LREM deputy for Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, had a very bitter experience of this: his support for the vaccination pass made him a scapegoat. From a political adversary, he turned into a personal enemy. There you go, that's it: everyone, all day, takes everything personally. We no longer think in terms of a national community. It is the domestic indisposition that rules. The authorities are no longer authoritative. Institutions are demonetized: we no longer want to be represented, we want to come in person. It is no longer a question of discussing; we are here to break. " It has to change ! a yellow vest dropped at me. " What exactly ? I had replied. Fantastic answer: “I don't know, me… Everything. »

In 2021, nearly 2,000 elected officials were molested, outraged and vilified. The death threat has become the trade union fare in the country of freaking out: for a control perceived as superfluous, a decision interpreted as intolerable, an arbitration considered as unfair, we draw the specter of beheading, immolation, whatever I again. We do justice ourselves. By dint of believing that everything is permitted, we think that we are all-powerful. The brave Jean Lecanuet died a long time ago. His France is no longer ours, our France is no longer his. The French no longer support each other intellectually, socially or physically. From school to nursing homes, they no longer “fuck on each other”, as bad sleepers, as in the seventies: they kill each other like animals. How to reform this gigantic pile of mud? To do nothing amounts to non-assistance to people in danger. Because it is no longer a population that suffers, but a people that dies.