April 2, 1974: President Pompidou died... Pompidou was to begin with a small professor of letters who taught French, Latin and Greek then a fighter of the Second World War. Demobilized during the armistice of June 22, 1940, he did not join the Resistance. After the end of the war, by social promotion he will reach the highest responsibilities until becoming the president of the French Republic. This presidency, although shortened by illness, will be most active until the end of his life: in five years, he has established a "new society", not exactly that dreamed of by his Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas but the two visions complemented each other.
Previously, Georges Pompidou was a banker at Rothschild from 1953 until obtaining the portfolio of Prime Minister in 1962. Everywhere, he demonstrated exceptional adaptability and a certain dilettantism born of his ease of work, confused by the handsome speakers with laziness. He acquired the experience of Prime Minister by directing four successive governments, under the presidency of General de Gaulle. He drew in his political wake three generations of future presidents: Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac.
He described François Mitterrand "on the peaceful banks of the opposition, like the emigrants of the Ancien Régime on the shores of England" and he said to him: "the future is not yours... The future is not for ghosts”. And Mitterrand, once he became president, was just as fierce with his opponents: from DSK, he judged that "He is a player with no destiny". And DSK himself, fired from the IMF, said in turn that "The PS has no future and that is a good thing". Pompidou finally reluctantly accepted that Britain, the United States' Trojan horse, joined the EEC, at the risk of jeopardizing the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). And Britain will show its demands and its desire for independence, until this last referendum to leave the EU, which led to Brexit.
Humanist, Pompidou dared in his time ask to redistribute in part the wealth accumulated during the "Thirty Glorious Years" by the new rich and offer some unexpected advantages to the workers, women, to the poor and the disabled in the 1970s, with for example new modern and humanized hospitals, aid for families and resources for the elderly, reform of the pension system, social guarantees in the event of accident, illness, old age, monthly payment of wages, upgrading of work workers and vocational training, the creation of an allowance for disabled adults, the most generous paid holiday policy in the European Community, the reform of the minimum wage, etc.
Its name still evokes "the capacity of the State to lead the industrialization of the country", if possible in concertation (to avoid a new May 68).
Faced with the multiplication of road accidents, Pompidou created the Interministerial Committee for Road Safety, which has not prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths and especially disabled people who saturate hospitals and widen the deficit of our " Social Security". The time was carefree and he did not have to fight against great epidemics but there were hidden tragedies everywhere.
Pompidou modernized our agriculture and encouraged agro-industry without knowing the devastation that this industrialization would cause in the fifty years to come, with the European policy of the CAP and the all-powerful FNSEA to manage conflicts of interest. At the same time, he developed the regional planning and organized the consolidation, which became the ruin of our countryside. Despite everything, he created the Ministry of the Environment with "the political will to defend nature in the 1970s".
He participated in the launch of the first French satellite, the success of Airbus and the TGV, and he organized the motorway network around Paris.
Finally, not to mention everything, he worked to transmit to us his passion in the arts and letters, the transmission of knowledge and culture. He had as Minister of State for Cultural Affairs named André Malraux in four successive governments under De Gaulle, from 1962.
Thus he restructured the whole society to improve our common lot and we owe him everything we still enjoy today in France in the organization of work or in the face of illness. But its benefits faded with the social revolts preceding the first oil shock in 1973 and the end of our most glorious thirty years in France. He probably learned of his inevitable end between 1968 and 1971 but it was in 1974 that his illness was fatal to him.
Its Prime Minister, the co-author of his reforms between 1969 and 1972, was Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a Saint-Cyrien, great sportsman, former resistance fighter, now brigadier general, deputy mayor and three times president of the National Assembly. For his inauguration speech as Prime Minister of Pompidou, Chaban was quite enlightened, laying the foundations for a "New Society" (but in his own way), as an act of faith and solidarity.
Alas, since Pompidou, everything tends to prove that the successive technocrats, from the "grandes écoles", were good-for-nothing and uneducated. Pompidou was far from an uncultivated person but undoubtedly one of the last humanists reconverted "in the interest of France" into "Captain of industry". His successors will often be content to clumsily perpetuate what Pompidou had designed and achieved.
For example François Mitterrand, also condemned by the disease, was often only a “little player” with harsh remarks: “This is none of your business!” he liked to say. Giscard d'Estaing was the most inspired to him of all these Presidents by writing a “European Constitution” and Jacques Chirac had a good time going to eat sausage and test the ass of the cows at the "Salon de l'Agriculture".
None of these successors denounced the criminal defects of this frenzied industrialization of our country: immensely polluting factories and obese and destructive productivist agriculture based on chemicals, that imposed by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to obtain the most high yields possible. Asia and China, by taking over our less efficient industries, also recovered the corresponding pollution.
After, what about Macron, versus Pompidou, imagining such a fight in the ring?
Macron is just a bantamweight (when Pompidou was a heavyweight), even with boxer Édouard Philippe as prime minister. His vision is narrowed and he resembles all these technocrats melted into the same mold of the "grandes écoles": his culture seems to me notably insufficient, even curiously absent and more based on an exercise in memory than on a historical understanding, even if he spends his nights sleeplessness to read. Mitterrand, Sarkozy and Hollande had also tried to rub themselves against modern culture with more or less happiness and sometimes in secondary registers: literature but also cinema, pop songs etc.
Macron is just a bantamweight (when Pompidou was a heavyweight), even with boxer Édouard Philippe as prime minister. His vision is narrowed and he resembles all these technocrats melted into the same mold of the "grandes écoles": his culture seems to me notably insufficient, even curiously absent and more based on an exercise in memory than on a historical understanding, even if he spends his nights sleeplessness to read. Mitterrand, Sarkozy and Hollande had also tried to rub themselves against modern culture with more or less happiness and sometimes in secondary registers: literature but also cinema, pop songs etc.
Twice alas, the essential is not what we can see: “humanist culture” is born from observation, comparison, study, pleasure and memory. Intellectual in books, sensual in museums (of which France is rich) and in admirable nature, humanism naturally establishes scales of values to judge its time. There is nothing pre-chewed or predictable and gives a taste for effort, travel and conquest.
In contrast, the development of the “all digital” of which Macron was the minister under the presidency of François Hollande promotes the digitization/virtualization of all the elements that seem to characterize our cultural exception, the transfer of all the information digitized towards the databases of “Big data” in America or in India to then restore them on demand on any screens, the capture of our identities while passing to monetize these transfers, the use of the communication network American "plug and pay" and all orchestrated in fine on the stock exchanges in the cult of king profit and insolent success: "It is because I am worth it ...". But which person is worth all this money?
Is Macron the genius we imagine? Does he win market share elsewhere than in the military armaments industry? If he sacrifices entire sections of France: air space (Air France); the electronic, computer and digital space with the leak of our technologies and our engineers (after the failure of Alcatel-Lucent, Matra, Alstom dismantled and sold to General Electric or Siemens); our public administrations soon to be digitized in Big Data and outsourced to India; our uberized businesses including hotels and restaurants and all offered to the hegemony of the great powers, multinationals and financial markets, then such a government greatly threatens our economy and our independence. Soon, we will be museified and statufied like idiots, a kepi on the head and a baguette under the arm.
Macron wants to be the representative of a "digital generation", at a time when new smartphones seem to have the answer, with the assistance of pseudo-intelligent programs. Did his computerized operational headquarters help him win the presidential elections? No doubt, but It is not advantageous for him against the stature of a Georges Pompidou. The processing and study of a large mass of personal information can favor a candidate without party and without support by indicating the right choices, as in an election rigged by Donald Trump, but without adding anything to his greatness. For these men commentators speak of "charisma", a mysterious thing to describe their surprising success, but Steve Jobs yesterday or Donald Trump today may seem absolutely hateful to us despite their personal success.
We often talk about "artificial intelligence" about machines, but these are today just superprograms that are increasingly used to make the world go round on control screens with operators, computer scientists and programmers behind them. It remains for robots to become "humanly intelligent" and to really put themselves at our service, ie to integrate a "humanist approach" ... Except that humanism cannot be invented, cannot be copied neither is it decreed, and it is not kids in computerized rooms who can translate an ancient culture, of which they know nothing, in machine language. So, to put it simply, how to integrate poverty, ignorance, isolation, old age, illness and death in their algorithms? And in whose service, in what project and by what manipulations?
Pompidou put himself at the service of men and not of a virtualized "plug and pay" society. He did not want a "state super-structure" led by a sphinx like François Mitterrand or a god like Jupiter (the name of his labrador). He simply wondered how to improve everyone's life, and he developed the corresponding reforms as so many sophisticated programs presented to citizens: "Have you dreamed of it?" I did it... but nothing to do with an Apple computer and the vanity of a Steve Jobs.
Pompidou explained that he believed more in man than in society. Except that there is a new concept to include in his speech, and Georges Pompidou would have quickly assimilated it: society taken as a whole acts like a self-destructive super-organism with its warlike madness, its polluting industries emitting gases greenhouse effect and its intensive agriculture which is fatal to biodiversity. In addition, we are threatened at all times, because of our recklessness, by natural disasters and epidemics.
To redress these deadly addictions, it would be necessary for each individual to become aware of being part of a whole and of the global threat which hangs over the entire planet as a result of human contamination: diseases, global warming, depletion of resources, the growing injustice of the human condition between the North and the South, the lack of water, wars etc.
Each of us should have the ability to challenge the power in place to tip the scales on the bright side, while the powerful, the wealthy, industrialists and farmers, bankers and financiers, governments, lobbies and the entire Establishment remain in denial. These reject the "precautionary principle" to protect their economic interests in the short term, even when they know that the social and planetary cost will be infinitely greater than the added benefits of some of them. And once their misdeeds are accomplished, the "polluter pays" principle is flouted ...
I think of this farmer, very alone in his mountain, who sees his beehives empty and his feet of lavender dried up. In the past, its ancestors victoriously fought against the vagaries of the weather, but what can be done against neurotoxic pesticides and greenhouse gases?
The real problem is that ordinary citizens, even sufficiently informed, are deprived of the opportunity to express themselves in Europe (and worse in America) to denounce the serious shortcomings concerning the health of all and the obvious abuses of a few.
Our only hope to make ourselves heard as “a humanity in the imminence of planetary destruction” is to organize petitions when, on the contrary, we have to react all together. In the absence of these petitions, our leaders organize consultations on priorities of their choice or unnecessary referendums, with questions that do not question their blindness about the very survival of the species.
“Intelligent machines” could be useful to us by bringing everyone's fears back to our respective governments and by overcoming industrial excesses all over the planet. Electronic or quantum brains, automata and robots would become, in a catastrophic scenario, "super-cops" responsible for saving the Earth from our irresponsibility, by all means and all possible restrictions. In summary, the most advanced form of machines would be to enslave us to protect ourselves!
To remove the specter of inevitable self-destruction, Emmanuel Macron should ask himself the right questions: what to do to protect us from devastating industries, pollution and epidemics, threatening machines and transhumanism in the service of projects totalitarian? What reforms would be needed to make life less hopeless for us without further delay?
Let us listen to what humanist terms Georges Pompidou* and Jacques Chaban-Delmas* used to express themselves:
* "The Republic must be that of the politicians, in the true sense of the term, of those for whom human problems prevail over all the others, of those who have a concrete knowledge of these problems, born of contact with men, not of an abstract or pseudo-scientific analysis of man. It is by frequenting men, by measuring their difficulties, their sufferings, their desires and their immediate needs, such as they feel them or such as sometimes that it is necessary to teach them to discern them, that one becomes able to govern, that is to say effectively to assure to a people the maximum of happiness compatible with the national possibilities and the external conjuncture. The time is no longer for Louis XVI in his Palace of Versailles, in the midst of his elders, but nothing would look more like it than a large computer, directing the electronic control room for the conditioning of men.” Dixit Georges Pompidou.
* “The new society that we must build must also be, it must be said, a united society; In solidarity, of course, with the weak and the unlucky, and in this regard the foremost among our concerns are the poorly housed, the elderly, the handicapped and widows. But I would be careful not to forget these foreign workers who take on the most arduous work in our economy and whose reception and living conditions must be improved. Our society must also show solidarity with social categories and individuals who are particularly affected by the essential change in our economic structures. This government wants to be one of reconciliation and action. For centuries, our old country has known all the glories and all the miseries; triumphs and defeats have succeeded one another; the regimes have passed and men whose love for France could not be suspected tore themselves apart in the very name of this love. Many wounds, bitterness and perhaps hatred still remain. Ensuring man his dignity, fighting against all injustices, this is the meaning of the great fight that we must fight. This is a great effort that can only materialize, be realized in the union of all”. Extract from Jacques Chaban-Delmas' inauguration speech.
And I think of the Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition, Nicolas Hulot, when he sought to mobilize us in the face of the disasters caused by global warming:
"We collectively have an immense responsibility ... We can no longer maintain divisions, real or artificial, when this issue calls for a universal response. Political confrontation is necessary, but on this point, let's make peace. I call for a sacred climate union...”.
What if the new French society became more protective, less industrial and truly ecological? How would you draw it, Messrs. Macron and Trump? Do not take refuge in calculations of immediate profitability and become the precursors of a real and united ecology when the world goes adrift. Health disasters threaten us more and more for lack of water, hygiene, precariousness and unhealthy confinement of populations in sprawling cities and ghettos. In addition, ubiquitous pollution is optimized by manufacturers to achieve record profits, even if it means paying an “ecological bonus-penalty” by passing the corresponding taxes through the “losses and profits” box: in total, a simple accounting game. It cannot go on like this.
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