English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Presentation of the theme: world before, world after 0:00 Spot on, excellent. So good evening, we are live with the Popular University of Saint-Dizier, so this is the first one, we don't quite know how it's going to go, but well. Good evening. And so we have members of the Popular University who are going to connect normally, and then we have the extreme joy and happiness of welcoming once again Dominique Pagani to talk to us about the theme we chose this year.
0:36 So he should have come last year, but of course you know what happened, it wasn't the World Cup, but it was the health crisis that intruded, so we couldn't do much around the World Cup. And this year we moved from the World to the Revolution, hence the idea today of talking about the world before and the world after, since you have no doubt heard that expression in the mouths of many politicians, or news commentators, where there would be a world before and a world after.
1:13 So that got us a bit intrigued, what does a world before mean, what does a world after mean, notably with a phrase spoken by Goethe, and Dominique will perhaps tell us in what circumstances he said that, and it was indeed a world that was gradually fading away to see another world emerge, it's the end of the 18th century and of course it's the French Revolution, and Goethe makes direct reference to Voltaire and Rousseau, saying with Voltaire a world is ending, with Rousseau a world is beginning.
1:59 There you go, so there perhaps we already grasp a bit better what the world before or the world after is, since it's a bit like before Jesus Christ and after Jesus Christ, so there would have been a world before the French Revolution, and then one that Voltaire would have embodied, a bit, one of the last supporters of parliamentary monarchy, he rather wanted to shift French society from absolute monarchy toward the English model, toward parliamentary monarchy, whereas Rousseau of course had a completely different idea of what governing a nation is.
2:37 And so Goethe, very perceptive, notes that there is a world ending, embodied by Voltaire, and a new world, a world emerging, which is that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, announced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but Dominique knows this by heart. And so the idea is that today, for a year now, we have been in what's called a health crisis, is it only a health crisis? I don't know, it doesn't seem so to me, it's a bit broader than that, and then there would be a world that existed or pre-existed this health crisis, and then a world after, today, which perhaps hasn't even arrived yet, but which we're told is going to arrive.
3:25 So yesterday I heard an interview, it was about restaurant owners, restaurants are closed today, and many restaurant owners aren't happy, understandably. And there was a speaker who said, perhaps to start the discussion, who said, it seems to me something interesting, since the journalist was questioning him, asking him the question saying, but won't you have to reinvent yourselves?
3:56 Reinvent the trade, reinvent something, and I noted a bit what he said, he said this, reinvention, question mark, it's a dangerous word, we don't reinvent, we don't reinvent things, we don't reinvent things, they evolve naturally. These are false reinventions in times of crisis, there's no rupture, but rather an acceleration of past trends. It was already there, even before this crisis began, the movement accelerated.
4:30 So, without knowing it, I find that very Hegelian, and I think it lays things out well, as if the French Revolution took place on a Tuesday at 6pm, and at 5:59pm we were in the old world, and a minute later we crossed over to the other side. So perhaps things happened well before the events of July 14, 1789, or the convening of the Estates General, for the new world Goethe speaks of to come about.
5:08 There you go, so, I'll hand over to Dominique now, of course, who will talk to us a bit about all this, and who will tell us whether, in the end, there is a world before, what is the before, what is the after, and if in the end, if we're talking about this example of the French Revolution, would the revolution be a new world, something that appeared just like that, and that would have strictly speaking, that would have broken all ties with the past, that would be entirely new, entirely fresh.
5:43 There you go, Dominique, I'll hand the floor over to you now, and thank you again for coming to enlighten us on this subject. Thank you, Bertrand, and thank my friends Bragar for giving me the opportunity, even virtually, to find myself a bit at your place, I miss it. Even though, even though there's a bit of snow anyway, I mean. I'm not going to make you talk about the weather, I'm not here for that, but well, it snowed for the first time this morning in Paris too.
6:16 But anyway, it must be a little milder at your place, and there you go. But I'm delighted, I know that the human warmth at your place melts all that away. There you go. And I greet my friends, my comrades, I'm very happy to see you again. And that, I missed that. Well, my cat is already starting to argue with me, but 18 square meters, well, you stay in your place. Sorry. So I was saying, but what is it?
6:47 You're going to go on screen, but that's not true, look at that, huh. Well. I don't have much more to say, because Bertrand pretty much said the essential, there. I don't have much more to say. Ah, I hear, I hear interference, there. Pretty much the essential.
From the French Revolution to advertising "revolutions" 7:17 I hear myself, delayed. Ah well, not anymore now. So, I think maybe everyone should mute their mic, no? That's not it, isn't there something like that? No, because I think someone started the live broadcast at the same time, and so had the delayed sound. Yes, that happens often. Okay. And now it's fine. It seems fine to me, there. It's fine for me. Perfect. Sorry, so I was saying, I don't have much more to say, Bertrand really condensed the essential in a few words. Yes, I'll just dig into what he said a bit further. Yes, Goethe's phrase, namely, with Rousseau, a world ends, with Voltaire, a world ends, with Rousseau, a world begins.
7:56 For me, it's almost a sacrilege to compare changes as significant as this, since there have been almost every 20 centuries, practically like the French Revolution, which as a political revolution followed the English industrial revolution, barely a generation before. So all that happened very fast. Those are cracks, once again, cracks we have not come out of. They are cracks from which our modernity emerged. The industrial world, bourgeois civil society, to speak in terms of political philosophy, in which we still are, and what's called the ancien régime — I mean, the new regime, in historical terms — all of that comes to a head at that moment.
8:41 And not only for France, mind you, the others too, including the monarchies, I'm thinking of England, or the Scandinavian countries, hastened to make some reforms, so that it wouldn't happen to them. Because the peoples, the peoples were beginning to lend an ear to one of the most beautiful phrases, weren't they, of one of our revolutionaries, I'm thinking of Saint-Just, of his eternal youth, Saint-Just, who said, happiness is a new idea in Europe. The peoples suddenly realized that they too had a right to happiness, and not just a handful of privileged people.
9:13 To compare that, without even getting to Macron, because this doesn't date from today, that we're made to believe that now we're living through an unprecedented revolution. First, there's Steve Jobs, who said it every week. Do you remember, he'd come out in front of a whole audience, he'd pull out a connected sock, he'd say, this is a revolution. No, but I'm not joking. So people considered him one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. I saw that when he died, there were followers, young people, poor things, they were raised on this, who said he was between Einstein and Mozart.
9:51 Can you imagine? Even though he only benefited from work done by the Pentagon. Everyone knows it's the American army that created the Internet. That shouldn't be forgotten, first of all. And there you go, I'm sure he's an excellent engineer, in some way. But I'd say, there are plenty of those. And he's above all a shrewd businessman. There you go, that's to say, be wary of those who tell you every day, this is a revolution. So, for now, there are the moderates, they talked about reforms.
10:23 Every time there was a setback, they called it a reform. And the French increasingly understood that when someone says a reform needs to be made, it means there's going to be a new stage in the counter-revolution. That is to say that gains that represented struggles across several generations, I don't know, pay-as-you-go pensions, social security, that nothing was guaranteed anymore. And the reform means we're going to attack all that. And so, not bring about tomorrow's world, but return to the world of the day before yesterday.
10:56 You know, back in the day, for example, of day laborers, when labor was paid daily, we need to go back because monthly pay, job security, social protection, all of that, are luxuries we can no longer afford. We need to be careful. I'm not against change. But change can go in several directions. Cars have reverse gears too. I mean, that's not for nothing. So, there you go, that's my preliminary thought.
11:26 Yes, Bertrand? No, I'm listening, I'm listening. Oh right, I think he wants to say something. No, go ahead, go ahead. So, there are two texts. For once, I'm criticized for not reading enough and talking about it, for making allusions, but not discussing it. Listen, I'm going to satisfy those who find that I don't quote him enough, but there's a passage in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit where he makes an excellent distinction between evolution and revolution that will be quite valuable to us.
12:01 Because I'm thinking of, it was a restaurant owner you quoted. Yes, it's a restaurant owner. I'm in admiration, first of all. Me too, when I heard that, I need to listen to it because I feel like... First of all, I fully validate the dialectical and Hegelian side of the matter, of his remarks. But moreover, he saw very clearly the essence of the problem when he said that there is a natural evolution and what's called a revolution is often only a crisis, is only an acceleration, thanks to the crisis, of underlying trends that were already there.
12:32 well, it's clear that we've already handed back part of our common property in EDF. EDF wasn't nothing, mind you. The whole world envied us for it. It was the biggest borrower for half a century, the biggest borrower in the world on the capital markets. You see? Now only 30% belongs to us in EDF, to you and me. You see? That's why I say be careful before reading the text. Let me give another example. When we're told, and what about your pensions, because, you know, while we talk about Covid, while we talk about our health, when we're very concerned about our health, careful, I'm not saying Covid is an invention, I'm not into that conspiracy theory.
13:14 I mean, it's serious. It's a personal stake because unfortunately, I'm not the only one, but I have loved ones involved in this, especially at my age, as you can imagine. So I take this very seriously. But what is scandalous, and what I feel a collective anger rising against more and more, especially given the latest polls, is the media-political exploitation of this danger, which is real otherwise, in order to push through things that have nothing to do with our health.
13:46 And I come back to the pension problem, which is being whittled down to the bare minimum while we're being made to swallow vaccines that should have been made by the Pasteur Institute, which was known throughout the world as the best operator in this field. Which, incidentally, one shouldn't forget that the very notion of vaccine was created by Pasteur himself. So, in its modern version.
14:16 So, I'll remind you, still before reading the text, a few more precedents to dilute this so-called revolution, to show that we're just treading water, that the previous president had already taken as his campaign slogan 'Change is now.' And Macron got himself elected with a book called 'Revolution.' There you go. And then there was Giscard well before who had already said 'I will bring about change within continuity.' He was clever, that one, you see, he was courting the conservatives.
14:46 Mitterrand, in 1981, was that it? Yes, both. He took it from Giscard, they were very close moreover, that's why they were at each other's throats. They were fighting over the same territory, the post-Vichy niche, well, the right, no, anti-Gaullist, if you prefer. Right? I say the right, without any polemic, because Mitterrand, when he was appointed as the head of what was called at the time, in '71, the new Socialist Party, he didn't even have his party card at the PS.
15:16 He came from the right, you know, from those who, after the war, hid a bit under labels of unaffiliated, moderate, various rights, center-left, center-right, yes, okay, yes. There you go. What I call the abominable extreme-center. Well. Which, despite appearances, contains more extremists than moderate people. Especially when it comes to social matters, they don't pull their punches. Remember Raymond Barre.
Hegel against perpetual novelty 15:46 Well. The more he talked to us about austerity, the more of a belly he got, all the same. Let me get back to our topic, precisely, regarding change, it's now. I'm not going to read the text on evolution and revolution right away, I'll precede it with another one found in a different preface, the one to the Philosophy of Right. Yes, that's my lazy side, I only read the prefaces. After that, I yawn and fall asleep. No, come on, let's be serious. Look, look how strange this is, this was written in 1820.
16:16 You're going to see how topical it is. Sorry. But as if I haven't lost my page. Excuse me. I had it there. There, there. Currently, one would say that it's in matters relating to the state, this is his political testament, saying in the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, that it is in matters relating to the state that one finds the strongest root of the notions according to which proof of free thought would be apparent nonconformity and even hostility toward publicly recognized values.
17:03 And consequently, a philosophy of the state would seem to have as its specific task to invent and expound one more theory, and of course a new and particular theory. When one sees this conception and the procedures that result from it, one could imagine that there has never been any state, any political constitution in history, on earth, that there is none at present. It would be, listen carefully, starting from there, it would be starting from now, and here there's a crucial parenthesis, and this now renews itself indefinitely always, that everything would have to be started over from the beginning.
17:46 And the moral and political world would have waited until the present moment for it to be thought through fully and for it to be given a foundation. There you go. End of quote. Admit that this sounds a bit like what we're being told, that all those preparing a dirty trick make you believe it by wrapping it up in the bling-bling of novelty. Right? Because most people, they like, they're not, they like having a breath of fresh air, something new, me too, me first. That's the principle of advertising.
18:18 Exactly. People like Macron, they were raised on that, in financial, political, commercial marketing, I mean, especially commercial, him, I know his career well. Now I'll read you this more theoretical, more general text, much more serious, less ironic, less polemical, about the dialectic of evolution and revolution. First he begins by saying, moreover, it is not difficult to see that our time is a time of gestation and transition to a new period.
A time of gestation: spirit never rests 18:49 You see? Obviously, all of Europe is vibrating with the cracking I was alluding to earlier and that Bertrand introduced very well with the Goethe quote. And there, these were truly cracks that shouldn't be underestimated. And so he speaks, don't forget that Hegel is the generation that was 20 years old at the time of the storming of the Bastille. He was born in 1770, you see? Give or take a year. So, there you go.
19:19 He never ceased, until the end of his life, to admire the French revolutionaries. I'll even add this little, this isn't an anecdote, it's serious. He said, rather ironically, we Germans, we are profound. That's the reputation we have. Right? We are profound. We think the revolution. The French, they do it.
19:49 We think, but we think what they did. There you go. A little quip that Marx will later take up, won't he? Let me get back to the text. It is not difficult to see that our time is a time of gestation. It's about the transition from the old to the new regime, nothing less, and of transition to a new period. Spirit, spirit, for him that means history, I'll say it quickly, without demonstrating it. Spirit has broken with the world of its being-there and of the representation that has lasted until now.
20:25 We're talking about the old world. It's on the point of burying this world in the past and it's engaged in the labor of its own transformation. You see, there we're far from the abrupt change that Jean-Bertrand, ironically, was talking about, saying Tuesday at 6pm. I usually say, it's not on December 31 at midnight that we passed, I don't know, from animal to man or from the old regime to the new regime or from antiquity to the Middle Ages or from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. There, all of that consists of transitions that have a temporal thickness.
20:58 So, there you go, it's on the point of burying this world in the past, it's a very beautiful text, and it's engaged, you know, the same word used for childbirth, it is engaged in the labor of its own transformation. In truth, spirit is never in a state of rest and here comes the thesis he suddenly puts forward. Now we notice that things are moving. In fact, they never stopped moving. But when it's evolution, we don't notice it. When you watch the news, you see, I don't know, a minister's remarks on intersectionality, I'm not too sure, I mean, you see, the struggle of gays, straights, Hutus, Tutsis, Corsicans, French.
21:47 That's quite cisgendered, all the same. Bourgeois women against proletarian men. Well, I say that to defend proletarian women who are exploited by bourgeois women and men. I recall the passage. Women like Madame Lagarde, Madame Merkel, and others, and plenty more, and Madame Thatcher had already set the tone earlier, a generation before or not, didn't much care about knowing how the millions of women they were putting out of work were going to manage.
22:20 when I talk about bourgeois feminism, it's to defend feminism, the serious kind. So, you see, this evolution at work that we don't perceive while, to go back to my point, the media draw our attention to sideshows, to anecdotes or bling-bling about what's happening to some trendy singer, whatever.
22:57 Meanwhile, I mean, there are upheavals in the modes of production. There are 200 million Chinese moving from a thousand-year-old poverty, right, to running water. That's why they're a real threat. It's not that they're challenging, not you and me, they're not our competitors, admit it, but they're competitors to those who thought they were the only ones tearing the world apart, right? There you go. So, you see, and that's silent, the big things.
The birth of the child: the threshold and the qualitative leap 23:27 So, I'll pick up the text again and continue. In truth, the spirit is never in a state of rest, but is always carried along in an indefinitely progressive movement. Only, here it's like the case of the child. I was talking to you about childbirth. You see, he takes up the same metaphor. He means the child, he means — I know the text in German — it's the newborn, no, sorry, the fetus. As in the case of the child. Colon.
23:57 After a long and silent gestation of nine months, isn't that so? The first breath, in a qualitative leap, abruptly interrupts the continuity of merely quantitative growth. And it's only then that the child is born. A superb demarcation between the silent evolution, isn't it, of the embryo in the maternal womb, and what is truly a person beginning its career, if I may say so, its career in life.
24:33 It's not the first breath. It's a threshold. A threshold. I say this for those interested in the classics of Marxism, it can be useful given the times we're living in. You know the importance of the notion of threshold in the dialectical method. It's not the passage from quantity to quality like the passage from liquid H2O, which you have in Evian bottles, to the ice you're going to have. Watch out tomorrow under your feet and under your tires, especially in your region.
25:05 That passage looks gradual, but everyone knows that the temperature of a liter of water drops like that, and then all it takes is a little tap and it crystallizes all at once into ice like that. It's also Descartes's piece of wax. Exactly. It's the notion of threshold that shows the passage from quantity to quality. That's what Hegel has just illustrated here. When the silent hammer-blows I was talking about earlier have been numerous and multiplied enough, all of a sudden there are cracks, a bit like with earthquakes.
25:41 You know it's the molten magma constantly working away at the center of the earth, and sometimes it has worked so much that it finds an opening and — bang — there's an earthquake, always in the same spots where the plates are... There are also things by Hegel with the tree that falls and the forest that grows. Yes, of course, it's the same problematic. So he gave his image of the embryo becoming a person, and he takes up his comparison again: thus the spirit that is forming — you see it's very concrete, spirit is not at all spirit like a vapor, it's not the spirit one summons as if turning tables, it's history in all its concreteness, economic, artistic, warlike, unfortunately, etc. Thus the spirit that is forming matures slowly and silently toward its new figure, disintegrating fragment by fragment the edifice of its previous world — there I'll stop
Voltaire gnaws away the old world, Rousseau builds the new one 26:51 because it makes Goethe's line even more concrete, because Goethe's line, with that art he has of finding the formula that condenses everything, sums it all up — but there are allusions that need to be clarified, with Voltaire, a finished world — yes, Voltaire is the termite that never stops gnawing at the building, which is what Hegel says about the old world — he has this merit, Voltaire — it's the termite that gnaws at, gnaws at what? At the old world, isn't it. He once found himself at a table where he was annoying a bit the master of the house, who was a... Voltaire, he was born into money, his father was a great lawyer of the Paris bar, and while Rousseau was playing truant on the roads, Voltaire was at Louis-le-Grand, I mean — well, so he was part of the bourgeois establishment, but it was a caste society at the time, before the Revolution, and a bourgeois like him was not supposed to attack certain figures of the nobility, and what he was doing, he was showing off, you can trust him, at a table, until Monsieur de Rohan himself, one of the greatest families — it's a bit close to home for you, the Rohans, they're linked to the cardinals
28:02 of Lorraine after all — when I say close to home, I mean the East, I mean deep in the East. Well, who is this individual sneering who doesn't even have a name — and there Voltaire drops that superb line: 'Sir, my name begins where yours ends.' You see, so he mainly attacks religion, Voltaire — but religion is important, it's one of the pillars — not religion, not the content of religion, I respect all of that first, isn't it — but the religious institution, what in philosophy is called positive religion, the one that is imposed, that is, when you're born, you're already told, tomorrow is Palm Sunday, you see, it's established religion — I respect all those who, while being believers themselves, spent centuries protesting against the abuses of positive religion, whether Saint Francis of Assisi, whether — those who protested against the trade in sacraments, you know, at the time when your sins were forgiven if you gave a small sum of money, or else
29:14 they traded in relics, you know, they sold you a rung of the ladder Jacob saw in his dream, or a feather fallen from the archangel Gabriel when he made the Annunciation — I'm not joking, that was the thing that was worth fortunes. All right, let's be serious. So Voltaire worked at that level, until the building — crash! But afterward you have to build, and that's where Rousseau comes in. Rousseau is the one — I'm thinking in particular of the Social Contract — who lays the foundations of what a new deal could be between men, I'm speaking a bit trendily, but in historical terms, based on freedom and no longer on birth, because you had to be born noble to be noble, until 1610, until the nobles were so broke that, isn't it, they started marrying their daughters to bourgeois men — that was called 'regilding the coat of arms,' as it was called at the time — and it was decided by a Monsieur Paulet, P-A-U-L-E-T, an advisor to Henri IV, and that's why it's called the Edict of the Paulette.
30:25 which had an enormous historical impact — what was instituted was what was called the venality of offices, you know — before, you had to be born noble to be noble; now you could become one, but you had to pay up. There, you see, there are advances, so those are evolutions. So I'll go back to the text: thus the spirit that is forming matures slowly and silently toward its new figure, disintegrates — there for Voltaire — fragment by fragment the edifice of its previous world; the shaking of this world is only indicated by sporadic symptoms; colon; the frivolity and boredom that invade what still remains — that's very well observed in the salons, isn't it, of the late 18th century, that there are symptoms of decadence, from the Marquis de Sade to the new sensibility; the frivolity and boredom that invade what will soon be the mal du siècle, what still remains, the vague premonition of something unknown are the harbingers of something else that is on its way; this continuous crumbling which did not alter the outward appearance at all
31:35 at all is abruptly interrupted by the sunrise, which in a flash draws once and for all the shape of the new world — it's extraordinary, isn't it. So it's overwhelming as a difference compared with what's happening now — it's not a sun illuminating a new world, what they're serving up to us now, as your restaurant owner friend put it so well, are the heavy underlying trends of social breakdown that began nearly a generation and a half ago and which is undergoing an acceleration — that's his term, isn't it?
Novelty, national revolution, and the refusal of progress 32:08 a significant acceleration — that's why I wanted to start with these two references. That said, I'd like to remain dialectical, that is, yes, there is a change taking place, I don't know if afterward there will be a new world — I don't like that phrase, the world has seen people talk about novelties before. I'm alluding here — I'm keeping my thread, don't worry — to the film Children of Paradise; I imagine some of you have seen it, it's one of the most acclaimed films in the history of cinema, and it's said to be the golden age of French cinema. Now, at one point Baptiste's father, who works as a theater man at the Funambules, a small very popular theater where precisely the Parisian proletariat comes, up in the gods, where the seats aren't expensive — he says at one point, backstage: 'The public always demands novelty, but that's as old as the hills, novelty is.'
33:19 He knows a thing or two, really. So, dialectically, I'd like to demystify what claims to be new and is really the old soup they want to make us swallow again — I alluded earlier to the return, I don't know, soon, to daily wages, working for a day's pay, while we're at it, or to private social insurance, pension by points — you see everything they're preparing for us. But on the other hand there is a real change — I don't know what will come of it, I'm not sure it will be the sun lighting up a radiant new world, but for now, I'm an old fellow, I'm a bit over 75, I've never seen what's happening now. So, that is to say, revolutions are, in the collective imagination and no doubt in the consciousness of many people, the reference is the French Revolution, and it's necessarily progress, social progress. But there are revolutions that are not necessarily leaps forward but rather reactions — yes, since you
34:29 — internal to reaction, you're taking the words right out of my mouth — Pétain spoke of a 'national revolution' — but of course, you're anticipating exactly what I was going to say — I was going to go all the way across the Rhine, I wasn't going to stop at Pétain. Let's not forget that the Nazis spoke of a 'new order' and of 'national revolution' — the word revolution was very common. So you're quite right, there's nothing more dangerous than these periods when concepts become perverted. Drivers know very well that the most dangerous hour is what's called 'between dog and wolf' — you know, when night hasn't fully fallen yet, and especially if it's raining a little on the windshield and all that, visibility is poor — it's better at night when things are clear, or in daylight, but in between, that's what's happening now. People talk about 'red-brown' — you see people bringing back into fashion ideas we thought had disappeared with the horrors of the Second World War, passing themselves off as people of the left. Let me give you an example: when I was in my colonial childhood
35:40 I'm not just anybody — I was born into a family that, like many Corsicans, had fled Corsican poverty into the colonial administration. You can well imagine that among my parents' circle, they were very conservative people, as was on average the case with expatriates — most had collaborated with the Japanese in Indochina, where I was born — it's now called Vietnam — but just as here some collaborated with the Germans, it's the same thing. Now, a refrain that often came up in that world was: 'We should never have brought them progress, the radio, transistor radios — they were happier before.' That was really the far right saying that at the time, you see, furious about the struggles against colonization. Now any environmentalist will tell you the same thing — you shouldn't, you have to leave the Indians in their tradition as they are, you mustn't impose progress on them. In short, that's what China was doing, taking 200 million people out of poverty, I don't know, and adding some comfort. I'm thinking of Niger, where I lived for a long time
36:50 where people have — Niger holds the world record for birth rate, that's why I'm bringing up this precise example — believe me if you want, but the average number of children per family there is 9 per household — I'm not even talking about the extended family — 9 in order to keep 2, because 4 or 5 out of them die between the ages of 0 and 5 from diseases that, for the most part, could be prevented simply by having clean water, isn't it, running water with a bit of chlorine in it, to avoid, I'm thinking of cholera, dysentery. So, to tell you, Bertrand is right to warn us that change is a neutral term for now — it can change from A to B or from B to A, I mean it can change moving forward, it can change moving backward. Change from illness to health is good; from health to illness is less good; but all of that is still change. So there, the world after — what I am sure of
The economic crisis before Covid 38:00 is that there is something calculated, without being a conspiracy theorist — I told you, there's a serious illness, but it's coming at just the right moment, if I may say so, and believe me, the precedents that we had somewhat forgotten and that we're starting to talk about again now for comparison's sake — I'm thinking of SARS, I'm thinking of bird flu, of those pandemics that had circulated — I think that already made a lot of circles reflect, saying to themselves, 'good grief, when you see the reactions, the popular fears, there's something to be done here.' Where I want to get to is this: now I ask you to make a little effort of memory — just before Covid, what was in the news? The imminence of the worst economic crisis since the postwar period — read the papers from that time, well, TV news, print, whatever, look back at the media in the United States, all anyone talked about was when will it come, what they call 'the Big One' — it's the same expression as for the earthquake that one of these days is supposed to hit — I don't wish it — San Francisco, Los Angeles, with the Californians sitting on a seismic fault line, and which they dread one of these days — not a little tremor like that which damages a few
39:11 cars and roofs, but one that would be much deadlier, and which they call the Big One — they use the same expression, 'when will the Big One come.' Since the outbreak — so now I'm doing anamnesis against the amnesia we've been forced into — let's not forget that we have been in crisis, according to those concerned themselves, since 2008, the so-called subprime crisis, which was of course the trigger, and for years we'd been told that what's wrong economically, especially in France, is the number of civil servants, of parasites in the public sector, which is excessive, taxes that are too — well, you hear it 50 times a day, you don't need me for that — and then, crash, the crisis doesn't come from that at all, no, that's not what's dangerous for the economy, but from people who were selling real estate in the United States without rules, without faith or law, I prefer to say, isn't it, and as a result so many people saw their savings go up in smoke and still don't have a roof over their heads, and those who had one are now out on the streets — you've seen the images
40:21 I won't dwell on that — we mustn't forget that something was bound to happen. So what have we done since then to get out of the crisis — I mean the one that started in 2008, I'll stick to that, I won't go back to the dollar crises of the 60s-70s, special drawing rights, the oil shock, you see, I'm taking the most recent one, the one that kicked off the period we're living in — and what have we done to fix it? You know as well as I do, because we talk about it every day — the central banks since then, starting with the most powerful in the world, the Fed, have taken fire hoses to put out the fire, except that instead of water, they put gasoline to put out the fire, by flooding the capitalist economy with billions and billions in liquidity — no, no, it's not in your pockets, don't go looking for it, we'd know, wouldn't we — nor in mine, of course.
41:31 but never have companies been showered with so much money to support them — you see, doesn't that remind you of something happening right now. I personally dread next spring, because officially I'm very cautious, because everything keeps changing right now regarding — I'm talking here about the official guidelines — one day it's masks, one day it's not, one day it's 8pm, one day it's 6pm, curfew — that's one way to keep us on alert permanently. I mean, if we let them carry on, at this rate in 10 years we'll be at the 27th lockdown, I rule nothing out for now, I leave that as hypothetical. Let me come back to solid things — I dread the spring, why, because for now the aid for working from home, isn't it, for certain sectors hit harder than others, aid that — the higher you go in the economic hierarchy, the bigger the companies, the more substantial this aid is — that said in passing, I already know two restaurant-owner friends who've closed up shop
42:42 but that aid is expiring at the end of March — wait, remember, before the crisis they said the problem was debt, you're wallowing in consumption, you're not being serious, you're living beyond your means — that's what we heard every year from the economy's high priests of the liberal religion, that's exactly what we heard, and it was the Germans who pounded the table hardest, orthodoxy, you Greeks there — after selling the Greeks weapons, the Germans, weapons which completely destroyed the Greek trade balance, isn't it — they cashed in, they billed them, they got paid, and afterward they said, you're in debt, that's not good, watch out — and I don't badmouth the Germans, everyone knows I'm culturally a Germanophile, more so than Bertrand, I know — Bertrand, like many people from your region, has some reasons to be a bit wary of what comes from the East — a year in Germany calms you down, with the uniform
Gramsci and Nietzsche on German depth 43:52 well yes, of course, but I can't resist the pleasure — give me three seconds to find you a source, you're going to enjoy this — but it's very topical — go ahead, we're live — I'm thinking precisely, I'll bring this up, there, I had found again the phrase by Gramsci that sums up a bit what you said: 'The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear, and in this chiaroscuro monsters emerge' — there, you know it well, so I think exactly, yes. So you see, I'm not sectarian, I'll bring you some Nietzsche, the exact opposite of Hegel and Marx, isn't it, but he writes so well, he knows it, he's the one who knows he writes the best in Germany at the time. So he says this, isn't it: 'There was a time when it was customary to grant Germans the epithet' — I'm talking about Germans there, I told you I'm rather a cultural Germanophile, but because they're the ones running Europe, watch out, otherwise this wouldn't be relevant to what I'm telling you and it starts in his time — 'there was a time when it was customary to grant Germans the laudatory epithet'
45:02 of 'profound' — you see, we're back to that — 'now it is quite other honors that the German aspires to.' When he says 'now,' it's because Germany had just crushed France at Sedan, not far from your region — bam — Alsace-Lorraine in 24 hours. 'Now it is to quite other honors than profundity that the German aspires, and all profundity now seems to him a lack of drive' — you see, the panzers, they need fuel, not profundity. 'It is thus almost timely and patriotic to ask whether that old praise was not in fact an error all along, in short whether German profundity is not in reality something else, and worse, a quality of which we are, thank God, on the point of ridding ourselves.' I'll skip a long passage on the German character, I'll spare you that, but the punch line is so, so well observed, I can't help but read it to you — I'm thinking of Madame Merkel, because today is her day, she's being replaced as of today by a new secretary general — is it — I don't know, chancellor in general — 'German profundity is all too often merely a painful digestion.'
46:12 well, that's something else — yes, Nietzsche contrasts beer cultures with wine cultures — there — and just as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics, tend toward indolence — 'the German loves frankness and good-naturedness' — they call her mama, Madame Merkel in Germany, you know that — Mutti, it's not 'mother,' it's 'mommy,' it's very familiar — so — 'and just as' — sorry — 'the German loves frankness and good-naturedness, how convenient it is to be frank and good-natured' — 'this may be, today, of all the disguises the German is capable of, the most dangerous.' This text is incredible — 'and the most successful — this familiar, obliging German honesty which always lays its cards on the table, which does not have the arrogance of the French' — you see, implying that it always lays cards on the table — 'is its truly Mephistophelian talent, and one which can lead far.' He writes that just a couple of steps, historically, from the two world wars that were going to drench the world and Europe in blood — 'and which can lead far' — and there, look
47:22 it's a gem — 'the German makes himself comfortable; he fixes on you the empty gaze of his honest blue German eyes — and the foreigner immediately mistakes him for his dressing gown.' That's not very nice, is it — there you go, he's funny too — ah no, no, but he's even insolent — there — but anyway, as he says, the opposite of what he says on page 14 from what he said on page 13, generally it's fine, he's got the right, that's it, he manufactures it, yes, exactly, exactly. So I'll get back to this point: you mustn't — in times of crisis like these, you absolutely must, it's the moment when you must be least amnesiac, because things move very fast. There are plenty of people who tell me, since Covid and the lockdown, I don't know anymore, I lose track of time — you must have heard things like that — not having the same setting, all that, not having the alternation between home and work, I mean, I'm losing my bearings. So, on top of that, you know, it's well known, a government is surrounded by an army of consultants, of specialists, of things
Memory against the power's communication 48:32 who are at its service — never forget, don't take Macron the individual too seriously, he's a little bank employee at heart, originally, isn't he, who was pushed forward, just like young Bush, I mean Bush junior, the one who launched the wars in Iraq, the one who showed journalists, you know, the medallion on his belt buckle, saying, 'look, that's the emblem of Texas' — he was a moron, a 'born-again' as they say over there, you know, who had given up alcohol, who had fallen at the feet of the evangelicals. Well, it's people like that whom serious circles, business circles, put forward, because they're people who can't sneeze or walk without their advisers, you see, that's important, what one sees, and Macron fits the bill perfectly at that level. So he must be very good technically in his own field, buying up companies, mergers and acquisitions, he knows that, but he knows it well, but anyway, it doesn't concern your interests or mine, except negatively — that's why I'm telling you, this is the moment, more than ever, when we must not let
49:42 our memory be stolen. Let me remind you that just before the Covid crisis, all anyone talked about was the impasse and the fact that we were heading toward an economic catastrophe — that the American deficit, since then it has tripled — that the American deficit had become unbearable — I'm telling you, they're putting out a fire with gasoline pumps — Japan is at 240% debt — yes, 240% debt — here we scream bloody murder because we've just passed 100% thanks to Covid. This isn't the time to forget these precise facts, we're not in metaphysical speculation, these are serious benchmarks. So, you can't hide the sun with your finger, as an African proverb says, but one that ought to be used outside of Africa too, in my opinion, because it's so well put — you can't hide the sun with your finger. The powers that be know — I say 'powers' to avoid being paranoid, it's not one individual — the powers know that more and more
50:52 people are realizing this. So what do they do? They churn out talking points, communication — there too there are consultants who say, here's how to present things. When you're told, 'oh come on, stop bothering us about the debt, well, Japan is at 240%,' as hyper-liberal as it is — so it's not social security or unemployment benefits that make up the debt in that case — they tell you, 'yes, yes, but in Japan most of the debt is held by the Japanese themselves.' Good grief, the same people who tell us, 'what, you speak French, mainland France, but you're closed in on your own little turf, you need to be globalized' — and there they go praising the Japanese for holding their own debt. You see, we're dealing with crooks, I'm not afraid of the word, it's still you talking. So, that's all — so this is not the world before, it's unfortunately what has always been worst in the world — I won't even say the old or the new — in the world as it has always been, isn't it. So I do reflect nonetheless on the present, on these unprecedented changes
52:02 in our way of life — well, at the beginning we were told, it'll last at least a quarter, then we were told it'll last the half-year, now no end is in sight. I talk with people around me, more and more people are worried, in every walk of life, in every age group, who wonder when it's going to end. And I put forward the hypothesis — I don't want to impose it on you, because I can't prove it — that if we let them carry on, it wouldn't be impossible — I said earlier that we'll be told about the 37th lockdown in 10 years if we let them carry on, given the way things are going — I'd be surprised if there were such political stability in our region — I extend the region to Europe here. So, that's essentially what I wanted to say about change — for years and years now, to sum up the essential point I wanted to make, we've been hammered with reform after reform, which I've renamed counter-revolution, that is, tearing down gains that our elders fought for to make them into acquired rights, and which we've had the nerve to
53:12 call privileges. Oh yes, you understand, people are fed up with privileges — privileges, it seems to me, the French Revolution was made essentially against the notion of privilege — how convenient, privileges are by birth — no, this was hard-won, there were deaths in these social struggles — we're getting a call — hello.
