the left is indignant, the right applauds – RT in French

“Dangerous for our country”: the term “decivilization” used by Emmanuel Macron during the Council of Ministers on May 24 was strongly criticized on the left. The right, it is pleased that the President of the Republic joins his analyzes.

“Guilty complacency of Emmanuel Macron towards the far right, a new example.” This May 24 on Twitter, Cyrielle Chatelain sets the tone on the left. The president of the environmental group in the National Assembly reacted to the remarks made by the President of the Republic the day before in the Council of Ministers. Referring to the climate of violence punctuated by several dramas, he called on the government to “work in depth to counter this process of decivilization”.

If the term “decivilization” was created by the sociologist Norbert Elias on the eve of the Second World War, the left has indeed preferred to recall that it was also the title of a work by Renaud Camus (Ed. Fayard, 2011). The latter is particularly known for having forged the syntagm of “Great replacement”, in the eponymous book of 2011, often presented as a “far-right conspiracy theory”.

This is what Alexis Corbière, deputy of La France insoumise (LFI) underlined in a tweet of May 24: “The hazy concept of decivilization launched by E. Macron is the title of a book by the far-right writer Renaud Camus.

Same story on the side of Manon Aubry, rebellious MEP: “The president endorses the smoky “decivilization” of racist Renaud Camus.”

Decivilization, “smoky concept”?

“It’s quite simply dangerous for our country,” worried Marine Tondelier. The president of Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) responded to BFMTV during the march in support of the resigning mayor of Saint-Brevin.

“Emmanuel Macron has once again proven us right,” launched Marine Le Pen at the National Assembly on May 25. The president of the National Rally (RN) group stressed that she had been talking about “wildness for years” and that “decivilization is barbarism”.

Guest of the program “The 4 truths” on France 2 that same day, Bruno Retailleau detailed a vision of the term which joins that of Marine Le Pen. “There is decivilization when there are phenomena of barbarism, of ensavagery of society, when the school no longer manages to transmit knowledge, when there is an enterprise of cultural deconstruction in France. Decivilization is the opposite of civilization, which is what allows a society to contain violent reflexes, ”explained the president of the group Les Républicains (LR) in the Senate.

A line which is not so far from that of the President of the Republic, who supported his remarks on several recent dramas: the nurse killed at the hospital in Reims, the police officers who died in Roubaix because of a drugged driver and alcoholic, and the fire at the home of the mayor of Saint-Brevin, which caused his resignation.

“Phenomena of barbarism, savagery”

Although these events are of a different nature, they illustrate for Emmanuel Macron the fact that “in all countries, there is a form of decivilization movement”, explains a participant in the Council of Ministers at Parisian, this May 25th. If “the meaning of the history of societies has always been to reduce the share of drives in order to increase respect for others, throughout the world, for a certain number of years, it is the opposite movement which seems to be ‘start’, would have added the head of state, according to this same member of the government.

If by this leak of remarks made in the Council of Ministers, Emmanuel Macron has tried to regain control in the media, it is a success. It remains to translate safety into facts. In 2020, the National Observatory of Delinquency and Criminal Responses (ONDRP) counted 120 knife attacks per day. For 2019, the figure was 114.

The Ministry of the Interior also counted 306,700 physical attacks (including intra-family) in 2021, up 31% since 2017. The same year, the number of homicides rose to 842, placing France well ahead. European countries for this indicator. By way of comparison, in 2020, Germany deplored 719 homicides, compared to 298 in Spain and 285 in Italy.