Vitry-le-François, France
Can a modern revolution emanate from the political center or, more unconventionally, from the heart and mind of an aristocrat who places republican values above factional allegiance? This was the question that propelled me more than a hundred miles east of Paris — while another day of mass demonstrations unfolded in the capital and across France — to the post-industrial town of Vitry-le-François to meet Charles de Courson, the French parliamentarian descended from Norman nobility who nearly succeeded in bringing down the government of President Emmanuel Macron with a no-confidence vote on March 20.
The interparty revolt led by de Courson’s small group of nonaligned deputies in the National Assembly had been triggered by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne’s invoking of Article 49.3, a frankly dictatorial clause in the constitution that permitted the government to impose an increase in the French retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, rather than put it to a vote she almost certainly would have lost.
‘Macron’s position on the retirement age works to the advantage of the extremes’
On April 6, the gray and rainy day I interviewed de Courson in his fief, the 5th Assembly district in the department of the Marne, the decision by the Constitutional Council to validate the pension reform was still two weeks away, and Monsieur le Député, dressed in a dark suit, black jersey and tie, seemed reasonably happy with the outcome of his work so far. His staff had suggested lunch at Le Grillardin, a noisy, no-frills restaurant on the Place d’Armes, where the only indication of de Courson’s recent fame was that we were placed by the front window, comfortably away from the din of a packed house. De Courson ordered the French equivalent of soul food, a blanquette de veau on special.
Even though the no-confidence vote had failed by nine votes, de Courson considered the close call a personal “victory” because it had split the center-right Les Républicains and summarily ended talks between its leader, Éric Ciotti, and Borne that were aimed at enlarging Macron’s rickety governing co-alition. Nineteen of sixty-one LR members had defected from their party line and supported the no-confidence motion, a stunning act of rebellion that was the most significant story of the day and the principal reason Macron’s authoritarian reign was in danger.
Until de Courson made his “motion de censure” speech on behalf of his grab-bag parliamentary group LIOT, most of the media’s attention had been focused on the anti-Macron bellicosity of the unruly leftist group NUPES, and the somewhat surprising opposition to his pension reform by Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement Nationale. Le Pen’s group introduced its own no-confidence motion, but the NUPES wouldn’t support a proposal brought by its sworn ideological enemy. Then LIOT put forward its own motion, a pragmatic solution acceptable to all opposition parties, and with it De Courson’s remarkable speech — remarkable because of its eloquent economy and clarity, which were a refreshing alternative to the often florid and frequently sarcastic rhetoric of French politics. De Courson read his speech through his wire-rimmed glasses, hardly ever looking up at his applauding supporters, not even when the president of the Assembly cut off his microphone because he had exceeded the ten-minute limit.
”I learned this from the Jesuits in middle school,” de Courson said. “A good speech has an introduction, an outline, and a conclusion.” He describes this style as containing no “fla-fla,” which means no ornamentation, nothing fancy. And, indeed, there was nothing fancy about his motives for placing himself at the center of the storm. “Macron’s position on the retirement age works to the advantage of the extremes. If we continue like this, in four years it will be Marine Le Pen against [leftist Jean-Luc] Mélenchon in the second round” of the presidential election, a contest he believes Le Pen would win. De Courson cited a recent poll that showed Le Pen defeating Macron with 55 percent of the vote if last year’s election were rerun today.
“So my idea with my group was that we have to halt the massacre” — by bringing down the government and forcing the president to call new elections. De Courson has learned to take seriously the threat from Le Pen, and her popular appeal, over the past fifteen years: she carried 57 percent of his district’s vote last year against Macron, up from 53 percent in 2017. “This was the only industrial city in the Marne and it experienced all the vicissitudes of industrial restructuring — leaving by the wayside people of modest means.” This made them perfect targets for Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-free-trade and anti-immigrant message.
For the wine producers of adjacent Champagne, Le Pen was popular for different reasons. De Courson imagines some of his constituents saying: “We’re sick of paying taxes, of working to feed the loafers. Nobody wants to come to work anymore.” So it’s no surprise that his commanding 72 percent victory in the legislative election in 2017 shrank to 63 percent last year.
But de Courson’s calculation wasn’t just political or tactical, since his sympathies tend to the left of center on social and economic issues. In his no-confidence speech before official France, he declared that the pension reform “in reality crystallized all the injustices” inflicted on ordinary people and denounced the government’s “hijacking of the spirit of the Constitution.”
In the president, he says, ‘You see the behavior of a filthy rich man who has never taken care of anyone else’
Across the table at lunch, he decried Macron’s “Hegelian conviction about power… this belief that while he doesn’t know anything, that while he has never run anything in his life, that because one obtained power through unlikely circumstances, well, now one can do anything one wants. This Hegelian concept of power is destructive to a democracy. He has done everything to eliminate the intermediary bodies, local collectivities, unions, everyone. And he finds him-self naked before the people.”
And then there’s Macron’s psyche, a portrait in selfishness: “The total lack of a social dimension — total. When you look at his life, he has never devoted one hour to others.” I asked de Courson if Macron was a narcissist, but he preferred to describe Macron as “bourgeois.” “His wife is an heiress, if you will. He has lived in a protected milieu. It’s true he didn’t get into the [ultra-elite] École Normale Supérieure, but afterwards he did Sciences Po, he did École Nationale d’Administration, and he surrounds himself with people like him, which is a fundamental error.” This puts Macron in opposition to people from inferior social classes. “When there is a boy who says to him, ‘I don’t have any dough,’ and he responds, ‘You only need to cross the street to that restaurant, they’re looking everywhere for workers,’ you see the behavior of a filthy rich man who has never, ever taken care of anyone else — of people in difficulty.”
Despite sounding rather “left” in his critique, de Courson isn’t calling for insurrection and, unlike so many other towns and cities in France, Vitry-le-François was quiet the day we met. Ever the stickler for procedure, de Courson had quickly followed his performance in parliament with a formal challenge to the pension reform in front of the Constitutional Council, arguing that the government hadn’t adhered to the rules for proposing a law intended to “rectify the financing of social security.” But on April 14, the council, a group of nine appointed, not-very-independent-minded ex-politicians, jurists and bureaucrats, dashed any hope that procedural challenges would change anything. They not only upheld the essentials of the new law, but also rejected the call for a nationwide referendum, which polls suggest would decisively defeat the pension reform.
De Courson had already despaired of reaching political compromise — during the three-month crisis before the no-confidence vote, he claimed that the government had refused serious negotiation with its opponents. One of his ideas that was never considered: instead of raising the retirement age, “you can ask the French to work more days of the year to finance the pension system: you say, listen, we have twelve holidays in France — maybe we abolish one of them to finance pensions.” This compromise sounded reasonable, and politically astute coming from a former councillor in the French Court of Auditors, but de Courson at seventy-one has no interest in running for president or assuming a ministerial post other than in the Ministry of Finance.
Macron clearly isn’t listening to politically moderate critics like de Courson and seems to feel he has nothing to lose by hardening his stance. Although he had ten days to act, he signed the pension reform into law almost immediately after it was ruled valid, another provocation. De Courson had told me that “the government is hanging by a thread” because just “eight or nine additional LR deputies could bring down the government at any moment” with a new motion of no confidence. For now, the protest against Macron has shifted largely to “the street” or, as De Courson politely corrected me, “the people.”
At lunch, before we got to present-day politics, De Courson talked at length about his family’s past, and nearly cried several times as he recounted his father Aymard’s Resistance service in the British Prosper network; his maternal grandfather Léonel de Moustier’s Assembly vote in 1940 against suspending the Constitution and granting Marshal Pétain dictatorial power in the wake of the German invasion; and his grandmother Germaine’s deportation to a German concentration camp. Léonel died at Neuengamme in July 1944; Germaine died at Ravensbrück in January 1945. De Courson didn’t mention that his deputy ancestor, the Marquis de Saint-Fargeau, voted for Louis XVI’s execution in 1793. Hegelian or otherwise, I’m not sure Macron realizes what he’s up against.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
