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The Populist Century. Pierre RosanvallonЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Populist Century - Pierre  Rosanvallon


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that has become more and more independent in many democracies. Populists denounce this independence in particular when it is expressed through the development of jurisprudence that amplifies a law in the process of interpreting it. Marine Le Pen has hammered away at this point in a typical refrain: “Judges are there to apply the law, not to invent it, not to thwart the will of the people, not to replace legislators. A public office is not supposed to authorize its holder to usurp power.”6 Some have not even hesitated to use the newly coined term “juridictatorship” to characterize the independence of the magistracy and the extension of the authority of France’s Constitutional Council,7 qualifying the rule of law as “the central error” of contemporary democracies. The opposition between law and democracy is not a new one. It was the focus of many arguments during the American and French Revolutions, leading the writers of the French Constitution, in 1790, to adopt the principle of electing judges. (Called into question later on, this principle remained a republican demand throughout the nineteenth century.) For their part, many American states also instituted mechanisms for electing judges; these systems are still in place.8 But the law/democracy opposition has been radicalized in the populist vision, which deems that the magistracy can claim only a narrow functional legitimacy, and that the democratic status of this legitimacy is secondary to that of the elected officials who have been anointed by popular vote. In this case, we can speak of a polarized vision of legitimacy and of democratic institutions, in which voting is seen as the unique means of democratic expression. (This vision leads in turn to the view that democracy itself is a procedural matter, lacking any substantive dimension; the term might characterize, for example, the quality of an institution and its operations.)

      An immediate democracy of this sort thus does not require the structuring of political organizations that operate on the basis of an internal democracy; it calls rather for acts of adherence to already-constituted political propositions. An internal democracy would in fact imply the existence of tendencies, debates over strategy, competition among individuals: this is how parties are typically structured. Conversely, a political movement in the image of “the people as one body,” of which it seeks to be both the midwife and the revealer, can only form a coherent and cemented ensemble. This is why populist movements are in phase with the new world of social networks in which a category of followers has arisen; the term characterizes a type of bond among individuals and implies a pole from which initiatives emanate.

      The critique of the media that is at the heart of populist rhetoric must be understood and measured by the yardstick of this principle of immediacy. The insults of a Trump addressed to journalists, the vituperations of an Orbán against the henchmen of George Soros, or the calls of a Mélenchon to a “legitimate and healthy hatred of the media” do not stem from simple fits of pique. While they may well translate exasperation and rancor in the face of contrary forces, they share more deeply in a theory of immediate democracy that deems it structurally illegitimate for intermediary bodies – of which the press constitutes a major instance – to presume to play an active role in animating public life and in constituting public opinion. For them, the media are impediments to the expression of the general will rather than necessary contributors to its formation. Viewed through a prism presupposing democratic spontaneity, the media can be regarded as functionally illegitimate and morally illegitimate as well, given their presumed dependency on private interests and the power of money.

      1  1 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), p. 5.

      2  2 Jean-Marie Le Pen, “Pour une vraie révolution française,” National Hebdo, September 26, 1985. Le Pen was marking his difference from the Maurrassian counter-revolutionary extreme right that jeered at the idea of democracy. His article also marked a turning point with respect to his own previous skepticism about “Churchillian democracy”: see his earlier manifesto, Les Français d’abord (Paris: Carrère-Lafon, 1984).

      3  3 Le Pen, “Pour une vraie révolution française.”

      4  4 See chapter 4, “Rendre le pouvoir au peuple,” in the programmatic text Le grand changement, with a preface by Jean-Marie Le Pen: Marcos-Antonio Cantolla-Iradi, Le grand changement: Et si on essayait le Front national? (Saint-Cloud: Front National, 1997).

      5  5 See for example Yvan Blot, Les racines de la liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985), chapter 8, “Le modèle Suisse,” and chapter 9, “Le recours: La démocratie authentique”; and Yvan Blot, La démocratie directe: Une chance pour la France (Paris: Economica, 2012).

      6  6 Speech delivered February 26, 2017, at the Zénith, a large concert venue in Nantes; see https://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/presidentielle-meeting-de-marine-le-pen-sous-tension-a-nantes-26-02-2017-6713349.php. At the time, Marine Le Pen was the target of several judicial investigations into the operations of her party, the Front National, focusing on the fact that individuals working for her within the party had been remunerated by the European Parliament.

      7  7 See the emblematic article by Alain de Benoist, “Vers une juridictature,” Éléments, no. 178 (May–June 2019). In the same issue, see also the dossier titled “Les juges contre la démocratie: Pour en finir avec


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