[by Bruno Sire , Professor Emeritus , Member of the Academy of Legislation ]
This text was presented at the annual public meeting of the Academy of Legislation [1]
The appearance of the pronoun "iel" in the Robert dictionary and of inclusive writing in many documents, even though, since 2017, a circular from the Prime Minister asks not to use it in all administrative documents [2]
Official Journal of the French Republic No. 0272 of November 22, 2017, the Prime Minister: "invites , particularly for texts intended for publication in the Official Journal of the French Republic , the avoidance of so-called inclusive writing, which refers to editorial and typographical practices aimed at replacing the masculine form, when used generically, with a spelling that highlights the existence of a feminine form. In addition to respecting the formalities specific to legal acts , government departments must comply with grammatical and syntactic rules, particularly for reasons of intelligibility and clarity of the standard. "
The circular is therefore not limited to the texts of the Official Journal; it targets "administrations falling under the State", which is the case for universities; in application of the constitutional principle of independence which protects them, teacher-researchers are free to use or not "so-called inclusive writing" in their publications, on the other hand, when they draft administrative acts in the exercise of management or representation mandates within "State administrations" they are required to respect this circular.
Rama Yade declaring that " walking past the statue of Colbert in Paris is a microaggression " [3] ; the Mayor of Rouen's plan to remove the statue of Napoleon; the residents of the Villa Medici strongly demanding the removal of the tapestries given by Louis XV on the pretext that they depict slaves; the European Commissioner for Equality, Helena Dalli, producing a guide to "politically correct" vocabulary for European civil servants in which, so as not to offend minorities, words such as Christmas and citizen should be avoided; what do all these recent events have in common? It can be summed up in a single word: wokism.
To be “woke” means to be “awake” (in the sense of “vigilant”) to the injustices suffered by minorities in Western countries [4] . For Armand Laferrère, “A woke person is someone who sees, behind the deceptive appearances of an open society and the rule of law, hidden systemic structures that perpetuate racial and sexual oppression and injustice ” [5] .
Woke ideology spread in the early 2010s in the English-speaking world from a few US university campuses and highly controversial works, such as those of Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler [6] . It gave rise to notorious excesses, such as that shown in a revealing 2019 report on Evergreen State College in Washington [7]
It shows how, under pressure from radicalized far-left movements, an administration supposedly fighting discrimination ends up establishing an extremely pervasive moral order to compensate for inequalities such as skin color, gender, and social origin. Through universities and the education system, this ideology is spreading like wildfire across the European continent, and France in particular, as demonstrated in its May report by the Observatory of Decolonialism and Identity Ideologies [8] .
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Wokism encompasses a set of notions and concepts developed from the work of French philosophers in the 60s and 70s, such as Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze's poststructuralism, and Jean Baudrillard's postmodernism. These philosophers gained significant traction in the USA from the 80s onward, where they are grouped under the term " French Theory ." This movement contributed to the emergence of postcolonial studies , cultural studies , and gender studies , as well as concepts such as " systemic racism ," " cancel culture ," " intersectionality ," and " affirmative action ." It finds particularly fertile ground in radical circles—political, activist, or religious—because these groups are aware that they represent minority viewpoints. He also explains the emphasis on the notion of "convergence of struggles," in which, in the name of intersectionality, we find side-by-side, within communitarian demands, defenders of the LGBT movement, supposedly defending individual liberties, Islamists who seem to defend the exact opposite, defenders of racialist movements, and individuals clearly situated on the far left of the political spectrum. Finding them all arm in arm at the head of a demonstration is not incongruous, given that there likely exists a micro-community that exhibits all these characteristics simultaneously. For the woke movement, in our Western democracies, these minorities are dominated and therefore victims of systemic discrimination. It's worth noting, in passing, the semantic shift that leads them to equate domination with discrimination.
Pushing the reasoning to its extreme, we understand how the proponents of this ideology consider that Western humanist civilization, which gave birth to our universalist democracies, can be considered as something to be "deconstructed" in order to purge it of the domination of the "white heterosexual man" considered as the archetype of the designer of this system of domination [9] .
As the French academician Jean-Marie Rouart points out, " the invasion of the 'woke' movement risks dealing a fatal blow to our language and more broadly to our nation. We are going to witness sectarian quarrels, religious wars, theological oppositions which will increase our divisions and make the French archipelago even more fragile " [10] .
And indeed, if it is true that a nation only exists to the extent that it is founded on a shared foundation of values, then it is legitimate to question the risk that woke ideology poses to the values of our republic as they are set out in Article 2 of our Constitution, and written on the pediments of all our town halls. Let us here, in particular, consider the compatibility of woke ideology with the principle of equality before the law as defined in Article XNUMX of the Constitution: "France ensures equality before the law for all citizens without distinction of origin, race or religion."
The analysis of this relationship between woke ideology and equality of rights will be conducted by means of two questions: Can the communitarian approach coexist with the fact of everyone having the same rights? Is the principle of discrimination as a means of redressing systemic injustices compatible with the principle of equality before the law?
Can a communitarian approach coexist with the principle that everyone has the same rights?
On the website of the "Ministry for Gender Equality, Diversity and Equal Opportunities," one finds what could be considered a veritable paean to communitarianism. It promotes " observatories of anti-LGBT hate ," already established in some school districts, as well as inclusive education that makes visible communities considered to be underrepresented [11] . On the Ministry's website, for example, under the heading "Training Educational Staff," one finds: " Develop initial and continuing training for teaching staff on the prevention of and fight against LGBT-phobia and the inclusion of LGBT+ students. Continue and strengthen the production of data on LGBT-phobia in schools: create a dedicated website "Educating against LGBT-phobia" modeled on the website "Educating against racism and anti-Semitism"; publish an updated guide to combating LGBT-phobia for use in higher education institutions , etc…". Reading this program, one wonders when we'll see observatories of "hatred of 'racialized' people, Muslims, Christians, etc." Where will it end?
In short, we will end up believing, with these Doctor Knock of education, that "every white man is a homophobic-racist who doesn't know it", because producing data systematically, is it not the best way to reveal problems where there are none? All this could be laughable if this "political correctness" did not result in reinforcing the victimization of subsets of our social fabric and increasing tensions in the "French archipelago", to use Jean-Marie Rouart's term.
However, as Delphine Girard, a literature teacher at a high school in the Paris suburbs, explains, for classes with social diversity to properly fulfill their educational mission, the exact opposite is needed: “It is this common culture that our youth so profoundly lack, and which is the sine qua non for developing the feeling, which the school must foster, of belonging to a community of principles and heritage, this feeling of civic fraternity which, transcending particular identities, makes us profoundly equal and allows us to form a society ” [12] . Is it really necessary to keep telling young people that they are victims of discrimination and that special pathways must therefore be found to access certain positions, as proposed by Minister Elisabeth Moreno in early 2021? Does this not amount to persuading them that the country rejects them instead of ensuring the conditions for equal opportunities, as the essayist Tarik Yildiz wrote in an opinion piece in Le Monde [13] .
This touches on the fundamental debate between universalism and communitarianism. Doesn't the universalism of the Enlightenment offer a response to the phenomena that are fracturing our society? In her recent work on the opposition between these two notions, sociologist Nathalie Heinich [14] answers this question very clearly:
“ Reducing citizens to their membership in communities of race, sex, religion, etc.; reducing men or women, in all circumstances, to a gendered category synonymous with either a ‘dominant’ or a ‘dominated’ position; and opposing those holding antagonistic positions as enemies rather than mere ideological adversaries, whom the aim is then not to convince but to silence: all of this stems from a conception of the social world conducive to the absolutization of boundaries between groups of belonging or thought rather than to attention to contexts, to plurality, and to the search for what unites beyond what divides. This is why identitarianism, neo-feminism, and the new forms of censorship express a fundamentally communitarian conception of the social world, the opposite of the universalist ideal of which France, thanks to the achievements of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, remains a global emblem. ”
Thus, our society faces a paradox: it is at the very moment when, relying on the notion of universality, it has granted everyone identical rights without distinction of race, gender, or religion, as no other society in the world does, that a segment of its population is trying to impose the notion of race in the name of the anti-racist struggle [15] , the notion of gender in the name of alleged sexist discrimination, and support for certain religions in the name of secularism. It denounces, indiscriminately, “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” “LGBT-phobia” and “Islamophobia.” In doing so, it victimizes minorities and designates the “white heterosexual male” as their scapegoat. All this, as David Lisnard and Christophe de Voogd note, " in a conceptual hodgepodge where, without warning, differences are slipped into inequalities, and inequalities into discriminations ." [16]
Because deep down, and this is the heart of the problem, by dint of wanting to respect differences, which is laudable and very objectively humanist, we end up, from semantic shifts to conceptual shifts, by creating antagonisms that lead to conflicts.
As if this victimhood weren't enough, the culture of erasure, so dear to the woke movement, appears as its corollary in the rise of communitarianism. How else can we interpret the toppling of statues and book burnings we are witnessing here and there in the Western world? For example, the destruction of 5000 books deemed "harmful to Indigenous people" by the Ontario School Board in Canada. Among the burned books were Tintin, Asterix, and Babar comics! In a video intended for students, those responsible for these destructions explain their approach: " We are burying the ashes of racism, discrimination, and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where everyone can live in prosperity and security. " [17] . Aside from the disarmingly naive, "feel-good" aspect of this approach, it must also be seen as a genuine abdication of the necessary education that must be provided about our shared history and the conflicts we have collectively overcome. This is why the culture of erasure is a dangerous regression because, as Winston Churchill said, " a people who forget their history are condemned to relive it ."
Added to this is the notion of "symbolic violence," a legacy of Bourdieu, which lies at the heart of woke rhetoric . It refers to the internalization of the "dominant discourse" by the dominated themselves. However, as David Lisnard and Christophe de Voogd note in the Revue Politique et Parlementaire , through a kind of reversal, it is Western societies that are internalizing woke directives , which have become the true "dominant discourse" of our time within the educational and media apparatus.
“ We see it in the refusal to name rapists and murderers, as long as they are not white; we see it in the pathologizing of Islamist terrorists, conveniently categorized as ‘mentally unstable’; we see it again in the woke washing of large corporations, multiplying their pledges to the new political correctness: codes of ‘appropriate conduct’ and other training on ‘gender’; marketing heavily reliant on couples of color or mixed-race couples, who are vastly overrepresented compared to their actual proportion in the general population, and where it is increasingly rare for the man to be white. This is therefore not a legitimate and desirable recognition of the diversity of our societies, but rather the acceptance, or even the prescription, of new norms, extending to the ‘innocent’ image of veiled girls in advertising. ”
David Lisnard and Christophe de Voogd, Wokeism or the great reversal of symbolic violence, Political and Parliamentary Review, October 14th 2021.
Thus, if we are not careful, the victimization on which woke ideology is based, and the communitarianism that this prism of reading our history engenders, could come into direct opposition with the humanist culture that is expressed in the first article of our constitution and in particular the reality of the principle of equality on which our entire legal structure is founded.
Is the principle of discrimination as a means of remedying systemic injustices compatible with the principle of equality before the law?
Faced with perceived discrimination (to be distinguished from objective discrimination), there are two ways: one is to improve the legislative apparatus; the other is to circumvent the principle of equality by doing what is cleverly called positive discrimination; and taking care not to specify that what is positive for some and negative for others. The woke movement contests the first, the parliamentary way, because it is by definition the expression of the dominant. It therefore campaigns for positive discrimination, that is to say for an unequal application of laws and regulations according to the communities to which they apply.
However, to give credit where credit is due, the idea of affirmative action didn't originate with these woke ideologues. Back in the 70s, in his famous "harangue," Oswald Baudot, an influential member of the judges' union, wrote to a class of young judges upon their graduation from the National School for the Judiciary: "Be impartial (...) always examine where the strong and the weak lie, which are not necessarily the same as the offender and the victim..." In a way, he was proposing nothing less than removing the blinders from our legal status in the courts!
The same was true regarding gender parity. Indeed, the Constitutional Council, referring to Article 1 of the Constitution, had to invalidate gender quotas and parity in elections twice, in 1982 and 1999. Faced with the impossibility of introducing a parity-based approach, which is, in effect, based on communitarianism, feminist movements managed to circumvent the problem through a constitutional amendment. Thus, the Constitutional Law of July 8, 1999, concerning equality between men and women, introduced into Article 3 of the Constitution the principle that the law " promotes equal access for women and men to elected office and positions ."
However, the 1999 revision only concerned elections to political offices and positions. The legislature had not intended for this gender discrimination to extend beyond representation in the public sphere. But this barrier was quickly crossed. In July 2008, the chair of the National Assembly's delegation for women's rights, during the constitutional revision of July 23, had the following paragraph added to Article 1 : " The law promotes equal access for women and men to elected office and positions, as well as to professional and social responsibilities ."
Since then, there is no longer any area of social life that escapes parity norms. Such is the principle of positive discrimination. And, as Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet notes: “ No one questions anymore why a proportion of 50% women in all positions of responsibility would be desirable, nor how parity can improve the common good and the general interest… It ‘must’ now be unanimously accepted that the feminization of any institution is an absolute ‘good’ and that the objective of 50% women in an assembly or any other body constitutes a desirable end and the unsurpassable horizon of democracy ” [18] .
It is still permissible to question the consistency of this paragraph with the one preceding it in the same article, which stipulates that " The Republic ensures equality before the law for all citizens without distinction… ".
Moreover, how can one resist the small pleasure of recalling the remark made by our colleague, the legal historian Georges Frêche, always quick to point out inconsistencies, who declared during his term as mayor of Montpellier: “ In this team, there are nine Black people out of eleven. The norm would be three or four. That would reflect society .” And why not share his astonishment at the lack of men in the judiciary or women on garbage trucks? All these excesses allow us to address the question of merit in the face of communitarian demands.
Because if there is one area in which positive discrimination has particularly prospered, it is that of challenging merit alone as a criterion for access to certain functions, certain titles and certain training courses.
Two examples clearly illustrate this. First, there are the reforms implemented by Richard Décoing when he directed Sciences Po Paris (1996-2012): by reserving places for students from disadvantaged areas (ZEPs) through quotas, he established a dual access system that constitutes a genuine form of affirmative action. While highly contested by some, this recruitment method has nonetheless flourished over the years. The most striking and revealing aspect of this evolution is that Sciences Po has gradually shifted from discrimination at the entrance level based on a desire to "compensate for cultural capital" deemed insufficient in certain neighborhoods, to discrimination based on gender and race. This leads to the paradox that a "white heterosexual male," even if from a disadvantaged area, has less chance of gaining admission to Sciences Po than a "transgender person of color," even if from a privileged background. Continuing this logic of discrimination, today, with yet another reform of the entrance exam, the written general knowledge tests are being eliminated, considered " obstacles to diversity "; goodbye to bourgeois neighborhoods [19]. some of the institution's teachers, Sciences Po is becoming an echo chamber for American progressive delusions, a "mini-Evergreen" [20] However, Sciences Po has a ripple effect, as many higher education institutions, including some of the most prestigious, take this school as a model.
The second example is that of the "gender-specific scholarships" that the Ministry of National Education has just set up. The Ministerial Delegate for Gender Equality, Claude Boiron, explains:
“ Generally speaking, we have succeeded in implementing tools that address social inequalities; today we must address gender inequalities. Among the avenues we have explored and which have now been formalized is the creation of a gender minority scholarship. These “equality scholarships” will be established starting next school year. We will offer scholarship recipients in their second year of high school a kind of bonus to their allowance, which could amount to several tens of euros per month, if they choose a specialized subject in their first year of high school in which they are in the gender minority. For example, philosophy and literature for boys, and engineering or digital sciences for girls. This bonus could be doubled in their final year of high school if the chosen subject is retained .”
The irony is that these state scholarships, which will differ depending on the recipient's gender, are being called " equality scholarships " by their promoter! Go figure! We'll be curious to see what the Constitutional Council thinks. Nevertheless, this gentleman seems very pleased to have found the formula to, as my grandmother used to say, " make a horse drink ." Doesn't it seem more reasonable to consider that " gender-neutral education will never erase the anthropological differences between men and women " [21] This is certainly what the very mixed results of the Scandinavian countries, which are at the forefront of gender discrimination in the education system, demonstrate.
All these examples ultimately lead us back to the difficulties of exercising democracy, which Tocqueville had already identified in Democracy in America, in 1835. For Charles Coutel: “ By emphasizing the contradictions of the majority wish within democracies, Tocqueville indicates a program of action. He assigns us a threefold task: to ensure that we respect the majority opinion without giving in to conformism, to ensure that we respect the minority opinion while preventing the drift towards communitarianism, and finally, to ensure that we respect each individual, the custodian of the dignity of all humanity, thus summarizing the richness of the word culture, beyond the very confused rights of minorities ” [22] .
Nearly 200 years after his essay on democracy, it must be acknowledged that current developments lend a singular relevance to Tocqueville's warnings. Representative democracies are facing a new form of protest that challenges the majority principle. Indeed, the mobilizations against injustices that we are witnessing in our squares and roundabouts are a continuation of a central demand of the woke movement: the denunciation of the limitations of a democracy that serves the interests of the dominant class rather than the interests of the many dominated. We are seeing the emergence of a democratic aspiration that distrusts mediation and takes the form of a general challenge to those in power who act in the name of categorical and community interests. As the work of Réjane Sénac demonstrates, we are witnessing the creation of a " community of anger and resistance " in the face of injustices suffered individually but denounced collectively. “ Through the relationship to the principle of equality, we can read the disappointments and betrayals in relation to misguided ideals ” [23] .
Conclusion
It is neither appropriate to overestimate nor to underestimate the power of this woke ideology, imported for a large part from the United States. It is enough to note that it is today gaining strength in all sectors of society, including in the educational world, and to keep in mind that it is the values of equality of rights and fraternity that remain the pillars of our living together.
So, those who are attached to humanist values must remain vigilant to counter the “vigilante-woke” activists. And let’s bet on the fact that the conceptual and historical approximations that unite a galaxy of minorities will end up collapsing the woke ideological construction “in the style of the Tower of Babel”.
