[by Bruno Sire, Professor Emeritus , Member of the Academy of Legislation]
This text was the subject of a communication during the annual public session of the Academy of Legislation [1]
The appearance of the pronoun "iel" in the Robert and of inclusive writing in many documents, even though, since 2017, a circular from the Prime Minister has requested not to use it in all administrative documents[2]
JORF n°0272 of November 22, 2017, the Prime Minister: " guest, in particular for texts intended to be published in the Official Journal of the French Republic, not to use so-called inclusive writing, which refers to editorial and typographic practices aimed at substituting the use of the masculine, when it is used in a generic sense, with a spelling highlighting the existence of a feminine form. In addition to respecting the formalism specific to acts of a legal nature, State administrations 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 who declares that " Walking past Colbert's statue in Paris is a microaggression »[3] ; the Mayor of Rouen's plan to unbolt the statue of Napoleon; the residents of the Villa Medici who are strongly demanding that the tapestries donated by Louis XV be removed on the pretext that slaves are depicted on them; the European Commissioner for Equality, Helena Dalli, who is writing a guide to "politically correct" vocabulary for European civil servants in which, in order 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 one word: wokeism.
Being “woke” means being “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 contested works, such as those of the philosopher from the University of Berkeley: Judith Butler[6]It has given rise to notorious excesses, such as that shown in an edifying report produced in 2019 on Evergreen University in Washington State.[7]
. We see how, under pressure from radicalized far-left currents, an administration that is supposed to fight against discrimination ends up establishing an extremely strong moral order to compensate for inequalities such as skin color, gender, and social origin. Through universities and the education system, this ideology is spreading across the European continent like wildfire, and France in particular, as shown in its report last May. The Observatory of Decolonialism and Identity Ideologiess[8]
.
Wokism brings together a set of notions and concepts developed from the work of French philosophers in the 60s and 70s, such as the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, or the postmodernism of Jean Baudrillard. These philosophers have enjoyed great success since the 80s in the USA where they are grouped under the term French Theory. This current contributed to the appearance of the postcolonial studies, cultural studies, gender studies, as well as concepts such as the " systemic racism "The" cancel culture ", " Lintersectionality »And« positive discrimination ". He finds particularly favorable breeding ground in radical circles, whether political, militant or religious, because they are aware of representing minority currents. He also explains the promotion of the notion of "convergence of struggles" in which, in the name of intersectionality, we find side by side in the communitarian demands of defenders of the LGBT movement, supposed to defend individual freedoms, Islamists who seem to defend the complete opposite, defenders of racialist movements and individuals who are clearly on the far left of the political spectrum. Finding them all arm in arm at the head of a demonstration is not an incongruity to the extent that there is probably a micro-community that presents all the characteristics at the same time. For the woke, in our Western democracies, these minorities are dominated and therefore victims of systemic discrimination. Let us note in passing the semantic shift that makes them equate domination and discrimination.
By pushing the reasoning to its extreme, we understand how the supporters of this ideology consider that Western humanist civilization, which gave birth to our universalist democracies, can be considered as having to be "deconstructed" in order to purge the domination of the "heterosexual white man" considered as the archetype of the designer of this system of domination.[9].
As French academic 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 will witness petty quarrels, religious wars, theological oppositions that 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?
1/ Can the communitarian approach coexist with everyone having the same rights?
On the website of the "Ministry responsible for equality between women and men, diversity and equal opportunities", we find what could be considered a real eulogy to communitarianism. It promotes " anti-LGBT hate observatories ", already created in some academies, as well as inclusive education that makes visible communities that are supposed to be underrepresented.[11]. On the ministry's website, for example, under the heading "Training educational staff": " Develop initial and continuing training for teaching staff on the prevention and fight against LGBT-phobias and the inclusion of LGBT+ students. Continue and strengthen the production of data on LGBT-phobias in schools: create a dedicated website “Educating against LGBT-phobias” based on the model of the website “Educating against racism and anti-Semitism”; publish an updated guide to combating LGBT-phobias for use by higher education establishments, etc… ». Reading this program, one wonders when there will be observatories of “hatred of “racialized” people, Muslims, Christians, etc.”. Where do we stop?
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.
But as Mrs Delphine Girard, Professor of Letters at a high school in the suburbs of Paris, explains, for classes with social diversity to fulfil their educational mission correctly, we need the exact opposite: "It is this common culture that our youth deeply lacks, and which is the sine qua non condition for developing the feeling, which school must arouse, of belonging of all to a community of principles and heritage, this feeling of civic fraternity which, going beyond particular identities, makes us profoundly equal, and allows us to form a society. »[12]. Do we really have to keep telling young people that they are victims of discrimination and that we must therefore find special access routes to access certain positions, as Minister Elisabeth Moreno proposed at the beginning of 2021? Doesn't this amount to persuading them that the country rejects them instead of ensuring the conditions for equal opportunities, as essayist Tarik Yildiz wrote in a column in Le Monde?[13].
This is where we come to the fundamental debate between universalism versus communitarianism. Isn't the universalism of the Enlightenment 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 as enemies rather than as simple ideological adversaries the supporters of antagonistic positions, who are therefore not to be convinced but to be silenced: all this is part of a conception of the social world conducive to the absolutization of the boundaries between groups of belonging or thought rather than to attention to contexts, plurality, and the quest for what unites beyond what divides. This is why identitarianism, neo-feminism and new censorship express a fundamentally communitarian conception of the social world, the opposite of the universalist ideal of which France still remains, thanks to the achievements of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, a global emblem..
Thus, our society is faced with a paradox: it is at the moment when, relying on the notion of universality, it has given everyone identical rights without distinction of race, gender and religion, as no other society does in the world, that a part of its population is trying to impose the notion of race in the name of the anti-racist fight.[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 a scapegoat. All of this, as David Lisnard and Christophe de Voogd note, “ in a conceptual mishmash where we slip, without warning, from differences to inequalities, and from inequalities to discrimination"[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 victimization were not enough, the culture of erasure, dear to the wokes, appears as its corollary in the rise of communitarianism. How else can we interpret the unboltings and auto-da-fés that 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 books burned are albums of Tintin, Asterix and Babar! In a video intended for students, those responsible for these destructions explain the approach: " We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow into an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security. »[17]. Aside from the disarmingly naive "teddy bear" aspect of the approach, it must also be seen as a real resignation in the face of the necessary pedagogy that must be done about our common history and the conflicts that we have collectively overcome. This is why the culture of erasure is a dangerous regression because we can, with Winston Churchill, consider " qu'A people who forget their history condemn themselves to relive it ».
Added to this is the notion of "symbolic violence", a legacy of Bourdieu, which is at the heart of the rhetoric Woke. It designates the internalization of the "dominant discourse" by the dominated themselves. However, as David Lisnard and Christophe de Voogd note, in the Political and Parliamentary Review, by a kind of reversal, it is Western societies which are in the process of internalizing the instructions Woke, which have become the real “dominant discourse” of our time in the educational and media apparatus.
« We measure it in the refusal to name rapists and murderers, as long as they are not white; we measure it in the psychiatrization of Islamist terrorists, conveniently classified in the category of the "unbalanced"; we see it again in the woke washing of large companies, multiplying the pledges to the new political correctness: code of "appropriate conduct" and other training on "gender"; marketing with great reinforcement of couples of color or mixed couples very overrepresented compared to their real weight in the general population, and where it is increasingly rare for the man to be white. It is therefore not a question here of a legitimate and desirable recognition of the diversity of our societies, but of the acceptance or even the prescription of new norms, going as far as the "innocent" image of veiled little girls in advertising messages. »
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.
2/ Is the principle of discrimination as a means of redressing 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, we must give these woke ideologues credit; the idea of positive discrimination did not wait for them. Already in the 70s, in his famous "harangue", Oswald Baudot, an influential member of the magistrates' union, wrote to a class of young judges as they left the magistrates' school: "Slisten to bias (…) always examine where the strong and the weak are, which do not necessarily coincide with the offender and his victim…”. In a way, he was proposing, nothing more and nothing less, than to remove the blindfold from our statutes in the courts!
The same was true of the issue of gender parity. Indeed, the Constitutional Council, referring to the first article 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 logic, which is, in fact, communitarian, feminist movements managed to get around the problem by means of a constitutional revision. This is how the constitutional law of 8 July 1999, relating to equality between men and women, made it possible to introduce into article 3 of the Constitution the principle according to which the law " promotes equal access for women and men to electoral mandates and elective functions"
However, the 1999 revision only concerned elections to political mandates and functions. The legislator had not wanted this discrimination on the basis of sex to go beyond the framework of representation in the public sphere. But this barrier was quickly crossed. In July 2008, the president of the delegation for women's rights of the National Assembly, on the occasion of the constitutional revision of July 23, had the following paragraph adopted in article 1:er : " The law promotes equal access for women and men to electoral mandates and elective functions, as well as professional and social responsibilities"
Since then, there is no longer an area of social life that escapes parity standards. This is how the principle of positive discrimination works. And, as Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet notes: " No one is wondering any more about how a proportion of 50% of 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% of women in an assembly or any other body constitutes a desirable end and the insurmountable horizon of democracy. »[18].
It is nevertheless permissible to question the coherence of this paragraph with the one preceding it, in the same article, which stipulates that " The Republic ensures equality before the law of all citizens without distinction... ».
Moreover, how can we resist the small pleasure of recalling the phrase of 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 Blacks out of eleven. The normal thing would be for there to be three or four. That would be a reflection of society. "And why not be surprised, like him, that there are not enough men in the judiciary or not enough women behind the 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 show this. First, that of the reforms implemented by Richard Décoing when he was director of Sciences Po Paris (1996-2012): by reserving, through quotas, places for students from ZEPs, he established a dual access system that is a real form of positive discrimination. Highly contested by some, the fact remains that this method of recruitment has prospered over the years. The most striking and revealing thing about this evolution is that Sciences Po has gradually moved from discrimination at entry based on a desire to "compensate for cultural capital" deemed insufficient in certain neighborhoods, to discrimination based on gender and race. We arrive at the paradox that the "white heterosexual male" even if he came from ZEPs, has less chance of integrating Sciences Po than the "racialized transgender" even if he came from a bourgeois background. Continuing the logic of discrimination, we are today, with yet another reform of the entrance exam, eliminating the written tests of general culture considered as " barriers to diversity » ; exit the bourgeois neighborhoods[19] ! For 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 knock-on effect in that many higher education establishments, and not the least, 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:
« In general, we have managed to put in place tools that tackle social inequalities, we must now address gender inequalities. Among the avenues we have worked on and which are now in place, there is the creation of a gender minority scholarship. These "equality scholarships" will be created from the next school year. We will offer scholarship students in the second year a kind of bonus to their allowance that could go up to several dozen euros per month if they choose a specialist course in the first year where they are a gender minority. For example, philosophy and literature for boys, engineering sciences or digital technology for girls. This bonus could be doubled in the final year if the course is retained ».
The irony is that these state scholarships, which will differ depending on the gender of the recipient, are called " equality scholarships " by their promoter! Understand who can! We will be curious to see what the Constitutional Council thinks about it. The fact remains that this good gentleman seems very satisfied to have found the formula for, as my grandmother used to say, " make a donkey drink when it is not thirsty ". Does it not seem more reasonable to consider that " “Gender-neutral” education will never erase the anthropological differences between men and women »[21]This is in any case what is shown by the very mixed results of the Scandinavian countries which are at the forefront in the field of gender discrimination in the education system.
All these examples bring us back, ultimately, to the difficulties of exercising democracy that Tocqueville had already identified in On 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 triple 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 communitarian drift and, finally, to ensure that we respect each individual, the depositary 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 admitted that current developments give a singular relevance to Tocqueville's warnings. Representative democracies have to face a new contestation that challenges the majority principle. Indeed, the mobilizations against the injustices that we witness in our squares and roundabouts are in line with a central demand of the woke movements, namely the denunciation of the limits of a democracy that serves the interests of the dominant and not the interests of a large number of the dominated. We see the emergence of a democratic aspiration that distrusts mediations and that takes the form of a general contestation of governments in the name of categorical and community interests. As the work of Réjane Sénac shows, 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 with regard 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”.
