The League of Human Rights has only the name. Widely dishonored during its active support for the Moscow trials in 1936, it has initiated in recent decades a slow but vigorous drift of accommodations with Islamism (public condemnation of the caricatures of Charlie, defense of Imam Iquouissen, parade with the CCIF – banned since for separatism -, we pass and many…). Notwithstanding, it continues to exert its influence on a large part of the left which refers to the Dreyfus affair – would the LDH support it today, it which tends to reduce any question concerning the French Jews to the question? of Israel, whom she portrays as the big bad colonizer? This left, we said, is engulfing itself, and digging the grave of democracy by legitimizing violence and defending the “new oppressed” even if they are terrorists. Some go so far as to show their support for the association by signing petitions and taking their cards in the name of freedom and the rights that the LDH rightly rejects and tramples on.
If the League of Human Rights was born at the time of the Dreyfus affair, founded in 1898 by the senator from Gironde Ludovic Trarieux, its matrix had already existed for ten years. On May 23, 1888, Clemenceau created “the League of Human and Citizen Rights to defend the Republic against threats of dictatorship”, in response to General Boulanger’s electoral victories. Born of radicalism and supported by men from the radical or socialist extreme left, Boulanger’s “national party” benefits from the popular base of the League of Patriots, founded in May 1882 by Paul Déroulède, a convinced republican and veteran , with 200,000 members.
Any resemblance to today’s events….
The young Third Republic was in crisis: between the loss of Alsace-Lorraine after the defeat of 1870 (7% of France’s industrial capacity, all the same), the scarcity of credit, the stock market crisis of 1882 and the deep agricultural crisis, the fall in the birth rate and a notable increase in delinquency (the Bérenger law introduced the “minor recidivism” criminal law, which increases the penalties for repeated minor offences), a surge in xenophobia (French workers the hunt for Italian immigrants in Marseilles and Arles, pushing the Parliament to pass a law that toughens the conditions for immigration), everything is going badly – any resemblance to today’s events, etc.
What Boulanger and the obscure range that surrounds him (from the extreme left to the anti-parliamentary right) demand is the end of the republic of compromise and flawed parliamentarianism. The watchword is simple: “dissolution, constituent, revision” – any resemblance to characters existing today, etc. It is the birth of French populism, neither right nor left, national, authoritarian, social and interventionist. Boulanger will be elected in April 1888, benefiting from a strong electoral abstention – any resemblance, etc. – but the crisis is serious: the Republic is called into question – any resemblance to existing facts and characters of today, etc.
Boulangism will not last long, divided between its left and its right, and it is the failure of the legislative elections of 1889. And, as it should be in France, where amorous passions go hand in hand with political grandeur and decadence , General Boulanger commits suicide in Belgium on the grave of his mistress, the aptly named Madame de Bonnemains.
History is essential to measure the present, without excess, without dramatization, without partisan rewriting. The LDH lost its Latin by supporting groups and ideologies contrary to its DNA, it is enough to open a history book to note it and to condemn the LDH today without forgetting that of yesterday.
I don’t know what ailment many commentators, politicians, journalists have taken, choking to howl that never has France ever been in such a serious crisis and has never so failed to fall into abyss of authoritarianism. Institutional crisis, regime crisis, the most serious crisis since the Algerian war (Pierre Rosanvallon, among others, strays into strange paths as far from reality as possible) to describe what is a political crisis, born of the choice of French citizens for an Assembly that resembles them. The institutions hold up, it is the policies that hold up badly. Once again, it suffices to open a history book to avoid tripping over a fantasy. A fantasy on which those who see the LDH for what it has long since ceased to feed as much as those who hope for an institutional chaos from which they hope to emerge victorious.
