“The crowd is pissing you off”, could we read on a panel in the demonstration of Thursday, March 23. qualify as ” crowd “ is, it is true, rather vexing. Emmanuel Macron knows this well, who, during his televised intervention with rural retirees in this country, Thursday at 1 p.m., saw fit to oppose two notions:
“The crowd that demonstrates has no legitimacy against the people who express themselves through their elected officials. »
This crowd/people opposition is an old trinket of political philosophy, this great bric-a-brac. Macron, who studied Machiavelli and frequented Paul Ricœur, knows this well. Aristotle already distinguished between plethos et demos. Demosthe people, refers to the citizens: the people who politically make up the city. Plethos, the crowd, the mass, refers to the simple multitude: a whole which is not organized, which is in its raw state. In Rome, the noble populus opposes the bass plebs (the plebs, as opposed to the patricians) or even worse, at the crowd the crowd, the vulgar.
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Macron’s choice: trash before democracy
The word “crowd” appears in the Middle Ages. Where is he from ? Apparently the root is Proto-Germanic (fulka“people”, “armed band”) which will give folk in English and volk in German. In old French, we come across “foulc”. The transformation into a “crowd” would have taken place through the influence of the word “tread”, in the sense of pressing: to tread on sheets, to tread on grapes (it comes from the Latin drunk).
Who despises representative democracy?
The crowd is therefore people who hurry, huddle together, jostle each other. It is a phenomenon to be controlled, which has no political legitimacy. “When you believe in this democratic and republican order, the riot does not prevail over the representatives of the people”, added the president during the famous 1 p.m., in a sentence that would have delighted Lacan because of his involuntary play on words (the riot = the packs).
During his vows of December 31, 2018, after the episode of the “yellow vests”, Macron had already insisted on the crowd/people opposition. He had denounced those who proposed to “speak on behalf of the people” and were not “in fact only the mouthpieces of a hate mob (…) quite simply the negation of France! » and he added: “The people are sovereign. He speaks out in elections. He chooses there representatives who make the law precisely because we are a State of law. » He then took up the theoretical credo of representative democracy. For him, what distinguishes the people from the crowd is the representation. The paradox he does not seem to see today is that it is he (and not “the mob”) who has just perverted parliamentary representation. With him, the elected officials do not really vote the law, or else, with a 49.3 gun to the temple. And it is this attitude that today pushes the so-called “crowd” to radicalize its protest.
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For the president, the people seem to be only an abstract entity, whose only function is to vote and obey the law. He does not see it as a body crossed by affects and conflicts, a body scarred by a long history, by great social movements, barricades, revolutions. Nor does it occur to him that the sovereign people can also be a sentimental crowd with a thirst for the ideal, drawn to the stars, the sails.
