If there was indeed a “break” in the New Year’s greetings delivered to the nation by Nicolas Sarkozy, it was certainly not in their form that it should be sought. From that perspective, the expectations clumsily aroused by reports of genuine changes and disseminated by the Elysian press services were particularly disappointed. National anthem, use of the expression “my dear compatriots,” listing past actions and announcing upcoming programs, a legitimate initial mention, and necessarily compassionate for those excluded from the joys of the celebration, France’s role for world peace, probable reading from a teleprompterโnothing was missing from the “traditional” ensemble of the presidential ritual in use under the Fifth Republic.
As an excellent politician, the head of state may have innovated where he was not expected: the tone of his speech. First, one notices a vocabulary of a rather religious essence. On the occasion of the turn of the year, a celebration after all pagan, it invokes a “message of hope”, emphasizes the necessary “faith in the future”, borrows the equally fervent notion of “doubt” and finishes on a concept akin to resilience, of overcoming worries and anxieties related to “uncertainties of the future.” Comments that seem to find a spiritual equivalent only in a now-famous phrase by Franรงois Mitterrand: that of his “belief in the forces of the spirit” contained in his last presidential New Year’s address on December 31, 1994.
Beyond the voluntarist emphases, the presidential intervention, marked by the phrase on the “politics of civilization,” then reveals in negative โ and this may be the real interest of these greetings โ all the deep ills of French society. By calling for a sort of aggiornamento of the “values,” “identity,” and “culture” of France, the head of state gave the impression of wanting to conjure in advance, in spirit if not in actions, the fate of serious material difficulties likely to cloud the national sky in 2008: a barrel of oil permanently above one hundred dollars, a moribund growth of just 0.7%, worsened, moreover, by a general rise in consumer prices and by that of energy services, developments largely confirmed by the Minister of the Economy. Suffice it to say that the hopes for an improvement in purchasing power placed at the heart of his program by Nicolas Sarkozy are quickly receding.
Would this “new renaissance” of civilization that the president calls for in his “wishes” manage to mask all the malaise? One can doubt it upon reading a recent international survey on the youth of the modern world aged 16 to 29, conducted by the Foundation for Political Innovation and prefaced by sociologist Franรงois de Singly. According to the results, only 26% of young French people versus 60% of young Danes, 54% of young Americans, or even 43% of young Chinese consider their future to be “promising.” Figures unfortunately even more telling when it comes to discussing “the prospect of a good job in the future,” “the entrepreneurial spirit to be developed in children,” or “the feeling of being able to choose one’s life”: young French people remain fundamentally “pessimistic” on these three subjects. Could it be a specificity as French as the forty thousand cars burnt again this year in our country? Has nothing been resolved since Freud’s observation in 1929 on the opposition between “instinctual demands” and “cultural restrictions” imposed by “civilized morality”? The insistent litany of “emergencies” stated by the head of state in his address on December 31st suggests as much.