During a debate on national identity in Marseille, the Minister of Immigration Eric Besson proposed that every French person reaching the age of majority should sign a “Charter of Rights and Duties,” “something that binds them to the republic,” “a symbol that can touch,” according to remarks by the Minister reported by Le Monde.
The idea is noble. On the surface, one can only agree with it. However, it reveals the quintessential French mistake: a law where there should be desire, a signature where there should be emotion. It also demonstrates the insurmountable disconnect, both on the right and the left of the national political spectrum, between the elected official and the citizen: instead of seeking to understand a phenomenon, the former finds refuge in legislative omnipotence. In search of humanism, if not happiness, the latter declines the offer or even resists. Although both ardently wish for it, the meeting is unlikely. Let us accompany this disheartening observation with some common-sense reflections.
First, should we wait until the age of the “legal majority” to be concerned about an individual’s “attachment” to the nation? We can — perhaps naively — consider someone an “eternal apprentice” of republican values. But the approach proposed by the Minister may raise more questions than it resolves: can one expect to correct education as late as this, as simply as straightening a bent bar?
Doesn’t the formalized signing of a charter risk contradicting the symbolic power of the implicit ideals it entails? As a solemn admission of powerlessness, it would sanction their failure like a reverse diploma. Attempting to substitute for them, the proposed framework would only reveal the emptiness it encloses: a fragile container instead of a solid content.
Proposing the signing of this charter at eighteen also constitutes a formidable wager: we know today — symptoms demonstrate, much like the debate on the criminal responsibility of minors — that legal majority and its psychic counterpart no longer really correspond. Socio-professional benchmarks are blurred. Adolescence, a particularly turbulent period of redefining the essential stakes of a human being in all directions, where it opens a vast field of possibilities, can invariably favor or reject any integration of the norm. In this respect, adolescence is an aggravating factor of inequality before the law.
And since the Minister speaks of “symbol,” let us finally recall its enigmatic significant dimension: the initiation ritual of passage, which consists of detaching the young human from the gravitational pull of maternal omnipotence to make them definitively enter the adult world, begins from an early age. But even in “The Jungle Book,” it is the sudden and unforeseen power of desire that guides Mowgli to the village. It is this “freely” felt attraction and its unconscious extension — an adhesion to everything it conveys in terms of education and culture — that will no doubt make him accept, through the repression of fundamental violence, the painful constraints of living in society.
