Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

The dominant discourse right now is “Calm down, this is just the normal game of democracy”. Actually, “this” is not the normal course of democracy. Everyone has experienced the disappointment of a favored candidate losing. The result of Tuesday is something else, not seen before in our lifetime: the triumph of indecency and the rout of decency.

There is in the world a general category of decent people, who as one of their characteristics seek out the company of other decent people. (“Elective affinities”.) They have been massively and perhaps decisively defeated.

What makes people decent is not that they never do bad things (although they perhaps strive not to do more of them than necessary), but that as much as possible they prefer certain things over their obverses. For example, they prefer:

• Telling  the truth over lying.
• Elegance over vulgarity.
• Education over arrogant ignorance.
• Arguments over insults.
• Beauty over ugliness.
• Joy over gloom.
• Progress over regress.
• Health over disease.
• Financial well-being over widespread poverty.
• Reason over mania.
• Science over fables.
• Helping others over hurting them.
• Encouraging others over denigrating them.
• Peace over war.
• Respect over contempt.
• Calm over violence.
• Tolerance over intolerance.
• Honesty over dishonesty.
• Democracy over totalitarianism.
• Freedom over slavery.
• As an example of the last pair, women’s freedom over their submission to hateful men.
• Kindness over cruelty.
• Fairness over injustice.
• Sanity over insanity.

(Again) those preferences do not mean that decent people never indulge in any of the second terms of these pairs, but that given a choice they will lean towards the first terms,  that they prefer the world to evolve in the direction of these first terms, and that they naturally associate with other people with similar preferences. The first terms all go well with each other (after all, what is science if not the dogged pursuit of truth? What is democracy if not the reign of tolerance?), and all the second terms go well with each other too, but until now it was exceedingly rare to see a  widely popular leader in a civilized country, and his zealots, deliberately embrace everything indecent and reject everything decent. At worst they would on the sly adopt a few indecencies here and there.

The pair elected yesterday is unique in the history of the United States by having deliberately, ostensibly and proudly chosen every second term.Every single one, many times, in the public’s full view, and under the cheers of their supporters.

That is why all decent people are desperate today. The desperation has nothing to do with matters of left versus right, or democrat versus republican, or higher taxes versus tax cuts, or the price of eggs, or any other political issue of substance.  It has everything to do with decency over indecency.

And particularly with truth over falsehood. The first of the above pairs largely subsumes the others: when society starts tolerating constant, blatant, enormous lies as if they were part of expected discourse, everything else falls out. Dictators understand this process well.

We hear that “no one knows what is going to happen”. Not so. We know something with certainty: catastrophes are coming our way. The only unknown is how many of them will hit us. For one thing the fight against climate change is doomed: all experts tell us that the change is not linear and that we have (we had) at best a few years to avoid the worst. As the US, the biggest  source of warming and emissions (although by no means the only large one), turns away from climate action, everyone else, beginning with China, will have an excellent excuse to do nothing. The consequences are horrendous to contemplate, and will be with us soon.  Another certain catastrophe is chaos in the US, merrily encouraged by its enemies. The part of the country that voted for sanity is defeated and despondent but not gone; come the first round of anti-constitutional measures, we may expect no end to clashes. Tens of millions of Americans are almost certainly going to lose their health insurance, going back to a situation unique in developed countries.  Women, denied abortion and resorting to back-alley substitutes, will die by the thousands. It is better not to think too much of what will happen to Ukraine now (and through a possible ricochet effect to Poland and the Baltic states).  Or of what would ensue in the case of a new health crisis, with loony anti-vaccine, anti-mask activists at the helm. Of what will take place at all levels of governments, with none of the “adults in the room” around: the cool-headed conservative professionals who saved us from some disasters the first time around (and this time exhorted the country to vote for the sane candidate). We are back to the dark years of 2016 to 2020, when we would wake up almost every morning to the news of the latest crazy initiative, except that now there will be a rock-solid majority (presidency, Senate, Supreme Court, with the House still not decided as of this writing) and the entire party’s total subservience to the whims, however extreme, of one man.

The founders of the Republic had warned against exactly the kind of outrageous demagogues that will now assume power, but they could never imagine such a combination of circumstances as has now overwhelmed the country; if they had they would surely have put in more checks and balances. (For one thing, convicted felons cannot vote; why in the world can they be elected?)

The USA is, or was until now, the world’s oldest continuously functioning democracy. Does it have enough resilience to continue as a democracy? Do not hold your breath. For one thing, there is no democracy without civilized debate. Yet another certain and unprecedented catastrophe is the debasement of public discourse, step by step until destruction, in the past few years. Everyone now seems to have accepted that it is OK for a major party candidate, a past and now future president, to resort again and again and again to personal insults, to mocking disabled persons for their disability, war heroes for having been heroes, soldiers for having been soldiers, and opponents for being supposedly stupid. The press calls these insults “schoolyard bullying”, but a 12-year-old who says any of these things in  a school’s yard promptly gets a dressing-down from the principal and a suspension.

We in the West have been living, whether we realized or not, a wonderful 80 years. We have suffered traumas (the repeated Paris attacks, 9/11, October 7, February 2022) but we have also enjoyed peace and prosperity. We are at the end of an era. Particularly those among us who aspire to decency.

This week, Informatics Europe, the association of European computer science departments and industry research centers, is holding its annual ECSS event, bizarrely billed as “20 years of Informatics Europe”. (Informatics Europe was created at the end of 2006 and incorporated officially in 2011. The first ever mention of the name appeared in an email from Jan van Leeuwen to me with cc to Christine Choppy, received on 23 October 2006 at 21:37 — we were working late. Extract from Jan’s message: “The name `Informatics Europe’ has emerged as as a name that several people find appealing (and  www.informatics-europe.org seems free).” So this year is at most the 18th anniversary.)

I would have liked to speak at this week’s event but was rejected, as explained at the end of this note. I am jotting down here a partial sketch of what I would have said, at least the introduction. (Engaging in a key-not since I was not granted a keynote.) Some of the underlying matters are of great importance and I hope to have the opportunity to talk or write about them in a more organized form in the future.

Informatics Europe came out of a need to support and unite Europe’s computer science (informatics) community. In October 2004 (funny how much seems to happen in October) Willy Zwaenepoel, chair of CS at EPFL (ETH Lausanne) wrote to me as the CS department head at ETH Zurich with an invitation to meet and discuss ways to work together towards making the discipline more visible in Switzerland. We met shortly thereafter, for a pleasant Sunday dinner on November 14. I liked his idea but suggested that any serious effort should happen at the European level rather than just Switzerland. We agreed to try to convince all the department heads that we could find across Europe and invite them to a first meeting. In the following weeks a frantic effort took place to identify, by going through university web sites and personal contacts, as many potential participants as possible. The meeting,  dubbed ECSS for European Computer Science Summit, took place at ETH Zurich on (you almost guessed it) 20-21 October 2005. The call for participation started with:

The departments of computer science at EPF Lausanne and ETH Zurich are taking the initiative of a first meeting of heads of departments in Europe.

Until now there hadn’t been any effort, comparable to the Computing Research Association in the US with its annual “Snowbird” conference, to provide a forum where they could discuss these matters and coordinate their efforts. We feel it’s time to start.

The event triggered enormous enthusiasm and in the following years we created the association (first with another name, pretty ridiculous in retrospect, but fortunately Jan van Leeuwen intervened) and developed it. For many years the associated was hosted at ETH in my group, with a fantastic Executive Board (in particular its two initial vice presidents, Jan van Leeuwen and Christine Choppy) and a single employee (worth many), Cristina Pereira, who devoted an incredible amount of energy to develop services for the members, who are not individuals but organizations (university departments and industry research labs). One of the important benefits of the early years was to bring together academics from the Eastern and Western halves of the continent, the former having still recently emerged from communism and eager to make contacts with their peers from the West.

This short reminder is just to situate Informatics Europe for those who do not know about the organization. I will talk more about it at the end because the true subject of this note is not the institution but European computer science. The common concern of the founders was to bring the community together and enable it to speak with a single voice to advance the discipline. The opening paragraphs of a paper that Zwaenepoel and I published in Communications of the ACM to announce the effort (see here for the published version, or here for a longer one, pre-copy-editing) reflect this ambition:

Europe’s contribution to computer science, going back seventy years with Turing and Zuse, is extensive and prestigious; but the European computer science community is far from having achieved the same strength and unity as its American counterpart. On 20 and 21 October 2005, at ETH Zurich, the “European Computer Science Summit” brought together, for the first time, heads of computer science departments throughout Europe and its periphery. This landmark event was a joint undertaking of the CS departments of the two branches of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology: EPFL (Lausanne) and ETH (Zurich).

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The initiative attracted interest far beyond its original scope. Close to 100 people attended, representing most countries of the European Union, plus Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, a delegate from South Africa, and a representative of the ACM,
Russ Shackelford, from the US. Eastern Europe was well represented. The program consisted of two keynotes and a number of panels and workshops on such themes as research policy, curriculum harmonization, attracting students, teaching CS to non-CS students, existing national initiatives, and plans for a Europe-wide organization. The reason our original call for participation attracted such immediate and widespread interest is that computer science in Europe faces a unique set of challenges as well as opportunities. There were dozens of emails in the style “It’s high time someone took such an initiative”; at the conference itself, the collective feeling of a major crystallizing event was palpable.

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The challenges include some old and some new. Among the old, the fragmentation of Europe and its much treasured cultural diversity have their counterparts in the organization of the educational and research systems. To take just three examples from the education side, the UK has a system that in many ways resembles the US standard, although with significant differences (3- rather than 4-year bachelor’s degree, different hierarchy of academic personnel with fewer professors and more lecturers); German universities have for a long time relied on a long (9-semester) first degree, the “Diplom”; and France has a dual system of “Grandes Écoles”, engineering schools, some very prestigious and highly competitive, but stopping at a Master’s-level engineering degree, and universities with yet another sequence of degrees including a doctorate.

And so on. The immediate concerns in 2024 are different (Bologna adoption woes are a thing of the past) but the basic conundrum remains: the incredible amount of talent and creativity present in Europe remains dormant; research in academia (and industry) fails to deliver anywhere close to its potential. The signs are everywhere; as this note is only a sketch let me just mention a handful. The following picture  shows the provenance of papers in this year’s International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the premier event in the field. Even if you cannot read all the details (it’s a photo taken quickly from a back row in the opening session, sorry for the bad quality), the basic message is unmistakable: all China, the US, then some papers from Singapore, Australia and Canada. A handful from Germany and Switzerland, not a single accepted paper from France! In a discipline that is crucial for the future of every European nation.

Venture capital? There is a bit more than twenty years ago, but it is still limited, avaricious and scared of risks. Government support? Horizon and other EU projects have helped many, with ERC grants  in particular (a brilliant European exclusive) leading to spectacular successes, but the bulk of the funding is unbelievably bureaucratic, forcing marriages of reason between institutions that have nothing in common (other than the hope of getting some monies from Brussels) and feeding a whole industry of go-between companies which claim to help applicants but contribute exactly zero to science and innovation. They have also had the perverse effect of limiting national sources of funding. (In one national research agency on whose evaluation committee I sat,  the acceptance rate is 11%. In another, where I recently was on the expert panel, it’s more like 8%. Such institutions are the main source of non-EU research funding in their respective countries.)

The result? Far less innovation than we deserve and a brain drain that every year gets worse. Some successes do occur, and we like to root for Dassault, SAP, Amadeus and more recently companies like Mistral, but almost all of the top names in technology   — like them or loathe them  — are US-based (except for their Chinese counterparts): Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Apple, Meta, X, or (to name another software company) Tesla. They benefit from European talent and European education: some have key research centers in Europe, and all have European engineers and researchers. So do non-European universities; not a few of  the ICSE papers labelled above as “American” or “Canadian” are actually by European authors. Talk to a brilliant young researcher or bright-eyed entrepreneur in Europe: in most cases, you will hear that he wants to find a position or create a company in the US, because that is where the action is.

Let me illustrate the situation with a vivid example. In honor of Niklaus Wirth’s 80th birthday I co-organized a conference in 2014 where at the break a few of us were chatting with one of the speakers, Vint Cerf. Someone asked him a question which was popping up everywhere at that time, right in the middle of the Snowden affair: “if you were a sysadmin for a government organization, would you buy a Huawei router?”. Cerf’s answer was remarkable: I don’t know, he said, but there is one thing I do not understand: why in the world doesn’t Europe develop its own cloud solution? So honest, coming from an American — a Vice President at Google! — and so true. So true today still: we are all putting all our data on Amazon’s AWS and Cerf’s employer’s Google Cloud and IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Total madness. (A recent phenomenon that appears even worse is something I have seen happening at European university after university: relinquishing email and other fundamental solutions to Microsoft! More and more of us now have our professional emails at outlook.com. Even aside from the technical issues, such en-masse surrender is demented.) Is Europe so poor or so retarded that it cannot build local cloud or email solutions? Of course not. In fact, some of the concepts were invented here!

This inability to deliver on our science and technology potential is one of the major obstacles to social and economic improvement in Europe. (Case in point: there is an almost one-to-one correspondence between the small set of countries that are doing better economically than the rest of the Europe, often much better, and the small set of countries that take education and science seriously, giving them enough money and freeing them from overreaching bureaucracy. Did I mention Switzerland?) The brain drain should be a major source of worry; some degree of it is of course normal — enterprising people move around, and there are objective reasons for the magnetic attraction of the US — but the phenomenon is dangerously growing and is too unidirectional. Europe should offer its best and brightest a local choice commensurate with the remote one.

Many cases seem to suggest that Europe has simply given up on its ambitions. One specific example — academia-related but important — adds to the concerns raised apropos ICSE above. With a group of software engineering pioneers from across Europe (including some who would later help with Informatics Europe) we started the European Software Engineering Conference in 1987. I was the chair of the first conference, in Strasbourg that year, and the chair of the original steering committee for the following years (I later organized the 2013 session). The conference blossomed, reflecting the vibrant life of the European software engineering community, and open of course to researchers from all over the world. (The keynote speaker in Strasbourg was David Parnas, who joked that we had invited him, an American, because the French and Germans would never agree to a speaker from the other country. That quip was perhaps funny but as unfair as it was wrong: founders from different countries, notably including Italy and Belgium, even the UK, were working together in  a respectful and friendly way without any national preferences.) Having done my job I stepped aside but was flabbergasted to learn some years later that ESEC had attached itself to a US-based event, FSE (the symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering). The inevitable and predictable happened: FSE was supposed to be ESEC-FSE every other year, but soon that practice fell out and now ESEC is no more. FSE is not the culprit here: it’s an excellent conference (I had a paper in the last edition), it is just not European. My blood boils each time I think about how the people who should have nurtured and developed ESEC, the result of many years of discussions and of excellent Europe-wide cooperation, betrayed their mission and let the whole thing disappear. Pathetic and stupid, and terrible for Europe, which no longer has an international conference in this fundamental area of modern technology.

The ESEC story helps think about the inevitable question: who is responsible? Governments are not blameless; they are good at speeches but less at execution. When they do intervene, it’s often with haste (reacting to hype with pharaonic projects that burn heaps of money before running out of favor and delivering nothing). In France, the tendency is sometimes to let the state undertake technical projects that it cannot handle; the recipes that led to the TGV or Ariane do not necessarily work for IT. (A 2006 example was an attempt to create a homegrown search engine, which lasted just long enough to elicit stinging mockery in the Wall Street Journal, “Le Google”, unfortunately behind a paywall.)

It is too easy, however, to cast all the blame on outsiders. Perhaps the most important message that I would have wanted to convey to the department heads, deans, rectors and other academic decision-makers attending ECSS this week is that we should stop looking elsewhere and start working on the problems for which we are responsible. Academia is largely self-governed. Even in centralized countries where many decisions are made at the national level in ministries, the staff in those ministries largely consists of academics on secondment to the administration. European academia — except in the more successful countries, already alluded to, and by the way not exempt either from some of the problems of their neighbors — is suffocating under the weight of absurd rules. It is fashionable to complain about the bureaucracy, but many of the people complaining have the power to make and change these rules.

The absurdities are everywhere. In country A, a PhD must take exactly three years. (Oh yes? I thought it was the result that mattered.) By the way, if you have funding for 2.5 years, you cannot hire a PhD student (you say you will find the remaining funding in due time? What? You mean you are taking a risk?) In country B, you cannot be in the thesis committee of the student you supervised. (This is something bequeathed from the British system. After Brexit!) Countries C, D, E and F (with probably G, H, I, J and K to follow) have adopted the horrendous German idea of a “habilitation”, a second doctorate-like process after the doctorate, a very effective form of infantilization which maintains scientists in a subservient state until their late thirties, preventing them during their most productive years from devoting their energy to actual work. Universities everywhere subject each other to endless evaluation schemes in which no one cares about what you actually do in education and research but the game is about writing endless holier-than-thou dissertations on inclusiveness, equality etc. with no connection to any actual practice. In country L, politicized unions are represented in all the decision-making bodies and impose a political agenda, censoring important areas of research and skewing scientist hires on the basis of political preferences. In country M, there is a rule for every elementary event of academic life and the rule suffers no exception (even when you discover that it was made up two weeks earlier with the express goal of preventing you from doing something sensible). In country N, students who fail an exam have the right to a retake, and then a second retake, and then a third retake, in oral form of course. In country O, where all university presidents make constant speeches about the benefits of multidisciplinarity, a student passionate about robotics but with a degree in mechanical engineering cannot enroll in a master degree in robotics in the computer science department. In country P (and Q and R and S and T) students and instructors alike must, for any step of academic life, struggle with a poorly designed IT system, to which there is no alternative. In country U, expenses for scientific conferences are reimbursed six months later, when not rejected as non-conformant. In country V, researchers and educators are hired through a protracted  committee process which succeeds in weeding out candidates with an original profile. In country W, the primer criterion for hiring researchers is the H-index. In country X, it is the number of publications. In country Y, management looks at your research topics and forces you to change them every five years. I would need other alphabets but could go on.

When we complain about the difficulties to get things done, we are very much like the hero of Kafka’s Before the Law, who grows old waiting in front of a gate, only to learn in his final moments that he could just have entered by pushing it. We need to push the gate of European academia. No one but we ourselves is blocking it. Start by simplifying everything, but there are more ways to enter; they  are what I would have liked to present at ECSS and will have to wait for another day.

Which brings me back to the ECSS conference. I wrote to its organizers asking for the opportunity to give a talk. Naïvely, I thought the request would be obvious. After all, while Informatics Europe was at every step a group effort, with an outstanding group of colleagues from across Europe (I mentioned a few at the beginning, but there were many more, including all the members of the initial Executive Board), I played the key role as one of the two initiators of the idea, the organizer of the initial meeting and several of the following ECSS, the founding president for two terms (8 years), the prime writer of the foundational documents, the host of the first secretariat for many years in my ETH chair, the lead author of several reports, the marketer recruiting members, and the jack-of-all-trades for Informatics Europe. It may be exaggerated to say that for the first few years I carried the organization on my shoulders, but it is a fact that I found the generous funding (from ETH, industry partners and EPFL thanks to Zwaenepoel) that enabled us to get started and enabled me, when I passed the baton to my successor, to give him an organization in a sound financial situation, some 80 due-paying members, and a strong record of achievements. Is it outrageous, after two decades, to ask for a microphone to talk about the future for 45 minutes? The response I got from the Informatics Europe management was as surprising as it was boorish: in our program (they said in February 2024!) there is no place left. To add injury to insult they added that if I really wanted I could participate in some kind of panel discussion. (Sure, fly to Malta in the middle of the semester, cancel 4 classes and meetings, miss paper deadlines, all for 5 minutes of trying to put in a couple of words. By the way, one of the principles we had for the organization of ECSS was always to be in a big city with an important local community and an airport with lots of good connections to the principal places in Europe — and beyond for our US guests.) When people inherit a well-functioning organization, the result of hard work by a succession of predecessors, it is hard to imagine what pleasure they can take in telling them to go to hell. Pretty sick.

For me Informatics Europe was the application to my professional life of what remains a political passion: a passion for Europe and democracy. On this same blog in 2012 I published an article entitled “The most beautiful monument of Europe”, a vibrant hymn to the European project. While I know that some of it may appear naïve or even ridiculous, I still adhere to everything it says and I believe it is worth reading. While I have not followed the details of the activities of Informatics Europe since I stopped my direct involvement, I am saddened not to see any trace of European sentiment in it. We used to have Ukrainian members, from Odessa Polytechnic, who participated in the first ECSS meetings; today there is no member from Ukraine listed. One would  expect to see prominent words of solidarity with the country, which is defending our European values, including academic ones. Is that another sign of capitulation?

I am also surprised to see few new in-depth reports. Our friends from the US Computing Research Association, who were very helpful at the beginning of Informatics Europe (they included in particular Andy Bernat and Ed Laszowka, and Willy Zwaenepoel himself who had been a CRA officer during his years in the US), told us that one of the keys to success was to provide the community with factual information. Armed with that advice, we embarked on successive iterations of the “Informatics in Europe: Key Data” reports, largely due to the exhaustive work of Cristina Pereira, which provided unique data on salaries (something that we often do not discuss in Europe, but it is important to know how much a PhD student, postdoc, assistant professor of full professor makes in every surveyed country), student numbers, degrees, gender representation etc. etc., with the distinctive quality that — at Cristina’s insistence —we favored exactness over coverage: we included only the countries for which we could get reliable data, but for those we guaranteed full correctness and accuracy. From the Web site it seems these reports — which indeed required a lot of effort, but are they not the kind of thing the membership expects? — were discontinued some years ago. While the site shows some other interesting publications (“recommendations”), it seems regrettable to walk way from hard foundational work.

New management is entitled to its choices (as previous management is entitled to raise concerns). Beyond such differences of appreciation, the challenges facing European computer science are formidable. The enemies are outside, but they are also in ourselves. The people in charge are asleep at the wheel. I regret not to have had the opportunity to try to wake them up in person, but I do hope for a collective jolt to enable our discipline to bring Europe the informatics benefits Europe deserves.

I do not have a crystal ball and disaster may still strike. A terrorist attack, disruption by the hateful scoundrels of the extreme left. (Meaning I would have to eat the words below, since they will be here for the record, but then we will have worse things to deplore.)

After initial doubts I have had an increasingly good feeling, as we got closer to the event, about the Olympic games. A few months ago I feared that unions would stage irresponsible strikes, but that does not seem to be happening; if peace was bought it was worth it.

It looks like the organization has been truly efficient and professional, with the right dose of controlled craziness (for the opening ceremony). After all, for the first time in decades France has had a competent government since 2017, still in place even if on the way out, and it shows.

What if everything went according to plan and beyond expectations? What if the unimaginable just happened now?

A skillfully orchestrated production, national unity even if temporary, smiles and welcomes — two weeks of bliss?

It is permitted to hold one’s breath and cross one’s fingers.

Bienvenue à Paris.

[English version forthcoming.]

Que peut-on faire ? Un pays vieux d’un millénaire et demi est en train de se suicider. Pour tentant que soit le désespoir, il est encore temps d’agir.

Le pire scénario, c’est la menace de la gauche. Ce qu’il restait de sociaux-démocrates s’est prosterné devant une bande d’extrémistes décidés à détruire toute structure sociale, défendant ouvertement les terroristes les plus sanguinaires, et conduits par un apprenti dictateur assoiffé de pouvoir absolu et de vengeance dans la pure tradition stalinienne. Les contrer est la priorité absolue : faire barrage à la gauche.

Ceux d’en face, s’ils sont moins immédiatement dangereux, ne valent guère mieux. À peine dégagés de leurs origines pétainistes, ils sont soudoyés par Moscou et leur arrogance n’a d’égale que leur incompétence. En faisant chavirer la France ils risquent d’entraîner l’Europe dans le naufrage, ouvrant la porte à l’agression russe. D’abord les pays baltes, puis la Pologne, et qui ensuite ?

Pour la première fois depuis des décennies la France avait un président et un gouvernement dévoués, honnêtes et compétents. Des gens sérieux, éduqués, mus par le souci du bien public et décidés à résoudre les problèmes structuraux du pays, ayant déjà en peu d’années vaincu le cancer du chômage, rééquilibré un régime de retraites voué à la catastrophe, rétabli la crédibilité internationale de la France, rendu le pays attractif pour les investisseurs, géré efficacement la crise sanitaire, assaini les conditions de l’immigration, attaqué l’islamisme et évité les attentats des quinquennats précédents… La liste pourrait continuer longtemps. Face à cette action massivement réussie les moyens d’information privés et publics, bien pires que les réseaux sociaux tant décriés, se sont déchaînés contre ce président et son gouvernement année après année, mois après mois, jour après jour. Les historiens qui analyseront la débâcle sauront faire la part de la presse dite de référence, et d’une grande partie des intellectuels, ceux-là même qui auraient dû être le rempart de la raison et n’ont su être que les acteurs d’une impardonnable trahison des clercs.

Aberrant, impensable et abominable.

Toute indulgence vis-à-vis des extrémistes du pire bord ou de l’autre vous rendrait complice de l’inévitable débâcle historique qui suivrait leur élection. Pour éviter le désastre absolu, chaque personne sensée doit voter dimanche pour le candidat local de la liste Renaissance.

What is going on?

In the US, the leading presidential candidate is a vulgar crook, a serial business failure and convicted business fraudster; more ominously, he acts like a vassal to Putin. His first term was an endless string of catastrophes, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his compatriots through gross mismanagement. And yet he mesmerizes the entire Republican party and half of the population, which despises his adversary, one of the most skilled presidents ever, surrounded by an A-team of aides, who brought back financial stability  — taking the Dow to unheard levels  —, defended Israel’s right to exist against the extremists in his own camp, and re-established respect for the US. But no, the electorate is ready to elect again the sinister buffoon and thereby to bring to an end the longest-running democratic run in the history of the world.

Have the American people gone mad?

France has its best government in 50 years; a young, energetic, smart president, he too surrounded by an incredible team of passionate men and women dedicated to the public good and to solving the country’s ills, one at a time. And whom does the common folk, for once united with a large segment of the educated class, deeply hate? That president and his team. Whom do they idolize? The extreme right, led by Kremlin-funded ignorant demagogues, unable to manage anything but prompt to fan any discontent anywhere. Also the extreme left, which has turned into the official antisemitic party in the hope of winning the vote of the banlieues by pronouncements that seem to come out of der Stürmer. In-between, the moderate left and the moderate right are representatives of the governments which for decades have not dared to address any of France’s structural problems. The press and mass media, including the previously neutral references of record, eager to prove their independence, savage the government day in and day out, good initiatives and bad. (Mostly good actually, but who cares? Nasty headlines make you look cool.) For the European elections of next Sunday, Macron has fielded an outstanding slate of determined professionals in his image; and yet all the polls suggest a landslide for the extreme-right list, led by a know-nothing who in years at the European parliament missed most sessions and did not produce a single law, report or result.

Have the French people gone mad?

Meanwhile top universities in Western Europe, the US and Australia fall prey to supporters of terrorism, defenders of the rapists and killers and butchers of women and children. The oh-so-nice bourgeois leftist press publishes ignoble articles glorifying the enemies of peace who advocate of the destruction of the only democracy in the Middle East. (The Guardian, the favorite reading of intellectuals in the English-speaking world, deserves a special mention in abjection. Its uppity journalists cannot  let Rishi Sunak state that two plus three equals five without firing a volley of attacks and mockery. And as soon as an anti-Israel bigot makes a statement, they religiously amplify it, shedding any semblance of a critical mindset and rational analysis.) Young people are being brainwashed with words like Apartheid (they apparently do not know that one fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs, most of them Muslim or Christian, with a strong place in society, representatives in Parliament and at the Supreme Court) and Genocide (they apparently do not know that Israel voluntarily relinquished Gaza, removing every reluctant Israeli by force, and that the Palestinian population has grown by a factor of five since 1950). Disinformation generously fanned by authoritarian regimes relentlessly tries to convince us that the aggressor is the victim and the victim is the aggressor. To make us forget that the terrorists immerse themselves in the civilian population, so as to maximize casualties which they then attribute to Israel. That they bar those civilians from their immense underground network, reserving it for combatants and hostages. That in cold blood and out of sheer hatred they tortured and murdered hundreds of innocent civilians, gang-raping the women with proud sadism. That they refuse to release those they are still holding. That they relied on the world’s compassion and subsidies to plan and implement their murderous rampage. They hide the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forcibly expelled from Arab countries (any “right of return” there?) and had to find new countries and build new lives. And yet from Columbia in New York to Sciences Po in Paris, activist students insult democrats and promote obscurantism. (One of the most extreme examples, which would be funny if it were not tragic, is the “LGBTQ for Gaza” movement, apparently oblivious to what happens to homosexuals in Gaza: torture first, then usually being thrown from the roof. As someone wrote, the slogan evokes notions of “Turkeys for Thanksgiving”.) The truth is that the Israelis, by defending themselves, are defending us from fanatics who want to bring the Western world back one thousand years, to a society of religious absolutism, power of the warlords, constant fear of violence and abuse, subjugation of women, and absence of any form of freedom.

Have the supposed future elites of the West gone mad?

Others too are defending us by defending themselves: the Ukrainians. Resisting the savage onslaught of a neighbor many times bigger and richer, they are shedding their blood to defend their right to freedom and democracy, values that we in the West have taken for granted. And yet many people in that same West grumble about the money that we are giving them and the risk of provoking Putin. (As if he needed provocation to launch what we thought would never happen again in Europe, an imperialistic attack motivated only by a thirst for power and domination.) The West’s mixed reaction is emboldening China’s own tyrant, intent on destroying a thriving democracy. Republicans in the US, egged on by Trump, delayed by half a year the provision of supplies needed as a matter of survival (even though much of that money comes back to the US in the form of weapon purchases!). Here too Macron, today’s European statesman  in the lineage of Adenauer, Monnet, Schuman and de Gaulle, is showing the way, along with the leaders of Eastern Europe an countries (the Baltic republics, Czechia, Poland, who on top of all their existential issues have to cope with the systematic obstruction of Hungary). The miserable German chancellor is, for his part, scared of his own shadow. Germany, with its addiction to Russian oil stemming from an idiotic and criminal rejection of nuclear power two decades ago, was a significant enabler of Putin’s ability to start monstrous war, but today it refuses to play its part in coping with the consequences.

Have the Germans gone mad?

The world seems to be upside down.

This blog started out as a “technology blog” and branched into “technology+” as I started including topics from other domains, but mostly I have stayed away from politics. One major exception was an
extensive article about Europe twelve years ago, to which I would not change anything today, especially days before crucial European elections. I prefer to write about what I know best: programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering, with occasional incursions into music, and once in a while some observation about the little ironies of life. But there are circumstances under which anyone who has had the benefit of learning to think — we do not even need the word “intellectual” — has to raise the alarm and explain that we risk losing everything.

Yes, we are at risk of losing everything that we have gained in the past millennium and which (along with economic progress, which it has enabled) makes life worth living: freedom of thought and action, tolerance, respect, democracy, generosity, protection of the weakest members of society, the prevalence of reason over arbitrary might, checks and balances on every kind of power, gender equality and other forms of giving everyone a chance. In the 1930s Julien Benda talked of La Trahison des Clercs, the treason of the educated, when he saw his peers endorse authoritarian (and ultimately murderous) theories from the left and the right. Something similar is happening today. We have been spoiled by those very advances of freedom, spoiled into thinking that we can show off by smugly promoting contrarian ideas, without realizing that they are not clever retorts in fancy conversations but part of a demolition process. Something like this happened in a previous generation: in 1968, it was fashionable for bourgeois youth to advocate Trotskyist or Maoist precepts. That was a lot of fun and made you look cool for a few years, before you became a professor, a middle manager or a capitalist. Today the stakes are much higher because the ruthless adversaries are at the door, with considerable means of physical destruction, threatening the very basis of modern, stable, pleasant society. They do not tolerate us, actually they despise us, but they have noticed that we tolerate them and they take every advantage of our cherished tolerance.

Let us not help them. If you ever feel tempted to forget our own collective interest, please remember that the surest feature of rational thinking (I do not even need to say “intelligence” is the ability to distinguish the auxiliary from the essential. Today:

• Biden is old: auxiliary. (He is as sharp as ever and has a brilliant team to support him.) Trump is unhinged and eager to become a dictator: essential.
• Macron is arrogant: auxiliary. (Also, not true. He is just smarter than most and does not quite know how to hide it.) Le Pen, Bardella and co. are incompetent and nefarious: essential.
• You do not agree with everything that Macron or Biden does: auxiliary; in a way, comforting. (Only in dictatorship is the Supreme Leader always right, supposedly.) Trump wants to ban abortion to please the most extreme religious absolutists in his camp: essential.
• The clever columnists from the Guardian and Le Monde find something awful in every carefully thought–government initiative: auxiliary. The French extreme left and extreme right want to jeopardize the incredibly successful European project and pave the way for hostile, autocratic foreign powers: essential.

We cannot stay away. You cannot stay away. If you are in the US, a vote for Trump (as I have heard otherwise serious people advocate, out of absurd arguments seemingly meant to make them sound cutely contrarian), or some boutique competitor, is a catastrophe; it is crucial that you go cast your ballot for Biden and for other rational candidates. If you are in France, go vote for the Macron list this Sunday. In those countries and everywhere else, support politicians who are not subservient to an authoritarian regime.

Do your part. Vote for the competent and level-headed candidates against the crazies of all hues. Explain patiently to less educated and less informed people what is at stake and where right and wrong, evil and good truly lie.

Treat the defense of reason and freedom as if it were a matter of life and death, because it is.

Are you not tired, too, of those endlessly repeated arguments that, sure, it was not very polite of Putin to invade Ukraine, but you have to understand the situation, it’s all the fault of NATO’s aggressive westward expansion which, you know, was provoking the Russians!

You see this argument everywhere on social networks and also from people such as the former French prime minister Jospin (in March of 2022!). Plus of course Noam Chomsky, for whom there is no atrocity committed by a dictator anywhere that cannot be justified by some real or imagined American turpitude. (Evidence that (1) a great scientist is not immune to shameful delusions and (2) Chomsky, the kind of person who would not last two weeks in one of the regimes he praises, is really fortunate that his family landed in a country where he can safely spew out whatever theory he likes, however outrageous.) Most recently in an opinion piece of the New York Times.

Come on. NATO is a defensive alliance. It has no offensive designs on any part of the world. It does not gobble up any countries: its members all decided to join NATO for their own security.

As to the supposed provocation: if I have an aggressive neighbor with attack dogs and my other neighbors have built a fence to shield themselves from him, am I “provoking” him if I ask them to extend the fence to encompass my house?

It is obvious to all who is aggressive and who is aggressed. Shame on those who insinuate otherwise.

Un chef d’état donne une conférence de presse ; par exemple Emmanuel Macron, président de la république française, le 17 avril dernier. Les journaux publieront des commentaires louangeurs ou critiques, mais en premier lieu, si ce sont des journaux d’information, ils rendront compte de ce qui a été dit. Leur manchette sera du genre de celle du Guardian ce jour-là :

Dans ses autres articles et éditoriaux le Guardian, très à gauche et très remonté contre Macron, ne se gêne pas pour exprimer ses critiques. Mais il commence par faire son travail d’information : M. Macron a donné tel jour une conférence de presse sur tel thème, il a expliqué ceci et annoncé cela. Quelle différence avec le quotidien autrefois « de référence » dans le pays même de Macron, Le Monde. Inutile en « une » de chercher à s’informer sur l’exposé ; à la place, le lecteur a droit à l’opinion des journalistes, un arrêt définitif et cinglant :

Ce qu’il a dit ? Quels sont ces chantiers ? Mystère. Et aucune importance. Sans doute le lecteur serait incapable de former sa propre opinion sur la nouveauté, ou non, des annonces de Macron. Ou il y perdrait trop de temps. Les grands experts du Monde lui évitent cette fatigue en interprétant pour lui le discours, plutôt que de le décrire. Tout ce qui compte est leur jugement.

Jour après jour,  au lieu d’informer, Le Monde mène une campagne de démolition du gouvernement actuel qui n’a rien à envier aux plus beaux (ou mauvais) jours de l’Humanité d’antan. Cantonons-nous à quelques exemples pris au hasard dans le mois d’avril 2023, reflétant comment un quotidien autrefois sérieux compose aujourd’hui ses  Unes. Le 5 avril, le gouvernement ayant annoncé vouloir dissoudre un groupuscule violent, « Les Soulèvements de la Terre », responsable de millions d’euros de destructions et déprédations les mois précédents et cherchant en permanence l’affrontement avec les forces de l’ordre, voici ce que Le Monde trouve de mieux à titrer :

Aucune nuance, aucun recul. Le terme « méga-bassine » est lui-même tendancieux. Il s’agit d’une réserve d’eau, destinée à préserver cette ressource pour faire face aux étés de plus en plus chauds que nous connaissons. On peut être pour ou contre mais force est de noter que dans aucun autre pays d’Europe occidentale ce genre de discussion ne passe par des émeutes d’une telle violence (47 gendarmes blessés ce jour-là). La « bataille » principale n’est pas celle des arguments mais une bataille au sens propre entre les forces de l’ordre et des extrémistes déchaînés. Rien de tout cela dans le titre et le résumé, seulement l’annonce que le mouvement a « réfuté point par point » — la cause est entendue et jugée ! — les raisons du gouvernement. Comme s’il s’agissait d’une aimable discussion d’idées (où l’un des partenaires a raison par définition) et non du contrôle d’une organisation subversive (contestable ou non, la décision de construire la réserve a été votée par les pouvoirs régionaux normalement élus).

Le titre publié deux jours avant est lui, plutôt amusant dans son obsession critique :

Populiste en plus de ses autres tares, il est le représentant de la Noblesse d’État ! Ah tiens, François Hollande, que Le Monde traita toujours avec de grands égards, n’en était pas, lui ? Fils de médecin, élevé à Neuilly, ancien élève de Saint-Jean Baptiste de la Salle puis HEC, Sciences Po et l’ENA, ayant commencé sa carrière à la Cour des Comptes, ensuite militant et responsable politique pendant toute sa carrière, oui, Hollande est de gauche, donc c’est le Peuple, le vrai ! Et Macron l’affreux représentant du Système.

Mais ne nous inquiétons pas trop, dans ce cas précis il s’agissait d’une « Tribune », présentée comme telle. Revenons à l’information, ou plutôt ce qui devrait en être. Le 10 avril Le Monde traite en Une d’écologie, sujet que vous croyez peut-être sérieux mais sur lequel votre quotidien préféré choisit son parti — comme Pierre Dac et Francis Blanche, le parti d’en rire :

Absolument. Rien de sérieux dans ce gouvernement, tout ce qu’il fait, quand ce n’est pas scandaleux, doit être risible. Le lendemain on revient au scandaleux :

Si Macron voulait vraiment « étouffer » quelque chose, bonne chance dans un pays où les moyens d’information de masse (Le Monde n’étant que l’un d’eux) sont ligués contre lui. (Note lexicale : « peuple » tel qu’employé ici est une abréviation pour « émeutiers et incendiaires ». Quant à la « légitimité » des syndicats, parlons-en : 10% des salariés français sont syndiqués, moins de 8% dans le privé et, même dans le secteur public, moins de 20%. En outre, de quels « syndicats» s’agit-il au juste ? Dans les autres pays, les salariés d’une entreprise ou d’une branche se groupent en un syndicat pour défendre leurs intérêts. Un seul syndicat, bien sûr. En France, il y a 4 ou 5 syndicats rivaux dans une même entreprise, petits partis politiques subventionnés se disputant les voix des quelques votants.)
Le 13 avril, un point vraiment lumineux sur la situation :

Nulle trace de ce que le supposé sentiment d’injustice et de colère n’est le fait que d’une partie de la population, chauffée à blanc par les extrémistes de gauche et de droite. Quant au 49.3, il est difficile de voir en quoi ce mécanisme prévu par la Constitution —précisément pour les cas difficiles, comme celui-ci, où une partie de la droite classique a été intimidée voire terrorisée par les menaces reçues de toute part — est injuste ou prompt à susciter la colère. Il est après tout sujet à un vote de défiance (qui a eu lieu et a échoué). Du reste ce mécanisme a été surtout utilisé par la gauche sous Mitterrand: 3 fois par Pierre Bérégovoy, 8 fois par Édith Cresson et 28 fois par Michel Rocard (vingt-huit fois !). Je n’ai pas souvenir que lors de ses 6 utilisations par Manuel Valls, sous Hollande, Le Monde ait crié à l’injustice et compati à la légitime colère du Peuple. Ce qui frappe dans ce titre c’est une fois de plus le matraquage quotidien : le scandale et la malfaisance sont toujours du même côté, et l’injustice subie et la colère justifiée toujours de l’autre.

Le 13 avril, suite des grèves à répétition. Un journal même minimalement soucieux de la vie quotidienne de ses lecteurs parlerait des complications incessantes, des attentes interminables dans les gares et aéroports, des trésors d’invention auxquels sont réduits ceux qui doivent faire garder leurs enfants, des nouvelles pertes colossales pour l’économie du pays, de l’annulation de la première visite d’État que le nouveau roi britannique avait choisi de réserver à la France. (D’avoir peu d’admiration pour la monarchie actuelle et encore moins pour l’Angleterre du Brexit n’empêche pas de ressentir la gifle monumentale qu’a constituée cette annulation.) Non, il ne s’agit que des luttes glorieuses du Peuple en révolte :

Intransigeance ? Qu’attend-on au juste : qu’un gouvernement élu sur la promesse d’une réforme et l’ayant fait passer au Parlement décide tout à coup de l’annuler ? Peut-être pour rassurer les Libraires en Colère (si l’on devine correctement le mot tronqué sur la photo de banderole) ? Cette Une du Monde et des dizaines d’autres comme elles sont de purs appels à manifester ; jour après jour le journal explique aimablement à ses lecteurs quant et où participer. Comme s’ils n’avaient rien de mieux à faire.

Le même jour, un autre sommet de l’élite intellectuelle éclairant le monde :

En d’autres temps Le Monde était attaché aux principes constitutionnels. Notez l’illustration menaçante. Côté constitution, avec sa sagacité habituelle le journal avait annoncé dès le 26 mars ce qui allait se passer :

Les opposants à la réforme, ayant perdu à toutes les étapes, se rattachaient à l’espoir que le Conseil Constitutionnel annulât tout. Bien entendu il n’avait aucune raison de le faire. Son rôle n’est pas de substituer la volonté des manifestants du jour à celle du Parlement élu. Peut-être y jouait-il  « en quelque sorte son destin » mais aux dernières nouvelles il existe encore. Le 26 mars il pouvait encore y avoir débat, mais un journal objectif et sérieux aurait publié une analyse factuelle et prudente.

Tout cela n’empêche pas Le Monde de continuer de tirer sur tout ce qui bouge du côté du gouvernement. Le 21 avril, Macron ayant rencontré des enseignants :

Si quelqu’un crispe, il semblerait que ce soit plutôt Le Monde, mais bon. Ce qui compte, bien sûr, ce ne sont pas les avancées forcément viciées du gouvernement mais la réaction des 18,4%, les syndicats. Conjecture oiseuse : s’il n’y avait pas eu le  « pacte enseignant », est-ce que plus rien n’aurait « terni » la joie débordante desdits syndicats et leur soutien désormais enthousiaste aux projets éducatifs du gouvernement ?

Après le passage de la réforme des retraites (au grand soulagement de beaucoup), Macron et Borne ont annoncé vouloir continuer avec les réformes. Quel dommage, selon Le Monde, qu’ils soient en situation si difficile ! Le 24 avril, pauvre Macron :

Pour Borne ce n’est pas mieux (26 avril) :

À ce point d’affaiblissement rien ne pourrait être pire, mais si, on peut s’affaiblir encore :

Le 1er mai, reportage sur les manifestations, dans le même genre que les précédents, par exemple :

Le « mais » est vraiment adorable. Un« mais » dans le style bien connu de « je ne suis pas raciste, mais… ». En réalité, depuis des mois (et dès la crise des gilets jaunes) Le Monde affiche une attitude de compréhension presque affectueuse vis-à-vis des pires excès. Macron, pour qui l’écoute, n’est en rien méprisant et son attitude est le contraire de celle de quelqu’un qui prendrait les gens pour des imbéciles. Ses discours sont de très haute tenue (comme l’étaient, du reste, ceux de François Hollande) ; il explique et il justifie. Ne se sentent méprisés que ceux qui en réalité le méprisent, pour des raisons qu’on n’a pas de mal à imaginer (il est passé par la banque Rothschild , comme Pompidou du reste, il parle bien, il joue du piano, il n’a pas besoin de « prendre de haut » pour qu’on détecte en lui le premier de la classe). Et d’ailleurs s’il l’était, méprisant, en quoi cela justifierait-il de mettre le feu à la brasserie La Rotonde ? Dans les pays développés seule la France est en proie à ces manifestations régulièrement violentes qui dégénèrent. Les activistes du Monde n’ont rien à y redire ; il préfèrent réserver leur indignation pour ceux qui essayent de moderniser le pays.

La rage anti-Macron et anti-Borne se déchaîne jour après jour dans ce qui fut le quotidien respecté de Beuve-Méry et (malgré ses défauts) une source d’informations souvent fiables et de commentaires pondérés. Il semble avoir été pris en otage par une poignée de propagandistes peu soucieux de journalisme. On voit bien que les éléments les plus responsables en sont gênés ; Sylvie Kaufmann publie dans le New York Times des analyses raisonnées et raisonnables, Françoise Fressoz écrit des éditoriaux équilibrés. On se demande si c’est pour maintenir une façade respectable pour les lecteurs étrangers qui ne voient pas le déferlement quotidien de bile anti-Établissement remplaçant l’information de base.

Dommage vraiment qu’on en soit venu là. Je ne sais pas ce qu’on enseigne aujourd’hui dans les écoles de journalisme en France, mais tous les autre grands pays démocratiques ont leurs journaux de référence qui appliquent (ou essayent d’appliquer, avec d’inévitables ratés) la distinction fondamentale entre nouvelles et opinions. Que faudrait il pour que les lecteurs français aient à nouveau un journal sérieux, objectif et crédible ?

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and prime minister, Elizabeth Borne, are showing incredible political courage in promoting an indispensable reform of the pension system. The international press (with the exception of one recent reasonable Washington Post editorial) has largely taken the side of the strikers, explaining sententiously that the proper answer would be to tax companies more (as to the efficiency of that approach, here is an old but still valid example, from a left-wing paper). The unions have vowed, in the words of one of their leaders, to “bring the country to its knees” and seem intent on reaching this goal literally. (It may be useful  to point out that unions in France are not what the term suggests. In other countries a union represents the workers at a company or administration. In France every organization has several unions, usually 4 or 5, competing for, typically, a small minority of the workers, but with a role enshrined in the constitution. They are really state-supported political organizations, of various political hues, several of them openly hostile to employers and to capitalism. Interesting approach.)

The reform of the pension system was part of Macron’s electoral program and has been amended repeatedly to take into account the special characteristics of manual or otherwise difficult worth. Months of attempted negotiations took place with those union representatives who were willing to talk. The extreme left and extreme right were united to defeat the reform and at the last minute, after innumerable debates in Parliament which had resulted in a majority-backed solution, intimated enough moderate-right deputies to force the government to use a special constitutional mechanism (“article 49-3”) to ram it through. Who knows how many disruptions of basic services the country will have to endure in the coming months as saboteurs of various kinds try to make good on their promise to prevent the country from functioning. The attitude of the international bien-pensant press, who fans the flames (as they did with the Gilets Jaunes protests 5 years ago),  while castigating the January 6 Washington rioters, who are of the same ilk, is unconscionable.

The entire political class knows that a reform is indispensable, and has been delayed far too long, out of the cowardice of previous governments. Macron’s and Borne’s goal is simple: to preserve France’s pension system (the very system that the opponents deceitfully accuse them of destroying), based on solidarity between generations, workers paying for retirees, as opposed to a capitalization-based system with its dependence on the ups and downs of the stock market. Thanks in particular to a generous health service, people live ever longer; the new plan makes them work a couple of years more to help ensure the sustainability of the approach. Macron is in his second, non-renewable term and has decided that he would not leave office without having carried out this part of his duty. Borne, an outstanding manager with a distinguished record, has taken the risk of sacrificing her political career by bringing the reform through. (In the Fifth Republic’s mixed presidential system, the conventional wisdom is that the prime minister is the president’s “fuse”, an expendable resource for implementing difficult tasks. Cynical and tough, but a direct consequence of the constitution designed by De Gaulle and his deputy Debré 60 years ago.)

In the meantime, Macron and Borne are showing Europe and the world what true dedication and leadership mean.

(An English variant will appear tomorrow.)

La presse nationale et internationale est déchaînée contre Borne et Macron. Les extrémistes et factieux de tous bords jurent de “mettre le pays par terre” (comment, au passage, peut-on accepter ce genre de langage de la part d’un responsable “syndical”?).

Toute la classe politique sait bien sûr que la réforme est indispensable. Elle est le seul moyen de protéger le système français de retraites par répartition. Elle tient compte de la pénibilité des travaux. Elle remet la France au niveau des pays voisins. Elle est le bon sens même. Elle suit des années de tergiversation de la part des gouvernements précédents effarouchés, et des mois de consultation avec les “partenaires sociaux”, si l’on peut parler de concertation pour une tentative de dialogue avec des gens qui ne cherchent que le tintamarre politique.

Quel courage, quelle détermination chez le président et la première ministre, qui au milieu des insultes sacrifient leur intérêt personnel au bien public. Les émeutiers — dans la tradition des ligues des années trente, des gilets jaunes, des voyous du 6 janvier 2021 à Washington — essayent de les faire reculer par la force, mais la raison et le droit triompheront.

It is easy to engage in generalities; it is risky to make firm predictions. In the first case there is no reckoning; in the second one the actual events can prove you wrong for everyone to see.

I am taking the risk. Here is my prediction: Putin’s energy blackmail (Western Europe will freeze this winter!) will fail. We’ll have some trouble but by and large we’ll be OK.

The basic reason is simple: great idea (from the blackmailer’s viewpoint), terrible execution. (Do we see a pattern there?) If you are going to freeze Europe by cutting off gas, you keep the suspense until the last minute and shut off the valves in October, leaving your targets no time to react.

Instead they did it all wrong! They started making noises in the Spring and cutting off supplies in August. The result: people listened. Governments and technocrats got to work, with some time to get organized. A company such as EDF in France is sometimes criticized as too big and monolithic, but they know their business, which is to provide energy, and are pretty good at it. I would bet that they and their counterparts in the electricity and gas industries all over the continent are working day and night to find alternative sources.

In addition, no day passes without some announcement of new energy-saving measures. Some may seem like for show only but the accumulated result will be significant. Recently everyone (for example the usually better inspired Guardian) was mocking Macron’s prime minister Borne and her ministers for showing up to work in padded jeans and sweaters to save on heating, but that kind of message can be influential. (Almost a half-century ago Jimmy Carter was telling Americans that instead of turning the temperature to 19 degrees C in summer and 21 in winter they should do the reverse. He too was derided. But he was right and that kind of advice will finally come to pass. One of the few positive outcomes of the current tragedy.)

So yes, you succeeded in making yourself a big nuisance. And no, it won’t destroy us. It will make us stronger — also warmer.

In the heavy context of current news I hope it is permissible to engage in lighter observations. Some time ago I was briefly in Dresden, in the midst of a mayoral election campaign, and I noticed posters for this candidate:

“Dirk Hilbert, Competent For Dresden”. Apparently it worked since he is now mayor, but do you not find the motto a bit on the bland side?

If anyone knows who will be doing his campaign’s PR for the next election, please put me in touch. If my name were Hilbert and I were running for office, I would demand better slogans from my team. Even if I were so power-hungry as to want to appeal to both sides on controversial issues.

Immigration for example:

• Pro-immigrant: Dresden hat Raum für mehr (Dresden has room for more!).
• Anti-immigrant: every spot is  already occupied!

On the environment too, one can, as any good politician, adapt to the audience:

• Animal-rights: Mehr Löcher für mehr Tauben (more holes for more pigeons!).
• Anti-animal-rights, pro-hunting-lobby: “We could kill half the pigeons, no one would notice!”. (Two thirds! Ninety-nine percent!).

Lots of potential on environmental and business issues as well:

• Pro-growth, pro-business: Extra rooms without the extra cost!
• Anti-growth: Dresden braucht kein neues Hotel! (Dresden does not need any new hotel.)

I can also see possibilities in inspirational-style slogans:

• Yes, I Can More Than I Can!
• Make Dresden Great Again! (Without Actually Changing It.)
• Build Back Infinitely Better.

Or a simple one focusing on the candidate himself:

• The natural and rational choice.

The possibilities seem limitless, although I hesitate to say innumerable. As always in politics, the hard part will start when things get real.

It is customary for an article to carry some kind of lesson or moral. This one does not. Or to be more exact it does have a lesson, several perhaps, but they are left to the reader to draw.

It is also customary, for an article that is written as a tribute to deceased people, that the writer would have known them. I never knew the protagonists of my chronicle. But my sister and I — along with a dear cousin, and I hope her children and grandchildren — are among the few people who still know they existed. Hence the need for a tribute lest the last traces of their stay on earth vanish forever.

They were German: Louis Bernheimer, born on 5 December 1875 in Issenhausen in Alsace, then part of Germany, and his wife Paola, born in Bayreuth on 12 February 1879, yes, that same Bayreuth where Wagner had premièred his quintessential German opera, Das Rheingold, three years before. They were German and seemingly, as we shall see, very German.

I know little about them, nothing else in fact than reported in this little note. One thing I do know is the nickname by which people in Paris called them behind their backs: “Mr. and Mrs. Bei Uns”. I know it because my father mentioned it to me. Just once, a long time ago, but I remember.

We need a bit of context. Herr und Frau Bernheimer flew Nazi Germany in the thirties with their son Fred, a young professional photographer, and settled to a safe place, or a place they thought was safe: Paris. There Fred met my father’s sister Éliane and married her; they had two children, my cousins. Now we are talking about the only people in this story whom I did know. Éliane was a strong personality, a dedicated feminist and activist. When her husband was hit with cancer and she abruptly found herself a widow with two young children and no resources, she took over his photography studio, learned the trade — about which she had known nothing — and made the business prosper. After the war, Studio Bernheim (the name shortened so that it would sound less German) became one of the fashionable addresses in Paris, thanks to both Éliane and her son Marc who trained himself to become its chief photographer while still a teenager.

Bei uns in German means the same as “chez nous” in French and translates as “at our home”, although that is not a good translation because English lacks a preposition that would accurately reflect the French “chez” or (in that sense) the German “bei”, which mean something like “in the home of”.  “Home” in a very intense and cozy sense, not just the physical house, but encompassing culture, country, community. Russians similarly say “U Nas”, literally “at ours” and, when talking about people, “Nashi”, literally “ours”, our people that is. In a Chekhov novella entitled  A boring story (full text available online here), when the antisemitic narrator wants to mention that at the theater last night the person seated in front of him was a Jew, he says that he was sitting behind an “iz nasikh”, a deformation with a fake Jewish accent of “iz nashikh”, one from our own, to suggest — ironically in light of the rest of my own boring story — a member of a tightly knit community.

It seems that the Bernheimers (to come back to them) were seen by their new extended family as stuffy Germans fitting the stereotypes. Not just stuffy: critical. Apparently, they went around commenting that whatever was being done in their new French surroundings was not being done right, and explaining the way it was done back home, “bei uns”. If so, it was perhaps not the best way to ingratiate themselves with their hosts, and it is not surprising that people in the family started referring to them acerbically, according to my father, as Mr. and Mrs. Bei Uns.

As noted, I never knew the Bernheimers, although in a different turn of the story I would — I should — have known them as a child. Therefore I cannot guess whether I would have yielded to family opinions and found them insufferable, or liked them as delightful, exotic older relatives having gone through hard times and now doting on their children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces. Maybe both. I feel a certain remote sympathy for them in any case, having probably been resented, like anyone who has lived in countries where people insist on the “korrekt” way of doing things and comes back to more lackadaisical cultures, as a bit of a Mr. Bei Uns myself.

The irony is that in the eyes of many people, including many who would never consider themselves antisemites, Jews still have the reputation of harboring a feeling of  solidarity with their own kin that transcends borders and trumps national allegiance. Here we have the reverse. Highly assimilated families on both sides, French Jews and German Jews, getting into a cultural conflict because some were French and some were German. Ever since the revolution emancipated French Jews, they have been passionately French. German Jews were just as passionately German (in the style of Heinrich Heine’s I think of Germany in the night, the poem entitled Nachtgedanken, written in exile in Paris, see its text here).  French Jews do not ask themselves how French their are, since their Frenchness is as obvious to them as the air they breathe; it’s others who want them to prove it again and again — something that no one ever seems to require of people from certain regions of France such as Brittany whose inhabitants have a loudly proclaimed attachment to their terroir of origin. Unbelievably, the question still resurfaces regularly; it is even a theme in the current presidential campaign.

Why did I never get to decide by myself who Mr. and Mrs. Bei Uns really were: chauvinistic scolds, or a charming old-world couple? If they thought of themselves as German, as part of “uns”, the “uns” ruling Germany had a different understanding. When Germany invaded France in 1940, the Bernheimers flew, like many others, to the South of France, which until 1942 remained a supposedly “free” zone. Then the Germans invaded the “free” zone too. In August of 1943 Mr. and Mrs Bei Uns were rounded up near Bayonne. The town is close to the Spanish border; I do not know if they had hoped to cross over, as others managed to do. They were interned in the Mérignac camp, where Bordeaux airport lies today. From Bordeaux they were transferred to the infamous camp at Drancy, near Paris. From there they were put on convoy number 26 to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

Could someone please explain what there is to celebrate when a candidate is elected to a political function? The grotesque ideas of a victory rally or an inauguration ceremony defy common sense.

An election success is an opportunity to start doing something good. It is not an achievement; it is the promise of possible achievements to come. Someone should hand the successful candidate the key to his office and wish him good luck. His supporters should go home and start thinking of how best to help him. He should get to work. End of that part of the story. There is by definition nothing to celebrate.

The time to hold a celebration, if any, is when a politician completes her term. At that stage there exists a clear basis for one of two outcomes: either a shameful, stealthy, miserable exit in the frosty predawn fog of a deserted airfield (as happened on Wednesday at Andrews); or a lavish, joyful party to extol and relish the brilliant successes of the last few years. Then, but only then, does a celebration makes sense.

Out with inaugurations, in with outaugurations!

Vous souvenez-vous de ce discours ?

Françaises, Français, mes chers compatriotes,

Je voulais vous parler hier mais on m’a dit que l’expression  “appel du 18 juin” était déjà prise et j’ai décidé d’attendre jusqu’aujourd’hui, 19 juin 2020. Un jour ne devrait pas faire une grande différence.

Mon message à toutes et à tous est simple :

Ne partez pas en vacances cette année.

Je sais, c’est dur. Pour les Français, les vacances sont sacrées depuis 1936. Toute l’année vous parlez essentiellement des dernières et des prochaines vacances. Mais cette fois-ci ce n’est vraiment pas le moment. Même si vous ne partez pas à l’étranger, avec la meilleure volonté du monde vous allez quand même vous entasser sur les plages et dans les hôtels. Vous essayerez le masque mais il suffit de se promener dans la rue pour voir combien sont au-dessous du nez ou au-dessus de la bouche ou les deux, ne servant strictement à rien.

Si nous partons comme tous les ans, imaginez la situation qui s’ensuivra inéluctablement. Projetez-vous quelques mois en avant ; le 28 octobre, pour choisir une date au hasard. Êtes-vous prêts pour 35 000 cas et 240 décès par jour, en croissance sans fin prévisible ? Pour un retour de l’engorgement des hôpitaux ? Pour — j’hésite à prononcer le mot honni ! — un nouveau reconfinement, celui que nous avions promis d’éviter mais qui serait devenu inévitable ? Et tout ce qui en découle — faillites, licenciements, séparations ? Sans même mentionner des fêtes de fin d’année sinistres sans la moindre lumière au bout du tunnel.

Non, j’en suis sûr, tout cela est impensable et n’est pas ce que vous voulez.

Alors, sacrifiez vos vacances cette année pour ne pas avoir à sacrifier bien plus les mois et les années qui suivront. Restez chez vous. Économisez votre argent, ne serait-ce que pour vous offrir d’excellentes vacances l’année prochaine. Lisez des livres, regardez des films, faites votre gymnastique, mais évitez déplacements et rencontres. Arrêtons-nous pour mieux rebondir ensuite. Si vous travaillez dans le tourisme, la passe sera difficile, et l’État vous aidera, mais céder à la facilité ne ferait que rendre vos perspectives pires encore.

En ces derniers jours de printemps, où tout semble vous sourire, vous n’en avez peut-être pas entièrement conscience encore, mais bientôt la bise sera venue : ne risquez pas, pour le bref plaisir d’un bel été, un automne et un hiver pires que ce que notre époque a jamais connu.

Pas de départ en vacances à l’été 2020.

Pour ma part, je ne m’en souviens pas.

D’autant plus qu’il n’a jamais été prononcé.

Another completely unexpected gem from the Viaje de Turquia (see the previous article on this blog): a 16-th century statement of the Dunning-Kruger effect!

An effect, of course, which has never been more visible than today (just watch the news).

Against Pedro, who narrates his travels and travails, the dialog sets two other characters, friends from his youth. They serve both as foils for Pedro, enabling his cleverness to shine — they are themselves not the brightest candles on the cake —, and as the embodiment of conventional wisdom. He occasionally gets really impatient with them, although always friendly, and at some point cites this ditty that he remembers from his youth in Spain:

Blind people want to see,

The deaf man wants to hear,

The fat man wants to slim,

The lame man wants to run.

For the fool there is no remedy:

Since he fancies that he knows,

He does not care to learn more.

Wow!

At this gloomy moment it is good to find a gem in an unexpected place.

I am reading (in translation) the Viaje de Turquia, or Turkish Voyage — literaly, Voyage of Turkey — a 16th-century epic dialog, whose authorship is disputed. It is a precious source of information on the period and rings throughout like a true story. The hero, Pedro, tells of his time as a prisoner of war of the Turks and the ignominies he had to suffer for years. He is a doctor, if a self-taught one, and has cured many members of the Pasha’s entourage, but at some point the Pasha, out of spite, sends him back to the harshest form of manual labor. One of his former patients, rich and high-ranked, spots him, the intellectual struggling to move heavy materials in the dirt and under the whip, and mocks him:

Hey, all the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, all the medical science of Galen, all the eloquence of Cicero and Demosthenes, how have they helped you?

To which Pedro, having put his sack on his shoulder and wiped the tears caused by this pique, answers, looking him straight in the eye:

They have helped me live through days like this one.

Pretty good, I thought. Not just the sense of repartee, but the sentiment itself (echoing by the comments of many a mistreated intellectual in later ages including ours).

Not only that, but it worked, at least for a while. So astounded was the persecutor by the retort, that he took Pedro’s sack to carry it himself, and convinced the Pasha to relieve Pedro from hard work and give him money.

In my last article, time to live up to the boasting, I pointed out how bewildering it is to see that top newspapers around the world, the supposed “papers of reference”, continue both to:

• Extoll their grandiose proclamations of supposed devotion to public service.
• Charge for access to the epidemic that is scaring the world.

In a meeting I recently attended, someone was saying that “the media has hyped the crisis”. About the mainstream media, this reproach is incorrect and unfair: articles have generally been measured and informative, explaining the situation and calling on experts.

But such solid content sits behind paywalls! Free sources, particularly on social networks, are where you find the hype, the crazy theories and the lies.

Rightly or wrongly, many people around the world are panicking. They need a serious source of information and they are not all able to pay for it, especially if it comes from many sources to which one must independently subscribe.

Newspaper owners, this is your moment of truth, or of eternal shame. Free Covid-19 content now and without restrictions until this crisis ends.

We are fed up with your self-professions of sanctity and want you to fulfill your elementary social duty. You should have started to do this weeks ago already.

It’s not even bad for business — it will attract new, grateful, supportive subscribers who will stay with you for a long time.

The simple, obvious, honest thing to do.

I, for one, pledge never in the future to give one cent, peso or kopeck in the future to any publication that continues its current selfish and abhorrent policy of charging for life-and-death information that the world craves and needs.

The decent media is not modest these days. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” says the excellent Washington Post, intimating, if I understand it right, that the only way for the US to avoid dictatorship is that I pay subscription fees. Maybe I would if they just stopped devoting every single one of their articles to King Ubu. La Repubblica tells us that it will “always fight for the defense of freeedom of information, for its readers and for all those who have in their hearts the principles of democracy and of civil coexistence.” Beautiful (and behind a paywall).

The epidemic expert Jonathan Quick, interviewed by the Guardian, had this remarkable observation, talking about Covid-19: news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free. The Guardian is in a way the right place to make this comment, since it remains, admirably, free-access with voluntary subscription (and all the same does not seem to be doing too poorly). But everywhere else there has been no change of policy. Whether you are looking at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Tages Anzeiger (“Dieser Abo+ Artikel ist exklusiv für Abonnenten”), La Repubblica, La Stampa, the kind of reputable press organs to which we would naturally turn, all have their more in-depth analyses reserved for subscribers. (The Russian Vedomosti seems to be an exception.)

Granted, every company (except maybe the Washington Post, since I have a feeling I am ordering enough from Amazon already) is entitled to earn money. But not all companies claim that their business model is about saving the world. My dear self-praising press, if you are really as generously public-minded as you are, here is a good way to demonstrate it. People around the world are genuinely worried about the Coronavirus epidemic and eager for serious information, if only to counter rumors and conspiracy theories. They eagerly seek credible, validated information that has gone through professional vetting, but many of them cannot afford to subscribe to all the relevant sources.

A few days before and after major elections, outlets such as the NYT and Wapo generally make their political articles free-access. The current health scare is an even more serious occasion.

This is the time for all serious news media around the world to show that their grand declarations of philanthropy are not just words.

We, the readers, should vociferously demand that as a public service these press organs immediately make all Covid-19 news, reports and analyses free-access.

Nulle part, dans la cohue des exégèses du mouvement des « gilets jaunes », ne trouve-t-on l’explication pourtant évidente : c’est pour partie une affaire de droit commun et pour le reste un coup de main proto-fasciste. Rien d’autre.

L’aspect le plus clair est celui de la délinquance. Dans quel autre pays civilisé des énergumènes se mettent-ils, pour clamer leurs frustrations, à opprimer leurs concitoyens en paralysant la société par la violence ? Dans un seul. La France. Et c’est en France seulement que l’on ne trouve rien à redire. En France et dans tous les pays du monde, si vous bloquez l’entrée d’un rond-point avec votre voiture, les gendarmes arrivent et vous emmènent au poste. En France seulement, si vous faites la même chose avec trente de vos acolytes, tout le monde compatit, le préfet vient repectueusement palabrer avec vous, et Le Monde convoque un professeur de sociologie pour expliquer combien vous avez raison de souffrir du mépris des élites. Absurde et inouï. Si le gouvernement Macron a fait une erreur, c’est celle-là : au premier péage bloqué, au premier radar neutralisé, il fallait dans les dix minutes coffrer les délinquants et les déférer à la justice – quitte à elle, dans la meilleure tradition d’un pays démocratique, de les juger sans passion en écoutant leurs doléances. Mais se plier à la morgue de ces gens qui utilisent la force pour empêcher les autres de vivre leur vie et d’assurer leur subsistance ? La suite était à prévoir : l’illégalité étant officiellement sanctionnée, tout ce qu’un pays compte d’extrémistes de gauche et de droite, et de simples malfrats ravis de casser et de piller, s’engouffre dans la brèche. Mais c’est hypocrite de regretter les malheureux débordements. Avant même l’entrée des casseurs professionnels, la violence était dès la première heure la définition même du mouvement. Il ne s’agissait pas de plaintes, de pétitions, de manifestations ; il s’agissait de saboter le fonctionnement le plus élémentaire d’une société civilisée. D’empêcher les citoyens de circuler et de travailler. Dans tout autre pays les voyous se retrouvaient immédiatement en prison. En France, on les invite à la télévision.

L’illégalité de droit commun n’est que le début. L’idéologie et surtout la pratique de ces gens rappellent de plus en plus le fascisme. Le fascisme est, pour une large part, le triomphe de la force brute sur la légalité: la prise de pouvoir d’une minorité par la violence, et l’imposition par la violence de ses valeurs au reste de la société. Les 250 000 bloqueurs du premier samedi représentaient moins d’un pour cent de la population adulte. De quel droit s’arrogent-ils l’autorité de décider qui passe et qui ne passe pas ? De tabasser un jeune homme et sa compagne, partis pour le cinéma, parce qu’ils refusent de klaxonner leur approbation ? C’est pour ne pas avoir arrêté dans l’œuf ce genre d’action brutale et illégale que l’Allemagne, l’Italie, l’Espagne, le Portugal et d’autres se sont retrouvés dans les années trente sous le joug de dictatures sanguinaires. Le semblant bonhomme et sincère de certains bloqueurs de ronds-points ne peut faire illusion. Il ne s’agit ni plus ni moins que de l’attaque de la force brute. Celle qui ne s’embarrasse pas d’arguments et qui se contente de vous asséner : vous ferez ce que vous dis, car je suis fort, vous êtes faible, et vous êtes en mon pouvoir.

Et leurs revendications ? Tous les conservatismes, tous les refus de raisonner, tout le fiel des envieux s’y retrouvent. Le mouvement, on ne le dira jamais assez, est d’abord celui des chauffards. Qui fréquente la France des provinces sait quelle haine a suscitée l’une des réformes précédentes, la limitation à 80 km/h. La raison était pourtant simple : les ingénieurs ont calculé qu’on pouvait sauver 300 vies par an de cette façon. Les chauffards — qui fréquente la France des routes départementales les connaît bien — n’accordent aucune attention à cet objectif de salut public : non, prétendent-ils, ce n’est qu’un prétexte pour nous ponctionner un peu plus. D’ailleurs l’ire des chauffards, des gilets jaunes, se concentre sur tout ce qui améliore la sécurité routière, comme les radars. La hausse des taxes sur les carburants n’est que le prétexte suivant pour se mettre en colère, prétexte d’autant plus absurde que cette hausse survient à un moment où les prix de base chutent. Quant à la transition énergétique, personne n’y prête attention non plus. Là aussi pourtant, les scientifiques s’époumonent à nous avertir : il est minuit moins une pour faire quelque chose, sinon le monde court à la catastrophe ; accidents climatiques constants, îles englouties, migrations cette fois-ci par dizaines de millions. Vous pourrez bien bloquer les ronds-points alors. Mais non, ce sont encore ces technocrates de Paris qui veulent nous prendre notre argent.

Le problème politique est profondément et exclusivement français. Les Français sont uniques, y compris parmi leurs voisins d’Europe occidentale. L’exception française a ses attraits : le goût, la tradition, l’élégance (pas chez les gilets jaunes), l’amour pour une langue d’une beauté sans égale. Mais elle se manifeste aussi par des défauts indéracinables. Dans tous les pays du monde, le citoyen moyen comprend que pour que quelqu’un reçoive de l’argent quelqu’un doit en produire. L’état c’est moi, et toi, et elle, et lui. Pas en France (et l’on peut avoir fait Polytechnique sans que jamais on vous ait expliqué ce qui ailleurs relève de l’école communale). En France « L’État » c’est quelqu’un d’autre. Il nous prend notre argent, toujours trop, et il est tenu de nous en donner, jamais assez. Il est de bon ton de se moquer des Américains qui croient que le monde a été créé tel quel en six jours, mais les Américains, jusqu’au moins instruit, comprennent les rudiments de l’économie. Les Français non. D’où les revendications conjointes de moins d’impôts et de plus d’aides. On ne peut sous-estimer ici l’influence de la gauche à la française. Cent ans de gauchisme primaire ont profondément corrompu le conscient et l’inconscient collectifs. Les patrons sont des exploiteurs, les salariés des exploités, révoltez-vous !

La deuxième catastrophe va avec la première : l’incompréhension des règles de la démocratie et l’imputation au gouvernement en place (dans le cas présent, en place depuis à peine un an et demi) de tout ce qui va mal. Gavroche le chantait déjà : Je suis tombé par terre / C’est la faute à Voltaire / Le nez dans le ruisseau / C’est la faute à Rousseau. Il ajouterait aujourd’hui :

J’en ai pris plein le front
C’est la faute à Macron

La démocratie, comprise à la française, ce sont tous les privilèges et aucun devoir. C’est le droit inaliénable de la minorité à se venger de son sort sur les innocents. Titre du Monde : « En occupant le rond-point de Gaillon, dans l’Eure, des manifestants forgent leur conscience politique et s’exercent à la démocratie ». Remarquable. On imagine les variantes : « En tirant au bazooka sur mes voisins, je m’exerce au pacifisme ». « En volant des voitures, je m’exerce au civisme ». « En trichant à l’examen, je m’exerce à l’honnêteté ». Invraisembable inversion des valeurs : l’arbitraire et le règne de la force brute érigés en morale.

La troisième catastrophe française est le recours immédiat et constant au sabotage et à la violence. Qui vient régulièrement en France de l’étranger est habitué au phénomène, que l’on pourrait appeler, si c’était drôle, le syndrome des Galeries Lafayette : il se passe toujours quelque chose. Parfois tragiquement venu de l’extérieur, comme dans le cas du terrorisme. Mais le plus souvent interne : grève du rail, grève d’Air France, grève des contrôleurs aériens, manifestation violente, incendie de voitures (dans quel autre pays le nouvel an signifie-t-il qu’on brûle chaque année des centaines de voitures ?), blocage de l’approvisionnement en essence, grève des « intermittents du spectacle » (parce qu’on ne les paye pas assez quand ils ne travaillent pas). Résultat : dans tous les pays voisins, on peut tranquillement planifier un voyage ; en France c’est impossible, on ne sait jamais ce qui va se produire. La violence en particulier est indigne d’un pays démocratique. De ce point de vue les gilets jaunes et leurs coups de main fascisants ne font que suivre une tradition ininterrompue, et largement impunie par crainte des conséquences (toujours le règne de la force) : séquestration de patrons, occupation illégale des universités avec dégradations en millions d’euros et représailles physiques contre ceux qui osent essayer de passer leurs examens, tabassage des responsables des relations humaines d’Air France par des syndicats de type quasi-mafieux. Au-delà de la violence, le dérèglement continuel est la source principale du retard français. La France est aujourd’hui le seul pays d’Europe où les vendeurs par correspondance ont cessé de garantir des dates de livraison, pour cause de troubles. Comment accepter une situation aussi humiliante ? Si les Suisses, les Allemands et d’autres réussissent tellement mieux, ce n’est pas qu’ils soient particulièrement plus intelligents. (D’intelligence et de créativité, la France n’en manque pas, du reste elle en exporte de plus en plus, comme elle exporta ses Huguenots après 1685.) C’est tout simplement qu’ils travaillent dans un environnement stable.

Le résultat récent le plus clair et le plus tragique est l’échec de ce qui aurait pu être une chance majeure pour la France : la récupération de l’industrie financière britannique pulvérisée par l’imbécile Brexit. Paris avait tous les atouts : la magie de la ville (vous iriez vivre à Francfort, vous, si vous aviez le choix ?), un gouvernement jeune et dynamique. Mais les banquiers ne sont pas fous. La banque a besoin de calme et de stabilité. Pas d’occupations, de grèves, de blocages, de déprédations et d’émeutes. Partie perdue, irrémédiablement.

Les destructions ne sont pas des débordements du mouvement : elles sont le mouvement. Dès le début, dès le premier automobiliste empêché de se rendre à son travail, il ne s’agissait pas de protester : il s’agissait de casser l’activité économique. Déjà les commerçants, pour qui novembre et décembre sont les mois clés, annoncent la pire saison depuis des années (et demandent bien sûr des dédommagements à l’État, c’est-à-dire une ponction supplémentaire). Une conspiration au seul bénéfice d’Amazon ne s’y serait pas prise autrement. Qui ne peut voir qu’il ne s’agit en aucun cas d’une protestation politique respectueuse de la démocratie, mais purement et simplement d’une tentative de destruction du pays ?

On s’arrêtera à la quatrième catastrophe française : la démission des clercs. C’est toujours très bien vu en France de s’enthousiasmer pour des idéologies rutilantes et généralement meurtrières. C’est très, très mal vu de soutenir le pouvoir, même quand il représente la raison, le droit et l’avenir. Mais où sont donc les fameuses élites (celles contre qui, selon les poncifs, le peuple est censé se révolter) ? Elles sont occupées à trouver des excuses aux vandales. Le Monde, auto-proclamé « journal de référence » (traduction : le New York Times sans les prix Nobel et sans les correcteurs d’orthographe), a passé tout l’été sur un scandale qu’il avait monté de toutes pièces, et sacrifie quotidiennement la vérité à une espèce de bonne conscience gauchisante sans aucun souci de l’avenir du pays. Le Figaro, au lieu de rallier la bourgeoisie au seul garant possible de l’ordre, se perd en élucubrations identitaires. Libération se croit toujours en Mai 68 et ne suit plus très bien ce qui se passe. Le Canard Enchaîné, vestige de la presse à chantage des années trente, dont on ne saurait sous-estimer dans le paysage français la puissance ricanante, méprisante, délétère et invincible, propage un peu plus chaque mercredi (entre ses contrepèteries obscènes) l’image du « tous pourris ». Pour soutenir Macron, personne.

Les élites devraient pourtant se rallier en masse ; non que Macron et Philippe soient infaillibles (ils ont fait des erreurs et ils en referont) mais tout simplement parce que dans la situation politique française actuelle ils sont le seul espoir crédible d’éviter le désastre. Le désastre, c’est la tiers-mondisation accélérée, l’écroulement de l’économie et le glissement vers le totalitarisme. D’un côté, un démagogue avide de pouvoir, suppôt de toutes les dictatures, admirateur de Chavez et de Maduro (qui en quelques années ont fait d’un des pays les plus stables de l’Amérique Latine, producteur de pétrole de surcroît, un abîme de pauvreté où les enfants meurent faute de médicaments et l’inflation mensuelle est à 94%, et qui serait pour nous le modèle ?) ; de l’autre, une extrémiste incompétente, issue d’un clan familial corrompu qui n’a jamais complètement renoncé à ses sources idéologiques des années trente. Macron est jeune, intelligent, compétent, calme et veut réformer la France là où elle en a le plus besoin, pour le bénéfice même de ceux qui n’ont rien trouvé de mieux pour progresser que de faire du chantage au reste du pays. Il a été démocratiquement élu, par une majorité sans ambages. La simple éthique démocratique appelle à le laisser faire son travail. Le simple souci du salut public appelle à le soutenir.

Tous ceux qui croient en la démocratie ; qui ont confiance dans l’énorme potentiel de la France ; qui savent qu’il faut en finir avec les lourdeurs et incongruités qui la paralysent ; qui perçoivent le risque énorme de totalitarisme ; et qui refusent que la violence d’une minorité l’emporte sur l’état de droit ; tous ceux-là doivent mettre au vestiaire le cynisme et l’éternel moquerie française pour s’engager publiquement et sans réserve, sans complaisance mais sans états d’âme, derrière l’unique force qui peut éviter la descente aux enfers.

The unspeakable in flight of the uneatable. One of the sad scenes of today’s Europe does not even take place in continental Europe, and does not even look sad. It happens every Friday afternoon at London’s Saint Pancras railway station as young expats from the continent joyfully board the Eurostar train on their way home for the week-end. They are all smiles, but the scene is nonetheless heartbreaking: why did these young and energetic graduates, some of the best the continent’s universities have trained in science, technology, finance and entrepreneurship, feel compelled to cross the Channel to deploy their talents? Sure, it is a great idea to try your luck abroad, but then the flux should be symmetric. Today, it is largely one-way.

That flux will stop. With Brexit, Britain has condemned itself to irrelevance. What a mournful end for one of the greatest civilizations in the history of humankind, which gave us both Newton and Darwin, as well as habeas corpus and the concept of individual liberty [1]! Faced with an obvious choice between grandeur and decline, a majority of Britons voted for decline and there is no going back. The word “Brexit” was coined to mean “British Exit”; there is no mention of Europe in it, an appropriate omission since Britain did not really choose to exit Europe, it chose to exit the modern world. The best that can now happen to it is that Britain keeps its oil and becomes something like Norway. Even that is not certain; the Scots may decide otherwise.

For a while I felt awfully sorry for my British friends and colleagues. They do not deserve this. Of course they did not vote for Brexit — no one with an ounce of reason did — but they have to suffer the consequences. On the other hand things may not be so bad in the long term. Many of them are Europhiles already; they will just move to more auspicious climes. Already the British are pumping up Paris real estate [2].

In the US, the tragic buffoonery goes on. Some days are more buffoon, others more tragic, but the destruction of one of the most successful societies on earth has started, and even though a majority of Americans are horrified with what is happening to their country the movement seems impossible to reverse because of the particular political system to which the US has now arrived. We may call it gerrycracy: democracy bridled by gerrymandering  (plus the Supreme Court). This system, although a recent invention in its current form, is designed to be self-reproducing, a phenomenon compounded by the evolution of the dominant party, which seems to have lost any sense of decency. The country’s greatness will not disappear in one day or one year; all that the world admires in the US, from Stanford and Harvard and MIT to the Metropolitan Museum and the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Review of Books to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Silicon Valley and Tesla is still up and churning. But the trajectory is set: downhill.

The programmed self-immolation of these two intellectual and economic powerhouses, depressing as it is, provides an extraordinary opportunity for Europe [3]. Here is a mosaic of democracies sharing an acute determination to do everything in their power to ensure that the horrors of their past will never occur again. People in Europe (not just the French) complain all the time, but they have, overall, the best deal in the entire world. Bewildering cultural riches, a non-extreme climate at least so far, decent economic standards, good-quality and largely free education, well-functioning basic services, a social safety net, tolerance for minorities, recognition of private enterprise, the rule of law… Where else on earth?

Europe has its challenges. Those of us who admire Macron’s bravado in inviting (in English) US scientists and engineers to come to France, and who also know how things work in European universities and business, are a little nervous. Convincing as the appeal is, it requires a serious redesign of the European university system and a concerted attack on the bureaucratic shackles and societal pettiness that stifle European creativity at all levels. It is doable. If someone like Macron could overcome the assault of demagogues and defeatists from the left and the right to get elected, he can start, with his counterparts in other European countries, to address the structural problems that hinder European progress. The context is right: the main countries have adults at the helm (in Germany this will remain true whether we get Merkel or Schulz) and the winds of optimism are blowing again. While Europe faces other major issues, present in the headlines everyday and hard enough on their own, the main challenge is economic: Europe needs to get richer. It is remarkable how much more smoothly a society functions, and how much happier people sound, when there is enough money going around. Just look at Switzerland. Macron and some of his international colleagues are the kind of strong and pragmatic leaders who understand this goal. They will also benefit, if Europe does not falter in its collective negotiating strategy, from a welcome windfall: the many billions that the UK will have to pay to disengage from its obligations. They should invest that money where it can make a difference: not the traditional European pork barrels, but science and technology, where it will catalyze Europe’s growth and wealth.

While the US and the UK are wasting their time, energy and money on non-problems, unimportant problems and self-inflicted problems, on building Maginot walls, on investing in technologies of the past and on closing themselves off from the sources of their own future, Europe should work on what matters. It should, and I think it will, at least as long as the King Ubu in the White House doesn’t get us into WW3 in response to some disagreeable tweet.

In forthcoming articles I will provide more detailed analyses of the various points sketched here. And yes, I know this venue started out as a technology blog and I will continue to talk about void safety, effective concurrent programming and how to verify programs. But the stakes are too high for scientists and engineers to stay neutral. Through what we know, see and understand, it is our duty to help Europe and with it the rest of humankind.

It could just work. I cannot wait for the scene at Paris’s Gare du Nord, a few years from now, on the typical Friday evening: lads and gals from London and Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent, eager to go home and get their hands on some fish and chips, but ready to return on Sunday night to resume their cheerful part in the new European renaissance.

References

[1] A remarkable  symbol of personal liberty is Blonde’s answer to Osmin, the head of the Janissaries who attempts to subdue her in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio (from 1782, seven years before the French revolution!): Ich bin eine Engländerin, zur Freiheit geboren (I am an Englishwoman, born to freedom). Blonde is not even the opera’s heroine but her servant.

[2] Brexit and the “Macron effect” are attracting the British to Paris (in French), in Le Monde, 31 May 2017, available here.

[3] Britain having officially thumbed its nose at Europe, we should from now on use the term to denote the continental part.

[4] Macron’s speech is available here, particularly from 1:34.

Headline of a recent article in the Financial Times, part of a supplement on “Investing in Germany”:

Germany’s coffers are overflowing but optimism is wearing thin

Oh, the humanity!

On reflection, though, better than the other way around.

The character of Ubu, created by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), deserves to be better known. The Wikipedia entry on Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) explains:

According to Jane Taylor, “the central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification”. Jarry’s metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero — fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil …

“There is”, wrote Taylor, “a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in the burlesque mode which Jarry invents, there is no place for consequence. While Ubu may be relentless in his political aspirations, and brutal in his personal relations, he apparently has no measurable effect upon those who inhabit the farcical world which he creates around himself. He thus acts out our most childish rages and desires, in which we seek to gratify ourselves at all cost”.

The derived adjective ubuesque is recurrent in French and francophone political debate.

An English translation of the play can be found here. The original French text (two versions of it) is available here.

Sometimes it is better not to know French. You will never quite get what Voltaire, Molière, Beauvoir, Zola, Hugo and Proust really mean and what Carmen and Faust really sing. But at least you will not find out what the Marseillaise really says. It is France’s national anthem and, according to a site dedicated to it, marseillaise.org, “believed by many to be the most stirring of all anthems“. Stirring, sure. Until you pay attention to the words.

I wrote an article on this blog, in French, proposing to shed the Marseillaise from its worst parts. A few people asked me to provide an English version; here it is. A rendition rather than a translation.

July the 14th, “Bastille day”, was France’s national holiday, and the opportunity for singing the Marseillaise. Politicians in towns large and small make a point of intoning it, in tune or (more often) out of it. One assumes — rather, one hopes — that occasionally they feel some embarrassment. You see, they understand French. The rest of the world hears the music, apparently good enough to have led such diverse composers as Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Beethoven to cite it in their own works, and has the luxury of ignoring the words. Better so. Here are some of the gems (in my almost literal translation, all those I found on the Web are awful):

It’s us versus tyranny
We have raised our blood-stained flag

and

Do you hear, in the countryside,
The howling of these ferocious soldiers?
They come to snatch our sons and wives from our arms
And slit their throats

and the triumphal part of the chorus:

Let’s march, let’s march!
Let an impure blood
Soak the grooves of our fields!

So kind and welcoming.

What makes someone’s blood so impure that every patriot must take as his sacred duty to spill floods of it?

As a matter of fact, it happened, three quarters of a century ago. Hundreds of thousands of French people learned that their blood was now officially non-conformant. There are a few more episodes of that kind in the country’s history. They are not, to put it politely, the most glorious, and not the most appropriate to recall for celebration in the national anthem.

In the days before the festivities, hearing a 7-year old sing (in tune) the impure blood that must soak the grooves, I wondered what kind of thoughts such slogans can evoke among schoolchildren, who are instructed to memorize them and sing along. What about the blood-stained flag? What about the tyrants (Matteo Renzi? Mario Draghi?) who unleash on us their ferocious soldiers, not only to howl, but to snatch, from our arms, our sons and our wives, and slit their throats?

It is time to reform this racist and hateful song.

We need not quarrel about history. The song had a role. The revolution faced enemies, it was defending itself. When we commemorate that revolution today, we think not of Robespierre and the murder of Lavoisier (the creator of modern chemistry, whose executors famously explained that “the republic has no use for scientists“); we think of its message of liberty and fraternity. Enough blood, battles, ferocity. Sing what unites us today.

A national anthem should not, of course, be changed every year as a response to changes in fashion. By nature, it will always be a bit off. But after two hundred and thirteen years of existence, including one hundred and thirty-six of service as national anthem, it is time to shed the Marseillaise of the most shameful remnants of its original text. The music will stay; but the words must adapt to today’s France, which does not whine about a troubled past but looks forward to a bright future.

Only weak peoples seek unity only through the detestation of others. Their songs are full of rejection and negation. Strong peoples, for their part, invoke positive images. Which phrase better projects the proud attitude of a nation that believes in its destiny: “it’s us versus tyranny“, or “with us, marches democracy”? “Their impure blood” or “our pure hearts”? “Slit throats” or “admire”? Be the judge.

There have been proposals for alternative Marseillaises before, but they tend to be mirror images of the original, falling into their own excesses, such as a rabidly anti-militaristic version which can only exacerbate divisions. We will not gain anything by replacing ancient grievances by modern insults.

The following version, illustrated below by the first verse and the chorus (and given in a literal English translation not meant for singing, whereas the French text respects the prosody and versification of the original Marseillaise) pursues a different goal: not antagonizing people, but uniting them; highlighting not differences, but affinities; and allowing everyone to bellow it: with no shame; instead, with pride.

Children of the fatherland, come along
The day of glory has come
With us, marches democracy
We have raised our shining flag.
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The murmur of those envious peoples?
They come to our towns and mountains
And cannot stop admiring them.

(Chorus)

Together, citizens!
Let us make our union stronger!
Let our pure hearts
Vibrate in unison.

[This blog is normally in English, but today’s article is particularly relevant to French speakers. The topic: freeing a national anthem of its hateful overtones.]

Mardi dernier quatorze juillet, une fois de plus, la Marseillaise a retenti un peu partout. C’est le jour où les hommes politiques s’essayent à l’entonner, juste ou (plus souvent) faux. On peut s’imaginer, en fait on espère, qu’ils sont ici et là un peu gênés. “D’un sang impur, abreuve les sillons!“. Vraiment ? Qu’est-ce qui rend un sang si impur que tout bon patriote ait le devoir de le faire jaillir ?

Certes, c’est arrivé, il y a trois quarts de siècle, quand on a soudain avisé des centaines de milliers de Français que leur sang était désormais classé non conforme. Il y a quelques autres épisodes de ce genre dans l’histoire du pays ; ce ne sont pas — pour dire les choses poliment — les plus reluisants, et certainement pas ceux que le chant national devrait glorifier.

À entendre ces jours-ci une petite tête blonde de sept ans chanter (juste) le sang impur qui doit abreuver les sillons, je me suis demandé quelles pensées ces slogans pouvaient bien éveiller pour les enfants des écoles à qui l’on enjoint de les répéter en choeur. Et l’étendard sanglant ? Et les tyrans (Matteo Renzi ? Mario Draghi ?) qui nous envoient leurs féroces soldats non seulement mugir mais, jusque dans nos bras, égorger nos fils, nos compagnes?

Il est temps de réformer ce chant raciste et haineux. Qu’il ait joué son rôle n’est pas la question. La révolution avait ses ennemis, elle se défendait. Quand nous l’invoquons aujourd’hui, cette révolution, ce n’est pas à Robespierre et à l’assassinat de Lavoisier (la république n’a pas besoin de savants) que nous devrions faire appel, mais à son message de liberté et de fraternité. Assez de sang, de batailles, de férocité. Place à ce qui nous définit vraiment aujourd’hui.

Il ne s’agit pas de changer tous les ans d’hymne national en réponse aux modes. Il sera toujours, par nature, un peu déphasé. Mais après deux cent treize ans de Marseillaise, dont cent trente-six ans de service continu comme chant officiel du pays, il est temps de se séparer des relents les plus honteux de son texte d’origine. La musique restera, assez bonne pour avoir été reprise par Schumann, Tchaikowsky, Beethoven, Rossini et bien d’autres ; mais les paroles doivent être adaptées à ce qu’est la France moderne, tournée vers  l’avenir.

Seuls les peuples faibles ne savent s’unir qu’à travers la détestation des autres. Leurs chants sont emplis de rejets et de négations. Les peuples forts s’appuient, eux, sur des images positives. Quelle formule projette le mieux  l’attitude fière d’une nation confiante en son avenir : “contre nous, de la tyrannie“, ou “avec nous, la démocratie” ? “Un sang impur” ou “nos coeurs purs” ?  “Égorger” ou “admirer” ?Jugez-en.

Il existe des Marseillaises alternatives, mais souvent elles ne sont que le miroir de la première, avec leurs propres excès ; voir par exemple cette version sympathique de prime abord mais d’un anti-militarisme qui ne peut que diviser encore. Point n’est besoin de remplacer les anciens cris par des insultes nouvelles.

La version qui suit — chantable, respectant la métrique,  et dont je fournirai les autres couplets si elle provoque autre chose que des invectives — a un tout autre but : non pas diviser, mais réunir ; attiser non pas les différences mais les affinités ; et permettre à chacun de la chanter à pleine voix : sans honte ; au contraire, avec fierté.

Allons enfants de la patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
Avec nous la démocratie
L’étendard vaillant est levé (bis)
Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes,
Frémir tous ces peuples envieux ?
Ils viennent, jusque sous nos cieux,
Admirer nos villes, nos montagnes.

(Refrain)

Ensemble, citoyens !
Renforçons notre union !
Que nos cœurs purs
Vibrent à l’unisson.

Résidence de l’ambassade de France, Berne, le 14 juillet 2015

In spite of the brouhaha surrounding the Affordable Care Act, the US administration and its partisans seem convinced that “the Web site problems will be fixed”.

That is doubtful. All reports suggest that the problem is not to replace a checkbox by a menu, or buy a few more servers. The analysis, design and implementation are wrong, and the sites will not work properly any time soon.

Barring sabotage (for which we have seen no evidence), this can only be the result of incompetence. An insurance exchange? Come on. Any half-awake group of developers could program it over breakfast.

Who chose the contractors?

When the problems first surfaced a few weeks ago, anyone with experience and guts would have done the right thing: fire all the companies responsible for  the mess and start from scratch with a dedicated, competent and well-managed team.

The latest promises published are that by the end of the month “four out of five” of the people trying to register will manage to do it. Nice. Imagine that when trying to make a purchase at Amazon you would succeed 80% of the time.

And that is only an optimistic goal.

The people building the site do not have infinite time. In fact, the process is crucially time-driven: if people do not get health coverage in time, they will be fined. But what if they cannot get coverage because the Web sites do not respond, or mess up?

Consider for a second another example of another strictly time-driven project: on January 1, 2002, twelve countries switched to a common currency, with the provision that their current legal tender would lose its status only a bare two months later. The IT infrastructure had to work on the appointed day. It did. How come Europe could implement the Euro in time and the US cannot get a basic health exchange to work?

Here is a possible scenario: the sites do not work (cannot handle the load, give inconsistent results). A massive wave of protests ensues, boosted by those who were against universal health coverage in the first place. Faced with popular revolt and with the evidence, the administration announces that the implementation of the universal mandate — the enforcement of the fines — is delayed by a year. In a year much can happen; opposition grows and the first exchanges are an economic disaster since the “young healthy adults” feel no pressure to enroll. The law fades into oblivion. Americans do not get universal health care for another generation. Show me it is not going to happen.

The software engineering lessons here are clear: hire competent companies; faced with a complicated system, implement the essential functions first, but stress-test them; deploy step by step, with the assurance that whatever is deployed works.

The exact reverse strategy was applied. As a result, we face the prospect of a software disaster that will dwarf Y2K and other famous mishaps; a disaster that software engineering textbooks will feature for decades to come.

A few years back my mother started writing her memoirs. She only completed a few chapters, hand-written, and I offered to type them up. There was not enough material to approach a publisher (my fault, for not pushing her to write more); the text has remained unpublished. I am making it available now: see here.

It is in French; if there is enough interest I will translate it. (Although the text is not very long, it is well written so the translation should be done carefully.) For reference I have included below the entry about my mother in one of many books about the period.

Here as a taste of her text is a translation of a short extract from chapter 5 (Grenoble, 1942, where her mission in the resistance network was to find safe havens for Jewish children):

 Along with hosting families there were religious boarding schools, and I should pay homage to a young Mother Superior, whose name I unfortunately forgot, who accepted some of our little girls cordially and without any afterthoughts. From schools for boys, however, how many rejections we had to suffer!

I also have to evoke that other Mother Superior, stern and dry, who after making me languish for several days while asking for the approval of her supervisors finally consented to see four or five little girls. I arrived with five of my charges, whom my neighbor had brought to me after their parents were arrested on that very morning. I can still see the high-ceilinged parlor, the crucifix on the wall, the freshly waxed and shining floor, the carefully polished furniture and a tiny figure with curly brown hair, all trembling: the eldest girl, who at the point of entering stepped back and burst into tears.  “One does not enter crying the house of the Holy Virgin Mary”, pronounced the Mother Superior, who had me take my little flock back to Grenoble, without further concerning herself with its fate.

And this note from the final chapter about the days of the Liberation of France, when under a false name she was working as a nurse for the Red Cross in the Limoges area:

This time it was the collaborationists’ turn to flee. I almost became a victim in a tragicomic incident when once, doing my daily rounds, I had to show my papers to a young FFI [members of the internal resistance army], aged maybe eighteen, who claimed the papers were fakes. Indeed they were: I still had not been able to re-establish my true identity. I tried to explain that as a Jew I had had to live under a borrowed name. He answered that by now all the “collabos” claimed to be Jewish to escape the wrath of the people…

 To understand the note that follows it is necessary to know a bit about the history of the period: the Drancy camp, OSE (see the Wikipedia entry), the Garel network. For the 100-th anniversary of OSE a documentary film was produced, featuring my mother among the interviewees; see a short reference to the movie here.

Biographical entry

From: Organisation juive de combat — Résistance / Sauvetage (Jewish Combat Organization: Resistance and Rescue), France 1940-1945, under the direction of Jean Brauman, Georges Loinger and Frida Wattenberg, Éditions Autrement, Paris, 2002.
Comments in brackets […] are by me (BM).

Name: Meyer née Kahn, Madeleine
Born 22 May 1914 in Paris
Resistance networks: Garel
Resistance period: from 1941 to the Liberation: Rivesaltes (Pyrénées-Orientales), Font-Romeu (Pyrénées-Orientales), Masgelier (Creuse), Lyons, Grenoble, Limoges
Supervisors: Andrée Salomon, Georges Garel

In July of 1942, Madeleine Kahn was sent by Andrée Salomon and Georges Garel to work at Rivesaltes [a horrendous “transit camp”, see here] as a social worker. She worked there for several weeks and helped improve the life of people interned there; she managed to extricate from the camp a number of children that she took to Perpignan and moved to several hosting places such as Font-Romeu and Le Masgelier. In Le Masgelier [a center that hosted Jewish children], she was assigned the mission of convoying to Marseilles, for emigration to the United States, Jewish children who were of foreign origin and hence in a particularly dangerous situation. [These were children from Jewish families that had fled Germany and Austria after Hitler’s accession to power and were particular sought by the Nazis.] The local authorities had put them up in the castle of Montgrand, already used as a hosting camp for elderly Austrian refugees. The Germans’ arrival  into the Southern half of France [until 1942 they were only occupying the Northern half of the country] abruptly stopped the departures for the US, and the authorities changed the children’s status to prisoners, held in appalling conditions. Madeleine Kahn remained alone with the children. All escape attempts failed. They were only freed after a long time, and sent back in some cases to their families and in others to Le Masgelier.

In November of 1942, Georges Garel and Andrée Salomon put Madeleine Kahn in charge of organizing the reception and hiding of children in the Isère area [the region around Grenoble], which by then was still part of the Italian-occupied zone. [Italian occupation was generally felt much lighter than the German one, in particular regarding persecution of Jews.] The mission was to find hosting families or religious institutions, catholic or protestant, and in advance of such placement to prepare the children to their new [false] identities and help separate them from their parents [when still alive and not deported]. It was also necessary to obtain the support of some authorities, such as Mme Merceron-Vicat from the child support administration and Sister Joséphine of Our Lady of Sion. After a while Madeleine was joined by Dr. Selinger and Herta Hauben, both of whom were eventually deported. Later on she collaborated with Fanny Loinger [another key name in the Jewish resistance], who for safety reasons took over in Isère and particularly in the Drôme.

After the departure of the Italians [and their replacement by the Germans], the situation became extremely dangerous and she had constantly to move the children around.

Warned that she was being tracked, Madeleine Kahn hurried to reclaim two babies that had been left in the La Tronche nursery. The director refused to give her Corinne, aged one, as earlier on three Germans had come for her, wanting to take her to Drancy [the collection point in France for the train convoys en route for Auschwitz], where her parents were being held. Upon seeing the child’s age, the Germans had left, announcing they would come back with a nurse. Instantly, Madeleine summons her friends in various [resistance] organizations and the process sets into motion: produce a fake requisition order in German with a fake seal stenciled from a war prisoner’s package; hire a taxi; make up a nurse’s uniform for Renée Schutz, German-born in Berlin as Ruth Schütz. Equipped with the requisition order, the false German nurse arrives at the nursery while Madeleine acts as a sentry to stop the Germans if needed. Corinne, the baby, is saved. [I became friends with her in the nineteen-seventies.]

The duped Germans were enraged. From an employee of the nursery they obtained Madeleine’s address, but she had left. The landlady gave them the address of Simone, Madeleine’s sister. [Simone was not a member of the network but knew all about it.] Interrogated under torture, she gave nothing away. All attempts to free her failed. She was deported to Auschwitz from where [adopting along the way an 8-year-old girl whose parents had already been deported, who clung to her, causing her to be treated like mothers with children, i.e. gassed immediately] she never returned.

Yes, I know, this is supposed to be a technology blog.

There are, however, times like right now when intellectuals should not remain silent — especially engineers and scientists.

I wrote the text referenced above several years ago; I don’t remember the exact date but it sounds very much Maastricht-aftermath. I have circulated it to a few friends, but think the time has come to publish it.

I am quite aware that unfolding events may make it look ridiculous. And then what? I will have done my tiny bit to bring people back to reason.

Note: I do not remember the provenance of the photograph. If informed, I would be happy to add the proper acknowledgment.