THE "BORDELIZATION" OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

The elected officials of the Nation seem to have a field day during the very stormy debates on the pension reform project.

It is Minister Olivier Dussopt whom the rebellious deputy of Hauts-de-Seine Aurélien Saintoul describes as "murderer".

It is Thomas Portes who proudly displays himself, tricolor scarf on his shoulder, his foot on a ball bearing the effigy of the same Dussopt. It was Louis Boyard who exploded when a Renaissance deputy asked him to calm down at the end of a session:

"What's the matter with you ? Come ! Come !"

"Bordelization" - the expression is from the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin - within the lower house leaves more than one perplexed to such an extent that some of LFI, among others, François Ruffin, Clémentine Autain etc., dissociate troublemakers.

The qualities of eloquence were particularly valued for politicians at the time of great orators such Gambetta, Clemenceau...

Insults, intimidation, insulting remarks...were little accepted insofar as they contrasted with the restraint and calm that the Republicans then intended to impose on their speeches and on the manifestations of emotions, conceived as pledges of an "ethics of civic respect and democratic debate".

Léon Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Jean Jaurès, Aristide Briand, Léon Blum… who were nevertheless violently insulted, therefore generally refused to respond on the same level.

In this context, and therefore, at least when it is public, insult, which moreover remains repressed by the press law of 1881, constitutes a form of transgression, a breach of the norms of political well-being. .

So why use insult ?

Doesn't it want to be the weapon of the outsiders ?

Faced with the anger caused by the tweet of Thursday February 9, 2023 from the majority, the right and the RN who summoned him to apologize, Thomas Portes appeared. "I will never give up in front of the bourgeois," he blurted out as he left the hemicycle to his dumbfounded Nupes allies.

The insult thus appears clearly as the weapon of the political outsider fitting into a veritable strategy of scandalization. It allows you to set yourself up as the mouthpiece of the "real" people reduced to silence in the assemblies...

The ways of doing politics have changed under the effect of increased media coverage and the individualization of the political field, which emphasizes singularity more than exemplary or representativeness, and which values ​​a certain exhibition of feelings more than emotional restraint.

But already in 1885, the pamphleteer Henri Rochefort, founder of L'Intransigeant, a socialist newspaper which gradually evolved towards Boulangism, claimed in an interview for Le Matin (October 3, 1885) his desire to undermine political theater and the rules of the game laid down by the establishments?

"The Palais-Bourbon had been transformed into an old-age hospice, where everyone sleeps; now, my duty is to wake up the residents of this branch of Sainte-Périne. […]. And when, at the Palais Bourbon, we'll talk to Ferry, there won't be any more “Mr. President of the Council” as big as his arm, we'll go under his nose, we'll shake his bridle and we can call him “assassin”. parliamentary formulas will have had their day".

Now, ladies and gentlemen, get to work !