JI am incredulous at the title of your article (“Death of Mikhail Gorbachev: the ambivalent legacy of the last Soviet leader”). Either you have no guideline and the opinions being by definition diverse (like Putin’s versus mine, which I will share with you below), any legacy will have the ambivalence of the different actors; or you have a guideline and really think that the fall of the USSR was a disaster, hence your title. I thought that The worldjust like me, would consider Gorbachev a hero and that the gaze of tyrants and Putin’s revenge would not alter your opinion.
I was 20 in 1989 and will never forget that we owe Mr. Gorbachev the fall of the Wall, therefore a certain (perhaps naive) end to nuclear fear. All my friends from the former Eastern Europe have finally been able to study, think, travel, work in complete freedom, and also the Russians who have chosen it.
This easing of tensions has been favorable to globalization, which has enabled hundreds of millions of people in formerly developing countries to emerge from poverty and everyone to continue to improve their standard of living (even if much less quickly for the European middle classes). All peripheral “proxy” conflicts have decreased in intensity, or even disappeared, collaboration with Russia has developed (International Space Station, energy, investments, etc.).
The contrast is striking with what we are seeing today, when the dictatorships that Gorbachev helped bring down return with Putin, Xi and others: wars (Ukraine, Hong Kong, tomorrow Taiwan?), return of the nuclear threat, tensions on the energy markets, food shortages which will have dramatic consequences in the poorest countries, lower growth, which means impoverishment for many.
Gorbachev is a true hero and deserved from the Monde major treatment. Disappointing. Thanking you despite everything for the quality of your work, an article does not make a newspaper!
Georges Destriau, Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine)
Gilles van Kote, Deputy Director of Reader Relations, answers:
Reading Isabelle Mandraud’s article seems to me to remove any possible ambiguity as to the title of the article, since it would not be clear: the ambivalence evoked in the title does not concern the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev as such but the perception that one can have of him in the Western world or in other parts of the world, first and foremost Russia. The world always regarded Mikhail Gorbachev as a statesman of exceptional caliber, who played a decisive role in contemporary history, and as a sincere defender of peace in the world.
JI am incredulous at the title of your article (“Death of Mikhail Gorbachev: the ambivalent legacy of the last Soviet leader”). Either you have no guideline and the opinions being by definition diverse (like Putin’s versus mine, which I will share with you below), any legacy will have the ambivalence of the different actors; or you have a guideline and really think that the fall of the USSR was a disaster, hence your title. I thought that The worldjust like me, would consider Gorbachev a hero and that the gaze of tyrants and Putin’s revenge would not alter your opinion.
I was 20 in 1989 and will never forget that we owe Mr. Gorbachev the fall of the Wall, therefore a certain (perhaps naive) end to nuclear fear. All my friends from the former Eastern Europe have finally been able to study, think, travel, work in complete freedom, and also the Russians who have chosen it.
This easing of tensions has been favorable to globalization, which has enabled hundreds of millions of people in formerly developing countries to emerge from poverty and everyone to continue to improve their standard of living (even if much less quickly for the European middle classes). All peripheral “proxy” conflicts have decreased in intensity, or even disappeared, collaboration with Russia has developed (International Space Station, energy, investments, etc.).
The contrast is striking with what we are seeing today, when the dictatorships that Gorbachev helped bring down return with Putin, Xi and others: wars (Ukraine, Hong Kong, tomorrow Taiwan?), return of the nuclear threat, tensions on the energy markets, food shortages which will have dramatic consequences in the poorest countries, lower growth, which means impoverishment for many.
Gorbachev is a true hero and deserved from the Monde major treatment. Disappointing. Thanking you despite everything for the quality of your work, an article does not make a newspaper!
Georges Destriau, Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine)
Gilles van Kote, Deputy Director of Reader Relations, answers:
Reading Isabelle Mandraud’s article seems to me to remove any possible ambiguity as to the title of the article, since it would not be clear: the ambivalence evoked in the title does not concern the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev as such but the perception that one can have of him in the Western world or in other parts of the world, first and foremost Russia. The world always regarded Mikhail Gorbachev as a statesman of exceptional caliber, who played a decisive role in contemporary history, and as a sincere defender of peace in the world.
Analyse. Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, Wednesday, September 7, after police shootings following “refusal to comply” in Rennes and Nice. Nine deaths since the beginning of the year. In a few weeks, the question has become a major subject of political and security debate, fueled by the legitimate media coverage of these repeated tragedies.
Sign of a “enslavement of society” for some, proof of “systemic police violence” for the others: the polarization of the debate is not satisfied with nuance and pays little attention to the causes of the phenomenon, which are nevertheless clarified by unequivocal figures. In 2020, the report of the National Interministerial Road Safety Observatory noted, over one year, a 16.5% increase in refusals to comply, with 26,589 cases identified. In a decade, from 2010 to 2019, this offense has seen a considerable increase of more than 49%, rising to 80% for the most serious cases, which involve a “risk of death and injury”.
Why such inflation? In the eyes of the police unions, a « haine antiflic » almost generalized would suffice to provide an explanation for the phenomenon, which is actually explained by a multiplicity of factors. How not to establish a link between the entry into force of the license points, in 1993, and the multiplication by twenty-five, since, of the number of refusals to comply? How not to compare this increase to the situation of the 800,000 French drivers affected by a lack of insurance? Confiscation of the vehicle, cancellation of the driver’s license, driving ban of up to five years: the heavy repression of this offense can weigh, in an economic context where the loss of a means of transport can also mean that of a use.
Exception within exception
To these factors must be added the multiplication of anti-drug operations, in line with the “War on Drugs” decreed by the authorities, which increases the temptation to evade police checks. Especially since the improvement of instant screening tools responds to the frantic quest for statistical performance – the “stick” – deplored by the police officers monopolized by this task.
Have law enforcement shootings increased proportionately? No. Here again, the statistics sweep the assertions out of the blue. Admittedly, for the national police, 60% of cases of opening fire concern “moving vehicles”, a broader category than that of refusals to comply. But the police only take responsibility for using their weapon in 1.1% of these cases and, in almost all of them, only after having been confronted with a danger – the perception of which may vary according to the circumstances.
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Analyse. Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, Wednesday, September 7, after police shootings following “refusal to comply” in Rennes and Nice. Nine deaths since the beginning of the year. In a few weeks, the question has become a major subject of political and security debate, fueled by the legitimate media coverage of these repeated tragedies.
Sign of a “enslavement of society” for some, proof of “systemic police violence” for the others: the polarization of the debate is not satisfied with nuance and pays little attention to the causes of the phenomenon, which are nevertheless clarified by unequivocal figures. In 2020, the report of the National Interministerial Road Safety Observatory noted, over one year, a 16.5% increase in refusals to comply, with 26,589 cases identified. In a decade, from 2010 to 2019, this offense has seen a considerable increase of more than 49%, rising to 80% for the most serious cases, which involve a “risk of death and injury”.
Why such inflation? In the eyes of the police unions, a « haine antiflic » almost generalized would suffice to provide an explanation for the phenomenon, which is actually explained by a multiplicity of factors. How not to establish a link between the entry into force of the license points, in 1993, and the multiplication by twenty-five, since, of the number of refusals to comply? How not to compare this increase to the situation of the 800,000 French drivers affected by a lack of insurance? Confiscation of the vehicle, cancellation of the driver’s license, driving ban of up to five years: the heavy repression of this offense can weigh, in an economic context where the loss of a means of transport can also mean that of a use.
Exception within exception
To these factors must be added the multiplication of anti-drug operations, in line with the “War on Drugs” decreed by the authorities, which increases the temptation to evade police checks. Especially since the improvement of instant screening tools responds to the frantic quest for statistical performance – the “stick” – deplored by the police officers monopolized by this task.
Have law enforcement shootings increased proportionately? No. Here again, the statistics sweep the assertions out of the blue. Admittedly, for the national police, 60% of cases of opening fire concern “moving vehicles”, a broader category than that of refusals to comply. But the police only take responsibility for using their weapon in 1.1% of these cases and, in almost all of them, only after having been confronted with a danger – the perception of which may vary according to the circumstances.
You have 50.1% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
“The Reactionary Style. From Maurras to Houellebecq”, by Vincent Berthelier, Amsterdam, 388 p., €22.
In the 1930s, Albert Thibaudet (who then reigned over criticism in the pages of The New French Review) noted that if the left was slowly imposing itself in politics, conversely the letters were sliding to the right. Freed, according to him, from the ideological weight of Marxism, right-wing writers would have enjoyed the freedom that the exercise of style demands. This firmly established thesis, Vincent Berthelier discusses its merits by going through a century of so-called reactionary literature, from the classical ideal advocated by Charles Maurras, who reigned on the traditionalist right during the interwar period, until anti-liberalism in the neutralized style of a Michel Houellebecq.
The desire to restore an old order
Between these two poles: the imprecations of Bernanos, whose writing reflects the desire to restore an old order; the tension between classical purity and aesthetic preciousness of Marcel Jouhandeau; an art of the aphorism and the point at Cioran, “a kind of hysterization of classicism and [d’]calming down of the metaphor”, writes Berthelier; or even the “conservative role” of writing according to Renaud Camus, whose“linguistic and literary imagination is articulated in a social and racial hierarchy”…
The Hussars, Roger Nimier in particular, had the intelligence to push the distinction established in his time by Thibaudet and to attribute to the right the monopoly of style – a way for them to rehabilitate Céline, Paul Morand or Marcel Aymé, compromised during the ‘Occupation. However, under the charm of the formulas, Vincent Berthelier detects above all the desire to neutralize the political options. Whether it is the biting irony with which Aymé attenuates his criticism of the purge in Uranus (Gallimard, 1948), or paradoxes that give Cioran a disillusioned lucidity, but maintain, secretly, a racialist thought: “After having ruled the two hemispheres, Westerners are on the way to becoming a laughing stock: subtle specters, ends of race in the true sense of the term, doomed to the condition of pariahs, weak and flabby slaves”he wrote in 1977 – the fear of the “great replacement” was already in the air…
The Celine case
The brilliant stylistic study proposed by Vincent Berthelier, where the only thing missing, he admits, is Maurice Barrès (whose influence he exerted on Malraux, Aragon or Mauriac blurs the political lines), nevertheless comes up against Céline. In the latter, fascism coexists with a revolution in style, where reactionary writers most often subordinate their writing to political affects that limit its possibilities for innovation. Should we consider the lyricism of Celinian slang as the vehicle of his fascism?
You have 20.75% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
“The Reactionary Style. From Maurras to Houellebecq”, by Vincent Berthelier, Amsterdam, 388 p., €22.
In the 1930s, Albert Thibaudet (who then reigned over criticism in the pages of The New French Review) noted that if the left was slowly imposing itself in politics, conversely the letters were sliding to the right. Freed, according to him, from the ideological weight of Marxism, right-wing writers would have enjoyed the freedom that the exercise of style demands. This firmly established thesis, Vincent Berthelier discusses its merits by going through a century of so-called reactionary literature, from the classical ideal advocated by Charles Maurras, who reigned on the traditionalist right during the interwar period, until anti-liberalism in the neutralized style of a Michel Houellebecq.
The desire to restore an old order
Between these two poles: the imprecations of Bernanos, whose writing reflects the desire to restore an old order; the tension between classical purity and aesthetic preciousness of Marcel Jouhandeau; an art of the aphorism and the point at Cioran, “a kind of hysterization of classicism and [d’]calming down of the metaphor”, writes Berthelier; or even the “conservative role” of writing according to Renaud Camus, whose“linguistic and literary imagination is articulated in a social and racial hierarchy”…
The Hussars, Roger Nimier in particular, had the intelligence to push the distinction established in his time by Thibaudet and to attribute to the right the monopoly of style – a way for them to rehabilitate Céline, Paul Morand or Marcel Aymé, compromised during the ‘Occupation. However, under the charm of the formulas, Vincent Berthelier detects above all the desire to neutralize the political options. Whether it is the biting irony with which Aymé attenuates his criticism of the purge in Uranus (Gallimard, 1948), or paradoxes that give Cioran a disillusioned lucidity, but maintain, secretly, a racialist thought: “After having ruled the two hemispheres, Westerners are on the way to becoming a laughing stock: subtle specters, ends of race in the true sense of the term, doomed to the condition of pariahs, weak and flabby slaves”he wrote in 1977 – the fear of the “great replacement” was already in the air…
The Celine case
The brilliant stylistic study proposed by Vincent Berthelier, where the only thing missing, he admits, is Maurice Barrès (whose influence he exerted on Malraux, Aragon or Mauriac blurs the political lines), nevertheless comes up against Céline. In the latter, fascism coexists with a revolution in style, where reactionary writers most often subordinate their writing to political affects that limit its possibilities for innovation. Should we consider the lyricism of Celinian slang as the vehicle of his fascism?
You have 20.75% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
A year after the ecologists’ primary which saw her emerge, Sandrine Rousseau continues to trace her ecofeminist furrow. With the authors Adélaïde Bon and Sandrine Roudaut, she publishes a manifesto at Le Seuil, Beyond the Androcene. Sixty pages, plenty to delight its conservative detractors. Something to reinforce, too, an increasingly promising story with a new generation of activists.
It is therefore a history of the “Androcene”, a neologism which replaces the Anthropocene to link the patriarchal system, capitalism and climate change. Assuming that men, more than women and the dominated classes, bear the responsibility for the disaster. The reader adept at an old-fashioned universalism, that of the man with a capital “H” creator of progress, will stop reading there, the curious will continue his trip to ecofeminism.
In this era, write the authors, “a handful of oppressors, different according to place or time, have exploited and enslaved the multitude for their own interests”. Exploitation of nature, of women, of slaves and then of the proletariat, this is the trio that underlies this definition of patriarchal capitalism. A story rich in shortcuts but which has the advantage of opposing a clear dismissal of the idea that technology could, on its own, represent a solution to climate change.
“No more question of enjoying at the expense of others”
Reading the economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) in support, the authors are not afraid to attack the sacrosanct Enlightenment, to hold a critical discourse on science: “Linné, Buffon, Lamarck or Darwin theorized and put nature into boxes. This research has contributed to seeing it no longer as a whole, coherent and balanced, but as a sum, an assembly of parts. By classifying, we have lost sight of the essential: the links, the interactions, the balances. »
The rapid demonstration highlights examples taken from feminist research. Inspired by a reading by academic and feminist activist Silvia Federici, the book presents the witch trials at the end of the Middle Ages as a symptom of this capitalism in preparation which alienated land and women.
Aware that they will alienate « boomers »the authors oppose the “let’s enjoy without hindrance” of May 68 a new “cardinal rule” : “No more question of enjoying today at the expense of others. » without ever saying “degrowth”they offer “to transform the illusion of purchasing power into a right to live in dignity, to have access to basic goods and services”.
You have 19.64% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
A year after the ecologists’ primary which saw her emerge, Sandrine Rousseau continues to trace her ecofeminist furrow. With the authors Adélaïde Bon and Sandrine Roudaut, she publishes a manifesto at Le Seuil, Beyond the Androcene. Sixty pages, plenty to delight its conservative detractors. Something to reinforce, too, an increasingly promising story with a new generation of activists.
It is therefore a history of the “Androcene”, a neologism which replaces the Anthropocene to link the patriarchal system, capitalism and climate change. Assuming that men, more than women and the dominated classes, bear the responsibility for the disaster. The reader adept at an old-fashioned universalism, that of the man with a capital “H” creator of progress, will stop reading there, the curious will continue his trip to ecofeminism.
In this era, write the authors, “a handful of oppressors, different according to place or time, have exploited and enslaved the multitude for their own interests”. Exploitation of nature, of women, of slaves and then of the proletariat, this is the trio that underlies this definition of patriarchal capitalism. A story rich in shortcuts but which has the advantage of opposing a clear dismissal of the idea that technology could, on its own, represent a solution to climate change.
“No more question of enjoying at the expense of others”
Reading the economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) in support, the authors are not afraid to attack the sacrosanct Enlightenment, to hold a critical discourse on science: “Linné, Buffon, Lamarck or Darwin theorized and put nature into boxes. This research has contributed to seeing it no longer as a whole, coherent and balanced, but as a sum, an assembly of parts. By classifying, we have lost sight of the essential: the links, the interactions, the balances. »
The rapid demonstration highlights examples taken from feminist research. Inspired by a reading by academic and feminist activist Silvia Federici, the book presents the witch trials at the end of the Middle Ages as a symptom of this capitalism in preparation which alienated land and women.
Aware that they will alienate « boomers »the authors oppose the “let’s enjoy without hindrance” of May 68 a new “cardinal rule” : “No more question of enjoying today at the expense of others. » without ever saying “degrowth”they offer “to transform the illusion of purchasing power into a right to live in dignity, to have access to basic goods and services”.
You have 19.64% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
Book. Until recent years, the fate of the Uighurs [orthographié ainsi par Le Monde] didn’t interest many people. Even Bernard Kouchner, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, was caught in the act of ignorance in 2009, citing the « Yoghourts » on national radio. And MEP Raphaël Glucksmann bluntly acknowledges that he has only been won over to their cause since September 2019. However, the tragedy of the Uighurs is not new. One of the – many – merits of Laurence Defranoux’s book is to remind us of this.
Ever since East Turkestan (now Xinjiang Autonomous Region) was ruled by a Chinese emperor in the mid-eighteenthe century, relations between the Middle Kingdom and this region are marked by ignorance, mistrust and violence. Not only is this region far, very far – the city of Kashgar is farther from Beijing than from the Turkish border – but it has been mainly populated since the 14th century.e century of Muslims considered as barbarians by the Chinese despite the refinement of their civilization. Problem: despite its peripheral position in the empire, it has been for two thousand years at the heart of commercial relations – the famous “silk roads” – between China and Europe.
Also listen Uighurs: A Century of Persecution
The victory of the communists in Peking in 1949 makes matters worse. Of course, Mao Zedong forgot as soon as he came to power the promises of self-determination that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had renewed to the Uighurs, the Mongols and the Tibetans during the previous quarter century. As early as 1949, he sent General Wang Zheng, a relative to Xinjiang, who, it is said, advised him to“definitely eliminate” the Uighurs. At the time, citizens who were not part of the Han ethnic group represented less than 6% of the population, but lived in territories which, together, covered 64% of the country’s surface area. The self-determination of the different peoples living on Chinese soil is therefore no longer on the agenda. Apart from during the parenthesis between 1976 (death of Mao) and 1989 (general takeover after the Tiananmen movement), the Chinese settler never ceased to repress the Uighur people, to prevent them from speaking their language and from practicing his religion.
With two other constants: the massive sending of more or less voluntary Han people to Xinjiang so that the Uighurs there become a minority and the development of the region thanks to black gold (oil) and white gold (cotton), two sectors that impoverish the soil more than they enrich the Uighurs, who are systematically excluded from positions of responsibility. Results : “Instead of smoothly integrating the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang, the neo-Stalinist policy of minorities, fierce repression and forced colonization have the diametrically opposite effect. Under pressure from outside, the mosaic of small communities scattered over 1.6 million square kilometers of desert and mountains are becoming aware of their ethnicity”explains the journalist of Release.
You have 44.07% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
Book. Until recent years, the fate of the Uighurs [orthographié ainsi par Le Monde] didn’t interest many people. Even Bernard Kouchner, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, was caught in the act of ignorance in 2009, citing the « Yoghourts » on national radio. And MEP Raphaël Glucksmann bluntly acknowledges that he has only been won over to their cause since September 2019. However, the tragedy of the Uighurs is not new. One of the – many – merits of Laurence Defranoux’s book is to remind us of this.
Ever since East Turkestan (now Xinjiang Autonomous Region) was ruled by a Chinese emperor in the mid-eighteenthe century, relations between the Middle Kingdom and this region are marked by ignorance, mistrust and violence. Not only is this region far, very far – the city of Kashgar is farther from Beijing than from the Turkish border – but it has been mainly populated since the 14th century.e century of Muslims considered as barbarians by the Chinese despite the refinement of their civilization. Problem: despite its peripheral position in the empire, it has been for two thousand years at the heart of commercial relations – the famous “silk roads” – between China and Europe.
Also listen Uighurs: A Century of Persecution
The victory of the communists in Peking in 1949 makes matters worse. Of course, Mao Zedong forgot as soon as he came to power the promises of self-determination that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had renewed to the Uighurs, the Mongols and the Tibetans during the previous quarter century. As early as 1949, he sent General Wang Zheng, a relative to Xinjiang, who, it is said, advised him to“definitely eliminate” the Uighurs. At the time, citizens who were not part of the Han ethnic group represented less than 6% of the population, but lived in territories which, together, covered 64% of the country’s surface area. The self-determination of the different peoples living on Chinese soil is therefore no longer on the agenda. Apart from during the parenthesis between 1976 (death of Mao) and 1989 (general takeover after the Tiananmen movement), the Chinese settler never ceased to repress the Uighur people, to prevent them from speaking their language and from practicing his religion.
With two other constants: the massive sending of more or less voluntary Han people to Xinjiang so that the Uighurs there become a minority and the development of the region thanks to black gold (oil) and white gold (cotton), two sectors that impoverish the soil more than they enrich the Uighurs, who are systematically excluded from positions of responsibility. Results : “Instead of smoothly integrating the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang, the neo-Stalinist policy of minorities, fierce repression and forced colonization have the diametrically opposite effect. Under pressure from outside, the mosaic of small communities scattered over 1.6 million square kilometers of desert and mountains are becoming aware of their ethnicity”explains the journalist of Release.
You have 44.07% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
In office since 2019, the current Minister for the Spanish energy transition, Teresa Ribera, obtained from Brussels, in May, the recognition of the“Iberian exception” and received the green light to cap gas prices for a year. The mechanism consists of paying the gas companies the difference between the cost of gas on the market and the cap set for the energy mix. Funding assumed by consumers and by the reduction in remuneration of other energy sources.
A 53-year-old senior civil servant and director of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (Iddri) in Paris between 2014 and 2019, she pleads for a similar mechanism in Europe and a freeze on CO prices.2. She also wants France to unblock the construction of a new gas pipeline linking the two countries, through the Pyrenees, the MidCat, so that it can export gas to northern Europe.
Almost a year ago, you called for the decoupling of gas and electricity prices in Europe in order to curb the escalation of energy prices. On Friday, September 9, finally, the energy ministers of the European Union (EU) are called to an extraordinary meeting to find solutions to the surge in bills…
Europe’s reaction is important: it is to prepare for zero supply from Russia, because it is the only way to avoid this constant blackmail.
What we have experienced throughout this year is an economic war. Energy is used by Vladimir Putin as a weapon of psychological terrorism: I loosen the screw, I cut off the gas, I resume the flows… But it is not easy to do without Russia, one of the main suppliers of gas, coal, oil, diesel and enriched uranium. Cutting yourself off from such an important player requires time and preparation, and very strong political will.
Doesn’t this meeting come late?
The Commission’s response was initially to think that the problem was temporary and that nothing should be touched, that the profits of the energy companies would be reinvested in accelerating the energy transition. And, at the same time, national budgets had to assume social policies. Spain, like France, understood from the start that it was dangerous. That could last a long time. And that the decision of financial operators in the energy sector to reinvest was not automatic. We also see that state budgets alone cannot help families and the industrial fabric to get through the crisis.
You have 69.85% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
In office since 2019, the current Minister for the Spanish energy transition, Teresa Ribera, obtained from Brussels, in May, the recognition of the“Iberian exception” and received the green light to cap gas prices for a year. The mechanism consists of paying the gas companies the difference between the cost of gas on the market and the cap set for the energy mix. Funding assumed by consumers and by the reduction in remuneration of other energy sources.
A 53-year-old senior civil servant and director of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (Iddri) in Paris between 2014 and 2019, she pleads for a similar mechanism in Europe and a freeze on CO prices.2. She also wants France to unblock the construction of a new gas pipeline linking the two countries, through the Pyrenees, the MidCat, so that it can export gas to northern Europe.
Almost a year ago, you called for the decoupling of gas and electricity prices in Europe in order to curb the escalation of energy prices. On Friday, September 9, finally, the energy ministers of the European Union (EU) are called to an extraordinary meeting to find solutions to the surge in bills…
Europe’s reaction is important: it is to prepare for zero supply from Russia, because it is the only way to avoid this constant blackmail.
What we have experienced throughout this year is an economic war. Energy is used by Vladimir Putin as a weapon of psychological terrorism: I loosen the screw, I cut off the gas, I resume the flows… But it is not easy to do without Russia, one of the main suppliers of gas, coal, oil, diesel and enriched uranium. Cutting yourself off from such an important player requires time and preparation, and very strong political will.
Doesn’t this meeting come late?
The Commission’s response was initially to think that the problem was temporary and that nothing should be touched, that the profits of the energy companies would be reinvested in accelerating the energy transition. And, at the same time, national budgets had to assume social policies. Spain, like France, understood from the start that it was dangerous. That could last a long time. And that the decision of financial operators in the energy sector to reinvest was not automatic. We also see that state budgets alone cannot help families and the industrial fabric to get through the crisis.
You have 69.85% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
One day in 2018, Liseby Elysé appeared before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and declared: “I came to The Hague to get my island back. » Forty-five years earlier, like all of the approximately 1,500 inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, she was forced into exile by the United Kingdom, which became sovereign in 1968 over this former Mauritian territory soon emptied of its population to allow the United States to set up a military base there. She was 19 years old. She never came back.
Beside her, in The Hague, where she is about to testify, stands the Franco-British lawyer Philippe Sands, a tireless defender of human rights in the hottest areas of the planet. Hired by the government of Mauritius, he obtained a historic judgment from the ICC, which recognized the injustice committed against Liseby and her family and required the United Kingdom to authorize their return. To date, however, nothing has been done. In Mauritius, the Seychelles, London, the Chagossians are still waiting. “We have the right to live therethey say to Philippe Sands, we will never give up. »
That’s what simultaneous publication is for, in English and French – “the Chagossians don’t speak English, having the book immediately translated into French was a matter of respect”explains the lawyer to the “World of Books” -, The Last Colony. Awaken public opinion. Putting at the service of the Chagos the literary power that Sands’ two previous books have made known to the whole world, Back to Lemberg et La Filiere (Albin Michel, 2017 and 2020). And because this way of linking politics and literature, far from any ideological discourse, by uniting the powers of one and the other to insert them together in reality, makes his work unique, this book, a fascinating synthesis of all the lives of its author, provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on each of them, and on the whole that they ended up creating.
Voice
« Back to Lemberg completely changed my life”, notes Philippe Sands. A lawyer since 1985, professor of international law at the University of London, author of several academic and political essays – untranslated – he had never spoken about himself, his family history, the ghosts who haunt him. “In these professions, he says, one does not allow one’s own voice to speak. We hide it. And there, when, in 2010, I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Lviv [Lemberg, au temps de la domination autrichienne], in Galicia, western Ukraine, where part of my family is from, something is triggered. There is a voice coming out. »
You have 72.77% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
One day in 2018, Liseby Elysé appeared before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and declared: “I came to The Hague to get my island back. » Forty-five years earlier, like all of the approximately 1,500 inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, she was forced into exile by the United Kingdom, which became sovereign in 1968 over this former Mauritian territory soon emptied of its population to allow the United States to set up a military base there. She was 19 years old. She never came back.
Beside her, in The Hague, where she is about to testify, stands the Franco-British lawyer Philippe Sands, a tireless defender of human rights in the hottest areas of the planet. Hired by the government of Mauritius, he obtained a historic judgment from the ICC, which recognized the injustice committed against Liseby and her family and required the United Kingdom to authorize their return. To date, however, nothing has been done. In Mauritius, the Seychelles, London, the Chagossians are still waiting. “We have the right to live therethey say to Philippe Sands, we will never give up. »
That’s what simultaneous publication is for, in English and French – “the Chagossians don’t speak English, having the book immediately translated into French was a matter of respect”explains the lawyer to the “World of Books” -, The Last Colony. Awaken public opinion. Putting at the service of the Chagos the literary power that Sands’ two previous books have made known to the whole world, Back to Lemberg et La Filiere (Albin Michel, 2017 and 2020). And because this way of linking politics and literature, far from any ideological discourse, by uniting the powers of one and the other to insert them together in reality, makes his work unique, this book, a fascinating synthesis of all the lives of its author, provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on each of them, and on the whole that they ended up creating.
Voice
« Back to Lemberg completely changed my life”, notes Philippe Sands. A lawyer since 1985, professor of international law at the University of London, author of several academic and political essays – untranslated – he had never spoken about himself, his family history, the ghosts who haunt him. “In these professions, he says, one does not allow one’s own voice to speak. We hide it. And there, when, in 2010, I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Lviv [Lemberg, au temps de la domination autrichienne], in Galicia, western Ukraine, where part of my family is from, something is triggered. There is a voice coming out. »
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“Les Exportés”, by Sonia Devillers, Flammarion, 276 p., €19, digital €14.
Who was he really? A new Oskar Schindler, savior of Romanian Jews victims of communism, or a cynical profiteer from their tragedy? A Jew of Slovak origin, a businessman based in London, Henry Jacober (1918-1994) traded at a high price the right to freedom of tens of thousands of people, whom the communist regime forbade from leaving, for breeding pigs or breeding chickens, so many essential goods for the modernization of a failing collectivized agriculture.
“Jews and oil are our best export products”, admitted Nicolae Ceausescu about this somewhat particular trade, started in the 1950s, before he came to power. Remained discreet for a long time, this “state barter”as the historian Radu Ioanid calls it in Security and the sale of Jews (“The Securitate and the Sale of the Jews”, 2015, untranslated), only appeared in its full extent with the opening of the archives, after the “revolution” of December 1989.
Always elegant, Henry Jacober was a regular at the Athénée Palace in Bucharest. “A strange smuggler, both benefactor and wheeler-dealer”says Sonia Devillers in The Exportedthe beautiful story that she devotes to her grandparents, Harry and Gabriella, who left Romania in 1961 with their two children, including the author’s mother, exchanged for “high yielding animals”as a regime official put it at the time. “They didn’t flee, we let them go and they paid a fortune for it”, notes the journalist at the start of this fascinating dive into the tragedies of Romanian Jewish memory. For a long time, she was uninterested in it. “I grew up with a hole in the middle of Europe, a shapeless nation that I barely knew how to locate”she acknowledges.
Reduced to pariah status
This past was the business of his mother, who left at the age of 14 and remained forever scarred by this wrenching. It was above all the story of his grandparents, cultured and wealthy, who always kept the nostalgia of Bucharest between the two wars, despite the violence of the local fascists of the Iron Guard. They had welcomed communism as a liberation, before the stark reality of the new regime’s oppression and anti-Semitism came into full view. Accused of “cosmopolitanism”, they were expelled from the party, reduced to the status of pariahs. As in all other similar cases, the sum was paid by family members and friends who had already taken refuge in France. The debt was fully repaid.
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“Les Exportés”, by Sonia Devillers, Flammarion, 276 p., €19, digital €14.
Who was he really? A new Oskar Schindler, savior of Romanian Jews victims of communism, or a cynical profiteer from their tragedy? A Jew of Slovak origin, a businessman based in London, Henry Jacober (1918-1994) traded at a high price the right to freedom of tens of thousands of people, whom the communist regime forbade from leaving, for breeding pigs or breeding chickens, so many essential goods for the modernization of a failing collectivized agriculture.
“Jews and oil are our best export products”, admitted Nicolae Ceausescu about this somewhat particular trade, started in the 1950s, before he came to power. Remained discreet for a long time, this “state barter”as the historian Radu Ioanid calls it in Security and the sale of Jews (“The Securitate and the Sale of the Jews”, 2015, untranslated), only appeared in its full extent with the opening of the archives, after the “revolution” of December 1989.
Always elegant, Henry Jacober was a regular at the Athénée Palace in Bucharest. “A strange smuggler, both benefactor and wheeler-dealer”says Sonia Devillers in The Exportedthe beautiful story that she devotes to her grandparents, Harry and Gabriella, who left Romania in 1961 with their two children, including the author’s mother, exchanged for “high yielding animals”as a regime official put it at the time. “They didn’t flee, we let them go and they paid a fortune for it”, notes the journalist at the start of this fascinating dive into the tragedies of Romanian Jewish memory. For a long time, she was uninterested in it. “I grew up with a hole in the middle of Europe, a shapeless nation that I barely knew how to locate”she acknowledges.
Reduced to pariah status
This past was the business of his mother, who left at the age of 14 and remained forever scarred by this wrenching. It was above all the story of his grandparents, cultured and wealthy, who always kept the nostalgia of Bucharest between the two wars, despite the violence of the local fascists of the Iron Guard. They had welcomed communism as a liberation, before the stark reality of the new regime’s oppression and anti-Semitism came into full view. Accused of “cosmopolitanism”, they were expelled from the party, reduced to the status of pariahs. As in all other similar cases, the sum was paid by family members and friends who had already taken refuge in France. The debt was fully repaid.
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Analyse. In the early 1980s, a beginning teacher earned the equivalent of 2.3 times the minimum wage, today they earn around 1.2 times the minimum wage. This eloquent comparison, carried by the economist Lucas Chancel, has struck people in recent months as it illustrates the fall in teachers’ salaries in forty years. With the shortage of professors setting in – more than 4,000 tenured positions have not been filled in 2022 – public opinion has suddenly become aware of the phenomenon. “Wages are no longer commensurate with the work and effort required”, said the Minister of National Education, Pap Ndiaye, Tuesday, August 30, on RTL. He promised to raise teachers’ salaries above 2,000 euros net per month from the start of the 2023 school year.
The average salary of public teachers is 2,596 euros net per month, bonuses and allowances included (in 2020, latest published statistics). This average hides strong disparities between the categories of teachers (school teachers, certified, agrégé), their status (tenured or contractual) and their seniority. A school professor or holder of the Capes, or three quarters of the profession, receives 1,480 euros net per month, excluding bonus, during his internship year, and 1,680 euros when he becomes a holder. He then climbs the ranks of the index grid as his seniority progresses.
How did we get here ? The end of the indexation of the index point to inflation in 1983 had a long-term burden on teachers’ salaries, and the freezing of this index point for the past ten years – until July 2022 – has amplified the phenomenon. Inflation, even between 0% and 2% per year, and the increase in social contributions have eroded the progress obtained, according to the analysis of Bernard Schwengler, author of Teacher salaries. The fall (The Harmattan, 2021).
Upgrading, a “permanent project”
The salary of French teachers has suffered a triple drop in a few decades. A stall compared to other state officials, first of all, for whom the drop in the value of the index point was more compensated by an increase in their bonuses. The latter represent between 10% and 15% of the total remuneration of professors, while they can reach up to half the amount of a pay slip for civil service executives. A Senate report noted in June: “The net salary of teachers is close to that of crossing guards and peacekeepers” with lower skill levels.
You have 54.88% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
Analyse. In the early 1980s, a beginning teacher earned the equivalent of 2.3 times the minimum wage, today they earn around 1.2 times the minimum wage. This eloquent comparison, carried by the economist Lucas Chancel, has struck people in recent months as it illustrates the fall in teachers’ salaries in forty years. With the shortage of professors setting in – more than 4,000 tenured positions have not been filled in 2022 – public opinion has suddenly become aware of the phenomenon. “Wages are no longer commensurate with the work and effort required”, said the Minister of National Education, Pap Ndiaye, Tuesday, August 30, on RTL. He promised to raise teachers’ salaries above 2,000 euros net per month from the start of the 2023 school year.
The average salary of public teachers is 2,596 euros net per month, bonuses and allowances included (in 2020, latest published statistics). This average hides strong disparities between the categories of teachers (school teachers, certified, agrégé), their status (tenured or contractual) and their seniority. A school professor or holder of the Capes, or three quarters of the profession, receives 1,480 euros net per month, excluding bonus, during his internship year, and 1,680 euros when he becomes a holder. He then climbs the ranks of the index grid as his seniority progresses.
How did we get here ? The end of the indexation of the index point to inflation in 1983 had a long-term burden on teachers’ salaries, and the freezing of this index point for the past ten years – until July 2022 – has amplified the phenomenon. Inflation, even between 0% and 2% per year, and the increase in social contributions have eroded the progress obtained, according to the analysis of Bernard Schwengler, author of Teacher salaries. The fall (The Harmattan, 2021).
Upgrading, a “permanent project”
The salary of French teachers has suffered a triple drop in a few decades. A stall compared to other state officials, first of all, for whom the drop in the value of the index point was more compensated by an increase in their bonuses. The latter represent between 10% and 15% of the total remuneration of professors, while they can reach up to half the amount of a pay slip for civil service executives. A Senate report noted in June: “The net salary of teachers is close to that of crossing guards and peacekeepers” with lower skill levels.
You have 54.88% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
The book. It’s a little music that we’ve been hearing in offices for many years. It is played with consistency by managers, executives and consultants, and taken up by a “managerial literature” prolific. Its main theme can vary: it sometimes invites people to give meaning to work, sometimes to encourage discussion, employees to speak out about the company’s activity, or even to see any novelty as progress.
But this background sound also and above all represents, for Sandra Enlart, a set of “moral discourse” which allow organizations to define the good, the fair, the true… and what is not.
Throughout his work When good and bad come to work (PUF), the author, director of research in educational sciences at Paris-X-Nanterre, works to deconstruct many of these stories that are current in companies. She tries to understand what underlies them and what also explains their permanence over time. Mme Enlart recalls, for example, that “the idea that it is necessary and that we can reconcile the company and its employees” has been in vogue since “the appearance of large modern organizations. Didn’t Taylor himself plead this cause before the unions? [au début du XXe siècle] » ?
Preconstructed discourses and conformism
Why are these discourses so present in managerial spheres, sometimes inspiring the company’s strategic orientations (definition of its raison d’être, its values, etc.) or management methods (recruitment, etc.)? If they are strategic, according to the author, it is because the organization pursues, through them, a clear purpose: to create a link, an attachment with the employees to ensure their voluntary involvement, their “voluntary submission”.
Through this dive into managerial beliefs, Mme Enlart denounces preconstructed speeches, a moral conformism singularly lacking in nuance. It doesn’t stop there. The author engages, in the second part of the book, in a similar analysis of the literature critical of the business world, ” works [qui] tried to show how dangerous and disrespectful of the individual the organization is”.
Here again, the author raises the “moral discourse” who come back regularly. “Work kills”, “the reality is on the ground”, “in the company everything is manipulation”… If she underlines the veracity of certain theses, she regrets, there again, the lack of nuances and the Manichean presentations which are regularly made of the world of work.
You have 30.83% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
The book. It’s a little music that we’ve been hearing in offices for many years. It is played with consistency by managers, executives and consultants, and taken up by a “managerial literature” prolific. Its main theme can vary: it sometimes invites people to give meaning to work, sometimes to encourage discussion, employees to speak out about the company’s activity, or even to see any novelty as progress.
But this background sound also and above all represents, for Sandra Enlart, a set of “moral discourse” which allow organizations to define the good, the fair, the true… and what is not.
Throughout his work When good and bad come to work (PUF), the author, director of research in educational sciences at Paris-X-Nanterre, works to deconstruct many of these stories that are current in companies. She tries to understand what underlies them and what also explains their permanence over time. Mme Enlart recalls, for example, that “the idea that it is necessary and that we can reconcile the company and its employees” has been in vogue since “the appearance of large modern organizations. Didn’t Taylor himself plead this cause before the unions? [au début du XXe siècle] » ?
Preconstructed discourses and conformism
Why are these discourses so present in managerial spheres, sometimes inspiring the company’s strategic orientations (definition of its raison d’être, its values, etc.) or management methods (recruitment, etc.)? If they are strategic, according to the author, it is because the organization pursues, through them, a clear purpose: to create a link, an attachment with the employees to ensure their voluntary involvement, their “voluntary submission”.
Through this dive into managerial beliefs, Mme Enlart denounces preconstructed speeches, a moral conformism singularly lacking in nuance. It doesn’t stop there. The author engages, in the second part of the book, in a similar analysis of the literature critical of the business world, ” works [qui] tried to show how dangerous and disrespectful of the individual the organization is”.
Here again, the author raises the “moral discourse” who come back regularly. “Work kills”, “the reality is on the ground”, “in the company everything is manipulation”… If she underlines the veracity of certain theses, she regrets, there again, the lack of nuances and the Manichean presentations which are regularly made of the world of work.
You have 30.83% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.