Posts Tagged ‘Jean-Luc Mélenchon’
La France insoumise in crisis as leading figures denounce “autocratic” Mélenchon.
Crisis over Nationalism and Autocratic Leadership in La France insoumise.
Des cadres de La France insoumise dénoncent les dérives autocratiques de Mélenchon
Nouvel Obs.
A wave of protest has been stirring in La France insoumise (LFI). According to Le Monde several leaders of the movement, including candidates for European elections, and Charlotte Girard, co-responsible for LFI’s programme – have denounced the autocratic excesses of the leader of LFI. These criticisms were published in an internal letter of January 9 came after ” banishment” of François Cocq, January 5, by this tweet from Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
CNews claims that a Spokesperson for LFI is nationalist François Cocq who has been banished from the movement.
Le Nouvel Obs continues, that there are “serious complaints about the internal organisation of LFI.”
Le Monde has the original story.
Europe I continued,
Now it is clear that this Blog has little, indeed, no sympathy with the politics of Cocq, who represents the worst sovereigntist tendency in La France insoumise.
This is, for example, what he has said in his defence (Novel Obs)
ll emploie le mot nationaliste comme une injure. Je n’ai pas de problème à parler de la nation. Pour moi, c’est le corps politique constitué, ce qui définit le corps républicain. C‘est notre histoire, la grande histoire révolutionnaire. Mélenchon parle lui plutôt de patrie républicaine mais je sais qu’on met la même chose sous ces deux termes.
(Mélenchon) used the word nationalist an insult. I have no problem speaking of the Nation. For me, it is the political body which makes up the flesh and bones of the republic. It’s our history, our glorious revolutionary history. Mélenchon prefers to speak of a Republican fatherland, but I know that the two terms refer to the same thing.
The main difficulty seems to be that Cocq does not simply repeat the party line on this ideological issue.
There also appear to have been differences over the degree of warmth and enthusiasm for some of the Gilets Jaunes, notably the leading figure Eric Drouet.
Cocq appears to have been more guarded in his support for this figure.
It is clear that, as the letter cited above states, banishing the individual, who is widely known in the Rally, apparently a “national orator ”, by tweet from the Party leader, is hardly democratic.
As those protesting have said, this is an off the cuff pronouncement from Mélenchon not a the result of LFI party members’ decision-making.
It reminds people of Trump’s behaviour.
French Government Backs Down on Fuel Tax Rise . “The Solution, it’s the People!” Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Stop Taxes! Gilets Jaunes “aspire” to Mélenchon’s Programme.
French Prime Minister announces suspension of fuel tax hikes
France fuel protests: PM Philippe suspends fuel tax rise
BBC.
France’s PM has announced a six-month suspension of a fuel tax rise which has led to weeks of violent protests.
Edouard Philippe said that people’s anger must be heard, and the measures would not be applied until there had been proper debate with those affected.
The below puts the result in its true historical perspective:
The genial Mélenchon has found a whole new raft of supporters!
They have given “weight to my words”.
And “aspire” to his programme.
Bless!
After Saturday’s Violence: the Politics of the Gilets Jaunes, La France périphérique and the Far-Right.
Gilet Jaune: Sacred Heart, The Hope and Salvation of France?
France 24
Masked, black-clad groups ran amok across central Paris on Saturday, torching cars and buildings, looting shops, smashing windows and fighting police in the worst unrest the capital has seen since 1968, posing the most formidable challenge Emmanuel Macron has faced in his 18-month-old presidency.
Disturbances also rocked several cities and towns and across France – from Charleville Mezieres in the northeast to Nantes in the west and Marseille in the south.
“We have to think about the measures that can be taken so that these incidents don’t happen again,” government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux told Europe 1 radio.
…
According to figures released by the French interior ministry, around 75,000 demonstrators took to the streets across France on Saturday. The headcount was significantly lower than for the last two “Yellow Vest” protests, which drew roughly 300,000 and 100,000 respectively.
Authorities were caught off guard by Saturday’s escalation in violence overshadowing the spontaneous protest movement, dubbed the “Yellow Vest” protest because many participants are wearing the fluorescent safety jackets kept in all cars in France.
In Paris, police said they had arrested more than 400 people while 133 were injured, including 23 members of the security forces. Police fired stun grenades, tear gas and water cannon at protesters at the top of the Champs-Elysées boulevard, at the Tuillèries Garden near the Louvre museum and other sites.
The analysis below is gaining traction:
It is in this France périphérique that the gilets jaunes movement was born. It is also in these peripheral regions that the western populist wave has its source. Peripheral America brought Trump to the White House. Peripheral Italy – mezzogiorno, rural areas and small northern industrial towns – is the source of its populist wave. This protest is carried out by the classes who, in days gone by, were once the key reference point for a political and intellectual world that has forgotten them.
France is deeply fractured. Gilets jaunes are just a symptom Christophe Guilluy
Le Monde this week published David Goodhart. He employed his distinction between “somewhere” and “anywhere” people in The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (2017) to say much of the above: Gilets jaunes » : « La “France périphérique” demande à être respectée.
There is something in this.
The distinction taken from the writings of Christophe Guilluy, between better off urban areas to the left behind regions and “peri-urban” areas, exists. But there is a great deal of rhetoric, shared by Goodhardt, about a “cosmopolitan” urban liberal electorate and and the “real” country, La France profonde, inhabited by françaises de souche and (in the French case) the banlieue where there are large number of people whose origins lie in post-War and more recent immigration.
In the case of the Gilets Jaunes their principal complaint – fuel prices – is based on transport. That is, the need (and we would not dismiss the choice) of a car. This is easy for people across Europe to get to grips with: you can see it where I am writing from, where austerity has meant fewer, if any bus services in rural areas, and villages described as “fossils” with few services at all.
The problem is that claims about a gulf between the Citizens of Nowhere and those from Somewhere is not a sociological portrait.
It is not directly a picture of classes, people are defined by where they live, and their culture, not their work or their ownership of economic agents.
It is clearly directed by those who oppose the Nowhere people and try to assert their authority to speak for the Somewheres.
The fiercest opposition to rootless cosmopolitans comes from nationalists….
We would not reduce the Gilets Jaunes to this cultural-political-economic ferment at all.
But it’s not hard to see that this is fertile ground for the right, and we should not forget that the far-right has intervened vigorously in the protests.
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Marine Le Pen et Marion Maréchal droite tente de se rhabiller en jaune
This is an account of the presence in Paris of groups to the right of the above:
Gilets jaunes : à Paris, groupuscules nationalistes et d’extrême droite s’affichent.
The journalist noted the presence of groups equipped with catapults umbrellas, hammers….
Libération was thus able to identify Yvan Benedetti, former president of the ultranationalist group “L’œuvre française”, dissolved in 2013 after the death of Clément Méric. There was graffiti from the GUD (Groupe Union Défense), a far-right student organisation, sprayed on shop fronts and street furniture.
(Note, the GUD is notorious for decades of physical attacks on leftist students).
A little further on, we read this inscription:«On est chez nous.» “We are at home.” A slogan taken up in chorus by a few dozen people, sometimes wrapped in blue-white-red flags, who threw stones and bricks at police vehicles. In another place, there was the“Justice for Esteban” that was made, in reference to the skinhead Esteban Morillo, sentenced to eleven years in prison for killing – in a fight – the anti- fascist Clément Méric in 2013.
Several traditional Catholic groups, including the Saint Pius X fraternity, the Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet church are also present, recognisable by symbols such as the flag of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, adorned with the slogan “Hope and Salvation”, and royalist emblems with the fleur-de-lis.
This has appeared on the Facebook pages of French leftists.
And this violence:
Placed alongside this response from the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA) seems feeble: support for the Gilets Jaunes without qualification.
The French far-left, no doubt encouraged by reports which talk of “urban guerrilla warfare” is said to be desperately searching for texts to justify backing tax revolts.
Amongst a call for a d’états généraux de la fiscalitée to plan taxes, referdums and Proprotional Representaiton, emerging from the Gilets Jaunes is the demand for an immediate freeze on the tax rise on fuel, and for fewer checks on cars, that is MOTs in the UK. (Des Gilets jaunes lancent un appel : “Nous voulons être les porte-parole d’une colère constructive” le Journal du Dimanche).
This morning it was noticeable how carefully right-wing figures treated the violence – which would have been far from the case had it happened if young inhabitants of the banlieue had invaded the Champs–Élysées.
Large sections of Marcon’s party (LREM), following nearly all the political class, have responded by demanding a Moratorium on Taxes.
Amongst the cacophony Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has called for the return of the tax on the wealthy, the impôt sur la fortune .
Although we discover he managed to find this programme, close to his own, put out by the “gilets Jaunes”.
Spooky!
The US Jacobin has just published a piece defending the revolt. We’re With the Rebels. AURÉLIE DIANARA
Even the moralistic criticisms that accuse the gilets jaunes of materialism and selfishness can be called into question. as not the increase in the price of bread the main factor pushing the women of Paris to mount their furious march on Versailles in October 1789?
One can understand the appeal of calls to reduce, if not abolish, taxes, to the wealthy owner of this publication.
Though this justification for the movement looks like flaying at very dry old straws.
Brendan O’Neill would relish these lines, about left-wingers who criticise the Jilets Jaunes,
Criticisms of their behaviour have been influenced by an evident contempt for the “lower classes”: social media are awash with jokes about the “pig-headed” “imbeciles” of the “France d’en bas.” Such derision also appeared across the social networks close to the autonomous “movement” left, before the powerful demonstration of November 17.
Oddly attempts by the other side, those to wish to “shape the movement” with wise left guidance, have yet to discover the magic potion which will make the following problem vanish. Even somebody as wreathed in a halo as the author admits,
Ecologists and the defenders of nature have been, to say the least, disconcerted by the hubbub around a movement that basically asks to be able to burn more fuel at a lower price and that seemed initially uninterested in the government’s at least explicit intention to use this “carbon tax” to fund the ecological transition.
Another Setback for La France insoumise after Defeat in By-election.
After predicted win, defeat for La France insoumise.
The American radical progressive journal Jacobin ran this story this weekend,
France Insoumise’s Farida Amrani is the frontrunner to replace France’s former prime minister Manuel Valls as MP for Évry.
A Foot in the Streets An interview with Farida Amrani.
Talking to a progressive French patriot, Cde Broder, Amrani the candidate for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Rally, said that their progressive politics were clear,
We work in the interests of a program created by and for the people, above partisan divides.
Amarani lost, heavily, to the candidate of la République en Marche (LREM), President Macron’s Party.
He, the Mayor of Évry, Francis Chouat got 59,1% of the vote.
There was a high rate of abstention in the by-election, 8,08 % in the first round.
And in the second (83%), which the Leader of the Progressive LFI drew some comfort from – by blaming it for stifling the voice of the people’s anger.
The candidate of LREM was less unhappy:
The owner of Jacobin, the wealthy Brexiter and radical progressive Bhaskar Sunkara has recently bought into the British left.
Well-established rumour has it that he has sent his majordomo, Sebastian Budgen, to negotiate a slice of the media empire of La France insoumise, the “web-télé” imaginatively titled Média.
It is said that after this, and other setbacks for LFI, stocks are on offer at an attractive price.
More information: Législative partielle en Essonne : Francis Chouat, soutenu par LREM, succède à Manuel Valls
Gilets Jaunes: the Ultra-Right Accused of Creating Saturday’s Violence.
Ultra-Right Accused of Leading Violent Protest on the Champs-Élysées.
According to initial reports, (the violence) was in the majority created by members of the ultra-right, who infiltrated the movement with the sole intention of smashing everything up. These rioters were largely said to be young men, who came from the regions.
“D’après les premiers éléments, il s’agirait en grande majorité de membres de l’ultra-droite, qui se seraient infiltrés au mouvement avec l’unique ambition de tout ravager. Ces casseurs seraient des hommes plutôt jeunes, venus de province.” BFM
The historian of social movements Sylvain Boulouque evoked the “political colouring” behind the flags carried on the Champs-Elysées, some of which held sympbols of the Sacred Heart and the fleur de lys. “Calls were spread on the all the web sites of the radical right calling for people to pour into the Champs-Elysees and to storm the Elysée, or at least to get close to it.”
“une coloration politique” des drapeaux représentés sur les Champs-Elysées, parfois frappés du Sacré-Cœur ou de la fleur de lys. “Des appels fleurissent également sur tous les sites de le droite radicale pour descendre les Champs-Elysées et prendre d’assaut l’Elysée, ou du moins s’en rapprocher”,
In this interview Boulouque notes that the ultra-right were at the head of the march.
Here is a broader report:
France 24.
Demonstrators wearing the yellow, high-visibility vests that symbolise their movement threw projectiles at police preventing them from moving along the famed shopping avenue, which was decked out in twinkling Christmas lights.
They also built barricades in some spots, and tore down traffic lights and street signs, creating riotous scenes reminiscent of France’s 1968 civil unrest, or street insurrections in the mid-19th century immortalised in paintings and movies.
Police arrested 130 people, 69 of those in Paris, and 24 people were injured, five of them police officers including one who suffered burns to his groin, the city police department and Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said.
…
The interior ministry counted 106,000 protesters across France on Saturday, with 8,000 in Paris, of whom around 5,000 were on the Champs-Elysees.
That was far less than the national tally of 282,000 in the November 17 protests.
Castaner said after the tumult died down that damage on the Champs-Elysees was “small”.
The French government cast blame for the unruly protests on far-right politician Marine Le Pen,claiming she egged them on.
But Le Pen rejected that accusation saying she had “never called for any violence whatsoever” and in turn accused the government of “organising the tension” and seeking to make her a scapegoat.
Meanwhile, opposition parties on both the right and left accused the government of trying to reduce the protests to just the sporadic scenes of violence, and turning a deaf ear to the demonstrators’ grievances.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the radical left France Unbowed party who attended a separate march Saturday protesting violence against women, tweeted that the action on the streets was “a mass protest of the people” which signalled “the end for [interior minister] Castaner”.
There is no doubt that there were ultra-right protesters on the Champs-Élysées.
That, is, apart from the Front National, who in French political language are just far-right…
Amongst those present on Saturday was prolific anti-semitic far-right writer, Hervé Ryssen, originally an anarchist, then a holocaust denier, and obsessed with Jewish ‘plots’ Ryssen recently rendered homage to Robert Faurisson after his death.
Violences aux Champs-Élysées: une centaine de membres de l’ultra-droite parmi les gilets jaunes
Here is a video of them chanting “On est chez Nous” – that is, “It’s our Homeland”
This is another picture of them.
There is an issue as to why the Police let these demonstrators erect barricades, something, to say the least, unusual in the posh 8th arrondissement.
Mélenchon of the rally La France insoumise (LI) claims that the protests were part of the great French revolutionary tradition of refusing to pay taxes for the rich.
The far-right Sovereigntist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, leader of Debout la France, who has very publicly backed the protest.,accused the government of seizing on a few idiots to discredit the movement, the honest folk behind the Gilets Jaunes movement.
The Gilets Jaunes protests could be called “populism in the streets”, an upsurge against the government by a very mixed group of people.
It is hard to not to sympathise with those, trapped into using their cars in many parts of France without proper public transport (as is the case in many areas of Britain) are the first to suffer from tax rises on the diesel they were encouraged to use.
But it is hard to claim that this this protest is ‘floating signifier’ which the left can ‘hegemonise” (“Le gilet jaune comme signifiant flottant. ) There is a case for addressing the issues of the “peripheral” parts of France, which, as in the rest of Europe, suffer from poor transport and a shrinking number of public services. But how exactly can any left, the “composantes progressistes du champ social” convince those who, to put it simply, correspond to the “petrol heads” of Top Gear. Clearly the far-right have not been able to work within the Gilets Jaunes so easily without a reason. Any Green measure is likely to be fought by these people.
It does not take a Doctorate in the behaviour of the far-left to see something of an opportunist running after any form of popular unrest here.
Macron and Interior Minister Christophe Castaner have not just been able to accuse Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National of fomenting disorder.
They have (with transparent logic) posed a real problem for those parts of the French left which have shown sympathy with the Gilets Jaunes.
It is fortunate, helped by support for the march against sexual violence at the same time, that none have said, “No, it was not the ultra-right – we were there too!”
and Ligne rouge et gilets jaunes
and: Classes d’encadrement et prolétaires dans le « mouvement des gilets jaunes »
Notably,
Cet agrégat informe d’individualismes, qui ne veut pas payer pour les autres, s’insère dans un fond idéologique d’extrême-droite. Au delà de la présence plus que problématique de l’extrême droite parlementaire et extraparlementaire, un discours, qui revient comme une rengaine : contre les « parasites » dits du haut (Macron, les bobos, le gouvernement, mais pas la classe capitaliste) et du bas (les précaires, les immigrés, les chômeurs, etc) qui profiteraient de la redistribution. Cela s’est traduit concrètement par des attaques physiques sur une femme voilée, un reporter asiatique, un couple homosexuel, des migrants cachés dans un camion et livrés à la gendarmerie, un camarade noir, etc.
Formal legal investigation opened into Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise’s finances.
Mélenchon Faces the Law of the Republic.
Two inquiries have been launched into the campaign accounts of Jean-Luc Mélenchon for the 2017 presidential election and the assistants of his rally La France insoumise’s MEPs. They have been entrusted to investigating judges by the Paris prosecutor’s office, according to a statement issued on Friday 9 November .
Jean-Luc Mélenchon et LFI visés par deux informations judiciaires
Two judicial information was thus opened against X. The first, relating to the financing of the campaign , mainly for “fraud” and “breach of trust” , while the second, concerning the parliamentary assistants, was opened for “misappropriation of public funds “ .
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party are therefore targeted by two separate investigations.
The first concerns the accounts of the campaign of Jean-Luc Mélenchon for the presidential election of 2017 where the fraud is alleged to occurred.
These are extremely serious and range from money-laundering to pure and simple swindling.
The second concerns Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s parliamentary assistants in the European Parliament.
The suspicion is that he and his rally employed parliamentary assistants in the European Parliament to work for themselves outside of their European tasks. This ultimately amounts to diverting money from Parliament by creating fictitious jobs.
Other MEPs and former MEPs are involved in the investigations into the use of European Parliamentary assistants for domestic party work, such as Brice Hortefeux and Michèle Alliot-Marie (the right of centre, Les Républicains), Edouard Martin (elected on the Socialist Party’s list, now in Génération.s , of Benoît Hamon) or Yannick. Jadot (Europe Ecology-The Greens, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts EELV).
Mélenchon has reacted by stating that he is happy that this inquiry is to be led by two independent investigating judges, the “normal” procedure:
Mélenchon and la France insoumise in Free-fall.
Looking Further from the Gates of Power than Ever.
“la vertu est cette capacité à mettre en adéquation les principes qu’on applique dans sa vie avec ceux qu’on voudrait voir appliquer au plus grand nombre au benefice de tous”
Virtue is the faculty to be able to properly line up the principles that you apply in your life with those that you would like to see applied to the greatest number of others to the benefit of all.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon. De La Vertu.2017.(1)
Tout commence par la mystique, par une mystique, par sa (propre) mystique et tout finit de la politique.”
Everything begins in mysticism, by a mystique, one’s own mystique, and ends in politics.”
Notre Jeunesse. Charles Péguy. 1910 – 11. (2)
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, writes Chantal Mouffe, is a successful left-populist. He has channelled a feeling of being “left behind” and the “desire for democratic recognition” away from the far-right. Mélenchon’s Rally, la France insoumise (LFI) has been able to “federate all the democratic struggles against post-democracy”. Like Jeremy Corbyn his “anti-establishment discourse” “comes from the progressive side”. (3)
Mélenchon has ambitions grander than picking up the votes of La France périphérique, the ‘somewhere people’ stranded on the margins in the age of globalisation. He seeks support in that direction. LFI’s reaching out to protests against the rise in engine fuel, backed by the far-right Rassemblement National (ex-Front National) – despite previous green commitment – underlines the approach. But the goal of the movement is to create the multitude, the common people, are transformed into a People by collective action. The fight against the “oligarchy” the push for equality, what remains of class struggle, the deeply rooted “anthropological” need for sovereignty, are woven together into a vision adequate to the ecological demands of a planet under threat. (4)
Out with Class Based Parties!
In these conditions the old class based “party forms” of the left have consigned the left to a dwindling “archipelago”. Their vertical structures correspond to the old Taylorist and Fordist forms of work. The emergence of the dissatisfied People, broader than the traditional working class, as a category, a potential political subject, facing the financial Oligarchy rends them obsolete. Horizontal on-line debate makes the old ‘rigid’ democratic procedures out of date. His movement, a “brand (“label”) is a vehicle for common action. It is not (his quotation marks) “démocratique”, with different tendencies, factions, or even votes on opposing motions at conferences of elected party representatives from branches. It is, in line with these social changes, a “movement”, in which its politics are visible, and through which supporters are involved not by old-fashioned voting but through selection by lot to participate, to a degree decided by their own wishes, in the grand replacements of the old politics of La France insoumise. (5)
It was hard not to be reminded of this vision when listening to the radio station, Europe 1 this morning. The news began with the results of an opinion poll which put LFI’s list for the 2019 European elections in free-fall, down to 11% (drop of 3%) three and a half points above the Parti Socialiste (7,5%if Ségolène Royal lead their list, otherwise 6%) Its follows surveys which indicated that, after his public exhibition of petulant rage over an investigation into the Movement’s finances, Mélenchon himself has lost 7 points in personal popularity though some polls put the loss higher at a drop in 15% amongst those who voted for him in the Presidential elections (Jean-Luc Mélenchon dégringole de 7 points). Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (ex-Front National) meanwhile is scoring the same, around 20%, as La République en Marche of Emmanuel Macron.
L’enfance d’un chef.
The coup de grâce came with an interview with Mélanie Delattre et Clément Fayol, the authors of a book, to be published this week, on Mélenchon and La France insoumise. Mélenchon : Aux portes du pouvoir.This attempts to unravel “le système Mélenchon” It began with a description of LFI as a “business” (Chef d’entreprise et anticapitaliste), and its Leader’s considerable personal fortune. The canny homme d’affaires prefers, they allege, to squirrel away money in a variety of companies rather than reward his long suffering staff. We were then treated to a sketch of its internal ‘operations’, tightly controlled by those in the ‘club’ around the leadership.
Next, the authors asserted, far from being a ‘new type of open to all, a” participative” structure, it is ruled by ‘Trotskyist’ organisational practice – that it a very special kind of ‘Trotskyism’, the Lambertist centralist type which brooks no opposition. They managed to suggest that his screaming and foot stamping against those officials and police agents trying to investigate some of the secrets of this “business” was a premeditated piece of theatre. In short, the accusation is that Mélenchon has retained the political practice of his youth inside one of the most sectarian narrow-minded nationalist (both of its two existing splinters advocate Frexit) French left currents.
Finally, the interview raised the issue of Jean Luc’s long-standing membership of the Freemason, Grand Orient lodge. This, for those wishing to pursue further, may be compared to the deceased leader of Mélenchon’s former faction Pierre Lambert, who enjoyed a life- time friendship with one of the founding figures of French Trotskyism in the 1930s, Fed Zeller, who passed from the Fourth International to the same loge…(6)
To their credit after his tantrum and disrespect for republican legality the French freemasons have suspended Mélenchon and some have asked for his expulsion (Des francs-maçons veulent éjecter Jean-Luc Mélenchon du Grand Orient à cause de son attitude lors des perquisitions).
Where does this leave La France insoumise?
Many people have the impression that their intellectual support was from the kind of academic or student who, had they been born at the time, would have admired Péguy. That is, a kind of faith in the capacity of socialism to effect a cultural and spiritual renewal beyond sordid (‘post-democratic’) politics. One can see them warming to the nationalist exaltation of Le Mystère de la Charité de Jean d’Arc (1908) It is to be doubted if they would have belched at the author’s railing at “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” and hatred of Jaurès’ Teutonic socialism. (7) The might well have had a sneaking admiration for the Camelots du roi, armed with lead-weighted canes against rootless youpins. If few would accuse Mélenchon of anti-semitism, LFI, we are informed is none too fond of George Soros, and as for Germans….
Rather than awaiting the Second Coming the supporters of Mélenchon expect a laïque révolution citoyenne and the Sixth republic led by the genial LFI Chief – any day now…
The painful realisation that Mélenchon’s ‘mystique’ is evaporating and that they have ended up in the sordid world of less than virtuous politics will be a hard to manage…
Mélenchon aux portes du pouvoir, published at the end of the week, looks set for the leftist must-read list….
- Page 136. Jean-Luc Mélenchon avec Cécile Amar. Editions de l’Observatoire. 2017
- Page 115. Charles Péguy. Notre jeunesse. Folio Essais. Gallimard. 1993.
- Pages 22 – 23. Chantal Mouffe. For a Left Populism. Verso. 2018.
- Le Peuple et son conflit. Pages 142 – 147. Jean-Luc Mélenchon L’ère du Peuple. Pluriel. 2017 (new edition).
- Le Peuple et son mouvement. Pages 148 – 156. Op cit.
- Fred Zeller. Témoin du siècle. Du Blum à Trotsky au grand Orient de France….Fayard. 2000
- This is how he described the German influence on the politics of Jean Jaurès: “une sorte de vague cosmopolitisme bourgeois vicieux et d’autre part et très particulièrement et très proprement un pangermanisme, un total asservissement à la politique allemande, au capitalisme allemand, à l’impérialisme allemand, au militarisme allemand, au colonialisme allemand.”(P 1259) .Charles Péguy: Oeuvres en Prose. 1909 – 1914. Tome ll. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Avant-proposes et notes. Marcel Péguy. 1961.
