Chronicle subscribers of the newspaper Le Monde by Jacques
HOCHMANN,
professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University Claude Bernard (Lyon). 18.08.10
Mr. President,
Like you, I am a son of immigrants (Polish, in my case). My father came to study in France in 1925, he returned to marry the country in 1932. I was born in France in 1934 and we, my parents and I was naturalized French in 1936 under the Popular Front.
Although my father, an engineer at a steel plant, was involved in the arms effort of France and has always been respectful of the law, we have in 1942, as Jews, been dismissed French nationality by the Government in Vichy, and thereby put in immediate danger of being arrested and deported. We have life, like many other Jews living in France, and sometimes the dedication to the heroism of those, then we have hidden and assisted in providing us with false papers and we hosting .
You were born after this dark time. You do not know, in the press and radio, the outburst of xenophobic hatred. It's the only excuse I can find that I dare call your irresponsibility, if I was obliged to respect the high office that you embody.
You are not alone, indeed, the majority leader who led a policy chosen by the voters. You occupy a symbolic place that recognizes the law, declaring you above it during your tenure. By having a President of the Republic, by deciding, there are nearly half a century, to elect by universal suffrage, to strengthen its image and power, the Sovereign People has sought both a guide medium term and an arbitrator transcendent popular passions.
They are quick to warm up, especially in times of economic crisis like the one we are experiencing. Passion led to the abolition of reflection, acting out, the immediate discharge of the most primitive desires. What's more passionate, more reckless and more primitive than hate or fear of foreigners. Especially if he lives among us, if seeps across boundaries, erected to protect us, and if he violates continually feeling of home, abroad, whatever he does or does not, is in itself a potential source of insecurity. It inevitably leads, in human societies archaic as in animal societies, violence.
In difficult moments, he becomes the scapegoat. The Jew, the gypsy and now the Black Beur or whatever his nationality formal, thus embodies, in itself, danger or evil, regardless of objective behavior.
Just read the reviews now and follow the polls to ensure the broad positive response met by your proposals in Grenoble and their immediate application. You surf on a wave carrier. But that is precisely what worries me. History is not stingy with examples that show how far can lead to overflow passion and how facilties can crack the shell of civilization that is trying to contain them, based on the values of solidarity, tolerance and hospitality which are also part of human heritage.
Beyond your person, you are the representative of these values, your mission and you recalled in one of your old speeches, quoting Edgar Morin, to work of civilization. A President of the Republic should strengthen the sense of security by doing a job as a teacher (what had been your predecessor Francois Mitterand, asking parliament to abolish the death penalty, against the feeling prevalent in the majority of the population).
responses from day to day that you give, the passion with which you characterized the current problems of social insecurity, economic and public order, were hardly reassuring. You're fired, justified in advance, social reflexes that you may no longer control. The National Front is pleased to see validation at the highest state level, some of its proposals.
Ironically, this is a country with little democratic tradition, Romania, where, as elsewhere in Hungary and Bulgaria, the Roma have never enjoyed an enviable status, you are Today the accusations of populism and appeals to a more peaceful and more included in the term.
Please accept, Sir, the President, the assurances of the high regard in which I want your job
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