When Notre Dame burned, something in the flames seemed to speak to the combustibility of our age. Nothing is for ever, the fire said, even those edifices – stone or institutional – that we assume will always be there. In almost every democracy, there are similar forces of backlash and disaffection. The anger is diffuse and the discontents vary, but there is a general agitation that seems to boil down to the feeling that someone should do something.
At the moment, France seems to have crystallised this phenomenon in a way that other democracies might draw both warnings and lessons from. Will François Bayrou last longer as prime minister than Michel Barnier? Perhaps. But the basic impediment remains: the country is politically split roughly into thirds (and the “left” is split among itself), with the end result that creating a majority for anything is almost impossible.
A recent study entitled French Fractures revealed some familiar paradoxes: 40% of people are very satisfied with their lives, 55% say they are experiencing financial difficulties, 73% think “things were better before”. And yet, the average European (and this holds for France in particular) is better off than they were before by almost every possible metric: health, education, income, leisure, freedom. Despite that, democracy everywhere is judged harshly: it remains widely popular as an ideal, but a median of 59% say it’s not working as it should.
Clearly, there is something about modern life that the data is not capturing: a break between the governed and their governance. The world has become too complex for any individual to fully grasp, and it’s moving so quickly that it seems beyond our collective ability to control.
The average European born in the early 1700s entered a world where it took roughly 22 days to travel from Paris to Rome by horse. One of their descendants born in the 1800s could have experienced the ending of slavery, heard the first recorded music and seen the first projected film of far-flung parts of the world, and made the trip to Rome in 36 hours.
My grandmother was born in 1927 in the American south, and what was compressed into her single lifetime is jaw-dropping by comparison. Sixty-six years from the very first flight to the first step on the moon; the shift from the widespread adoption of telephones to video-calling on iPhones; going from attending a segregated school and living under Jim Crow to voting for Barack Obama; practically every city on Earth being no more than 36 hours from any other city on Earth.
And the things that I can realistically expect to occur in my own lifetime? Our climate changing in ways that are unpredictable, but will be catastrophic; the first human footsteps on another planet; artificial intelligence that even in its infancy already threatens whole categories of jobs, and will confront us with what it means to produce literature, art and music – what it means to be human. All of this while knowing that one pernicious virus, or one domino too many in the run leading to the use of nuclear weapons, could wipe out all of this – and all of us.
At the same time this hypercomplex world operating at hyperspeed, demands expertise precisely because it is beyond any individual’s ability to grasp. And it requires time and space for wisdom to emerge from genuine reflection. The challenge is balancing this need for expertise with voters’ frustrations over representation, because the sense that we no longer control the direction of our lives is making us collectively insane and unstable.
The impact on democracy isn’t just that people feel unrepresented: they suspect that their governments have lost the ability to control much of anything about the environmental and technological upheaval all around us.
Is it really all that surprising that far-right political movements are on the march everywhere? Just look at what they are offering: the illusion of control. Of course, far-right politicians have no more control than anyone else – and by seeking to retreat behind walls, they renounce what little control we might be able to exercise collectively. The chimera they offer instead is seductive because it amounts to control over the small fractions of life that a nation state can still bend to its will: immigration and borders, individual bodily autonomy, traditionalist conceptions of the roles that men and women should fulfil, and how they should relate to each other.
Democracy needs an update for this new space that the world is in. This is something that France has experience with, because it has reinvented its democracy five times over. The First Republic ended the monarchy, abolished slavery and declared the basic individual freedoms upon which modern democracy is based. The Second re-abolished slavery and offered universal suffrage. The Third oversaw huge social progress: free public education, a thriving free press, separation of religion and state, the right to organise and strike, a 40-hour working week and two weeks of paid holiday. The Fourth Republic helped to create the foundations of the EU, and when it floundered in an attempted coup d’état in 1958, was replaced by the one that exists today – the semi-presidential system that was meant to provide stability, but at the moment, is providing discontent instead.
I’m not sure that drafting a whole new Sixth Republic from scratch is necessary, because the institutions of the Fifth are surprisingly flexible. There is no shortage of ideas on how to respond to the disconnect: for France, and for other democracies as well. Proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, devolution to revitalise rural areas (this one is particularly relevant to France), more space for referendums to occur (though perhaps with high thresholds to initiate them and supermajority requirements for adoption) and some type of voluntary national or EU-wide service year.
Another recurring idea is that of randomly selecting citizens for an assembly and having them actually take up the reins of government. Having observed France’s 2020 Citizens’ Convention on Climate in action, I think citizens’ assemblies have potential. Perhaps they could be integrated into existing institutions, as non-voting bodies that participate in debates and consult on legislation. Or perhaps a certain number of parliamentary seats could be reserved for randomly chosen members of the population, but changing every year, rather than every electoral term – like a form of jury duty. After participating in these types of bodies, people would go home and be an accessible and relatable point of contact for their neighbours and communities into what governing really entails.
Like a cathedral, liberal democracy is a civilisational project. “Great edifices, like the great mountains, are the work of ages,” wrote Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Every stone of the “venerable pile”, as he deemed Notre Dame, was “a page of the history not only of the country, but of science and of art”. Creation is far more difficult than destruction, and when Emmanuel Macron promised that Notre Dame would be rebuilt in five years, I didn’t think it was possible. And yet that venerable pile is magnificent once more.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
