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79 CHAPTER 9 Democracy MT: Democracy? RG: I like Churchill’s quote: it’s “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” MT: Democracy is not without injustices. Children from affluent families have a much better chance of becoming big businessmen, great artists, or even great thinkers, great advocates for the poor, than do those who are born poor: because their parents are cultured, because their personal fortune gives them time to reflect and create. Although my own origins are modest, I’ll take the provocation a step further: alas, many poor people who have come to power, the Communist leaders, for example, or Hitler, behaved very badly, because they were bitter and wanted revenge. All in all, then, we should accept those injustices as the lesser of two evils: what a disappointing world. Do such reflections resonate at all with the man of faith that you are? RG: That’s a little bit like what I say about America: maybe it’s better to vote for the Republicans, because they’re already rich! [Laughter] I’m thinking back on my childhood in Avignon. My parents were from the old, 80 Chapter Nine impoverished bourgeoisie. My father was a museum curator. We lived in a fairly working-class neighborhood, and my high school friends were the sons of low-grade clerks and office workers. And most of them eventually got their baccalaureate and managed to climb a few rungs on the ladder. Among the various societies that I’m familiar with, the French Republic doesn’t do such a bad job at fostering social mobility. Traditionally, America is even more open, and the possibilities for creating a business without start-up capital are much better than in France and everywhere else in Europe. But in periods of economic crisis things can become very difficult. MT: I’d agree that in France the schools don’t really teach what kind of a society we’re living in. I was prepared to take all sorts of competitive exams, I knew that I could become a manager or a functionary or an employee or a worker—in short, that I could get a job with a regular salary, like my teachers —but nobody ever told me that the most normal thing to do in the society I lived in would be to start my own business; and, of course, I was told even less about how to actually go about it. It should be taught in primary school, because it’s our law, it’s the law of the entire world: maybe we wouldn’t stumble so much in the world markets. In your texts, you often defend the democratic nature of English law: are you sure the United Kingdom is such a democratic country? There are also terribly reactionary and brutal things about it. The colonization of Ireland was no barrel of laughs. Even today the lords possess entire islands (the Hebrides), which are half the size of French departments, and at the end of the nineteenth century they kicked human beings off them, giving preference to the sheep: that’s how Australia came to be populated. All the rich neighborhoods in central London belong to the same person, and the people who live there can’t buy their lodgings. RG: I grant you that. But despite everything it’s the English model of democracy that’s taking over the planet, via America of course, and America has reacted very strongly against the aristocratic tendencies that you’re talking about. The model is so supple, so far from being “Cartesian” in the negative sense, that it allows for all sorts of transformations without losing its virtues. In France, the rediscovery, or rather the all-too-belated discovery, of Tocqueville, is a sign of this model’s influence, which is gaining more and more ground on homegrown Jacobinism, not only in the public’s mind but Democracy 81 also in political and administrative circles. Since the shift is happening via first-rate French adherents, like Tocqueville himself, it’s not perceived as a foreign import. The English model implies no particular economic system. What I’m saying is not a defense of “unbridled capitalism.” MT: A Jewish friend observed to me one day that in the Biblical Decalogue, it’s a matter of human duties rather than of human rights. RG: That’s also Simone Weil’s...

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