A backward totalitarianism without purpose and meaning

THE GREAT NURSERY

by Mathieu wool

JC Lattès, 251 pages, 17 euros.

THE BUBBLE. FRANCE

DIVORCE ITS ELITES

by Nathalie Brion

and John Bush

The Round Table, 205 pages,

17.50 euros.

There is already a good decade, Helmut Kohl feared that the Germany became a huge leisure park. The future gave him wrong. Hope that it also disown Mathieu Laine, a young author who feared that the France is becoming a huge day care for children. Says the banker Charles de Croisset preface, "there is a chance that Mathieu Laine is considered a"liberal"thinker, which would place him in a category sometimes poorly perceived in our country". Go further: in the France of today, the message of this passionate advocate of ideas seems to be inaudible. While it is probably necessary.

The Central thesis of the book is simple: the French are increasingly patronized by a State that materne them, from the cradle to the grave. "The State intervention to protect man against himself was born (...)". a series of curves, indices, figures, statistics that eventually convincing a Minister or a member of the boon created by the denunciation of a new risk. "Wrapped in a few tens of pages, countless laws and regulations that corsètent our daily lives are what give the Vertigo. Food shows the temptation of always more, for example govern to combat obesity. "When the 100 euros fine for purchased three jars of Nutella in the same week. "Do not believe that this is impossible", prevents the essayist, often tempted by the pamphlet.

The problem is that the protection will turn the suffocating spiral. Individuals refuse to more risk. The State imposes more in addition to standards and gives the illusion of a tutelary power, which in turn feeds the application for protection. This "the welfare trap" is everywhere: the defence of minority shareholders, the obsession with victimization, perversions in the fight against discrimination, the limits of the police state, the right to employment.

"Backward-looking totalitarianism."

Sometimes schematic, the words could be cast by a classical antiphon: "no rights without duties. He also has a lawyer naivety the company would be nothing else that "a meeting of people linked by a series of ambitions and values or shared and formally United by freely granted contracts". But his appeal to the "responsible company" deserves to be heard. Not because its opposite, "society of control", takes us imperceptibly but to a soft dictatorship exercised by Big Brother, but by "big baby-sitters", surely or "Big Mother", in the words of the psychiatrist-enarque Michel Schneider.

Excessive fear A radically different approach, Nathalie Brion and Jean Bush reach the same conclusion. Working with tools of analysis of the words, the two consultants describe French seeking autonomy not disqualified elites. The individual would become "Gore-Tex", the image of "membrane soft, light, adapting to its movements and protecting external weather influx completely." At the collective level to sketch a fascism voluntary structured grading, the rejection of difference, the shrinking borders, regulatory hysteria and nostalgia." "A backward totalitarianism without purpose and meaning." No doubt, the France have to change. But how