It is understood: all the polls demand tough measures to curb migratory flows. And the same opinion surveys favor those politicians who are the most intransigent.
In short: if the most questionable measures in terms of individual freedom or health realism – not treating a foreigner carrying an epidemic virus is exposing the entire society – do not pass today, they will come back tomorrow carried by a compact combat majority. Especially since the idea of an “absolute majority” is coming back into favor in public opinion in the face of the parliamentary souk on view in the hemicycle.
82% think that France is in decline
A heavy anger proportional to the dismay of the French facing the future: “82% of French people think that France is in decline, according to the Ipsos survey last October. And it’s irreversible for 34% of them.”
Immigration bill: the macronie left finds a second wind
Faced with this grim future, who can really believe that it would be enough to condition social benefits on five years of presence on the territory or to restrict state medical aid to undocumented immigrants to restore morale? Who can believe in a change of direction in an opinion which has for years expressed its discontent on almost all subjects except unemployment which is no longer a subject! How can we imagine that the loss of confidence in most politicians (Macron like Mélenchon), excluding Le Pen, could be erased thanks to a shaky agreement in a Joint Commission?
Detour through an old grimoire by Rutilius Namatianus
To get away from commonplaces, I invite you to take a detour through an old grimoire. A kind of poem written by Rutilius Namatianus (1), a Gallo-Roman notable of the 5th century AD. This senior official of the Empire left Rome by boat in 417 to reach his properties in Narbonne. And he evokes the great Big Bang of his old world in capilade: the recent sack of Rome by the Goths (410), the security crisis, the omnipresence of migrants and these Christians who destabilize ancient pagan beliefs.
In short, Namatianus declines the “Everything goes to hell”. His scapegoat? “Stilicho”, a Roman “general” guilty of having knowingly pursued an “immigrationist” policy before its time, for having allowed “barbarians” to integrate the army and other responsibilities in Roman society…
Stilicho introduced, he says, “a formidable enemy into the very heart of the disarmed fatherland, and by the harm he thus did to it, prepared means to do more to it. Rome was delivered over to these barbarians covered in skins; she was a captive before she was taken.”
But Namatianus, who sees everything and describes everything about the collapse of the old order, has only one conclusion: the identical restoration of the imperial order of always. “Lift up your head laden with laurels, O Rome, and let your whitened hair be arranged on your sacred forehead, like the hair of a young goddess. »
Namatianus also has magnificent words to describe the universal Rome of yesteryear: “For diverse nations, you have made a single homeland; the peoples who ignored justice gained from being subdued by your weapons; and, by calling on the vanquished to share your rights, the universe, you have made a single city. »
Hugo, Mitterrand or Mélenchon discussing the nation of France!
Or again: “You, whose triumphs embrace and civilize the whole world, you make of the universe a vast society; it is you, goddess, you whom all peoples who have become Romans celebrate; all bear an independent head under your peaceful yoke. » One would say either Hugo or Péguy or even Jaurès and even Mitterrand or Mélenchon expounding on the nation of France!
This is all well and truly, but it was yesterday. Namatianus does not imagine for a second that it is not the resurrected Empire of Augustus but precisely the European Roman-barbarian kingdoms, composed of Goths, Franks, Burgundians or Alemanni, which will save Romanity, its language, its law, its literature, its philosophy, from the ruin of old Rome. Starting with the brilliant reign of the Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great less than a century later.
Namatianus is so far-sighted that he also does not envisage that the Roman Christian Church could perpetrate the idea of lost universality. When he describes the monks of the island of Capraia, he calls them cockroaches, cowards, depraved, oriental papyrus maniacs because they turn away from the forum, from civic life and from the avenging sword. Hermits who, moreover, have the defect of reading and thinking in Greek and are therefore more or less suspect in his eyes of perverting native Rome.
Be careful, don’t make fun of Namatianus. We are all a bit of Namatianus. We imagine the future as a vaguely updated copy and paste of our past. We most often think about the future backwards and we always wake up disappointed. Mutilated. Betrayed and therefore looking for culprits: a weak-kneed consul or a weak president, the last one to arrive not very clear on him…
Read alsoImmigration to France: the truth in the figures
Of our myths and legends of the day before yesterday, we are, of course, not completely fooled. But that’s reassuring. It’s Lexomil. How that reassured the brilliant Namatianus. May we learn a few lessons from the Latin illusion, we who now know that Namatianus got it wrong, that nostalgia is a poison, that the History that is made is not the history that is made. fact. That History is a metal that each new era brings to the hot iron for a new forge.
2023-12-19 17:15:00
#Immigration #law #history #lesson #Romans #Empire
