Tunisia finds itself in the situation of a people asking for a dictatorship and an autocrat responding to this “popular” echo. This ended up creating a formidable social power.
Between the double “black decade” of Ben Ali’s “new era” and the “black presidency” of July 25, it is indecent to speak of a “black decade” of democratic transition. Each has its downside, although not all political evils are the same. Despite everything, a State where one can democratically denounce the filthy hydra is preferable to a state of outrageous confiscation and general paralysis. The transition was freedom and disorder. The Saïed presidency is neither order nor freedom nor right. It is a shortage and an aggravated crisis (compared to the transition) at all levels.
But one certainty emerges from contemporary Tunisian history: the Tunisian people like to be violated, robbed, tyrannized by retrograde and immobile dictatorships, called “stable” or “reassuring”, and hate learning to enjoy their freedom in honorable difficulty. , like the great nations. His will bends almost spontaneously in the face of the authoritarian order, like an old reflex that comes to the surface at the slightest embarrassment. The herd instinct for order wins out over the “luxury” of freedom. Undoubtedly a distant remnant of the Islamic order. Autocrats unscrupulously rejoice in this state of affairs. Learning about democracy and freedom is for future history to do, not present times.
The people would like, not without lucubration, for the moment to live naked and secure at the same time. Negation of the revolution, of the transition and of the Islamists, Saïed embodies all of this at once, in the imagination. The people even strongly applauded it. Four years later, the people are still naked, worse than before in destitution, and just as insecure. We are no longer in “the black decade”, but in the “black presidency”. This miserable person saw both the shortage of raw materials, necessary for their vital needs, and the “shortage” of freedoms, supposedly superfluous. By wanting things upside down, we risk getting lost.
Tunisians seeking dictatorship
If the Tunisian people today dream of a gradual improvement in their political and social status, they should look to history and ask if one day a dictatorship, or even a democratorship, could become a democracy or bring freedom, equality and dignity to any people. Would the plenitude of Ben Ali’s “eat – drink – sleep” be enough to restore his dignity? Unintelligent beings, animals will certainly be content with it out of necessity.
For human beings, only a dehumanized and impolitic people, that is to say people who do not seek the realization of the Good, would inevitably be satisfied with fixist stability, with subjection guaranteeing the misuse of power. Hobbes spoke, it is true, of the first right of man, the right to life, but it was in his mind to justify the necessity of the Leviathan, of the State, of public order, pledge of politics, not to legitimize the yoke of political fraud and the moral stripping of men. Politics resides for him only in the effective decision of power. It was in the 17th century in England, a century of war, trouble and anarchy where monarchs were beheaded, like King Charles I in 1649.
We will always wonder, after an era despite everything democratic, and after a revolution, how the Tunisians, people and certain elites, can themselves be applicants for dictatorship, seduced by a vulgar populism. The enjoyment of a few more or less formal freedoms is enough for them in the absence of their logical consequences: solid institutional guarantees. They trust, not in the law, but in the illusions of a man, worse, in a confiscator exercising the thankless function of a Leviathan guarantor.
A disrupted power
Tocqueville, the true prophet of democratorship, whom he sensed before the time, never ceased to warn us as early as the 19th century of the risk of “regulated, gentle and peaceful servitude which could be combined with external forms of freedom in the very shadow of the will of the people” ( Democracy in America, II, p.325, Complete Works, Paris, Gallimard, nrf). He has seen it all with us in the 21st century. He also told us that anarchy is not the main evil that we should fear in the democratic era, but it is rather the love of order, of public tranquility that risks ruining us.
It is wrongly believed, rulers and ruled, that democracy spreads anarchy, by the force and energy it puts into action, that it is a superabundant activity of one and the other or rather of one against the other, that it is artificial conflict before being conciliation and agreement. Tocqueville further replies that “it is by enjoying a dangerous freedom that Americans learn the art of making the perils of freedom less great” ( Ibid, t.II, p.126). Presidents Nixon, Clinton and Trump know this.
The Tunisian people made a democratic and restless revolution. An agitation so chaotic and disorderly that it ended up turning against both the democracy of the transition and against a historic revolution, in particular by the sudden coup d’etat of Saïed and the shameless violation of the entire constitutional order. Deep down, these people remained childish in their quest for an idyllic, romantic, peaceful revolution. As if we could have the “dream of a civilized revolution” according to the expression of Claude Lefort ( Essays on politics . XIXth -XXth centuries, p.94). With hindsight, Tocqueville’s fears of “regulated and gentle despotism” proved to be well and truly justified. The facts speak for themselves.
power and democracy
A people as conservative as it is revolutionary, loving order as well as disorder, ends up joining the concerns of the dictator embodied in a sort of democratorship, leaning both towards uniform order and towards spectacular disorder. These two attitudes of a people seeking dictatorship and of the despot initiating dictatorship, by coming together, end up giving rise to a dangerous “social power” or to a “collective individual”, depending on the angle of view, made of despotism plebeian and autocratic despotism, even coexisting, supreme luxury, with a few islands of freedom, in the process of exhaustion.
