This email to announce the new session of the seminar series "French Politics: A Neighbour's 'History of the Present'", next Thursday 10 October, 5.30-7pm, at the University of Westminster, room UG.05 (309 Regent Street W1B 2HT).
As part of the cycle "An Authoritarian Spiral in France?", the Centre for the Study of Democracy and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture invites Sophie Wahnich (CNRS/IIAC).
Sophie Wahnich's paper is titled: "Democracy Taken in Vice: Understanding the 'Yellow Vests' Event"
The session will be chaired by Pippa Catterall (Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture).
Abstract: The yellow vests did not appear out of the blue in November 2018, but out of the latest betrayal of popular classes. It was not such much because of President Macron, who takes money from the poor and gives it to the rich in an actually very European logic.
No, the betrayal is that of the social democracy which occurred between 2012 and 2017, and which finds its root even earlier. The previous president, François Hollande, a socialist candidate, was elected using words like “popular”, slogans like “change is for now”, and asserting that the real adversary was finance and that “it had neither a face nor a party”.
The French social democrats understood what had to be said to win, but they maintained the values of economic liberalism and believed in austerity. They ruled knowing that the measures promised against the speculative banking system and the notorious finance could only be fainthearted. They have destroyed the protective right to work and civil liberties in a context in which “terrorism” has justified a continuous state of emergency in order to repress activists, those who are worried about the planet, those who struggle not to end up into a wage slavery that does not say its name, those who invent a new art of gathering to talk at night.
The last attempt to re-engage in the electoral discourse has widened the gap between the rulers and the ruled ones. The yellow vests tell us that they now link injustices and flawed political representation.
Bio: Sophie Wahnich is a Director of research in History and Political Science at the French Institute of Scientific Research (CNRS) and the director of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Anthropology of the Contemporary at the EHESS. She is a regular columnist for the daily newspaper Libération.
Sophie Wahnich is a specialist of the French revolution and was trained in discourse analysis and political theory. Her work deals with disruptive historical events and their consequences upon the political, social and emotional fabric of society. Her work as an academic and public intellectual approaches contemporary issues facing Western democracies (terror, nationalism, globalisation, refugees, war, trauma, religion, collective memory) that she studies alongside the historical achievements and universal ideals of the French Revolution.
Through her publications, exhibitions and public interventions, Sophie Wahnich assesses with critical insight the continuing challenges and ambitions of the ideals of the French Revolution in the political, social and economic struggles that we face today.
This series is organised with the support of the French Embassy in the UK and the Political Studies Association. Attached is the full programme for 2019/2020.
Thank you for your attention.
Best regards,
Emmanuel Jouai--PhD Student / Teaching Assistant / Visiting Lecturer
Centre for the Study of Democracy
School of Social Sciences (CLAS)
University of Westminster
32-38 Wells Street
W1T 3UW London
