The project of this book
On a night of riots after a football match, a capital burns, cities are ransacked, public property is destroyed for nothing. A mob is not a whole people, but a question remains: how can a society entrust the same political power to those who respect common rules and to those who trample on them?
To understand, indignation is not enough. It takes a magnifying glass, memory, and patience.
The filter and the switch
This essay holds in two words: the filter and the switch. Every regime succeeds or perishes depending on whether it can bring competent leaders to power, that is the filter, and remove bad ones without shedding blood, that is the switch. Without a filter, democracy slides toward mediocrity, then toward mediocracy; without a switch, authority slides toward tyranny.
But a graver question runs through this book: can we, in the sacrosanct name of democracy, accept that a nation collapses by the choice of its own voters? Is democracy a principle of common life, or a suicide pact through which a people would let itself be destroyed provided its destruction was voted upon?
A journey across twenty-five centuries
To answer, this book traverses twenty-five centuries: Athens condemning Socrates, Rome and its reversible dictatorship, the China of the mandarins, Venice, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Weimar, Singapore and contemporary China. France serves as a specimen under the microscope, because it shows visibly to the naked eye symptoms that other democracies carry under different names: public impotence, administrative layering, political mediocrity, loss of civic culture, a weak State when it should be firm, intrusive when it should be simple.
From this journey arises a question that our time refuses to look at: when a country can no longer reform itself through ordinary channels, should we exclude on principle the exceptional individual, elected or not, capable of cutting through what paralyzed institutions can no longer resolve? History answers that this path exists. But it is only legitimate under one condition: never to confuse recovery with the confiscation of power.
Neither the mob, nor the iron fist
This book celebrates neither the mob nor the iron fist. It refuses two lies: the one that sacralizes the vote even when it leads to shipwreck, and the one that dreams of a savior dispensing citizens from becoming adults again. For a nation is truly saved only when it regains the means to choose the best, and to dismiss them when they cease to serve.
David Salvan, French author, here delivers an essay that marries historical rigor with philosophical audacity, and lays the foundations of an institutional refoundation for contemporary democracies.