Many people, in light of certain recent events, now doubt whether we are truly living in a democracy. Perhaps soon we will come to realize that we never were. That the illusion of democracy was the greatest social fraud ever devised by the ruling class to indefinitely preserve the power structure upon which their illegitimate privileges depend.
It is true that for decades, the desires of the people—shaped by a certain form of cultural hegemony—seemed to align with those of the oligarchy. Election results reflected this strange convergence, these intertwined and curiously overlapping desires.
In the 1970s, our leaders were able to definitively bury Gaullism, which had embodied the only genuinely popular regime ever established in our country—ironically, one that arose from a coup d’état.
In 1981, by voting en masse for a man of the collaboration who posed as a socialist, the working classes believed that, after two centuries of one-sided exploitation, they would finally wrest a few scraps of power from the bourgeoisie. The proletariat thought the beneficiaries of the capitalist system would loosen their grip on domination, and at last allow them, through redistribution of value and wealth, to enjoy a share of bourgeois life. In truth, they were naïve—usefully naïve, in the way that allows the good people to be endlessly deceived.
With Mitterrand's victory and the Common Programme of the Left, the bourgeoisie gave up nothing of its power—on the contrary. It even significantly increased it, seizing from the public domain what it would convert into state assets, only to hand them over to the private sector, itself subordinated to the bourgeois state which alone possesses the administrative machinery to create and allocate markets. At most, the bourgeoisie sacrificed a bit of its money along the way (and even that is debatable) through redistribution, merely to mask the brutal inequality of real power under the appearance of economic equality—real power, which is never shared.
The people believed for a few months, then were disappointed, then swindled again—as they have grown used to being. And then, they fell asleep.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the people obediently voted in alignment with the well-understood interests of the globalist oligarchy: to weaken the French nation-state, to reduce the prerogatives of political authority in favor of law and market forces, to deepen European integration (as seen in the vote on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992), to abandon their currency, to delegate political power to supranational bodies, to give up their productive apparatus through free trade and offshoring, to work less and shift the burden of production onto an enslaved proletariat in emerging countries, to stop having children and compensate for the birth deficit by massively importing foreign populations onto their soil, to demilitarize, and to gradually relinquish all the attributes of sovereignty.
Since then, the people—who were nothing more than a thorn in the side of the global technocratic infrastructure—have never again endorsed at the ballot box anything but their own renunciation of life.
The successive “accidents” of 2002 (Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise appearance in the second round of the presidential election) and 2005 (the victory of the “No” vote in the referendum on the European Constitution) were mere missteps, swiftly corrected by the institutions.
The invention of the far right, meant to demonize any democratic will of the people to reclaim power, functioned at full throttle over the following twenty years. A formidable apparatus of guilt, intimidation, and the systematic belittling of the people was deployed by the elites, eager to emphasize the supposed cultural backwardness of voters leaning in that direction. The rise of so-called “far-right” parties went hand in hand with a growing sense among these voters of the illegitimacy of a power whose nature was becoming increasingly clear.
The fear of the “far right,” communicated to the people by the ruling classes, was a convenient tool for preserving the appearance of democracy.
Until now, it was important to let the people believe they had a choice—a choice between tyranny and freedom, between paradise and hell, between love for one’s neighbor and hatred of the other, between good and evil, between the sunny terrace and the damp cellar, between life and death.
The “far right” was therefore an acceptable option for the people—as long as it never won.
But now, electoral forecasts for Marine Le Pen’s participation in the 2027 elections no longer frame her victory as a possibility, but as a probability. As was done in Romania just a few weeks ago, in the deafening silence of the international community, the French Republic may find itself compelled to annul the results of a presidential election. Or, to avoid going to such lengths, to make the candidate favored by the people ineligible through a court ruling.
This would mark the final stage of the boundless war—the invisible, asymmetrical, yet total war—waged against the French people by its ruling class. A war that mobilizes against the people every means afforded by the power of the state: legal, administrative, fiscal, institutional, normative, and perhaps one day even military—who knows?—as the brutal repression of the Yellow Vests movement ominously foreshadowed.
Two hundred years after a failed revolution against the tyranny of the feudal system, the French people now risk losing the last beacon that still faintly connects them to the democratic illusion—the illusion that it is still possible, through legal means, to end the illegitimate power that has ruled over them for half a century.
We will see on Monday, March 31, 2025, whether we are free subjects, and citizens of a free country. We will see whether real power will fully assume its determination to remain in place at any cost—even if it means violating all the rules it once established to legitimize itself in the eyes of the people. We will see if it lets the mask fall. We will see whether democracy was truly just a stratagem devised to make the people swallow the idea that they were masters of their own fate. Wait and see.
We’ll find out next Monday whether we have been living in a democracy—or quite simply, in a dictatorship.
