Grandstand In his historical novels, the writer Eric Vuillard develops an idea, an intuition which he repeats and verifies through the fictionalized account of the great moments of History: History is not the embodiment of an idea which would happen in the world (Hegel); Nor is history the surface product of deep economic forces (Marx). Because history with a capital H does not exist: it does not exist at the moment it is made, it only exists afterwards, in our retrospective rewriting (Bergson).
Before History, there are stories: under the capture of the Bastille, rather than realization of the Spirit or manifestation of the ascendancy of the bourgeois forces, there are Jean Rossignol, Louis Tournay, Stanislas Maillard, Marie Choquier …
We always think we are helpless in the face of the vicissitudes of the world. We think that we are deprived of our capacity to act (ofagency), that it is they (the rich, the powerful, the CAC40, the big) who make the world. Sometimes, however, man acts – what he does (good or bad) leaves a mark, has effects that go far beyond the cause.
A parallel position China United States
A film, a novel one day, will tell us what Derek Michael Chauvin (whose name resonates in French like a predestination) had done the day before, his mood in the morning when he went to the office and when he was called to the rescue by Thomas Lane and JA Keung at around 8 p.m. to subdue a suspect. They will also tell us what was going on in his head when he put his knee on Georges Floyd's neck: the amount of personal frustration that it could express, the passive reprimands he had already received, or the influence of his relationships with Floyd when he alternately worked with him as a bouncer at the Latin Club of Minneapolis.
What seems certain in any case, is that was absent from his mind everything that was going to be the consequence of his act: the riots from Halifax to Eureka, from Coral Glabes to San Diego, the broken shops, the cars burned, Justin Trudeau's 50 seconds of silence before answering the question of what he thought of the events in the United States, the speech by Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong-Kong, on "double standard ”from Trump’s America, front-page news in North Korea on US uprisings and“ chaos ”.
All over China, at the moment, pro-regime commentators (there are hardly any others who are still heard) loop the images of the police car forcing its passage against the demonstrators in Brooklyn, evoking the "duplicity" of Trump and Pompeii: condemning the repression in Hong Kong but using in a strong way against the "anti-fascists" in the United States.
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