What is happening now in France Telecom is very revealing of the evolution
of the French society, and in particular its attitude towards death. After
the first suicides in the company, we refused to see there more than a
succession of coincidences, each of those who committed the fatal act, had
good personal reasons to do so, it was said. Then specific internal causes
were looked for within the company, whose inhumanity, it was said, would
explain many despairs, unthinkable elsewhere. Now, we seem to understand
that the causes of these absolute acts of revolt were much more complex and
it became apparent that our country had no serious analysis of the causes of
suicides that were taking place here. We do not even have an exhaustible
listing that is up to date allowing to classify them by sex, age,
geographical location, social environment, means of action, and alleged
motives. Whereas we have all that for the swine flu or pickpockets, we do
not have it for the heaviest decision, the most desperate decision a human
being can take. Because our society, unlike many others, wants at all costs
to wash its hands of it. It refuses to accept that it is largely its fault.
And if in the case of Orange, they seem to look into it even less, it is because
what happens there seems to refer to causes much larger than a business. A
priori, people who committed suicide had little objective reasons to be
desperate: many were not losing their job, some people even had to undergo
only one relocation from their workplace and others only heard announcing
the departure of their boss, without consequence for them.
In reality, the cause is probably elsewhere: France Telecom is becoming
Orange. A public company, whose staff were sedentary by nature, becomes a
private company, whose employees are nomads. In one, no pressure on prices
and human management traditionally managed with labor unions. In another
obsessive pressure on costs, material and human. It can then happen that
someone is crushed if he is caught in the gap between these two logic.
All this is beyond Orange, because these two logic are becoming those of
France: a nation made of fewer and fewer government employees, immersed in a
world increasingly more private. A country, blue like its history, rooted in
its sedentary traditions which make its identity; but an increasingly
wandering capitalism, increasingly precarious employment, even within the
administration. This shock between one France which stills wants, rightly so, to
live the thousand-year-old serenity which manufactured its identity and another
which must, to survive, take part in the world adventure, this can only despair
those who were asked carelessly to cross the line of demarcation between
these two France.
Reconcile them, put the one in the service of the other. Make France at the
same time nomadic and sedentary, welcoming and welcomed, this is probably
the biggest cultural challenge, that is to say, political, for the next
decade. May we hear those who gave their lives so that we understand t