Contenu du sommaire : Transgresser en politique

Émile Ollivier has been viewed as one of the greatest transgressors in the history of France. A supporter of the Empire, he came to incarnate its transformation before he fell definitively with it. We trace his footsteps here, from his youth to his death. The portrait of a young man emerges, transgressive in his very nature, an atypical politician who made many mistakes but who, like others, showed his contemporaries a new way, and even had a form of prophetic genius.

Michel Rocard has always had a complex rapport with the Parti socialiste. Splitting to form the PSU (1960), he found himself marginalised in the PS once he returned. In essence, his career played out around the tension between the will to conquer the partisan machinery and the distinction which allowed him to have unrivalled success in the polls. His case allows us to study subversion as an indispensable resource in a field where polls and the media have a growing role.

The very notion of transgression is attached to the name and career of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. The shock of his taking control of the radical party (1969-1971), marked by well-established traditions, allowed him to shake up habits and conventions and renew a sclerotic political body. But the systematic use of transgression created a climate of instability which was ultimately destructive for the party, and counter-productive for JJSS and his team.

After his 1968 ‘Rivers of blood' speech, Enoch Powell was progressively marginalised in the Conservative Party and emerged as an important dissident voice against the policies of Edward Heath. We explore the different forms of transgression that Enoch Powell exercised in his party and the reasons which pushed him towards this transgression, in relation to subjects like immigration policy, the reversal of economic policy after 1972, and joining the EEC.

Elected as a deputy in 1889, Christophe Thivrier made his entrance into the Chamber dressed in workers' overalls. This sartorial transgression was rather well received but the ‘workers' talk' of the new deputy was mocked, and his cry in the lower chamber in 1895 - ‘Long live the Commune!' - caused great indignation. This article examines these reactions, and, more generally, the way in which political actors and observers envisaged, in relation to appearance, the representation of their fellow citizens.

This article examines the survival of the duel as a transgressive practice in the parliamentary milieu after 1945. A ritualised practice inscribed in parliamentary culture, the duel has lost its transgressive substance. Outdated and displaced in a context of little tolerance towards political violence, it survives as a spectacle and dramatisation of transgression, constituting more than ever a weapon of communication whose outcome plays out less in the fields than in the media.

Betrayal is a form of transgression; it shares a certain number of points with other phenomena of this type. We will consider the extent to which it has always constituted a fearsome ‘tool' in political struggles. Finally, we will focus on the reactions and representations it incites: these testify to the importance in all social organisations and political communities of norms and expectations related to trust and loyalty.

Maurice Barrès published an obituary of Ernest Psichari, who died in action on 22 August 1914, in L'Écho de Paris. He recalls the way in which the latter transgressed the intellectual heritage of his family, his father Jean, one of the founders of the LDH, and his grandfather, Renan.

At the time, the famous photograph of Jacques Chirac jumping over the barriers at the Auber RER station in 1980 appeared as the symbol of a young and ambitious politician, ready to break every taboo to gain power. This photo has also had a legacy, contributing, paradoxically, to an identification of Jacques Chirac with the collective unconscious of the French people.

On 24 March 1998, Tony Blair gave a speech to the House of Commons which outlined the theses of the new Labour Party with regard to British political life, and his vision for Europe. This speech can appear transgressive in two respects: in relation to traditional Labour Party values and in relation to Thatcher's vision of Europe, even if this rupture was no less evident in concrete terms.

This article studies the role of the Renaixença cultural movement in the emergence of political Catalanism. The trajectory of the Lliga Regionalista illustrates the way Catalan nationalism penetrated its institutions, the reinforcement of its pluralism from 1906 onwards, and the formation of the Republican Catalanist current. A socio-historical analysis of the trajectories of the Catalan nationalist parties demonstrates their role in the modernisation of the Spanish political system.

The Socialist Party has traditionally accorded a great deal of importance to secularism, presented as one of the pillars of its identity. Although this attachment has remained, it has gone through a difficult period which stretched from the congress of Épinay in 1971 to the Stasi commission in 2003 (linked to the question of the Islamic veil at school). This period, marked by multiple factors and changes, interrogated the secular identity of this party in an intense way.