LThe show is announced. We begin to wave the muleta of the retreat, and already the bulls from all sides are preparing to rush headlong into the scarlet linen to leave their imprint there, to stretch it, carve it up or shrink it, depending on what they call a social imperative or a sense of reality, which is accompanied by definitive formula: “You have to know how to keep reason”, the leitmotif of the poor in spirit with a deficient imagination.
We will present this debate on retirement as the dazzling manifestation of democratic functioning, we will gut each other, we will congratulate ourselves on the result or we will cry foul, and all this politico-media brouhaha – and this is perhaps its unconscious purpose – will amount to accrediting this idea that the central body of all existence is work, limited, on the one hand, by years of training (which prepare to enter the great body, there is no question of learning birdsong there) and , on the other, if all goes well, by an offer allowing this large sick body to have something to breathe, possibly under respiratory assistance. So that it is existence as a whole which is organized around the sacrosanct work. Say, what have you done, you here, with your life? I worked.
This terminal rest, we can see what it is inspired by, this seventh day granted by the Creator after six days of returning to earth and sky. The revolutionaries, in their Voltairian determination to put an end to “the infamous” (the Catholic Church), abolished the seven-day week (the biblical heritage) to replace it with the decadi. Instead of 52 Sundays off, there were only 36 left. On the employers’ side, we are starting to rub our hands. Especially since the Old Regime added to the 52 Sundays 25 religious holidays, also non-working. Voltaire, of course, but also Montesquieu, were alarmed by this, who denounced the “perverse effects” for the economy of this pious rest granted to the workers. A good God is a dead God.
great stampede
The poet Racan [1589-1670] was 29 when he published his Stanzas on retirement (“Tircis, you have to think about retiring”), and Montaigne 38 when he retired to his tower to write, study, practice the Carpe Diem horacian. But that, this injunction, “to seize the day without worrying about tomorrow”, except for the birds of the sky and the wealthy, is precisely what constitutes the stone of concern for the majority of humanity. In the past, births were piled up so that there was a surviving child who agreed to take charge of his old parents.
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