Roberto Bertoni Arrogant like Sarkozy and irresolute like any one of the Fourth Republic’s prime ministers, Emmanuel Macron is steering France toward a 1958-style situation, except that this time there is no De Gaulle on the horizon capable of staging a substantive coup d’état to give the country back some minimum of stability and social security. After all, the General had been the head of the French Resistance against Nazi-fascism, and so had the credentials to take power, calm the climate, advance the decolonisation process that reached its peak in 1960, mend relations with Algeria after Prefect Papon, on 17 October 1961, had strewn the Seine with the bodies of rebelling Algerians, and bring into being the so-called “Fifth Republic,” now at the end of the line. ...

Roberto Bertoni Let us hope we are wrong, that we are being too pessimistic — but watching the tragic affair unfolding between Iran and the United States, which at times takes on almost grotesque proportions, one gets the impression that the world no longer knows how to live without war. And given how things have unfolded in Ukraine, with the continuation of the Russian occupation (let us not forget that Putin’s rise is also a consequence of globalisation’s limits and of the West’s betrayal of an honest statesman like Gorbachev) and Zelensky still ordering long-range missile strikes against Russian targets, along with the failure of any prospect of a truce after four years of conflict, the bitter feeling is that the Old Continent has slipped back to 1913 — the year of the “sleepwalkers,” those who drifted into barbarism without even realising it. ...