Lèse-majesté

It was a rare sight. One of the world's richest billionaires (right up there with Americans Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates), Frenchman Bernard Arnault, was, for a few hours on Wednesday, an ordinary citizen. A man with no more or less rights than any other, on par with all the bosses called upon to explain themselves before senators on the use of public funds by the groups they lead. What an indignity! What a crime of lèse-majesté! One only had to perceive the bitterness of the lord of the CAC 40 to gauge his disapproval.

In a few weeks, the entire elite of industry and business were questioned by the commission of inquiry into public aid to businesses (whose rapporteur, Fabien Gay, is a senator and director of L'Humanité ). Having begun with the indifference of most of the media, its work gained in publicity, fueled by the embarrassment or bad faith of those who felt they were not accountable for their management.

The main arguments repeated both inside and outside the committee boil down to a syllogism. First, it is inappropriate to talk about public aid, since the state returns to businesses a portion of the money it takes from them. Second, parliamentarians are not responsible for monitoring the actions of private companies. Third, it follows that these summonses and the purpose of the committee border on an abuse of power.

Over the past quarter of a century, since the Hue Law of 2001 on the control of public funds granted to companies – one of the first laws repealed when the right returned to power in 2002 – the world and capitalism have been profoundly transformed, but not the social relations based on the inviolability of capital ownership.

At a time when 200 to 250 billion euros of public money per year—no one, even at Bercy, has any idea of ​​the exact amount—are allocated to employers, some of whom use this money to lay off workers, and while public finances are sinking inexorably into the red, democracy still stops at the door of the boardroom. The bad mood of the emperor of luxury, a tax exile and friend of Trump, has only highlighted this archaism, the source of so much human, social, financial, and environmental waste.