In the face of this unprecedented abasement of politics, subjugated by this public opinion that the ancient Greeks called doxa, and muddled still more in the age of buzz and Twitter, made more obscure, more incoherent than ever; in the face of the sudden acceleration of what commentators have baptized “counter-democracy,” or the incessant harassment of elected representatives, notably the first among them, by a political body with no organs that is subject to every passion, pressure, and influence and that has little or nothing to do with the electoral body of political theory—in the face of all this, permit me to recall some events that ever one of us remembers, even if we all seem to be pretending to have forgotten them.

François Mitterrand was not preoccupied with public opinion when he made the historic decision to abolish the death penalty.

Charles de Gaulle did not begin by sampling, cajoling, and seducing public opinion when, having been elected on a platform that called for pursuing the war in Algeria, he decided to do the opposite.

De Gaulle did not recruit a following before choosing, on his own and based on the powers vested in him by the laws of France, to withdraw from NATO, an action that entailed a profound disruption of the country’s alliances and security system.