Mister President,

Minister,

My dear colleagues,

My comrade Jean-Pierre Sueur having explained to you the position of the socialist group on the main lines of the text, I will concentrate for my part on article 7, which requires consulting firms working for the State to kindly, please use the French language in their exchanges with the administration and in their documents.

This article is the translation of one of the recommendations of this commission of inquiry, in which I participated with pleasure. Thanks to it, we were able to measure what is happening behind the scenes of these public contracts where, slide after slide, firms offer adequate solutions that administrations could not find on their own.

To make myself better understood by the ecosystem which occupies us and which perhaps listens to us, I could have said that I was part of the board of the commission which measured, behind the scene, how slide after slide the consultants juniors and seniors from the same practice make “propales” to offer the right feedback and key learnings to their public prospects.

My dear colleagues, if like me you understand nothing about this sabir, rest assured: the commission of inquiry has annexed to its report a glossary of the vocabulary with which consulting firms inundate their clients – I thank you for that. President Éliane Assassi. On the other hand, be concerned about the situation which has made this glossary unfortunately indispensable.

During his hearing, the CEO of La Poste indicated that the overly systematic use of consulting firms ran the risk of a “new conformism”, passing through language and leading to an impoverishment of thought. This “globish”, which is not even English, is in reality a formatting tool. Many civil servants and citizens feel certain suffering as a result.

France has a relationship with public power and administration that is specific to it; Villers-Cotterêts is not Wall Street. However, this relationship cannot be understood by these frames of thought from across the Atlantic. These correspond perfectly to Anglo-Saxon culture; it is a great culture, but it is not ours and it does not allow us to sovereignly develop our own vision of public action.

The slight modification of the law of August 4, 1994 relating to the use of the French language, known as Toubon, proposed in this text cannot be summarized as a backward-looking approach consisting of regretting the good old days of the imperfect subjunctive or the sailing navy.

Nor is it the search for a pure language, because a fixed language is a finished language, a morbid fantasy that I leave to the reactionaries. We must accept, with relish, the integration of foreign or new words, when they cover better than any other term a reality that our language does not describe.

On the other hand, when the word exists in French and, above all – I come to the essential point – when it is perfectly understood by all citizens, it must be used, so that people understand each other. It is a democratic imperative as much as a refusal of oneself.

A recent study by the Research Center for the Study and Observation of Living Conditions (Credoc) on the subject recalls the “obvious attachment to language, which is expressed through the expression of the need for exemplary public services on the subject ".

This is what is expressed in article 7 of this bill, in a context in which governments have not respected, and for a long time, neither the Toubon law nor the regulatory provisions taken in application of it. , nor the primary ministerial circulars, which nevertheless impose themselves on the administration. “Choose France”, “French Tech”, “Business France”, “France Connect”, “French Impact”, “start-up nation”, “bottom-up” and other clusters are all attacks, which deepen the gap between the people and their representatives; you have to be aware of it. When we are paid by the taxpayer, we serve them in their language and this applies both to the administration and to its managers and service providers!

Last February, the French Academy published a report subtitled “So that French institutions speak French”; we have reached this point… Last June, the Quebec Minister of the French Language visiting Paris emotionally invited us not to leave his government alone in this battle; we need to hear it!

We have here a rare opportunity to usefully strengthen the Toubon law: let’s seize it, Minister!

Some would write on their concluding slide that it is now or never that we must reaffirm these linguistic principles, but, with the audacity that we know how to demonstrate in the Senate, on all sides, we can say, much more clearly, it's now or never!

Mister President,

Minister,

My dear colleagues,

Contrary to what the fake news traffickers, the resistance fighters of the boulevards, the has-not-beens of French song and the Sakharovs of the health dictatorship have been claiming for months, today we have three certainties:

1) The vaccine prevents the vast majority of serious forms.

2) The probability of a stay in intensive care is ten times higher among the unvaccinated.

3) Emergency services are filled by the small minority, who refuse vaccination.

The conclusion is biblically simple: we must vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible. 92% of French people understand this. Not anti-tax people. For a year they have been taunting us with their “convince rather than coerce”, telling us to educate, not to stigmatize, they who stigmatize all the others. We will soon have to vaccinate in secret and tear down the walls so as not to disturb them.

Well we're not going to raze the walls, we're going to respond. And first of all, to the hard-pressed politicians who are trying to get back on track, to the counter philosophers who confuse freedom and irresponsibility, to the agitated people on the TV screen, who cry about democracy being flouted. Philippot, Asselineau, Le Pen, Dupont-Aignan and Mélenchon, this German-Soviet pact of disinformation, were successively for chloroquine, against the vaccine, against the health pass and now against the vaccination pass, with absolute infallibility in blindness. These lovers of dictatorships must still be inflated to accuse the government and parliament of taking repressive measures.

If they had been in power, vaccination would have been lost months. And the deaths would have been much more numerous, like among their friends Bolsonaro the anti-vax or Putin and his inoperative vaccine loudly demanded by Mélenchon and which even the Russians do not want. The French would have only been entitled to bogus remedies from an incredible guru, validated by the Twitter school of medicine and Facebook university. These Stakhanovists of error and cynicism are against the vaccination pass, not to preserve the health of our fellow citizens but to recover the votes of extremists. Whatever you do, Minister, you will hurt them. I suggest an idea to vaccinate the 5 million who are missing: ban the vaccine, they will require everyone to be injected.

Now that's enough ! At 300,000 cases per day, it is time to respond and it is also past time to stand up. Democracy does not mean kneeling before an unconscious minority who today populate emergency services, who make caregivers cry with rage and exhaustion seeing their beds filled with patients who should never have been there. found there and which chase away all the others. Democracy does not consist of listening to supermarket rebels jumping like goats with their signs shouting: “Freedom! ".

From fifteen years of my life as a doctor in wars or epidemics, I have learned a simple lesson: it is viruses that violate freedoms, not vaccines. And if we do not take the necessary measures, it is the epidemic alone that decides, and always in the most violent and lethal way.

We must therefore, because there is no absolute freedom, as Philippe Bas said earlier, find the balance between contradictory freedoms and make the right decisions, even if they do not please everyone. . This is what you are proposing to us today, Mr. Minister, and this is what we are going to do with you.

Yes, the vaccination pass is a way of encouraging vaccination. And to be honest, the ideal would be compulsory vaccination, as there are eleven others without anyone crying tyranny. You don't propose it - wait until the end, wait until the end - because you fear that the blasters will end up tearing apart an exhausted country and because in a democracy there is no infallible way to impose it, and you you are probably right.

So go for the vaccination pass. The offended professionals will say that you are creating two categories of French, while it is they who place themselves on the margins and put us in danger. They will say that you are stigmatizing them, while for a year they have been treating vaccinated people like sheep, caregivers like collaborators, that they are destroying the offices of elected officials and threatening them with death.

But we will continue the fight against the epidemic together, calmly. Despite them. And with the vast majority of French people. Because despite the incessant campaigns on anti-social networks, the French have shown remarkable understanding, remarkable patience and remarkable responsibility. Despite the misinformation, France is in the leading group of the most vaccinated countries.

The networks even had a virtue: after two years of lies, our fellow citizens ended up, faced with the enormity of fake news, by forming a solid opinion about those who spread it, and I prefer not to repeat here the epithets with which they gratify them. As for the discussions at family meals where there was an anti-vax during the holidays, they definitively vaccinated millions of French people against absurdities. And this vaccine, fortunately, is very effective.

In the United States today, if you talk about the Enlightenment, you are told that you are racist and that the Enlightenment was used to justify, to theorize, colonialism and slavery. Which is still a shame. Or that rationality as such was a white discipline. I mean, that's what they're telling us today. Or even that mathematics needs to be decolonized because it is racist. Well, still, we're losing our minds!

Woke ideologies come to us through things like inclusive writing - which is appalling stupidity - gender studies, decolonial thinking, the intersectionality of struggles and especially cancel culture, which is undoubtedly the most important aspect. more contemptible of this woke ideology, since it is in reality a question of rewriting the entire past according to the ideologies of the present.

The origin of woke is of French origin. Foucault explained to them that any discourse of knowledge was a discourse of power. They read Derrida, they understood that it was necessary to deconstruct Western culture because it was deeply misogynistic, racist, colonial, etc. And they read Liotard who got rid of - it was a whole generation which got rid of Marxism - and who, mourning this total thought that was Marxism, concluded that ultimately, well ultimately everything was equal, that all the speeches, the great theoretical speeches of the past, whether religious or ideological, had no value, and that, again, everything was worth it. So it came from French intellectuals.

In a second period - and this is typically American and this is what is only happening to us today in France - we strangely reconstituted knowledge, not on disciplinary bases: anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history... but on ethnic bases and on identity bases. That is to say that we said: there is a black culture, there is a women's culture, feminist culture, a homosexual culture, etc., etc. a decolonial culture… And we are going to lock people into these cultures and we are going to create scientific disciplines in their own right.

So, on the one hand, you have deconstruction and there you have a phase of identity reconstruction on the contrary. And this identity reconstitution was used by identity entrepreneurs, who spoke in the name of their community, (said) that it was necessary to study their texts because they were representative of this community and who turned them into political movements. And this is the most serious danger! Identity politics means locking people into their ethnic or racial category, pitting them against each other in a zero-sum game, whereas democracy is not a zero-sum game! It is a game in which ideologies and interests are exchanged, combined, in which there can be an agreement in principle.

Identity is non-negotiable. You cannot negotiate your identity. We can negotiate the fact of being a capitalist or a proletarian, of being a socialist or a liberal. That can give rise to an interesting and productive confrontation. But when you say, “I'm black” or “I'm a woman,” “I'm a black gay woman and you can't understand me because my experience is so unique that I can't argue with you”: democracy stop.

Madame President,

Ladies and Gentlemen Ministers,

My Dear Colleagues,

Listening to Senator Ravier just now, I quickly understood that we were living under the yoke of a dictatorship and that, without a handful of heroic resistance fighters, we would not have even noticed it. We were all inoculated with DT-coq-polio from a very young age and since then, Agnès Buzyn, this autocrat, has added eight compulsory vaccinations. The vaccination card, ancestor of the health pass, established generalized control of the population. Big brother had decided that no child, hold on, could enter school without this “ausweiss” to speak like our colleague. Our most sacred right to choose illness rather than immunity has been violated since Pasteur. The French themselves had internalized servitude, thinking, like Hobbes, that only a Leviathan armed with syringes and needles could save them.

Fortunately, like Zorro, Facebook and Twitter have arrived, allowing an enlightened vanguard to band together against vaccine totalitarianism. After, for years, 11 vaccines were injected into us without our consent, at the twelfth, bingo, our eyes opened, thanks to these freedom fighters who had the courage to name the infamy of the health pass: “apartheid” for Florian Philippot, “coup d’état” for Asselineau, “generalized discrimination” for Coquerel, and this evening “generalized confinement” for Ravier; “yellow star” or “Shoah” for the more daring. Ultimately, the best proof of humanity's progress is that in 2500 years we have gone from Socrates in the agora to Francis Lalanne on Facebook.

What a shame that social networks did not exist sooner to defend against the dictators of the injection the freedom to die in harmony with nature and its gifts, including our lifelong companions, smallpox, polio, plague and cholera which allowed the greatest authors, Camus, Giono, Thomas Mann and others, to write the immortal masterpieces of pandemic literature.

Smallpox has disappeared, COVID has a chance of surviving thanks to all the digital resistance fighters who demand the right to catch the virus and fight it, like the Poles of 40 against Soviet tanks, with the sole force of their chests and their bare hands, and the only help of hydroxychloroquine, also sometimes reinforced by a rediscovered drug: Ricard. The elders died with their fists raised on the barricades while singing the Internationale, our heroes are ready to die with their fists raised in discotheques to the sound of Staying Alive.

How can we not admire this MP having made the difficult choice to leave the majority without which she would never have been elected and to harangue, like freedom guiding the people, the crowds of resisters to the health dictatorship by inviting them, like Henri IV, to rally around his blond panache and invade the offices of his colleagues in favor of the health pass.

I would like, very seriously this time, to implore that we please stop this nasty quarrel over freedoms. It is not the government, the medical authorities or the supporters of compulsory vaccination who restrict them, it is the pandemic. Far from being a violation of our freedom, the measures announced are the conditions for its restoration.

Accelerated vaccination or confinement in two months, this is the alternative that the vast majority of French people have understood very well, who realize that it is by limiting a few freedoms today that we have a chance of saving many more. valuable in September. So this is what we are going to do and this choice does not make the President a dictator but a decision-maker. It does not make Parliament a gathering of tyrants but an assembly of those responsible.

Is this decision difficult? On the contrary, it is clear. The vaccine is a scientific achievement that billions of human beings are desperate to obtain. Which government would be irresponsible enough not to offer it to everyone, as quickly as possible, and in the meantime protect those who are not yet protected?

All that remains is questions of method, which does not make them any simpler.

And firstly should we choose compulsory vaccination for all or the tightening of the health pass? The first solution has the advantage of numerous precedents and the simplicity of the message. Its disadvantage is that it cannot be completed for several months while time is running out. The epidemic is growing exponentially. The Chinese have just discovered that the viral load of the delta variant is a thousand times higher than that of previous variants. And in a few days we will be at 40,000 or 50,000 daily cases.

The government has chosen the health pass, believing that it will be better accepted and above all that it is immediately applicable, and finally that it does not exclude, if necessary, the first solution.

If we agree with this strategy, and that is my case, we still have to clarify its contours. The editors of the initial text, no doubt thinking that to speak loudly you need to have a big stick, had a heavy hand. The Council of State has already curbed some efforts on the amount of fines or labor law. We must do our part and, as elected officials close to the ground, ensure that the past is not the first step in our industrial recovery plan: the relaunch of the production of paperwork. And prevent, for example, café terraces from being transformed into boxing rings and the 8:47 a.m. train from adding two hours to its usual delays due to checks. When it comes to protocol, Courteline is never far away.

Vaccination for all means freedom for all. Everyone's rights must be respected and excessive constraints avoided. But on condition of not endangering the health of others and of not forgetting that the corollary of freedom is responsibility.

Look, I was born in 1955. I'm 64 years old. When I was born, it wasn't that long ago anyway, there were two and a half billion inhabitants. Two and a half billion inhabitants. In less than a man's lifetime, the world's population has tripled. It's incredible !

In thirty years, there will be nine billion of us. At the end of the century, there will be eleven billion of us. But it's done. That is to say, whatever we decide, it is done. So the shock is not a climate shock. There is obvious climate change, to which a response must be provided. But the biggest global shock is the demographic shock. The world has experienced climate change, which has led to the disappearance of 80% of living species. This is not why we should not do anything, on the contrary, we must do! But the world has never experienced a demographic shock like the one we are currently experiencing. Never.

In thirty years, Nigeria will have more people than the United States of America. At its shortest, the Mediterranean is 780 km. We are going to go from one billion two hundred million Africans to two and a half billion. So, I say: the migration crisis has not started. She hasn't started. She is coming. So we can refuse that, if we want. Understand me. It is also the first source of pollution in parentheses. Because wanting to promote sustainable development without asking the question of the explosion in global population makes no sense.

I don't know if you've been to Lagos, which isn't even the capital of Nigeria. Twenty-two million inhabitants. So, if you think that with selective sorting, we will solve the Lagos problem, it is because you have not yet been there in Lagos. My neighbor says “that will help”. Certainly. But I would like to tell you one thing. Twenty-two million people who consume well cause more damage than a million who consume poorly.

I add that I am told that the future is electric cars. So everyone: “the electric car, the electric car, fantastic!” Tremendous ! ". Then first of all, you have to be careful about what you say, since you no longer say anything. But I still ask a question: do electric cars consume electricity? Electricity must be produced. And so, we have Germany which is going to reopen all its coal mines, to produce electricity.

There was a minister of ecology there, whose name I have forgotten… Who on the same day said, with authority… “In ten years there will only be electric cars!” ". Ah, very good… And everyone applauds you. “And in ten years we will have closed half of the nuclear power plants! ". (laughs) Because of course electric cars don't need electricity, it's well known.

The demographic subject is a monumental, tectonic subject. And do you know that there is no international organization that monitors the evolution of the world population. In terms of agriculture, there are around ten international organizations. Don't you think that it would be appropriate, urgently, to lay the foundations of a world organization which would follow the evolution of world demography? I'm not at all for saying you need birth control. But at least we need to be aware of the problem and try to deal with it. We are already trying to have viable statistical elements.

The Chinese - and we cannot blame them, they no longer have the means to pay their pensions - have just decided that we will no longer implement the “one child” policy. In sub-Saharan Africa, the average number of children per woman is around five. So if we don't act very quickly, we are heading towards an extravagant catastrophe. The question: how many human beings can live on this planet at the same time? This is a subject...

I clearly understand the difficulties, the desire to have children, what that can represent. But, don't we see that all living species, one day, are destined to disappear due to overpopulation or depletion of resources? And, do we think that, for us humans, this will not arise? And I'm quite fascinated to see, rightly so, the discussion about climate and the awkwardness when we discuss the evolution of global demographics.

So I see this young Swedish girl so friendly and so smiling. (cough) And so original in its thinking... But, the question of this organization which would follow the evolution of world demography, of the reflection that we Westerners must have before the others, because the gap between us and Asia, not only does not stop, but is still growing. Today it’s four billion eight hundred million, but tomorrow it will be much more!

And at the same time, I think that Europe must, as a matter of urgency, come together with Africa to decide on a monumental infrastructure plan in Africa, to try to raise Africa's standard of living. Because it seems, I say it seems, that there is a correlation between the level of development and the explosion in demography. It seems. Well, at least that's what a number of people are saying.

And these are really the exciting topics of tomorrow. And extremely difficult. I don't have the solutions naturally. But these subjects are tectonic.

Mister President,

Mr Prime Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen Ministers,

My dear colleagues,

France is the most revolutionary of conservative countries. And the political and social crisis that has been threatening us for thirty years has arrived. We all felt this anger coming, in our countryside, in our neighborhoods, in our territories. And yet, year after year we have failed to meet the challenge. By cowardice perhaps, by weakness surely, by renunciation it is certain. We didn't reform while everyone else around us was reforming. And as punishment we had the worst of both worlds: more public spending and less public service, more debt and less justice, more words and fewer actions.

Events put us against the wall. Are we going to emerge from this crisis, like so many others before, with a tinkering that will change nothing or are we finally going to take advantage of this electroshock to finally pose, and resolve, the essential subject, carefully put aside for years? Are we going to continue the dead dog policy of ever more taxes and ever more spending or are we finally going to succeed, in our world record-holding country for taxation, in what several of our neighbors have succeeded in: the optimization and profound renovation of public spending and public services, the only way to achieve lower taxes, and therefore an increase in purchasing power?

This challenge concerns both the Government and Parliament.

First of all, the government. This major consultation that you are announcing, Mr Prime Minister, you must ensure that it will be followed by effects. If this Grenelle on taxation and ecological transition were to lead to the application of Queuille's formula: “Politics is not about solving problems, it is about silencing those who pose them. ", if it were to consist of drowning the fish, of putting one's head in the sand while waiting for better days, then today's anger will be nothing in comparison with that which will seize the French who for a long time cannot bear it. plus ostriches.

If, on the contrary, you seize this opportunity that history presents to you, then perhaps you have a chance, in difficult conditions, to truly reform this country which is dying because it has not been reformed.

As for us parliamentarians, our responsibility is no less. If our participation in the debate is only an opportunity, as I have already heard for several days, for demagogic and contradictory proposals, such as lower taxes, coupled with an increase in spending, which amounts to trying to raise a bucket while we have both feet in it, if it is only a question of demanding the resignation of the President of the Republic from a sidewalk on the Champs-Elysées or the dissolution of the National Assembly by those who dream of a great evening believing that they have an appointment with history when they only have an appointment with the TF1 newspaper, I do not believe that the French would forgive us for taking our institutions hostage and lead to a new five-year term for nothing.

But in all cases there is a responsibility that government and parliament share. It is to regain their prerogatives. Everyone has the right to like or not like the yellow vests. Everyone has the right to support their demands or find them confusing and unrealizable. Everyone has the right to think that we can block the roads or, as is my case, to be allergic to attacks on the freedom to come and go. But ultimately, in a representative democracy, the law is made in Parliament and not on the roundabouts. For the same reasons as in a democracy it is better to put ballots in ballot boxes than stones in shop windows.

Why do I say this? Because I would like in this hemicycle to seriously question, my dear colleagues, the fact that one of the first demands of the current movement, we have all heard, was the abolition of the Senate. Are we going to keep quiet about this here? Don't we see what that means? The reality is that we are caught between two fires: on the one hand a President of the Republic who, in his obsession with verticality, believed that he could step over the intermediary bodies, the parliamentarians, the local elected officials, and which logically finds itself today, having cleared its institutional interlocutors, in direct confrontation with a radicalized base. On the other side a movement which thinks that without any organization and thanks to Facebook we can do without national representation, or even demand its disappearance. What we know is that a country cannot lead itself through social networks. That, every day a little more, these social networks are invaded by fake news and bullshit. That each day a little more, their motto seems to be: “I hate therefore I am”. What we know is that a situation in which a radicalized base opposes the government and the President without any intermediary, to the point that one of its leaders did not hesitate yesterday to call for an invasion of the Elysée on Saturday next, that such a situation can only end in two ways: either insurrection, or in the event of decay the dispersion of a movement and the forgetting of its objectives of which there would be no more than what remains of 'a sparrow having crossed a fan.

If there is one thing that we must remember today, here, in this hemicycle, that we must remind the President of the Republic as well as the yellow vests, it is that the last thing France needs is the weakening of the Senate and more generally of all the bodies that we wrongly call intermediaries and that we would do better to call essential because they constitute the backbone of the country.

There is one last subject left for me to discuss: that of violence, because the fear of what could happen next Saturday is becoming the major concern. This violence is not only serious in itself. They are serious because of their consequences on those whom the thugs claim to defend, those who work in the destroyed shops or businesses and who have the same end-of-month problems as the others. They are serious for the image of France abroad which is, once again, in the process of plunging. Finally, they are serious because of the chosen location. The Arc de Triomphe, like the Assembly, the Senate, the Concorde, these are emblematic places in the history of France, they are the symbols of the motherland. Tagging the Arc de Triomphe, breaking its bas-reliefs, devastating its interior, is like slapping your mother. Those who are capable of doing this, and I am of course not confusing them with all the yellow vests, are not only rioters, they are not only degrading a monument, they are degrading our national identity.

This is why calling for a new demonstration in Paris on Saturday, in the same conditions of unpreparedness and irresponsibility as that of last Saturday, is to take a heavy responsibility.

Opposite the demonstrators there will be those who are also the bulwark of our national identity and our security. The police, whose courage I would in turn like to salute, after the Prime Minister, in particularly difficult circumstances, even though they have been constantly on the line in the fight against terrorism for three years.

My dear colleagues, at this crucial moment, I hope that we can show the same courage. First of all, the courage of words, the courage to tell the truth to the French, the truth about the state of our public finances, about our societal choices and about the future of the planet. Then, the courage of action, that of taking the difficult decisions that the country and the French need. This is our mission today. Thank you.

The drama of France, if you allow me - I wrote a few articles on this also over time, particularly in English to explain to my clients around the world what France was - France is making two mistakes absolutely incredible logic.

The first is to think that those who have the best education are the most intelligent. It's not true at all... [Journalist: But it's very difficult to admit!] It's very difficult to admit, but when I was at my university in the United States, I had a professor who I really liked, who one day asked us the question: “Why do you think we are looking to hire you?” ". You know I was in a business school. [Journalist: Yes]. And we all said: but this guy is stupid, really. They are looking to hire us because we are the best. I finally see. We thought… it was obvious.

And he told us: “No, not at all. It's (that) you followed studies, you followed studies - I was 27/28/29 years old - and therefore it shows that you have no character. If you had the slightest character, you would have started your business a long time ago. And so, you have shown that you are able to repeat what the teachers tell you and that is what we call intelligence. But that has nothing to do with intelligence in everyday life. It's like staff officers. If you want. Gamelin, who ruined the… who screwed France up, he came first from Saint-Cyr. And first in the war school. Still, he screwed France up. So first mistake: intelligence equals studies. It's not true.

Second mistake is to think that, because you have the best education, you are able to make decisions. There is no connection between the two. [Journalist: There is no connection, in fact.] There is no connection between the two. So, from these two errors, we built an education system which celebrates... which brings up guys who have a horse's memory and who have no character. These are the two characteristics of the French elites. [Journalist: It’s terrible, when I hear you mention “horse memory and no character”, I think of Bruno Le Maire. It's stronger than me.] But exactly! [Journalist: it's exactly him (laughing).] This man who has just explained to us that he is going to reform French companies, even though he is incapable of managing his bank account.

Your rank, your functions, your knowledge, will give you authority over men. You have not only the right but the duty to exercise this authority. But never forget that as men they are equal to you.

You will find yourself in circumstances where it is about punishment. You must do it, but consider being led there a personal failure. You will admire leaders who are easily obeyed, and are esteemed by all. Some are familiar and earthy, others coldly distant. Do not imitate the behavior: subordinates, even the most humble, sense the falsity of an artificial attitude, and are sensitive to it.

Do not bring down a bad mood on your subordinates that they did not cause. You are allowed three tantrums per year, two of which are simulated. If you know how to delegate to well-trained staff, you know how to command. Never give an order if you do not have both the will and the means to enforce it (the Highway Code is the model of what not to do!...). Don't let a subordinate ignore what you think of their actions: make observations, or compliments, when appropriate.

Whenever possible, explain to your subordinates the reasons for your decisions; knowing your thought process, they will react, if you are prevented, as you would have done. The supreme indiscipline consists of carrying out an order without having first exposed to your superiors, if there is no urgency, the facts and arguments which, in your opinion, have escaped them. If, after hearing you, they maintain their order, you must, of course, carry it out without hesitation.

There are two attitudes when it comes to trust in one's subordinates: give it to them a priori, even if it means taking it away from them if they do not prove themselves worthy, or wait until you know them before granting it to them. The latter is bad because distrust breeds distrust and you will not escape this vicious circle.

When you have allowed a reasonable amount of time to carry out an order, never accept the excuse: “I didn't have time!” ". This is insolent, because it means that he found it more interesting to use his time on other tasks than those you had ordered him to do. If you know how to do a task quickly and well, have a subordinate do it. You will waste time at first but you will save a lot later.