Frédéric Lordon’s “Boulevard de la souveraineté” first appeared on La pompe à phynance, Lordon’s blog in Le Monde diplomatique, on 14 January 2026.
“Words start to fail. Bush invented an imaginary ‘axis of evil,’ but there is a very real ‘axis of shame,’ and it is European. We watch, flabbergasted, as European Commission spokeswoman Paula Pinho sinks at a press conference. Two journalists ask her what the Commission thinks of Trump’s assertion that it is in the European Union’s interest for the United States to get its hands on Greenland ‘for security reasons.’ There was an appalling silence, mixed with stammering. Keir Starmer, repeatedly asked whether Maduro’s abduction violated international law, repeatedly replied that international law was very important and that he took international law very seriously. Mike Tapp, no other than Home Office minister, was asked whether the United Kingdom would condemn an invasion of Greenland. His response: ‘Denmark is an ally, and allies are very important.’ ‘Can you at least say that Trump should not invade Greenland?’ ‘Diplomacy is a delicate matter.’ Meanwhile, Friedrich Merz wasted no time to appraise that the legal analysis of the ‘American intervention’ was ‘complex’ and ‘needs to be looked at closely.’ Like the Commission, which believes that it is ‘too early to give a legal assessment’ of what happened in Venezuela.”
— Frédéric Lordon
His histrionics will be to no avail; it is the first impression that lasts: the shameful statement — gleefully amplified by Trump, who never misses an opportunity to humiliate. We totally get that this is about Macron and Venezuela. “Correcting,” “softening,” or, in the automatic language of journalism, “raising the tone”: it’s almost worse than before, since every ill attempt at damage control only serves to reemphasize the miserable thing whose face it is trying to save.
Exactly one week later, we learn that France will postpone the date of the G7 summit it is hosting so as not to clash with the mixed martial arts tournament scheduled at the White House for Trump’s birthday. At this point, we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Macron will be performing as a clown at the birthday party — or why not as a fake fighter destined to take an amusing beating.
At this stage, all words are fair game: vassalage, doormat, rug, toilet paper. We didn’t think the cycle of humiliation could be traversed so quickly and so far — the worst part being that, in reality, one would be rash to think that we’ve reached the end. The worst of the worst is that this humiliation comes at a time of historical perilousness that would normally call for the exact opposite: a little dignity, firmness, and resolve.
One grovel after another
Historians will no doubt rush to warn us: no anachronisms, no reductionisms, no reckless comparisons. Fair enough. But we can still be sensitive to echoes. Hemisphere: Lebensraum. Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia: Austria, Sudetenland, Poland. Then we watch Stephen Miller, Trump’s national security advisor, on CNN. We can turn off the sound: fascism can be seen in the eyes of fascists. Miller is in a state of hallucinatory trance. If we turn the sound back on: “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” At least on the outside, Trumpism is increasingly taking on the characteristics of a Hitlerism tinged with predatory capitalist crudeness. And with psychiatry, too. The White House — not a MAGA troll from Texas: the White House — posts a visual of Trump with the sole caption “FAFO”: “you fuck around, you find out”, a mixture of little thuggery, megalomania, and the world’s leading military power. That’s what decivilization is.
The question, as always, is what forces can be brought to bear against it. But in the series of echoes, there is also Munich. Munich, so often invoked in public debate, indiscriminately, at every opportunity and out of turn, except when it is really relevant to remember it. The European concert … Words start to fail. Bush invented an imaginary “axis of evil,” but there is a very real “axis of shame,” and it is European. We watch, flabbergasted, as European Commission spokeswoman Paula Pinho sinks at a press conference. Two journalists ask her what the Commission thinks of Trump’s assertion that it is in the European Union’s interest for the United States to get its hands on Greenland “for security reasons.” There was an appalling silence, mixed with stammering. Keir Starmer, repeatedly asked whether Maduro’s abduction violated international law, repeatedly replied that international law was very important and that he took international law very seriously. Mike Tapp, no other than Home Office minister, was asked whether the United Kingdom would condemn an invasion of Greenland. His response: “Denmark is an ally, and allies are very important.” “Can you at least say that Trump should not invade Greenland?” “Diplomacy is a delicate matter.” Meanwhile, Friedrich Merz wasted no time to appraise that the legal analysis of the “American intervention” was “complex” and “needs to be looked at closely.” Like the Commission, which believes that it is “too early to give a legal assessment” of what happened in Venezuela.
Let’s admit that we shouldn’t be surprised. Because the pieces of the puzzle had been falling into place for a long time. We might remember, for example, Mark Rutte, Secretary General of NATO, who didn’t quite understand who he was dealing with and didn’t expect his private displays of flattery to be made public — by Trump himself, of course. “Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world. You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done” — Rutte is referring to the “achievement” of twisting the arms of NATO members to force them to spend 5% of their GDP on military spending. Without forgetting in the process to congratulate and thank him “on his decisive action in Iran” [Trump had just dropped the most powerful conventional bombs in the US arsenal on Iranian nuclear facilities], something “truly extraordinary” and that “no one else had dared to do.”
We could also remember Ursula Von der Leyen, who saw no problem with groveling at Trump’s golf resort in Scotland at the end of July 2025. The aim was to negotiate — in a state of panic — customs duties, and since the European Union is merely a platform for continental capital interests, its roadmap was clear: capitulate. The damage is limited to an overall 15%, with the added humiliation of committing to a flow of $600 billion in investments in the United States and $750 billion in purchases of American energy. That capital should be required to pay what it costs to resist a little and save face was obviously out of the question.
And then there’s this astonishing scene (see above): it’s August 2025, and Macron, Merz, Meloni, Starmer, Von der Leyen, Stubb (Finland), and Rutte (NATO) have been summoned to the White House. Here they are, sitting in a semicircle in the Oval Office around Trump — who is lecturing them. Later, Macron and Zelensky are taken aside by Trump, who shows them a display of MAGA merchandise. There are red caps, mugs, etc. It’s like being in a duty-free shop. Macron, asked to gush over a photo of Trump looking heroic, carries the box of cigars he has just been given — the equivalent of candy for older boys. It was an appallingly embarrassing moment of humiliation swallowed without protest. Trump, of course, did not fail to make a spectacle of it for the whole world to see — the French media relayed it without seeing anything, having internalized, through the same Atlanticism as their leaders, their vassal position; the shame was nonetheless palpable on screen.
Shame
There is no doubt that shame is perfectly understood as such. And that this has an effect on people’s minds. The more “technical” renunciations, the piecemeal sales largely authorized by the investment banker president (or the deputy secretary general of the Élysée, or the former minister of the economy), Alstom, Technip, Atos, Alcatel, a slumping Von der Leyen, who declares without batting an eyelid that “American AI chips will power our AI mega-factories and help the United States maintain its technological lead … All these things that the media make no effort to report, explain, or highlight as scandalous — indeed do not “stick” in the public mind. But Macron as a little boy, Von der Leyen as a doormat, farmers, and Mercosur do.
Of course, those who have been subjugated always find a rationale for their subjugation: “Trump is nuts, that’s clear, but in three years he’ll be gone and we’ll return to the America we’ve always known, the one that humiliates us with respect; so this is just a bad stretch that will pass, and in the meantime, let’s try to avoid reprisals and tariffs by appeasing him as best we can.” Or: “The small gains we are trying to achieve around Ukraine are still too important to us, and too precarious, to risk angering him — let’s admit that he is a bit of a lunatic.”
With nevertheless specific variations in Macron’s case. First, through a combination of fascistic affinities and psychic affinities — “I would like to be able to do the same.” Then through a movement typical of the psychic structure that psychoanalysis calls perversion, which leads the pervert to believe that he has what the other lacks, and thereby undertakes to keep him under his influence, in this case: “Leave him to me, I’ll know what to do with him.” This is exactly the same scene that played out in 2022 with Putin, with the brilliant results we remember: “the other,” at the end of the long table, clearly did not “lack” the talisman that Macron thought he possessed and with which he believed he could build an ascendancy. None of this, of course, will prevent Macron from continuing to put on a show in this other register, even more typical of perversion, namely denial: “We reject the new colonialism and the new imperialism, we also reject vassalage and defeatism.” This is the kind of statement that reveals, as never before, the true meaning of “at the same time,” which has been right under our noses since 2016, the meaning of denial, the meaning of perversion, which Octave Mannoni so aptly summed up with the maxim: “I know, but still.” Here: “I do something, and at the same time I say I don’t do it.” It was all there, in plain sight: “There must no longer be a single homeless person,” “Women are the great cause,” “We are saving the hospitals,” “The five-year term will be ecological,” “I will unconditionally take up all the proposals of the Climate Convention ” And at the same time … It is therefore the ultimate (unconsciously perverse) logic to reject new colonialism and imperialism at the “same time” as endorsing them, and vassalage at the same time as wallowing in it.
Sovereignty
While the “internal” version of perverse denial fueled disorientation and anger, its “external” version fueled shame. The country watches Macron, and a feeling of shame overwhelms it. Is there anything to be done politically with shame, perhaps even more so than with anger? The answer is obvious. Because the feeling of shame is the flip side of sovereignty. In the affliction of shame, it is the wounded desire for sovereignty that protests. For, apart from objective manifestations, sovereignty is first and foremost an affect — a shared affect.
This is usually the moment when the reflexive prejudices of a whole section of the radical left suddenly bristle. Nothing seems closer to the ideas of sovereignty than those of national identity, which such faction of the left hates so much (which it hates … sovereignly). Above all, do not go in this direction: danger. For this faction, it’s not even that sovereignty is unthinkable: it’s that sovereignty amounts to a refusal to think. So, on social media, they hunt down the slightest flag, reveling in it as soon as they spot one. One Marseillaise, and they are beside themselves. How much scrutiny have the Yellow Vests been subjected to by this faction? The idea that when the working classes rise up and seek to create their collective, they look for symbols and quite naturally turn to the first, and in fact only, resource at their disposal: the resource of national symbolism, drawing from it what they can, flags and anthems, which give them tangible anchors to moor their desire to be collective, and that this does not necessarily make them fascists, this idea does not occur for a moment to the guardians of abstract internationalism. Incidentally, it should be noted that they too, perhaps, must painfully witness the spectacle of the humiliation and submission of the ruling class, of Macron, of the European Union. And that they will then have to admit that, knowing shame, they consequently know pride — which is its inseparable counterpart. National pride — or the paradox of leftism. In the name of basic consistency and logic, we will therefore examine the left-wing examiners to ensure that they do not display the slightest emotion, the slightest hint of shame, and that they contemplate the current spectacle with a cold, entirely detached eye — unless they want to betray the unmentionable opposite.
It is less costly, and above all more useful politically, to allow oneself to feel shame and pride. More useful politically because, in the present period, it opens up a boulevard: the boulevard of sovereignty. Nothing clears it or widens it like the spectacle of vassalage. Sovereignty is a common affect — an affect that cuts across party lines. It permeates the body politic much more widely than its distorted institutional “representation.” In fact, except for last-minute verbal backtracking, the objective line of vassalage, starting with unconditional Atlanticism and European submission, has for three decades united all the so-called “government” parties, the extreme right of the Republicans, various (now fragmented) sectors of Macronism, which took this line to its highest point, not to mention, of course, the Socialist Party. However, there is a new and perhaps decisive element in this period, namely that Rassemblement National, once on the margins, has now largely rallied to this line, in keeping with “normalization.” Admittedly, the hierarchy sensed danger with Maduro’s kidnapping and took care to distance themselves. But the Euro-liberal alignment is complete — as demonstrated by their inability to get involved in the Mercosur agricultural crisis, which they would previously have rushed into.
So the boulevard of sovereignty is clear, and open to the only political party that is credible, capable, and willing to take it: La France insoumise. Let us hope that it genuinely makes this its guiding principle, rather than just an occasional talking point: a major theme, which does not hesitate to embrace the affect of shame in order to better promote its antidote: sovereignty, as opposed to vassalage.
You have to be as narrow-minded as a doctrinaire to despise the role of affects in politics and offer people only ideas that are unprocessed and gluten-free. Affects run high here, and with an intensity rarely seen — typical of periods of great crisis. Politics is a legitimate game of capturing affects — and reworking them. For among raw affects, there are some that are not pleasant to see, and others that lead to the worst outcomes. This is why, moreover, “sovereignism” cannot be a political line, at least not until its contents have been made explicit. “Sovereignty” as such is nothing more than a jumble, assured, by default, to end badly. We are all too familiar with the fate of all proposals “from both sides.” They are all guaranteed to end up on only one of the two sides — surprisingly, always the same one. When it comes to “Republicans from both sides,” we are left with the degenerate and fascist products of the “Spring” or “Charlie.” As for the “sovereignists on both sides,” who formed during the euro crisis of the 2010s, they are now floundering in the muddy waters of the (formerly) National Front. And that’s all.
Unless there is blatant bad faith, one does not run such risk with La France insoumise. One may doubt that it is “anticapitalist’, not that it is on the left, or even that she is firmly established on the left. The visceral, frothing hatred directed at it by the entire bourgeois press is undeniable proof of this — and, like vice paying homage to virtue. What’s more, La France insoumise stands alone: alone at the end of the boulevard of sovereignty, perfectly clear, just waiting to be taken, even paraded down. This solitude, which has earned it so much abuse elsewhere, is an immense advantage: the advantage of difference. Embodiment of difference when everything around it is nothing but homogeneity is the winning card in a climate where popular anger reigns. That is to say, the violent rejection of the same — the same Euro-liberalism that has been relentlessly imposed on it for decades. Rassemblement National thought it was very clever to normalize itself, obviously to the compliments of a bourgeois press in the midst of fascistization but which demands that we do things properly. Mistake: never go where the bourgeois press wants you to go. This major strategic blunder led Rassemblement National to abandon the field of difference and deprived it of the asset on which it had prospered.
In politics, vacant positions never remain empty for very long. La France insoumise has logically come to occupy the space of difference, but this time with a left-wing agenda, an authentically left-wing agenda, to give sovereignty. One that does not exhaust itself, or should never exhaust itself, but offers an answer — and, in fact, always carries an answer— to the question: sovereignty, for what purpose? With this answer firmly established, there is nothing to prevent us from speaking out against vassalage, acknowledging a common sense of offense, and picking up what the devastated and furious people refuse to let be thrown away.
(To be continued.)
Featured image: Bayeux Tapestry, scene 13: Harold Godwinson, shipwrecked in Normandy, swears an oath of fealty to William the Conqueror (c. 1064). WikipediaCommons. Image insert: President Donald Trump Meets European Leaders at the White House on 18 August 2025. Photo: Daniel Torok. WikipediaCommons.
Translated from the French by Rolando Prats.
