The real people responsible

It's not the doctor; it's the patient. He is not the tyrant; he's the oppressed. It's not the general; he's the second class trooper.

We are bothered by always wanting to feel sorry for the victims; the victims choose their executioner and go looking for him. We will never condemn enough the passivity and resignation of the victim, and their complacency which is complicity. Because the victims represent numbers and strength.

You choose your doctor; it's you who called it. It is easy for you to see that you are dealing with a learned imbecile, full of formulas, full of theories like a doctoral gosling, and who will zig you out of principle; or on the contrary to an intelligent man, freed from medical science, who will prevent you from dying or at least will not hinder your recovery.

Here is the way for the patient to make a diagnosis about their doctor: five minutes of conversation on a non-medical subject. Shake before using it... If you notice that the doctor is a doctor, and nothing better, you tell him that you are very well and you express your regrets for having disturbed him... If you find a man, you authorize him to examine you, and you can even, after a period of observation, risk taking the drugs he prescribes to you.

You choose your tyrant: it is you who elected him, or at least it is you who allowed him to stand there... If he is not a good tyrant, what imbecile prejudice, what traditional spinelessness force you to endure it longer?

As for the military spirit, which is the worst cause of oppression and the most incurable of endemic evils, it is unfair to locate it only among generals. Generals are not very numerous, compared to the army; thus the harm would be very limited... We must go further; it is not the stripe that sets the limit of the military spirit.

The laced soldier is not strictly speaking the soldier. He is the leader, in all the ineptitude of the term and in all its mechanical value. Obeying and commanding is the reason for being and the rules of the game for the leader.

You find the leader, intact, in the offices of our ministries and our administrations. You find the leader, in perfect condition, behind the counter of your post office, and under the agent's cap, and under the bus conductor's cap... The leader without stripes, whom you knew to the regiment under the guise of cook, moth guard and nurse. What makes a leader is insolence, inability to think and obstinate refusal to discuss...

Mr. Poincaré is truly a leader. He is proud of it. Those who understand refuse to command; they teach.

But the soldier, the soldier from whom we are dying, the soldier who generates the military spirit, who puts the people on the brink?... It is not the general.
I denounce the victim. The evil soldier is the incorrigible second-class trooper, who stoops in the barracks all day long and stands up in town, ringing his spurs; the one who tests the prestige of his livery on the nannies of the square; the one who does not understand the imbecility of the gesture accomplished and the dreary sadness of the lost years; the one who bawls like a triumphant calf the day he is declared good for service and walks through the streets of his town, decorated like the animal that was in the competition before going to the slaughterhouse; the one who marches in step following the retreat of July 14 and who, in the evening, will be drunk as a thrush for having confused the celebration of freedom with that of the army... the one who, once released from the service, evokes with moved tenderness the most humiliating bullying, with this conclusion: “Bah! We were young; Those were the good times...as if there weren't better ways to spend your youth.

I denounce the victims, who are solely responsible for the ills from which they suffer. The victims: the patient, the taxpayer, the soldier…

G. DE LA FOUCHARDIÈRE.

P-S. -- Jacques Robin: thank you for your letter, which was valuable to me, as you can judge. As for Robert de Jouvenel, I am copying for you a sentence written by another reader: “The language of Robert de Jouvenel was as pure as his face: so we now have the impression that a fragment of logic has become detached of this world.