France’s Last Weapon When Disarmed: Its ‘Values’
French magazine Valeurs Actuelles argues that politicians invoke abstract values to justify contradictory policies on Ukraine and Syria while avoiding accountability for inconvenient facts.
In contemporary France, political discourse has become saturated with appeals to so-called “values” — republican, European, democratic, humanist — invoked as self-evident justifications for policy decisions that often contradict observable reality. According to Valeurs Actuelles, this rhetorical device has become a substitute for reasoned argument, allowing politicians to avoid accountability while presenting subjective choices as moral imperatives.
The distinction between a value and a virtue is crucial, the French publication notes. A value represents what we choose to esteem, transforming preference into purported fact and moral obligation in one stroke. Once proclaimed, values require no further demonstration of justice, reasonableness, or efficacy. The conclusion is reached before examining reality itself, and when reality proves inconvenient, it is simply reinterpreted through the lens of these declared values.
Ukraine: Selective Memory in Service of Values
The support for war in Ukraine exemplifies this mechanism. While Western nations frame their backing as a defense of shared values, the Donbass conflict had already claimed over 14,000 lives before Russia’s February 2022 invasion, including more than 3,400 civilians according to United Nations data. To maintain the narrative aligned with proclaimed moral principles, inconvenient history is erased. The Russian invasion becomes the conflict’s starting point, while the preceding eight years disappear from collective memory.
Syria: From Jihadists to Respectable Partners
Syria presents another case study. Following Bashar al-Assad‘s fall and the assumption of power by Islamists in December 2024, Western governments have resumed dialogue with authorities emerging from a movement long considered hostile to the West. The justification relies on a convenient narrative: former jihad adherents supposedly discovered moderation on the road to Damascus. A moral stamp of approval transforms the questionable into the acceptable.
Brussels: Democracy Without the People
The European Union illustrates the same contradiction. Democracy is championed within an edifice that more closely resembles what Charles de Gaulle famously described as a technocratic, unaccountable, and stateless assembly than genuine popular government. The structure features officials not directly elected by citizens, a Commission wielding legislative initiative, and lobbyists enjoying permanent access to governing bodies. Yet merely extolling democracy apparently suffices to render the institution democratic and thereby legitimate.
Concealing Sovereignty Transfer
Beyond these specific instances, constant reference to values serves to conceal that France has transferred substantial sovereignty to supranational bodies. This rhetorical device exempts leaders from answering for their actions and enables them to defend a policy and then its opposite without acknowledging contradiction. Simply claiming to act in the name of shared values settles the matter, as Valeurs Actuelles observes.
Aristotelian Virtue Versus Modern Values
The compulsive recourse to values does not align with traditional Western political thought. As European Union structures assume powers once held by nation-states, abstract values fill the resulting void. Instead of inquiring what is good or just in itself, these qualities become dependent on subjective appraisal rather than objective standards.
The ancient concept of virtue offers a substantive alternative. For Aristotle, virtue was not a rule applied to situations but a quality verified through action and engagement. Courage is not a slogan inscribed on buildings but the capacity to confront danger. Justice means rendering to each what is owed. Prudence involves discerning in each situation what should be done, at the appropriate moment, for the common good. Virtue proves itself rather than merely proclaiming itself.
Where a value declares what must be esteemed, virtue asks what one is capable of doing and, more importantly, what one is capable of being. This distinction reveals why virtue is infinitely more demanding than values: it cannot be satisfied with declarations but requires demonstration through concrete action tied to the circumstances of existence.
The substitution of proclaimed values for practiced virtues represents a profound shift in political discourse. It allows contemporary leaders to invoke high-sounding principles while avoiding the rigorous self-examination and accountability that genuine virtue demands. In this framework, the invocation of values becomes less a guide to action than an insurance policy against confronting uncomfortable realities.
With information from Valeurs Actuelles
