(speech by B. Stirn on October 7, 2024, at the meeting of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences)
I would like to place on the desk of the Academy the book by Jean-Denis Combrexelle, Les normes à l’assaut de la démocratie, published by Odile Jacob.
Our country’s taste for standards is old. Montaigne wrote that “we have in France more laws than the rest of the world together and more than would be necessary to regulate all the worlds of Epicurus”. Montesquieu noted that “unnecessary laws weaken necessary laws”.
But the disease tends to get worse. In three successive studies, published in 1991, 2006 and 2016, the Council of State expressed concern about normative inflation and instability. It must be said, however, that the situation has hardly improved. The book by Jean-Denis Combrexelle is therefore a very timely contribution to the debate, as it helps us to understand the phenomenon and offers prospects for progress.
The author was particularly qualified to undertake such a task. During his rich administrative career, Jean-Denis Combrexelle served for thirteen years as Director General of Labour, and he knows better than anyone how much labour law is affected by excessive standards. He then chaired the social section and then the litigation section of the Council of State before heading the cabinets of the Minister of Justice and, finally, of Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
His book leads us safely into the “law factory”, of which the author knows every corner. Jean-Denis Combrexelle notes that “the law, often poorly mastered, has taken a disproportionate and excessive place in administrative action and most often masks a form of conformism and cultural refusal of reform and change”. He observes that “lawyers and administrations have built cathedrals, but only a few specialists understand the liturgy that is celebrated there”. It is not a question of blaming anyone, and in particular not “the deep state”, which Jean-Denis Combrexelle shows to be largely a myth. Taking a pragmatic approach, his book emphasizes that responsibilities are shared and that the excessive use of the norm actually has sociological roots. “Our society suffers from an addiction to the norm, and more particularly to the norm contained in the law,” explains our author. The various actors in society seek to assert their uniqueness and to over-guarantee what they believe to be their legal certainty.
The result is worrying for the authority of the law as well as for administrative efficiency. Jean-Denis Combrexelle underlines that “if all the norms were applied, in their entirety, by all the actors, it is more than likely that society would be blocked”. He notes that “in the vast majority of cases, existing standards and texts already make it possible to achieve the desired goal without the need to add additional layers of measures”. He rightly points out that the inflation of standards feeds public spending since “the more complex and numerous the standards, the more human and budgetary resources are needed to implement and control them”. Ultimately, democracy itself is at stake, since, as Jean-Denis Combrexelle tells us, “far from serving democracy…the rule of law, in its inflationary form, can reduce its effectiveness and put it in difficulty in the eyes of public opinion”. There is therefore “an urgent need to reverse, in a significant and lasting way, the curve of normative inflation if we want to prevent democracy from being assimilated to an inefficient bureaucracy”.
Courses of action are therefore sought, here too with a concern for pragmatism in the approach and efficiency in the result. Jean-Denis Combrexelle shows that we must beware of false good solutions, which are simplistic and ultimately without real effect. Far from breaking the “steel cage” that the administrative technostructure constitutes, it is necessary to mobilize public officials by means of adapted methods, such as a “public accounting of the norm”, so that they deploy their qualities in the right direction. Parasitic structures, which duplicate the work of other administrations, should be abolished. Reform without a norm is to be favored, and the culture of the result is to be disseminated. Without being a miracle cure, artificial intelligence is an opportunity to better reflect on “the place, content and meaning of the norm”.
Accessible to a wide audience, Jean-Denis Combrexelle’s book provides an informed and measured insight into one of the stumbling blocks of our public action. He emphasizes that beyond the quality of the law, normative inflation undermines the effectiveness of the administration and contributes to the questioning of democracy. Even if, as the author acknowledges, “there is no modern society without complex standards”, a leap is needed, which invites the State to better play its role as guardian of democracy “through its standards, through its organization, by listening to civil society, by its efficiency, by its ability to deeply question itself and to reform itself, by the courage of its members “. It seemed to me that this call deserved to be heard by our academy.
(speech reported by JJ PLUCHART)