How citizen's protests are answered in 21st century, France...
One year ago today, I made the decision to leave the legal profession. As of January 1, 2025, and after more than 12 years as a member of the Rouen Bar, I officially hung up my lawyers' robes. It was a particularly difficult choice, perhaps one of the most difficult of my life, but it was carefully considered.
In this short text, I want to briefly outline the main reasons. I will say this from a position that protects me from any reprisals, since I am now freed from any ethical obligations.
Like so many others, the Yellow Vest protests changed my life forever. There was a before and an after. Today, the injustice has become so unbearable that I feel the imperative need to do everything possible to fight against it.
However, faced with the decay of the public justice system, I no longer found any meaning in my actions. Due to neoliberal austerity policies, the justice system is severely under-resourced and is increasingly unable to fulfill its mission. To put it simply, the courts do not even have a sufficient paper budget to print lawyers' submissions and documents... Procedural delays have become absurd (count, for example, two to three years for an industrial tribunal action, add another two or three years for the appeal...), magistrates are swamped with cases and everything is only getting worse year after year. Among the direct consequences, one of the most serious is that the decisions rendered are of an increasingly "questionable" quality. An understatement. What's the point of spending dozens of hours working on a case only to be scuppered by a judge who, despite himself, has only devoted a few minutes of attention to it. In my last year alone, I've encountered several catastrophic court decisions based on blatant errors, with disastrous consequences for the individuals involved. And while it would be an exaggeration to say that miscarriages of justice are the norm, they have become so recurrent and egregious that they corrupt the entire system. Justice has become unjust. Everyone knows it, everyone complains about it, but everyone accepts it, and nothing changes.
The worst part of all this is the general apathy that reigns in the legal profession. There are a few exceptional individuals here and there who are trying to awaken spirits and take action to save the judicial system from collapse, but their courage is drowned by the general tide of conformism and indifference.
Faced with the inertia of the entire legal profession in the face of a disgusting political situation directly responsible for this disaster, I no longer felt like I belonged. The few exceptionally human and dedicated colleagues I encountered along the way—and whom I warmly thank here—weren't enough to dispel my sense of loneliness. Good souls are all too rare in a world dominated by appearances, where one must never speak of anything important to avoid being viewed negatively.
The legal world is no exception to the tyrannical contemporary principle that the image one projects matters more than one's good deeds. This results in a casualness and a form of schizophrenia where, with each attack on justice, the profession simply gesticulates like a headless chicken. People dance, sing, and chain themselves to the courthouse... but there's no question of talking politics!
It's less about defending citizens than about preserving the privileges of one's profession; it's less about fighting yet another villainous law than about blandly reassuring oneself by saying "we did something," and too bad if this "something" had no chance of success. We pretend, and that seems enough.
I've seen people who, for the most part, are so happy to have achieved a high social status that they consider themselves "made it."
They no longer think, no longer inquire, as if being granted a lawyer's license had promoted them to the rank of noble, thereby exempting them from being accountable to society. Occupying a high social position comes with an obligation: to work for the defense of less privileged social classes. This, for me, is the profound meaning of the lawyer's oath: "I swear, as a lawyer, to practice my duties with dignity, conscience, independence, probity, and humanity." Unfortunately, I believe we're a long way from that...
I realize that the burden is heavy, and may be hard on some in the legal world. But the times ahead are dangerous. Storms are brewing, and without a collective moral awakening, today's wait-and-see attitude will soon produce—if it hasn't already—culpable acts of cowardice.
This isn't about tallying up the numbers, handing out good and bad points, and ranking the good guys and the bad guys. But when a situation becomes critical, we need to talk things through, to encourage self-reflection and move forward. Yes, we'll have to get our hands dirty, reinvest our political ideas, take the time to understand current dynamics, and agree to talk about them! We're trained to plead with respect for the adversarial process; we should be able to debate politics calmly, right? So let's stop burying our heads in the sand! Please forgive my indelicacy. I just hope this message can contribute to a collective awakening.
I will now follow a different path where I believe my commitment against injustice will be more useful. I will make an announcement about this soon.
