It is useful to refer to the historical definition of the term “dictatorship” in order to understand what Karl Marx meant by the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as well as to approach the subject with the rigor necessary to first dispel any semantic confusion.
In the context of the Roman Empire, "dictatorship" (dictatura) referred to an exceptional absolutist regime, established for a limited duration, during which the sovereign could be granted full powers, which he was then required to relinquish at the end of his mission—either once it was accomplished, or when the conditions that had caused the unrest had been resolved. It was a mechanism that the State could invoke upon itself in order to address a domestic crisis, whether political or military.
Any regime that prolongs this mode of governance beyond a period of six months (as was the case with Julius Caesar) or after the resolution of the unrest (as in the well-known example of the USSR) would, in reality, distort the legitimate and legal function of dictatorship.
The term totalitarianism, whose definition remains fluid despite the abundant literature produced on the subject, partially captures the reality of such regimes.
Hannah Arendt tells us in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that not every authoritarian regime is necessarily totalitarian in nature. She bases this on a number of elements (first and foremost the concentration camp— a necessary but insufficient condition— as well as the one-party system or the police state), without which the characterization of a regime as totalitarian is not applicable. What must be retained about totalitarianism is, above all, the anthropological foundation on which it relies: that of a mass of isolated, atomized, de-subjectivized and depoliticized individuals, wholly surrendering themselves to the authority of the State and renouncing their principle of personal responsibility. If this anthropological model— a historical consequence of the development of industrial capitalism and entry into modernity— seems to have reached its peak in advanced human societies, political science remains cautious when it comes to labeling most existing authoritarian regimes in the world as totalitarian.
A regime that is not totalitarian is not necessarily democratic. Moreover, if we were to rely strictly on Roman terminology, no political system or country in the world could truly be described as a dictatorship. Yet, no one would seriously argue, in any context, that dictatorships do not exist.
While it may not be relevant, for example, to classify Putin’s Russia or the Mullahs’ Iran as totalitarian states— given that certain legal institutions persist and that elections involving multiple parties are regularly held— these countries cannot, for that reason, be considered democracies.
It seems problematic to attach qualifiers such as “authoritarian,” “illiberal,” or “plebiscitary” to the term “democracy,” as is sometimes done, especially by those who attempt to nuance the non-democratic character of these regimes. This is much like how the word “secularism” (laïcité) immediately loses its meaning when adjectives like “inclusive” or “demanding” are added. After all, who would think to speak of an “open dictatorship,” a “free dictatorship,” or an “enlightened dictatorship”?
Consequently, although both types of regimes—dictatorships and democracies—take on various forms depending on the historical norms and national cultures of the countries concerned, one must conclude that there is nothing in between them.
The hybrid concepts of “liberal oligarchy” or “authoritarian liberalism,” invented by the social sciences to artificially carve out an analytical space between the two regime types, are chiefly marked by relativism and a lack of rigor.
The Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, which underpins formal logic, prohibits us from speaking of a “democratorship” (a “democratic dictatorship” or a “dictatorial democracy”). We will therefore proceed from the premise that, in the world, there exist only democracies and dictatorships.
It is thus in its common, modern, and widely accepted meaning that we will use the term dictatorship here: to describe a regime that is not democratic in nature, or whose functioning runs contrary to democracy.
While there is not an absolutely impermeable boundary between the two regimes—dictatorship and democracy—we can rely on a set of indicators to draw the distinction.
In a previous article, we laid out reasons to doubt whether France can currently be considered a democracy. But can we, for all that, classify it as a dictatorship?
I emphasize the need to reach a conclusion.
To do so, we will examine the following points in order to rationally compare the two types of governance.
In democracies, checks and balances are independent. The press is independent. The judiciary is neutral. Civil servants are ineligible for elected office. Dozens of professions—workers, shopkeepers, artisans, business owners, employees, and the self-employed—are represented in parliament, reflecting the social body in all its complexity and diversity, so that citizens can engage in deep deliberation through their representatives on complex and multifactorial issues.
The supreme and inviolable principle of equality of all citizens before the law is respected, just as the equal dignity of all citizens is inalienable.
This aspiration toward equality is reflected in the demand for a public education system that provides every citizen with a basic level of knowledge, enabling them to understand the fundamental issues facing the nation and to grasp their underlying premises. In a democracy, every citizen—barring cognitive disabilities that are recognized and supported by society—can read, write, and do basic arithmetic, and has a grasp of the fundamentals of logic, reason, syntax, and applied mathematics. This implies a commitment on the part of the elites to raise the general level of consciousness within the population, even at the risk of fostering dissent or challenges to the established order that might arise from the growth of critical thinking and analytical capacity among the people.
It therefore also implies viewing the people not as a homogeneous and undifferentiated mass, nor as the sum of inherently unequal individuals, but as a political whole made up of citizens who are self-aware and attuned to collective concerns, whose aspirations are equally legitimate, and whose voices are expressed in a lucid and informed manner. Consequently, when elections take place and the sovereign people express a will—even one that runs counter to that of their leaders—that aspiration is heard and respected.
In dictatorships, checks and balances are placed in a position of dependence and vassalage to the State—if they are not simply extensions of it. The media are funded by public authorities or by shareholders directly linked to the State, who themselves benefit from government subsidies. All newspapers, whether right- or left-leaning, reproduce identically the same dispatches produced by government news agencies.
Magistrates are unionized, politicized, and openly issue voting instructions during each election. The trade unions themselves are directly funded by the State, with the goal of framing social movements, filtering out seditious elements, and controlling and steering public demands.
When the people take to the streets, they do so surrounded by unions and police officers, within a perimeter authorized by the State, and under slogans approved by the State. As long as these demands stay within the allowed framework, people are permitted to blow off steam and even break things in the streets—like the Two Minutes Hate described by George Orwell in 1984. But when demands go beyond what is authorized, protesters are beaten, maimed, and blinded by police on government orders.
Parliament is almost entirely composed of civil servants, or official representatives of this or that profession appointed by the State. Nearly all come from the upper social classes, since social privilege is accepted as hereditary. When this is not the case, one may witness the pitiful sight of a simple-minded man—meant to represent the working class—humiliating himself as he stammers through his speech, lips moving, a hesitant finger tracing the lines of a sheet of paper he struggles to decipher, under the condescending gaze of more educated apparatchiks who have taken him under their wing.
Because in dictatorships, in order to secure and enshrine its domination over the people, the elite ensures—through a debilitating and dysfunctional educational system—that a significant portion of the adult population has difficulty reading, or simply never learns to read at all.
Indeed, in dictatorships, the notion of merit does not exist. Only the stupidest and most incompetent attain the highest positions, in order to dissuade and discourage others from attempting to rise through hard work. In this way, social structures and hierarchies are preserved, to the great satisfaction of the ruling classes.
In democracies, all political tendencies are granted a place and enjoy equal legitimacy. The plural expression of the people's voice is respected by definition. Politics is recognized as a space of conflict, and conflicts are mediated—through dialogue, negotiation, and civilized compromise.
In dictatorships, there are good and bad political parties, good and bad citizens, legitimate demands and shameful aspirations.
In democracies, the right and the left confront each other along clearly defined lines, and citizens—properly informed—are free to make their choice in good conscience.
In dictatorships, the differences between various political parties are a matter of simulation. The ruling party is the political embodiment of the state bureaucracy—typically, the partisan form adopted by the high administrative function itself. Competing parties, both on the right and the left, are mere satellites of the ruling power. When a party distances itself from the central bloc and is allowed to run in elections, all other parties—from both ends of the spectrum—come together to form a coalition against it, which logically means in favor of the central authority.
Thus, in dictatorships, there is in reality only one ruling party, composed of differentiated factions always ready to unite, and one opposition party, designated by the state as an internal enemy.
Indeed, whereas in democracies, the opposition is considered a political adversary, in dictatorships, it is seen as an enemy to be defeated, contained, and eliminated—as a threat to the institutions themselves.
In democracies, negotiation with the opposition is possible, especially on existential issues such as immigration, the future of work, healthcare, sovereignty, war, or national identity. In dictatorships, the opposition is demonized.
In dictatorships, a “firewall” is erected against the opposition. Investigations are launched against it. Mainstream media outlets are weaponized against it. Children are paraded in the streets against it. The masses are whipped into a frenzy, with troubled emotions stirred and a hysterical emotional register summoned in order to spread fear in the public psyche. To instill terror, people speak of “a return to dark times” or “the comeback of the 1930s” to evoke the prospect of opposition leaders coming to power. Vladimir Putin, for instance, speaks daily of the need to “denazify” Ukraine to justify his invasion.
In democracies, there is trust in the people—in their political intelligence, their capacity for judgment, and their common sense.
In dictatorships, since all symbolic reference points and egalitarian structures—chiefly public education—have been deliberately and systematically dismantled, the people are viewed with suspicion. They are distrusted. The goal is not to educate them, but to re-educate them.
When elections are held, people’s minds are saturated with propaganda to ensure they vote “correctly.” When they persist in being themselves and stubbornly vote “incorrectly,” their vote is interpreted, amended, and discarded. Or it is delegitimized. This is done using the violence of social contempt.
Democracies are founded on the dignity of ordinary people—workers, and above all, the most vulnerable, the most precarious, and the poorest. Dictatorships, by contrast, thrive on their humiliation.
In dictatorships, only those with degrees, who have studied, who possess symbolic capital—usually backed by financial comfort—feel entitled to judge what is right or wrong. The rest are expected to remain silent and vote as they’re told.
If they vote correctly, then they are an enlightened proletariat—an avant-garde to be patronized, subsidized, and celebrated. If they vote incorrectly, then they are “rednecks,” “toothless,” “undereducated,” “Dupont-Lajoie types,” “inbred,” “filthy fascists,” and they can go to hell. They are portrayed as manipulated, misled—if not outright driven by unhealthy, resentful impulses—justifying their depiction as ugly, backward, and despicable people. Despicable because they do not share the values of the ruling class, which, by definition, dictates the dominant morality.
In democracies, there is no dominant culture, because there is no state culture. There are national cultures, which are expressed through the respect, maintenance, and intergenerational transmission of artistic, cultural, material, and immaterial heritage—heritage that transcends the surface of current events and is inscribed in long-term History. Artists may draw inspiration from it—or not—freely, in order to express their vision with full integrity. New forms may emerge, by intention or by accident.
In dictatorships, there is a Ministry that subsidizes a state culture and pays fake artists to fabricate a state-sanctioned art, which is nothing more than an instrument of propaganda promoting the dominant morality. Those who are called artists are a sort of civil servant, whose activity consists in prescribing the dominant morality. They do so most of the time with zealous fervor—and that’s why they are paid. True artists, those who express themselves outside the standards of the dominant morality, are marginalized, ostracized, or censored.
In democracies, censorship is taboo. Freedom of expression is not an abstract or incantatory notion, but a fundamental legal principle, whose only limits are defamation, threats, or incitement to violence against individuals or groups. In democracies, no one can be intimidated, harassed, convicted, or imprisoned simply for writing, drawing, or speaking.
In democracies, it is the duty of the State to protect freedom of expression. Exhibitions are not banned, books are not burned, cartoonists are not murdered in the street.
In dictatorships, there is no freedom of expression.
And if there is no freedom of expression, it is because the distinction between fiction and lived experience, between truth and falsehood, must be abolished—along with any intellectual or artistic production through which this distinction could be questioned or made apparent.
A dictatorship can only endure over the long term by destroying everything which, by its message or mere existence, contradicts the official narrative and might reveal the factual incoherence of reality with the discourse of the ruling class. This is why, in dictatorships, people can be banned from speaking or television channels shut down—often justified in highly dubious ways with respect to the rule of law.
The rule of law is, in fact, the very expression—elevated to a totem and emptied of content—on which dictatorships rely to give themselves the appearance of legitimacy or legality.
Dictatorships typically call themselves “Democratic Republic” of this or that, and most often justify the worst horrors committed by their regimes with grand, incantatory, and purely declarative principles.
Dictatorships imprison their opponents “to protect democracy,” and ban gatherings or performances in the name of the “values of the Republic.”
They label political opponents as being “outside the republican framework” or “dangerous to democracy.”
The treatment of political opponents is, indeed, a decisive criterion for distinguishing between democracies and dictatorships.
In dictatorships, when a political opponent—despite the entire apparatus deployed by the State to intimidate, frighten, and discourage the public from voting for them—manages to come a little too close to power, radical and unthinkable methods are used to prevent them from winning. Elections are annulled, opponents are imprisoned, jurisprudence is created and custom-made laws are invented to bar them from running. Pressure is exerted on banks to block their financing, on elected officials to obstruct the collection of required signatures. They are forced to devise byzantine strategies to secure funding, all while being placed under tight surveillance—and ultimately, they are brought down just as the polls start to suggest they could win.
In democracies, political opponents are not eliminated. They are not poisoned, imprisoned, or declared ineligible under immediate enforcement just as they stand at the gates of power.
Finally, in dictatorships, everything is arranged so that citizens live with an idealized perception of their country’s power, prosperity, and international image. Everything is done to ensure they remain unaware of the economic, moral, and civilizational decline inevitably brought on by the nature of the regime in which they live. The population is kept in a gentle anesthesia of their sensory intuitions, so as to persuade them they are extraordinarily lucky to live in their country.
Every effort is made to instill in them the deep conviction that the rest of the world is a hell of violence, poverty, and amorality—that foreign populations suffer in silence from countless humiliations and starve in the streets. They often believe they have the best healthcare system in the world and a standard of living the rest of the planet envies.
Dictatorships perceive themselves as the apex of civilization, and their citizens are largely unaware of the dismal image neighboring nations have of them, and of the horror their situation inspires abroad. Some see themselves as a bulwark against decadence; others, as the Homeland of Human Rights.
Unable to find lasting and rational solutions to internal deadlocks or absurdities they cannot address, dictatorships often adopt an aggressive and belligerent stance toward other powers, using them as scapegoats to distract the people from their own incompetence. For dictatorships are defined by their lack of self-reflection and by their refusal to examine their internal contradictions—hence the pathological relationship they maintain with their own History: either they obsessively cling to a glorified episode celebrated ad infinitum, or they lock the population into an irrationally dark and guilt-ridden vision of the past, in order to better dominate and crush them.
Democracies, by contrast, are oriented toward the future. But they are wary of the cult of progress, as well as its corollary—the impersonal hegemony of technology and the market. They understand that their only true legitimacy lies in the consent of the people. That is why they respect the people—in their temperament, their history, their particularities, their long memory, and their identity, through which they can remain themselves while constantly evolving. This dynamic identity allows democracies to endure through the shifting tides of time and to weather the storms of History, while also finding their own ways to engage fully with modernity—protecting themselves from the harmful effects of rampant globalization and triumphant capitalism.
Dictatorships, on the other hand, loathe the people. Their sole objective is ultimately to rid themselves of the people in order to survive. That is why, throughout all eras and in every place, they have sought to create a “new man.” Dictatorships have always worked to change the very nature of the people—through conditioning, re-education, or whatever means historical circumstances have provided—so as to mold them in their image, align them with their will, adapt them, or, failing that, erase and replace them.
This is undoubtedly why tyrants tend to meet bad ends—because when the people, stripped of all legal means of negotiation, dialogue, and dissent by a regime entirely directed against them, are left with no recourse but to either accept their long-term disappearance or to rid themselves of their rulers—violence generally follows.
I hope this synthesis has helped the reader discern the distinctions and to determine which of these two regimes is currently at work in France. It is not for me to substitute my own judgment for that of my readers. Only, in light of the doubt, I recommend fleeing.
