Maier chez Ruquier

Michel Polac (journalist and writer): …It’s a nightmare. You give a lot of true details, with witch I totally agree. But what bothers me, one more time, is the style. When I red your book this morning, I thought you were living in suburbs (NB: French suburbs are a kind of ghetto). Actually, you’re from a middle-class family from Genève and you invented your style. In my advice, it’s a little bit cheating. You exaggerate your vulgarity. It removes strength to your book.

Corinne Maier: I’ve always been “pee and poo”, since I was a little girl in spite of my education.

MP: So you always have been like that. But may be your vocabulary hasn’t always been like that.

CM: Yes, it is. I think it’s hopeless, Mister Professor.

Laurent Ruquier (presenter): Speaking about teachers, I hope they won’t read your book.

CM: My kids go to school, I’m very afraid.

LR: What you say is terrific: the way the teachers speak to parents is terrific. And above all: “in this place of constraint, school, the teacher reigns. Or more precisely the she-teacher, who generally is somebody that didn’t like school when she was a little girl, otherwise she would have chosen more brilliant studies and would have a more interesting job and a bigger salary.” That’s the last straw!

CM: It’s easy to say, but it so good!

LR: Is it a personal revenge? It’s terrific. Polac?

MP: I will change my tone and speak seriously of a book that doesn’t seem serious at all. It’s a book that I would like to have written. Not in that style, but with the same content. Why? It’s because I always refused to have kids. I have a daughter and know I am a grand-father, but I didn’t want her. I confessed to her, but I waited that she is old enough to bear the confession. I didn’t want kids. I was used to detest the idea of a progeny, of recognize me in children; contrary to people who are delighted with recognize them in their own children. So I thought that there was an important book to write. If we see it through to the bitter end of our - mine and yours - reasoning, it’s the end of humanity. It’s over, humanity is too much lucid. You are terribly lucid. So let’s stop it all, we’ll be the last human beings on Earth. I quite agree with this, because I’m bored of human stupidity. I find that human being isn’t worth.

Franz-Olivier Giesbert (journalist): Not the children. Adult human beings aren’t worth, but the children are.

LR: They’ll do worse!

MP: Children are polymorph perverse, everybody knows that since Freud.

Eric Zemmour (journalist): If I could add something after Michel, I’d tell the reproach that I wanted to do to the book. There’s no wholeness. As if she didn’t know that the story is tragic. She seems to say that we must stop having kids, but she addresses only to the white Europeans. But if the white Europeans stop having children, the others still have a lot. And the other will come to take up their place. That’s the law of humanity.

CM: And so what? Where is the problem? We just have to let come people from outside who will be glad to live in Europe. It would be far less expensive than educate our own children.

FOG: Do you realise what you are actually saying?! We’re going to import children?

CM: The european child pollutes in an enormous way!

EZ: It’s terrific. It looks like cheap humanism.

CM: There’s no humanism in my words. I’m not humanistic at all.

EZ: On the contrary you are!

CM: Stop insulting me, because I’ve never thought about humanism!

EZ: It looks like if we can exchange people. But we can’t exchange people! People have their own culture.

CM: Wait a minute. You are telling me that this will be a problem in a collective point of view. I answer you in a collective point of view.

EZ: So do I.

CM: People of course can’t be exchanged. But in an economic point of view, we just need to let people immigrate.

LR: She says: “A piece of advice: if you want to support some parasite, choose a gigolo but not a child. Gigolos are more pleasant and you know for what you pay.” She’s so funny!

Clementine Célarié (actress): Seriously… your book is a joke, isn’t it?

CM: Not at all! I don’t write in order to have fun. It’s very serious.

CC: Why did you have two children?

CM: I committed a lot of mistakes in my life. The first was to be a salaried employee during 15 years. I made a book of that. After what I had children and I thought that it may be a mistake and I wrote a book.

FOG: Your third mistake is this book!

CC: You made 2 before you understand this was a mistake?

CM: And I’m not sure that my books are mistakes.

EZ: She says something very interesting. She gives some interesting statistics: people divorce more and earlier more quickly after they had their first or their second child. As the woman becomes a mother, men are intimidated by women become mothers. As people confuse desire with love and marriage, they think that if desire decreases, they’re not anymore in love, and then they divorce.

LR: Clémentine Célarié wants to say something.

CC: I have an idea. I’ll write a book, and I swear I will, on 40 reasons to have a child. Thank you for giving me this idea.

CM: People who come back home from work are totally tired by a pointless and alienating job. When they’re back home, they have to cook, wash home. Low-classes live that way.

CC: You think people are idiotic when you say that! People have a private life and a personal responsibility! They are not just sheep that can’t make love, can’t travel, like people who don’t live anymore since they have children! It’s null! It’s a null way to have children! It’s ridiculous! And don’t say it about social classes, it’s not true!

CM: Yes, it is!

CC: No, it isn’t. I do know lots of poor people who love their children and who know how to love theim!

EZ: That has nothing to do with it!

CM: We don’t know, we are not at their place.

LR: In any case, they’re watching us because their children are asleep.

CC: The choice not to have children is luxury. You speak about social classes. If they at least had the choice to say they don’t want children. That’s luxury.

EZ: Corinne Maier is right when she says that take care of children takes a lot of time to both working parents. In the low-classes, people don’t have anybody else to take care of their children.

Lou Doillon (actress and Jane Birkin's daughter) : That’s not really recent! If you watch any documentary in the world, women give birth and go back to work one week later. I don’t agree with you when you say that know the mother and the father work. It’s not true. Both parents have always worked with little babies. The question is how people do with it. I agree with the idea of king child. For an example, my son has to adapt to me and not the opposite. If people applied this, they would manage their family life better.

EZ: Yes, but women who work immediately after have given birth don’t take care of their child in the same way than us.

LD: It’s because we make them king child.

CM: I would like to add something. I describe the king child, but also the child allowed to give his advice. We enhance the image of the child as an object, but he doesn’t exist as a subject.

EZ: But he speaks all the time.

CM: He speaks all the time but has nothing to say. His parents speak to him to say nothing. When he begins to decide what he wants to do in life, when he is a little bit older, parents tell him: “are you kidding?! You don’t know what will happen to you! You’ll have a precarious job. You’ll have to adapt yourself to society. You’re gonna be flexible.”

FOG: You’re not serious!

CM: But it’s true. The society is like that. But who are you? That’s the real question. I talk about low-classes.

EZ: She says something interesting. The new generation of workers is in majority in precarious conditions.

CM: And what they are told is “adapt yourself!”. Life is very difficult for young people nowadays. There’s the king baby that becomes a young who is the “baby looser”.

LR: In conclusion, Michel Polac.

MP: It’s a subject about witch women can stop talking. Her book, beyond its women magazine style, is absolutely nihilist. It’s going to drive human beings, as do lemmings, to suicide.

CM: I don’t militate for the survival of our society. Our society like it is doesn’t interest me. I’m looking for the mean to reduce the disaster. That’s why I write.

LR: There’s an excellent question.

LD: I wander if you agree with suicide.

CM: You mean group suicide?

LD: I don’t know. I ask the question.

CM: I don’t have any solution and I don’t suggest anything to anybody. I live my life just as I want and I write books that entertain me. But I don’t suggest anything.

MP: You didn’t say how old your children are. Are not you worried about their reaction after have red your book? Aren’t you afraid they shoot themselves?

LR: No, they won’t. They’ll shoot her.

CM: That’s it! Actually that’s what I hope.

LR: How to be killed by your own kids in 40 lessons!