In the confrontation between reason and outrage, in the anxiety over what will become of “Their children after them”, to use the symbolic title of a famous Goncourt Prize winner (Nicolas Mathieu, Actes Sud, 2018) and a successful film (2024), the French and Americans are the actors in the same tragedy, the heirs to two betrayed promises.

“Today’s America, weakened and fractured, seems to be drifting away from its original promise, that of its Constitution, to lead ever closer to a more perfect union; the 2024 presidential election is decisive because it raises the question of democracy itself”, writes the Franco-American academic and essayist Amy Greene in her latest book*.

Although the two societies appear to be built on opposing structures – American multicultural communitarianism and French secularism – they are now suffering from the same kind of profound upheaval. Born of a gathering of immigrants of diverse beliefs and origins, and the scene of a racial tragedy from which it eventually triumphed, America has always been able to transcend its diversity through the fusion of all its children’s adherence to its founding values. The famous “miracle” is here, and it is towards it that we have turned with envy – forget the obsessive anti-Americans – since our own is showing signs of running out of steam. Because the French also have their miracle: the historic struggle of the Republic to keep religion, which separates, at bay in favour of education, which repairs, and secularism, which protects.

Here, as there, we fear becoming orphans. Our model is being undermined by political influencers who are cynically banking on presumed origin and obscurantist impulses to do their electoral bidding. As for the American people, “the loss of common points of reference between citizens is contributing to the collapse of national unity,” notes Amy Greene, “The notion of shared truth is being supplanted by so-called alternative facts in a political and media environment that allows individuals to isolate themselves within digital enclaves that either reinforce or harden their opinions…”

This cruel diagnosis is indisputable. As do many analysts in France on the loss of a sense of the common good that has befallen us. But on both sides of the Atlantic, pessimism and anger are bad bedfellows. People don’t detach themselves so easily from what they are founded on. A brilliant observer of civilisations, Elie Faure, author of a monumental History of Art, once examined the American soul. Although he was not seduced by this world, he did concede its virtues of “unlimited energy” and described the United States as a “dynamocracy”.

“The Americans are not interested in the definitive, that is their real strength, and it seems gigantic” wrote Elie Faure in an essay entitled “D’autres terres en vue”, published before the Second World War and recently reissued by du Seuil Editions. In other words, the ever-young America has a ability for renewal that totally contradicts the backward-looking attitude advocated by Trump, the old Republican entrenched in a fantasy ranch.

Like her, old France, rich in its universalist battles, cannot accept that they be disavowed by sorcerer’s apprentices. Whatever their birthplace, whatever their language, whatever their poets, democrats are linked by the same thread. That is why we will be vibrating in unison with the people of the other side of the Atlantic when the day breaks over their presidential election.

* L’Amérique face à ses fractures, by Amy Greene, Tallandier, 250 pages, €19.50.