Sabine Herold
s the editor and spokeswoman for Liberté j'écris ton nom (Liberty, I Write Your Name), a think tank and activist organization at the forefront of a new and growing pro-liberty movement in France.
Herold and Liberté j'écris ton nom came to prominence last summer when the organization led two anti-government-union rallies in Paris, the second of which attracted a phenomenal eighty thousand protesters.
A passionate speaker and essayist, Herold promotes liberty from a moral, ethical point of view — namely, from the standpoint of individual responsibility and the right of every individual to make his or her own decisions.
For this Atlasphere interview, Herold spoke with editor Andrew Schwartz about politics, French culture, her thoughts about the United States, and the goals of Liberté j'écris ton nom.
The Atlasphere: How did you first become interested in politics?
Sabine Herold: It's interesting — when I was eighteen and still in high school, I was absolutely not interested in politics. Then I arrived at the Université Science-Po [Political Science University] in Paris — and when I got there I was still almost apolitical.
But I'd always been anti-communist, because I knew the consequences. I knew it caused close to eighty million deaths — that's just too many.
And at the Université Science-Po, I met many interesting people. Everyone there is very political. You have the left wing of course, but then I started talking with others and thinking, and I started reading some very interesting authors like Jean Francois Revel, Toqueville, and about six months later I discovered Hayek. And I started thinking about these things.
Also, about one year after I arrived at school, the association Liberté j'écris ton nom was created by Edouard Fillias, another student at Science-Po. I knew Edouard on a casual basis, and at one point he sent an e-mail to many people in Science-Po about his organization — so I went to the web site and found it very interesting to read the articles and to chat with other people on the forum.
All this led to my interest in politics and got me to thinking in a political way.
TA: When you encountered these new ideas, were they shocking? Or did they resonate with you immediately? Libertarian-oriented thought is not exactly well known or popular nowadays in France.
Herold: You're right, it's not. But I think I had always been a libertarian, without always knowing it.
When I wrote my first article for Liberté j'écris ton nom, even at that time I didn't know I was a libertarian. The article was on euthanasia, and was written from a clearly libertarian perspective. But when I wrote it, I was thinking only in terms of individual freedom, without knowing what libertarianism could be as a philosophy.
I think that to believe in individual freedom is a natural thing.
TA: Since that first article, you've become Liberté j'écris ton nom's editor and spokeswoman. What are the organization's goals? What was the initial motivation for creating it?
Herold: It was created three years ago by several students who wanted to act in a political way, but outside the party system. When you're young, there's no real forum to express your views in politics. If you work for a political party as a young person, you can act — you can hand out some flyers — but you can't in that system think and express your own feelings.
The students who originally created Liberté j'écris ton nom wanted to engage in both action and reflection. And that's partly why I found it very interesting.
We have a web site where we publish articles, and that forces us to think about individual freedom, to try to define it and to apply it to current issues. And we're also activists — we organize conferences and demonstrations. So it's a very good combination that you can't find anywhere else in France.
Also, France doesn't have a libertarian party, so…
TA: That's right — is there any libertarian movement at all in France other than Liberté j'écris ton nom?
Herold: There's not much. The problem with libertarians, I think, is that we're all very individualistic, so it's hard to work together! But there are various groups in France with libertarian ideas working independently.
Actually, I think each organization is useful in the area it wants to touch — some want to specialize on taxes, some want to specialize on pension issues, some are just general think tanks.
The thing that makes Liberté j'écris ton nom special in the libertarian movement is that we mix both action and reflection. And that's pretty rare in this movement, to include action.
TA: You're not joking when you say "action" — Liberté j'écris ton nom led a couple of very prominent anti-state-union rallies last summer in France, the second of which drew an incredible eighty thousand people. How did those come about?
Herold: The first one was May 25 in Paris in front of the town hall (not in my home city, Reims, as some articles reported). There were about fifteen hundred or two thousand people there, so this was a kind of prelude to the very big rally.
This first one was conceived in a café, where myself and two friends, whom I had met through Liberté j'écris ton nom, were complaining, saying that we had to do something. At that time there were strikes in France by the state transportation workers, and the country had basically been crippled for about one month. It was pretty impossible, because when you have to catch a subway, you have to catch it — you want to go to work — and that had been impossible for about a month.
So we were just completely fed up. And we decided to organize a demonstration against the unions on the twenty-fifth of May, because this was the day the unions wanted to organize a huge demonstration.
We actually wanted to do a kind of counter-demonstration, though we didn't want it to feel like we were only against something; I think the term "counter-demonstration" is not a good one, because it implies that the primary demonstration is more legitimate. We wanted a demonstration that was not just against the unions, but that was also pro-reform. Because we wanted to say that we want to reform the country and that we need to have a pension reform — and we also wanted to oppose the unions blocking the country.
We had only about twelve days to organize it, so that was pretty difficult — but we did convince some mobile press crews to join us and we sent people faxes and e-mails. It was pretty difficult to publicize it.
An Interview with Sabine Herold on Politics, France, and Freedom - Ayn Rand Admirers at The Atlasphere
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