"Love Letter to the 2010s": a youth making its own common sense

According to Mediapart, producer and author Shanice Mendy has published an unreleased column, "Lettre d'amour aux 2010" ("Love letter to the 2010s"), addressed to young people who have been mobilised for more than a month. She describes the 2010 generation as "the children of adults too tired to still shout", and writes: "The living, that's you. Those of the present. Those of 17 October, of the 24th and of 5 November." That is more or less all the wire report gives us: neither the precise object of the mobilisation, nor its scale, nor its demands are detailed. We will not invent them.

What remains is what the text does, and that is our reading, not an established fact. A love letter is an odd genre for a mobilisation: one would expect a tally, a headcount, a "youth movement" with its inevitable experts on the set explaining that it is nice but not very serious. Mendy chooses the direct address. She does not speak about this youth, she speaks to it. That simple shift of pronoun is already a small insurrection against the usual tone, in which the commentator plays the reasonable adult and the young play the weather.

One thinks of what Gramsci called hegemony: an order holds as much through consent as through coercion, when its worldview becomes common sense, the thing that makes the contingent look "normal". The media, the school, civil society are its trenches. Against this, counter-hegemony cannot be decreed: it requires ideas, places and organic intellectuals drawn from the milieus concerned. An author who takes the floor for a generation in struggle, naming it "the living", is precisely attempting to reverse the label: the weary are no longer the norm, urgency is no longer excess.

But let us keep the gardener's patience. First caveat: this column appears in Mediapart, an independent but well-established paper, read by an audience already sensitised. The alternative common sense circulates here in a channel of the respectable critical establishment, not yet in the thirty seconds of a rolling news channel or in a school playground. Second caveat: a tribute, however sincere, remains an adult's voice about youth. The Gramscian question stands: will this generation produce its own intellectuals, or will it be forever narrated, even tenderly?

Third caveat, more prosaic: emotion mobilises, it does not structure. A war of position is fought with institutions, newspapers, unions and collectives that last longer than three dates on a calendar. The text cites 17 October, the 24th and 5 November: milestones, not yet an architecture.

We would be wrong, however, to treat the matter with condescension. When the dominant press says "les jeunes", it often means "the problem". When an author says "les vivants", she shifts the boundary of what looks reasonable. It is modest, it is literary, and it is exactly there that another common sense sometimes begins.