Just milieu

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Juste Milieu ( French for “correct middle”, “maintaining mediocrity”) is a catchphrase that is used in various areas.

Literary studies

In numerous comedies by Molière , the protagonists , who are characterized by a ridiculous excess of a certain character trait (greed in The Avaricious , Hypochondria in The Imaginary Sick , etc.), face so-called "reasoning" who are guided by reason. In literary studies these are called heralds of a “ morality des juste milieu”. The quote from the first act of Molière's School of Husbands serves as an example :

"Toujours au plus grand nombre on doit s'accommoder, // Et jamais il ne faut se faire regarder."
"You should always adjust to the larger number and never be conspicuous."

Political catchphrase

After the French July Revolution of 1830 , Juste milieu was used as a political catchphrase to characterize the leading political category of the “citizen king” Louis Philippe and the leading middle class. A prominent theoretician of the Juste Milieu was Benjamin Constant .

The term found its way into the German-speaking area through the intermediation of Junge Deutschland . It served in particular the authors of the Vormärz for their attacks against liberal conservatism . The criticism was directed against the political “half measures” and the prevailing liberal economic principles of the time, symbolized in the motto of the Enrichissez-vous . Karl Gutzkow described the Juste Milieu as a "creed [of stockbrokers], which does not want to spoil it with anyone, and which must be subject to wherever it is doctrine and deal with positive ends, but where it has the upper hand where it is only a measure of the Cunning and astute calculation of an individual is ”.

In France , the term Juste Milieu passed over to that of the middle and upper bourgeoisie and the upper bourgeoisie during the Second Empire and the Third Republic . In the political discussion it still appears today as a polemical catchphrase against dominant centrist and mediating positions.

For the 1972 election campaign in West Germany, Werner A. Perger wrote in Die Zeit that the Chancellor of the social-liberal coalition Willy Brandt used the conservative "Juste Milieu" when he took office, meaning the CDU / CSU and their allies in business and society, with the words shocked: "We are not at the end of our democracy, we are just getting started."

In 2020, Hans-Hermann Tiedje wrote to the CDU / CSU Chancellor Angela Merkel that she had been “supported by the benevolence of the journalists and the justice milieu” for 15 years.

Automobile history

The French vehicle manufacturer Hotchkiss was originally an armaments company and, like other companies, had found an alternative in the field of automobile production after the First World War. In the 1930s, Hotchkiss positioned itself in the gap between mass production and one-off production and promoted its own vehicles with the slogan “le juste milieu”. With high-quality, but stylistically rather inconspicuous vehicles, Hotchkiss aimed at the upper middle class in France. One served quality standards that went beyond the mass-produced goods, which z. B. by Citroën , Peugeot , Renault , Mathis . At the same time, it was a matter of delivering vehicles that were cheaper and less flamboyant than the luxury bodies of z. B. Delahaye .

See also

swell

literature

  • Karl Heinz Bohrer : Surrealism and Terror or the Aporias of the Juste-Milieu. In: The Imagination Endangered, or Surrealism and Terror. Carl Hanser, Munich 1970, pp. 32-61.
  • Heinz Maus (Author), Michael Th. Greven (Ed.), Gerd van de Moetter (Ed.): Die Traumhölle des Juste Milieu. Reminder of the tasks of critical theory . European Publishing House, Frankfurt / M. 1981, ISBN 3-434-00493-9 .

Footnotes

  1. ↑ La doctrine littéraire de Molière dans “l'Impromptu” (French) .
  2. ↑ Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung of 23/25. May 1835. Quoted from: Gutzkow's Works and Letters - Annotated Digital Complete Edition (October 1, 2006).
  3. ↑ Werner A. Perger: Election campaign 1972: The mother of all election battles Die Zeit , August 10, 2013
  4. ↑ "After 15 years of Merkel, the CDU is without a compass" NZZ from June 10, 2020