By DANIEL AFONSO DA SILVA*
Let it be recognized: the arrest of President Lula da Silva was unequivocally an act of treason against the country.
"Un roi n'est pas quelqu'un d'ordinaire. Un roi n'est pas quelqu'un comme les autres. Un roi doit donc régner ou mourir” (Camille Desmoulins).
Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794) unconsciously forged the ethos of contemporary politics. Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes and Locke had done it centuries ago. Now it was him: Camille Desmoulins.
The Revolution was in full swing. The Parisian furor was taking over France. The Bastille no longer existed. The greatest symbol of centuries-old French repression had just been invaded, unfurled, and adulterated. Not a single prisoner – real criminals and simple sinners – remained there. It was the beginning of the end of the past. New times were opening up. Versailles was next. target. And the fearless people, enveloped in uncontainable fury, headed there with the aim of capturing the king.
Everything was going well at the departure. But as the abode of the kings approached, some contrition began to visit hearts. The wise and the uneducated began to hesitate. Louis Capet was not simply Louis XVI, King of France. He was the fusion of two bodies. The first human, all too human. The other almost celestial; eternal and immortal. Who reincarnated the divine trinity. From father to son. From God to the French. For a long time, for almost a thousand years.
The most intelligent not only knew, but also felt the content of it all. They recognized the revolutionary dimension of the Revolution. And so they began to thrive. Capturing the king was nothing more or less than a direct affront to the family father [father of the family]. An affront that, in itself, imposed aggravating factors and unpleasantness.
It was clear that no one demoralizes or discredits with impunity a celestial, divine, maximum and supreme authority, present or past without returns. Without mincing words, one does not affront the family fatherTaking Versailles, therefore, produced this discomfort.
Many, therefore, in the middle of the Paris-Versailles road, besides hesitating, wanted to retreat. Many even began to cry. It was all useless. Their actions were no longer their own. The movement was becoming historic. Where people are simple passive and powerless objects. Led by irreversible forms of conduction and power. Which, in this case, reached the King of France and intercepted him. In their two bodies. Louis Capet and Louis XVI. They took him out of Versailles and brought him to Paris, the Tuileries, the Louvre.
What can I say? It was a brutal shock for everyone. Initially of a moral nature. But, little by little, of an irremediable spiritual nature. A king, sent by God, was seen deposed and imprisoned. Tortured and deprived of his freedoms. Despised, harassed and humiliated. Ruthlessly kidnapped from his royalty.
Were the revolutionaries really that powerful? Just in case, the dilemma remained: what to do? What to do with a king who, by all indications, is no longer a king?
The buzz was spreading from mouth to mouth. Speculations of all sorts were circulating in Paris and elsewhere. Theories of the most diverse kinds were also circulating. No one was indifferent. Nobles and commoners. Clergy and laymen. In squares and palaces. Streets and convents. Seraglios, brothels and taverns. It was the talk of the town. A great furor that was mixed with great fear.
For better or for worse, France – Europe and the world – was being thrown into the unknown. It was an acute moment of turning point severe. The kind that takes millennia to repeat itself. That recalls the Iliad, the Peloponnese, the spoils of Oliver Cromwell, the blood-curdling screams of the American Revolution. A rare thing, something like that. Endless trauma. An impetus for rupture and change. Sudden change. The kind that is never a good advisor.
The King of France was in prison. And, essentially, no one really knew what to do. That is the objective situation. His contemporaries did not know Lenin. And Robespierre, already steeped in madness, was already too blind. That is the context.
It was then that Camille Desmoulins took upon himself the imperatives of reason and reminded everyone, in a deliberative plenary session, among the common people and before Sylvian Bailly, the city's legal representative, that “Un roi n'est pas quelqu'un d'ordinaire. Un roi n'est pas quelqu'un comme les autres. Un roi doit donc régner ou mourir” [A king is not someone ordinary. A king is not someone like any other. A king, therefore, must reign or die].
To reign or to die: a logical, rational and irreparable precept. Which would mark the fate of Louis Capet and Louis XVI. Two bodies in one. Which would disappear forever. And, beyond that, with their martyrdom they would shape the entire ethos of the structure of contemporary representative regimes. To the point that no truly democratic democracy disregards this precept and inspiration. To the point that General De Gaulle, in the founding act of the Fifth French Republic in 1958, referred almost verbatim to Camille Desmoulins when he stated that a president should only exist if he is to actually preside.
And to preside in a sovereign and absolute sense. With total authority, emanating from the people. In a simulacrum of monarchical power. Distant and haughty. With symbolic and material, concrete and transcendental distichs. With the people as witnesses. First in France. Then throughout the world.
Whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not, but that's how it was. After 1945, the world's main democracies began to grant the president of the Republic material, symbolic, moral and magical power and strength similar to the attributes of a monarch who holds absolute, concrete and abstract sovereignty as a deep wedge of power. That the people – and only the people – can weaken, dehydrate, empty and remove.
The most eloquent example of this also occurred in France. The year was 1968. The month was May. The generation baby boomer took to the streets of Paris and its surroundings. Students, workers and people without any occupation joined hands in protest against the established authorities. Something unprecedented after 1945.
The President of the Republic was General De Gaulle. The Prime Minister was George Pompidou. The 1958 Constitution – conceived and drafted by the general – clearly gave the former the imperative to preside and the latter the prerogative to govern. This made it quite clear that presiding and governing were never synonymous. For they were part of parallels driven by a long political-philosophical tradition anchored in diatribes rooted in the ancient world for millennia. These imposed on the act of presiding an authority superior to and distinct from the simple and simplistic act of governing and forging governability. In other words, only the president was a monarchist.
Given the furor of May 1968, General De Gaulle therefore left for Baden-Baden – where he met with General Jacques Massu – and left Georges Pompidou in Paris to hold talks with the representatives of the mutineers. The general assumed, and the Constitution imposed, that a president of the Republic should never stoop to the level of the common people in order to “negotiate” with them. The prime minister was there precisely for this gesture of stepping into the mud and mud. By definition, he should always be ready to get his feet dirty.
And so it was. So, weeks later, in May-June 1968, everything seemed to be on track. The French government had given in. The mutineers – generally beardless people who had never known the fury of Hitler or Mussolini – celebrated their award. Meanwhile, General De Gaulle – hero of the total wars, leader of the resistance against Nazism, architect of the appeal of June 18, 1940 and founder of the Fifth French Republic – fell into depression. And for good reason: he realized that May-June 1968 had tarnished the morale of the Republic and the dignity of the presidential office.
In response, General De Gaulle called a referendum with the purpose of rebuilding their forces. There were many doubts in the air. Doubts that weakened the president's position and forced the general to clarify. That's what the French did, saying no to the general. No and nothing more. The year was 1969.
The general took this as an offense and left. He resigned and resigned from his position. Even though such a gesture was not constitutionally imperative, for the general it was morally necessary. Since the president only has a reason to exist if he is to effectively preside. And, in this case, since the people – the source of all power – emptied the president's presidential capacity, he preferred to leave in a convinced and extreme gesture. Made a family father misunderstood who is thrown out of the house.
This is how it was for the general and this is how it was for the French: a reminder of Camille Desmoulins' message that a president of the Republic, in fact and law, cannot be treated like an ordinary, common or banal person. Therefore, he cannot and should not be cornered. Nor threatened. Even less so, arrested. Killed, perhaps. Imprisoned, never. A president – the quintessence of a monarch – does not belong in a prison.
The general knew this. And at the slightest possibility of losing all of his legitimacy and being treated like an ordinary person, and even facing trial and going to prison, he decided to leave. A president of the Republic in prison is an ignominy.
On the other side of the Atlantic, despite largely consistent criminal reasons, the Americans have never arrested any of their top leaders. They have killed some and tried to kill others. But they have never arrested anyone. No American president has ever been sent to jail.
In the recent French case, since January 2025, President Nicolas Sarkozy has been under controversial house arrest, having been forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and suffer restrictions on his freedom. But, as everyone knows, this only happened because France is no longer France [France is no longer France].[I]
In the case of Brazil, the temptation to flirt with the ignominy of arresting the President of the Republic gained new colors, passion and flavors with the complaint filed by the Attorney General of the Republic, Paulo Gonet Branco, on February 18, 2025, involving former President Jair Messias Bolsonaro.
A truly honest first reflection would lead any interested person to, before making any statement, read, analyze and seek to understand the nature and consistency of the document presented by the Attorney General of the Republic.[ii]
After doing so, one realizes that it is, unequivocally, an irreproachable piece. Well thought out. Well written – which, in general, is not common in this type of work. Well founded. Well constructed. Formally impeccable. Convincing and imposing. To the point that former minister Carlos Velloso, of the Federal Supreme Court, concluded, in an interview with Valor Econômico, on Friday, February 21, 2025, it is an impeccable piece.
Yes: impeccable. But – according to the same minister – caution is required in the judgment. Firstly, because the process “is under the eyes of the world”. Secondly, because the judgment needs “not only to be correct, but to appear correct. This is super important”.
The highly respected former minister of the Supreme Federal Court asserts very relevant positions. But on a legal level and without noticing that, at the bottom, the issue is political and moral. Since attempting to arrest a former tenant of the Palácio da Alvorada represents, first and foremost, an extraordinary audacity.
With all due respect to jurists and non-jurists, enlisting a President of the Republic in any process that could result in a prison sentence represents the most extreme level of insurgency against the nature of any political regime with a veneer of democracy. Take a deep breath and think about it.
Yes: that's what it's all about: parricide. An insurmountable trauma. Looking more slowly and clearly at the history of France, it becomes clear and evident that the French have not yet overcome the trauma of the parricide they committed in 1793, resulting from the beheading of the king, nor the resignation of General De Gaulle in 1969, resulting from that no. referendum.
The beheading of Louis Capet and Louis XVI shaped the French exceptionalism that marked the planet throughout the 1940th and XNUMXth centuries. However, the debacle of XNUMX came to exact its toll. That strange defeat [strange defeat] on which Marc Bloch meditated was essentially fueled by the unheard-of ghosts that had haunted the unconscious of the French since the offensive against Louis Capet and Louis XVI a century and a half earlier.
De Gaulle served as a savior in the 1940 defeat.[iii] Like it or not, he was the one who best embodied this redemptive condition and, later, founded the Fifth French Republic.
But the circumstances that forced his departure in 1969 accentuated the trauma of 1793 by launching, once again, France to the unknown.
The lack of love in any society vis-à-vis To your family father throws any country into the unknown.
Back in Brazil and seeing everything like this, unequivocally the arrest of President Lula da Silva – as well as the arrest of President Michel Temer – threw the country into the unknown.
At that time, the Judiciary became the dominant power among the branches of government. Partly due to the atrophy of the Executive and Legislative branches. Partly due to the trivialization of the practice of playing with fire, practicing chronic disaffection towards the nation's leader. Something ignominious that was fostered by the Mensalão scandal, amplified by Operation Lava Jato and embodied by the impeachment of 2016.
O impeachment 2016 – as everyone knows – was a shock. A transgression. A direct political affront to the honor and competence of the President of the Republic. But, as they say, it was part of the political game. So the trauma was temporary. Different from what happened in 2018. In fact, very different.
Let it be recognized: the arrest of President Lula da Silva was unequivocally an act of treason against the country.
To put it bluntly: no serious country – and Brazil is a serious country – involved in a regime worthy of the epithet of democratic arrests the president of the Republic. Period and full stop.
But they dared to do this in Brazil. President Lula da Silva was arrested.
The situation was complex. People were living in hysteria. The furor of the nights of June 2013 could still be heard. In the same way, the blind desire for relentless revenge against the Lula-PT legacy had gained strength with the political entropy of the 2015-2016 biennium. And, as a result, the extremely fragile redemocratization initiated by the Geisel-Golbery duo, set in motion “slowly, gradually and surely” by people of the caliber of Ulysses Guimarães, Tancredo de Almeida Neves, Fernando Lyra, Franco Montoro, José Richa, Teotônio Villela and expanded during the presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and Lula da Silva (2003-2010) faded away.
Yes: the arrest of President Lula da Silva caused the redemocratization of Brazil to fade and disappear. Because in that extreme gesture, the fragile intersocial pacts for redemocratization were broken and the consensus on the imperative of democracy in Brazil ceased to exist. Consequently, the country was thrown into the unknown. The existence of the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro is a simple detail.
The release of President Lula da Silva was a mix of decency and greatness. But it fell far short of redeeming society from its greatest failing: confronting family father.[iv]
How to redeem yourself for the 580 days of imprisonment of a family father? We can no longer pretend that it didn't happen. The Brazilian social fabric has been torn apart and all interpersonal relationships have been called into question. Consequently, such brutality, uncertainty and lawlessness have rarely been witnessed among us.
So, to once again consider the arrest of a former president of the Republic of Brazil – even if it is Jair Messias Bolsonaro – borders on absurdity once again.
*Daniel Afonso da Silva Professor of History at the Federal University of Grande Dourados. author of Far beyond Blue Eyes and other writings on contemporary international relations (APGIQ). [Read here]
Notes
[I] On the conviction of President Nicolas Sarkozy, empty, Especially here . And about French entropy, empty here .
[ii] Vide the full complaint here .
[iii] About the subject, empty here .
[iv] I have discussed at length the consequences of President Lula da Silva's arrest here .
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