I look at France's political landscape and I see a terrain of fractures. Majorities barely hold before they break apart, governments pass like seasons too brief, and the country, weary of quarrels, sometimes comes to doubt the Republic itself. Forces are being recomposed without yet drawing a clear face: on the right, on the left, in the center, each seeks its path through the fog, and we too often confuse agitation with movement, maneuver with thought.

But through this din, a question rises that no artifice will silence any longer: that of the earth, the air and the water. It had been relegated to the rank of fair-weather concerns, fit for days of plenty and deferred to tomorrow whenever worry pressed. Here it returns to the heart of the debate, not by the grace of a speech, but by the force of things: summers that burn, harvests that tremble, the humble who, first of all, pay the bill for a world thrown out of balance.

Let there be no mistake: this question is not a cause among others, to be placed alongside work, bread, peace. It is the measure of everything else. For there is no social justice on a ruined planet, no prosperous Republic on exhausted soil, no brotherhood among men when they quarrel over the last sources of water. The earth is the first of our common goods; to defend it is to defend the worker as much as the farmer, the child being born as much as the nation that endures.

What we lack is not clarity—everyone, deep down, knows—it is will. We are told that the hour is too grave to act, that we must wait, spare interests, defer decisions to tomorrows that never come. But waiting here is only another form of abdication. The interests that set peoples against one another are the same ones that would have us believe we can do nothing: they have everything to lose if a nation seizes hold of its destiny.

So I say it with the faith that has never left me in the people and in the power of deeds: the hour is no longer for diagnosis, nor for promises paid in words. The hour is for action. Let politics cease to contemplate the wreck and set hand to the work; let it make of the transition not a burden cast upon the humble, but a great common undertaking, just in its means as much as in its ends. It is by this that we will recognize a living Republic: not by the speeches it pronounces, but by the acts it dares to take.