The New French Far Right

My friend Peter Sahlins has an excellent article in the French newspaper Libération this week, in response to a nutty proposal by far-right essayist Pierre Hilliard to strip Jews of French citizenship on the grounds that, historically, France only gave citizenship to Catholics. As Peter points out, drawing on his own pathbreaking work on the subject, even under the Old Regime monarchy of the eighteenth century, there were Jews, Protestants and Muslims who routinely gained naturalization as French subjects. King Louis XIV may have stated his desire for a wholly Catholic kingdom when he revoked toleration for Protestants in 1685, but the realities of Old Regime governance were always far messier than royal pronouncements suggested.

Hilliard made his remarks at a summer institute of the Catholic fundamentalist organization Civitas, and Interior Minister Gérald Darmarin has already announced his intention to dissolve it, and to pursue charges against Hilliard for incitement to racial hatred. But the incident points to the disquieting ongoing revivification of some of the most noxious political currents in French history: deeply racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic. These currents congealed during the nineteenth century around the myth that an organic, unified, devout nation living idyllically under a benevolent king had been deliberately attacked, and nearly destroyed, by atheist revolutionaries working on behalf of shadowy Jewish and Masonic conspirators in 1789. These currents fed the enormous popularity of Édouard Drumont’s noxious 1886 bestseller La France Juive, and then the huge wave of anti-Semitic hatred that flowed across the country during the Dreyfus Affair a decade later. Their principal organ, the newspaper and association called Action Française, had a major influence throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1940, after the defeat and occupation of France by Nazi Germany, they provided the principal inspiration for Marshal Philippe Pétain’s so-called “National Revolution.” His collaborationist Vichy government, on its own initiative, pledged to wipe out all traces of the Republic and to remake France into an ethnically pure, organically organized autocracy. On its own initiative it quickly enacted discriminatory legislation against Jews, and then, starting in 1942, worked with the Nazis to send over 75,000 Jews to their deaths in the east.

The purges that followed the Liberation of 1944, and the trials of Pétain and other leading Nazi collaborators, seemed for a time to have cut these horrible tendencies out of French political life and to have cauterized the wound. The far right appeared to have been entirely discredited, even as many leading Vichy officials quietly slipped back into influential positions in French government and society.

But the currents never disappeared. They inspired much of the resistance to France’s acquiescence to Algerian independence, including the terrorist movement called the Organisation Armée Secrète. One veteran of that resistance, the openly anti-Semitic former paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, went on to found the most important far right political party of the Fifth Republic: the National Front. Now called the National Rally, and led by Le Pen’s daughter Marine, it has become a serious force in French politics, with Marine gaining over 40% of the vote in the second round of last year’s presidential election against incumbent Emmanuel Macron. The party did better in the subsequent legislative contest than any far-right party since the 1880’s. Marine Le Pen is sometimes credited with “de-demonizing” and mainstreaming the party, in part by actively courting support from French Jews, even while contesting the place of Muslim immigrants and their descendants in French society. But you don’t have to talk to many National Rally supporters to see the old conspiracy theories and hatreds bubbling to the surface.

Even as Le Pen comes closer to power, these currents have achieved greater visibility and influence in France than at any time since 1944. The reasons are much the same as those that explain the influence of Trumpism in the United States. A large, resentful, alienated segment of the white population believes that feckless elites have betrayed the country, allowing for unrestricted immigration by heavily criminal newcomers who have no respect for national traditions and loyalties, and destroying native industries to the profit of rapacious foreign multi-nationals and “globalists.” These voters have lost all respect for and confidence in mainstream institutions and media, and now receive most of their news and information from a right-wing information bubble—including the cable channel CNews—which massively reinforces their prejudices while providing them with endless conspiracy theories.

Politics is always tightly entwined with historical narratives, in France more than almost anywhere else, and the French far right has a reworked historical narrative to feed its supporters. Most importantly, it has very effectively—if mendaciously—functioned to nullify the heaviest charge against far right, namely its guilt for the killing of French Jews in the Shoah. First, writers like Hillard repeat the old lie that the Vichy government actually worked to protect Jews with French citizenship, and mostly only deported foreign-born Jews. And second, they deflect from the charge by insisting that the worst episode of genocide in French history was actually perpetrated by the Republic: the supposed genocide of French Catholics in the region known as the Vendée, by French Revolutionary forces in 1793-94. Ever since the publication of Reynald Secher’s mephitic book Le genocide franco-français in the 1980’s (see my review here), this charge has had enormous success on the right in France. Walk into any French bookstore today, and you will find many of the history books in the French Revolution section dedicated to expounding upon Secher’s charges. Over the years I have had many, many conversations with ordinary French people who, upon learning that I study the French Revolution, immediately bring up the Vendée “genocide.” In fact, while the First Republic carried out large-scale atrocities in the region, in the context of a civil war, the charge of genocide is unfounded and inappropriate (as I have argued here).

The clearest sign of how much the old currents have revived came during last year’s presidential campaign, in the campaign of far-right journalist Éric Zemmour. Although, ironically, a Jew of Algerian descent, Zemmour long ago effectively embraced the line of the Action Française and its bigoted, xenophobic, blood-and-soil nationalism. In a series of best-selling books, a popular column for a major newspaper (Le Figaro, of course), and a prime-time program on CNews, Zemmour has defended Vichy, peddled the “great replacement” theory (elites are deliberately trying to “replace” the native French population with swarthy immigrants), called for the closure of mosques supposedly associated with radical Islam, and railed about the Vendée “genocide.” In his number one bestseller Le suicide français, he wrote: “We have eliminated our borders, renounced our sovereignty; our political elites have forbidden Europe even to refer to its Christian roots… France is killing itself, France is dead.” (I have written about Zemmour at greater length here). Founding a party pointedly called “Reconquête,” Zemmour only received seven percent of the vote in the first round, but for a time polled above fifteen percent. Ultimately, his candidacy above all benefitted Marine Le Pen, because in comparison with Zemmour, she looked positively moderate.

And this, at least for the moment, is the real danger posed by the revivification of these political currents. There is no danger that France will fall to fascism in the foreseeable future, or that a French government will try to revoke Jewish citizenship. But the more these currents come to be seen as significant and legitimate, the more the political field as a whole shifts markedly to the right, with less obviously absurd and harmful elements of the far-right program now treated as lying within the bounds of acceptable political discourse. The next presidential election will not take place until 2027. But Macron is walking wounded after the massive protests and strikes against his retirement law reform last spring, and the deadly urban riots this summer. With figures like Pierre Hilliard making Marine Le Pen look more moderate than ever, the chances are not at all insignificant that a party once seen as beyond the pale could take over the French Republic before the decade is out.