France on the Brink by Jonathan Fenby

Author:Jonathan Fenby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Though most racism came traditionally from the right, left-wing opposition to Israel shaded into broader sentiment which could easily verge on anti-Semitism at least by implication. That shift in opinion was made for Le Pen senior who constantly warned that la patrie was the target of an evil international conspiracy. He fulminated about foreign finance, international organizations and, above all, ‘cosmopolitans’—an old far-right code for Jews.

Thus, despite her modernization efforts, Marine Le Pen cannot escape a long and poisonous heritage stretching from Dreyfus through the fascist leagues that unsettled governments in the 1930s, Vichy and the Milice, the Poujadist small shopkeepers movement that rose in revolt against the Fourth Republic, the settlers of Algérie française and the OAS desperados who tried to keep alive France’s empire in North Africa and on to the anti-immigrant swell of our time. When asked if he could work with the new-model FN, Nigel Farage, the frankly spoken leader of Britain’s anti-European party UKIP, told the Financial Times in 2013, ‘subjects like anti-Semitism are so deeply embedded in that party that I think it’s difficult to change it.’

To a degree which the politically correct find hard to accept, the Front is no longer necessarily an outsider. In its often confused, often primitive manner, it goes to the heart of many of the concerns felt by ordinary French people today. After the local election result in Brignoles in 2013, Libération wrote that ‘the FN poison contaminates the whole country and all its politics.’

But what if the poison, or at least its first traces, was already in the bloodstream and the Front was simply tapping into it? What if voters no longer wanted to be told by the headquarters of the orthodox parties of left and right in Paris what to think? What if respect for the whole political class had sunk so low that people thought it did not matter who sat in the Élysée and were ready to let their ras-le-bol take over even if that meant voting for a movement which had been on the margins for much of its existence, but now melded with national chord? What if the French were only too willing to seize on external reasons for their woes—immigrants, the Commission in Brussels, globalized finance—rather than facing their own weaknesses and examining why the Germans had done better in coming to grips with the twenty-first century? What if the equivocations and refusal to face reality by the established political class since Mitterrand had created the context in which the Front could put itself forward as the only political movement that addressed the true issues facing the nation?

Shocking as such questions may be to a land of reason and fraternity ruled by a superior elite, it is really not so surprising that the gamut of social, economic and existential problems comes together on the unlikely figure of a twice-divorced forty-year-old who has never held national office. But the roots of France’s problems run much deeper and have a longer historical perspective in framing the national psyche.

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