French Populism and Discourses on Secularism by Per-Erik Nilsson

Author:Per-Erik Nilsson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

6

Echoes from the Past

An Outlook on Europe

In this book, I sought to account for how the web-based journal Riposte Laïque and its associated activist network, the RR, diagnose the state of contemporary French society and politics, and the ills that are plaguing France and its people. Moreover, I showed how and by which means their authors and leaders seek to cure France of these ills. I have analyzed the Riposte Laïque diagnosis and countermeasures used as discourse, and have focused on how the journal articulates populist discourse on both secularism and nationhood.

I have approached populism as a mode of identification that is structured along one horizontal and one vertical axis of articulation of the category of ‘true French people.’ The underlying logic of these articulations is one that reduces the current social, political, economic, and geopolitical struggles into a battle between two essential groups: the true people and its enemies. The enemies of the people are turned into a projection surface for the ills identified by the publication Riposte Laïque. Thus, along the horizontal axis of populist identification, Riposte Laïque articulates a preeminently universal civilizational, cultural, religious, ethnic, and political alterity: the enemy being Islam and its Muslims.

While Muslims are articulated as the quintessential external enemy, the categories of immigrant and being clandestine are widely attributed to non-French and non-European citizens, even though these people may be fourth- or fifth-generation French. They are continuously racialized through articulations that tie their somatic features to alleged cultural and religious universal identities, and they are seen to pose an existential threat to the French nation and its people. According to Riposte Laïque, they have declared war against France and seek to colonize the nation through the use of veils, mosques, halal food, street prayers, and by manipulating French political leaders and gullible journalists, academics, and activists. Also, Riposte Laïque reproduced the Eurabia thesis, stating that Muslims together with the Gulf States are joined in a mission to turn Europe into “Arabia.”

The declared essential identity of the external enemy is juxtaposed with essentialized concepts about the people’s identity. Riposte Laïque rearticulates and reframes the dominant articulations of the current social and political identification categories; and it seeks to legitimize and hegemonize their meanings through the reclassification and restructuring of history, by employing pseudo-scholarly lingua and commonsense rhetoric. While Riposte Laïque claims to be anti-racist, the analyzed material seems imbued with an abundance of racial markers. Moreover, the identification of their “true people” racializes whiteness, through the many allusions to pure French Gallic ancestry, the French nation, European civilization, and Christianity. Riposte Laïque professes that it is the true bearer of feminism, while it uncritically absorbs and reproduces anti-feminist thoughts and a biological essentialization of gender. The heterosexual nuclear family is articulated in Riposte Laïque as being the organic base of the nation, by which the cultivation of the people’s Gallic ancestry (hence, pure blood) can be reassured. The publication’s writers also cherish the inherent characteristics of the people, in an autophilic manner: In the

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