France and the far Right: writing fiction I fear could become fact

Albert Einstein once wrote that “the world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it”.

As events of the last month or two have shown, not only are we living in dangerous times but also, at the time of writing at least, there seems little real consensus about what to do about it. The hideous attacks in Paris are rightly galvanising people across the continent to stand up for the freedoms we all value so highly and, so far at least, to avoid turning on our own minority communities. You don’t have to search too hard on most social platforms, however, to find individuals who don’t share that view and are only too happy to spread their own brand of hatred. Perhaps it’s the unpalatable price you pay for freedom of speech.

And so you begin to wonder how long will our resolve hold? If the attacks continue, and especially if they continue to be perpetrated by individuals from within our own countries, how long might it be before those on the political extremes play upon our anger and our fear? How long before people become persuaded that their own safety and the safety of their families might be more easily secured by political leaders we might consider too extreme in less threatening times? This is not a fanciful prediction. Aside from the Front National in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Swedish Democrats, Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, the Dutch Party for Freedom and the Danish People’s Party have all been gaining ground.

I have no particular political insight but I have always been concerned by the way history has a habit of repeating itself. Politicians of the far Right have been gaining political ground in France for a number of years. The notion now that one of Europe’s great nations might elect its first far Right president in 2017 is no longer as fanciful as once it was. It was the reason for and the fallout from just this kind of scenario that I wanted to explore when I began to write The Sixth Republic more than a year ago.

The temptation when you start to write a book like this is to begin at a macro-political level; but the real stories are about the impact on people like you, or me or anyone of those poor souls who were targeted in Paris. History is littered with instances of people turning against anyone in their communities they have become convinced may represent a threat. Rarely, of course, is there any truth in such an assertion; isolating the outsider is less about protection and security and more often an attempt by those with power to spread fear and exercise even greater control. It’s the classic divide and conquer technique and this is the point at which our democracies become most vulnerable. Go down this route and, though we may not know it until later, we actually jeopardise the freedoms we believe we are fighting to preserve.

I wanted to explore what goes through the mind of those who may be unfairly deemed guilty by association and to ask how it might feel when the country you have always called home suddenly decides that you’re not welcome any more. I wanted to show how initiatives that, taken in isolation, may seem innocuous at first but whose combined impact over time erodes freedom for everyone, changes the character of a society and renders the prejudices and hatreds of those in power as the norm. I wanted to show how it emboldens those in other countries who hold similar extreme views to spread similar fears in their own countries under the cloak of protecting a particular way of life or offering greater protection or security for all. In this complex, inter-connected world, people tell me it could never happen again. It is that sort of complacency that could lead to it doing so, perhaps so slowly that we don’t really notice until it’s too late. After all, it took five years from the election of Hitler in Germany in 1933 until Kristallnacht in 1938.

The fact is that if we lose our resolve and go down that route, it isn’t merely the communities that are isolated who lose their freedom; we all do. Imagine believing a charismatic politician who tells us we are all under threat; the politician who says that the only way to protect ourselves from Islamist terrorism is to take stronger action. Most people are frightened and so they agree. It isn’t what they want but it seems to them the best chance of staying safe. And then this new president goes further then we had originally imagined and the realisation dawns that far from delivering freedom, every individual has been “imprisoned” almost as much as those deemed to be a threat have been physically incarcerated. Just being able to walk the streets, to visit the shops and to eat in a restaurant isn’t freedom if your society dictates to you who you can be friends with and who you cannot. That’s when you realise you aren’t really free after all.

Sometimes I think that writing stories is a ridiculous thing to do. But then occasionally you hope that what you write just prompts those who read it to think about their own place in this world we all have to share. That’s why it’s time to hold our collective nerve and to realise, irrespective of which god we worship or whether we worship any at all, the overwhelming majority of us have far more in common than ever we have the separates us. That’s the freedom we have to fight for. And, in this case, as an author, that’s when you hope that what you write remains nothing more than a story from your own imagination.

[ The Sixth Republic  ]