The far right is, to use Marx and Engels’s terminology, a spectre that is haunting Europe, or has been haunting the continent for so long now that it has successfully impregnated political life with its own obsessions and motivations without having held office in most countries.
We in the media are often, not without reason, accused of complicity in this dogged persistence, particularly around election time in foreign lands when potential breakthroughs by far-right parties are given prominence, sometimes at the expense of more salient electoral issues. Journalists will plead the newsworthiness of the coverage, which is often fair enough, but there is a sense that the inevitability of the far right coming to power is baked into all the attention being given to this political tendency.
To no country, not even Germany, does this apply more than to France, where Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (RN, or “National Rally” in a rather unsatisfactory English translation) is now the country’s largest party in parliament and consistently leading in opinion polls. Victor Mallet, Paris bureau chief for the Financial Times, and a long-time correspondent in France, states from the off in Far-Right France, an astute portrait of the party, that he is convinced it will at some point in the years to come govern France.
That could be as soon as next year, with Le Pen, having this week had her ineligibility to stand for office shortened on appeal, this allowing her to run, better placed than any other prospective candidate to win the presidential election. This, Mallet says, would have consequences “as profound for France and the European Union as Donald Trump’s rise has been for the US and the world, and as important politically and economically as the Brexit vote to leave the EU has been for the UK”.
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The party that was once a political pariah, subject to the “cordon sanitaire” of bipartisan alliances to keep it out of power, has been steadily improving its electoral scores (41.5 per cent for Len Pen in the 2022 presidential election). Le Pen, a woman with a propensity for tone and optics, has transformed the party into a more respectable-seeming entity than it was under her mendacious, loud-mouthed and unabashedly fascist father Jean-Marie.
This has been accomplished via the much-touted process of “dédiabolisation” (de-demonisation or detoxification), with an impressive message discipline imposed on its members. Le Pen has softened the image of the party (changing its name from the more militant Front National, and also feminised it (40 per cent of its members are women) and even made it welcoming to gay men (it counts 17 of them among its prominent cadres). She has also benefited from an increasingly rightward media landscape, led by reactionary billionaires such as Vincent Bolloré and Pierre-Édouard Stérin, which pushes the party’s agenda in a way similar to Fox News in the United States.
Mallet draws on his own interviews with the party top brass and speaks to its members and supporters across France to understand its appeal. The answers are familiar enough from accounts of Maga and Brexit – a rising cost of living, immigration, resentment at urban elites (the RN continues to struggle electorally in Paris and most other major cities), and culture wars stoked by the Bolloré media (even if RN voters are, by right-wing standards, heterogeneous in this respect). The panoply of grievances was crystallised in the 2018-2019 Gilets Jaunes protests, many of whose participants either were existing RN sympathisers or later drifted towards the party.
It is unclear to Mallet what direction an RN government might take. He evokes two scenarios: one outlined by Pierre-Yves Bocquet, a former presidential speech writer for François Hollande, in which the RN would amend the constitution by referendum to turn France into an authoritarian xenophobic state, which would move fast and break things (party chairman Jordan Bardella has spoken of instigating a “DOGE à la française” once they take office, and the party plans to privatise the state broadcaster, which is perceived as riddled with leftists).
The second possibility is less disruptive, in the view of political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, who thinks that, as with Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Le Pen would find herself too hampered by the constraints of office to do much of what they want.
It is certainly true that the RN would struggle to square being a low-tax, business-friendly party with maintaining a welfare state that its electoral base values every bit as much as the left does. That said, as with Meloni, there would, even in this instance, still be scope for implementing changes that could do significant harm to vulnerable constituencies, not to mention the fact the party’s links to far-right political violence remain worryingly close.
Marine Le Pen has now been cleared to stand for election less than a year out from the presidential poll. Her conviction last year of embezzlement of public funds had rendered her ineligible from running for public office for five years; though the conviction was upheld on appeal, the ineligibility was shortened, allowing her to run, albeit with a court-ordered ankle tag. The party has made contingency plans to run Bardella instead if necessary. That might be to its benefit, because, despite progressively better election results, Le Pen has acquired the air of an also-ran, and the family name is still, for many, a turn-off.
The 31-year-old Bardella could well be a stronger candidate, though his much-publicised romance with a wealthy Italian duchess is reportedly causing jitters within the party. The RN, also, for all its self-embellishment, remains a Le Pen fief, with the family’s reluctance to yield control having driven away successive pretenders over the years. Bardella will also have to wait in line.
Mallet also correctly discounts the assumption that Trump’s misfortunes or even the RN’s historic closeness to Vladimir Putin will automatically weaken the party. Le Pen and Bardella are already putting distance between themselves and Maga, and they will most likely fail or succeed on issues closer to home.
A misconception prevalent in the English-speaking world about the FN/RN is that it is an inheritor of collaboration with the Nazis, which gives rise to perplexity that French people would subscribe to it at all. This is understandable, given the FN was cofounded by former Waffen-SS members Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s own frequent provocations about the Holocaust and the Occupation of France. But most politically aware French people would recognise in it a much older French far-right tradition, which goes back to the reaction to the 1789 revolution and emerged as a modern political force with the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s.
Enda O’Doherty’s The Dark Side of France traces this history, beginning with Dreyfus, whose framing on charges of treason polarised French society. Anti-Semitism – the word itself had been popularised, by anti-Semites, in the preceding decades – was one of the vectors of the new movement, as were militarism and resentment at the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany during the Franco-Prussian war.
The twin ideologues of this nascent far-right nationalism were Catholic intellectuals, the royalist Charles Maurras and the republican Maurice Barrès, both of whom forged their careers in the Dreyfus years and who, unlike the far right of today, were firmly part of the establishment – each being members of the Académie Française. Maurras founded Action Française, the foremost far-right movement of the Third Republic, and was a veritable incarnation of French reactionary views, seeing the enemies of France as being, among others, Jews, Protestants, foreigners, Muslims, Freemasons and liberals. But even he was opposed to the Nazis, although he did support Vichy France.
[ Fractured France by Andrew Hussey: Half-analysis, half-memoir, highly enjoyableOpens in new window ]
O’Doherty, co-publisher of the Dublin Review of Books, and a former editor at The Irish Times, charts the rise of the far right in the pre-1914 and then interwar years, in formations that resemble in many ways their political heirs today – the Camelots: street-fighters from wealthy families who brawled with socialists and communists; and also the far-right press, which railed against public sector workers as parasites, much like how Bolloré’s media empire now lambastes publicly-funded broadcasters. The breadth of reading on display, of journals and correspondence that are rarely read today, is impressive, and O’Doherty is adept at delineating the texture and discourse of politics of a bygone era.
The Occupation is, of course a key moment in the history of the French far right, and the defeat of the Nazis weakened the movement for some time afterwards; it subsisted, in O’Doherty’s words, among “intellectual cranks and disaffected young men with a taste for violence”. But France, no more than Germany, was not a cold house for former fascists after the war, provided they changed political colour. One example was the pro-Nazi publisher Robert Hersant, who would in later years own Le Figaro, France-Soir and a string of provincial French newspapers, and remain close to power.
The Algerian War and attendant decolonisation also fanned the embers of the far right, particularly for the young Jean-Marie Le Pen, a notorious torturer during the war. The return of the “Pieds noirs” to France, brimming with resentment at Charles de Gaulle’s betrayal, provided the FN with vital electoral ballast in its early decades.
For all of O’Doherty’s diligence as a chronicler, however, The Dark Side of France is a sometimes frustrating read, which might have benefited from tighter editing. The historical linearity of the book would probably be better replaced by a thematic treatment and too much time is spent recounting episodes that many readers would presumably be already familiar with, such as the Munich conference and annexation of Czechoslovakia.
The opening chapter, which relates Émile Zola’s flight to London in 1898 from his second trial for criminal libel for his open letter “J’accuse…!”, is the sort of novelistic trope beloved of nonfiction editors but here it just proves to be a narrative red herring, a false start that sends the book astray before it has even begun.
These gripes aside, though, this is a worthy read for anyone interested in the political history of the far right in France, and will offer valuable clues as to why a contested political heritage has endured, despite the historic opprobrium many of its tenets have been subject to. As O’Doherty says, it is not for nothing that the French far right has mostly replaced its historic anti-Semitism with support for Zionism and replaced Jewish immigrants with Muslim ones as its preferred bogeyman.
Oliver Farry is a Paris-based journalist
