When their backs are to the wall, the French turn right

When their backs are to the wall, the French turn right

It is said that in the event of an international security crisis, the Americans go to DEFCON 1, the Brits convene a meeting of the COBRA emergency committee and the French raise their national alert level from “surrender” to “collaborate.”

That is perhaps unfair: in the darkest days of the 1940s, with most of Western Europe under the Nazi jackboot, the brave men and women of the French Resistance shouldered the burden of defiance almost alone.

What is true, however, is that when their backs are to the wall, the instinctive French reaction is to execute a sharp political turn to the right.

In November 1799, with the revolutionary First Republic financially bankrupt and widespread discontent on the streets, the Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte led a coup and had himself appointed first consul — and, eventually, emperor.

Napoleon is, of course, best known for his military genius, conquering most of Europe until he met his Waterloo, but domestically he was very much a man of authoritarian bent. He concentrated power in his own hands, introduced censorship, closed all opposition publications and brutally repressed dissent in a regime that the American historian David A. Bell has described as “soft despotism.”

Napoleon concentrated power in his own hands, introduced censorship and brutally repressed dissent

Ross Anderson

A century and a half later, the French were at it again. While the Resistance enjoys and deserves our enduring respect, it was in 1940 that the “collaborator” jibe was first deployed. The collaborator-in-chief was Marshal Philippe Petain, a mentor of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco with political views two goose-steps to the right of Attila the Hun.

Conveniently for Hitler, who lacked the resources to subdue all of France, Petain set up a government in the town of Vichy and offered to do it for him. The Vichy regime was authoritarian and repressive and reversed the liberal policies that had made Paris the avant-garde capital of European arts and culture. Moreover, if there were any Jews, communists or other “undesirables” to be rounded up and carted off in cattle trucks to the death camps of Eastern Europe, Petain was the man for the task: with his enthusiastic help, the Nazis murdered at least 72,500 French Jews.

You would think by now that the French would have learned a lesson, but evidently not. They vote on Sunday in the first round of National Assembly elections and, if the polls are accurate, then a majority of its 577 members will belong to National Rally, the far-right party led in the assembly by Marine Le Pen.

To be fair to Le Pen (and we are fair to everyone here), she has done much to sanitize the legacy of her father Jean-Marie, who founded the party as the National Front in 1978. A rare combination of antisemite and Islamophobe, he was repeatedly convicted of assault when he was a law student. He was president of a student association whose members specialized in street brawls with anyone they suspected of being a communist, and he even managed to have himself thrown out of that. The old boy is also a serial loser: he served with the French Foreign Legion in Indochina (defeat) and Suez (humiliation) and five times he has tried and failed to become French president. He turned 96 last week, so he is probably past all that now, although he could try a bid for the White House — his relative youth might be a bonus.

The daughter is an altogether smarter operator, who knows a liability when she sees one. She deposed her old man as party leader in 2011, threw him out entirely in 2015 and changed the party name to National Rally in 2018. Gone, too, is the vile, racist rhetoric demonizing migrants, minorities, Jews, Muslims and even France’s European partners. In its place are emollient words about tolerance and cooperation.

And in place of anyone called Le Pen as overall chief, National Rally’s candidate to be prime minister is the fresh-faced and squeaky-clean party president Jordan Bardella — who, at 28, is barely out of short trousers and does not exactly bestride the world stage like a colossus. You would pay to be a fly on the wall at his first encounter with a genuine major player such as Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.

The Muslims fleeing France are young, educated, professional people who have simply had enough of intolerance

Ross Anderson

It may be that Marine Le Pen’s conversion to the voice of sweet reason is genuine, with electoral gain the motive, but there remains a problem that she shares with her fellow populist in the UK, Nigel Farage: with so many of their parties’ candidates running for office, some of them will not have got the memo. You can never tell when some far-right dipstick will accidentally and instinctively execute a straight-arm Nazi salute without being fully aware of what he is doing. One of the candidates for Farage’s Reform UK party at next month’s British parliamentary election has declared that the UK should have stayed neutral in the war against Hitler, that women were spongers and not entitled to healthcare, and that Winston Churchill was an “abysmal leader.” It is only a matter of time before similar sentiments emerge from the darker recesses of National Rally.

Already, those most likely to be affected by an epidemic of xenophobia in France’s governance have begun voting with their feet. A remarkable book out this year, “La France, Tu l’Aimes Mais Tu La Quittes,” has just been published in English as “France, Loving It But Leaving It.” In it, a succession of disillusioned and disenchanted Muslims tell the authors why they no longer feel safe, welcome or at home in the country of their birth and have decided to move elsewhere.

And these are not the usual suspects, the deprived denizens of the banlieues, the largely lawless suburbs of Paris where the police go only with a bulletproof vest and weapons drawn. The Muslims fleeing France are young, educated, professional people who have simply had enough of intolerance.

A typical example is Aminata Sylla, 25, who is studying at the Sorbonne for a master’s degree in international relations but cannot wait to quit the country. “It’s been a build-up of all the negative experiences I’ve had,” she told the authors. “When it’s not that I’m Black, it’s that I’m Muslim, then it’s that I wear a headscarf. I feel like I can’t breathe sometimes.”

The book’s authors believe matters will only deteriorate with the electoral rise of the far right. “In the next few months, we will see a growing disinhibition of Islamophobic words and behavior,” said one of them, Olivier Esteves. “We wrote about women who are spat on for wearing the hijab — that kind of thing is only going to get worse.”

We can only hope he is wrong — but don’t hold your breath.

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News’ point of view