Jean-Marie Le Pen and the French paradox
Sophie Masson
Keywords: France, Politics, Leadership, History
In 2001, the great French filmmaker Eric Rohmer released his latest film, L'Anglaise et le Duc, released as The Lady and the Duke in Anglophone countries. It is a film set in the bloody period of French history known as the Revolution,and it is based on the diaries of a Scottish woman named Grace Elliott (she was known as "English" by the French of the time, who then as now rather gallingly make little difference between the inhabitants of the Isles). Grace Elliott, an intelligent, spirited woman, was for a time the mistress of the infamous Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XVI. Infamous because this liberal,revolutionary grand seigneur signed the warrant for his own brother's execution, thus exemplifying in one hideous gesture the fratricidal nature of the Revolution. (It did not save Citoyen Orleans from the guillotine, of course.) Grace Elliott could not bear the contradictions inherent in Orleans'position, and left him, but stayed in Paris during the Reign of Terror, thus providing an eyewitness view of the Revolution as it was truly lived, and not mythologised.
Rohmer's portrayal of the period, of the inhumanity and terror of a time when ideologues and psychopaths were in charge of affairs of state, and a kind of collective madness gripped a large section of the population, is unexceptionable to most people, certainly in Anglophone countries. His apolitical,non-ideological stance, focussing on the suffering and terror of the victims,and the hypocrisy and viciousness of the tormentors and fellow-travellers; his pessimistic theme, that the road to hell often starts with the search for heaven on earth: all these things are not exactly untravelled territory, you might think. Indeed, most Anglophone reviews of the film tended to focus on his unusual cinematic technique instead, and whether it worked or not in conveying the sense of the time.
But in France, the reaction was rather different. Although, in a sign of the times, on net sites devoted to film, ordinary French filmgoers reviewed the film very fairly, media critics focussed almost exclusively on the fact that Rohmer should dare to imply that the Revolution was anything other than an unalloyed good, and its participants anything other than saintly idealists. It was nothing more than blatant treachery against The Home of the Rights of Man, the Cradle of Modernity, the Light of the World, post-1789 France. The octogenarian filmmaker was forced to defend himself against the charge that he was some kind of traitor who ought to be guillotined for his effrontery. His plea, that he "did not do this film for political reasons, but to tell historical and human truths",did not sit well with the hypocritical Committees of Public Safety and Jacobin rabble-rousers who inhabit the "quality" media in France. It was all rather reminiscent of the furore surrounding another daring, or innocent filmmaker back in the 1970s: Louis Malle, and the reaction to his groundbreaking, honest, and moving masterpiece about the Occupation, Lacombe Lucien.
The whole kerfuffle was an illuminating illustration of the fact that the wound of the Revolution has never closed in France. At various times in history,it reopens, and shows forcefully that there are not one but two Frances; those divided not only between pre and post 14 July 1789, but more cogently, pre and post 10 August 1792. That is, pre and post the radical coup d'etat by the two extreme revolutionary factions, the Girondins and Jacobins, which unilaterally abolished the 900 year old French monarchy and installed the world's first modern totalitarian dictatorship, and first Year Zero dystopia. It was an event from which France was never fully to recover. Worldwide, this is also where Nazism's and Fascism's, as well as Bolshevism's true roots lie. Here is the birth of extreme right and extreme left, reflections of each other,brothers under the skin, would-be moulders of humanity: its supposed saviours,but in fact its enemies.
Before the radical takeover, there had been a possibility that a truly representative government under a constitutional monarchy might be formed in France. This was Louis XVI's own wish: in his papers found at the Tuileries (but quickly suppressed) were plans for a two-chambered parliament, reform of laws,and much else that would have made France into the same kind of stable parliamentary state as Britain. However the Jacobin republic and its aftermath ensured that France would have huge difficulty in catching up to Britain, in terms of scientific research, colonisation and exploration, and general economic and social progress. The genius of a wonderful country was halted for decades. It ensured that Britain and the Anglophone world would become dominant, and forever doomed France to the envious status of a second- or even third-rank power. It also ensured that "la graine de haine", or seed of hatred, as one nineteenth-century commentator called it, would never entirely be extirpated from the green and gorgeous land that is France.
Sometimes, France is able to somehow bridge the fissure; at various times in the nineteenth century, for instance, the full complexity of the history of the Revolution was honestly discussed and laid bare, with the horrors committed then fully admitted to. But at moments of crisis, the old contagion has spread again,the old wounds open, the old conflicts start up again, each time in slightly different form:
revolution and counter-revolution;
extremism against moderation; and
French against French.
Sometimes, it leads to actual civil war, which is solved only when some authoritarian but balancing figure takes control, someone like Napoleon, say, or de Gaulle after the Second World War (for the Occupation was as much a French civil war as a foreign domination). Sometimes it leads to instability and unrest and actual violence: between 1792 and 1871, for instance, there were no less than ten insurrections and coups d'état in France, and these continued throughout the twentieth century. This basic instability has led to the various changes of Republic and lurching changes of styles of government,from republic to consulate to empire to monarchy back to republic back to empire back to republic. And it has led to what I will call the French paradox: the fact that in France revolutionary extremism and authoritarian absolutism are not just opposites, but quite often part of the same thing. The centralisation of the French state after the Revolution rivalled anything the Bourbon kings imposed, and this has led to ossification in many areas of government, and a fear of devolving power back to local authorities and to the people themselves. And of course la graine de haine continues to dominate discourse to an extraordinary extent.
This paradox is of course often missed by those who do not know France well;most foreigners who love the country do so becausethey love the underlying,pre- and non-revolutionary human reality of France, its gorgeous diversity of landscape, culture, architecture, its ribald, passionate, wry and earthy Gallic base (known as l'esprit gaulois in France), the sense that here is a deep traditional culture that knows itself well. This is la France profonde,or deep France: a term that is itself the subject of much furious invective in modern Jacobin circles. And in many ways, especially but not exclusively in the provinces, la France profonde does still exist, and very strongly; for the Jacobin fury predates the industrial earthquake that transformed society in Britain, and as an ideology, it has little impact on the real lives of many French people. Most people, in whatever place we live, are not ideological; we know life is messy, complex, and not to be analysed "rationally". Industrial and then post-industrial, capitalist and then globalist changes,however, bring real lived changes to the lives of most people; and in this new turmoil that is the post-Cold War world, France once again finds itself staring into the abyss of its past, and the paradox of its existence as a modern state is once again extremely painful, and dangerous.
And therein lies the reality of Jean-Marie le Pen and his Front National movement. It is notable how recent comment on the success of "anti-politician"movements in the West often fails to understand the living paradox that is Le Pen and the reaction of the French state to him. Other peoples in other European countries may have suddenly woken up to the idea of the French paradox, as poisoned gift not only to that country, but to much of the world; the idea that revolutionary extremism and authoritarian absolutism go hand in hand. The metaphorical Jacobinism of the Western left is a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century Year Zero movement: not surprisingly, as the modern manifestation of revolutionary extremism in France, the "spirit of '68"as it's known there, has influenced many Western intellectuals now in a position to influence the media and even public policy. The wish for power is allied to rancorous revolutionary zeal. In this light, it is interesting to remember what Edmund Burke said about the revolutionary assembly in France:
Every thing which they have done, or continue to do, in order to obtain and keep their power, is by the most common arts. They proceed exactly as their masters of ambition have done before them. Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences, and you find nothing at all that is new. They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader. They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation. But in all the regulations relative to the public good, the spirit has been the very reverse of this. There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories, to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns. They make this difference because in their desire of obtaining and securing power, they are thoroughly in earnest; they travel the beaten road. The public interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance; I say to chance because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial.
There, in Burke's characteristic lucid elegance, is the heart of Jacobinism. And many people throughout the Western world, of all kinds of backgrounds, feel that their public discourse has been taken over by Jacobins, who both want power and to destroy customary order. However, although the metaphorical Jacobins do exist in other Western countries, they do not have as strong a grip as in France, simply because the history is not the same. It is quite possible that their influence will fade very quickly, especially under the pressure of popular counter-revolution: there is no underlying grip on institutions and custom,though one should never be complacent about these things.
But France faces something much graver because its very existence as a modern state is predicated on that paradox. The establishment in France is in itself paradoxical: both ancien regime and Jacobin inheritor. And the reaction to Le Pen paints him in similarly paradoxical terms; to the conservative majority, he is depicted as a dangerous revolutionary; to the revolutionary minority, he is painted as a throwback to monarchical-style absolutism. This paradoxical picture is filtered through the matrix of modern France's most feared recent past: the Occupation, in a way that completely traduces Le Pen's personal history (on which more later). But Le Pen himself plays on that paradox: both conservative and radical, he depicts himself first and foremost as a counter-revolutionary. He is not a royalist, but he provocatively praises the achievements of the French monarchy; he is a traditionalist, and yet he is quite prepared to advocate a disturbance of order.
Le Pen's is the model for all the modern Western anti-politician movements;in his slow evolution from 1950s peasant radical to 1960s Breton patriot and anti-Gaullist fighter to 1970s immigrant head-kicker to 1980s MEP to 1990s lost-cause infighter to millennium presidential contender, he has projected as the changeling representative of a France of all colours and ages and backgrounds and yes, religions, united against the Jacobin tyranny which oppresses all. It has made him both larger than life and the ultimate bogeyman for the French political establishment. And yet it has proven unable to get rid of him. In the political system for more than 50 years, since the time he entered the French Parliament as France's youngest MP at the age of 23 (for Emile Poujade's populist party), Le Pen's individualistic, mocking, puckish style has made him a target of extraordinarily virulent hatred, repeated attempts on his life, the mysterious assassination of at least three members of his party, including an important fundraiser, and an endless attempt to smear him with accusations of everything from Nazism to undue influence on the mentor who left him a fortune: an attempt so prolonged and sustained over the years that those who have seen the full extent of it are surprised by the man's continued robust psychological health.
The reputation of Jean-Marie Le Pen has been successfully besmirched to such an extent that even the most open-minded of people thoughtlessly preface any discussion of the new political climate in Europe with something like, "This is no Le Pen, who is of course beyond the pale, but …" His life story has been traduced to a shocking degree, so that someone who actually fought in the Resistance as a teenager – unlike stalwart figures of the post-war French left like Francois Miterrand, who was an official in the Vichy government, and Georges Marchais, for decades the leader of the French Communist Party, with a guaranteed seat in Parliament, who was a voluntary worker in the Messerschmitt factory during the years of the Hitler-Stalin alliance – can be portrayed by press both "left" and "right", all over the world, as the "true heir to the Vichy regime"! And yet nothing has stemmed that slow rise to prominence, to the surface of the zeitgeistwhose undercurrents he swam in for such a long time.
Nothing has ever really stuck to him, in reality; even his most infamous statement, that the Nazi concentration camps were a "detail of history"has not only been taken out of context (he has always condemned revisionist historians, and expressed great sorrow over the Holocaust), but it is rarely acknowledged he apologised for what should be seen not as ideology but as an ill-advised, insensitive bon mot. And indeed he has found many Jewish supporters, especially of late. His inflammatory Enoch Powell-style comments on immigration in the 1970s have been progressively honed and changed as times have changed, and as the Front National, forced by establishment blackballing from the normal media channels of communication, has gone to speak to people directly, and learnt that many immigrants share their concerns about corruption and crime and violence and unemployment and instability, and what people see as the strange inertia of the government.
Le Pen is not a fool or an ideologue, but an intelligent man who is not afraid to change his mind. He now says that only illegal immigrants have no place in France; that immigrant communities only want to live in peace and order, and that he fully supports them in that. He has said that the totem of the left was once the working class and is now immigrants – but only delinquent immigrants. His anti-Islamist statements have not been stressed by anyone from any political front, after 11 September made certain things perfectly clear. His conservative stance on such things as homosexual adoption rights naturally earned him the angry dismissal of Pim Fortuyn, but is shared by a large number of the French public: he has never pretended to be a "progressive"on such issues. The other real piece of bad manners, his jostling of a mayoral candidate in the 1990s, was rightly condemned – but again, in far too shrill terms, as if the Devil himself had suddenly appeared. The reaction to that is to be contrasted with a recent incident in which a mainstream politician attempted to run down – in his car – a factional opponent, when all kinds of excuses were found for him!
Some Le Pen platforms, such as opposition to GM foods, resistance to globalisation, and suspicion of US supremacy, are loudly decried when it's Le Pen but treated sympathetically, or at least neutrally, if it happens to be that of some vague "left" group. The truth of the matter is that he has always worked within the system and the law, peacefully: unlike "left wing"activists like the mass murderer Richard Durn, an official in the grandly-named League of the Rights of Man and a "green" activist, who gunned down several councillors in Paris earlier this year; and the conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan, from the leftwing "think tank" Reseau Voltaire,who published a book a few months ago claiming that the Al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon was really a plot by the American establishment! (He was given space and respect in which to expound his disgusting views in the French media, of course.)
Despite all kinds of attempts made to pin some real thing on him, Le Pen has survived 50 years in politics without any solid evidence of anything more untoward than occasional bad manners and hot-temperedness, and a weakness for bon mots, even at the expense of spin-doctoring and damage control. His formidable talents – an extraordinarily quick intelligence, a bardic gift for oratory, a strong understanding of historical processes, and an often reckless bravery – are part of the fear he inspires in the establishment;this is a man who in any other democracy might have had better scope to exercise them.
Long before modern pundits woke up to the fact, he also exemplified the fact that the rebels who arise out of our times also tend to be not of the majority,the mainstream, as such, but strangers in some way, yet able to work within to subvert the system. Insider outsiders, as it were. Ironic indeed, when you consider, as Parris (2002) observed in a recent, striking piece in The Times:
They challenge and in the end break the Centre-Left's dream of gathering a rainbow collection of once-beleaguered minorities to dance behind the machine.
In France, such a truth has been clear for a very long time to anyone who understands French history: it is often the "insider outsiders" in France who have championed French unity, when the centre cannot hold. Such was the case in the fourteenth century, when outsiders like Bertrand du Guesclin (a Breton too) and Jeanne d'Arc helped to rescue the fledgling, failing French nation both from attack from without – the English; and within – the Burgundians. Such was the case too in the Revolution: as Napoleon, himself an intimate stranger, saw, it was the Chouans, Bretons and Vendeens, who were the defenders of true liberty. Le Pen, son of a fisherman and a peasant girl, born in Morbihan, deep Breton-speaking Brittany, comes from a people who have known the oppression of a unitary, monolingual system intimately. He is Breton to the bootstraps, a fighter for "hopeless" causes in time-honoured Celtic clansman's fashion, long in memory, and a gripping, old-fashioned orator. This is the kind of man the "old" working-class-focussed left must have thought was their own; except for the fact of that wrinkle, the Breton singularity that militates against centralising conformity. It is a singularity which encompasses both a fierce pride and a fierce loyalty.
If Le Pen had identified as a Breton separatist, even one who advocated armed revolt and political murder à la ETA, he would have been more respectable to the radically chic "new Jacobins", even to the politically orthodox, who have learnt that "militant" need not always equal "terrorist" if one says it quickly enough, and as long as one is far away from the bomb or the gunshot. As it is, though, his combination of Breton mercurial puckishness and appeals to French unity baffle and frighten and enrage a great swathe of the political spectrum. And it has to be said that he plays on his own paradoxical nature to such an extent that he often runs the risk of alienating the conservative majority. It is interesting to note here that the old revolutionary areas of the far south and the deep north voted in the largest proportions for Le Pen in the recent presidential elections, while the traditional, revolution-hating west recorded some of the lowest votes for him, a phenomenon baffling to the bonbon Jacobins of Le Monde.
His combination of humour, pessimism, passion, and use of anecdote and story drawn from history and the natural world have made him a speaker to be feared amongst those who practise what he calls, with a great play on words which combines French, Breton and modern history, as "la langue de Blois".("La langue de bois", or wooden tongue, in French, is an idiomatic phrase for hypocrisy, fudging, political correctness; "Blois"was the family name of the king of France who was supported by Joan of Arc and then betrayed her; and "bleiz" in Breton, which has in the past been associated with "Blois", means "wolf".) Partly, his wide reading and love of language and the natural world have helped him to survive, no doubt, the vicious attacks on him. But it has also contributed to his formidable reputation, which has grown by word of mouth, and not hype. Not everyone understands the full gamut of the allusions and references in his speeches; but he writes them himself and speaks clearly, lucidly, with no patronisation of his audience.
It has found him more and more supporters: from 1 per cent of the vote in 1972, when he started the Front National, to nearly 20 per cent now. Nearly six million French people, of all backgrounds, voted for Le Pen in the second round of the Presidential elections, despite a shameful media campaign which made many people in France, of whatever political persuasion or temperament, feel deeply uneasy about the real meaning of the huge vote for Jacques Chirac. Of course there is no such thing as an objective press in France: maybe because of the role of the pamphleteers and writers in creating the Revolution, the Fourth Estate has always seen itself as directing the agenda. Here, too, revolutionary extremism and absolutism were married; there is no independent TV or radio, and as far as the print press is concerned, you have a choice between parish-pump regional papers (which most people buy) and heavily ideological and polarised "quality" press. But in between the first and second round, there was practically Soviet-style unanimity in the organs of media. You had to look at Anglophone media to get any sense of balance or fairness at all. And though some milk-and-water Jacobins in the Anglophone press interpreted the fear of FN voters to identify themselves publicly as "shame",in fact it was good old-fashioned intimidation, to the extent that many people felt that if they did admit to voting FN, they might lose their jobs, be personally abused, their houses or other property vandalised. This was not altogether paranoid: such things as the sight of crowds in the streets marching under red flags, and calling out slogans such as "On egorgera le porc!"(we shall cut the pig's throat), or the threat made by leftwing extremists to watch who took what how-to-vote card in the second round, and follow them home later to "re-educate" them, were not exactly calculated to inspire confidence in democratic wishes being respected!
The ghosts of the bloodthirsty ideology-enforcing harpies known as the tricoteuseswere invoked several times when public figures, such as singers, sportspeople,writers, film stars etc., were harassed and pressured into divulging that they would vote for the incumbent President – with the corollary being that if they did not, their careers were over. Chirac himself, a born political survivor, and his party showed those signs of unease as well: how comfortable could it have been to know that everyone voted for you because though they thought you were a corrupt crook, you were only electable because the Devil himself was standing against you? Certainly, after the second round there was little real celebration on the rightwing side of the establishment, and the cabinet the President appointed later was notable for its careful adaptation of many of the points Le Pen himself had raised. But though one might be pleased at the fact that ministers such as Raffarin or Ferry have raised such questions as whether the "Spirit of '68" (read, the revolutionaries) was responsible for the way France seems to be heading for the abyss again, it is difficult to know whether or not it's all far too little far too late. The French paradox hems the establishment in; too much truth-telling, in fact, leads us right back to that vexed question not of 1968 but of the cause of which 1968 was merely a symptom: that underlying undermining of legitimacy.
It is obvious that France cannot return to pre-1792 monarchical days; but a start on a healing or repairing process could be made. By, for a start, not persecuting filmmakers who tell the truth about murderers and fanatics; by remembering the reality of poor Louis XVI and his doomed attempts to reform the French state; by remembering the victims of the Terror, by the President attending memorial services in Vendee to the victims of the Convention's genocidal zeal; by looking again at the whole of French history, with complexity and honesty and understanding. And this leads into modern realities, into acknowledging the idea that in a democracy, people are entitled to ask questions, even difficult and uncomfortable ones, and are entitled to expect proper answers from their elected representatives.
Intimidatory name-calling and invective designed to silence – such as accusations of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Nazism etc. – should not take the place of real debate. They do not protect from the really dangerous people,in any case. And now that the secret ballot and universal suffrage allow establishments and authority to know the true feelings of their citizens, it is time to make a proper start towards a real, evolutionary, truly representative democracy in France. In order to do so, one must admit not only to the existence of the paradox, but also to the fact that critics of the establishment, like Le Pen, have their important part to play. In a time when "the people" have really come on the stage, the last thing France needs is a simple brushing-aside of unpalatable truths. It is a dangerous decadence at a time when a new bravery is needed, a bravery of understanding to see what is really happening beyond those self-erected walls, the walls of the French paradox.
ReferenceParris, M. (2002),"Left and right no longer have any meaning", The Times, 11 May.
