Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Emmanuel Todd, a French sociologist, is convinced that there was something more sinister behind that great outpouring of patriotism. The fact that “millions of French people came out onto the streets to define, as a priority of their society, the right to pour scorn on the religion of the weak” reveals something deeper and more disturbing. “The focus on Islam actually reveals a pathological need among the middle and upper strata to hate something or someone,” he writes in his book Who Is Charlie?49 Nor is it driven by concern about Jews, who have been repeatedly targeted. Anti-Semitism is a very real problem plaguing France, but hardly any of those who so earnestly demonstrated after the Charlie Hebdo attacks raised their voices when Jews were murdered in Toulouse a few years earlier. French Islamophobia is a force that “casts Muslims out of the national community,” and though a direct by-product of terrorism, it also, he argues, has the effect of provoking it.50

  Thinkers like Finkielkraut and the famous feminist Élisabeth Badinter are part of this provocation. Badinter is known for likening veils in school to the Munich Agreement and boycotting labels that produce Islamic clothing. She sees attacks on Islam not as racist but as upholding secularism and women’s rights. But as certain excessively clad visitors to French beaches would soon learn, this can lead to very concrete new forms of oppression by agents of the state.

  Finkielkraut and former president Nicolas Sarkozy have gone so far as to protest the conversion of unused churches into mosques in a petition in the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles. The irony is jarring. Upholding secularism, apparently, now requires the restoration of churches. “It’s no wonder,” Shatz writes, “that, for many Muslims in France, including the silent majority who seldom if ever set foot in a mosque,” Charlie Hebdo’s very large iceberg, was starting to sound like “a code word for keeping them in their place.”51

  7

  NOSTALGIA, FEAR, AND THE FRONT NATIONAL’S RESURRECTION

  “It was the cold that woke me,” writes Marine Le Pen in the first line of her autobiography. It was 3:45 a.m. “It seemed like I’d just fallen asleep, when I awoke with a start, shocked by the cold and this strange silence. I was going to get up when I realized that my bed and my room were scattered with shards of glass.”1

  The twenty kilograms of dynamite that tore through the building shattered windows, collapsed steel columns, and catapulted the neighbors’ baby—and the mattress that saved him—from the fifth floor into the foyer of the building. Marine and her older sisters were sent to neighbours across the street in their slippers and pajamas—“planted there in front of a cup of hot chocolate in the home of strangers. Completely lost.”2 She was eight years old.

  November 2, 1976, changed the course of Marine Le Pen’s life. It was that night that she was thrust into the reality of politics in the cruelest and most violent way possible. “I was 8 and learned brutally … that my father could die, that he risked dying and what’s worse, that it was because people wanted to kill him,” she writes. “I had gone to bed the night before like all other girls of that age. When I woke up I was no longer a little girl.”3

  The attack also planted the seeds of a deep resentment in her, one that persists to this day. “My father didn’t receive the slightest sign of solidarity or compassion from the authorities. Not a sign or word from the head of state or members of government or the police chief. Nothing in the mail or even the shadow of a telegram,” she recalls. “Only a young city councillor from the 15th arrondissement who came to the crime scene to meet the victims.”4

  The explosion that cut the building in two and left a gash sixty feet wide was one of the biggest attacks Paris had seen since World War II. “Even as a child, I could sense clearly that an assassination attempt against a politician—even one who wasn’t yet well known—was a major event, yet the attempt against my father and his family would very quickly be filed away and passed over in silence.”5 Forty years later, she found herself running the party her father founded and leading polls for the first round of France’s presidential election.

  The Front National’s headquarters sit on a quiet street in the unassuming Paris suburb of Nanterre, near a car repair shop and a Portuguese restaurant, about six miles west of the flat where Marine Le Pen was almost killed as a child.

  Only when you approach the grey building with its mostly closed blue shutters do the armed guards come into view. In her modest second-floor office, surrounded by books and a cloud of vape smoke, Le Pen explains how she transformed a party known for calling the Holocaust a “detail of history” into a genuine contender for the presidency.

  “Voluntarily or not, he gave ammunition to our adversaries,” she says of her father’s rhetoric. But she insists that she has now put her house in order. “I kicked out the people … who had stayed,” as a result of her father’s complacency, she says. “I fired them all from the FN … all those people who expressed an ideology or held views that I found unacceptable.”6

  When Marine Le Pen took the reins of the Front National in 2011, putting an end to the charges of anti-Semitism that had been levelled against the party for decades was at the core of her de-demonization campaign. In 2015, she went so far as to formally oust her father from the party and his role as honorary president.7

  Le Pen is deeply resentful of past efforts to declare the FN beyond the pale. It is a visceral resentment, one that is rooted in her anger as an eight-year-old as she watched her childhood world shattered with scant sympathy from anyone around her. There are traces of that rage when she speaks about the front républicain and talk of a cordon sanitaire that have been mobilized in the past to sideline her party.

  While she acknowledges the faults of her father’s leadership and insists that she has purged all relics of that era, she believes her opponents are still tarring the party with the same brush and painting her as a clone of her father. “Today our adversaries no longer have that ammunition and they repeat on loop” slogans that no longer have any currency with French voters. “They’ve repeatedly used the arguments of racism, fascism, and xenophobia,” she complains. But, Le Pen contends, “at a certain point, this argument loses its force … because voters see clearly that there’s absolutely nothing in our platform that closely or even remotely resembles fascism or racism.” She seems to sincerely hope that “if the person who embodies a certain politics changes, perhaps the vision that people have of the political movement, in fact, changes with it.” In other words, that people will accept that she is not her father.

  “They’ve tried everything against the FN—everything!” she exclaims, listing a litany of legal challenges and electoral reforms, “and nothing has worked.” She remains extremely calm about it all, she says. “My goal is not to come to power by surprise,” she told me one year before her election loss. “I would really like to be defeated based on what I stand for and not on the caricature that has been made of my platform.”8

  Julien Rochedy, a twenty-nine-year-old who was the head of the FN’s youth wing from 2012 to 2014 and has since left the party due to clashes with Le Pen’s top advisers, believes that the changes are real. Whereas the party leader once peppered his speeches with lines that made Jews’ hair stand on end, today, if someone tells a racist joke within the party, “you will be attacked straight away,” says Rochedy.

  “There is such self-discipline these days. They are genuinely afraid of once again being labeled anti-Semitic or racist,” he says.9 But Le Pen’s mission went beyond dissociating herself from her father’s legacy; she wanted to clear the taint of homophobia, too. A survey showed that her share of the vote among married gay couples in the 2015 regional elections was over 32 percent, only slightly less than the number who voted for a left-wing party—up from just 19 percent in a similar poll from 2012.10

  If there is a day when it became kosher for gays and Jews to vote FN, it was December 10, 2010. Le Pen was campaigning for the party leadership and declared in a speech to the party faithful, “I hear more and more firsthand accounts
of how, in certain neighborhoods, it’s not good to be a woman, or a homosexual, or a Jew—or even French or white.”11 It was not a dog whistle or a subtle reference; she was saying directly to gay voters: I recognize that you’re being victimized, and immigrants and Muslims are the cause of your pain. Or as Sébastien Chenu told Le Monde, “Who best protects the weakest? Marine Le Pen. A gay who is attacked for being gay is going to seek a strong law-and-order platform.” Chenu, a cofounder of the gay rights organization GayLib, which was formally associated with Nicolas Sarkozy’s party for a period and later split with the party when it refused to support gay marriage, is now a close associate of Le Pen’s. In 2015, he was elected a regional councillor in the northern Pas-de-Calais region.12

  There are others in the FN who cling to a more traditional Catholic conservative stance—namely, Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, once the party’s rising star. Marion Maréchal opposed the marriage-for-all movement. Chenu calls her position “an orthodoxy that is no longer in the majority.”13

  In 2013, when the country was riven by a debate over gay marriage, “the FN was split in two,” recalls Rochedy.14 The Catholic conservative camp was led by Marion Maréchal; the socially liberal camp was headed by Florian Philippot, who is gay and is now Marine’s right-hand man. Marine stood above the fray, allowing her to dissociate herself from conservatives seen as homophobic. Even if her niece has taken a more traditionalist line on homosexuality, their divergent views have allowed the Le Pens to straddle the fence and project the FN as a big tent.15

  As her inner circle has filled with more and more openly gay advisers, she has also made her pitch to Jewish voters more explicit. “For a lot of French Jews, the FN appears to be the only movement that can defend them from this new anti-Semitism nourished in the banlieues,” Le Pen told me. “In a very natural way, they have turned toward the FN because the FN is capable, I think, of protecting them from that.”16

  By actively managing the party’s image and courting Jews and gays, Le Pen is giving political expression to an idea that the philosopher Finkielkraut articulated more than a decade ago: that the left, not the right, poses the greatest threat to vulnerable minorities. He described the days leading up to the 2002 election as a mixture of euphoria and terror as anti-Le Pen protesters took to the streets en masse. “Unanimity reigned,” he wrote in his short essay In the Name of the Other. The crowd’s collective smile dripped with “moral superiority over the men of the past.” Five days later, they succeeded, “as the ballot boxes brought down the Beast … and the smile of protest became a smile of satisfaction.” Although Finkielkraut voted against Le Pen, he did not, he writes, “join the party” and the masses reveling in the streets.17

  It is a statement that evokes the final scenes of Albert Camus’s classic The Plague, when the heroic Dr. Rieux, having banished the disease that nearly decimated his city, gazes out from his terrace listening to “the cries of joy rising from the town” but worries that the celebrations are premature because “he knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good … and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”18

  Like a latter-day Dr. Rieux, Finkielkraut scanned the crowds dancing in the streets in May 2002 and worried that victory was never definitive and that the scourge might one day return to haunt France. For him the threat would come not from the Le Pen family, but from those celebrating the FN’s defeat.

  “Today it is the dancers who are making life difficult for the Jews,” he wrote. “The future of hate is in their camp and not in the camp of those nostalgic for Vichy. In the camp of the smile, not of the grimace. Among the humane and not the barbaric. In the camp of the multicultural society and not that of the ethnic nation—in the camp of respect, not that of rejection.”19

  More than a decade later, sitting in his fifth-floor flat, Finkielkraut remains adamant that the true danger facing France comes from the left. “Antiracism today frequently serves as a pretext for not seeing the true danger that threatens us,” he told me in June 2016, on his sixty-seventh birthday. The French must, he insists, “avoid simplistic analogies with the 1930s. We must not mistake what era we live in. Europe doesn’t only have demons; it also has enemies, and it needs to know how to fight those enemies.”20

  With so much in flux, longings for a bygone era have become an anchor, and peddling nostalgia is the centrepiece of many new right parties. In France, Marine Le Pen has promised a return to a time when the French had their own currency and monetary policy, when there were fewer mosques and less halal meat, when no one complained about nativity scenes in public buildings, and when French schools promoted a republican ethos of assimilation. Meanwhile, Finkielkraut unapologetically defends a nostalgic vision of France as the only thing that can save it. His 2013 book, The Unhappy Identity, depicted a France in crisis due to its unmooring from tradition. No one talks about belonging anymore, he complained.

  In a January 2016 debate with the man who was then the presidential front-runner, Alain Juppé, Finkielkraut declared, “A growing number of French feel uncomfortable in their own country.” He spoke of halal butchers and tea shops filled with only men, pleading that “the public good isn’t in the clouds, it’s made from tangible things—the French of Proust and Montaigne … the Jardin du Luxembourg and the cows of Normandy.”21

  At home on his couch, down the street from the Jardin du Luxembourg, he elaborates. “There’s an anchoring in the French soil,” he insists. “A people is built by its history. This heritage can be shared with newcomers but on the condition that there is a difference between he who is welcoming and he who is welcomed.” And because the newcomers, in his view, are refusing to accept the culture of the receiving country, the place is fragmenting into parallel worlds. Finkielkraut talks about France reconquering its lost territories—meaning the suburbs surrounding Paris.22 “Integrating people is not telling them, ‘You are how you are and we are how we are.’ … Integration means making them an integral part of our civilization.” And if that doesn’t happen, he warns darkly, “at best we’ll have secession and at worst civil war.” Increasing immigration today, he maintains, is nothing less than the “planned demise of Europe.”23

  Finkielkraut is no fan of the FN. Jean-Marie Le Pen has long traumatized the French Jews, because “he had anti-Semitism in his bones,” he tells me. “His jokes, his slipups. Everyone knows them by heart. So it is difficult for the Jews to turn this page.” Yet Finkielkraut believes the party has changed and argues that it “should be fought, but for what it is today and not what it was in the past, and not in the name of antifascism.”24 He also sounds startlingly like Marine Le Pen on issues ranging from the defence of secularism to denunciations of globalization.

  Laïcité, France’s term for its peculiar brand of state secularism, was long a cause of the left. A 1905 law mandating the removal of institutional religious influence from the public sphere was a well-intentioned effort to render the state neutral in matters of faith and make all citizens equal before the law. In theory, it is a noble and democratic ideal. In recent years, however, the far right, once hostile to secularists out of attachment to the Catholic Church, has taken up the mantle of laïcité and claimed the cause as its own, transforming it into a weapon to be used against Muslims on matters ranging from Islamic dress to halal meat. “Everyone has the right to have a religion, the right to exercise it, but in the private sphere,” Marine Le Pen argues. To her, the law is extremely clear, and it is Muslim immigrants who have eroded it. “Little by little, this secularism was nibbled away, precisely as a result of communitarian claims often emanating from fundamentalist Islamist associations.”25

  The author Jean Baubérot charges Le Pen with politicizing minor municipal clashes and turning them into national issues that helped fan the flames of Islamophobia and push voters toward t
he FN. The problem today, he argues, is that the issue of secularism has been hijacked by the right as Le Pen “proclaimed herself the champion of laïcité.” Instead, a new ideology has supplanted the actual law of 1905 in public debate. Rather than keeping religious institutions—namely, the Catholic Church—out of public life, it has been used to target Muslims praying in the streets.26

  During the same speech in which she presented the FN as the defender of gays and Jews, Le Pen spoke of 10 to 15 places where Muslims engaged in “an occupation” of French territory. When the editor of a conservative paper asked her if Muslims might be praying in the street because there wasn’t enough space in the mosques, she replied that they “would have to go pray at home”—a position that violates the 1905 law’s provisions on free exercise of religion.27 As the media frenzy ensued, Le Pen’s 10 to 15 places ballooned in public debate to 185. “Marine Le Pen knows the art of playing billiards. She isn’t just believed; she also succeeds in creating beliefs that go far beyond what she has said,” writes Baubérot. The word laïcité “comes easily to her mouth, but it is a falsified laïcité,” he insists—a word that has been led astray with the explicit purpose of marginalizing one religion.28

  The irony of the FN’s defence of secularism as a principle is that Le Pen is an adamant defender of the purely Christian holiday calendar that celebrates countless obscure Catholic festivals but makes no mention of Eid, Diwali, or Yom Kippur. And the odd nativity scene in a public building does not clash at all with her hallowed notion of secularism. When I ask why, in a staunchly secular state, it’s legal to display nativity scenes at Christmastime in town halls and other public buildings, she scoffs.