Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Mayors like Carême are Marine Le Pen’s favorite targets. In her view, the last thing France needs to do is roll out a welcome mat. Le Pen blames the EU, more than any other institution, for encouraging and increasing immigration. “The European Union, through a whole series of structures, has been arguing for years that it would be necessary to welcome millions of immigrants to Europe because of the aging population in order to make the labour market more fluid,” she tells me. “The reality is that Europe wants immigrants, and the people do not want them. That is the problem.”

  It’s an argument that merges the FN’s two greatest grievances—the threat immigration poses to France’s culture and economy and hostility toward the Brussels bureaucracy that is supposedly stealing France’s sovereignty. The EU’s objective “is to bring in lots of immigrants, not because of the aging population,” she insists, “but to put pressure on wages, to push down salaries, because it believes that it will succeed there in gaining productivity in its global competition.”17

  It is yet another example of her co-opting the rhetoric of those who fancy themselves to be leftist and claiming it for herself. By framing the EU as a capitalist villain, the FN becomes the defender of the little guy.

  Once again, Le Pen’s analysis sounds remarkably similar to that of Alain Finkielkraut. The philosopher also has harsh words for the global elites who jet between capitals without a second thought or from coast to coast in the United States, ignoring the so-called flyover states that voted disproportionately for Trump. “Our societies are now divided between the planetary and the sedentary, between the global and the local,” between those who have the luxury of living without being grounded anywhere and the indigenous who have no choice.18 For a Jewish philosopher who has written extensively on ethnic nationalism and anti-Semitism in French history, it sounds suspiciously like the vision of the nineteenth-century writer Maurice Barrès, who spoke of rootless cosmopolitans as a threat and idealized a French identity grounded in the cemetery with a direct bloodline from past to present.

  “It’s not necessarily the vision of Barrès,” insists Finkielkraut, “but it’s a completely natural view” because a people is a product of its history. And it is not just a difference in lifestyle and priorities; there is also an implicit value judgment and deep condescension at work, he believes. Those who are not rooted anywhere thanks to new technologies and “have the intoxicating feeling of forming a new global civil society despise the others. They despise the indigenous people. They treat them as stupid hicks and even bastards. The privileged today are not only better off economically, but in addition they feel morally and politically superior.”19

  Le Pen’s immigration policy is quite simple. She insists that France must reclaim its borders, and that means an end to the free movement of the Schengen era. “To reclaim the borders means being able to prevent people from entering the country when they are not invited, and I will send back to their country those who are illegally present on French territory,” she declares. The massive refugee population that was until recently concentrated in Calais is the result of what she calls “a cul-de-sac problem. We do not have a border, and Great Britain has borders. Immigration is blocked in Calais. If we had our borders, by definition, we would push back the problem. But having borders is not enough. It’s also necessary for France to create the conditions so that the country is not attractive to immigration.”20

  Le Pen’s campaign manager, David Rachline, agrees. At twenty-nine, he is the youngest senator in France and one of just two FN members; he is also the mayor of the small Riviera town of Fréjus near Nice. In September 2016, Le Pen announced that he would run her presidential campaign.

  Rachline, like his boss, enjoys a good argument. We sit outside the gilded and Versailles-like senate chamber on a sweltering June afternoon a few days after Brexit, which he describes as a “great joy.”

  The FN has many gripes with the European Union, but Rachline’s is borders. The EU instructed its members “to remove our internal borders and replace them with external borders,” he argues. “It will certainly not have escaped you that there are no borders at all, neither internal nor external.” In Calais, there is the sea, which keeps many migrants away from Britain, but, he insists, “if there were no sea, the situation would be the same as in southern France,” where, he says, “hundreds of thousands of immigrants pass through Italy and Ventimiglia,” the town on France’s border with Italy to the east of Nice. Europe, he claims, has become “a sieve, through which anyone who wants to enter can pass.”

  The day before we met, Rachline had accompanied Le Pen and a few other high-ranking party officials to meet then President Hollande and request a Brexit-style referendum in France. They knew the answer would be no; it was more for show. It would be too dangerous for Hollande to “let the people speak,” he says, because they would reject his policies. “The European Union, as it exists, has strictly no legitimacy,” Rachline maintains, because nonelected European commissioners make “rules that have not been validated by the French people.” It is this, he argues, that “creates this rift between our elites and the people.”21

  In Le Pen’s telling, immigration policy is not just about deterrence; it is about fairness. She contends, “Today in France, you are better taken care of for free when you’re an illegal immigrant than when you’re a working French citizen.”22 It may be an exaggeration—the refugees in Calais were often living in destitute conditions, although they did receive medical care at local hospitals—but it is an argument that clearly catches on with the sort of voters she is trying to attract.

  Le Pen has no time for dual citizens and sees birthright citizenship as a threat to France. She doesn’t use the term “anchor babies,” but the idea is the same. Casting aside centuries of French tradition in the realm of nationality law, she insists that granting citizenship by birth is a disaster. “We must stop creating automatic French citizens,” she argues, pointing out that the Charlie Hebdo killers were legally French.23

  It is an argument with a long pedigree. It traces its roots to long before the time of Renaud Camus and his “great replacement.” It started with Barrès. Before his vitriol was turned against Captain Dreyfus, Barrès fumed about birthright citizenship just like Le Pen does today. He warned of new French citizens that wanted to impose their way of life. “They are in contradiction to our civilization,” he wrote of the immigrants becoming French. “The triumph of their worldview will coincide with the real ruin of our fatherland. The name France may well survive; the special character of our country will be destroyed.”24

  The theme was picked up by Charles Maurras’s followers in the 1920s. The industrialist François Coty, who owned the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, laid out the great replacement in more concrete terms in an editorial. The internationalists had decided, he wrote, “to replace the French race with another race.” Having arranged for the destruction of the true French and the insertion of neo-French, these new citizens, with their French identity on paper, would become “naturalized enemies.” For Coty, the most alarming problem was that these new citizens “could no longer be expelled; they are at home in our home; they have the same rights as us inside our own walls,” he warned.25

  Today’s version of the argument is: if you don’t behave appropriately, then you don’t get a passport. “To give French nationality to someone without having taken the trouble to make sure that this person has the necessary morality to become a citizen and has the true wish to become one and to participate in the national destiny—it makes no sense!” Le Pen exclaims. And if it takes “a certain amount of time to see if the person has the right moral views,” then the law should force people to wait until they are eighteen or twenty to apply. “So what” if they have to wait, she says. “I have friends who are French who went to live for fifteen years in Germany; they didn’t become Germans. One can very well live as a foreigner in a foreign country.” She mentions a study of French people who have lived in the United Stat
es for twenty years and want to become Americans. They “look at whether they have not stolen, raped someone, trafficked drugs—if they participate in the American way of life.”26

  What she doesn’t mention is that a white French rapist or drug trafficker would not be subject to any extra moral scrutiny at age twenty according to her plan or risk losing his passport; only those with a drop of foreign blood need additional moral screening.

  Julien Aubert is an up-and-coming member of the Assemblée Nationale who represents a southern district near Avignon for the conservative Les Républicains party. He is on the rightmost edge of his party and is one of the people thinking about how to push back against Le Pen’s narrative. At times his rhetoric sounds remarkably close to the FN’s. In mid-2016, he wrote an article in Valeurs Actuelles, a conservative magazine that has embraced much of Le Pen’s rhetoric, declaring that France was at war and would have to change its laws and priorities and renounce the comforts of peacetime. Like Le Pen, he denounced the political establishment for failing to call the enemy by its name. “Say it! Yes, Islamism has everything to do with Islam because all of our enemies identify with this religion,” he wrote, calling for the bodies of dead Muslim terrorists to be incinerated—a deliberate violation of Islamic law’s injunction against cremation.27

  In June 2016, a few months before the primary that elevated François Fillon to the top of the Les Républicains ticket, he explained the party’s strategy in countering Le Pen. “Absorb the centrists. Maybe recover the voters of the FN and therefore qualify automatically for the second round facing Le Pen,” which he thought the party would win handily. When his party’s nominee, François Fillon, became mired in scandal, this plan went out the window. Marine Le Pen beat Fillon by a margin of 11 percent in Aubert’s district in the election’s first round, and Emmanuel Macron won with 53 percent in the final round.

  When it comes to winning back Le Pen voters, many of the people who devoted themselves to the subject are gone from politics, having lost elections. According to Aubert, his party is hamstrung by its broad tent approach. The FN has a unified and coherent message. Even where disagreements exist, they are generally smoothed over in the interest of party unity. “We do not necessarily agree on everything,” he says, and more importantly, “we are accountable for the past. So rightly, people are telling us, ‘You are the ones in charge.’” By contrast, he argues, the FN has the advantage of not being perceived as bearing any responsibility since it has never been in power. Not being seen as responsible for past failures means the party can get away with proposing policies that are completely impractical or financially unrealistic. “When you are in the FN, you can say anything,” Aubert complains. “For us, nothing is forgiven.”

  For Aubert, the question of how to run against the FN hits close to home. In his region, the Vaucluse, the approach that brought Chirac to power so overwhelmingly in 2002 could backfire today. Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal performed extremely well in regional elections there, Aubert notes. “You have 51 percent of people who vote Front National. It gets complicated. Do you establish a cordon sanitaire against half of the people?”28

  In addition to courting Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant voters from the centre and left, the other major shift in FN policy was to purge the party of its dinosaurs. The de-demonization efforts actually began long before Le Pen took over. It was after the crushing 2002 defeat that several party leaders became convinced that the image of an anti-Semitic and racist party needed to be purged if it was ever going to have a chance of electoral success.29

  Le Pen’s de-demonization campaign, culminating with the expulsion of her father, demonstrated a shrewd understanding of voters’ “thin commitments” and the possibility of pulling some reluctant radicals over to her side by ditching the party’s most damaging baggage.30

  For all Le Pen’s talk of courting Jews, she has not forgiven the community’s leaders. One of the organizations she blames for treating the FN unfairly is the official organ of the French Jewish Community, known by its French initials, CRIF. “The CRIF is always trying to be on the winning side,” she says mockingly. “It’s socialist when it is the socialists in power; it’s right wing when it’s the right that’s in power.” And she believes they are stuck in a time warp. “To admit that for twenty years they had fought against the FN and while they were fighting against the FN, which represents no danger whatsoever to French Jews, they had not led any of the necessary fights against the fundamentalist Islamists is to admit that they have failed in their duty.”31 When Le Pen denied the French state’s responsibility for the roundup of thirteen thousand Parisian Jews in 1942—by French police—and then appointed a man who had questioned whether the Nazis used poison gas to murder Jews to head her party during the final weeks of the election campaign, many French Jews found themselves reconsidering her claim that the FN no longer posed a threat to them.32

  Whether or not Jews are flocking to her, she is confident that there is a “shy FN” syndrome. And like the shy Tories or shy Trump voters who didn’t admit their voting preference to pollsters, she is adamant that a similar phenomenon exists in France. “You go down the street and you count. One, two, Front National. It’s a fact.” She is convinced that if people weren’t afraid of being socially ostracized, they would admit their true preference. “I think there is still a form of intellectual terrorism in France that makes it impossible for you to say that you are FN. We whisper it to each other, we let each other know, but we do not dare say it, because if you do, public subsidies, relations with institutions, all of this is turned upside down.”33

  If such a hidden vote exists, it will spell trouble for the centre-right. If the 2017 election is any indication, Le Pen’s 47 percent showing in Aubert’s area in the final round suggests that she’s right. Aubert has thought about this. The real question for him is whether the FN has simply become a normal right-wing party, in which case, he argues, “we must fight it as we would fight any party.” But, he says, “if the National Front is a far-right party that uses a more smiling mask that allows it to attract voters, there is a danger.”

  He believes the party is riding the same wave Trump rode to victory in the United States. The driving force is the same: people who say, “We are declining, and we do not want to decline.”34

  9

  FREEDOM OF RELIGION—FOR SOME

  On July 14, 2016, as French families and tourists strolled along Nice’s seafront promenade, a man of Tunisian background barreled around a corner in a large truck, running down everyone in his path and killing eighty-six people. Immediately, France, still reeling from the previous November’s attacks in Paris, was again in mourning. Less than two weeks later, two young men who had tried to join ISIS in Syria slit the throat of an octogenarian priest in his church near Rouen.

  A month later, in mid-August, with most of France’s population at the beach or near one, the mayor of Cannes declared that “burkinis”—a nebulous term for modest swimwear favored by many religious women who prefer not to bare themselves in bikinis or less—would be banned from the city’s beaches.

  Even France’s ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, whose Twitter account often limits itself to disseminating images of works by famous French painters, joined the debate with a rousing feminist defence, declaring that “a burqa is not a neutral attire. It conveys a conception of the woman as a [sic] object of lust, a subject and not an agent of history.”1

  But for Araud and the staunch defenders of French laicité, this was a clash of Huntingtonian proportions, and the battle to defend Western civilization necessarily required showing some skin. With the threat from Le Pen looming, the moderate right and even the socialists were keen to profit from the moment. After Le Pen declared that “the soul of France is in question here … France does not lock away a woman’s body, hide half of its population,” others raced to join the bandwagon to defend women’s rights by insisting that they strip down to their swimsuits.2 Former president Nicol
as Sarkozy reacted by declaring “to wear a burkini is a political act, militant, a provocation.”3

  The argument that, at a time of heightened fear and sensitivity after the Nice attack, wearing “provocative” attire like the burkini could inflame public opinion and threaten public order is somewhat incoherent. It relies on the same dubious logic as those who argue that women should not dress in revealing clothing lest they provoke lustful men to rape. The actual problem in both cases is the harasser, not the woman or the garment; Islamophobic beachgoers, like aroused men, ought to be responsible for restraining themselves and not verbally or physically abusing a woman because of the clothes she does or does not wear.

  The burkini bans led to discord at the highest levels of government with then education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, herself a non-practising Muslim woman, calling the proliferation of burkini bans “unwelcome.” Prime Minister Manuel Valls, concerned with appearing tough at a time when approval ratings for the Socialist Party were at an historic low, insisted that the bans were necessary for public order. It was an easy way to win some points and look tough at a time when Le Pen was rising in the polls. “Women’s rights imply the right for a woman to cover up,” Rim-Sarah Alouane of the University of Toulouse told the Associated Press. “What is more French than sitting on a beach in the sand? We are telling Muslims that no matter what you do … we don’t want you here.” Remona Aly made the point more bluntly in the Guardian, arguing, “Politicians talk constantly about integration and inclusion, and then proceed to kick out to the fringes the very women they claim are oppressed and excluded from society.”4