Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Ménard was supported by the FN in his race for mayor and claims that he agrees with Marine Le Pen on “80 percent” of the issues, but he has several major policy differences and insists that she won’t ever win unless she changes.

  Chief among his grievances is the FN’s obsessive hatred of the EU that Le Pen and her campaign manager, David Rachline, constantly harp on. He describes her stated desire to leave the euro as a “colossal error” and insists that “leaving the euro would weaken France,” he told me in June 2016, a year before Le Pen’s defeat.1

  He thinks the strong state she dreams of resurrecting, or reinforcing, is a chimera. “I don’t think for a moment that her economic policies can be implemented … [b]ecause it’s a statist program.… The French only want one thing—to be left alone,” says the ex-Trotskyist.

  Ménard used to be seen as a leftist. Now he is calling for immigration to be halted and was filmed kicking Syrian refugee families out of public housing in Béziers. What changed? According to Ménard, his ideas ran up against reality. “You say, ‘Long Live Integration,’ and then you go into a school … and you see it just doesn’t work.”

  Ménard tells the story of visiting a local school in a tough part of town where he once lived. He went to eight classrooms and, much to his chagrin, on only one occasion did the teacher ask the kids to stand. Ménard was incensed by the lack of respect. “How do you educate kids when the mayor of the city, who is an adult, enters the classroom?… You say, ‘The mayor is coming, stand up, stop talking, and listen,’” he fumes. “Either you give up and say, ‘That’s how it is.’ And the entire left is giving up and saying, ‘That’s how it is.’ Or you say, ‘Maybe things have to change.’ And so I changed,” he tells me.

  “How are you going to integrate kids when instead of teaching them and their parents French in after-school hours or outside class we are teaching them Arabic or Turkish?” he asks, dismayed. “You won’t integrate in a school in Béziers when two-thirds of the kids are Muslims. You won’t integrate anyone, because you integrate when people are a minority, not when they’re two-thirds of the class.”

  Sounding very much like Le Pen, he argues that to integrate the people who are already in France, you have to stop letting new people in. “You have to stop family reunifications. You have to stop birthright citizenship, and you have to get rid of the social advantages that attract economic migrants to France,” he argues.

  The other issue hampering integration, he says, is that France has lost its pride in itself. Ménard likes to quip that France celebrates its defeat at Waterloo and not its victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. “That lacks all common sense!” he exclaims. France, he maintains, is consumed by self-doubt. If the country “can’t seduce its own population, how is it going to appeal to a number of people who are French on paper and not in their hearts?”2

  His latest gambit has been to rename a street commemorating the accord that officially ended the war in Algeria. He has rechristened it to honour Hélie de Saint Marc, a World War II hero who later joined the rebel generals who defied de Gaulle and attempted a coup in 1961 to prevent Algerian independence. Ménard regards the Évian Accords that ended the Algerian war as a “capitulation” and those who tried to preserve French Algeria as heroes.

  Ménard comes from a family of pieds-noirs, or French settlers, in Algeria who were forced to relocate in 1962, part of an exodus of seven hundred thousand. Béziers is home to many of them, and they are a reliable source of votes for him and for the FN. These days, the debate over identity is most heated in this region, where many piedsnoirs, like Ménard’s family, arrived after fleeing Algeria. The Algerian war and decolonization is an open wound in southern France in much the same way that slavery still haunts the American South.

  The wound has certainly not healed for Ménard. “In the official history of France, we present March 19, 1962, as the cease-fire because Charles de Gaulle signed the Évian Accords,” he tells me. “There were more victims among the French of Algeria and the harkis after the ceasefire than before,” he adds, referring to the massacres of Algerians who fought with France, but neglecting to mention the many Algerians and French soldiers who were murdered by diehard French colonialists after the cease-fire.3 It’s “historical revisionism to try to make people believe it was a cease-fire,” he contends. “We all know it’s a lie.” Although there has been an outcry about the decision to rename the street, Ménard brushes it off. “No one’s removed the plaque. It’s still there.”4

  Ménard sees no contradiction between his current stance and his prior work as an advocate for press freedom. In fact, he began to change as a journalist, becoming outraged by corruption in Africa and Western aid to governments he believed were corrupt. “In France, when you lead an organization defending human rights, it’s assumed that you’re on the left because it’s only the left, sir, that defends human rights,” he says sarcastically, “it’s only the left that’s for equality, it’s only the left that takes care of the poor.”5

  Pascal Bruckner is another Frenchman of the 1968 generation who has followed a similar political trajectory, but he is more clear-eyed in his appraisal of France’s woes. Like Ménard and Finkielkraut, he is unsparing in his attacks on the left’s blindness to certain problems and many leftists’ hypocritical embrace of third-world villains. Yet he is not at all nostalgic for some imagined past idyll as they are.

  “Identity is not a cage but a point of departure that allows us to add onto the past, to turn it in a different direction,” Bruckner writes. “A people, unless it buries itself in its own mausoleum, has to be able to break with its customs, trample on them in order to recharge its batteries.”6 France has not been honest about its own dark chapters. Rather than celebrate them, as Ménard does, Bruckner wants the filth out in the open. France “has long lived under a system of deferred truth, struggling to unveil the secrets that have been fermenting like a puddle of pus for years,” from the delayed reckoning with the crimes of Vichy to the Algerian war. “It took almost sixty years for France to pay lip service to the Sétif massacre in Algeria on May 8, 1945,” he notes.7 Bruckner doesn’t want to dwell on the past and ruminate on the nation’s sins, but he is honest enough to acknowledge them and to see a nation’s strength in its ability to face the past squarely, as Germany has done, rather than sweep it under the mat.

  Ménard prefers his nostalgia served raw. His latest crusade is to place a moratorium on the opening of kebab shops in Béziers. He caused an uproar when he declared war on the town’s many Turkish-run restaurants, which on a Monday at 10:00 p.m. are among the only places open in the town centre. “There are twenty to twenty-five. That’s enough,” says Ménard. “I’m for culinary diversity; the problem in Béziers is the diversity is in the other direction,” he rages, like the vegetarian mayor of Hayange, who fears creeping Islamization of the national palate. “For me, the problem is defending the restaurants in the centre of town that are not halal.”8

  In May 2016, Ménard organized a conference for the French right in Béziers, seeking to unify the FN supporters with disparate other groups—those backing Sarkozy, the so-called Identitaires movement, which opposes immigration and Islamization and argues, as Barrès does, that the French are rooted in their cemeteries and soil. Renaud Camus, the author of Le Grand Remplacement, was on hand to sign books, and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine’s niece, represented the FN but ended up walking out halfway through the proceedings due to attacks on the party by other participants.

  One of those in attendance was Julien Rochedy, the young conservative who served as the FN youth wing’s leader from 2012 to 2014 before falling out with some members of Le Pen’s inner circle. Rochedy went to the Béziers conference hoping the right could unify; he came away disappointed. He is still a committed conservative, yet he was convinced a year before the election that the FN would not get much more than 35 percent of the national vote in 2017 because of its backward-looking rhetoric. He was right. According to Rochedy, �
��They just want to go back thirty years.” Their platform, he maintains, “doesn’t at all take into account the world as it is and what France has become; it’s a purely nostalgic discourse.”

  Rochedy has seen the FN from the inside, and he believes that they face a real challenge in reconciling a nostalgic vision with practical policies. “There is a difficulty for these parties, and for the FN in particular, to see things as they are” and try to respond—“not with answers that come from the ’60s and the time of General de Gaulle” but with policies that address the challenges France faces today. He is aware that appeals to make France great again will win some votes, much as Trump touched nostalgic nerves with his slogan and his pledges to bring back jobs that moved abroad decades ago. “Unfortunately, today, European populist parties are winning with impressive margins because they draw on this nostalgia.” It exists, Rochedy concedes, “but it won’t win because nostalgia never wins.” It might win “with those who have lost everything, who are really truly angry. So that’s 20–30 percent of the population, but it can’t go beyond that.”9

  He argues that the politics of nostalgia have a clear appeal, but not necessarily for the sort of voters one might expect. France is different from both Britain and the United States because of a generational divide that keeps older voters, even those angry about immigration, from voting for Le Pen. The reason, he insists, has less to do with ideology and more with caution and conservatism in the most literal sense.

  Whereas young British voters overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and the elderly voted to leave, in France, opinion about the EU tends to run in the opposite direction. That’s because appeals to nostalgia work better with the young, who dream of an era they never witnessed, than with the old, who lived through the good and the bad of an era Le Pen promises to restore. “Marine Le Pen can’t win [among the elderly] because those people are afraid of leaving the euro,” Rochedy told me in 2016. “They are afraid of huge changes.… She is scaring all the old people.”

  There is also a deeper cultural reflex. “The French are Vichyists,” he insists, and not in the sense of racism and anti-Semitism. “Since World War I, the French have accepted foreign domination,” he explains. “What matters, what they want, is jobs, security, and all that.” But anyone seeking to run a campaign on the idea of France reclaiming its independence, as Le Pen has, is not likely to attract older voters. “It no longer speaks to them,” says Rochedy, “There’s a Vichyist mentality in the sense that as long as I’m living well, I don’t mind if someone else is ruling me.” As a result, the elderly vote for the parties that want to remain in Europe and the euro. Meanwhile, more and more of the young vote for the FN.

  Rochedy was convinced then that if Marine Le Pen would just stop talking about leaving the euro and the EU, she would rise to 40 percent in the polls. Instead, she stood by her staunch Euroskepticism until the final days of the campaign. The results confirmed his analysis. Those in their sixties and seventies voted overwhelmingly—over 70 percent—for the winner, Emmanuel Macron.

  As much as Rochedy is sympathetic to some of the broader goals of the FN and their views on immigration, he is a pragmatist, arguing that “these parties are living on the moon.” As he sees it, “the far right in France lives off two fantasies,” either what they call re-immigration, the idea that tomorrow they could “expel fifteen million people, which has never happened in history, or the total assimilation of fifteen million people, which also has never been seen in history.” As an opposition party, the FN can say whatever it likes, but if it ever wins power, it will have to return to earth. “I understand what they want, and it’s legitimate, I think, but it has absolutely no chance of succeeding,” he adds.

  When talking to FN leaders, including Le Pen, the idea of assimilation, rather than integration, is a favorite talking point, but Rochedy thinks it is just as misguided and impractical as their attempt to rewind history. “The FN wants to act as if the immigrants, the people who have entered France, never came. Their platform is to say, ‘We’ll assimilate them, all of them, whatever their origin, whatever their religion, and make them into perfect Frenchmen.’” It won’t work. Their policy sells well with many voters, “except that ignores the fact that more than ten million people have entered France over the past thirty years. I believe that we will have to accept these communities, we will have to accept the communal fragmentation of France—a vision more in line with the American model.”

  That model is poorly understood in France, “but it is the only possible one,” he argues. “We cannot make fifteen million people into native French.… It won’t work anymore. Believing that is a failure to look at the world as it is. All they are doing is pleading to return to the way things were thirty years ago, but that serves no purpose at all, because it is impossible.”10

  As the 2017 election approached, France’s nostalgist in chief, or at least its best-selling one, was Éric Zemmour. Having sold half a million copies of The French Suicide, Zemmour is the most widely read of the new French reactionaries. The ideology of the moment is nativist nostalgia, and Zemmour, despite or perhaps because his roots are in Algeria, channels it perfectly. The Jewish writer happily quotes a legendary anti-Semite, noting that “Maurras once exalted the 40 kings who made France; henceforth we will have to count the 40 years that unmade France.”11 He even had the chutzpah to defend the collaborationist Vichy regime in front of a synagogue audience, arguing that Jews had too much power in the French economy of the 1940s and that the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic decrees were merely discriminatory but not exterminationist.12 Zemmour seems to believe that the sort of anti-Semitism that stops short of the gas chambers is acceptable.13

  His five-hundred-page tome doesn’t seek to connect the disparate dates marking France’s slow progression to the grave. Zemmour is concerned primarily with providing a list of enemies and their crimes.14 His pantheon of traitors includes feminists, Eurocrats, and lefty intellectuals. He denounces the sans-papiers, or undocumented immigrants, who were a favorite cause of the French left as a new “ideal Jew” and the return of a “Christ-like figure, a poor persecuted foreigner” who had come to save a sinful and corrupt France.15

  But his most frequent target is Muslims. He doesn’t attempt to hide his hatred for them or his hopelessness that their situation can be remedied. Like the Danish People’s Party and Marine Le Pen, he has little time for integration—it’s a lost cause. This extends to the national football team, often celebrated for its multihued representation of modern France. In Zemmour’s telling, Les Bleus are a cesspool of barely literate converts who eat halal meals—an incarnation of the new white proletariat that will emerge from “reverse integration” if those of solid French stock are left to remain in the festering banlieues in the era of the great replacement.16

  Zemmour’s account of France’s self-immolation apportions its blame equitably across the political spectrum. “The right betrays France in the name of globalization; the left betrays France in the name of the Republic. The right has abandoned the state in the name of liberalism; the left has abandoned the nation in the name of universalism,” he writes. Most egregiously, in his view, “The left has betrayed the people in the name of minorities.”17 And for a Maurras admirer like Zemmour, minorities are just paper citizens who do not belong to the “real France.” They are not part of “the people.”

  Zemmour, the observant Jew with a soft spot for Vichy, laments the fact that “political elites have forbidden Europe to refer to ‘its Christian roots,’” calling it a “premeditated suicide that brings back the storms that we fended off in the past,” transforming France into a pathetic purgatory stuck between “tourist attractions and Islamic fortresses, between Disneyland and Kosovo.” For him, as for Finkielkraut, the ideology of antiracism is the real threat.18 Along with globalization and multiculturalism, it will be to the twenty-first century what totalitarianism was to the twentieth—“a messianic progressivism” that will eventually have the effect o
f replacing war between nations with wars within them.19

  Rochedy rejects the best-selling nostalgia of people like Zemmour, but he is equally harsh toward the left and those who denounce any form of restriction on immigration. That path will lead to disaster, he believes. “What’s amusing for us is that left-wing journalists, American Democrats, liberals who have a kind heart, those who want to open Europe up—by preventing a halt in immigration, they will lead France and other European countries to civil war.” He is convinced that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and that failing to reduce immigration as much as possible while obliging politicians to accept legal immigration will lead France “straight for a catastrophe, and that’s when there will be racism, hatred, and violence,” the sort of dystopia Stenner imagines when the latent authoritarian reflex is fully provoked.

  Rochedy is not sure anything can be done at this point to prevent conflict; some of it, he believes, is inevitable. Looking at tensions between young immigrants or their kids and native French in certain poor areas, he says, “I think it’s too late. For my generation or the next, it’s going to be horrible.”

  Whereas secularism was once a neutral glue that held the country together, it no longer serves that purpose. “It worked because it was French patriotism. French identity is no longer religion, it is no longer Catholicism; it is the republic, the homeland,” he says, somewhat nostalgically for a twenty-nine-year-old. But state secularism has become a wedge issue rather than a unifier, a rallying cry for the FN on everything from butchers to burkinis. He argues that immigrants were once attracted to that strong sense of identity. “They wanted to become like that and part of that.… That’s why France was able to assimilate a lot of immigrants,” says Rochedy. “Now, there’s nothing left. It’s an open space.”20 And many voices have flocked to that void, including some who are far to the right of Marine Le Pen and some who are simply angry citizens like the neighbours of the Jungle in Calais. Others join the Identitaires movement, which glorifies a Frenchness rooted in white blood and a specific soil. Still others gravitate to right-wing websites like Francaisdesouche.com, a Breitbart for the ethnic French that hides nothing in its name.