Ranbir Singh
'Liberty Leading the People' by Delacroix
The twenty per cent polled by Marine Le Pen in the recent first round
of elections in France has come as a shock to many. She is said to have
softened the often blatant racism, xenophobia and even fascism of her
father who founded the Front National. Jean-Marie Le Pen and his
daughter are said to lead a ‘far right’ party and Marine herself is
called a candidate of the ‘right’.
Marine-Le-Pen
Yet how much of the Front National’s success can be laid at this
supposed ‘softer’ image? Our memories fail us if we are to take this
assessment at face value. The bicentenary of the French Revolution in
1989 included celebrations of ethnic diversity. African-American
operatic diva Jessye Norman was invited to sing Marseillaises in the
Place de Concorde as director Jean-Paul Goude projected the Revolution
as something akin to world culture. Only the Front National explicitly
rejected the updated message of 1789 which now included feminism, civil
and human rights, anti-racism, cultural and racial inclusion, as well as
widening the message of the Revolution of social justice. Yet only
thirteen years later the presidential ballot of 5 May 2002 saw a run off
between Chirac and Le Pen, arguably a much better success than that
achieved this week by Marine. The French were forced to ask themselves
why they had such a powerful Far Right party comparable in strength to
analogous movements in Belgium and Austria, and in fact more powerful
than neo-Nazi elements in Germany. France now had the very real
possibility of having the first unashamedly fascist style government
since the time of Vichy. Was this not a diametric opposite of everything
which 1789 had envisaged? Yet at the same time was it really so
unsurprising? Is the flourishing of extreme racism and ethnocentrism
perhaps a direct result of the French Revolution itself? France, the
birthplace of Jewish emancipation in Europe and the Rights of Man has in
many ways become the intellectual lab of anti-Semitism, racism and
prejudice. Indeed the country has become host to the largest post-war
fascist, racist and national socialist movement. France claims to stand
in stark contrast to the Anglo-Saxon policies of multiculturalism as
found in Britain, America and Canada, with its unitary policy of
assimilation. Of course the contrast between the naive ideal theory and
reality could not be greater. Did Jacobinism unleash something sinister
which has pervaded French social and political thinking ever since?
France in the 1920s became a cockpit of exotic cultures. Modernist
art combined elements from Africa and Polynesia. Jazz, which had arrived
with American troops in the First World War, flourished and became an
integral part of the social and cultural life of Paris attracting
African-Americans denied equality in their own country. The exotic
dancing of Josephine Baker led French men to queue for the
Revue Nègre.
Sidney Bechet the saxophonist was another who came while Louis
Armstrong felt at home in Paris. Jazz was attractive because it was both
primitive and modern, the bodily expression of dance expressed through
the latest technology of wireless and gramophone. Enthusiasts insisted
on authenticity known as
le jazz nègre. Black Jazz was said to
have colonised Paris with Le Hot-Club in Paris reaching international
status in the world of this music genre. Yet there was also a move for
‘French jazz’ to divorce the music from its African-American origins.
With global depression it was obvious that French modernism was a
minority taste. Rampant xenophobia reared its ugly head as ‘alien’ black
and foreign musicians were denied employment. From the 1920s the pages
of
L’Action française Maurras regarded modernism as subversive
to French tradition with ‘black jazz’ being especially ascribed as
decadent. Surely this stands in contrast to as education system and
state authority impose a uniformity which mitigates against
multiculturalism? People of all ethnic backgrounds should conform to the
national stew and unity of the republic. The official French doctrine,
derived from the ideals of the Revolution, then of the
état laïque,
is that since all citizens are equal in rights, so their racial
origins, or their culture or religion, are purely a private matter. From
this it follows, first, that official research and statistics about
origins are not allowed. While France reached greater prosperity in the
1960s the largely Maghrebi, Portuguese and Spanish inhabitants of the
bidonvilles
were excluded. Even with their clearance in 1964 the resultant ghettos
continued to seal off any social mobility. The republic’s ideal of
conformity ignored the reality in the
banlieus, tower block
suburbs of La Courneuve, Aubervilles and Saint-Denis outside Paris which
in places of worship, food and colloquial French are very much a
different world from republican values. The government expects
immigrants to integrate fully while rejecting any notion of
multiculturalism as practised in Britain. Yet the minorities are
rejected by the white host community. Racism against non-whites, largely
Maghrebis and blacks, has replaced the xenophobia once prevalent
towards Poles, Italians and Portuguese. But the Europeans were able to
integrate into wider French society because they were white. Laws to
tackle racism are difficult to enforce. Discrimination in jobs and by
the police weighs heavily on French non-white minorities. Whites move
out of housing or schools where Maghrebis and blacks congregate too much
thus creating ghettos in diametric opposite to France’s official policy
of integration.John Ardagh, formerly of
The Times and the
Observer in his 1999 book
France in the New Century Portrait of a Changing Society (Viking, London, 1999):
“The State promotes an integration which the public then obstructs;
the public stresses cultural differences which the State refuses to
recognize. That, in a word, is the basic dilemma of immigration today in
a France that officially does not accept multiculturalism or ethnic
communities. On the one hand the State regards all citizens as equal,
with the same full rights, and turns a blind eye to any distinctions
between them of race or culture. But the French public, in its mass,
does
not regard immigrants as fully or equally French, and will
constantly remind them of their otherness. The State expects those who
become French citizens to integrate fully, and many immigrants would
themselves like this: but the French people make it hard. Conversely,
many immigrants would like to retain something of their own culture and
identity: but the French State in turn makes this hard. It is a terrible
paradox. A Breton, for example, is easily accepted as Breton yet also
fully French: but the many Beurs who see themselves as French Arabs, and
would like to be respected as such find it much more difficult.
Although they may hate the American model, they sometimes envy its
acceptance of diversity.”
Film belatedly recognising the contribution made by colonial troops to the French army
The French Revolution of 1789 provided the civic idea of the nation,
one in which the collective sovereignty of the inhabitants as citizens
in a given territory constituted both state and nation, regardless of
ethnicity and language. The civic nation has since become synonymous
with constitutional democracy, the rule of law and human rights. From
the perspective of eighteenth century Europe, nationalism was a
subversive doctrine which introduced the notion of popular sovereignty
as the basis of legitimacy of government, substituting that of divine
right of kings. The new legitimacy therefore came from the nation. But
Robespierre and Napoleon were also the first modern dictators and worked
on the premise that they served the ‘general will’. Inspired by
Rousseau’s divination of the people, Robespierre divided the French into
two binary opposites: people and enemies. The latter were to be
exterminated and indeed 50,000 people died in the Terror. The Nazis were
in fact to emulate the Jacobins in minute detail. The terror is not a
side-effect of the system. It is the system. The earthly paradise can
only be achieved when the ‘enemy’ is eliminated. Massacres are necessary
in an ideology in which killing is an inherent element and takes on a
momentum of its own. Rousseau, prophet of the 1789 revolution, provides
the antithesis of liberalism by creating an anarchic individualism, an
individualism which extends from the intellectual sphere to that of the
passions. He appealed to existing
la sensibilité, proneness to
emotion, which was admired by cultivated people in eighteenth century
France. This overturned existing conventions by justifying direct and
violent emotion uninformed by thought and for this reason is the father
of what we recognise as fascism by introducing the virus of the
totalitarian state. After all the
Social Contract claims to
solve the problem by allowing freedom without the brute force needed for
order. In this context we can understand why Poles who flocked to
Napoleon’s banner found revolutionary rhetoric to be empty of real
liberation because French imperialism oppressed them even more than the
tsar. More ominously disillusionment with French rule led German
thinkers to seek answers in a spiritual quest which became romanticism.
The French Revolution had therefore led to the exaggerated imperialism
of Napoleon, and the rise of a romantic conception of national cultures
notably by German thinkers such as Fichte, Herder and Hegel, imprisoning
humanity into certain uncompromising categories of nation, ethnicity
and therefore race.
This was noticeable in the cradle of revolution itself. The French
historian Tain said that the revolution of 1789 had brought forth
barbaric, animalistic baboon types. The Parisian bourgeoisie deployed
language such as
classes dangeruesses in racial terms
describing the proletariat as being of low intelligence, violence, raw
animality and moral corruption. For the ideologue of modern racism,
Arthur de Gobineau, this was not an age of progress but one of despair
as he translated aristocratic fears of the seething masses into racial
terms in his 1855 book
Essaie sur l’inégalité des races humanes (
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races)
asserting that whites or Aryans were the master race. The fissures of
1789 were manifest in the language of identification to act in the best
interests of France brought to a head in the anti-Semitic Dreyfus Affair
where Radicals and socialists found themselves as
patriotes pitted against right-wing
nationalistes
in an obvious overlap of self-descriptive language. Anti-Semitism was
an essential glue for Nationalists who saw the true French nation as
excluding the Jews who supposedly ruled them. In 1902 the
Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme
by Maurice Barrès articulated an organic French society which
emphasised rural culture and respect for ancestry as opposed to the
rootlessness and materialism of urban industrialised society. A central
concept in this French nationalism was that of the Jew as outsider and
traitor. The Jew was the perfect ‘Other’, symbolising everything that
was not organically French. In 1886 the failed publicist Edouard Drumont
produced
La France Juive employing Gobineau’s terminology of
Aryan and Semitic to describe races and reach out to those who felt left
behind during France’s industrialisation such as small traders
struggling against large department stores. Drumont blamed Jewish high
finance and capitalism even though most department stores were owned by
Catholics and Protestants outnumbered Jews in banking. When workers in
Fourmies in 1891 protesting for an eight-hour day were fired upon by
troops, Drumont blamed Jews for the massacre in his attempt to use
anti-Semitism to garner proletariat support. But of all the hate
preachers of organic nationalism few surpassed Charles Maurras for whom
the guilt of Dreyfus was self-evident simply because he was Jewish.
Drumont and his classic anti-Semitic hate manual
Yet the little known fact is that organic French nationalism lagged behind the Left.In their book
Why the Jews?, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin:
“The belief in Jewish world domination was spread during the twentieth century through the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and used by the Nazis as a justification for genocide. This mythical
worldview was first introduced into the West’s consciousness not by
racists, Fascists, or Nazis, but rather by socialists in
nineteenth-century France.”
In the early nineteenth century, Pierre Leroux coined the term
“socialism” and identified Jews with capitalism and exploitation of the
French proletariat. Along with Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier was
a founding father of French socialism, and he referred to Jews as
“parasites, merchants, userers”, and was against their emancipation. In
1845 Alphonse Toussenel’s
Les Juifs, rois de l’époque (
The Jews, kings of the Epoch)
said cosmopolitan Jews dominated Europe. But the most extreme attitude
was perhaps taken by Proudhon who justified pogroms in Russia and in
December 1847 and said all Jews must be exterminated or expelled to
Asia. During the Dreyfus Affair, the French socialists were either
indifferent or even hostile to the army officer’s plight. When they
eventually did take a stand, they made it clear that the Jewish element
in the persecution was irrelevant.
Unhappy with what he saw as a republic dominated by opportunist
politicians influenced by the Rothschilds and Reinachs, Edouard Drumont
made his fortune from the thousands of
La France Juive sold and
in the process politically transformed anti-Semitism from an originally
socialist weapon peddled by Proudhon. Jews were now not just usurers
and capitalists but the cause of all evils through parasitic capital
which fleeced peasants and large department stores which undermined the
small shopkeepers. Drumont’s slogan was
La France aux Français which he circulated through the new paper he founded in 1892,
La Libre Parole. In 1889 the
Ligue Nationale Antisémitique de France was founded and led by the Marquis de Morès, with a vice president who actually called himself a “national socialist”.
With a new nationalism that denounced economic injustices, the rich,
parliamentary democracy and called for a fervently authoritarian state,
there was also a French socialism which was national and not
international. Barrés used the term Socialist Nationalism and it reared
its ugly head during the Dreyfus Affair when Jews were denounced as not
being French. In the words of Maurras:
“[A] form of socialism which, when stripped of its democratic and
cosmopolitan accretions would fit in with nationalism just as a
well-made glove fits a beautiful hand.”
Although his L’Action Française made great efforts in appealing to
the French proletariat, Maurras was now being superseded in both his
nationalism and working-class appeals by the former members of the
French Left. In, 1903 the former “Red” socialist Pierre Biétry founded
the Nationalist Socialist Party which espoused “Yellow” socialism:
national solidarity in lieu of class conflict, where private property
would be sacrosanct, and workers would benefit from profit shares as
management and unions worked side by side. Anti-Semitism, a strong state
and the personality cult of leader were other essential elements. The
emergence of Federation des Jaunes de France was the model for similar
European groups such as the DAP (German Workers Party) which emerged in
Austria in 1903, and the national socialism of Enrico Corradini in
Italy. Yellow unions had their origin in workers opposed to the strike
of 1899. Lanoir established the Bourse de Travail in Paris and gained
the support of the nationalist majority on the city council. Biétry had
in fact been his deputy until rebelled against his authority and was
expelled. This led to him forming the Fédération des Jaunes and the
Nationalist Socialist party, the latter collapsing within a year.
Elected to parliament for Brest, Biétry formed Le Parti Propriétiste
anti-étatiste with a platform to defend property ownership for the small
man not big industry. Indeed he opposed capitalists and especially
Jews, proposing the nationalisation of the Western Railway to be run by
its own employees. Yellow socialism hence resembled what would later be
called fascism. Maurras emulated attempts by Barrès in the 1880s to
create a union of nationalists and socialists by reaching out to that
prophet of syndicalism himself, Georges Sorel. A Proudhon Circle was set
up by Georges Valois to develop an axis of both Nationalists and
Radicals to combat the Republic, Jews and capitalists. The resultant
‘integral’ nationalism was therefore based on excluding everything
defined as anti-France. Sorel in his 1908 book
Révolution sur la violence saw workers responding to the idealist myth of a general strike and advocating violent change.
Yet xenophobia and racism continued practised by the traditional
French Left. In 1910 French seamen in Marseilles went on strike against
the employment of Kabyles by the merchant navy. From 1910 to 1912
Italian immigrants in oil refineries fought with North African strike
breakers. In 1913 Kabyles were attacked by Belgian immigrants in the
coal mines of northern France. In World War I French trade unions
lambasted colonial workers for lowering the wage levels of native
whites. From 1917 African workers were subject to violent street level
assaults by the French proletariat in Dijon and Le Havre. The Hatmakers’
Union campaigned against the immigrant “lepers” while the Hotel
Workers’ Federation targeted an invasion of foreign labour.
Le Peuple,
mouthpiece of the General Confederation of Labour denounced foreign
labour. Violent clashes occurred in 1931 between French workers on one
side with their Belgian, Moroccan, Italian and Polish compatriots used
as strikebreakers or competition. Even the Communist Party claimed “
La France aux Français!”.
French Communists were hostile to refugees and the racist and
anti-Semitic venom spewing from its own mouthpiece ironically named
L’Humanité
led communist Jews in 1938 to form their separate Union des Sociétés
Juives. Of course after 1945 the communists joined the national postwar
amnesia as it conveniently hid the two year alliance of Hitler and
Stalin which they had supported. During this postwar period the PCF
(French Communist Party) dropped all pretence of anti-colonialism in
order to champion national imperialism. Stressing unity and assimilation
the PCF said it was in the interests of the colonies to remain French
in order to be safe from American imperialism. The USSR with its many
nationalities was cited as a template for a fully democratic imperial
France of 100 million citizens of all races. The PCF’s anti-Americanism
led them in 1954 to forge an axis with Pierre Poujade and his UDCA’s
attack on Jews, foreigners and support for colonialism in Algeria. Le
Pen was to emerge from this Poujadist fold. From the 1960s the PCF
complained that conservative governments were dumping immigrants in the
working-class suburbs, industrial zones and communes that encircled
Paris. From 1978 PCF mayors blocked access to public housing by
immigrants. A quota of fifteen percent was imposed on immigrant children
attending summer holiday camps for youth from deprived backgrounds. On 5
November 1980 the Political Bureau of the PCF condoned this official
racist strategy. In Vitry the PCF mayor went so far as to lead the
bulldozing of an immigrant worker hostel. In February 1981 the Communist
mayor of Montigray, Robert Hue, coordinated a harassment campaign
against a Moroccan family accused of drug-dealing. Hue later became
leader of the French Communist Party. The erosion of its traditional
working-class base led the PCF to adopt a strategy of racist populism.
This was barely distinguishable from Le Pen who himself managed to
attract working class vote to the Front National, support that
previously went to the Communists. Indeed the party has overtaken the
PCF in becoming the foremost proletariat party in France, while also
gaining support from farmers and small tradesmen. Front National has
established its own parallel trade unions which are very strong in the
police and prison service. Gaining greater proletariat support than
Maurras had ever enjoyed, the situation was complicated in places such
as Marseilles where dockers were quoted as both members of the Communist
CGT and supporting the FN.
U.S.
soldiers of the U.S. 28th Infantry Division march along the Champs
Elysees on Aug. 29, 1944, four days after the liberation of Paris
Sikh soldiers in Paris during World War 2
Vichy is a collaborationist period which French leaders have
consistently failed to come to terms with. Voting power to Pétain at
Vichy in 1940 was no impediment in René Coty becoming president in 1954.
Indeed successive presidents laid wreaths at the Marshal’s tomb. It was
only in 1995 that President Jacques Chirac admitted the inescapable
guilt of Vichy in the deportation and extermination of French Jews. But
Vichy is perhaps merely a reflection of the snister flipside of the
revolutionary heritage which has shaped modern France. Towards the end
of his life it was revealed that socialist president François Mitterand
had been associated as a student with the Cagoule or Comité Secret
d’Action Révolutionnaire, founded in 1937 by Éugène Deloncle as a
radical and violent offshoot of the anti-Semitic paramilitary Action
Française. In February 1935 he was photographed on a march against
foreign students with the banner “Go on strike against the wogs”.
Mitterand also wrote for a newspaper which admired Mussolini and became
leader of a nationalist student group. Indeed he later served with the
Vichy regime. As head of state he never formally acknowledged the
collabarionist national stain. Even as socialist president Mitterand
even then he insisted that the state bore no responsibility for what
happened to Jews during the Occupation and Vichy. But he was far from
the only Leftist in Vichy. Admiral François Darlan was a radical
socialist and republican who in 1940 joined Pétain’s regime as Minister
of Marine Affairs, and also met Hitler twice and drafted legislation for
Jews to be deported to the death camps. Maurice Papon belonged to the
Radical Socialist Party, joining the Air Ministry in 1931 at age twenty,
and in 1936 took a role with the Popular Front government of the Left,
only to Vichy Ministry of the Interior in 1941 and take an active part
in rounding up Jews for extermination. Papon his racist and repressive
policies into the 1950s by crushing Algerian demands for independence as
prefect of Constantine. He also imposed curfews on Algerians in Paris
and blocked enquiry into the massacre of forty of pro-FLN demonstrators
in Paris on 17 October 1961, and the subsequent and incarceration of
thousands. He managed to keep his Nazi past hidden until 1981 as he
served successive French government. Réne Bousquet had also come from a
radical socialist background yet became a Vichy prefect in 1940, and
head of national police in 1942. He was so successful in the round up
and deportation of French Jews that he greatly impressed Himmler.
Nazi poster encouraging French recruits for the Waffen SS
France has always accorded a great respect to its intellectuals and
it was here that Holocaust denial found its first pseudo-academic hero
and he was firmly a creature of the Left. In 1948 Paul Rassinier
published
Le Passage de la Ligne (
Crossing the Line).
This first book as with the sequels attacked survivors’ claims regarding
the atrocities committed by the Nazis, especially in there being an
explicit and deliberate plan by the Third Reich to exterminate the Jews.
In 1977 Rassinier’s books were reissued in one volume. By now he was
denying that there were even any gas chambers. Dismissing the
credibility of testimonials from Holocaust survivors, he stated that
concentration camps were evidence of the benign nature of the Nazi
regime and that the Holocaust was merely being used by Israel as a guilt
trip milk cow in order to financially exploit West Germany under the
guise of reparations. The truth was prevented from emerging due the
all-powerful nefarious network of Zionists. Such ideas being staple food
for neo-Nazi groups worldwide and especially in France. Yet Rassinier
had joined the French Communist Party in 1922 at sixteen, moving to the
Socialist Party in the 1930s and even enlisted for the Resistance
following the German invasion. Captured, he was incarcerated in
Buchenwald concentration camp and on his release in 1945 he was elected
member of the National Assembly as a Socialist. Serving for a year he
then began a writing career which by exonerating his former Nazi captors
provided essential foundations for the pseudo-academic undiscipline
known as Holocaust denial. In the 1970s French anti-racists laid claim
to
droit à la difference, the right of ethnic minorities to
retain their own language, religion and cultural identity. This was the
antithesis of French republicanism with its tradition of assimilation.
The New Right transformed this right to difference to defend European
national cultures. This meant that the French had as much right to
survive as Amazonian tribes. Mixing of cultures would damage the
cultural identity of both host and minority communities. The only
solution was an apartheid style separation which justified exclusion and
repatriation of non-whites. French culture must be protected from being
swamped and immigrants themselves were being damaged through contact
with the superior numbers of Europeans among whom they lived by being
allowed to recover their own traditions.To thsi effect Alain de Benoist
founded Groupement pour Recherche et d’Études par la Civilization
Européen (Research and Study Group for a European civilization), with
the acronym GRECE, in 1968 at the age of twenty-five. GREC referred to
classical Greece and emphasised it was an intellectual battlefield for
what became the Novelle Droite (New Right). Taking the ideas of Italian
national socialist Julius Evola, De Benoist looked to the pagan glory of
classical Greece and felt that Christianity was an alien colonising
ideology which had no place in Europe. It was this which caused a chasm
with America’s New Right. Indeed de Benoist opposed the Americanisation
of Europe through television, fast food, mass media and worship of the
dollar. As he himself admitted in 1982:
“Better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn.”
He condemned NATO and dallied with the New Left during the May 1968
student uprising in Paris and claimed he was in favour of
ethnopluralism, cultural diversity and preservation of ethnic
identities. But his ideas were parallel to that of the National Front
under Nick Griffin, who by 1985 had moved to a Third Positionist stance
in praising black separatism, Khomeini’s Iran, Gaddaffi of Libya and
Jerry Rawlings of Ghana.
De Benoist in 1993:
“Will the earth be reduced to something homogenous because of the
deculturalizing and depersonalizing trends for which American
imperialism is now the most arrogant rector? Or will people the means
for the necessary resistance in their beliefs, traditions, and ways of
seeing the world? This is really the decisive question that has been
raised at the beginning of the next millennium.”
Bolstered by the ideas of Alain de Benoist, Le Pen often said that
the native French were now the real victims of racism in France. He
denied xenophobia and hatred, and even voiced his respect for Arab
civilisation but stressed that Muslims would enjoy their own culture
better in their own countries. By now Le Pen said it was no longer a
conflict between capitalism and Communism but instead economic
nationalism versus internationalism. Free market ideas were abandoned
for statism, economic protectionism and anti-globalisation he also
praised Saddam Hussein and condemned US military action against Iraq in
1991. was well received by the dictator in Baghdad, lauding him as a
“great Arab patriot”.
Saddam Hussein meeting with Jean-Marie Le Pen
In 1993 Charles Pasqua said that the Front National only reflected
the same values as the majority. But rather than influencing the
majority of French into becoming racist or sympathetic towards fascism,
perhaps the Front National merely exhibits a behaviour pattern which can
be traced back to Jacobinism itself. Calling Front National ‘Far Right’
only clouds its ideological origins on the Left and why in the second
round of voting Marine Le Pen appeals even more to traditional
socialists than to those who have supported Sarkozy.
Le Pen minimising the Holocaust in 2009 in the European Parliament
