Director of the Observatoire des radicalités politiques and researcher at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, essayist (“Les droites extrêmes en Europe”, Le Seuil, 2015), Jean-Yves Camus analyses the root causes of the eruption of radicalism on the French political scene.
Interview By Martine Gozlan– In your opinion, has the National Rally broken with the fascist and far-right heritage of the National Front?
– Jean-Yves Camus: The label “extreme right” could be applied as long as Jean-Marie Le Pen was President of the National Front, because a political leader who doubts the existence of the gas chambers, declares that he believes in the inequality of races, and accuses the “Jewish international” of being in control of the media, the economy and political life, unquestionably deserves to be described as extreme right-wing. At the time, the National Front’s allies in the European Parliament were also extreme right-wingers. During the Second World War, he was an instructor for French volunteers in the Waffen SS. The Flemish party – the Vlaams Blok, now the Vlaams Belang – was led by independence fighters who had largely supported the Nazis. But all this has a biological end. Jean-Marie Le Pen has just turned 96 and the foreign protagonists I have just mentioned are dead. With the passage of time, there are no longer any people who openly claim to be fascists, National Socialists or associated movements. The big problem with the term extreme right is that, in the European imagination, it inevitably refers to the history of the 1930s and 1940s. When you confine a political grouping to fascism or Vichy, it becomes a polemical argument and this ostracisation is a factor of intellectual laziness. All you have to do is hurl an anathema to save yourself the work of reading the programmes so that you can then argue why this or that measure is unconstitutional, too costly, or at odds with our ideals.
– Why was this work abandoned?
– It was believed that France was immune to national-populist phenomena, to the “radical right”, a term I now use. Because Vichy had lost, because French fascism had never really emerged, it was thought that our country enjoyed a kind of natural immunity. After all, it was the home of the Rights of Man and the Revolution, the home of the contractual nation. History had decided, democracies had defeated fascism and there was no reason for things to change. That’s what we’re paying for today. From the second round of the presidential elections in May 2002 onwards, we told ourselves that Jacques Chirac had won by more than 80%, and that the Front National accounted for only 17% of the vote: it was therefore a sign that the phenomenon would never become a majority. As a result, the 200 or so anti-fascist collectives set up in the 1980s, such as Ras l’Front, quickly dissolved themselves. But the phenomenon has continued to grow. As it gained ground in the polls, intellectual debate became poorer and poorer. No one ever took the time to dissect the FN/RN issue in order to develop an ideological corpus that would enable the Right to keep its voters without making any concessions to the Lepéniste programme. The result is a situation unprecedented in Europe. The Republicans are in an extremely bad way in France today, while in all the other neighbouring countries, mainstream conservatism is still quite strong.
– What do you mean by “mainstream conservatism”?
– This is what George W. Bush and David Cameron called compassionate conservatism. In other words, an attachment to economic liberalism and societal conservatism, tempered by a certain number of safety nets for our fellow citizens facing unemployment, illness and other difficulties. In France, this conservatism has been eaten twice. On its liberal side in economics by the Macronist majority and, on its identity side, by the National Rally. This is not good news for democracy. Nor for the left.
– Is this a strictly French phenomenon?
– Not exactly, because there are comparable elements in Belgium with the spectacular breakthrough of the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB) and in Flanders with the nationalists. But there are certain specificities in France. Firstly, we still haven’t put our civil wars behind us. Starting with the French Revolution. We have not closed the Boulangiste episode, which gave rise to a form of plebiscitary populism that is necessary for understanding the current National Rally. In particular, the appeal to the common sense of the people against the corrupt elite and Caesarism. Theoretically, we’re past Vichy, but in the current wave of anti-Semitism, I’m not sure that there aren’t some remnants of it, not just on the far right: the Islamists and their supporters know that France wasn’t predominantly resistant, and some on the radical left have hints of Christian anti-Judaism. Of course, we didn’t overcome the Algerian war either. Basically, we haven’t overcome any of France’s divisions and we’re living on pretence.
– What is the nature of these masks that conceal reality from us?
– For example, the pretense of the survival of Gaullism. The label of Gaullist or neo-Gaullist no longer bears any relation to what General de Gaulle’s political practice was. Everyone claims to be one, but no one is fooled. This tutelary figure of Gaullism prevents the Right from being itself. Today we should declare the death of Gaullism. There’s another thing that sets us apart: the French are passionate about equality. But they – and not just RN voters – see that this country has become increasingly unequal. I’m not singing the same tune as La France insoumise when they talk about the number of billionaires. I’m talking about the rate of self-reproduction of the elites, which is higher today than it was thirty years ago. We can no longer tell our children that they will have at least the same opportunities and the same standard of living as our generation. There is a growing feeling that not everyone is on the same starting line. That the social ladder no longer works. This starts with schools, which are doing far less to fulfil their role as a melting pot for the nation. And we have lost another melting pot: military service. Admittedly, it bothered everyone, but it produced a mix of populations that we no longer experience. The civil service, too, enabled many people from modest backgrounds to rise through competitive examinations. Finally, according to Eurobarometer, we are the most pessimistic people on the continent. And yet our situation is not bad if we compare ourselves with the countries of Central Europe.
But something is happening to us that may seem tragic to many. We are no longer a great power, but a middle power. This is quite difficult for many French people to accept because we still act as if we were a great power. There is a total dichotomy between what we are led to believe and what actually is. When the President of the Republic tells us that he intends to play a leading role in peace in the Middle East, he is thinking as if we had the means to do so. When Emmanuel Macron went to Beirut, we saw the limits of the exercise. This does not mean that we no longer have a message to deliver. But we need to be more realistic about what we represent and fight for what we can really defend. It is incomprehensible to hammer away at the idea that France is a great power and then capitulate, as we have done for decades, on the Francophonie. It is just as incomprehensible to have pursued the perfectly muddled African policy of recent years and then to have been chased out of the African continent.
– Are we suffering from an existential malaise?
– Yes, a malaise that has lasted since the end of decolonisation. On the right, there are those who are nostalgic for the big pink spots on the maps of yesteryear – our former colonial empire – while on the left, there are those who plead repentance for what we have done and what we have not done. This is another thing that sets us apart from our neighbours. The Germans colonised and that doesn’t seem to trouble their memory, and neither do the Italians. After the Carnation Revolution in April 1974, the Portuguese absorbed almost a million Portuguese from their overseas colonies, exactly the same number as our Blackfoot. In Lisbon’s domestic policy, this is a non-issue! At a time when we are still dealing with requests for reparation, or even the revision of the 1968 agreements on the movement of Algerians in France. Not to mention the complicated relationship with Morocco and Tunisia, which are turning their backs on us. And of course, the migration issue remains closely linked to our colonial past, since the majority of migrants come from our former colonies.
– Why has the issue of anti-Semitism come back like a boomerang?
– It has never gone away. We must remember the anti-Semitism of the immediate post-war period. The historian Anne Grynberg refers in her work to the incidents that occurred when the Jews of Paris sought to recover their flats from which they had been dispossessed. The first anti-Semitic groups were dissolved in January 1945. These were three associations of administrators of Jewish property “Aryanised” during the war. They did not want to return what they had taken! From this point onwards, we can psychologically understand the process by which the survivors and their descendants said to themselves “never again”.
However, this is an illusion. The creation of Israel changes something, but not the substance. It is a state inserted into a region with populations whose anti-Jewish prejudices are ancient and deeply rooted. What Israel offers Jews is not that they live in a State that anti-Semites cannot attack, but that Jews in Israel become the subjects of their own history, whereas in the Diaspora they are the objects. And secondly, the fact that there is an army. For the first time since ancient times, the ban on bearing arms has come to an end, the desire to say to the Jews: “You are a people who must remain with your necks bent”. The Jews can defend themselves. But this is not an absolute guarantee, as demonstrated by 7 October. And by its consequences in the political use of pro-Hamas propaganda by La France insoumise.
– Does our country have sufficient institutional countermeasures against the eruption and domination of radicalism?
– They are there with the Council of State and the Constitutional Council. I understand the anger of some people at what they call the government of judges, whose decisions are often questionable. But a democracy must have its safeguards. But one thing is obvious. We have become a multicultural society, whether we like it or not. And not just in the big cities. So, we’re going to have to find a solution. Short of sinking into a form of authoritarian state that would expel all non-Europeans, we’re going to have to invent a way of creating a nation without compromising on principles. We are a multicultural society, but secularism is a principle, assimilation is a principle, we have a culture and a language: that is the basis of integration. Certain types of behaviour should not be tolerated. I’m in favour of being firmer on the issue of migratory flows. An obligation to leave French territory must be enforced if it is imposed. We have undoubtedly dithered too much on a number of points by not stating the rules clearly enough and not enforcing them enough. But there is an opportunity to get back on track. In the interests of those who are already here. Many people have arrived from the other side of the Mediterranean or from Africa with a real desire to integrate. We are not going to assign them to something they do not want to be. The Anglo-Saxon communitarian model is not ours, and freedom of religion is perfectly compatible with secularism. If we managed to consolidate our own French model, that would be a huge step forward…
