A French Populist Tide? Things Could Be Worse

For the very life of the nation was at stake, and it behooved true patriots to mobilize. Such was the impulse that fueled the growth of extra-parliamentary leagues, like the Ligue de la Patrie française (LPF), the Ligue des patriotes (LDP), and the Action française (AF). When the LPF was founded in 1899, litterateurs and academics flocked to its ranks, embracing it as a vehicle to defend French quality in a vulgar, democratizing age. Maurice Barrès, an early member, was emblematic of this frame of mind. He had authored Les Déracinés in 1897, the story of a cohort of young men momentarily led astray by an empty intellectualism. What French youth needed instead, Barrès exhorted, were professors of energy who drew strength from the nation’s soil, from la Terre et les Morts, as he later phrased it. It was a tradition-minded way of thinking that ultimately led Barrès himself away from a youthful iconoclasm toward a renewed faith in Christian religion. 

Barrès preached the gospel of energy, but the Ligue des patriotes and the Action française took matters one step further. The LDP’s membership was less high-brow than the LPF’s and ready to engage in roughhouse politics in a way the LPF was not. In 1899, Félix Faure, the president of the Republic, died, and the man slated to succeed him, Émile Loubet, was known to favor a new trial for Dreyfus. The leader of the LDP, Paul Déroulède was determined to forestall such an eventuality and seized the occasion of Faure’s funeral to attempt a coup d’état. He tried to cajole military units in the cortege to march on the Élysée, a stratagem that ended in pathetic failure. The Action française took a more deliberate approach to the matter of street politics. Grand gestures like Déroulède’s might be doomed, but it was still possible to intimidate opponents on a day-to-day basis. To that end, the AF maintained its own band of street-fighters, the Camelots du roi, who dedicated themselves to making life miserable for those it deemed lacking in national feeling.

It is not that the Left has pulled itself together, though it is making an effort. It is that two new contestants on the Right have entered the lists, Valérie Pécresse and Éric Zemmour. Their appearance on the scene has shaken things up, making Le Pen look less of a shoo-in to make the second round. As the landscape has evolved, moreover, it has come to resemble more and more (though not entirely as we shall see) that of Dreyfus-era France and the contemporary US. 

The terrain that Pécresse has staked out is clear in its outlines. She boasts all the right educational credentials with degrees from the HEC Paris and ENA. She has worked alongside pillars of the conservative establishment from Jacques Chirac to François Fillon. These are right-wing times, of course, and that has left its mark on Pécresse’s platform. She talks about protecting the nation’s sovereignty, but at heart, she is a business-friendly moderate of a familiar, even reassuring type.

So it comes as little surprise that he eschews the slanging speech of the demagogue, peppering his oratory instead with learned invocations of counter-revolutionary writers like Georges Bernanos. Or, on other occasions, of reactionary philosophers like Louis de Bonald. The Bonald/Bernanos pairing is suggestive in its own right. Both men remained loyal to a Catholic Church that refused to bend to the revolutionary times. Indeed, for Zemmour, it is not just a question of refusing to bend but of reconquering, hence the name of his party, Reconquête, itself an allusion to the Reconquista, the centuries-long struggle to return Muslim-controlled Spain to Christendom. Little surprise again, then, that the Villepinte audience cheered when Zemmour declared his commitment to l’école libre or that Zemmour’s campaign has attracted the interest of the most Catholic of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s descendants, Marion Maréchal. There are evident ironies in all this, of course. Zemmour is Jewish, and Barrès, the anti-Dreyfusard, was no friend of the Jews. Notwithstanding, and as unlikely as it may seem, Zemmour has positioned himself as the present-day standard-bearer of a Barrès-style Nationalism.

The position has its limitations, however. Barrès had some success in politics, entering the Chamber of Deputies in 1906 as representative from Paris’ 1^er arrondissement, at that time a constituency dominated by commercial interests. The middle class, rather than the plebs, made up his electoral base, and the same, there is reason to suspect, may said of Zemmour. Take a look at the crowd in attendance at his Villepinte speech, most of them wearing masks, many in neckties. They shouted and waved flags, but they were not a plebeian bunch. Zemmour’s message may go over at well-heeled Parisian dinner parties, but does it have the same echo in la France profonde (the "French heartland")? The populist, Déroulèdist strain of Nationalism is Marine Le Pen’s territory, and she still has a hold on it. Zemmour’s candidacy may not fizzle, but it will weaken with time, and there are signs that this is already happening.

There is something missing, however, in this inventory of right-wing options. In contrast to the United States, there is no one of prominence on the French scene who instigates violence or who boasts an established record of election subversion, and this is consequential for how next spring’s elections will play out. Zemmour may take enough votes away from Le Pen such that Pécresse squeezes into the second round; or he may fade so fast to Le Pen’s benefit that she powers her way into a return match with Macron. But whatever the scenario, there will be no attempted coup as in Dreyfus days or as in America in January 2021. The Right’s field of candidates may not be to everyone’s liking, but rest assured, things could be worse.

Copyright: STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP