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Philosopher Alain
Finkielkraut is at the centre of the row, but has denied being a
racist and says he is the victim of a witch-hunt. Photograph:
JDD/SIPA/Rex Shutterstock
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Right-wing
'new reactionaries' stir up trouble among French intellectuals
The
nation famed for its public thinkers is pondering a moral crisis
provoked by a media-savvy group of intellectuals with far-right views
Angelique Chrisafis
in Paris
Friday 9 October
2015 05.01 BST
From Emile Zola’s
J’accuse to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Left Bank politics, France is
credited with inventing the figure of the public intellectual: the
writer as a spiritual guide for society.
But the nation whose
vast scope of thinkers has ranged from Enlightenment heroes to
Bernard-Henri Lévy, in his white shirt unbuttoned to the navel, has
been plunged into a moral crisis over the dominance of a
controversial new type of talking head: the reactionary, right-wing
TV intellectual.
A group of
media-savvy French intellectuals, deemed the “new reactionaries”
for their political views and cultural conservatism, are at the
centre of a furious row, accused of being a dangerous threat to
France by stoking racism, intolerance and a fear of immigration.
Dominating the
covers of magazines and newspapers this month, winning large ratings
on prime-time TV and topping bestseller lists, the diverse band of
thinkers and pundits argue that they are the only ones brave enough
to challenge political correctness and defend the ideas of national
identity by highlighting the dangers of immigration and the fears of
“ethnic French” people, who no longer feel at home with so many
foreigners. Their detractors warn they are fuelling a dangerous
atmosphere harking back to the extreme rightwing ideas of France in
the 1930s.
The profile of the
new reactionaries, which has been building for over a decade but
recently escalated, is seen to reflect the tense public debate in a
country where the far right now holds about 30% of the vote and polls
show that at least 70% of people think there are “too many
foreigners” in France. The intellectuals have been accused of
giving credence to the ideas of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front
National, although they have no connection to the party. Laurent
Joffrin, editor of the left-leaning French daily newspaper
Libération, this week warned their domination of the airwaves now
amounted to “a cathode-ray apocalypse”.
Alain Finkielkraut,
the controversial and high-profile philosopher, is at the centre of
the row after defending Nadine Morano, a former government minister,
who repeatedly insisted France was a “white race” country. This
week, Morano was banned from running in the regional elections for
Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing Les Républicains party.
Finkielkraut’s
2013 bestselling book, The Unhappy Identity, warned of the dangers to
French national identity from mass immigration and multiculturalism.
The son of a Jewish Polish leather merchant who survived Auschwitz,
Finkielkraut was elected last year to the prestigious Académie
Française, the institute that defends the purity of the French
language, but was nearly blackballed as some claimed he was too
reactionary and divisive.
As he publishe d
another book this week, Finkielkraut, who was once classed as being
on the political left, reiterated the immigration problems and
dismissed anyone calling him right wing, racist or who puts him on
what he derided as a “blacklist of neo-fascists”. He told France
Inter radio it was “dreadful and catastrophic” that as soon as a
thinker dared to “look at reality” they were accused of being far
right. He said a witch-hunt was being conducted by the anti-racism
lobby.
Michel Onfray, the
leftwinger often hailed as France’s favourite contemporary
philosopher, was accused of lurching to the right this month when he
questioned the photo of the Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who was found
drowned after his parents tried to reach Europe, and said “old
school” French people might feel marginalised and betrayed by the
arrival of migrants. Libération accused Onfray of abandoning the
ideals of the left and playing “Le Pen’s game”. He hit back,
accusing the newspaper of “hatred”.
Behind all this
looms the figure of Éric Zemmour, a TV intellectual and French
newspaper columnist, who topped the non-fiction bestseller list with
Le Suicide Français, in which he argued that millions of Muslims
might be colonising and transforming France and should be
repatriated. Zemmour was cleared last month of inciting racial hatred
after saying on radio that “bands” of foreigners were “stealing,
assaulting, stripping” the country. In 2011 he was found guilty of
incitement to racial hatred after telling a TV chatshow that drug
dealers were mostly “blacks and Arabs”.
The political debate
in France has seen increasing references to the “great replacement”
theory by the controversial writer, Renaud Camus, who has argued that
local French populations will be replaced by newcomers who reproduce
faster. He was convicted of incitement to racial hatred last year.
As a counterpoint,
Nicolas Bancel, a historian at the University of Lausanne, has
co-authored a new book, Le Grand Repli, which warns that France and
the country’s political debate is turning in on itself with a rise
in intolerance and more outspoken racism. He said the rise of what he
termed “reactionary” thinkers, who focus on immigration and Islam
rather than the old concerns of salaries, gender equality and
integration, was in part due to a 24-hour media culture that courted
controversy while sidelining more reasoned university academics.
“Themes, which
aren’t new – such as the French nation, fear of immigration,
stigmatisation of the Muslim outsider – now translate into votes,”
he told the Guardian, arguing that Front National was presented as
the only party able to return France to the way it was 30 years ago.
He said the mood was bolstered by high unemployment and the fragile
situation of the lower middle class and working class.
Sylvain Bourmeau, a
journalist and associate professor at the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social
Sciences) in Paris, said: “There’s an unhealthy climate that has
been brewing for a long time. It reflects the impact of the Front
National on French political life. What is worrying is a form of
brazen racism displayed more and more openly ... I feel this wouldn’t
be as possible in the UK.”
He said there was a
huge divide between the essayists and pundits dominating media
headlines and university academics.
The philosopher,
Régis Debray, when asked this week about the row over rightwing
thinkers, said: “Politics has been emptied of all intellectual and
moral content so it’s normal that intellectuals fill that gap.”
But he warned people
not to lash out so harshly, quoting the French writer George
Bernanos: “The intellectual is so often an imbecile that we should
always take him for one until he proves the contrary.”
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