In the run-up to the
French presidential election, the far-right Front National leader has
courted growing numbers of voters in rural France where residents of
villages and small towns have seen factories close and services
disappear. Le Pen calls this ‘forgotten France’. Angelique
Chrisafis went to a Burgundy heartland of the left to meet voters
turning to Le Pen
How Leftists Learned to Love Le Pen
The far-right National Front’s path
to victory runs through France’s former northern Communist strongholds.
BY KATY LEE, CLAIRE SERGENTFEBRUARY 7, 2017
HAYANGE, France — The towers of the ArcelorMittal steel mill
loom over the little town of Hayange, silent and shuttered. Few people stopped
to chat on a recent winter day — the streets were shrouded in an icy fog — but
those who paused summarized life here succinctly: There has been little work
since the blast furnaces at the mill were shut down in 2013, and little hope
either.
“Everyone is sick of it,” said Pascal, who declined to give
his last name, leaning on the door of his tattoo parlor. “100 percent I am
going to vote for Marine Le Pen.”
Like much of France’s industrial north and east, Hayange, a
town of 15,000 near the border with Luxembourg, has a solid left-wing
tradition. It has been sending Socialist lawmakers to Parliament for 20 years,
while Communists and other far-left parties have played an active role in local
politics for decades.
But in 2014, the town booted out its Socialist mayor in
favor of a candidate from Le Pen’s National Front (FN). Mayor Fabien Engelmann,
a slick 37-year-old, embodies changing local tastes in politics. A former
hard-left trade unionist, he switched to the FN in 2010 due to his growing
concerns about immigration and Islam. The town backed Socialist François
Hollande by a whisker ahead of Le Pen in the last election, but if conversation
on the streets is anything to go by, she has a good chance of coming out on top
here when Hayange votes along with the rest of the country in April.
Hayange, in other words, is the French equivalent of Donald
Trump country, that swath of voters in the deindustrializing rust belt who
helped give Obama the presidency in 2008 and 2012, and whose votes delivered
formerly Democratic states to Trump in 2016.
Like Trump, Le Pen has a voter base beyond angry whites in
the economically depressed regions that account for most of the 900,000
industrial jobs France has lost over the past 15 years. The FN counts the
sun-soaked south as its historic stronghold, where social conservatives and
staunch nationalists returning from colonial-era Algeria have long backed the
movement. But if Le Pen manages to ride the global populist tide to a shocking
win after Brexit and Trump, decaying northern industrial towns like Hayange
will have helped her get there.
“The counties that voted for Trump have the same
sociological profiles as districts voting for Marine Le Pen — deindustrialized,
rather lost, very socially vulnerable,” said Stéphane Wahnich, a political
analyst who has written two books about the FN leader. “Paris and Lyon vote for
the left, because they’re wealthy. Guys from Hayange vote for the far right,
because they feel forgotten. The only one who’s taking up their cause is Marine
Le Pen.”
* * *
Hayange is nestled in the Moselle Valley along the borders
of Luxembourg and Germany, and has passed in and out of French hands over the
course of its history. However, it has been a consistent symbol of France’s
changing industrial fortunes. The de Wendel family, one of the country’s oldest
and most powerful industrial dynasties, bought its first forges here in 1704,
making it a birthplace of French heavy industry. From their base in Hayange,
the de Wendels spread out across a region rich in iron ore, growing into one of
Europe’s biggest steelmakers by 1900.
Fast-forward another century and the town had become a
byword for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s failure to halt industrial
collapse.Fast-forward another century and the town had become a byword for
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s failure to halt industrial collapse. By 2012,
ArcelorMittal, now the owner of Hayange’s blast furnaces, was seeking to shutter
them as the European steel sector grappled with massive overcapacity and a
flood of cheap metal from China and elsewhere. The fate of the plant became a
focus of that year’s presidential election. Then-candidate Hollande descended
on the steelworks — briefly casting a spotlight on a corner of the country that
had long felt forgotten — and mopped up blue-collar votes with a promise to do
better.
He eventually sealed a deal with ArcelorMittal to avoid 600
layoffs, sending some workers home on early retirement or pushing them into
other jobs at the huge site, which stretches into the neighboring town of
Florange. But he could not save the blast furnaces. The giant towers remain
shut. They dominate the skyline in Hayange, a painful reminder of busier times.
Officially, the blast furnaces are being kept mothballed for potential use in a
future project — but no one in Hayange believes that will happen, not even the
FN mayor.
“It’s finished; they’re out for eternity,” said Engelmann,
who believes the site should have been nationalized and resold when the market
was doing better.
A steelworker’s grandson, Engelmann started his career as an
official for France’s biggest and most hard-line trade union, the General
Confederation of Labour. Back then he was a Communist. His political
conversion, which he detailed in his 2014 book From Leftism to Patriotism, came
gradually. He always believed in a strong role for the state, and still does.
But increasingly he believed the left wasn’t addressing his concerns about
immigration and the role of Islam in France. The National Front had the answers
he was looking for.
“The politics of Marine Le Pen is the politics of common
sense allied with protectionism and a state that protects, but also a politics
that is clearer and tougher on security and massive immigration,” he said in an
interview at the Town Hall, a forbidding-looking building in the main square.
“At the beginning I was worried there’d be skinheads and
anti-Semites like the media said,” he said of his early ventures to party
meetings. “But I saw middle-class French people who were saying, ‘We’ve got big
problems in France; we’re struggling to pay the bills.’ Shopkeepers struggling
to make ends meet.”
Outside Engelmann’s Town Hall, a few Trotskyist activists could
be seen handing out leaflets. Hayange’s first postwar mayor was a Communist,
but the town’s far-left influence has waned in keeping with the decline of a
party that up until the 1980s was a major national player, with its members
even serving as ministers. François Mitterand’s election in 1981 as France’s
first Socialist president, and the country’s longest postwar leader, made the
mainstream left an electable force — but it sapped much support from the
once-popular Communists in the process.
* * *
The de Wendel family, like other paternalist tycoons of the
19th century, shaped Hayange’s culture such that the mines and steelworks
dominated all aspects of life. The city’s patrons didn’t just provide their
workers with employment, but extensive welfare services, from health care to
housing.
“You were born in their hospitals; the schools were provided
by the Wendels and the church too,” said Marc Olénine, a local business
consultant who has written a book about Hayange. He believes these generous
benefits — provided to some extent until the 1980s by employers who wanted
their workers healthy but compliant — were largely responsible for the
hard-left culture that still lingers today.
But Wahnich believes the region’s past helps explain why so
many locals have found it easy to switch support to the National Front.
“It’s important to know that the Moselle was annexed by the
Germans” during World War II, Wahnich said. Its citizens became German
citizens, its young men were conscripted into the German army. That wasn’t the
case in parts of France that were occupied rather than annexed. “Fascism is
something that’s slightly normalized there,” he said.
France’s experience with authoritarianism under Nazi
occupation is part of what makes the prospect of a National Front government so
abhorrent to mainstream voters. But for the annexed Moselle, the psychological
experience of the war was different, Wahnich said. It helped lend an
authoritarian bent to the leftism later found in steel families like
Engelmann’s. From authoritarian left to authoritarian right, “it doesn’t take
much to tip them over,” he said.
Others have asked if it’s really so surprising that rust
belt voters might flip from the hard left to the National Front, given that
both carry an anti-elitist message and claim to have the working man’s
interests at heart.
The difference, it seems, is Le Pen’s timely messaging on
immigration and Islam. Like elsewhere in the West, a fading economy has been
accompanied by a backlash against newcomers. Many locals are of immigrant stock
— descended from generations of Italians and others who came to work in the
valley’s mines and steelworks since the end of the 19th century. But there’s a
growing sentiment that more recent arrivals are different.
“The Italians and the Portuguese came, and they integrated,”
said Georges Dibling, an aging rocker selling punk knickknacks at a market
stall. “Now we’ve seen immigration from beyond Europe, and that is causing
problems.” Though there are two halal butchers in town, Hayange remains largely
white. But residents like tattoo shop owner Pascal talk of feeling “invaded.”
“We have to stop the foreigners coming here. Already there’s
not much work and what little there is, they come and take,” says Véronique, a
57-year-old market trader who is backing Le Pen after a lifetime of voting for
the left. “Something has to give.”
Marc Guillaume, an economist, says this resentment against
foreigners has been building since the 1970s, when soaring oil prices dealt a
body blow to the French economy in general and the industrial belt in
particular. The longer-term forces of globalization were also at work by then:
Iron ore previously mined around Hayange was now imported at lower prices from
Mauritania or Canada. And then there were advances in technology, which wiped
out human jobs. An industry that employed 155,000 people in 1975 had shrunk by
two-thirds by 2009 as thousands took early retirement. In Hayange, a plant that
employed 13,000 in 1973 has no more than 2,200 workers today, according to
union figures.
Like other rust belt towns, Hayange has suffered from its
reliance on a single sector. “It’s an area marked by its mono-industry,”
Olénine says. Centuries ago, when the de Wendels were building their steel
empire, cash had poured out of workers’ pockets into shops and bustling cafes
that drew people from miles around. Today the absence of that cash means the
cafes are mostly empty.
“Before there were businesses in Hayange; there was work
right in front of us,” says one unemployed steelworker who declined to give his
name, sipping a beer over a newspaper in a bar. He waved in the direction of
the blast furnaces. “Now it’s dead. It’s terrible.”
* * *
Today, about a third of Hayange’s residents commute to
Luxembourg, most of them skilled workers in service industries like IT and
banking who believe the cheaper rents here are worth the two-hour round trip.
Despite the decline of industry, unemployment rates in this stretch of
northeastern France are not particularly higher than the national average of 10
percent, but this is largely because so many work across the borders — 90,000
in Luxembourg and tens of thousands of others in Germany, Belgium, or
Switzerland. Even FN voters in Hayange admit their uncomfortable reliance on
their European neighbors. But their mayor insists the party could come up with
a workaround if Le Pen quit the European Union as threatened.
Other than commuting to a foreign country or subsisting on
government handouts, there is relatively little to do for work in Hayange. In
the wider region, Wahnich says the famously strong French safety net has had
the perverse effect of feeding populist anger, because it has served as a
constant reminder of how little improvement there has been in people’s
prospects.
“The archetypal miner is now 60 and has been laid off for 15
years, paid to do nothing. He’s richer than his son,” he said. “Meanwhile,
there has been no revival of the economy. The children either leave, or they
stay and are less well paid than their parents.”
France’s once-vaunted job security — a legacy of past
left-wing victories — has become a liability, making companies reluctant to
take on new permanent employees while the economic outlook remains bleak, and
encouraging them to shift production abroad. In 2015, nearly 90 percent of new
job contracts were temporary — most for less than a month.In 2015, nearly 90
percent of new job contracts were temporary — most for less than a month.
Hayange is no exception: Many of those left at the steel plant are on
short-term contracts and live in constant fear of losing their jobs.
“We’re like tissues — they take us, they use us, and then
they throw us away,” said the unemployed steelworker. The 45-year-old is at a
loose end after finishing up an 18-month stint at the plant. He feels too old
to retrain, and family commitments leave him unable to leave the region. All he
can do is hope there’ll be more need for him next year.
Opinion polls forecast that Le Pen will win a place as one
of the top two candidates in the first round of the presidential election,
going through to the runoff in May (though, for the moment at least, they don’t
expect her to win). Few expect Socialist party candidate Benoît Hamon to make
much headway. Most expect Le Pen’s opponent to be either centrist former
economy minister Emmanuel Macron, who has been surging in the polls of late, or
right-wing candidate François Fillon, even though his fortunes have been
falling as a result of an ongoing corruption scandal.
Neither of her opponents have much appeal to voters in
places like Hayange. Fillon, a proud Thatcherite, has made clear he wants to
slash corporate taxes and ax a half million public sector jobs. Meanwhile,
Macron has cast himself as pro-EU and business-friendly, and has suggested tax
cuts for the wealthy.
In the United States, the quirks of the Electoral College
gave outsized influence to Trump voters in rural and rustbelt states. In
France, by contrast, the anger of people in places like Hayange will propel Le
Pen to the presidency only if they represent more than 50 percent of the voting
public. Wahnich and most others believe they are unlikely to see a Le Pen
victory, not least because France’s last experience with authoritarian
leadership was within living memory, in the form of a Nazi puppet regime. “When
faced with a right-wing populist candidate, it doesn’t have the same resonance
for an American as it does for a French person, historically speaking,” he
said. In rust belt towns like Hayange, the authoritarianism of the past might
lend itself to a political culture comfortable with the National Front, but
this is not, he believes, the story of France at large.
That said, the anger on the streets of Hayange — against
useless politicians, the EU, the ravages of borderless trade — can be felt far
beyond this town. Le Pen billed herself as the “candidate of the forgotten” as
long ago as the last election in 2012. This time, it feels like the time of the
forgotten might finally have come around.
'The real misery is in the
countryside': support for Le Pen surges in rural France
Rift between ailing rural areas and
faraway big cities is where the Front National leader looks set to make her
biggest voter gains
Angelique Chrisafis in Château-Chinon
@achrisafis
Friday 21 April 2017 11.19 BST Last modified on Friday 21
April 2017 22.00 BST
Sitting at his kitchen table in a remote farmhouse in the
Morvan hills of Burgundy, with a calculator, bills and debts piled up in front
of him, Jean-Marc, a 50-year-old Charolais cattle farmer, had decided to vote
for the far-right Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, for the first time this
weekend.
“A whole French way of life is under threat,” he said,
looking at an old photograph of his father working the land with a horse-drawn
plough. “I work 70 hours a week and I can’t make a profit from my animals. It’s
misery. I’ll be in debt until I die. And if we replace the French with
immigrants, this country’s whole identity will change. We’ve got to protect the
French.”
Outside, his herd of 160 neatly brushed prime cattle were
ready to go out to pasture on his meadows. The farmer, who used to vote for the
right’s Nicolas Sarkozy, depends on EU subsidies for survival. “Without
subsidies, I wouldn’t exist, I’d be finished,” he said.
But he was proudly voting for Le Pen, who wants France to
leave the EU. “Subsidies are going down and I’m afraid we might lose them one
day anyway,” he said. There was “more and more talk of votes for Le Pen” in
farming communities, but he still did not want his real name published. In the
countryside, where everyone knows everyone else, he felt it was “better to be
discreet”.
As Le Pen ramps up her hardline security and
anti-immigration message in the final days before Sunday’s first-round vote,
she is in part appealing to those in rural communities where her support base
has been growing fastest. After a police officer was shot dead on the Champs
Élysées on Thursday night in an attack claimed by Islamic State, Le Pen
cancelled her last day’s campaign events. She said there must be a crackdown on
“Islamic fundamentalism” in France.
Her party’s central message of keeping France for the French
– giving priority to French people over non-nationals in jobs, housing and
welfare, as well as a ban on religious symbols, including the Muslim headscarf,
from all public places – has a resonance in rural communities, even where
immigration is very scarce.
Le Pen is looking to the countryside as she fights to
mobilise her full voter base. Her poll figures have dipped and she and three
other candidates – the centrist Emmanuel Macron, the rightwing François Fillon
and the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon – are now so close it is impossible to
predict which two will proceed to the second round.
Nièvre, the poorest département in Burgundy, is a
traditional heartland of the French left. For 40 years it was the rural power
base of the former Socialist president François Mitterrand, who was mayor of
the small town of Chäteau-Chinon for 20 years.
“This place has been leftwing since the French revolution,”
one local Socialist politician boasted, adding that Nièvre was a focal point
for the French resistance during the second world war. And yet, the Front
National more than doubled its vote here in the previous regional elections,
and it is here in Burgundy that Le Pen is hoping for some of her highest
scores.
Le Pen’s rural target is not just farmers, who are shrinking
in number in France and represent about 1% of the electorate. Her base
comprises people living in modest towns and country villages far away from big
cities, who have felt the sharp edge of France’s decades of mass unemployment,
who have seen factories close and local shops and services disappear, in places
where the population is ageing, young people are leaving and those who stay
have to drive long distances to see a doctor, or sometimes even to post a
letter.
Le Pen deliberately combined her vast urban campaign rallies
with small-scale appearances in denim jeans at meetings in village squares and
barns, appealing to the people she says live in a “forgotten France” neglected
by the “globalised elite” of cosmopolitan cities. That rift between what is
seen as a neglected France on the periphery and faraway “bubble” of the big
cities is where she hopes to make her biggest gains.
“People have had enough, they want to kick the system”,
sighed one shop worker in Château-Chinon. “Things have got to change,” added a
retired factory worker. “The political class are rotten to the core. All you’re
going to hear round here is one message: Get rid of them all, kick them out.
Start afresh.”
With its deserted streets and ‘for sale’, the village of
Varzy symbolises the plight of the depressed French hinterland, a key theme in
the presidential race. Photograph: Thierry Zoccolan/AFP/Getty Images
More than 15% of people in Nièvre live below the poverty
line. It has one of the lowest life expectancies in France and has lost more
than a quarter of its doctors in the past 10 years as they retire and move
away.
“There’s no work, there are no doctors, there’s nothing,
it’s dead,” said a pensioner who said she struggled to make ends meet at the
end of each month and had once turned to food banks for meals. Three-quarters
of people she knew would be voting Le Pen, she estimated. She used to vote
Socialist and said she had resisted voting Front National until now because she
had an uncle who had been deported to concentration camps during the second
world war, and she used to fear the far right posed a threat to democracy.
Boards to display election campaign posters are seen in
front of the church in Sermages in Morvan natural park. Photograph: Vincent
Kessler/Reuters
“But right now, to put this country back in order, Marine Le
Pen is the only one up to the job,” she said. “We’ve reached saturation point.”
She thought the government was putting “foreigners first” for benefits and
housing, while neglecting the “misery” that French people were living in.
“Britain opened its eyes with Brexit, closed the borders. We’ve got to do the
same,” she said.
One retired builder had switched from Communist to Marine Le
Pen – in part as a protest vote, in part because she would “get rid of” what he
described as “a certain population” of immigrants, and also because “I like her
a lot”. He felt she would sort out pensions and the economy.
Britain opened its eyes with Brexit, closed the borders.
We’ve got to do the same
In a country where the pollster Bernard Sananès recently
said every other person now knew someone in their circle who could not find a
job, more work was the chief concern of voters on Château-Chinon’s main street.
“If jobs were brought back, 80% of the other problems would
be fixed,” said Didier Felzines, who owned a bike shop. “The rise of racism
would be sorted too, because why do people become scared of others? Because
there aren’t any jobs left … As soon as a foreigner arrives, they say: ‘Oh no,
he’s going to take the jobs’. If there were more jobs, people would be happy to
see foreigners, there would be no more fear.”
Harold Blanot, 30, is a forestry trader from a village in
Morvan, where he said his family of woodcutters had lived for generations. He
joined the Front National aged 18 because he supported the 2005 no vote in
France’s referendum on the EU constitution and because of the urban riots that
spread through housing estates that year after the death of two boys hiding
from police.
He was now canvassing for Le Pen and running for a
parliamentary seat in the June legislative elections that will follow the
presidential vote. “This is forgotten France,” he said while leafleting in
Château-Chinon market. “The real misery is in the countryside. In Nièvre and
Morvan a few decades ago, there was small industry — manufacturing,
charcuterie, textiles. It has slowly shut … The Socialists have been here since
after the war, but it has led to disaster... People want to turn the page and
the solutions the Front National are proposing are having an impact.”
Guy Doussot, the Socialist mayor of Château-Chinon, said the
rise of the Front National locally was symbolic of a rise of the far right all
over France. “It worries me,” he added. He accused the party of playing on the
issue of immigration. Locally he felt there had been a growing and
“unjustified” negative view of families who were connected to a training centre
for imams in a village nearby because they wore Muslim dress in the town.
Across Nièvre, in the market of Fourchambault, a small town
of 4,500 people, Pascal Leguen was standing at his wine stall. He voted for
Sarkozy in the previous presidential election, but said he would now switch to
Le Pen.
“Two-thirds of French people just don’t want the traditional
political parties any more, they want change,” he said. “There’s less and less
work in France, and politicians can’t keep sticking their head in the sand.”
With fewer jobs available for the French, foreigners should
not be allowed in, he said. “When there’s no more bread at home, you don’t
invite in your neighbours.”
The long read
How Marine Le Pen played the media
For years, she has accused French
journalists of bias against her family and her party. Yet Marine Le Pen has
managed to lead the far-right Front National into the political mainstream –
and she couldn’t have done it without the press
by Scott Sayare
Thursday 20 April 2017 05.30 BST 485 Shares
Like most serious political reporters, Olivier Faye, of Le
Monde, professes little desire to please the people he writes about, and even
less expectation that he will. This equanimity has been of particular use in
his current assignment covering the Front National, the clannish party of the
French far-right, which has been warring with the news media for four decades.
Faye and the other reporters assigned to the FN make light of the hostility
aimed their way by the party and its supporters, and have adopted some of the
cleverest insults as their own. They call one another journalopes, for instance
– a mashup of journaliste and salope (whore) – or members of the merdia.
The Front National has fashioned itself as the “patriotic”
victim of a bankrupt political establishment and the corps of bourgeois
journalists allegedly beholden to it. Marine Le Pen, the FN’s vituperative
leader, often refers to her opponents as “the media-political system” or, more
succinctly, la caste. This tactic of populist martyrdom is a sort of trap, one that
lures the media into the stance of an adversary, called to defend both
themselves and a frequently indefensible political class. For years the French
press plunged into it with what, in hindsight, appears a heedless and
self-righteous sense of mission. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there were
media boycotts of various sorts against the party; yet it only rose in the
polls, citing the media’s hostility as evidence of both the conspiracy against
it and the potency of the truth it was preaching.
Faye, 29, with ruddy cheeks and modish round glasses,
conducts himself with a friendly but slightly fervent air that is common among
French political reporters, who constitute an informal elite within French
journalism. He fits a longstanding type, but neither he nor his colleagues
endorse the old condemnatory approach to the FN. “There’s no attitude that’s
more counterproductive, I don’t think,” he said. “Today people don’t want to be
held by the hand, to have someone tell them, ‘Watch out, these are bad guys! I,
I the great knower, I’m going to tell you what you should do.’” At Le Monde,
the conviction is now that “you have to treat this party like any other,” Faye
said, “even though it’s not a party like any other.”
It is fair to say this maxim represents a victory for Le
Pen. Upon succeeding her father, Jean-Marie, as the FN’s leader, in 2011, she
began a strategy of dédiabolisation, or de-demonisation, a broad effort to
soften the party’s image and normalise its portrayal in the press. The
following year, she won 17.9% of the popular vote in the first round of the
presidential election, the FN’s best-ever result. This year, she is expected to
take more than 20% and thus qualify for the final runoff. The words Front National
appear nowhere in her campaign propaganda.
Dédiabolisation is almost entirely a matter of appearances –
the party platform has undergone hardly any revision – and Le Pen and her
lieutenants thus scrutinise their press coverage with particular intensity. She
is known to call editors to complain, though with Le Monde she tends to call
Faye directly. She once left him a voice message admonishing him that she had
not “dressed down” a party official, as he had contended in an article, but had
quite simply expressed her disagreement. “I see the games haven’t changed, it’s
a shame,” she said, affecting a tone of weary exasperation. “Call me back if
you think” – she paused, as if summoning her acid – “you’ve behaved in good
faith. Au revoir!”
In early September, Faye and four of his editors invited Le
Pen to an off-the-record lunch to discuss the upcoming campaign. Such lunches
have long been common for French journalists and politicians, though only more
recently for the FN. They met at an upscale Danish restaurant on the
Champs-Élysées. Faye and his editors were seated at the far end of an enclosed
terrace. Le Pen, an imposing woman with platinum blond hair and an ashen scowl,
arrived with her bodyguards, who waited at the door, and her longtime media advisor,
a bemused and friendly man named Alain Vizier. Le Pen sat facing Faye; Vizier
sat at his side.
Le Monde, an afternoon paper widely held to be the country’s
publication of record, is the object of particular resentment for many at the
Front National; they scorn it as an emblem of the “system”, but seem to crave
its approbation nonetheless. After a brief round of pleasantries, and before
the journalists had had the chance to begin on their questions, Vizier placed a
stack of printouts on the table. Le Pen looked at Faye. “I’ve printed out the
last 20 articles you wrote,” she said, as Faye recalled it. “There’s one that
talks about real issues, and 19 that have nothing to do with politics.”
She had underlined, in red ink, various words of which she
did not approve. “You have a nice little tone of disdain, of condescension,” Le
Pen said, her voice rising to the low, imperious bark that is her standard
register for interactions with the media. “A little ironic tone that I don’t
like.” Surrounding conversations grew hushed; diners seemed to cease chewing,
and stare. Le Pen took particular exception to an article about the Front
National’s highly publicised recruitment of elite civil servants, after years
of attacking them as the embodiment of a blinkered governing class. The article
began: “Most political parties cart about their share of contradictions, and
the Front National is no exception. Marine Le Pen, who presents herself as the
megaphone of the ‘people’ and a paragon of ‘common sense’, ceaselessly
denounces ‘the consanguinity and collusion of the elites’, who ‘no longer
defend the common good’.”
Le Pen did not like the use of the word “paragon.” She
leaned back on the banquette and drew on an electronic cigarette, and left Faye
to defend himself. (“Sometimes I use irony,” Faye acknowledged later. “It’s a
way of marking a bit of distance, it’s true.” After the lunch, he learned that
the stack of articles and the “19 out of 20” accusation form a set piece that
Le Pen has used more than once.)
Le Pen went on for about 30 minutes. “She gave us a whole
speech about how we were her enemies, because she knew we were going to call
for people to vote against her,” recalled Caroline Monnot, Le Monde’s top
political editor. “And I told her, ‘Yes, we’re undoubtedly going to call for
people to vote against you, probably, but that’s not a big discovery for you.’”
Le Pen’s purpose, it became clear, was to convince Le Monde
to publish an op-ed she had written, and she threatened to restrict the paper’s
ability to cover her campaign if it did not agree. “That’s where things are
screwed up with them,” Monnot said. “That’s just not how it works. It’s not,
‘Up until now I was a pariah, now I’m going to be able to set my own
conditions.’ We don’t let anyone set their own conditions.”
Though it sets out to cover the the Front National like any
other party, Le Monde does maintain a rule that is particular to the FN. It
remains the paper’s policy – like that of various other publications – to
refuse to publish op-eds written by FN officials. “The problem we have,
honestly, is that if we open the door to taking her op-eds, then we’re helping
her put the finishing touches to her banalisation,” Monnot said, “and we don’t
want to be in that position.” To refuse on principle is also an imperfect
solution, however, accrediting as it does the party’s claim to ostracism and
victimhood at the hands of an unaccountable elite – themes that remain the
central feature of the party’s politics.
“There’s a pretty perverse and complicated game you have to
play with them,” Monnot said. “They’re constantly trying to drag us into this
system versus anti-system confrontation. Which we have to constantly avoid
getting trapped in.” She offered a metaphor for Le Pen. “There’s a theatre
play, and she absolutely wants us to act in this play with her,” she said. “And
how do you go about not acting in it?” Once the media have been pulled on
stage, whatever they do is part of the show, whether they like it or not.
All politics is storytelling, and all responsible political
journalism attempts to account for this, or at least make it plain. Le Pen and
her party have long sought to tell a story about the media themselves. This
places the journalist in the difficult position of being at once subject and
object: they can no longer perform their duties from behind the comfortable
myth of neutrality; they are called to speak about themselves, account for
their work. And if they are honest, they will be obliged to acknowledge the
possibility of contradictions and flaws. Le Pen has intuited this weakness, and
understands how to exploit it. If she cannot have what she wants from the
media, then, she knows she can at least have her way with it.
She did not dwell upon the rejected op-ed, but rather turned
to the slab of raw salmon that had been placed before her, and began to answer
questions, pleasantly now. “She’s a politician,” Faye said. Later in the
afternoon, Vizier, Le Pen’s media advisor, sent him a playful text message:
“Thank you Olivier for that ‘most lively’ lunch!”
Marine Le Pen was four years old in 1972, the year her
father, Jean-Marie, a truculent blond bruiser with a penchant for sinister
witticisms, was made president of the newly created Front National pour l’Unité
Française. The Front National – anti-communist, anti-Gaullist, anti-finance,
anti-tax, anti-immigrant, anti-Europe – was peopled by radical Catholics,
monarchists, Vichy apologists, colonial nostalgics, neo-fascists and other
marginal reactionaries. For the first decade of its existence, it distinguished
itself mostly by its insignificance. Jean-Marie won 0.74% of the vote in the
presidential election of 1974.
He understood that if the Front National was to grow, it
would require exposure in the press, positive or not. In 1982, though the party
had won no elections of any note and counted only a few thousand registered
members, he wrote to president François Mitterrand to complain that the media
was denying him attention. Calculating that any rise in Le Pen’s fortunes would
mean a corresponding fall in those of the parties of the traditional right,
Mitterrand, a Socialist, directed the country’s three state television channels
to give the FN more airtime.
Le Pen made his first major television appearance in 1984,
and immediately established himself as a showman of national stature. He had
been invited to appear on l’Heure de Vérité (The Hour of Truth), a political
programme that, in that era of relative trust in politics and limited
television entertainment, drew millions upon millions of viewers. The
invitation had been highly controversial; demonstrators and riot police massed
outside the studio.
The show began with the host lecturing Le Pen briefly. Though
he was “a marginal of the political realm”, the host said, Le Pen was
nonetheless “part of the reality of French society”. “This is a fact, and it’s
why I’ve invited you this evening,” he said. “This invitation, as you know, is
not to everyone’s liking.” Le Pen grinned, before seeming to remember the
camera and nodding solemnly. Marine Le Pen, then 15, dressed in capri pants and
heels, watched from the front row of the audience.
One of the show’s interviewers, a particularly svelte and
haughty man in a grey suit and tie, had come armed with several quotations of
dubious taste, attributed to Le Pen or his associates over the years, and asked
Le Pen to comment upon them, one by one, in the manner of a prosecutor
questioning a witness. One comment, attributed to Le Pen: “When I see the
Arabs, with their rumpled look, I wonder if there’s not some biological
determinism at work.” In the formal diction he has long employed, and which
lends even his most violent or outrageous statements a patina of harmless scholarship,
Le Pen claimed that he had never said such a thing.
“This really does seem to me a surprising method,” he
exclaimed at one point, “and one that strongly resembles political terrorism.”
He smiled broadly and laughed, realising that a clever and damaging line had
formed in his mind, and with both hands made a gesture of friendly admiration
toward his questioner. “Elegant terrorism, I acknowledge! And plush. But
terrorism just the same!”
Le Pen’s poll numbers doubled within a day. Later in the
year, the Front National won nearly 11% of French votes for the European
parliament, where Le Pen himself became a representative. (He remains one
today.) “I think they believed they would be devouring me whole, to the
audience’s great delight,” Le Pen, now 88, recalled to me recently, with
delectation. “Unfortunately for my opponents, it was the tiger that ate the
tamer!” He laughed wheezily.
Within the “caste” Marine Le Pen so disdains, it is habitual
to remark that she is “her father’s daughter”. This is meant to indicate that
she is not the gruff but compassionate patriot she proclaims herself to be, but
rather the leader of an unreformed proto-fascist party, a despot in democrat’s
clothing. The literal, rather than political, implications of her filiation tend
to receive little analysis. But the central fact of her life is that she is
indeed the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen. For the better part of her 48 years,
her father was very probably the most hated man in France, and if ever she
forgot this the press could be counted upon to remind her.
He was an inattentive parent and, by reputation, an
unrestrained narcissist, and his political activity was at the centre of family
life. He revelled in his infamy, and did little to shield his daughters from
its consequences. “You’re Le Pen girls for life,” he told them. “It’s not going
to be easy, so you might as well knuckle down now.”
In 1976, a massive early-morning detonation destroyed the
two apartments the Le Pens occupied in a building in Paris. Marine has
described the attack as a moment of political awakening. “I’m eight years old
and realise, brutally, that my father is someone well-known and that people are
angry at him,” she wrote in a 2006 autobiography. And yet, she continued, there
was not “the slightest sign of solidarity or compassion” from the authorities,
not so much as “the shadow of a telegram” from the president or any other
government official. “And it is then and there,” she wrote, “at the age of
dolls and dollhouses, that I become aware of this thing that is terrible and
incomprehensible for me: my father isn’t treated like the others, we are not
treated like the others.” She suddenly intuits that she is a victim, both of
her father’s choices and of an elite that, finding those choices repugnant,
denies him and his family their rightful membership.
Marine Le Pen’s autobiography, titled À contre flots
(Against the Torrents), is a standard political memoir insofar as it aims to
explain its author’s political views as the inevitable consequence of an
exceptional life; it departs from the norms of the genre in its embrace of
extravagant victimhood. It is a litany of grievances: the media are prominent
villains, accused of ginning up “delirious lies”, launching “great campaigns”
against the Front National, and caricaturing her father as “a racist, an
antisemite, a fascist”. And this alleged misrepresentation, this diabolisation,
is doubtless the root of the many other injuries of her life: if only her
father and his party had been presented for what they truly were, she would not
have been made to suffer.
Philippe Olivier, a member of the party since 1979, knew
Marine in her younger years and married her elder sister. “When you’re a kid,
and you read vile things about your parent, about the people around him, about
what they do, where the quotes are doctored, where the words are doctored –
it’s hard,” said Olivier, a personable man with a lisp that renders his
conspiratorial worldview less menacing, who is now Marine’s close advisor. “And
so she constructed a personality with the press as a life companion, but one
that wasn’t always so pleasant.”
When Jean-Marie Le Pen won nearly 17% of the first-round
presidential vote in 2002, the press was stupified. So was he
By the mid-1980s, a generation of highly politicised
journalists, children of May 1968, had risen to positions of influence within
the French media, and they seemed to believe it their responsibility to halt or
at the very least punish Le Pen and his party. “The whole story of the 80s and
90s was the story of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s electoral rise, and of the media who
wondered, ‘What do we do? What can we do?’” said Daniel Schneidermann, who
worked as a reporter for Le Monde in those years, before becoming a respected
media critic. “And yet they realise that nothing is working. If they scream
about fascism, it doesn’t work, it has no effect on voters. Not if they attack
him personally, either. If they put out big editorials on the theme, ‘This is
bad!’ nobody cares.”
“There was this idea,” said Schneidermann, “that since he
wasn’t a politician like the others, everything goes.” They took liberties they
would not have allowed themselves with other politicians, whose private lives
they handled with marked deference. Le Pen and his wife, Pierrette, began a
long and angry divorce in 1984. Pierrette had run off with her husband’s
biographer, a magazine journalist who had been living, at Le Pen’s invitation,
at the family home. (She left without a word even to her daughters; Marine did
not speak with her for 15 years.) The press covered the split with some glee,
particularly when, in 1987, Pierrette took revenge upon her ex-husband by
posing nude for the French edition of Playboy. Marine was humiliated.
Her father’s so-called dérapages, or “slips of the tongue,”
were covered with particular zeal. The most famous of these was what has come
to be known in France simply as “the detail”. In a broadcast interview, Le Pen
was asked for his opinion of the theories of two prominent
Holocaust-revisionists. He replied: “I ask myself a certain number of
questions. I’m not saying the gas chambers did not exist; I haven’t been able
to see any for myself. I haven’t studied the question in particular. But I
think that it’s a mere detail in the history of the second world war.” The
country was incensed. “There are details that are monstrous,” Le Monde wrote in
an editorial.
Le Pen denounced a “pack of political and media hounds” on a
“witch-hunt”, and specified that in the context of a war that killed tens and
tens of millions, the chosen technique for the slaughter of just a fraction of
these was surely not of terrible consequence. It was the sort of specious,
diversionary but superficially logical argument that has always confounded Le
Pen’s critics in the media, and they largely preferred to ignore it. He
protested, as ever and more loudly, that he was a persecuted speaker of truth.
The following year, 1988, he won more than 14% of the
presidential vote, his best finish yet. The media worked themselves into an
historic lather; his numbers remained there for a decade.
When Le Pen won nearly 17% of the first-round presidential
vote in 2002, qualifying for the first time for the final round, the press was
stupified. So was Le Pen. He ran his party as a sort of fiefdom, for his own
amusement; there is a widely held view among researchers, reporters and current
members of the Front National that he adored the attention he commanded as an
agitator and flouter of bourgeois pieties, but that he had no great desire for
power and its responsibilities. Serge Moati, a filmmaker who maintained
friendly relations with Le Pen, was with him on the evening of his first-round
victory, at Le Pen’s manor overlooking Paris. The brawler was suddenly
withdrawn, Moati said, seized with melancholy. Le Pen fretted that he had no
one to name as his chief of staff, nor as prime minister. “He just wanted to
have fun, to play around,” Moati said. His daughter, by contrast, seeks to
rule.
Like her father, Marine Le Pen has proven herself an
exceptional broadcast personality, born with a blood instinct for the minor
hypocrisies of her on-air opponents, and a quick-thinking talent for
transforming them into grand theatrical indictments. She has inherited her
father’s unconscious smirk, which often serves as notice that she has just
concocted some particularly clever bit of verbal violence. Like him, she also
tends to jut her jaw and bare her lower teeth when speaking, which can lend her
the slight air of a bulldog. The French say she has gouaille, which might be translated
as “cheekiness”, but is a term applied almost exclusively to women, evocative
of late evenings at a Paris bistro counter, cigarettes, red wine and a certain
bawdy self-assurance. Le Pen in action is good, if discomfiting, television.
Her father never seems to have encouraged her promotion
within the party. The camera noticed her first, and she built her rise largely
upon the strength of her media appearances. The first of these to attract
attention was on the evening of the second round of the 2002 presidential
election. Le Pen lost heavily to Jacques Chirac, with just 18% to Chirac’s 82%,
but Marine’s performance inspired a certain fascination. Journalists, she later
wrote, began requesting interviews, wishing to behold “the monster’s daughter”.
In the coming years, no other FN official was granted so
much exposure, in print or on air, with the exception of her father, and she
was far more pleasant for journalists to deal with. It is true that Le Pen
seems to enjoy nothing so much as a good row, and she is known to fume in
silence during commercial breaks when she feels she is being disrespected, but
she is also viewed as quite personable and inspires far less overt disgust than
her father ever did. “We’re all much less on edge,” one top television
presenter once told the magazine Télérama. “Before, we had to organise a whole
ballet so that our other invitees wouldn’t bump into Jean-Marie Le Pen. We had
to do their makeup separately, and install two entrances, so the other politicians
wouldn’t have to say hello to him.”
While there were those within the party who believed that
the FN’s disrepute brought in more voters than it scared off, Marine Le Pen
calculated that the party would have to soften its image if it wished to
accomplish anything more than shocking the bourgeoisie. This would require
courting the media.
After succeeding her father in 2011, she began to speak more
openly of her experiences as a woman and mother, banned skinheads from the FN’s
public rallies, and let it be known that “what happened in the camps” during
the war was, to her mind, “the height of barbarism”. In 2015, she had her
father expelled from the party; he had given interviews reiterating his views
about the “detail” and asserting that Philippe Pétain, the leader of France’s
collaborationist Vichy regime, was not a “traitor”.
Unsurprisingly, this narrative of fantastic family betrayal,
emancipation and political rebirth played well in the press. Most of the
coverage was sceptical, of course, and editorials were sure to note that,
whatever image Le Pen sought to project, she remained her father’s daughter
(though it is widely believed that his expulsion was not a stunt). But coverage
of any sort has a legitimising effect, and coverage of a contested claim –
here, that the Front National has truly changed – at the very least implies the
possibility that the claim is true.
In the country’s last round of national elections, in
December 2015, the FN tripled the number of seats it held on regional councils
and won more votes – nearly 7 million – than it had in any other election,
ever. In its editorial the following day, Le Monde called upon the country to
“take action before the catastrophe”. (The party’s successes cannot be
explained solely as a phenomenon of the media; but the media has nonetheless
been crucial to its rise.)
In 2002, Chirac had refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen.
This year, for the first time, his daughter appeared in a presidential debate.
In the view of party officials, the FN’s dédiabolisation has now been
accomplished. In her dealings with the press, Le Pen alternates between the
postures of the politician and the insurgent, answering policy questions when
it suits her and inveighing against her questioners when it does not. “First of
all, Marine set out to ensure that she was being respected by the media,” said
Philippe Olivier. “Because, there would be the little journalist who came from
who knows where, who’d show up and who would ask a really disagreeable
question. Well. We’re in politics, we’re not whores, you know? And even whores
have to be treated with respect!” He laughed. “She’s not going to go talk to
journalists who behave badly.” (The party, long wary of the “filter” imposed by
journalists, was the first in France to have its own website.)
In February, shortly after the official launch of her
campaign, Le Pen was interviewed during the nightly newscast on TF1, the
country’s most-watched channel. An economist from a thinktank called the
Institut Montaigne had been invited for the occasion, to ask Le Pen about her
plans to withdraw France from the euro, a decision most mainstream economic
thinkers believe would be calamitous. The Institut Montaigne, the economist
said, estimated the total cost of leaving the euro to be equivalent to 2.3% of
the country’s GDP. “I’d like to remind you, Gilles,” he said, addressing the
host, “this represents €50bn.”
“What is a shame, Monsieur l’Expert,” Le Pen began, “is that
you haven’t told us just what the Institut Montaigne really is.” The Institut
Montaigne, she explained, had been chaired until just a month earlier – “Ah,
look, what a surprise!” – by a man who was now campaigning for her opponent,
François Fillon, whose economic platform had in fact been penned by that very
same man.
Sensing catastrophe, the host interjected, but Le Pen
steamed on, smiling. She noted that, furthermore, the longtime director of the
Institut Montaigne was a close friend of still another opponent, Emmanuel
Macron, and a backer of his movement, En Marche!. “I believe En Marche! was in
fact domiciled at the home of the Institut Montaigne’s director!” This was
true.
Le Pen collected herself and, with icy didacticism,
broadened her charge. “I would like to tell the French: you’re going to be
experiencing this same thing for the next two months.” Until the end of the
campaign season, she said, “all those who have something to lose in this
election” – the media, the “great powers of finance,” her political opponents –
would be conspiring to block her candidacy. “You’re going to hear things as
utterly insane as what we’ve just seen here.”
The expert nodded, and looked at his shoes, and had not a
word to say for the remainder of the segment. “He thought that with his three
little graphs and his suit and tie, he’d be able to pass,” laughed Olivier.
“She left him standing there in his underwear!”
French political journalism has long rejected the notion
that the reporter should maintain great critical distance from the politicians
he or she covers. It is the account of the exercise of power that has
traditionally been valued in France, not the account of its consequences; and
to observe the exercise of power, one must be close. (The media historian
Alexis Lévrier has argued convincingly that the explanations for this attitude
toward power are largely to be found in the ancien regime.)
When president François Hollande took office in 2012, four
of his ministers were involved in relationships with journalists. Hollande
himself was living with a journalist named Valérie Trierweiler, with whom he
had begun an affair when he was the head of the Socialist party and she was a
reporter covering it. This was hardly uncommon – Hollande’s three immediate
presidential predecessors were known to have had intimate relationships with
journalists as well, and the same is true of countless other government
ministers.
None of this is hypocritical or fundamentally wrong, of
course, but such proximity does give the appearance of collusion, or at least
suggest it as a distinct possibility. For many voters – not only supporters of
Le Pen – journalists and politicians seem to be all-but-indistinguishable
representatives of a self-satisfied and entirely oblivious Parisian ruling
class, and it must be said they have done little to discourage this impression.
Accusations of partisanship and collusion are only bolstered
by the long traditions of both in French journalism
Nearly all of the French private media sector is controlled
by investors and corporate entities with highly diversified business interests
and no historical attachment to the principles of journalistic independence.
BFMTV, the country’s most-watched television news station, is owned by Altice,
a multinational telecommunications group founded and run by the Franco-Israeli
billionaire Patrick Drahi. In October, an Altice media executive left the
company to join the campaign of Emmanuel Macron. Before running for the
presidency, Macron had served as a senior aide to the president and then as
economy minister, and had shepherded Altice’s acquisition of a major French
telecommunications operator. The Front National has taken note of all this, and
has cited it repeatedly as evidence of BFMTV’s alleged collusion with the
Macron campaign.
The television station has taken to publishing statistics to
show that Macron is accorded no more airtime than Le Pen. The FN’s accusations
are “pulled out of thin air”, Hervé Béroud, BFMTV’s managing editor, told me.
“When an individual person leaves a company to join a political campaign, does
that commit the entire company?”
Béroud’s reasoning is perfectly sound, and there exists no
material evidence to suggest that BFMTV has been anything but fair in its
coverage. But given the disfavour with which financiers, politicians and
journalists are presently regarded, it is hard to believe the FN’s charges do
not resonate with voters. (Antisemitic elements within the party may pay
particular mind to the fact that Drahi is Jewish.) The Front National has made
similar accusations about Le Monde, whose co-owner, the philanthropist Pierre
Bergé, has been a vocal supporter of Macron’s candidacy.
These accusations of partisanship and collusion are only
bolstered by the long traditions of both in French journalism. As the country’s
daily paper of the right, Le Figaro might be expected to show sympathy for Le
Pen’s positions on immigration, say, or French identity. But the newspaper is
owned by an industrialist who also happens to be a senator from the traditional
right, to which the FN is a threat, and Le Figaro’s editors have been
discouraged from covering Le Pen “so as not to harm the republican right”,
according to Philippe Goulliaud, who served as the paper’s politics editor for
a decade. The paper’s opinion pages remain all but closed to Le Pen.
Libération, on the left, refuses to publish either op-eds or interviews with
Front National officials. (The paper is also owned by Altice.)
France’s various public television and radio stations, and
Agence France-Presse, are controlled by political appointees, and the privately
held print media, with few exceptions, depends upon state subsidies for its
survival. Which is to say, conflicts of interest, or at the very least the
appearance of such conflicts, are rife. The Front National knows this well, and
uses it.
On the evening of Le Pen’s combative interview on TF1, her
personal assistant was formally charged with embezzlement, the result of an
inquest into the Front National’s suspected misuse of funds from the European
parliament. Le Pen herself had received a police summons, which she
disregarded, citing the immunity granted her as an MEP.
On air, she deflected questions about the charges, and
suggested the contours of a plot against her. “This investigation was opened
two years ago,” she said. “It’s really pretty surprising that, all of a sudden,
two months before the presidential election, there should be this flurry of
judicial activity.” She denied any wrongdoing.
Three days later, the banner headline on the front page of
Le Monde described the FN’s finances as “a system of organised opacity”.
Inside, a series of articles detailed the allegations of campaign finance fraud
that have trailed the FN in every election it has contested since 2012. Olivier
Faye, the reporter, said his editors felt the Front National had been a bit
neglected in the paper’s recent coverage, which had focused most intently on Le
Pen’s opponent François Fillon, himself accused of a no-show jobs scheme involving
his wife. (The embezzlement accusations against Le Pen hardly make her an
outlier among French politicians.)
Le Pen held a rally the following day, in a concert hall on
the grey outskirts of the western city of Nantes. Faye was there, and before Le
Pen took the stage he wandered the concert hall interviewing her supporters. He
sat down a bit abruptly next to a man named Joseph Elie, a retired farmer with
blue eyes and black wispy owl eyebrows who worried that French agriculture was being
strangled by European regulations. “We’re assailed with rules,” he said, “rules
we sometimes can’t even understand.”
“A question that’s totally unrelated,” Faye said. “The
scandals that are trailing Marine Le Pen, the financial scandals – does all this
bother you?”
“No it doesn’t bother me!” Elie replied. “And I’ll tell you
why: because, unfortunately, they all do it. You see Fillon – all of them!” And
Le Pen wasn’t accused of personal enrichment, he noted.
“But some of her friends, on the other hand, did enrich
themselves personally,” Faye said.
“Her friends?” Elie asked.
“Yes, some of her close associates. You know, in the affair
about the campaigns in 2012?”
“Oh,” Elie said, sounding confounded. But then: “Has it been
proven?”
“Well, the justice system hasn’t given a verdict yet,” Faye
said.
“The justice system hasn’t given a verdict yet!” Elie
repeated, vindicated.
A man seated nearby, spilling breadcrumbs from a sandwich on
to his stained green sweater, asked which newspaper Faye was with. “If you
will, France, to me, is a pyramid,” the man said. “At the top of this pyramid,
there are a half-dozen very important men, billionaires, and the rest of us are
their employees, their parrots. Oh yes! You’re a billionaire’s employee.”
“I’m not technically his employee,” Faye objected.
“Fine,” the man said, “but you can’t write whatever you
want!”
“I know this will surprise you,” Faye said calmly, “but
really, I really do write what I want.”
“At Le Monde?” asked another man, incredulous. “For 30 years
they’ve been telling us there are no immigrants in France. While at the same
time you can see we’re drowning in immigrants!” His wife, seated next to him,
said the Front National was treated as “evil incarnate” by the “immigrationist”
media. The man said, “You can tell these papers are really just puppets.”
When Le Pen took the stage, she began with an indictment of
the country’s traditional political class, “dream-wreckers”, whose “inadequacy”
and “disdain” have condemned the French, at each election, to nothing more than
“turning the other cheek”. “I want to transform your oh-so-legitimate anger,”
she urged, “into an act of love, for that vital and unique community that is,
just like your family, your nation.”
She turned to her prime opponent, Macron, whom she derided
as the choice of “the ruling caste”. She smiled a tart smile. “Look, by the
way, at the zeal with which the moneyed powers are now openly backing Mr
Macron! The moneyed powers, and their representatives in the media. Like Mr
Bergé, the owner of Le Monde” – now there were boos, and whistles – “who has
put his newspaper entirely in the service of Mr Macron and is using it as a
weapon of war against the people’s candidacy that I embody!”
Faye sat hunched at his computer in the darkened hall and
dutifully typed out the words, raising his eyebrows in slight disbelief. Such
direct attacks on the media have few precedents in French politics. His jaw
worked away a bit more quickly at his chewing gum. “Or like Mr Drahi” – more
boos – “he too in the service of Mr Macron, who controls numerous channels and
numerous papers, all of them entirely devoted to his candidacy!” Le Pen went
on. “I want to tell the French to be extremely careful not to let this election
be stolen from them – to know how to recognise, in the avalanche of propaganda
they’re being served from morning till night, the hand of the system.”
When Le Pen had finished speaking and the lights came up, I
spoke with a delicate-looking woman in hoop earrings and a black skirt, who
carried a small French flag and whose name was Soizic Robin. “They’re the only
ones I believe in any more,” she said of the Front National, though she told me
she had voted for the party only since Marine has been at its helm. Jean-Marie,
Robin said, was a “disgraceful man”. She said the media coverage of the party
had grown fairer in recent years, though she complained the party was still
unfairly associated with its former leader, and presented only in a negative
light. Two buses transporting FN supporters to the rally that day had been
stopped on the road and attacked by masked protesters, for instance. “And I’m
sure that won’t be in the news,” she said, but she spoke without bitterness.
Faye called Monnot, his editor. “Really one of the most
intense speeches I’ve heard in the past two years,” he said. In the report he
filed for the next day’s paper, inflected with a hint of the irony he likes to
deploy, he wrote that Le Pen, in order to “counter the accumulation of scandals
implicating her,” had attempted “to pass herself off as a victim of some effort
to silence her”. Much of the article consisted of quotations from Le Pen’s
speech. A small sidebar ran alongside it: “Buses of FN supporters attacked.”
In a broadcast interview this month, Le Pen was asked for
her view of a particularly infamous chapter of French wartime history, one that
has come to stand for the inhumanity and collaborationist zeal of official
France during the Nazi occupation. In July 1942, more than 13,000 Jewish men,
women and children were detained in Paris, and deported to their deaths. These
mass arrests, now referred to collectively as the Vel d’Hiv (for the cycling
arena in which many of the captured were held) were planned and executed not by
the Germans, but by the French. In an historic address, Jacques Chirac once
proclaimed that “France, that day, committed the irreparable.” Le Pen was asked
if Chirac had been wrong to state this.
“I think France is not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,
voilà,” Le Pen replied crisply, glaring at her questioner – the same man, as it
happened, who 30 years prior had asked her father about the gas chambers. “I
think that in a general way, and more generally, if there are people who are
responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time.” She jabbed a pen in the
air. “It’s not France. It’s not France. France has been mistreated, in the
minds of people, for years. In reality our children have been taught that they
have every reason to criticise it. To see only, perhaps, its darkest historical
aspects. So, I want them to once again be proud to be French.”
Le Pen had spoken little of French history during the
campaign season; the Front National has not always been well-served by its
public exegeses of past events. And indeed, Le Pen’s opponents and detractors
asserted immediately and with righteous anger that she had outed herself as a
despicable revisionist. Le Monde charged that she had crossed a “red line”,
that of “the national consensus” on the country’s historical guilt. Macron
said: “Some had forgotten that Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le
Pen.”
One wonders what other dark episodes Le Pen would see scrubbed
from the country’s account of itself, what other unwelcome truths she would
banish. But there was – and Le Pen was quick, as ever, to note it – a slight
excess in the outcry, a note of hypocrisy. Revisionism of this sort has been a
frequent feature of the politics of contemporary France, and it remains largely
tolerated when it emanates from quarters other than the far-right. De Gaulle
had insisted Vichy was the regime of only of a traitorous few, while “France”
and “the Republic” had survived the war in exile in London, unsullied by the
ignominies of collaboration. Every French president until Chirac had maintained
the same, and a small number of contemporary politicians still do. François
Fillon, her opponent, has in the past rejected the idea that “France” might
bear guilt for Vichy. But he did not refrain from adding his voice to the
chorus of opprobrium.
“I find this controversy to be artificial and shameful,” Le
Pen complained. “Shameful! Because I expressed the position that was General de
Gaulle’s, and François Mitterrand’s, and that of all the presidents one after
another until Jacques Chirac.”
If only as a technical matter, this was true. And in the
eyes of some, perhaps many, Le Pen had once again been made the victim for
being right – “mistreated” like the nation itself, compelled toward false
repentance by a caste of moralising hypocrites. Indeed, she would be nowhere
without them.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário