Le Pen’s Moment / THE NEW YORKER.

“The exclusion of the Front was great news for Le Pen. Nobody believed that she would have wanted to go and be associated with the political mainstream, but, by failing to invite her, the Socialists had given her a cudgel. “I don’t intend to submit myself to this blackmail,” she told Le Monde. “It’s a total perversion of the concept of national union. They’ll have to accept the consequences from the voters.” She went on, “This whole thing is a way of pushing aside the only political movement that has no responsibility in the present situation, along with its millions of voters. All the other parties are deathly afraid. They’re thinking of their little elections and their little mandates. Their old reflexes that have frozen political life for twenty years and that dug the chasm between those who govern and the people. If I’m not invited, I’m not going to insist. It’s an old trap. The slightest incident and they’ll say it’s my fault.”

THE NEW YORKER

JANUARY 10, 2015

Le Pen’s Moment

BY PHILIP GOUREVITCH  / http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/le-pens-moment

“We’ve been predicting this for a long time,” Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French radical-right National Front party said on Wednesday, shortly after the massacre at the Paris office of the radical-left satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. “It was to be expected. This attack is probably the beginning of the beginning. It’s an episode in the war that is being waged against us by Islamism. The blindness and deafness of our leaders, for years, is in part responsible for these kinds of attacks.”

Although Le Pen and the National Front were frequent targets of Charlie Hebdo’s savage mockery, the two were at least as frequently aligned against shared political enemies. As the French say, “the extremes touch,” and when it came to ridiculing the mainstream political parties—the center-left Socialists of President François Hollande and the center-right Gaullists of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy—it was often difficult to distinguish the grotesque caricatures you might find in Charlie Hebdo from those in National Front rhetoric. So, too, when it came to the xenophobia and racism of their anti-immigration polemics, and their baiting of Islamophobic and anti-Semitic sentiment. (Charlie Hebdo was merciless toward Christianity, too, but there Le Pen lost his sense of humor.) Le Pen, the former fascist street fighter, relishes his role as a scourge of the establishment as much as the former Communist street fighters of Charlie Hebdo did, and he has always delighted in an opportunity to taunt his adversaries and critics. When I wrote about him in 1997, I reported that he had asked me, “What do I have to do not to be racist? Marry a black woman? With AIDS, if possible?” After the article appeared, he wrote to the magazine, complaining that, as “an Anglo-Saxon,” I had missed the Gallic subtlety of his wit: he had not said “une noire,” a black woman, but “un noir,” a black man.

The cover story of the issue of Charlie Hebdo released on the day of the massacre was about the author Michel Houellebecq and his new novel, “Submission,” a political fiction that describes the takeover of France by an Islamist party in the 2022 elections, following a tight runoff race against the National Front’s current leader, Marine Le Pen (who in reality took the party’s reins from her father four years ago). Marine, as everyone in France refers to her, has said that Houellebecq’s alarmist fantasy impressed her as entirely plausible, and the left-of-center daily newspaper Libération greeted the book with an essay damning Houellebecq as “the Le Pen of the Café de Flore,” a sort of fifth columnist for the National Front, sneaking far-right politics into the heart of Left Bank literary culture. Houellebecq, for his part, likes to protest that he is an apolitical sort of soothsayer—that he is merely imagining, not advocating, much less seeking to provoke, a radical polarization of French society, in which a soft and ineffectual center gives way to a clash of domestic and immigrant nationalisms. By the end of the week he had cancelled his book promotion and retreated to an undisclosed rustic hideout.

We know very little, as yet, about what the killers who terrorized Paris for the past three days sought to achieve, beyond the murders of Charlie Hebdo staff members; police officers; and Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket. But nobody in France needed Houellebecq’s novel, or Jean-Marie Le Pen’s I-told-you-so, to recognize at once that the terror played directly to the National Front’s advantage. Whereas Le Pen, the father, was content for most of his career to rattle the political order as a protest candidate, Marine is hellbent on remaking that order in her own image.

“You’re looking for a place at the table,” I said when I met her four years ago, while reporting on Sarkozy’s collapsing Presidency.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m looking especially for the Presidency of the table.” She laughed. “That’s right,” she said, and added, “It’s true today that we’re in a phase of accession to power.”

Since then, Le Pen’s popularity, and her share of votes, has only increased, and she has managed to present her agenda—anti-European Union, anti-immigrant, anti-euro—as approaching the mainstream, even as she cherishes her status as an outsider, untainted by the past twenty years of deepening French political crisis. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Wednesday, as traffic surged on her Facebook page and she picked up thousands of new followers, she did nothing special to insert herself into the story or to exploit the fears that the Front has long fed on. She reiterated her longstanding call for France to withdraw, unilaterally and at once, from the Schengen Agreement, which allows for open borders within the extended European community, but that was hardly newsworthy. Rather, Le Pen appeared to adopt the time-tested opposition strategy of waiting for the political establishment to make a misstep that would turn attention her way—and she did not have to wait long. Within hours of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the ruling Socialists and a coalition of allied parties of the left announced plans for a massive solidarity rally on Sunday—a silent march through the heart of Paris in the cause of “national unity”—without extending an invitation to the National Front.

The exclusion of the Front was great news for Le Pen. Nobody believed that she would have wanted to go and be associated with the political mainstream, but, by failing to invite her, the Socialists had given her a cudgel. “I don’t intend to submit myself to this blackmail,” she told Le Monde. “It’s a total perversion of the concept of national union. They’ll have to accept the consequences from the voters.” She went on, “This whole thing is a way of pushing aside the only political movement that has no responsibility in the present situation, along with its millions of voters. All the other parties are deathly afraid. They’re thinking of their little elections and their little mandates. Their old reflexes that have frozen political life for twenty years and that dug the chasm between those who govern and the people. If I’m not invited, I’m not going to insist. It’s an old trap. The slightest incident and they’ll say it’s my fault.”

François Lamy, a Socialist parliamentarian, retorted in Libération, “There’s no room for a political group that, for years, has divided French people, stigmatized our fellow-citizens because of their origin or religion, and can’t get behind a group march.” Jean-Vincent Placé, a senator from an environmentalist party, piled on: “We’re democratic enough to allow” the National Front “in our elections. We’re not going to turn the other cheek any farther than that.” But one Socialist source, who chose to remain anonymous, told Libération that it was a mistake to make such an issue of Sunday’s march. “After an event like this, it’s time to strengthen the dikes. What happened on Wednesday should serve to bring voters back to the Republic, not to draw attention to Marine Le Pen and company,” the source said, and concluded that the Socialist party had “fucked itself” by stepping into the Front’s trap.

On Friday morning, President Hollande included Marine Le Pen on the roster of national leaders he summoned to the Élysée Palace for consultations, in the name, again, of “unity.” But Hollande pointedly declined, in their face-to-face meeting, to invite her to the march on Sunday. Meanwhile, his Prime Minister, Manuel Valls—like Hollande, a Socialist—kept the controversy alive by announcing that he had invited Sarkozy to the march. When Libération pressed him on whether he would also extend an offer to the National Front, Valls scoffed at the question. “Are the families of Charlie Hebdo supposed to march with Marine Le Pen?” he asked, seeming to forget for the moment that they were going to march with leaders of nearly every other social and political element that the martyred cartoonists had reviled. In fact, Stéphane Charbonnier, Charlie Hebdo’s late editor, had rebuked the government when it tried to block an Islamic demonstration, saying that his censorious adversaries should have the same freedom of expression that he had.

On Friday evening, Hollande addressed the nation. By then, three suspects, all French citizens, had been killed in two simultaneous, terrifying sieges, while the fourth remained at large. The threat remained, Hollande said: “We must remain vigilant.” But he called for solidarity, and urged every citizen to march on Sunday, assuring his compatriots that “unity is our greatest weapon.”

As Hollande spoke on Friday, at the start of the Jewish Sabbath, the Grand Synagogue of Paris stood closed, for security reasons, for the first time since the Second World War. That was a spectacular victory for the terrorists. Whatever else they intended to accomplish, their most immediate targets were the press and the Jews. The attack on the press shocked the conscience of France and of the world. The attack on the Jews, not so much. President Hollande said, “We will emerge from this stronger than ever.” The shuttered temple told another story. Meawhile, Jean-Marie Le Pen took to Twitter to exercise his wit. Over a picture of Marine, looking as Presidential as the next guy, he offered a slogan in English, a language he does not normally traffic in: “Keep Calm and Vote Le Pen.”