It has been decades of unstoppable rise of the far right in France, and now the moment of truth has arrived. The French will decide in the legislative elections this Sunday whether to give power to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN). After years in which each election was framed as a consultation on President Emmanuel Macron, the referendum is now different: Le Pen, yes or no?
The answer to this question will be determined by the number of seats the RN wins in the National Assembly. It will be affirmative if there are enough seats to appoint Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s successor, as prime minister and form a government. To do so, they will need an absolute majority, which seems to be getting more complicated after the centre and the left formed a cordon sanitaire this week before the second round.
If the Le Pen supporters fall short of a majority of around 200 or a little less (the absolute majority is at 289 seats), as the polls predict, they will still have achieved their best result ever. The other parties will then have to look for imaginative solutions, such as a grand anti-RN coalition, in a country with no experience in the art of compromise and coalition.
Whatever the outcome, France faces another question. How did we get to this point, which is leading France, whoever wins, to an unprecedented situation under the constitutional regime of the Fifth Republic? And how can we untie the knot?
“But France is like that!” retorts historian and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco. “It is not at all a peaceful country. It is the country of revolutions, the country of absolute contrasts, as the historian Fernand Braudel said.”
On the eve of July 7, which will offer a precise picture of where France is, Morning Express has spoken with five intellectuals who have spent decades thinking and rethinking French passions and demons: the “hexagonal fever” that gives title to one of the essays by historian Michel Winock.
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“Today we are experiencing a crisis in our political functioning due to two concurrent factors,” says Winock, a theorist of the great crises that have marked French history since the Revolution of 1789. “One factor is the collapse of the right-wing governing parties, the Republicans, and the left-wing, the Socialist Party. The other is the rise of national populism, the National Rally. We will have to wait until the second round of the legislative elections to know whether France has entered a crisis.” greatcrisis.”
The legislative elections are the culmination of a process for the RN that can be traced back to 1972, when Jean-Marie Le Pen and a handful of former collaborators with Nazi Germany and veterans of the Algerian war founded the National Front (FN). Or to the 1980s, when that group of outsiders won their first seats in the European Parliament or the National Assembly. Or to 2002, when Le Pen caused a stir by surprisingly qualifying for the second round of the presidential elections. Or to 2011, when her daughter, Marine, took the reins of the FN, expelled Jean-Marie, changed the name of the party, removed it from the corner of ideological outcasts and made it the most powerful party in the world. normalizes.
“My entire political life, my entire adult life, I will have lived to the rhythm of this refrain, this bad song that has lulled us and confused us by saying ‘rise, rise, rise’, like a wave,” says historian Patrick Boucheron, professor at the Collège de France, founded in 1530 by Francis I. “Now the wave is very high.”
The wave did not come out of nowhere. Because there is a brilliant history that France likes to tell about itself: the country of human rights and the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola… But there is another history, the France of reactionary intellectuals. Barrès, Maurras… What Boucheron calls “a much less glorious French history”. “Racism,” he clarifies, “from a doctrinal point of view is a French history. Fascism, from an intellectual point of view, has French roots. And I would also say that colonial history weighs heavily today and we cannot quite shake it off.”
All this comes together in the original FN, but the RN today is not exactly the same and is much more. It brings together accumulated dissatisfaction, old resentments and, to quote the novelist Michel Houellebecq, “an expansion of the battlefield”, in a country that in 1992 was already on the verge of rejecting the Maastricht Europe and that in 2005 voted No to the EU constitutional treaty. The wave, meanwhile, was progressing.
“There was a step-by-step advance, to which we had become accustomed, as if it were simply a democratic dysfunction,” says another of the leading historians of this period, Pierre Rosanvallon, also from the Collège de France. “But it turns out that it was not just a democratic dysfunction. What we see with these elections is that the advance of the RN is linked to the transformations of French society and the political world.”
Parties and unions no longer represented citizens. The working classes became disconnected from the social democratic left. “The RN,” Rosanvallon explains, “was a kind of receptacle for forms of impotence and dissatisfaction, but in a radical way.”
For essayist Pascal Bruckner, “this is the party of victims, of people who believe themselves to be victims.” “And the talent of the RN,” he says, “consists in aggregating all the dissatisfactions and saying: ‘You are the real France, the elites are stuffing themselves at your expense and we represent you. ’ The far right has always operated on the basis of victimization. The far left, too.”
“The French always want to vote against“They are opposed,” says sociologist and former member of the Constitutional Council, Dominique Schnapper. “They dreamed that the left would transform life, and the left has not transformed life, because it cannot do so.”
“Before,” Schnapper continues, “people voted against voting communist. Because the Communist Party was very organized, it gave stability to the opposition. But now there is no Communist Party anymore. We have La France Insoumise.” He is referring to the radical left party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of whom he says: “I don’t really understand Mélenchon’s project, I think he wants to demolish the Republic.” And he adds, referring to those who vote communist,n against: “The only thing left for them to express their anger and discontent is the National Rally, with this astonishing argument: ‘It is the only one we have not tried, therefore, we are going to try it.’ The disturbing thing is that the day the National Front [sic] fail like the others, I don’t know what they will do.”
To understand how France has arrived at this situation, there is another, more immediate factor: Emmanuel Macron and the unexpected decision a month ago to dissolve the National Assembly and turn the system upside down. “A dissolution is prepared and organised,” says Schnapper, who does not hide his sympathies with the president, nor his disappointment. “It is not something that is done in five minutes.”
But the problem comes from before. It could go back to the revolt of the yellow vests In 2018, France was a country of impoverished middle classes in small towns. Or in 2022, Macron was re-elected in the presidential election and lost his absolute majority in the legislative elections a few weeks later. A year later, the pension reform, adopted by decree, brought hundreds of thousands of people out onto the streets. Rosanvallon says: “The decline of Macronism after 2022 and the disappointment with Macronism were the fuel that accelerated things.”
Macron promised in 2017, when he came to power, to do “everything” so that “there is no reason to vote for the extremes”. Seven years later, and with the extreme right having more than 33% of the votes in the first round of the legislative elections, on June 30, the failure is resounding.
“Macron is someone who does not understand the people,” Roudinesco analyses. “He probably does not understand France. He thinks that with his intelligence, his calculations, his culture he will solve the people’s problems. But he does not understand what is irrational, what is unconscious. And he does not understand this terrible thing in France: this permanent turmoil.”
Legendary journalist Jean Daniel told Morning Express a few weeks before his death in 2020: “France is crazy and he is making it crazier.”
Winock reflects: “Emmanuel Macron has become increasingly unpopular, for two reasons. One is his somewhat monarchical personality, Jupiterinethat of a man who knows or thinks he knows everything, who does not connect with the people, who embodies the elites, those with high degrees, the rich, the ruling class. The other reason is our constitutional practice, which has gradually given the president excessive power. Everything comes from him, everything converges on him and, inevitably, he concentrates the disappointments, the frustrations, the injustices.”
Macron himself theorized it before coming to power: the decapitation of Louis XVI left in France “an emotional, imaginary, collective void.” Since then, the French have tried to fill the void, with Napoleon or with De Gaulle and the presidential institutions of the Fifth Republic. “We need a king to cut off his head,” says Bruckner. “It is like a parody of the French Revolution.”
How can we get out of this? Bruckner quotes the romantic poet Hölderlin: “Where danger lies, what saves us also grows.” “There can be a salvific shock and we can realize that we are not so unhappy,” he says. He is referring to the secular French pessimism, the tendency to dwell on decline. “The narcissism of moaning,” he says.
A victory for the RN, according to Boucheron, would be “catastrophic”. Not only because it would have the far right in power, but because “France has a Constitution, that of the Fifth Republic, which largely authorises authoritarian power, with very few countervailing powers and without the parliamentary culture of other countries, including Spain”. It would be a scenario of “political and social chaos”.
The other scenario, that of a parliamentary session without a majority, “would be a political crisis, and it would be up to the president to try to get out of it.” “We would be faced with a case of ungovernability,” predicts Winock, “and then a lot of imagination and good will would be needed to find a solution, that of a government supported by disparate parties that would only have in common the rejection of the extreme right.” Another option that Le Pen and Mélenchon have put on the table to break the deadlock: the resignation of Macron, whose mandate does not expire until 2027.
“If Macron resigns, it would be a terrible catastrophe,” says Schnapper. “I hope he doesn’t, but I don’t rule it out because he makes decisions like that, recklessly…”
Schnapper sometimes thinks about what his father, the great liberal thinker Raymond Aron (1905-1983), would have said about a particular situation. “He believed in democracy, and the current decomposition of democracy…” he says without finishing the sentence. And he concludes: “Just as it seemed unfair to me that he was not able to see the fall of the Berlin Wall, because he was deprived of a great joy, I now think that he is fortunately dead so as not to see all this.”
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