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Letter From Paris
The Power of Le Pen
Two cheers for Marine Le Pen, the new president of France’s National Front party.
Two cheers for Marine Le Pen.
The new president of France’s National Front party holds that the nation-state is the only legitimate basis of government. She vocally detests soulless multinational organizations. She cordially despises that usurper of national sovereignty, the European Union, and its ersatz currency, the euro. She dares proclaim that France and the rest of Europe are in dire danger of being swamped by illegal immigrants, especially now that half of North Africa is landing on Europe’s Italian doorstep. She says that if Muslims want to live in France, they must make the effort to assimilate and accept France’s Christian heritage.
Faced with positions like this, Paris intellectuals recoil in the righteous horror they reserve for the politically very incorrect. The mainstream media, led by flagrantly biased TV interviewers, are in league against her. The established parties, from Nicolas Sarkozy’s nominally conservative UMP to the socialists, ecologists, communists, et al., loathe and fear her in equal measure. Instead of responding to her ideas, they resort to ad hominem attacks and try to ostracize her with a political cordon sanitaire, charging that her party lacks “republican values.”
She must be doing something right.
To be sure, there are reasons to be wary of the National Front (NF), on which more later. But there can be no doubt that today Marine Le Pen stands at the very center of France’s — and to some extent, Europe’s — political discourse. All the country’s elitist traditional parties, the very ones that, with a wink and a nudge, have so long colluded to do nothing real about France’s real problems, now scurry with unseemly haste to position themselves with respect to the Front. While labeling it dangerously extremist, they pay it the sincerest form of flattery by copying many of its stances, especially on illegal immigration.
Thus Claude Guéant, longtime éminence grise of Nicolas Sarkozy and now his new interior minister, declared recently that “due to unbridled immigration the French sometimes no longer feel at home.” How odd that no one in Sarkozy’s government, much less Himself, ever said anything of the sort until the NF pulled even with the other parties this year with numbers in the 20s. A UMP member pleaded almost comically with the party’s leadership the other day, “For four weeks now we’ve been discussing how to handle the Front. Can’t we talk about our own program?”
The NF’s sudden new status as the fulcrum of French politics has been a long time coming. It is the result of decades of growing displeasure with globalism and its concomitants, among them porous national borders and undigested immigration, offshoring of industrial production and lost local jobs, the bewildering malaise of lost national identity. Similar painful symptoms exist in the U.S., but the malady is much more acute in the once-proud nation-states of Europe that formerly bestrode the planet.
When the European Common Market, created in the late 1950s as a free-trade zone, started transferring national sovereignty to a Brussels-based organization manned by unelected bureaucrats (think letting the U.S. be run by the United Nations), the seeds of resentment were sown. Throw an aggressive Islamism into the mix, with France now home to 6 million ostentatious Muslims — 10 percent of the population — and the situation becomes toxic, if not explosive.
Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, founded the Front in 1972. The pugnacious son of a hardscrabble Breton fisherman, he had lost an eye as a paratrooper fighting France’s 1950s colonial war in Algeria — and boasted of using torture against bomb-throwing terrorists there. With an abiding veneration for Joan of Arc and a vision of a white Catholic France in need of moral revival, he molded the Front from several feckless right-wing factions. It was long seen, mostly correctly, as a motley bunch of Vichyites, skinhead hooligans, unreconstructed colonialists, and ultra-traditionalist, Latin-Mass Catholics.
Led by a confrontational firebrand with a trademark black eye patch who reveled in provoking polite opinion with overtly racist remarks (he famously called the Holocaust gas chambers “a point of detail” of WWII), the Front was a political untouchable. Ironically, it was Socialist president François Mitterrand who, hoping to weaken the conservative vote in the 1980s, reverted to the proportional balloting that had been banned by Charles de Gaulle as a way of bringing bipartite order to French politics. This opened the door to smaller parties. One unintended consequence was the rise of the far-right Front.
Growing support for the Front stayed under the pollsters’ radar for years because few citizens would admit to interviewers they were going to vote NF. France therefore was stunned in 2002 when Jean-Marie surprisingly made it to the second round of the presidential election, beating out the popular socialist Lionel Jospin, a former prime minister. He faced incumbent Jacques Chirac, who unsportingly refused the traditional debate with his opponent (many thought Le Pen, a redoubtable, hard-punching debater, would have won). Le Pen lost in an inevitable landslide as the established parties blocked him with a strange bedfellow, conservative-socialist-communist coalition.
THAT WAS THEN. Last January the 82-year-old Jean-Marie could say, “The situation has changed, the world has changed,” as he turned the party over to his daughter after she was elected leader. “Reality has met, and sometimes surpassed, our predictions.” With the euro zone sinking under its debt crisis, it was hard to argue with the Front position that European monetary union had been an error. Or, as Paris streets were blocked by the overflow of Muslims from their mosques for Friday prayers, with its warnings about the folly of naïve multiculturalism.
Marine has been key to the Front’s recent quick rise. As long as the craggy, volatile Jean-Marie was its threatening face, it was easy to relegate the party to the jackbooted, proto-fascist fringe, whatever its positions on the issues. She has changed all that. A handsome 42-year-old blonde with a ready smile, quick wit, and raucous laugh, she radiates vitality and charisma as she sweeps into a press conference in heels, tailored jeans, silk blouse, and no makeup. When making some of her most incendiary answers to reporters’ questions, she smiles sweetly.
Being a pro-choice, twice-divorced mother of three apparently doesn’t bother the Front’s traditional base of conservative Catholics. (Nor, apparently, does her living with Louis Aliot, NF vice president, also divorced.) No feminist, Marine deplores confrontational relations between men and women, and dislikes affirmative action: “You never know whether you’re hired because of your competence or because you’re a woman.”
Having forcefully denounced the anti-Semitism that long hobbled the NF, she laughs off extremist labels, accepting the term populist. “If it’s a choice between extreme right, fascist, Nazi, or just populist, I find that one okay,” she says, asking rhetorically, “What’s ‘extreme right’ about our program?” She points out with impeccable logic that when British premier David Cameron recently called for limiting immigration to the UK and better assimilation, no one termed him a fascist.
About the Author
Joseph A. Harriss is The American Spectator’s Paris correspondent. His latest book, An American Spectator in Paris, was released this fall.
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Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 6.28.11 @ 6:49AM
Quick! The elitists of France need to get Chris Wallace over there for an interview so he can label her a flake!
Alan Brooks| 6.28.11 @ 11:15PM
"they must make the effort to assimilate and accept France's Christian heritage"
No, they should accept democracy, not Christianity; only an absolute fool would think Christianity is transplantable into the Islamic mind.
TrueBlue| 6.29.11 @ 12:35PM
I don't think he meant they needed to convert, just that they should stop trying to force the rest of France to convert to Islam's frame of mind or expecting special treatment.
Foxfier | 6.29.11 @ 1:07PM
If they can't accept the Christian heritage-- with things like universal personhood and similar assumptions that underlay France's legal structure-- then they can't accept democracy in the form France practices it.
If the "Islamic mind" is able to assimilate to a nation that has a Christian heritage, and accept that there will be Christians around them, will be determined only through time and attempts, after they stop bending over backwards to accommodate the Islamic heritage of the newcomers.
(Especially since "Islamic mind" is a phrase that's very easy to redefine-- if it requires the "all who don't practice my specific form of Islam are sub-humans who live only to be useful to me and mine," then it's not compatible; if "Islamic mind" means "worldview of majority of Muslims in X area" then it's much more flexible.)
Westie| 6.28.11 @ 7:24AM
Wonders of wonder the Ladies of the West have more courage and intelligence than the distasteful Metro-sexual leaders such as the pricks Obama, Sarkosy and Cameron. May their fall from grace be complete!
P.Smith| 6.28.11 @ 7:35AM
What France needs is revolution; maybe it could be called “The French Revolution”. In this so called “revolution” they could go around chopping the heads off the liberal elite. I doubt anything like this could ever happen over there, but one can always hope.
Anita| 6.28.11 @ 9:48AM
Gee P. Smith, wonder why they never thought of it. Slow thinkers I guess.
Too much sex.
Tom| 6.28.11 @ 8:03AM
Could she become the French version of Margaret Thatcher?
A Mama Grizzly en francais?
As with Thatcher-Reagan, trans-Atlantic kindred spirits, summiting with President Bachmann as they work together to deconstruct the new Evil-Empire of NGO's and "global governance"?
A wonderful daydream with which to start the day! :-)
lydia | 6.28.11 @ 9:12AM
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In this so called “revolution” they could go around chopping the heads off the liberal elite. I doubt anything like this could ever happen over there, but one can always hope.
Michael Tomlinson| 6.28.11 @ 9:37AM
Le Pen may have a correct position on Muslims and their very real threat to France and the West, but she is no Margaret Thatcher and comparing her to the Iron Lady is an insult.
The National Front's emphasis on a top down economy is clearly more in line with Barack Obama than Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan.
Still if she pushes France to purge itself of Islam that would be a good thing. Hopefully, Geert Wilder's victory in a Dutch court and Fance's growing disgust with Muslims is a sign Europe is finally waking up to the threat of Islam to its freedoms and survival.
Prayerfully, it isn't too late.
e track from saq| 6.28.11 @ 9:42AM
The forces of darkness which seek to destroy the west and enslave us simple souls have found a real match in Le Pen.
Watch for the dark hand as it emerges to hurt her in some bizarre fashion.
The so called "global elites"have sold their souls for power and will do the bidding of their ever-so-strange master.
We can choose the light we see the world in but we must accept the facts.
crookedwren| 6.28.11 @ 9:43AM
Let's pay tribute to the most significant point here: "the nation-state is the only legitimate basis of government."
These "open borders" are no accident, as we all know. Our "open border" is no accident.
This phrase must become part of our battle cry.
Occam's Tool| 6.28.11 @ 11:54AM
France has a reputation for being, shall we say, less than stalwart as an ally. In addition, France is aging and shrinking. They, too, are the dead.
RCV| 6.28.11 @ 2:29PM
France also, as well as the Le Pen family, has a reputation for being, shall we say, pretty antisemitic.
Purple Lips| 6.28.11 @ 3:41PM
France has always had a long and glorious history of antisemitism.
ncatty| 6.28.11 @ 6:25PM
Yes Crooked, the concept of the nation-state is in play with many elites.
Smirking Weasel| 6.28.11 @ 1:17PM
No, a billion cheers.
And equating this woman with republicrat frauds like Bachmann or, especially, Quitter Granny of a
Bastard, is an egregious insul
Seek| 6.28.11 @ 1:39PM
Good for Ms. Le Pen. She is yet another example of a growing, potent and articulate trans-European patriotism, at once nationalistic and cognizant of the need for EU cooperation to keep out the Third World, especially the Muslims. The British National Party (UK), Vlaams Belang (Flanders) and the Freedom Party (Austria) are all indicative of a surge toward ethno-religious realism.
ZAK KLEMMER | 6.28.11 @ 3:17PM
I think that Ms. Le Pen deserves 3 cheers. However I am thankful for my British heritage and that I am an American.
Mel Torme| 6.28.11 @ 6:22PM
"When the European Common Market, created in the late 1950s as a free-trade zone, started transferring national sovereignty to a Brussels-based organization manned by unelected bureaucrats (think letting the U.S. be run by the United Nations)"
NO, ... think letting the state of Montana* be run by the US Federal Government!
The author has one hell of a statist mindset without even knowing it. Brussels, Washington, FS**, what's the damn difference?
*insert your state here.
**short for Washington, Federal Shithole.
Mark MacDonald| 6.28.11 @ 10:36PM
As much as it might rankle Americans and other Europeans, especially the Germans, turning away from NATO and establishing a closer relationship with Russia may make some sense for the French. First, as the interests of its partners become more and more divergent, NATO will become less and less relevant. Second, the French, like the Russians, are a very nationalistic people and there is a strong desire among the people of both countries to regain some of their former glory and influence. Finally, it should be apparent that a resurgent Germany is becoming the dominant player in the Eurozone and neither the French nor the Russians can look to the United States nor Britain to stand up to the German economic juggernaut. For at least the next decade the Germans will be making the decisions that determine the economic futures of countries like Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. For the victors of the Greatest War this is a bitter pill to swallow.
Pelligrino| 6.28.11 @ 11:56PM
Mr. MacDonald, please tell me who France must or can blame for its economic inequality with Germany? And Russia....do they have any excuses? (oh, aside from 70 years of demonic totalitariansim waged on half a continent -- with Russia's own people as the greatest of losers)
Germany is succeeding not so much because of terrific superiority (no way), but because other Eurozone nations with no excuse, like France, are so inept.
Note: Germany has been THE dominant European nation since circa 1985. This is nothing new.
If the French wanted to reverse this trend or attain parity, they've had a quarter century to get their act together....still waiting....
France was not ravaged in any way like Germany and yet it could not make itself the economic juggernaut of the post WWII Europe? With GB in decline since the 1970's, France could be the shining example of the very best Europe has to offer. But what we have is collective French denial of where to place the blame.
End: France has no credible excuses. None.
Ms. Le Pen might be sharing about 60% good ideas in these early days of her efforts. But getting cozy with Russia on anything is delusional, suicidal and immoral.
Naturalborn Texican| 6.28.11 @ 10:59PM
Just heard that multiculturalism is becoming out of style with many European nations such as the Netherlands, Specifically where Muslim immigrants who want to change the laws of the country they immigrate to by implementing sharia law.
It sounds like France is getting on the bandwagon.
Sounds good to me!!!
Madam Le Pen sounds pretty savvy so far.
Sometimes it takes a woman to get the job done. I find that women are more realistic and practical than most men.
Viva la France!!!
RCV| 6.29.11 @ 1:52AM
Ms. Le pen has just chosen a more politically correct group to spew venom on; when she was spitting on Jews we all recognized her as a bigot. Now she's a farsighted nationalist.
Johnimo| 6.29.11 @ 2:22AM
It's no longer conditional, Mr. Harriss, the dire circumstances of our civilization dictates that "all bets are off!" That's the reason Le Pen appeals to so many.
Don Carlson| 6.29.11 @ 7:02AM
I've heard it said that it is better to have France as an enemy than a friend, and there are deep differences between French leftists and American leftists, as well as between French conservatives and American conservatives. The French left and right both begin with the tenet that a secular, highly centralized, and powerful government is 'de rigueur', while in America, though this assumption lives in the hearts of Democrats, it is has had to be foisted on the rest of us, therefore it is not a position the Democrats care to air in debate. To American conservatives paternal government is inimical and they will resist the continued implementation of it despite its supposed usefulness in dealing with false concerns like global warming, social justice (income redistribution), ‘medical reform’, fairness to immigrants, and affirmative action.
Differently, political French of all stripes take such socialist-self-aggrandizing for granted and despise Americans generally. They more naturally cotton to the Russians, perhaps from a French sense of imperial and intellectual superiority. In the end America’s position vis-a-vis the French will not change: we will not be able to count on them in a fight, and we can expect their continued dismissal of American and Israeli interests in the world. There is nothing we can do to change this, for were we to slavishly ape the French, they would despise us even more. Provided we can stop the Democrats and Rinos from dragging us to pseudo-European semi-socialist hell, we can welcome France’s low opinion of America as a sign of our essential health.
POST American| 6.30.11 @ 9:06AM
"We are using MASSIVE third world
immigration to destroy British culture
once and for all ---FOREVER."
-TONY BLAIR
Fmr PM/Globalist/Cultural EUGENIST
Likewise with the 'on board' Czar-cozy,
to say nothing of the Bush Sr, Clinton,
Bush Jr, Obama ---CFR/RIIA front op.
weddingdress | 7.1.11 @ 12:37AM
Just heard that multiculturalism is becoming out of style with many European nations such as the Netherlands, Specifically where Muslim immigrants who want to change the laws of the country they immigrate to by implementing sharia law.
Mistral| 7.3.11 @ 12:37AM
Deo Gratias for the National Front in France. France is slowly going down the drain of increasing crime, delinquency, islamification on the streets, graffiti and ubiquitous beggary. There is an air of unremitting decline as hedonism, omnipresent drunkeness, sodomy and foul public youth misbehaviour take over daily norms and values.
Mistral| 7.3.11 @ 12:42AM
One tramway driver in Montpellier, France stated to me recenly when young north african louts were smoking in the tram (and had told me to "_u_ _off") that he could do nothing about it or any other breaking of the laws on the btrams. He was afraid the courts would be against him if there was an ugly outcome. He also said the public were not supportive when they took action so why should he bother. When I asked him what the eventual solution would be he said with a rye smile on his face, "Another War"