The Disappearance of the Political Left: Le Pen and “forgotten France”

“‘All politicians are the same, Left or Right,’ declared a sixty-year-old shopkeeper. ‘Always a lot of words, a lot of principles, but what do people see? The concrete. They see prices rising, insecurity, unemployment . . . and one day people get sick to see that nothing is done, nothing concrete. Le Pen [Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the National Front], him, he has character'” (Weber, p. 421).

Eugen Weber, the great French historian, was writing in 1994, reporting the results of a 1987 survey of National Front voters, of whom one-third had formerly identified with the Left. The numbers are likely higher today. The second round of the 2017 presidential elections pitted Marine Le Pen (who had succeeded her father as head of the party) against Emmanuel Macron. Le Pen polled strongest in the areas that had seen the disappearance of jobs and had high levels of unemployment; Macron polled strongly in areas of high income. But the numbers are tricky; what they show are the high hopes that were invested in Macron, who now has an approval rating seemingly stuck in the 26-29% range. They also show the record number of voters who disliked both choices, and either abstained from voting (at the highest rate since 1969) or cast blank ballots (almost 9%), a more pointed and decisive rejection than not voting at all. (See BBC for maps indicating the breakdown of voters; see also, for blanks and abstentions as well as voting maps, the New York Times electoral map).

The National Front party, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, was from the beginning regarded with distaste. Le Pen was antisemitic; in 1987 he made the statement that the Holocaust was a mere “detail” in the history of World War II, and he repeated the statement at least twice, once in the European Parliament (he was a member). In 2015, his daughter Marine Le Pen, who had succeeded him, called a special congress of the party to expel him after another inflammatory remark, though he remains an “honorary president” (The Guardian). By the 1980s and 1990s, an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim focus had enabled him to transition his France-first platform to the twenty-first century. The founding of the European Union in 1992 gave him a new target; joined with a protectionist approach to products, jobs, and the borders, he (and his advisors and think tanks) created a simple and persuasive story for those who felt an all-embracing sense of insecurity about their livelihoods, their safety, their national identity.

The elder Le Pen came closest to power in the “earthquake” election of 2002, when he received enough votes to go into the second round. (French presidential elections are held in two rounds: the first includes all those who fulfill the necessary requirements to run for president; the second round is a head-to-head match between the two top vote-getters.) Americans accustomed to waiting for hours for Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, might well be envious of the French coverage of the first round, which provides instant answers. The 2002 elections provided an instant shock: most people believed that the second round would be a match between the incumbent Jacques Chirac and the popular Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin, whom most also expected to be the next president. But there were eleven minor candidates, most on the Left; the vote was nickel-and-dimed away by a multitude of Jill Steins, and Jospin came in third.

The election ended with a sweeping 82% victory for the unpopular Chirac, who had been widely predicted, before the first round, to be on his way out. And Chirac, who had refused to dignify Le Pen with a debate, was able to stand as a very happy man before a cheering and relieved crowd, his wife Bernadette beside him, as he made note of the calamity they had all just escaped.

“We have not fallen to the blast that carried us off. We remain standing. We will defend liberty; we will defend equality; we will defend fraternity. . . . We will be vigilant, mobilized, and I will be with you each day of this combat.”

Le Pen’s first-round victory has been attributed to a number of factors–the assumption that the two front-runners were shoe-ins, lackluster campaigns, especially by Jospin–and, as Alistair Cole has suggested, the fact that the top voter concern was “insecurity,” the result of 9/11, the Middle East crisis, even a string of highly publicized murders. “On the ground of insecurity,” notes Cole, “there was no real challenger to Le Pen” (Cole, p. 324).

Le Pen’s graceless performance in his 2002 campaign video, as he shifts from side to side in front of his “Le Pen Une Force de la France” background, running one sentence into another, nevertheless encapsulates a message honed over the years. It is retained even now under Marine Le Pen, who needs only throw out a few words and images to conjure up the dangers, the precarity, the loss of agency for France and its citizens, that Le Pen père first proclaimed:

My fellow citizens, for twenty years France has constantly retreated, both internally and externally. She has progressively lost her independence and her judicial, monetary, budgetary, industrial, and social sovereignty to the Europe of Brussels [seat of European Union] and to globalization. Worse still, the army, symbol of our security, has been dismantled. A foolish policy of massive immigration has brought to us [chez nous] two million foreigners from the third world, with dramatic consequences for employment, security, and fiscal policy. The police and justice system are increasingly impotent and fear has taken root in the towns and villages. Industry, agriculture, commerce, the artisanal trades, are falling behind, while social expenses and charges are growing heavier. The [traditional] family has been ridiculed, the schools are incapable of forming citizens and the professionals of tomorrow. Rackets, drugs, and violence have taken root; corruption reigns at the top of the Republic. The young, too often unemployed, are in despair; the elderly are in anguish over their [inadequate] pensions. The disorder which has entrenched itself [in France] threatens, above all, defenseless children, women, the poor, the elderly. . . . it is necessary to give a voice to the people, to consult them directly in order to realize the reforms that are indispensable.

He thus ends his preamble with a call for a popular referendum, echoed in the current Gilets jaunes demand for the RIC, or citizens’ initiative; and that demand is also present in Marine Le Pen’s 2017 presidential campaign platform, in number 2 (for a constitutional revision) and especially number 5, which calls for a popular referendum on the basis of 500,000 signatures on a petition, though with no further specifics. (See earlier post on The RIC, or citizens’ referendum, of the Gilets jaunes.)

As for his other proposals, they follow the lines of the current party:

• A withdrawal from the EU, to re-establish French “sovereignty” and standing in the world;
• A re-establishment of law and order–zero tolerance for criminality and delinquency, the certainty of punishment, restoration of the death penalty, the building of more prisons;
• Expulsion of all illegal immigrants, an end to the family reunification policy for immigration [also known as “chain migration”], stronger borders, and a policy of “national preference” [in the allocation of jobs and services];
• A “strong reduction” of taxes and expenses;
• Employment for every French [man; français], by strengthening our small and mid-size enterprises, and providing them with policies that will ensure their competitiveness in the world;
• A priority given to [French] families by a generous policy favoring birth and early childhood, allowing for mothers to remain at home, and with national preference in terms of social housing and other family allocations.
• Free choice in the age at retirement (the age is regulated; see French Government: Retirements and pensions);
• Defense of animal rights.

He concludes by suggesting that those who wanted things to stay the same should vote for Chirac or Jospin–“the same thing.”

The 2002 second round results were met with a sense of relief and vindication for most of the French, but they were a mixed blessing for Le Pen. It was a triumph for him to have gotten past the first round; the second round showed that he had a ceiling. The next presidential election, in 2007, paired Nicolas Sarkozy of the conservative UMP against the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royale, the first woman to make it to the second round. Le Pen came in fourth–a distinct drop in his fortunes, but with a percentage that still put him ahead of the pack.

Most have attributed Le Pen’s collapse (ultimately, to about 10% of the vote) to the sharp right turn taken by Sarkozy. He adopted the anti-immigrant and law and order focus of Le Pen (Williams, p. 683), and combined it with a pro-European Union and NATO, as well as a pro-economic growth approach.

In 2009, Didier Eribon, Professor of Sociology at the University of Amiens and a well known political activist, published Retour à Reims. The book is a memoir: in his attempt to understand his own life, he also tries to explain the then-current political climate, which was just after Sarkozy’s victory. Born in 1953 to working class parents, Eribon credits his escape from that impoverished world to the fact that he is gay: he could not have survived in that masculinist, homophobic culture, so he had to get out. He approaches an analysis of his background by way of Sartre, Baldwin, Bourdieu; he is thoughtful and analytical; the events of his childhood appear as distant memories still capable of causing pain.

He did not return home until he learned that his abusive and alcoholic father had been confined to a care facility with Alzheimer’s. His mother showed him photos of himself and his brothers as children and teenagers, and he recognized “that working class environment I had grown up in, the incredible poverty that is palpable in the appearance of all the houses in the background, in the interiors, in the clothes everyone is wearing, in the very bodies themselves” (Eribon, p. 23).

And though he came out publicly as gay in the 1970s–not the most welcoming of times for such a revelation–he nevertheless found it a simpler “confession” than the one about his origins: “Let me put it this way: it turned out to be much easier for me to write about shame linked to sexuality than about shame linked to class” (Eribon, 25). He long kept his background a secret, but to do that required “a constant self-surveillance as regards one’s gestures, one’s intonation, manners of speech, so that nothing untoward slips out, so that one never betrays oneself, and so on” (p. 27).

Eribon’s mother and father, children in 1940, had fled into the interior of France when the Germans invaded. Their childhoods were cut dramatically short; they had left everything behind and were forced early into taking on adult responsibilities. They benefited from a series of hasty postwar housing projects. First came a grim row of connected cement block houses, each consisting of two rooms, with no bathroom but with a sink in the main room (Eribon, 95). Then, in the early 1960s, his mother’s efforts got them on the list for a cluster of modest 4-story tower block apartments–brand new, and with their own bathroom and kitchen, and two bedrooms (Eribon, pp. 103-104). In 1967 the family moved to a larger, low-income housing project on the outskirts of Reims (p. 109). By the end of the 1970s their white working class neighbors had moved out and North African immigrants had moved in (Eribon, pp. 142-143). His parents finally went to another housing development in the town of Muizon: “They were running away from what seemed to them to be a set of enormous new threats that had erupted into a world that had once been theirs, and that they felt was being taken away from them. My mother began complaining about the ‘swarms’ of children belonging to the new arrivals who urinated and defecated in the stairways and who, once they were teenagers, transformed the housing complex into a world of delinquency, producing a climate of fear and insecurity” (p. 144).

Eribon is palpably uneasy about this moment. He poses a question: “Did her descriptions really correspond to the reality around her or only to her fantasies? Most likely both at once. I no longer lived with them and never visited them, so I have no way of judging” (pp. 144-145). This is not a satisfactory answer, and he knows it; in his ideal world, workers would fight the class struggle together, regardless of race. He addresses what he has described as working class racism at about 30 minutes into the interview below, and quickly retreats into the idealism of 1968. (Some of the 1968 posters can be found in The Paris Review; the one he singles out, about French and immigrant workers in solidarity together, is the fifth.)

But he also shares the disillusionment, rather common now, in those young university activists of 1968 who saw themselves as leaders of the working classes: “It is said that one day in May 1968, Marcel Jouhandeau [a noted French writer, then about 80], seeing a column of student protestors passing by, sneered at them: ‘Go back home! In twenty years, you’ll all be bankers.’ . . . And, of course, he was right” (Eribon, p. 127).

Eribon’s strongest condemnation comes against the disappearing Left. As he thinks of his mother standing at an assembly line, performing a monotonous task, with only two ten-minute breaks in the day, “I can’t help but be struck by what social inequality means concretely, physically. . . . It is impossible for me to understand how and why the issue of harsh working conditions and all the slogans that denounced them–‘Slow down the assembly lines!’–have disappeared from discourse on the left, and even from its perception of the social world” (Eribon, pp. 86-87). Instead the Left was seduced by neoliberalism, shamed into believing that their former frame of reference was outmoded: “Gone was any talk of exploitation and resistance, replaced by talk of ‘necessary modernization’ and of ‘radical social reform’; . . . gone any mention of unequal social opportunities, replaced by an emphasis on ‘individual responsibility'”(Eribon, p. 128).

And, in a very important insight, Eribon notes that the concept of an oppressed class that was ready to fight for its rights (“‘the Left’ really meant something important,” Eribon, p. 43), was replaced with “the ‘marginalized’ of today–who were presumed to be of a passive nature. They could be considered as the silent potential recipients of the benefits of various technocratic measures that were intended to help the ‘poor’ and the ‘victims’ of ‘precarity’ and of ‘disaffiliation'” (Eribon, p. 130).

Marine Le Pen first ran for president in 2012, having assumed leadership of the party in 2011. She did surprisingly well, coming in third after François Hollande of the Socialist Party and Nicolas Sarkozy of UMP (now Les Républicains, the conservative party), who went on to the second round. Hollande defeated Sarkozy’s run for a second term. Hollande’s five years in office were disappointing in terms of economic reforms, and he was also battered by migration, a long-standing issue that reached crisis proportions in 2015, and by a string of terrorist attacks, beginning in January 2015 with the Charlie Hebdo affair. (The kosher grocery killings that were a part of that event signaled a return of visible, public antisemitism, though such acts had been–have been–increasing in frequency.) Hollande stepped down instead of running for a second term; Benoît Hamon won the Socialist Party primary, and became the candidate.

In 2017 Le Pen herself made it into the second round, buoyed by her relentless outreach to what she calls “forgotten France” and her promise to “Put France back in order/Remettre la France en ordre.”

A Guardian news video, posted just before the April 23 first round election (the second round was May 7, 2017) effectively showed both the old remaining stigma that still clung to the party in the eyes of many, and the extent to which Marine had, as she had promised, “de-demonized” the brand. After her defeat in the 2017 election, she changed the name of the party from Front national to Ralliement national, or National Rally (RN), presumably because it sounds less fascist. She herself prefers to emphasize her first name, as do her followers; and her ambitious niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, now goes by Marion Maréchal. (Of Marine and Marion, think Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve.)

The Front National candidate, Harold Blanot, is the new face of the party, or what they hope it will be, and suggest it will be–young, earnest, hard-working, a local man whose family is known to his prospective constituents. “Blanot’s son? We had the same taste in cars . . . and women.” If he belongs, how can the party be so bad? And some find it much more palatable to vote for Marine herself (“Oh, here’s our Marine!”). Blanot did not, in fact, win his election to the National Assembly. He came in third, with 15%, after the candidate from La République en Marche, Macron’s party, and with the Socialist Party candidate in second (Nièvre’s Second District). But Le Pen’s deliberate outreach to younger voters is expected to pay off in the future, as in this New York Times video just after the first round of voting.

Aymeric Merlaud lost his election. He served for a time as a National Assembly legislative aide to the RN while simultaneously holding the position of regional head of his party in Maine-et-Loire. He left active work in the party in September, 2018, after finishing his Sciences Po degree; he wished, he said, to turn his attention to finance. (Recruited while a student in Sciences Po, one of the elite graduate schools, the rising star Merlaud is expected to return someday to politics.) He was succeeded in his regional position by a 53-year-old father of three, Patrice Lancien, who worked his way up to the position of skilled worker and team leader–another group that is being targeted by the RN (Ouest-France.fr).

Yet despite the “we are the future” (and thus we’re inevitable) thrust of the party messaging, a closer look at the youth vote, the 18 to 24-year olds, in both first and second rounds of the 2017 presidential election, shows a very different pattern, as the No. 6 graph in this Vox article shows. In fact young people voted most heavily for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the far left La France Insoumise party (LFI, or France Unbowed), while Le Pen came in second, and Macron in third, only two points behind Le Pen. An example of an extraordinarily positive Le Pen youth spin is this article by The Independent after the second round, which celebrated the young people as the single largest voting bloc in Le Pen’s 2017 coalition, giving her 44% of their vote.  An update at the bottom of the article revealed that she had taken only about 34% of the youth vote, roughly in line with her overall percentage.

The “How Allegiances Shifted” graph from the Financial Times shows where the votes of Mélenchon went in the second round (though they are not broken down by age or other categories): and while most Mélenchon voters went to Macron, a hefty number went to the “blank vote” or no-vote category; and some went to Marine.

Hopes for the youth vote, and for the future, often reside in Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal, who represents a new global ambassador, of sorts, for the populist brand. She spoke at the 2018 CPAC convention.

Those who invited Marion Maréchal to CPAC were apparently under the impression that she is more moderate than Marine. (She isn’t.) Those who boycotted her were apparently under the impression that the Rassemblement National is farther to the right than the current Republican party. (It isn’t.)

Eugen Weber eloquently described the appeals made by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1980s and 1990s, noting that “Some formulas recur endlessly: France d’abord, les Français d’abord, la France aux Français. The insistent repetition, the ready acceptance of such slogans as France First and France for the French suggest that national identity is the kernel of National Front discourse, national preference the core of its appeal, national entity the essence of its platform of national regeneration and revival. The slogans imply rejection of what is non-national, foreign, alien, and impure; but also they imply attachment to France, the cult of its past, confidence in its value and its values, affirmation of an enduring originality. They embody a dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion . . . ” (Weber, p. 421). Marine Le Pen’s 2017 campaign commercials suggest that the party has not changed its direction.

Le Pen describes her target audience as victims of poverty, crime, the lack of security, restrictive laws to restrain Islamic fundamentalists–but in every way as victims. Le Pen does not speak, as the old Left used to do, as Eribon wants them to do, of structural exploitation, but rather of betrayal and lies; not of the class struggle, but of those living in precarity and marginalization and fear of racial and religious Others, just as the current Left also casts the people as victims who need a better adjustment of benefits and tax breaks.

The campaign ads suggest that the people of France are in deep trouble.

And she alone can fix it.

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Works consulted and works cited.

Cole, Alistair. “A Strange Affair: The 2002 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in France.” Government and Opposition37, no. 3 (2002): 317-42. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/44484411.

Eribon, Didier.Returning to Reims, trans. Michael Lucey (Semiotexte(3), orig. ed. Anthem Fayard, 2013).

Fœssel, Michaël. “Marine Le Pen Ou La Captation Des « Invisibles ».” Esprit, no. 382 (2) (2012): 20-31. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/24272554.

MAYER, NONNA. “COMMENT NICOLAS SARKOZY A RÉTRÉCI L’ÉLECTORAT LE PEN.” Revue Française De Science Politique 57, no. 3/4 (2007): 429-45. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/43120354.

Weber, Eugen. “Letter from France: Nationalism and the Politics of Resentment.” The American Scholar 63, no. 3 (1994): 421-28. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/41212267.

Williams, Michelle Hale. “A New Era for French Far Right Politics? Comparing the FN under Two Le Pens.” Análise Social46, no. 201 (2011): 679-95. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/41494868.