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Index - Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five |
By John Tully
Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front (FN after its French initials) came to the fore in last month's general elections, when it defied the overall leftwards swing which gave government to a Socialist-Communist-Green coalition. Because of the vagaries of the French election system, however, the Front 's 15.3% of the vote (more than the Communist Party's 9.9%), only translated into one seat in the National Assembly. Nevertheless, the Front has established itself as a force to be reckoned with. FN has succeeded in inplanting itself in many popular neighbourhoods. The front has also attracted the support of a number of prominent identities, most notably the film star Brigitte Bardot. The Front is stridently anti-immigrant - particularly if the immigrants have dark skins - and has made inroads into the Left vote with its claim that unemployment is caused by 'outsiders'. FN denies that it is fascist and whilst technically this may be true, this is an evasion. FN is a coalition which includes out-and-out fascists (particularly in its violent youth wing), reactionary Catholic monarchists and extreme right wing 'technocrats' such as the Front's second-in-command, the ex-Gaullist Bruno Megret, who now sits in parliament.
Led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, an ex-paratrooper reputed to have tortured members of the Algerian resistance in the 1950s and early '60s, FN has enjoyed a string of electoral successes, particularly in local government contests, in recent years. Bruno Megret's wife won control of a fourth council, that of Vitrolles, near Marseilles. for the Front. (They also control Orange, Maragnane and Toulon.)
FN taps into an odious tradition of anti-Semitism and clerical reaction which has long infected the French middle classes. One sign that these ideas are as deep-rooted as ever was the claim made a couple of years back by the chief French military historian that the verdict on Dreyfus was still open. (Dreyfus was the Alsatian Jewish staff officer framed up by anti-Semites on treason and spying charges in the 1890s. The case became a cause celebre for the socialists and republicans and Dreyfus had to be released, but not before serving a period of imprisonment on Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana.)
The belated confession by the Socialist ex-President Francois Mitterrand that he had been a convinced supporter of the Vichy regime has also placed the question of the mass collaboration of the middle class and the bourgeoisie with the Nazis during World War II back in the political spotlight. (The Vichy regime, headed by Marshal Petain, ruled the south of France after the Nazi invasion in 1940. It was strongly anti-Semitic and anti-socialist.)
We should never forget either that it was French police who rounded up the French Jews and locked them in the stadium at Drancy in the Paris suburbs prior to their deportation to Auschwitz.The Belgian torturers at Breendonk had their French counterparts in such sinister figures as Paul Touvier, the accomplice of Klaus Barbie, 'the Butcher of Lyon'. Touvier was hidden by the Catholic church for decades after the war, with government complicity.
In the past, FN has pitched much of its propaganda to the anti-Semitic Catholic petty bourgeoisie. It is strongly anti-abortion and has cast itself in the Vichy mould of 'Family. Work. Fatherland.' It has long enjoyed a popularity among the so-called 'pieds noirs' -- former white settlers who left Algeria after that country obtained independence. In common with racists across Europe, NF clamours for the deportation of immigrants, particularly those with black, brown or yellow skins, on whom it places the blame for unemployment. A typical rightist demagogue, Le Pen also rants against intellectuals, Jews and 'the smoked salmon right and the caviar left'. He is neither right nor left, but French, he claims, again echoing the grubby rhetoric of Vichy - and Adolf Hitler for that matter.
Yet the middle classes are no longer a large enough reservoir of support for the far right. The relentless drive of capitalism towards concentration of economic power has caused the numbers of petit bourgeois to dwindle. The Front has realised this and has made a conscious decision to target the traditional constituency of the Left, including both those marginalised by the crisis and also the organised working class. It has made some headway with this project and this will doubtless encourage it to redouble its efforts.
The Front is growing in the 'red belt' of working class suburbs to the north and east of Paris. FN regularly sets up soup kitchens for unemployed (white) workers in these districts.
Ominously, FN supporters have begun to appear under their banners on workers' picket lines, particularly those protesting factory closures and redundancies, such as at the Alsthom plant in Le Havre a year or two back. Clearly, the FN is aiming to develop a 'national populist synthesis' which includes a developed social programme that goes beyond the isolated themes of deporting immigrants. The Front calls for a new protectionism and is fiercely anti-GATT , anti-European Union and hysterically pro-French. In the words of FN general secretary Carl Lang, 'Governments change, the problems get worse: immigration, taxes, insecurity, unemployment, education, social security, nothing has changed since March 1993 [the date of the European Single Market, JT] ... Real change will be led by us and the FN will be there when the French people want it.'
Opposition to abortion - once a major plank of FN policy - has been downplayed in recent times. France is more secular than Catholic nowadays and growing numbers of FN voters and supporters are not particularly religious. Much of the Front's social programme is deeply reactionary, but it is not without a certain appeal to the disoriented and angry. Women are to be enticed back to where they allegedly belong - that is to church, kitchen and children - by the bait of a generous 'maternal wage'. FN members also worm their way into community organisations, such as pensioner groups, school councils and the like.
All of this has so far translated into votes of around 18 percent in what have always been strongholds of the Left. In the 1995 French presidential elections, Jean Le Pen scored 15% of the vote nationally. Among blue collar workers, however, he fared significantly better, with 27%. On average, together with the ultra right monarchists around Viscount Philippe de Villiers, deputy for the Vendee, the extreme right in France can count on a quarter of all votes cast.
One bright spot, however, is that a survey carried out three or four years ago indicated that 60% of voters claimed that the front was the one party they would never under any circumstances vote for.
(Next month: the far right in Italy.)