French Farce
Jean-Marie Le Pen's surprise success in the
first round of France's presidential election sent the country into a spasm of
anguished self-examination. Was the left to blame? Was politics itself
bankrupt? Only one thing is clear, reports Julian Barnes from Paris - the
extremist cannot lose.
Julian Barnes
Guardian
Friday May 3, 2002
"I am like Zorro," commented
Jean-Marie Le Pen as the exit polls came through in the first round of the
presidential elections. "Everyone knows he exists, everyone believes he
exists, but nobody has ever seen him." If few others compared the
septuagenarian one-eyed ex-para to a caped and masked
crusader - once played, moreover, by the young Alain Delon
- everyone knew what he meant. Ridiculed, marginalised,
ignored by the political and media elite he in turn despised, Le Pen was meant
to be only a bad memory. After the National Front split in 1998, Bruno Mégret was meant to lead any resurgence of the far right
(even Le Pen's eldest daughter defected to him); Jean-Marie was meant to fade
away, his grumbles shared by a few old fascists, young racists, and
pig-ignorant peasants. Instead, he got 16.8% of the vote on April 21, and Mégret 2.3%.
Now, after 10 days of the fullest visibility,
and a trampling progress through the nation's media, its political
consciousness and its waking nightmares, Le Pen stands in front of the Paris
Opera addressing his thousands of supporters. They are ordinary French people -
that's to say, they are ordinary white French people. There are a few groups of
leather-jacketed heavies with fast-food complexions and security armbands, who
look as if they would happily audition for the Vichy Milice
(French wartime military organisation that
collaborated with the Germans against the resistance); there are paranoid
leaflets being handed out predicting the Death by Immigration of a Brilliant
People (and the plot is more paranoid than you think - after all borders come
down, the Chinese arrive, form a majority by 2020, drive out the blacks and
North Africans, and by 2030 are left in charge of the few remaining elderly
French). But for the most part, the crowd is from the supermarket queue. Le Pen
is not directly visible as he orates - perhaps from fear of snipers. Instead,
he appears on a vast screen set up in front of the east wing of the Opera. This
is the side which bears the gilt inscription "Poesie
Lyrique". Bizarrely, these words hover like an
operatic surtitle over Le Pen's image as his mouth
vents blunt prose. He goes through his act: pious praise for Joan of Arc (who
drove out the English immigrants of her day); list of Treasons from the past
quarter-century; mockery of "Superliar"
Chirac; and catalogue of improbable promises. Beethoven, Mozart and Meyerbeer
look down from the facade without comment.
Whatever else happens - and there is a long way
to go - this has been Le Pen's fortnight. It is he who has set the agenda to
which others respond. The two main May Day marches are "Le Pen" and
"Anti Le Pen". No one marches for Chirac. The outgoing president -
who on September 21 last year got the lowest poll of any outgoing president -
has been physically active but politically inert, his face an embarrassed rictus as he waits to be re-elected, knowing that the majority
of those who will vote for him dislike and, in many cases, despise him. In Jarry's play, Ubu Roi, a single actor plays "The Entire Russian
Army". Chirac has been onstage for two weeks wearing a sash reading
"I Am The Republic". It is not much of a part.
Chirac will win - and lose. Le Pen will lose -
and win. Things play into his hands. Chirac declines a presidential debate, and
this looks more like panic than disdain (and disdain would be bad, too). The
unparalleled peacefulness of the May 1 marches could be taken to prove that the
National Front is now a respectable party. And even when Le Pen gets it wrong -
and despite 50 years in politics, he often behaves like a deluded amateur - it
merely confirms the views of those who loathe him anyway. But to others it
proves him an outsider, a regular guy who refuses to speak the slimy language
of what the National Front traditionally calls politichiens
- politicodogs. He is as much of a liar as Chirac,
probably more of a crook, and certainly as much of a politichien.
But this is currently less apparent.
Two days before the May Day march, I walk down
the Avenue de l'Opéra, a stern blast of Baron
Haussmann, turn at the far end, and reascend it. This
will be the final stretch of the Le Pen supporters' route, and I try to see it
through their eyes.
There are various banks (hatred for
international finance and offshore antics) and change shops (more business -
when Le Pen restores the franc to circulation). A number of
Japanese tourists and Japanese shops (admirable monoculturalism).
Several travel agencies (foreigners acceptable as long as they remain
foreigners, preferably in their own countries). The offices of Air Algerie (flying to the land where Le Pen served) next to
those of Club Med (the NF is anti-abortion, pro-family). The Moroccan Tourist
Office (in 1995, skinhead followers of Le Pen murdered Brahim
Bonarram by throwing him into the Seine). A shop
called Hunting World (Le Pen is trying to bring the ruralist
hunting-and-shooting party on board for the second round). The Hotel Edouard VII (interfering English). The Compagnie
des Etats Unis
(a reminder of pernicious globalisation). A poster in
the window of a mobile phone shop showing the French World Cup team (Zinedine Zidane has just criticised Le Pen in rather statesmanlike terms). At the
top of the Avenue, in front of Garnier's florid opera
house, a black woman traffic cop is whistling away as ferociously as any white
male colleague (high culture and multiculture:
neither on the NF's programme).
It is only by chance that I detect any active,
rather than allusive, political message. Half-way up the Avenue, a poster for
the new Sean Penn/Michelle Pfeiffer film has been defaced by discreet stickers
no bigger than playing cards. Their slogan is rather lordly - "Le Choc des
Partis, le Vide des Idées"
(The Clash of Parties, the Vacuum of Ideas). But their origin produces a
historical chill: they come from Action française,
the anti-semitic, royalist party and newspaper which
flourished up to and into the second world war. That
its adherents are still tottering out to bill-stick is as surprising a reminder
of political durability as was the discovery the other week that Pierre Poujade, eponymous founder of the 50s movement, was still
alive. Le Pen entered parliament in 1956 at the age of 27 as a Poujadiste, and half a century on his former boss (still only 81 himself) has resurfaced to denounce his
one-time protege. Le Pen, he said, was a liar, and Poujade wished he had never supported him: "It would
have been better," he added eccentrically, "if I'd broken my
leg."
It would have been better, too, if Le Pen were
just a political bully-boy, if he were fully summed up by Tony Blair's
"repellent", if he were egregious, a sudden boil on democracy's
bottom. But Le Pen is far from egregious, and stands as the rough inheritor of
a long tradition of the French counter-revolutionary right. If his power base
is different - Action française recruited among
wealthy rural society, Poujade among provincial
shopkeepers - Le Pen's rhetoric has clear historical echoes. When he claims to
be "socially left, economically right, and nationally, more than ever,
French", this is only a slight elaboration of the pre-war Fascist slogan "Neither Left nor Right - French!"
And you could go back earlier. Who is this, for
instance? "The French government cannot view with indifference a debased,
degraded nation capable of all forms of lowness... one must think of the
------s as a nation and not a sect. It constitutes a nation within a nation."
Not Le Pen on Muslims, but Napoleon in 1806 on
Jews. Napoleon's solution was forced assimilation (obligatory military service
and mixed marriages), Le Pen's expulsion via train and transit camp; but the
language, and the fear being played upon, are exactly the same.
"I was born in 1956," the writer Jérôme Garçin told me, "and
though I've always known of things to be ashamed of in our history, this is
different. I feel ashamed, I feel soiled. It's as if we've gone back to the
time of Zola - Zola mixed with Brasillach. I've never
known such a stain on the country, or such self-hatred in the country." Shame, humiliation, dishonour; deep
national embarrassment, too. "Other countries either feel sorry for
us, or laugh at us," said Garcin. "Or both." A Sorbonne lecturer told me. "My
English friends send me emails asking if we're all learning the Hitler salute,
but it's not funny. It's not funny."
Paris is self-conscious in normal times; now a
mood of anguished self-examination has set in. As the people take to the streets,
the intellectuals take to the television studios. No panel is complete without
Bernard-Henri Lévy (in more decorous décolletage
these days) or Alain Finkielkraut. Once
button-punching through the channels, I discovered, on completing the full circle
after a couple of minutes, that BHL had vanished from one studio and turned up
miraculously in another.
There are calls for greater national humility,
for the forgotten zones of France to be acknowledged, for the elites to stop
living in a bubble. This is in the longer term. In the short term, there is
practical action, and - this being France - symbolic action. On the base of the
gilded equestrian statue of St Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides,
where the National Front traditionally lays flowers on May 1, I discovered a
small, neatly written pencil protest: "No to the confiscation of the
symbols of France by the Fascists." Le Pen has co-opted Joan (as many
others have done before him, including the Catholic church
itself: first they burned her as a heretic, then a few centuries later they canonised her). He has tried to take over the national
flag: the only thing about the protest marches of the lycéens
(secondary-school pupils) that annoyed Garçin was
their preferring to march behind a red flag rather than trying to reclaim the tricolore. Le Pen has also tried to wrestle May 1 away from
the left, and uses the Marseillaise as his party anthem. Hence
the double importance to the left of the May 1 anti-Le Pen march. And
hence the appearance on Tuesday night on the steps of the Trocadéro
of 60 stars of song and music hall - a literal A to Z, from Aznavour
to Roschdy Zem - for an a
cappella version of the anthem in what was billed as a "reappropriation of the symbols of the Republic".
Also, in the short term, is the day after
tomorrow. One of the first emails I got from Paris after the first round came
from a friend in the theatre: "Over here we are all scrubbing down to vote
for Chirac." The metaphor of taint and cleansing continues. One young internetter started the notion of voting with a clothes-peg
on your nose; others suggested wearing rubber gloves. Sometimes irony is the
only defence against the bitterness of having to vote
for the bad in preference to the ugly. "Better to be fucked by Chirac than
raped by Le Pen," as the weekly Charlie Hebdo
puts it.
"I voted communist in the first
round," a young lecturer at the Sorbonne told me. "All my friends
voted either left or far left. At first none of us could see how we could vote
for Chirac. But after eight, nine days, we are all going to do so. I think it
was Bernard-Henri Levy who first proposed the idea that we should treat the
second round not as an election but as a referendum."
"So you're voting not for Chirac but for...
the republic?"
"Yes, for democracy. As a method of
self-persuasion this has its ironic side since it was an entirely democratic
vote in the first place which is now provoking a "referendum on
democracy".
"Some say," my informant went on,
"that in order to prove himself a true democrat, Chirac should resign
immediately after he's won so that he can call new elections."
"Call new elections so that he can lose to Jospin's successor?"
"Yes."
But not even the arrival of the real Zorro in
his cape and mask could fix that.
The night before his rally, Le Pen made his last
major television appearance, a 20-minute interview on TFl
with Patrick Poivre D'Arvor
(another Frenchman so famous he is habitually reduced to initials: PPDA). This
was a key campaign moment, since Chirac in the previous few days had been
pulling out of radio and television interviews, thus obliging the broadcasters,
by the law of equal time, to withdraw their matching invitations to Le Pen. I
watched the encounter from a few feet away, among a swirl of cables and a swirl
of dark-suited protection. The two of them joshed away off-camera as the day's
lesser news was rounded up: a rise in the price of lily-of-the valley (the
traditional May 1 gift); the sacking of a corrupt French ice-skating judge; the
choice of a black footballer for the French World Cup squad.
Leading easily on from this, PPDA brought up Zidane's statement on the National Front. Le Pen batted it
off in the crusty-but-genial mode he has been trying to maintain lately: of
course Zidane would say that, he's got a right to his
views, he's a French citizen, he's made a lot of money, he
doesn't want to rock the boat.
Then, before PPDA could continue, Le Pen pulled
what was clearly planned as a coup de télévision. He
had an announcement to make, he said. He'd been thinking over what had happened
in the first round, and had come to the conclusion that he and the public had
been the victims of an enormous swindle by the outgoing president. Chirac's
entire strategy was "to substitute Le Pen for Jospin", because he knew Jospin would
beat him in the second round. So an "extraordinary operation" was
mounted, "a Machiavellian operation to keep himself in power". This
involved, for instance, making sure that Charles Pasqua,
the hardline former interior minister, didn't get
enough support to be a candidate (which would have taken votes from Le Pen).
With Jospin thus defeated, "Superliar"
had little to do during the second round except foist on voters "the myth
of the extreme right".
As an analysis - unsupported by any evidence
beyond Le Pen's psychic powers - it was fantastical to the point of paranoia.
Afterwards, PPDA told me he'd had trouble following it, and so, he thought, had
Le Pen himself, since he had it written down in front of him to make sure he got
it right. Further, it seemed a completely counterproductive theory: rather than
praising his own political breakthrough, he was presenting himself as Chirac's
patsy.
"But he's always imagined plots
everywhere," said PPDA. "Among the media, among the
political parties."
Apart from this evidence of psychological
delusion, it was a surprisingly amateur performance (not that this would
discourage some). Pressed to explain in more than outline his plan to abolish
income tax, he declined to discuss figures on the grounds that other people
looked after the figures for him. Pressed by PPDA about a contradiction in
recent policy statements, he replied: "You're confusing my programme with that of the National Front" - by which
he appeared to mean that he had a separate programme,
as yet undisclosed (except by gaffe) as president, from the one his supporters
had hitherto been aware of.
Le Pen ended his 20 minutes with a reprise of
Blair-bashing: he was "no more of a racist than Toniblair"
(the French turn him into a single name) and would happily send over a
trainload of immigrants to prove it. This may strike us here as no more than
robust political tit-for-tat, but like other FN attitudes it has a longer
history. Britain has always been the object of particular loathing among the
French counter-revolutionary right - and not just because of our unsound
attitude to Joan of Arc. As Pierre Birnbaum put it in
La France imaginée (1998), for the leaders of this
tendency, "From Abbé Barruel
to Edouard Drumont, Charles
Maurras, and now Jean-Marie Le Pen, England eternally
remains the devil, guilty of having smuggled into France (with the subversive
assistance of its Protestant and Jewish agents) a spirit of capitalism and
individualism ruinous to French Catholic identity. England, they believe, has
always sought to destroy France through its introduction of a
multiculturalism contrary to its nature."
And if the British (or at least the English) are
the devil, which country does the National Front most admire? You may scroll through
your South American dictatorships, remember Salazar and Franco, but the
surprising answer, given what Birnbaum terms the FN's
"dreams of power and virile domination", is Switzerland. What is
admired is the country's attachment to its roots, its hostility to European
institutions, and its frequent use of the popular referendum. In particular,
not surprisingly, it admires the way the Swiss welcome - or at least accept -
foreigners on condition that they remain foreigners.
In 1979, Philip Larkin told an interviewer that
he "adored" Mrs Thatcher, not least because
"At last politics makes sense to me." This is one part of Le Pen's
appeal. If you live in the north-eastern rustbelt, in a town with 20%
unemployment and 20% immigration, Le Pen will make the equation for you; if you
mention rising crime, that will help him complete the
case. If you suffer the "insecurity" which was so featured in the
campaign, Le Pen will tell you exactly whose fault it is: Brussels and its
bureaucracy, America and its globalisation, the
arrogant inertia "of the énarques [graduates],
the corruptness of the politicians and the diluting effect on the national
character of large-scale immigration".
Chirac will win by a majority which in any other
circumstances would appear utterly convincing. He might even win 80/20. But
what would that mean? It would mean that Le Pen had actually increased the
far-right vote above the 16.8% he received, plus the 2.3% Mégret
received. It would destroy the argument that many people had voted for him the
first time as a protest vote, as a slap across the muzzles of the politichiens, and would return to normal electoral behaviour later. Jérôme Garçin says: "We have been living since September 21
with the expectation of being saved. But I have more fear for the second round
than for the first." If 80/20 would be very bad, 70/30 would be a
disaster, and 60/40, which some polls are predicting, a catastrophe.
"Those who vote Le Pen can no longer plead frivolity, or
unawareness," says Garçin.
"Everything is now out in the open."
BHL, comparing the reasons - or excuses - given for voting now for Le Pen to
those given for voting for Hitler in 1933, says: "Those who vote for Le
Pen will know exactly what they are doing."
The fear is not just of what France will learn
about itself on Sunday, but of what happens thereafter. The legislative
elections take place in June. If Le Pen does well on Sunday, it could have a
fragmentary effect and produce an ungovernable assembly.
One theory I heard was that the extreme left
might deliberately vote for Le Pen in the hope of provoking a revolutionary
situation. Paranoia isn't limited to the National Front, after all, and the
pollsters know nothing. We shall see only the new profile of France on Sunday,
and its full face in June.
Has anything good come out of the past
fortnight? The politicisation of the young, who see
the consequences of their elders dereliction at the
ballot box. A (possible) greater honesty on the part of
(some) politicians, and an addressing of France's underlying problems by the
(yet unspecified) same. Thirdly, and not widely mentioned, as Garçin points out, was the safety-net provided by the euro.
"Imagine what would have happened if we had still had the franc - it would
have gone into freefall. Imagine what would happen in your country to the pound
if you had our election results. The euro has saved us."
But francs were still the currency in the place
de l'Opéra on Wednesday morning. A woman was selling
cloth badges bearing the arms of France for three francs a go. Next to her, a
much-photographed little old lady had stickered her dachshund with Le Pen
slogans. "Proud to be French" read the banners. "La France retrouvée" - France rediscovered, read the day's
catchphrase behind Le Pen's head. But which France?
As Le Pen hymned the eternally Gallic virtues of
Joan of Arc, I remembered a story my friend Marina Warner told me just before I
left. About 10 years ago she had been walking down the rue de Richelieu when
she saw a bookshop window containing an obscure biography of Joan of Arc. The
shop itself seemed disused, with a cracked window and no nameboard.
Inside she found it full of browsers, presided over by a snooty bookseller with
stiff collar and pinned cravat. Gradually she realised
that all the "books" on display were anti-semitic
and anti-Arab tracts. On the wall was a photo of Chirac - already an NF target
- with a group of Arabs, entitled "Chirac et ses totes" (Chirac and his chums). You could buy
postcards of a medieval sculpture of the hanged Judas - just the thing to send
to your chums. And presiding at the back, on a shelf, was a bust of Hitler.
Joan of Arc has had a flexible, posthumous
career. Nowadays she serves, quite literally, as window-dressing for the
National Front. What May 5 will tell us is how many people are buying what is
still for sale at the back of the shop.
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