Enlargement : Illustration 1
Freelance journalist Claire Checcaglini spent eight months undercover as an activist in the French far-right Front National party, whose leader Marine Le Pen is running as a candidate in this spring’s presidential elections.
Le Pen, 43, a divorced mother of three who succeeded her father Jean-Marie as party leader early last year, hopes to draw significant support from across the political divide, after softening, on the outside, its longstanding crude and racist public image. Checcaglini, 35, who has previously worked for radio stations RTL and France Info, embarked on her undercover project to discover the real character of the new-look party, behind the scenes, how it operates, and to better understand the backgrounds and motivations of the people who make up its supporters and activists. “Because the Front advances behind a mask, I’ll go forward with a mask too,” she said.
Using the pseudonym Gabrielle Picard, she approached the party in May 2011 as someone who was attracted by Marine Le Pen, describing herself as unemployed and with time on her hands, choosing the branch in the sprawling Hauts-de-Seine département (county), just west of Paris, which is composed of a thorough mix of all social categories.
Checcaglini rapidly rose through the ranks as a militant, engaged in canvassing, branch discussions and party meetings, and socializing with fellow party members. She recounts her experiences in a book, Bienvenue au Front – Journal d'une infiltrée, (‘Welcome to the Front – An infiltrator’s diary’) to be published on February 27th, extracts of which are published here by Mediapart.
In her book, Checcaglini gave pseudonyms to party volunteer activists, while describing party officials with their true names. The exception is the party's branch leader in the Hauts-de-Seine département, who she gave the pseudonym ‘Sylvain'.
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November 9th 2011. At the Carré, the Front National party headquarters, author Claire Checcaglini chats with 'Sylvain', who is the head of the FN branch in the Hauts-de-Seine département (county), a member of the central committee and who is running for MP in next June's legislative elections in Genevilliers, a Paris suburb. She begins by asking him for an explanation of party leader Marine Le Pen's strategy regarding Islam.
CC: At the national level, are there instructions to refuse activists?
"No, but I told Marie-Christine [Editor's note: Marie-Christine Arnautu, vice president of the FN in charge of social affairs and head of the Paris area office]: We must denounce Islamisation but not immigration. She told me: 'That's part of immigration.' I said, no, it is not the same thing. I don't care about the Europeans or even the Chinese. What bothers me is Islam."
CC: Her too, I would guess.
Yes, but she thinks that it shouldn't be handled that way. But we have to talk about Muslim colonisation so that people understand that it is a people that is coming to invade us and to impose its culture and its demographics, and that we are in for it."
'Prats who still believe Islam is a religion'
CC: On that subject, Marine [Le Pen] has not been very aggressive. Do you know her personally?
"We peck each other on the cheek and use a familiar tone but it's superficial. But once, I attended a meeting at which she explained her position on Islam. She said: 'Here is the strategy. We will never get the Muslim vote, that's a target I'll not hit. If I sometimes butter up Islam, it is not for them, it's for those French people who still believe, those prats, that Islam is a religion. Those people, I don't want to lose their votes. If I say that Islam is unsavoury, that is the worst thing in the world, they will call me racist and they won't vote for me. So, for the moment, I am buttering up those people.'
So, I flatter secularism because the French are very secular, they are even 'secularists' [1], they reckon that every religion has a right to live. That is their belief; they learn that when they are very young – the principal of secularism – they think it is fabulous. So, I flatter them. In the meantime, the Front doesn't lay into Islam, and that bugs me." [2]
[...]
CC: You don't really think that Marine's position on Islam is nothing more than an electoral ploy and that she is really against Muslims.
Sylvain pauses for a moment then says: "It's hard to know what is going on in our leaders' heads. I don't know if they do this because it's good bread and butter or if they really want to win. When you want power, you don't do stupid things like [making questionable puns linking ovens in concentration camps to an opponent's name]. You don't say that the German Occupation was not all that bad [3], given all the people that died in the concentration camps, even if it was one million instead of six, it was horrible. There are terrible images of it and they are true. And my great-grand parents, they died there. He's a pain Jean-Marie [Le Pen]. But Marine, at the party congress, remember, in her speech she said the word power six times. She wants power. And that suits me fine. In any case, we want power, whatever the means to achieve it. Once we are there, we'll see what we do. Too bad if we go off the rails, too bad if we don't follow the wonderful path we had charted, we have to win!"
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1: "Laicards" in French.
2: Comments made by Jean-Marie Le Pen father of Marine and founder of the FN. He stepped down as party president in January 2011 but remains honorary president.
3: While the FN has always targeted immigration and Islamic fundamentalism, it accepted that a 'Frenchified Islam' could be compatible with the values of the French Republic.
'Never be led by journalists' questions'
Claire Checcaglini was invited to dinner at the home of a militant FN couple, the Maréchal’s. She is joined by officials of the local FN branch of the Hauts-de-Seine département (county) that borders Paris to the west.
The host, Christian Maréchal, is more than a rank and file activist. He is one of the long-time party faithful and a member of its disciplinary committee. A conservative Catholic, he hangs around his home portraits of Jean-Marie Le Pen and of Marshal Pétain, head of the WWII Vichy government of occupied France and a symbol of French collaboration with the Nazi regime. That evening, Maréchal is worried that a slew of 'Nazi' messages sent by Jean-Paul L., a party activist, have gone "public":
[...] "But are these messages public?"
I reassure him that they are totally personal.
"All it takes is for a journalist to land on them and then the information percolates back up and the general-secretary says: 'Sylvain is not doing his job.' In all the recent affairs, that's how it happened. In the disciplinary commission, we have to mediate in affairs that should never have gotten into the press."
"That's exactly what happened to [Alexandre] Gabriac, the poor guy. It should not have gotten out in the press", says Nicole.
The "poor guy' is a former member of the FN central committee, close to [Bruno] Gollnisch [1] and a regional councillor in the Rhone-Alps region. He was forced out of the party after being photographed with his arm raised in the Nazi salute.
Cédric approves the decision. "Just before the local cantonal elections, Marine was practically forced to exclude him. The picture was shocking, after all," he says. But then, sensing that he has hit a wrong chord, Cédric, almost embarrassed, seems to excuse himself a minute later. "Well, I know that doesn't mean anything," he adds.
What would it take for something to have meaning for this young activist? Cédric does not seem like one of those neo-Nazis, those skinheads the party is always trying to hide. Nothing in his dress betrays any such membership. He probably was happy to see his president chasing out avowed Nazis in early 2011.
But a disapproving silence was enough for him to back track. Cédric is not here because of his convictions but because of an absence of convictions, a lack of political consciousness that had just made him say that a gesture endorsing the worse of ideologies is 'nothing'. At that moment he showed his inability to respond, to reply, to argue, to protest. He is ill-equipped to decipher Marine Le Pen's strategy. Yet, Christian offers him a chance to wake up by making an explicit statement of clarification. "If you go look at all the Front's leaders, old mate, at one time or other we have all had relations with those people [neo-Nazis organisations]. We were with them all the time, at Front congresses, at the [flag-waving, patriotic fests], we were with them all the time," he insists. Cédric says nothing. This reminder of what the Front used to be like does not raise the least reaction from my neighbour, not even a frown of disapproval.
The subject is closed. Sylvain takes the lead and opens the subject of training activists to speak in public.
"You have to follow the party line without going into too much detail, you must especially not say too much and do not let yourself be led where the journalists want to lead us," advises Nicole.
That is when Christian, addressing me directly, starts to give us a course in media training. I sit back and enjoy it.
"When facing journalists, the important thing is to get the message through. You must not play their game by answering the questions asked, definitely not."
I approve while finishing my drink. We end the evening with a few rants about the justice system. Once again, I note a difference between Cédric's true nature and the party line.
"About the death penalty, I tend to be against." Again, Christian rectifies Cédric's words. "But today we are in an inferior position in relation to killers. We can't even knock them off when they do something shitty," he says.
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1: Bruno Gollnisch is a long-time party stalwart who hoped to lead the FN after Jean-Marie Le Pen stepped down last year, but his ambitions were nipped in the bud by Marine, with her father's support.
'The problem with Blacks is they're visible'
Paris, November 19th 2011. The event is a "Banquet for a Thousand" meeting with Marine Le Pen, where she unveiled her presidential platform to a thousand activists. The author joins a conversation between 'Sylvain', the head of the Hauts-de-Seine branch, and two activists, Didier and Marcel.
"In any case, we have an overpopulation problem. What is terrible, is that we can't do anything, we are letting ourselves be invaded by people who don't have the same culture as ours. More than an invasion, it's a colonisation. They are imposing their way of life on us and we encourage them."
"That’s true it’s a scourge. Things are going to blow up because there are more and more hate speeches."
"Of hate against France you mean! That is the reason for civil war, we are going straight for it, well, that's not actually true because the French are so soft, so little combative, that they will allow it to happen."
Marcel protests: "Yet we have never let things happen, in history".
The salmon starter and the wine arrive.
We clink glasses and Didier, silent until now, briefly explains why he came to the Front. "Foreigners, when there are several next door, it's bothersome."
Sylvain has but one solution to propose. "When a family of foreigners arrives in your building and they start to behave badly, making noise and bringing in other families and your building starts to fill up slowly, you have to get out. I tell people to sell while their home is still worth something – after, it's too late."
"In any case, it's quite clear, the population has changed," Marcel continues. "I lived abroad for a few years and when I came back, I was shocked. I didn't recognise my country. The other day, I went to Brussels on the train. Well, the Gare du Nord [Paris train station], it is scary, really scary. I told myself: there is something that bothers me, but hold on, I am not a racist."
"If you start to count those truly French, you'll see that there aren't any. In some cities there is no longer a single one, you can check it out," suggests Sylvain. And, after assuring us for the third time that he is not racist, Marcel calmly states that, "Black doesn't suit me".
"And the problem with Blacks, is that they are visible," notes Sylvain, shrewd as ever. Today he is not accompanied by his partner from Martinique, a “totally black”woman, as he once described her to me.
The un-demonizing of the Front has, undoubtedly, functioned so well that openly racist remarks are not considered as such. Marcel seems just as sincere when he explains that he does not like Blacks as when protesting against being racist. Rejecting a portion of the population because of their skin colour is that much easier for him to espouse because he is unable to see that he has crossed a line. He is incapable of recognising discrimination, xenophobia or the Far Right.
Undoubtedly, in the days of Jean-Marie Le Pen, there was something nefarious, provocative, and openly politically incorrect in belonging to the FN. But today, after hearing the party leaders repeat incessantly that the National Front is respectable, the new militants are sincerely convinced of the evolution. For them, the movement has become a party like the others and therefore, disliking Blacks, foreigners or Muslims is now part of the mainstream.
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- ‘Bienvenue au Front – Journal d'une infiltrée’ went on sale in France on February 27th, published by éditions Jacob-Duvernet, priced 19.95 euros.
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English version: Patricia Brett
(Editing by Graham Tearse)