Jean de La Fontaine, the author of fables about human pretensions and the blindness of the powerful, and whose birth four centuries ago will be precisely marked on July 8th, was inspired by the fables credited to the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop. One of them, The child who cried ‘wolf’, was the origin of the idiom “to cry wolf”, meaning to raise a false alarm so often that when the real danger is present the alarm is not believed.
In another sense, one can raise the true alarm seemingly too early, driven by the energy of foresight. That is a situation in which Mediapart broadly finds itself today, as the spectator of a catastrophe which our journal has repeatedly warned against.
“The catastrophe is not to come, it is already here,” we wrote in early 2017, just a few months before the last French presidential election (see here, in French), sounding the alarm over a “race to the bottom, towards the abyss of fear and hatred, of lies and violence, of a retreat of freedoms, the refusal of equality, and raging [concepts of] identities”. Henceforth, we added, “everything is possible, even the unthinkable”. Perhaps too early to be heard, the prophecy was nevertheless a just one. For here it is: the far-right now dictates its agenda on French political life, with the cynical complicity of the government, to the outrageous complacency of the media, and the opportunistic cowardice of a section of the Left.
Contrary to the words of President Emmanuel Macron after he was slapped by a man shouting the royalist battle cry “Montjoie! Saint-Denis!” during his visit to the south-east town of Tain-L’Hermitage on Tuesday, the event was not an “incident” that should be “relativised” because “all is well”. No, all is going badly, and the relativising by the president only makes the catastrophe worse. By targeting he who, under the presidential system, represents the French Republic, the violence is a boomerang: it hits back at the political powers which have ignored it, underestimated it, tolerated it, and even encouraged it by demonizing the leftwing opposition while legitimising the ideological obsessions of the far-right.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
On June 6th, two days before Macron was assaulted, a royalist activist known for his virulent opposition to every symbol of equality and emancipation, posted on social media a video staging the mock shooting execution of a “leftist” dummy, who could – the choice is open – be a supporter of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, or a subscriber to Mediapart, or a reader of the daily Libération. Beyond a few rare exceptions, this fascist incitement of violent action, which echoes very real terrorist threats from the ultra-right, prompted no indignation, let alone action, from either the political executive or the dominant media, which were busy setting upon LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon over his decidedly inappropriate comments on a radio programme last weekend.
Similarly, the intrusion on March 25th of militants from the far-right movement Action française at a meeting of a meeting of the council of the south-west Occitanie region, an irruption to denounce what they called “the Islamo-leftist traitors of France”, was rapidly eclipsed by the controversy over student union Unef organising 'non-mixed' meetings. Meanwhile, the targeted socialist president of the Occitanie regional council, Carole Delga, in a paradoxical Twitter post criticised the Unef for causing divisions in society (see more, in French, here).
In face of this freeing up of the expression and actions of a racist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic far-right, they don’t content themselves with looking the other way, they even give it a leg up. On June 7th, the day before the slap at Tain-L’Hermitage, a joint commission of the French lower house, the National Assembly, began its discussions to reach a compromise with the Senate for a second passage of the draft legislation for “the respect of the principles of the Republic” (dubbed as an “anti-Islamic separatism law”). Whatever the care taken in the language employed in the draft text, it legitimises the constant obsessions of the enemies of France’s true republic – that of equality of rights for all, whatever their origins, convictions or religion, gender or appearance – by the use of the simple word “separatism”.
It is a notion of civil war which legitimises, precipitates and installs it. There is supposedly, within our people, those who embody France and those who separate themselves from the nation; not opponents or protestors, but separatists. Otherwise put, French citizens who potentially are no longer such because of their engagements, behaviour and convictions. A heritage of the anti-communism of the Cold War and the imperialism of colonial wars, this denouncement of a “separatism” opens wide the door of a public debate around the far-right’s ever-present obsession: the anti-France.
A royalist and staunch adversary of the republic, Charles Maurras, the founder of Action française, theorised this by condemning what he called the “four confederated states” that he identified in “Protestants, Jews, free-masons and metics”. Driven by a phobia towards the encountering and mixing of peoples, this quest for pure ‘identity’ was an explicit call for the exclusion of otherness, of differences and dissidences, and for which anti-Semitism is a recurrent mobilising factor.
An anti-Semitism which, to no surprise, we find again today, in the words penned by France’s current interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, in his recently published essay called “Islamist separatism; a manifesto for secularism”. In it, he likens his actions, regarding Islam and Muslims, with those of Napoleon who tried to “sort out the difficulties regarding the presence of tens of thousands of Jews in France”, and cites a letter from the emperor to his interior minister in which he spoke of his intention to “bring a remedy to the harm which many among them go about to the detriment of our subjects”.
At the heart of far-right ideologies is the rejection of the principle of natural equality and the promotion, under the cover of identity, the nation or the people, of inequality, of hierarchies and domination. The government’s offensive on identity contributes to this grievous thinking, brandishing the words “republic” and “secularity” while having emptied them of their emancipating sense, their social requirements and democratic vitality.
While in the National Assembly interior minister Gérald Darmanin urges Members of Parliament to legislate against what he called a “jihadism of atmosphere”, with the single obsession of designating a religion – Islam – and a community – the Muslims – as factors of division and troublemaking, the public debate has become filled with the stench of refrains relating to exclusion and intolerance, and with a virulence characteristic of fascism. From the media to academia, with the assent of the government and the encouragement of intellectuals who have lost their way, a witch hunt, in packs, of “Islamo-Leftists” has been declared, a machine for excluding, disqualifying and demonizing, and recycling in modern terms the old fascist refrain that denounced “Judeo-Bolshevism”.
Voluntarily maintained by a presidency which plays the card of the far-right in the cynical hope of using it as an electoral stepping stone, this poisonous climate can only fuel violence. For it is an incessant call to reject supposedly foreign bodies, ideas and movements. As of the moment it has established itself, this quest for scapegoats, of which Muslims today represent the prime target, becomes infinite, variously picking out migrants, black people, women, homosexuals, nomads and, as always, Jews. In short, everything that is diversity, plurality and otherness upsets a uniform and immobile vison of a nation or people.
“The far-right does not exist. There is France and the enemies of France,” declared recently Éric Zemmour, the principal voice in the media for these baneful ideas, who earlier this week publicly gave his support to the fascist ‘Youtuber’ who staged the mock execution of a “leftist”. The fact that Zemmour championed the potentially criminal ideology of “the Great Replacement” , calling for the rejection of a section of our people demonized as the invader and occupier, has had no adverse effect on his media career, quite the opposite, as also neither have the accusations against him of his sexual violence towards women, who he has theorised as inferior beings.
Epitomising this political abyss into which we are being led by the sorcerer’s apprentices who govern us, Zemmour’s comment was made during a discussion about feminism, broadcast by TV channel CNews on June 4th, in which he exchanged views with Raphaël Enthoven, a figure who is emblematic of those lost intellectuals of our day. Three days later, on June 7th, this supposed philosopher who pretends to be of the Left, took to Twitter with a post that recycled the cry of “Better Hitler than the Popular Front”, as put about between the two world wars by those on the French Right who would later accompany the fall of France by collaborating with Nazism. He cited “Better Trump than Chavez” in his post justifying, in the event of a second-round playoff in next year’s presidential elections between far-right leader Marine Le Pen and radical-left LFI party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, that he would vote for Le Pen.
However mediocre and derisory it is, this media foam and froth nevertheless carries with it the detritus of an epoch that is ever more rancid, vulgar, uncouth and violent. We are the spectators of a national collapse and moral ruin. But our profession, journalism, is also one of the actors, such as it is that this catastrophe is orchestrated by those media who divert attention from the essential, smothering information and promoting hate, turning away from the social reality that is lived by the greatest number.
The trial of those who harassed on social media the French teenager Mila for posting anti-Islam comments received more attention than the trial over the so-called “Bygmalion” election campaign funding scandal, despite the fact that it shines a light on the shadowy side of French political life, involving vast sums of money and electoral crookery. Any and every controversy that revolves around the current vogue of Islamophobia and security issues meets with greater coverage than the latest revelations by Mediapart about the immense Libyan election campaign funding scandal, which has now unveiled, in an offshoot, the manipulation of the media by a PR and mercenary demi-monde.
In face of this spectacle of disaster, it would be reassuring to rise above it thanks to a resolute political opposition, one which has understood the gravity of the moment and which creates a common barrage, united around democratic principles, and rallied together in all its partisan diversity. Alas, the Left has for a large part also been led astray, digging divisions that represent irremediable wounds, to the point of losing all bearings.
Flouting their responsibilities towards an electorate that placed confidence in them, many of these actors have transformed into reality the prophecy of former socialist prime minister Manuel Valls who spoke of “irreconcilable” differences of the Left, a term that is an invitation for its self-destruction. What will be retained from the story of this French depression is that the socialist and communist parties, which are emblematic of the 1936 Popular Front (of which the dynamic was created from a reaction against the seditionaries of February 6th 1934), chose to show their solidarity, by the presence of their leaders, with a demonstration by French police officers demanding to exercise power over the workings of the justice system – which is the very definition of a police state.
Almost 20 years ago, analysing the shockwave of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US which sought to tip this century into a new war of civilisations, the American historian Robert O. Paxton published, in 2004, The Anatomy of Fascism. “Fascism,” he concluded, “may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity […].”
That is where we are now.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse