In the following reminder, any resemblance (to the current political tensions and media manipulation which are today escalating to the benefit of the far right against the alliance of the Left) is obviously not coincidental. The circumstances are different, the contexts are worlds apart, the protagonists are different. But the ideological constants remain the same: panic on the part of the wealthy, phobia about foreigners and a hatred of equality. And these are what concern us here.
On October 16th 1936, a manifesto entitled 'Quatre mois de Front populaire' ('Four Months of the Popular Front') was published simultaneously by three hundred daily and weekly newspapers in Paris and the provinces. Attacking a “socialist government held captive by the communists”, that had been delivered “into the hands of occult powers preparing the Sovietisation of the country”, it called on “French people of all persuasions” to defend “French civilisation” by combating its “most treacherous and dangerous enemy: communism”.
Two years later, on December 16th 1938, the journalistic circles who were behind that initial appeal, with financial support from business groups, launched a second manifesto under the headline: 'Un appel de 430 journaux Français' ('An Appeal by 430 French Newspapers'). Two months after the Munich Agreement, which this lobby supported in its pacifist surrender to Nazi Germany, it called on the French Parliament to dissolve the Communist Party because it was the “most powerful, the most active, the most dangerous of the factions that foreigners have installed on our soil”.
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Behind both initiatives lie a forgotten figure and a little-known history that would nonetheless prove to be central to the French media's collaboration with the Nazi occupiers after 1940. This was the story of Dominique Sordet, a music critic turned reactionary activist - he was a follower of the views of Charles Maurras - who created Inter-France, a business-backed news agency. This agency quickly became the “largest initiative for manipulating public opinion”, as shown by historian Gérard Bonet in his reconstruction of the story in 'L’agence Inter-France de Pétain à Hitler'.
This comprehensive work documents the rapid rise of Inter-France, the most significant press agency under the Occupation. Initially nationalist, it became 'Pétainist' – Field Marshal Philippe Pétain was head of the Vichy Regime - then openly collaborationist and, finally, outright Hitlerian. Along the way Gérard Bonet's research unveils an aspect, too often ignored by historians, of France's debasement in the middle of the 20th Century. And this was the collapse of journalism, as the profession became subjugated to business interests and defended those interests by abandoning the pursuit of news in favour of the sway of opinions - in this case, the most hate-filled ones.
Moreover, Dominique Sordet, who never faced trial after the Liberation of France because he died in hiding in March 1946, left us a book that is witness to and starkly illuminates the ideological motivation of the far right, however it is dressed up. Published on June 10th 1944, and based on a lecture delivered on March 25th of that year to the intellectual elite of those who collaborated, 'Les Derniers jours de la démocratie' ('The Last days of Democracy') identifies the “equality of men” as the ideology that, ever since philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution, had “ruled over civilised nations” and caused their “organic decline”.
Ferociously anti-Semitic - “equality is a Jewish passion” Sordet writes for example, contrasting it with the “essentially Aryan notion of hierarchy” - this mediocre essay thus sees the “passion for equality” as the cause of all ills. He views democracy as the poisonous fruit of this desire for equality, one that must be uprooted, resting as it does on the harmful illusion that “one man is worth another”. Without mincing words, this twilight confession - “We are witnessing the tragic end of a myth dissolving in a bloody twilight” concludes the author - reveals the true nature of the far right.
Equality of rights is the cornerstone of democracy
What is the far right? Simply put, it is a hatred of equality. What differentiates it from conservative or reactionary parties, politics, and rulers is the radical nature of its ideological foundation. The reason that, behind a new veneer of respectability, it is often physically violent in its actions, the reason that it is explicitly racist and xenophobic in its slogans, targeting foreigners and dual nationals first, and the reason that it is clearly opposed to the rights of women and LGBTQIA+ minorities in its manifestos, all of this is because it is driven by a long-standing desire for revenge against what is fundamentally the mainstay of any democracy, however imperfect.
For democracy is not merely about elections, which can be a mere façade as seen, for example, in the neo-fascist Russia of Vladimir Putin, whose regime has protected the French far right (read here and here). No, in the origins and roots of democracy exists a promise that is never completed, one that is continually renewed and which is constantly updated: and this is the promise of equality of rights. It was the proclamation of this equality by the French Declaration of 1789, extended by the Universal Declaration of 1948, that opened the path to emancipation, an ongoing call for the abolition of privileges, domination, and oppression – including against those authorities that have emerged from or claim to represent liberation struggles.
Fragile and incomplete, all our social and democratic gains flow from this, including those won in the teeth of the colonising and patriarchal conscience of republicans who believed themselves to be the heirs and guardians of these achievements. The right of peoples to self-determination and the right of women to control their own bodies underline the inexhaustible vitality of this horizon of hope. Equality of rights, regardless of origin, social status, appearance, belief, sex, or gender, is at the heart of a emancipatory movement that rejects a fixed reality in which humanity is held in check, a prisoner of their birth, social status, origin or gender.
This equality has thus continually undermined the perverse construct of the outcast and the upstart, in which those who have won rights shut the door on those who then in turn seek them. This was the pioneering struggle that confronted the Haitian anti-slavery revolution, against a class of owners who managed to be free-thinkers while denying the humanity of slaves.
Today we see it in the trailblazing fight of #MeToo which, shaking up old feminism, does not stop at equality in the workplace, in the family, or in politics, but tackles the long-standing masculine domination in private life, extending even to sexual relations, which cuts across all social spheres. Finally, we see it in the proactive fight of radical environmentalism, which reminds the human species that its inventiveness does not grant it a right to prey on the infinite bounty of the world.
Forming a united (and popular) front against the far right is therefore not just a tactical electoral imperative but a vital political necessity. Allowing them to take the reins of government tomorrow, and the presidency the day after, would open a hellish Pandora's box. What all the far right's factions share, in their various intellectual, activist, or electoral forms, is the desire to overthrow the citadel of human rights, the universal nature of their proclamation, and the natural equality that underpins them. The doctrine that unites them is the belief that there is no common humanity and no free individual.
This assertion might seem harmless, but we know, because European history has gone through it, with its genocides and crimes against humanity, how bloody its consequences have been. “Our programme replaces the liberal notion of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity with the people, a people determined by its blood and rooted in its soil. This is a simple and concise phrase, but it has huge consequences.” This is Adolf Hitler, in 'Mein Kampf', written in prison in 1924-1925 and published in Germany from 1925. The Left at the time, socialists and communists, caught up in their fratricidal wars, unfortunately failed to take seriously enough the devastating scope of this denial of free will and universal equality.
A devastating downwards spiral for the universality of rights
Now that we have been warned, we cannot afford the luxury of underestimating the danger, on the pretext that, in the end, the far right in power would merely be a continuation of what the Right is already doing. This is the case even if that Right stubbornly insists on giving the far right a helping hand in the hope that it will help preserve the interests of the ruling class, that “icy water of egotistical calculation” identified early on by Karl Marx, and whose catastrophic consequences the novelist Éric Vuillard reminded us of in 'L’Ordre du jour,' ('The Order of the Day'). The far right's arrival at the head of the governmental and thus of the state machinery would set in motion a devastating downwards spiral for equality and the universality of rights.
The nature of the far right is to anchor itself in an enduring ideological rejection of democratic ideals, of which the French Revolution remains the symbol and origin. These “anti-Enlightenment” thinkers, as documented by the historian Zeev Sternhell, are indeed French - or rather French-speaking, since the first of these counter-revolutionary thinkers, Joseph de Maistre (whose statue still stands in Chambéry in the French Alps), was a Savoyard at a time when Savoie had not yet become part of France.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man is the carrier for an ideology that is fatal to traditional nations, and Joseph de Maistre was one of the first to warn us of this.
The founder of the far-right Action française, Charles Maurras, devoured his work. “The foremost of our political philosophers,” he said of Maistre, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt was also a devotee. Indeed, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin regarded the monarchist from Savoie as the forefather of modern fascism, as a “proto-fascist”. Berlin wrote: “He was born too early and not too late.” Still read and commented upon, Joseph de Maistre’s work underpins the ideology that fuels today’s far right: the denial of a common humanity and a rejection of the principle of equality.
In Maistre’s view, man has no place in society, as he asserts in a well-known passage from his book 'Considérations sur la France' ('Considerations on France', 1796): “The Constitution of 1795 [editor's note, which established the Directorate] is made for Man. But there is no such thing as Man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian; but as for Man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he exists unknown to me.” However, Maistre knows what a man is when it comes to denigrating women: “The greatest fault in women is to want to be like a man. […] A woman can be superior only as a woman; but as soon as she tries to emulate a man, she is nothing but a monkey.”
This hierarchical approach to humanity goes hand in hand with a radically anti-democratic view of power. “If the masses believe themselves to be the equals of the few who govern, there is no more government. Power must be beyond the understanding of the masses being governed. Authority must be constantly kept above critical judgement through the psychological instruments of religion, patriotism, tradition, and prejudice.” It is no coincidence that the famous Italian anti-mafia judge Roberto Scarpinato quotes this comment by Maistre in his book 'The Return of the Prince', seeing it as the most complete theorisation of domination based on the obliviousness of a nation's subjects.
Far from being forgotten, Joseph de Maistre is read, recommended, and commented upon in far right intellectual circles. 'Joseph de Maistre: le droit des nations contre les droits de l’homme' ('Joseph de Maistre: the rights of Nations against the rights of Man'): it was under this headline in May 2023 that philosopher and journalist Alain de Benoist’s magazine Éléments gave a platform to Marc Froidefont, an academic philosopher and specialist in the thought of the reactionary Savoyard. His argument is as follows: “The Declaration of the Rights of Man is the carrier for an ideology that is fatal to traditional nations, and Joseph de Maistre was one of the first to warn us of this.”
“The critique that Joseph de Maistre made of the rights of man is more relevant than ever,” he explains. “It is in the name of this famous Declaration of 1789 that European nations are today threatened with extinction. What this Declaration favours is the abstract Man; laws have consequently been made to condemn anyone who dares to remind us that a nation belongs first and foremost to the heirs of those who, for hundreds of years, have patiently built it with their blood and sweat.”
If there were any lingering doubts that, beneath the academic veneer of words, there is a desire for racism and xenophobia to be translated into deeds, even to the point of driving out those among us who are not these “heirs”, the same interview approvingly points to Maistre's Islamophobia. It was Maistre who had praised the “popes who called for war against the Muslims”. Froidefont continues: “According to Maistre, conflict between Christianity and Islam is inevitable. His words are unambiguous when he writes: 'War is natural between us and peace is forced. As soon as the Christian and the Muslim come into contact, one of the two must serve or perish.'”
Equality is a mortal danger for the West, it is like a poison killing it.
Looking on with astonishment as we do at the horrors that flow unchecked from those mass media outlets taken over by the far right, it is easy to forget that these are not the ravings of an extremist fringe but indeed the very core of its ideology, beliefs held and passed on by certified and qualified intellectuals. With the former republican Right shifting to the far right, Le Figaro recently promoted 'Les mensonges de l’égalité' ('The Lies of Equality'), a work by another academic, law professor Jean-Louis Harouel, who forty years ago wrote 'Essai sur l’inégalité' ('An Essay on Inequality') - though its impact then was marginal. “Equality is a mortal danger for the West,” this author writes today, “it's like a poison killing it.”
Attacking an “ideology formed by the symbiosis of wokism and human rights-ism, in close association with environmentalism”, Jean-Louis Harouel readily asserts that the “religion of equality is even more dangerous than communism was”. He writes: “Communism was a murderous secular religion that tortured the peoples it subjected in the name of equality, but without making them disappear, whereas the equality madness that inspires the religion of human rights is preparing the outright annihilation of European peoples.” The example he gives is the “concrete equality between women and men” to which he attributes the “demographic collapse of European nations”.
In an older work, 'Les droits de l’homme contre le peuple ('Human Rights against the People')' published in 2016, the same author calls for a return to the concept of “love of self” as opposed to the “mad universalism of the religion of human rights which claims to make immigration a new human right”.
It is, therefore, “essential to discriminate” he says, before going on to recommend “subjecting Islam to a specific status” to let Muslims know that “no part of France is Islamic land”. In conclusion, this emeritus professor from the Parisian university Panthéon-Assas writes: “France can only hope to survive by repudiating its state religion of human rights.”
In the midst of all our diverse leanings, commitments and stances, this is the truth we must face ahead of the Parliamentary votes on June 30th and July 7th: a victory for the far right would hand the keys of power to the enemies of human rights. Of the universal humanity these human rights demand. And of the equality of rights they proclaim.
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter