“Worse than the sound of jackboots is the silence of slippers.” This warning, often attributed to the German-speaking Swiss writer Max Frisch in the 1950s, seems an apt description of today's France. For there is, indeed, a massive political and media silence greeting the assertiveness of a violent far-right that is determined to confront the diversity of our people, an assertiveness that follows on from the far-right Rassemblement National party's strong electoral standing. It is a far right that is moving from words to deeds in order to make clear to Muslims, people of North African origins, to immigrants and their descendants that they have no rightful place in this country even though it is their country, even though they were born here, even though they have French nationality.
Far-right groups now routinely resort to violence, whether this be at Romans-sur-Isère in south-east France following tragic news stories such as the fatal stabbing of a teenage boy at a village dance, after sporting events such as the France-Morocco match in the World Cup last December, over the creation of migrant hostels (at Callac and at Saint-Brevin in Brittany in the west), or at demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine.
We have also seen such groups effectively perform the role of backup police during the unrest caused by the death of teenager Nahel at Nanterre west of Paris in June, parade in an explicitly neo-fascist march in the streets of Paris, target a mayor who supports migrants, attack a libertarian bookshop in the city of Lyon, disrupt a lesbian pride march and step up the number of threats and attacks at universities.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It's an understatement to say that this evident return of the 'Brownshirts', as we knew how to describe them at a time when anti-fascism was not dormant, is not eliciting a response from those who govern us or the person who presides over us. So quick to react to the drama of the news agenda, they can scarcely be heard when faced with the growing number of openly-acknowledged and asserted expressions of political violence that cry “Islam out of Europe” and which encourage racially-motivated targeted attacks, those crusades of commonplace Islamophobia.
Just like the state prefect in Nice on the Mediterranean coast who, contrary to the law, persists in seeking to ban any demonstration that shows solidarity with the Palestinians and who, in his previous post as prefect in the southern département or county of Hérault, was on friendly terms with the far-right mayor of Béziers, the authorities focus their concern in one direction only. “Islamism”, a concept vague in nature, which enables it to encompass the realities of human diversity that have nothing to do with violence, fundamentalism or terrorism, has become the portmanteau term for their sole priority, a priority they in fact share with the far right.
Thus “Islamism” was the only threat expressly named by the president of the Senate and the president of the National Assembly when the heads of these two chambers of the French Parliament recently instigated a march “for the Republic and against anti-Semitism”. This just cause of combating anti-Semitism, a cause which is so vital and so urgent, thus became rolled into a fight against a single enemy. This is an enemy that the far right has erected as an identity-based threat, designating all the human realities that this vague concept covers in the collective imagination – Muslims, people of North African origin, other Africans, migrants – as a real danger for France, Europe and their peoples. Yet far from being something external to these populations, these realities in fact forge their diversity. As a result, seeking to exclude, ban or suppress them means dragging these populations into a war against themselves, against their own humanity.
A domain of natural inequality
At odds with the common cause of equality, which endeavours to unite all resistance to hatred of the Other, whatever their origin, this catalyst of division which equates a rejection of anti-Semitism to a rejection of “Islamism”, hands the far right a new respectability. This is despite the fact that the far right has inherited the mantle of France's long-standing tradition of anti-Semitism. Those blinkered or naïve people who have been taken in, such as one particular tireless campaigner for the truth about the French state's involvement in the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe, should educate themselves by reading investigations by Mediapart and other media about the past and current links of Rassemblement National and Marine Le Pen with the violent far right, its associations with the student group Groupe Union Défense and its obsession with the issue of identity.
Across the board, whether they are an activist or an intellectual, religious or an atheist, part of the election process or a radical, aristocratic or populist, the far right is working towards a common domain, that of natural inequality. It has not come to terms with that proclamation which, from the French Declaration of 1789 to the Universal Declaration of 1948, remains the bedrock of all liberations, fundamental rights and democratic freedoms: the equality of rights, with no privilege afforded as to origin, birth, appearance, social status, beliefs, cultural background, religion, sex or gender. As a result, identity issues have become the Trojan horse of the far right's attacks against the heart of the democratic cause. Ever since its historic defeat amid the ruins of Nazism, the far right has sought to promote natural inequality by designating foreigners and those who are different as scapegoats.
The novel feature of our era is that the far right has managed to get its obsession placed at the centre of public debate, thanks to the indulgence and cowardice of successive governments who have given in to these deadly diversions even as they have shirked away from urgent social, environmental and democratic issues. But the far right has done better, or rather worse, than that: it has managed to equip itself with an energetic, violent and radical political force through the promotion of a new racist ideology. Established in its French home since 2010 and widely picked up by the neo-Nazi international movement, the 'Great Replacement' theory is a deadly ideology which, in both words and deeds, is an explicit call to hunt down the Other, above all in the form of Muslims, people of North African background, other Africans and migrants.
But those who govern us have chosen to look elsewhere. Their priorities tell us about their indifference to the danger: they prefer to hunt down those who resist this new ideology, those who have understood the nature of the destructive political programme that this revival of racist identity issues carries with it. As a result, having reclaimed the word 'separatism' from colonial thinking – the idea that criticising the Republic is tantamount to excluding oneself from the Nation – the law passed on August 24th 2021 vigorously takes on not that ideological threat but instead the organisations that represent its victims, in particular Muslims. These victims cannot help but notice the extent to which they have been left abandoned and invisible thanks to political and media indifference.
It does not occur to the government, its Members of Parliament, its ministers and its president that a political force such as the movement led by polemicist Éric Zemmour, whose very name 'Reconquête' – 'Recapture' in English – is an appeal to chase out a section of France's own people, represents a far more serious peril to the principles of our Republic. And that, in a division of labour that is favourable to Marine Le Pen's rise in respectability, this freeing up of a racist ideology that extends all the way to extreme violence is the natural product of the political and media normalisation of the far right.
Catastrophe starts with words whose acceptance and normalisation later become acts that accustom us to the worse. That is what we see now with the growing number of avenging raids carried out in the name of an identity for which blood and soil are the watchwords. “A people defined by their blood and rooted in their soil. This is a simple and concise phrase, but one which has enormous consequences.” These lines, published in 1927, are from Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, and come just after he has rejected the notion of the individual (no free will) and the concept of humanity (no universal rights).
In France today the public authorities and the broadcast media have no problem with the fact that the proponents of this purity of blood and soil, a notion as illusory as it is deadly, are well established and have a powerful voice. Is it too late for society, with its vibrant community, trade union and political forces, to awaken to the threat and to rise up at last and hold the line against this surge? Is it too late to unite around the defence of what really matters, our common ideal of equality, faced with the rising forces of inequality which are dragging us into a war in which humanity is set against itself?
It's a question for all of us. For we will all be held accountable for our silence and indifference.
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter