Since his election in 2017, France’s president Emmanuel Macron has overseen a sharp turn towards the far right, marked particularly by the relentless targeting of Muslims. This has served two purposes. The first has been to divert public opinion with identity politics and anxiety to the point of legitimising the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory. It has also justified the introduction of repressive legislation such as the anti-separatism and comprehensive security laws.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has continued with her enterprise of ‘dédeabolisation’, seeking respectability for her party by whitewashing its history. Prior to its rebranding as the National Rally, the National Front was founded in 1972 by former supporters of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime, ex-members of the Organisation de’l Armée Secrète (an organisation that attempted a coup against Charles de Gaulle and brought the country to the brink of civil war in the 1950s) and even one time Waffen SS figures. For years, the party was on the fringe on French politics, polling less than 1 per cent in the 1974 presidential election. The extreme discourse of its founder Jean Marie Le Pen, a colonial veteran who bragged about torturing Algerians, did not find much backing aside from other Vichy and French Algeria supporting organisations and media outlets.
Jean Marie Le Pen’s break into the mainstream came in the mid-1980s after the Socialist president François Mitterrand allegedly told France’s public broadcasting networks to give him airtime. In particular, a 1984 appearance on what was then the country’s top weekly political show L’heure de vérité. Mitterand’s thinking was supposedly that, as well as condemning himself in his own words, Le Pen would weaken the mainstream right led by Jacques Chirac. In fact, Le Pen lambasted Mitterrand for his imposition of austerity measures the following year and used his platform to open the door for the French right to scapegoat immigrants for all of France’s problems.
In the following decades Le Pen continued to personify racism in the French political landscape and to continuously make the news with remarks on issues such as the supposed inequality of races or his Holocaust-denying assertions, for which he was prosecuted on several occasions, including that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were a mere ‘detail’ of history. This allowed Le Pen to spread his poison in the media while making other conservatives seem more respectable, even when they shared similar views on immigration and the presence of Muslims.
Politically unopposed
Le Pen’s racist rhetoric, though condemned by the mainstream, was never politically opposed. In 1984, Mitterrand’s prime minister Laurent Fabius declared that Le Pen ‘asked the right questions but provided the wrong answers’. On the other side of the political fence, Jacques Chirac made his infamous remarks referring to polygamous immigrant households living on benefits for which they had paid no taxes and ‘le bruit et l’odeur’ (the ‘noise and smell’) that drove French workers crazy: ‘And it is not racist to say this.’ The scapegoating of Arabs and black workers held them responsible for ‘taking French people’s jobs’, deflecting the issue of how unemployment was being used as a deliberate – and acceptable – policy to impose neoliberal economic policies on the working class worldwide.
If the potential for united class struggle was diminished by pitting workers against each other on racial lines, this was exacerbated by the left in the identity wars that arose around the presence of Muslims and their visibility. In 1989, a national controversy erupted after two girls in the small town of Creil were initially excluded from school due to their insistence on wearing hijabs (they were ultimately allowed to do so).
Le Pen’s racist rhetoric, though condemned by the mainstream, was never politically opposed
Left intellectuals were among the leading advocates of a hijab ban in schools, on the grounds that the wearing of overt religious dress or symbols went against the long-standing French republican tradition of läicité (secularism) in public institutions, originally introduced to protect those institutions from the influence of the Catholic church. In an open letter to the education minister published in Le Nouvel Observateur, Élisabeth Badinter, Régis Debray and other prominent leftists urged that ‘Prof ne capitulons pas’ (‘Teachers, let’s not give in’) on the issue.
Fifteen years later, this left secularism converged with the ‘unapologetic right’, spearheaded by Nicolas Sarkozy and resulted in the introduction of the 2004 anti-hijab law. Initially opposed by Sarkozy himself, banning the headscarf in public schools became trans-partisan policy to this day. The campaign for such a ban was initiated by teacher unions and the French Communist Party and found support across the left.
Mainstreaming the far right
After taking over the party from her father, Marine Le Pen aligned with the left on issues of läicité. Steering her party away from its historic anti-semitism, she made sure that her identity campaigns instead targeted Muslims, held as immigrants and invaders. No matter how long they have been French, whether they were born French, or are French of second or third generation, Muslims were only ever foreigners. And this view was common to most of the political elite, not the Le Pens alone.
Even before Marine Le Pen took over the National Front and subsequently rebranded it the National Rally, her ideas had been normalised. Following her father’s surprise success in reaching the run-off in the 2002 presidential election, Sarkozy made the tactical shift of moving towards the far right on identity and security issues. This initially bore fruit as people holding such views, but who were put off by the extreme positions of Jean Marie Le Pen, found it easier to vote for a more mainstream figure like Sarkozy.
The media was also central in pushing the Sarkozy narrative after the 2005 banlieues uprisings. The riots sparked by the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted after running away from the police (they had committed no offence), were framed as ethnic violence by conservative intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut, dismissing their root causes of poverty, unemployment, racism and police brutality.
At the beginning of the 2010s, Renaud Camus took this a step further with his ‘great replacement theory’, eagerly adopted by far-right conspiracists worldwide, proposing that ‘replacist elites’ are conspiring to replace white French and others with non-European, particularly Muslim, populations. On the left, Laurent Bouvet came up with the concept of ‘cultural insecurity’. If the former claims that non-whites from Africa and the Middle East are physically replacing the white Christian population of Europe, the latter says that the visibility of Muslims in the public space is making the white majority feel they are being culturally replaced and hence have legitimate grounds to wage a cultural war against them.
Weaponised laïcité
Weaponised laïcité In 2003, the conservative politician François Baroin wrote his landmark report Pour une nouvelle Laïcité, in which he made the case for a new definition of laïcité specifically aimed at the increasing visibility of Muslims in the public space. He argued that, at some point, laïcité and human rights were incompatible.
This redefinition marked the beginning of the process that would facilitate the 2004 law banning the wearing of purportedly religious clothing in public schools (which started with the headscarf and was later applied to long dresses or the abaya, when worn by Muslim pupils), the prohibition of the full face veil in public institutions in 2009, the anti-separatism law of 2021, the immigration law of 2024, and so on. The notion of laïcité had gone from the separation of religion and state and the religious neutrality of the state to the imposition of certain forms of cultural identity on users of public services and spaces. Its weaponisation and the subsequent state-sponsored witch hunt against veiled Muslim students in public schools and spaces found support across the political spectrum.
The battle of ideas has been lost so far because the left, rather than standing its ground, has moved towards the right
The terrorist attacks of 2015 and the following years opened the gates of hell for French Muslims on multiple fronts. The media portrayed them as the enemy within. Left-wing organisations such as Le Printemps Républicain (the Republican Spring) pushed a secular fundamentalist discourse to new extremes with online harassment campaigns against Muslims that were then echoed in the media and politics. The socialist president François Hollande declaration of a state of emergency in 2015 led to more than 4,000 police raids, of which fewer than 1 per cent led to terror-related investigations. The constitution was almost changed to allow the stripping of citizenship from convicted terrorists even if they were born in France.
The state of emergency of November 2015, which was extended six times before it became permanent in October 2017, had been preceded and followed by multiple ‘anti-terrorist’ laws that have de facto put the state beyond scrutiny. In the words of Frederic Sicard, then head of the Paris bar association, ‘France could become a dictatorship within two weeks.’ This grave warning was made in 2016, years before the radical ‘anti separatism’ and ‘comprehensive security’ laws that gave the state legal means to further crack down on French Muslims and, more broadly, to widen the scope of intervention of the police and restrain freedom of information.
Remaking the left
The battle of ideas has been lost so far because the left, rather than standing its ground, has moved with conservatives towards the far right. In 2016, Marine Le Pen said she felt that she was reading her own words in the writings of socialist prime minister Manuel Valls. In 2021, she was accused by Macron’s interior minister Gerald Darmanin of being ‘too soft, not on Islamism, but on Islam’.
The National Rally’s surprise failure to secure an absolute majority in the 2024 snap elections was not due to a vibrant anti racist front that had mobilised the country but the majority of French people refusing to hand over their future to the Le Pen clan. The racist policies that made the National Rally what it is have so far been almost absent from the conversation. That is why Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen’s defeat is only a temporary relief. So far none of the parties that have facilitated their normalisation in the political mainstream have shown signs of backtracking or reconsidering their focus on identity politics at the expense of socio-economic policies that could overturn the ‘votes of anger’.
The National Rally as a party has become a permanent threat to whatever is left of French democracy and to non-white minorities in the country, just as France has refused and still refuses to settle its colonial legacy. Racism and authoritarianism are anchored in France’s political tradition due to the feelgood colour-blindness of the Republic (it refuses, for example, to gather any ethnically or religious-based statistics).
It will take an unapologetic left capable of a thorough ideological shakeup to see off the far right. It will not gain any credibility as long as it fails to deal with Islamophobia and other forms of racism as a political issue. Reducing it to a moral question without political action has made the left complicit in the rise of the Le Pen dynasty. Failure to take that action now would mean that the far right’s seizure of power remains a question of ‘when?’, not ‘if’.
