France: our prettier neighbour
Part one: How Front National-ism replaced La République
‘I had made every land dear to its people, even though it had no charms whatever in it. Had I not made every land dear to its people, even though it had no charms whatever in it, then the whole living world would have invaded the Airyana Vaeja [conceivably this refers to France].’
Why write about France? There are a few reasons. Some are recent: the insistence of a part of the British right, and more recently still, centre-left, on adopting ‘Gaullism’ as their claimed model, and the ongoing, unending long walk to power of the Rassemblement National, which is likely to lock-in rather than prevent the slow slide to Brazil we are all merrily making our way down together. Some never change: France’s reasonable claim to be the most important European nation, her tendency to be the first adopter of new ideas in Europe and so ‘the world’, a land dear to its people, giving rise to a strangely old-fashioned chauvinism and, despite everything, her continuing status as a place of considerable charm.
My interest in France is peculiar, and I have to begin by staking out my claim: I am implacably opposed to the existence of the French nation and believe the French people make up a small proportion of the current French citizenry, even when ignoring the descendants of extra-European immigration since the twentieth century. I have arrived at this opinion not by crude chauvinism or tired national rivalry; in fact, I freely admit that I prefer France to Britain. France is clearly the gold standard for a European ‘country’ and, though it has travelled further down favela boulevard than any other major European state, their core remains intact and is capable of political self-expression in a way Britain’s is not.
The first part of our discussion must introduce the set on which only tragedy can take place, her inheritance and composition. The second and final chapter will conclude with what comes next — which, for those of a National persuasion, can only be a grim end to the Revolutionary passion play. For those willing to entertain a new beginning, there is hope for palingenesis.
France’s unique historical mission, the strange contradictions of the country make it a place where it is possible to create Europe. The primary enemies to this will be on ‘the national right’; they will use the French flag to dress up a Peronist project, and their voter base will be, and to a great extent already is, a strange mix of anti-immigration provincials and the immigrant-descended population.
Every national project is a fantasy and exists so long as belief in it is shared and renewed at regular intervals; the ‘type’ it creates necessarily sits over regional variations and is only found fully expressed in a small part of the population. For it to be a nation rather than an older, maybe more robust system of governance, the broader group should see something of themselves in the type, which is where the fantastic elements start to appear.
There are various characteristics you can use to justify such a project — ethnic similarity or racial affinity, religion, civic religions, language, and so on. The core French have used most of them at one point or another. It is a testament to the strength of the French project, as the self-expression of a relatively small group, how far they have been able to ignore or rewrite these characteristics over a vast territory. The problem is the methods used to make Nice or Brittany ‘France’ become absurd when used on non-Europeans, but the importance of keeping the story together makes this inadmissible in public life.
France has tended to use force to assimilate the broadest possible collection of peoples using the weakest of ties, the French language. Its secular religion of Republicanism, which replaced the Catholic Church for many people in many parts of the country after the Revolution, still has its rituals and rhetorical importance, but these are now blatantly used to keep a particular social bracket feeding at the trough of a corrupt but highly rewarding state bureaucracy. Decades of this mean La République, for most of the descendants of its true believers, has been replaced with Front National-ism in the provinces, and the corrupt anti-politics of its core.
France is probably the purest and perhaps most advanced example of Europe’s slow transformation since 1945; that she is, nominally at least, the Western European state to protect her independence most fiercely puts to bed the partially correct but simplistic story of our betrayal by hostile Americans. The demographics of central Paris are far more European than comparable British or Anglosphere cities; the broader metropolis is probably slightly whiter than London. Yet nationally, France has the largest non-European population on the continent.
Accordingly, the sort of questions that are quite recent arrivals in mainstream British political discourse have been national obsessions in France longer than any other nation: The Camp of the Saints was published in 1973. This gives France an outsized influence on both the pro- and anti-foreign people camps, and the marked Francophilia of most Europeans (and indeed most people everywhere) means a successful response to their present issues would be copied far more readily than if it came from Denmark or Italy.
Parts of France are visibly different to Paris to a greater degree than any region of England or the devolved pseudo-nations of the ‘United Kingdom’. The most obvious of these are Corsica — which has an ongoing armed insurgency against French rule — and Brittany. But large parts of the east, the far north, the upper Alps in Savoy, and the entire southern, formerly Occitan-speaking third of the territory are ethnically, culturally, and, until very recently, linguistically different peoples. Once the French conquered the old county of Toulouse, the system of royal authority largely allowed peculiar institutions and old languages to continue; Provençal/Occitan produced the oldest vernacular literary tradition in Europe and, until the sixteenth century or so, was vastly more influential on wider European letters than French.
Though the ancien regime found it less urgent to falsify a ‘national community’, practical and military reasons led to a longstanding policy of centralisation and piecemeal expansion to France’s alleged ‘natural borders’. Provençal became a patois for peasants, its legal use eradicated through edicts aimed at replacing Latin with a classic, academic French under Francis I, who also continued the recurring suppression of various religious and political separatisms that mysteriously reappear in the visually ‘not France’ parts of the modern state.
Céline used to make rather unpleasant remarks about Narbonoids, the inhabitants of the Western part of the old Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis whose post-Roman history is much closer to that of North Spain and Catalonia than ‘France’. In Céline’s case, this was simple prejudice along the lines of pretending the Irish are Spaniards. But you can visually distinguish a southerner from a northerner in a much cruder way than would be possible in England or Germany, and provincial cities have vast architectural differences in a way that is rare within the boundaries of a European state.
Paris, unlike London, did not traditionally draw its population from the surrounding counties, and due to its proximity to Versailles had a social importance for the aristocracy that exceeded that of London. There is no equivalent to Kent or Essex in France; the standard ‘respectable’ French accent is Parisian, and the modern language exhibits much lesser regional variation than English. Paris formerly had ‘ethnic’ neighbourhoods for specific regions; there are still large numbers of Breton restaurants around Montparnasse, many of the famous Haussmannian edifices were built by stone masons on working holidays from the Creuse, an empty upland department, who at the time spoke an incomprehensible mixed patois of French and Occitan. Massive internal mobility into Paris and a meritocratic education system centred on the capital formed the GCSE Geography ‘pull factors’ of modern France.
This may sound like trivia or a lame appeal for devolution: if you ask the average sane person in Provence whether they are French, they happily will say yes, and the institutes that try to reverse this are the preserve of harmless eccentrics. But in a country where race and biology are uncomfortable topics, France is caught in a trap: is it so much more ridiculous to pretend Africans are French — than that Perpignan, a visibly Catalan city (and RN stronghold) whose habits are clearly ‘foreign’, is just as French as Orleans? Is there a meaningful difference between the Moroccan couscous vendor and the Breton creperie next to the train station, viewed with much the same suspicion in another era? Have Algerian organised crime groups like the ‘DZ Mafia’ yet killed more people than the Corsicans did?
There are responses to these questions, but they break longstanding ideological taboos and rely on a concept of Europeanness that the French people still largely do not share. The English passion for measurement and well-trodden ‘online racist’ arguments about relative intelligence provide an alternative response, which shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, but I would love to see accurate ‘IQ stats’ for the Irish railway navvies in 1910 or the Creuse stonemasons versus those of their descendants. I suspect the gap, now mostly erased, would not be miles off those alleged by our mischievous friends in the social sciences. Besides, this particular line of argument has absolutely no traction in France — if it has traction anywhere, which is doubtful — and unless France can draw a clear distinction between Portuguese or Italian guestworkers and Algerian or Senegalese ones, their current habit of comparing ethnic strife between white Europeans and Maghrebians to ‘the Reformation’, an idiotic framing even Zemmour is guilty of, or of referring to ISIS-volunteer Jihadis as ‘separatists’, will continue.
Dishonesties and rascalities have a price, and enforcing a cultural norm on a disparate population creates a climate of denial, of wilful blindness on certain issues that are obvious to foreigners (including, amusingly, North Africans). Though you would not think it to speak to them, nor to read any of their countless journals and magazines, much less watch their hugely popular political television channels, France is a rich and pleasant country. White persons of good character can rent a fair-sized flat in a district of Paris equivalent to Bloomsbury or Fitzrovia for €1,000 a month. A second home is within the reach of a large part of the population, and those above a certain age rarely come into sustained contact with ‘the New French’. So far as it is possible to gauge such things, social circles in Paris seem far more monoethnic, perhaps especially in the typical centre-left ‘woke’ demographic of young professionals.
I am not attempting to gloss things over: France is perhaps two-thirds ethnically French with a bit on top of that of white European descent; some of their largest national minorities genuinely do hate the French state, and often the French people, who fought a tough war to hold on to Algeria and continue regular military operations in the old African Empire, in a way that is not really true of Britain’s major ethnic minority groups. The ethnic division of the country is visibly horizontal in a way Britain’s is not, and so the prognosis is more advanced. The French far-left has an increasingly violent obsession with a looming fascist apocalypse, the centre cries, and has cried for decades, of imminent bankruptcy, while the right predicts an ethnic civil war with barely concealed glee. In truth, Paris and economically functioning regions enjoy a quality of life that is very high, while a large hinterland (often those places whose claim to be French is recent) clings on through subsidies and tourism. It will not surprise you which of these two sides of ‘France’ votes RN. The prosperous part of France includes the capital, its western suburbs and hinterland, certain border areas near Strasbourg and Geneva, and the core second-home areas of wealthy Parisians: Normandy, Burgundy, and Brittany.
These are often relatively Catholic areas, which were not first to arms during the revolution, nor were they quick to industrialise, and so were less affected by the guest worker-family reunification process. Further afield, a few isolated cities like Bordeaux are wealthy, but elsewhere, even where there is significant economic activity, such as in Toulouse or Lyon, there is a certain isolation from ‘France’, and low-level political and ethnic violence is harder to ignore. Further south, you enter a region that I am hugely biased towards, but which has withered in the way occupied nations often do; outside of their core tourism zones, cities like Carcassonne and Nimes are heavily degraded and in the social housing blocks on their outskirts are centres for gang violence and drug trafficking. These towns are still in many ways nice, especially as an outsider, they are older, less gothic, retaining a Roman dignity nothing can ever remove, but — again, with a few exceptions — all have suffered the same fate as southern Italy or Greece after 2012, combined with a demographic situation comparable to Britain’s former mill towns.
This, of course, is the original heartland of Front National; the most famous far-right governed cities are probably Béziers and Perpignan, both of which are medieval towns now almost, in the American euphemism, ‘majority-minority’. Like any democratic party, the RN is receptive to the needs of its voter base, and so will end up winning by default as France’s importation of citizens continues.
In Greece-France instead of France-France, a few generations of that vast zone of défavorisés have put their faith, or hopes for revenge, in a victory by the Le Pen family. This is a strange political dynasty that began when Jean Marie Le Pen, a Breton ex-paratrooper fresh from stints in colonial wars in French Indochina and Algeria, joined a tax protest movement attacking supermarkets. Led by Pierre Poujade, one of those members of the Royalist extreme right who joined the resistance out of anti-German sentiment after Vichy fell, this slowly morphed into a minor populist party.
Poujadism was mostly a campaign on behalf of small business owners in the provinces; it began with a tax revolt in the rural south and expanded its platform to include support of French Algeria and steadfast opposition to the Treaty of Rome. JMP quickly fell out with his mentor, and the whole thing blew up after Algeria was betrayed, the generals’ putsch failed, and the current Fifth Republic was proclaimed. This left the young Jean Marie, who had first become a deputy at just 27, unemployed.
Like Odin and Nick Griffin, he had only one eye, offering contradictory stories and switching from an eyepatch to a more respectable glass eye at around the point the party stopped being entertaining and started winning elections. He briefly ran a record label that sold ‘military music’ by the usual suspects — ‘but also the Soviets and Israelis!’ — and, causing him some legal trouble, songs glorifying the attempted OAS assassin of Charles de Gaulle, Jean Bastien-Thiry.
In his eyepatch years, Le Pen senior organised a ‘Unite the Right’ meeting that resulted in the formation of the Front National, the predecessor of today’s Rassemblement National. This famously included former SS-Charlemagne volunteers and anti-Zionist radicals like Francois Duprat, a history teacher later assassinated with a car bomb, the party rapidly purging itself of these eccentric elements while winning a dedicated support base amongst southerners and especially pieds-noirs, European returnees from French Algeria. Duprat was Corsican, and from the beginning the support base belonged to what we may, Englishly, call ‘white minorities’, the mysterious ‘White Other’ of our census categories. At the risk of repeating myself, the core of French public life is Republican — either liberal or Gaullist — or Catholic, and took a dim view of Le Pen’s movement.
De Gaulle is often compared to Churchill, but is in fact a far more dominant figure in the French imagination, and his brand of rightism was long the only acceptable one in France. The General’s role as national saviour in the war relied on British acquiescence and the support of the French Army stationed in Algeria; he returned to politics after the fall of the chaotic Fourth Republic in a semi-coup by the generals on an explicit promise to save that colony. De Gaulle returned both favours by nursing an eternal hatred of England and betraying his old comrades in l’Algérie Française, resulting in the famous offer by the FLN for French settlers to return home either ‘with their suitcase or in a coffin’. Southerners and European immigrants made up much of the million or so who arrived back, mostly settling in the south. From that moment, an overt or hidden anti-Gaullism, expressed first through support for the left but increasingly from the 1980s, Le Pen motivated a certain part of the French electorate.
Le Pen’s party was excluded by the establishment for its associations and flavour, and found a voter base on the margins, amongst those same pieds-noirs who were the first to feel the growing effect of mass non-European immigration from the 1960s onwards, having been put up in the eastern-bloc style housing estates around French cities that are now subsidised slums for the New French.
The traditional ideological violence of French politics died down during the 1970s; the Algeria dispute was perhaps the last serious political debate fought across France. TV gradually pacified and standardised the country, and France adopted the chat show format early. JMP thrived in it; he took on the role of diable de la république with glee, performing well throughout the 1980s, especially in Marseille and now-unrecognisable northern suburbs of Paris. Like Britain, but in a more overt and legally defensible way, France is a managed democracy, having redrawn the departments around Paris to prevent communist control of the metropolis in the 1960s, while a 1986 experiment with single-round proportional representation was swiftly abandoned after the FN won 35 seats. From this point on, we begin to approach ‘the situation’ — that is, the terminal condition of The Republic — which must be treated separately in the final part of this conversation.
This article was written by Tom Dupré, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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I am glad I am not French, I conclude after having read this sprawling article. Still, food for thought! PS I wonder if Mr Dupre' is related to a scholboy so named who studied at the City of London school in 1980, where I did some teaching. It would be singular if he was...