France: our prettier neighbour
Part Two: What now?
This is the second part of ‘France: our prettier neighbour’. You can read the first part here.
We left our story in the 1980s, by which point France and most of Europe were firmly on a controlled flight into the terrain of now. Happily, that gives us the opportunity to mention recent events: this March, the second round of municipal elections selected mayors for most French communes, a powerful position which grants considerably more authority than British mayors or county councils.
Mayors enjoy both political and executive control over budgets, housing and policing, and form part of the 150,000ish-strong electorate for the Senate, a privilege shared with various other locally elected officials. It is also common practice for French politicians to hold multiple offices at the same time, with a stint as mayor of a fair-sized town often serving as a qualification for higher office. Typically, the legacy centrist parties and archaic relics of the postwar era, like the French Communist Party, outperform in local contests versus national elections: the same pattern we had pre-Brexit, with steadily more right-leaning results as you moved from local government to national government to the European Parliament, holds.
In the first round, the RN significantly outperformed, easily winning in mid-sized southern cities traditionally friendly to the ‘extreme’ right, coming an extremely tight second in Marseille, which, had it translated into a second round victory, would have been a national event of immense importance, perhaps more so than the Pim Fortuyn list’s long reign in demographically and socioeconomically comparable Rotterdam. The second round slightly underwhelmed, with wobbly coalitions of Green-Socialist-Centrist-Communist parties clawing back Nîmes and the centre-left incumbent surviving in Marseille, but the RN still saw solid gains and a vast increase in the number of local officials under both the RN banner and that section of the old centre-right Republicans (LR) allied with them under Eric Ciotti’s UDR etiquette. This matters financially and, coming after significant gains in the last parliamentary elections, anchors them permanently as a major party outside of European and Presidential contests.
Foreign rightists are often sceptical of the RN; I, too, am gloomy about their long-term intentions, but at this stage, there is no point in supporting alternative candidates, barring a highly unlikely transformation of the centre-right LR, now split between its provincial and core versions.
Ciotti, the LR mayor of Nice, attempted to drag the old party into a deal with the RN in 2024 and was met with an open rebellion by the Parisian core of the group, those parts of it in the uncomplicated French France and often with highly rewarding fiefs in rich communes around Paris. Ciotti lost and was removed from the party, taking his followers with him. The movement of some LR deputies — who, unlike the vast majority of RN listees, are capable of governing — to the new UDR is significant, but any hardline Republican presence in a future national government is made complicated by their association with unpopular pro-US and pro-Israeli foreign policy positions. As with the RN, the newly divided party is totally absent from the Paris metropolitan area; it is worth briefly looking at who votes for the nationalist right to explain why.
The summit of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political career and the point of his greatest significance to the hysterical tone of contemporary French politics came late in his life, in his mid-seventies, with his shock qualification for the 2002 presidential election second round. This resulted in a darkly comic display of unity by ‘civil society’, with mass demonstrations and a ban on further media coverage of Le Pen, who was not invited to debate or appear on television between the two rounds. Naturally, this ended his campaign, and the breezily corrupt Jacques Chirac won a second term by a larger margin than Vladimir Putin’s 2018 Presidential ‘election’.
The timing of this event was unfortunate for many reasons; just a few years later France would experience mass ethnic rioting, the 2010s were punctuated with acts of mass terrorism, and the decade 2002-2012 saw a quiet dismantling of the remaining ‘third way’ aspects of Gaullism; France rejoining NATO’s military command and the most Byzantine aspects of the emerging EU-complex passed despite rejection by national referendum. Finally understanding its horizons, the RN began a decades-long process of normalisation, turning them into an inevitable government-in-waiting, at least when the centrist coalition of ‘everyone who is not RN or LFI (the main French far left party, a harder version of Corbynism)’ fails.
The French are vain and talk ‘about politics’ in a way that is unusual to Brits; they are much shakier on the brute facts of life, but their partially meritocratic education system and socially intact bourgeoisie keep them above the sub-political state where Mike Tapp can enter parliament without Questions Being Asked. The flipside of this (slightly) more elevated discourse is a far greater capacity for delusion: even so, at this point, everyone knows the RN will soon win power nationally, and the powers of the President under the Fifth Republic mean, so far as any EU state subject to its courts can, they would have free rein to remould it. On the EU issue, France is essential to the European Union in a way that Britain or Hungary is not, and thus it has far greater leverage in realigning EU intentions rather than merely collecting exemptions. So far as I am aware, they have mostly used this to date for food standards matters such as banning BPA in plastic.
The catalogue of fringe leftist parties in every election (there are normally at least two Trotskyist and one Stalinist party to choose from) is a sign of the fantasy world many people here live in. I haven’t time to address ‘The Woke in France’, but though they exist, their positions are much further from received opinion, and they are not taken as seriously by a people who take great pleasure in being rude to strangers. The Greens and PS occupy the space Labour does in Britain, and the only hard left party of significance is the LFI, a group every bit as hopelessly dependent on the RN and the ‘threat of fascism’ to survive as Macron is.
Back in the pig trough, the fairly open strategy of Macron and people like him has been to delay France’s inevitable RN moment as long as possible, waging an absurd campaign of historical distortion and character assassination to do so, with the aim that the eventual Frontiste government is diluted and makes as many concessions to the centre as possible. Macron, who, like most people, is probably privately aware of the structural, financial and demographic issues facing France, periodically attempts to pass copies of RN policies, which are then struck down by courts (the judiciary is extremely liberal), before pivoting with each election cycle to the clownish appeal for an anti-fascist front against a party whose platform is at most slightly divergent from his own.
Just like protracted moon-staring, if you try to understand the thought patterns of the mad, you may lapse into them. But the cordon sanitaire relies on mischaracterising the RN/FN phenomenon as a continuation of fascism, rather than the revenge of the white Algerian settler and provincial small businessman. France does not have an Anglo-American racism discourse, and the non-white population are much less vertically integrated than in Britain. White ‘elites’ are often comically unaware of the preferences of a voter group they assume come to the polls to oppose racism and support their favourite footballers. Occasionally, this becomes very funny indeed: some analysis of the strong first-round municipal performance of the RN in Marseille played with the idea that ‘racists from Paris’ had moved there, hidden amongst the hippies who went south after COVID. This is apparently what explains the RN’s increase in vote share in a city where the Algerian consulate was bombed after a national of that country murdered a white bus driver.
It is hard to overstate the mental significance the German occupation has taken on in the last few decades of French politics. Interment in the Pantheon, the grander version of being buried in Westminster Abbey, is an honour traditionally reserved for cultural figures of the first rank. Until 2002, perhaps two of these could be qualified as résistants; since then, only two were not in some way explicitly linked to antifascism.
The Nazis, collaborators, and the occupation are constantly rehashed in films, popular musicals (‘Starmania’ is a sort of French Britpopper staple from the 1980s that imagined a future fascist France) and a political ‘discourse’ where comically absurd parallels between the mildly racist bumpkins of the RN and the SS are drawn explicitly. This is by no means one-sided, and accusations of collaboration fly in both directions with the Nazi appellation d’origine contrôlée freely applied to Le Pen, various Islamists, and now Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the LFI.
The large bloc whose lives remain excellent in this charmed land must play their part in this pantomime anti-politics, familiar to Brits as the worldview of The Times, gravely deciding whether ‘racism’ or ‘antisemitism’ is a more serious menace to the Republic this time around.
While the left genuinely believes France is on the brink of Hitlerism, this is much less common amongst Macronists or the centre-right, who think an RN government would be embarrassing or disruptive rather than a cataclysm. The obvious insincerity of this, using rhetoric which sustains an unhinged ultra left, an antifascist cordon sanitaire at each election, their Hitler, an Algerian-Italian social democrat with a slightly stricter view on immigration than the other parties, does not matter to a bright and trivial people who delight in discourse but rarely mean what they say.
The French think highly of themselves, not without reason, and are preoccupied with their own reputation. This is familiar to the drones of ‘international law’, but the French are unique in that it is their opinion of themselves they care about, rather than that of imaginary foreigners:
Suis-je, suis-je, suis-je belle ? [Am I, am I beautiful?]
Il me semble, à mon avis, [It seems to me, in my opinion,]
Que j’ai beau front et doux vis, [That I have a fair brow and a gentle face]Etc.
The National Assembly, with 50/50 sex representation, is primarily the scene for bad political theatre, of refusing to shake so and so’s limply outstretched hand, and practical considerations are effectively absent. This is helped/worsened by the string of intelligent technocratic choices made from the De Gaulle years until Mitterrand died, and for now at least, there is no spectre of lights going out or roads falling apart to sharpen minds on the real.
The massive vote tallies on offer for a successful instance of opposing the far right have allowed some of the most unimpressive and obnoxious figures imaginable to win large victories and establish themselves as statesmen, creating an obvious incentive for each generation to kick the can further down the road. But there are risks to delaying the inevitable for so long. It was none other than Marine Le Pen who had worked as a defence advocate for asylum seekers before moving into politics. She now has an electronic ankle tag and is likely to remain disqualified from standing in the next presidential election as a result of a long-running accounting fiddle that began under her father and seemed fairly common in a generally corrupt country.
Her mixed-race protégé, Jordan Bardella, widely seen as more moderate and without the ‘baggage’ of the family name (as we shall see, he is still intimately connected to the clan), has brighter electoral prospects and will probably become either president or prime minister within the decade. The electoral right’s stated goals of reducing immigration and ending easy routes to citizenship while clamping down on so-called ‘separatism’ are harder to enforce and become less effective the longer they are not achieved; a reasonable case could be made that 2002 was the last time this sort of strategy could avoid the coming Brazil. I suspect that the Le Pen clan know this very well and has no intention of preventing it.
From its beginnings, the FN/RN has been the party of provincial small business owners, military, and the police, and since Marine’s modernisation, has increasingly won the backing of retired state employees and underemployed millennials in the tougher parts of the country. Its interests are therefore directly at odds with the well-oiled pseudo-meritocracy of the Parisian bourgeoisie, who are aware of their own unpopularity in a country largely alien to them. The equivalent notion is a cliché in Britain (step outside the Westminster bubble, yep yep yep, the M25), but it is much truer in France.
‘Vote for the crook, Not the fascist’ was a winning slogan in 2002. And there have been plenty of crooks since Chirac, the centre-right seem to have taken the lesson of 2002 to be that open corruption is a winning electoral strategy; since they all believe in the ‘impending bankruptcy’ fantasy, they do so guiltlessly. Sarkozy served prison time for allegedly taking money from Gaddafi to fund his reelection campaign, a man he was at the forefront of the effort to depose; this sort of thing is outlandish and hard to draw conclusions from. But if true, these are not the actions of a man who believes in the long-term stability of his country.
Similarly, the Le Pen clan do not believe they can turn around France’s coming Brazilification either. So, in a rather less naked and commercial way than the Trump family, they are going through the pockets of Marianne as she sleeps on the driverless metro; the political conflict, at least within the Assemblée nationale, is over who will benefit from the legacy wealth and influence of a great country. France makes rockets, handbags and helicopters; she provides a far better quality of life for her inhabitants than Britain, and at least in large pockets will continue to do so indefinitely — she is charming, and not just to her own people.
The RN, Macron (who abandoned his ‘entrepreneurial’ patter on election), and the legacy centre-left are all social democrats with mild disagreements on who should access the welfare state, immigration, and how to become a citizen. The right of this block sometimes makes noises about the long-term viability of the national economy, but all are essentially of the view it is a pie to be divided or redirected for moralistic reasons.
By contrast, the UDR has its own ideas for a liberal economic reform of France to accompany a crackdown on crime and immigration. This is based on their personal obsession of economic collapse, which has been continually predicted since at least the early 1990s. Though reforms to immigration and citizenship law would save money, they will face immense vested interests. It is not at all clear that this agenda would be accepted by the RN deputies whom Ciotti and friends would rely on to pass legislation. A full dismantling of the benefits-state and social housing system would, at least in the immediate short term, collapse the ‘Greek’ part of France and result in the political destruction of the ‘extreme right’. There is no real interest in the RN in solving the problems of the grim areas it dominates: an unaffiliated extreme-right mayor (Robert Menard, in Béziers), who, to some extent, has done so, now has RN candidates run against him.
France’s appeal to foreigners means second-round results that go better than expected are seized on by an overseas left desperate for a viable model. The ideological left in France has few unifying principles beyond anti fascism, but, given its core in university staff and other fonctionnaires, is prodigious in its policy output. The biannual 1930s reenactments have ‘emboldened’ this group into a deranged form of far-left politics, which now has to be managed as a secondary or even primary risk by the French equivalent of North London. Although LFI, alone or in coalition, is very unlikely to ever form a government or win the presidency, the outcome of such an event for the core of French society would be vastly more disruptive than an RN victory.
Putting to one side their employment of weekend thugs now under arrest for murder as parliamentary assistants, the electoral platform of LFI includes plans to nationalise the pharmaceuticals industry, the defence industry, several banks and the energy sector, ban public-private partnerships, disarm the police even of non-lethal weapons, introduce wealth taxes linked to ‘climate’, and includes a curious section on suppression of terrorism that proposes increasing the capabilities of the police to gather human intelligence on ‘anti-republican’ organisations.
Other highlights include busing (through changes to the carte scolaire) and a predictable set of commitments to climate migration and so on, funded by extremely aggressive taxes on financial transactions, assets and income, including closing the various niches that allow small businesses and market traders to survive. Both the Ciotti faction of the right and LFI have (unsurprisingly opposite) foreign policy commitments that make their acceptance by the population and state less likely, but the left’s, far more so than for Corbyn, would bring an immediate close to any state acceptance of their platform should they find themselves in a position to suggest it.
As to the radical pose of LFI: I am not particularly wedded to the idea of private property, at least not for people I dislike, and there are plenty of assets I would be happy to seize as biens nationaux, but their suicidal platform is at least thorough, and is not being taken seriously by the fairly small world of people who want an easy life and have any influence over civic society.
There is absolutely nothing in their program which would appeal to anyone other than parasitic state employees in universities, and the only reason LFI continues to win votes is its role in farce pantomime of the 1940s, where Catholic Rightists worked with Communists to defeat their national/ideological enemy, allowing both the extreme left and the centre right to vote for each other with pinched noses in the second round, in order to reenact their respective parts in the Hitler Passion Play.
Despite their capacity for violence, I am fairly dismissive of the LFI, whose anti-white posturing and support for créolisation masks a platform that would fall heavily on the non-white voters they depend on. Aggressive measures against cars, thorough investigations into tax avoidance by small businesses, and the disarmament of the police would disproportionately damage the exact demographic they claim to represent. The Poujadiste today dodging the fisc in Provence has around a 30% chance of being an Arab. The war in Algeria recedes into memory every year, and the racial difference is not so great that it can form a permanent split as it does in the USA.
Mélenchon, himself a pied noir, a Murcian-Sicilian born in a white enclave in Morocco, adopted his rhetoric on third-world immigration relatively late; there are persistent rumours that the true purpose is to sustain his alleged harem of teenage Arab girls, a scurrilous notion we should dismiss out of hand. The right, having correctly identified ethnic voting blocs as an issue decades before anyone else, is sometimes overexcited by its own concept, and there is little evidence LFI has managed to ‘unite the browns’ to any meaningful degree.
Ballot stuffing (there is a strange system of taking posters into a booth and putting one in an envelope) and extremely low turnout on the social housing estates which are overwhelmingly populated by migrants give the impression of North Korea-level victories for the LFI, but I suspect these are in part fraudulent and even the official numbers ignore that by far the most popular party for foreigners is ‘no party’. Outside of social housing, I would be surprised if LFI do much better amongst the ethnic vote than the general population.
As in all of the European social democracies, there is a background assumption in France that politics doesn’t exist and instead hysterical social debates around femicides or the always-imminent guerre civile take on totemic importance; though France is far more indebted than Britain, at least some of the fake money goes on new metro lines and roads and so on, so they have at least something to show for it.
Less oppressive than the British model and, despite its narrow social base and tedious credentialism, far more meritocratic, France, as with most managed democracies, is only truly political outside of the pig trough. France has an extremely active extra-parliamentary right, which is divided into squabbling groupuscules that mostly hate each other, claiming alternately Royalism, Catholic Integralism (with or without the Pope), Pan-Europeanism, or a unique third-worldism that culminated in both the insane ‘Soral’ experiment and Jean Marie Le Pen’s diplomatic visits to Saddam Hussein in the 1990s.
The Third-Worldist faction and the most visually fascist groups tend to concentrate in Paris, and are at odds with the provincial far right (regionalist and anti-nationalist) and, thanks to predictable arguments about Islam, Jews and Paganism, the Catho block, which is the only far-right grouping with a substantial social world and multi-generational ‘type’ behind it. Unfortunately, though this world has sustained itself through many generations and is typically wealthy and well-connected, the national reputation of the Catholic ultras is abysmal, the stereotypical pute à poney, French scouts making pilgrimages to Chartres in what, perhaps only to outsiders, seems a maudlin display of smug self-satisfaction wrapped up in Religion. Unfortunately, this group are the only hard right faction with the credentials and social position to be taken seriously in government.
As we touched on in the first part, the original Front National was an unfiltered blend of every current then active on the non-Gaullist right, and the connection between these groups and the FN/RN was never entirely severed. The early FN strongholds were in secular areas that had been fierce supporters of the revolution and where, for various reasons, a dislike of the symbols and attitudes of the Catholic elite persisted. The Catholic rich, therefore, remained loyal to the LR and other Gaullist successor parties. Part of the Zemmour experiment was to prise away a rapidly radicalising voter base of wealthy North African-descended Jews and team them up with the Catholic fringe. Both groups live in expensive parts of Paris and its suburbs and have occasionally voted together before, as in the Sarkozy presidency. Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal, carried out a wrecking mission on the party in 2024, largely splitting the two blocs, and unlike Eric Ciotti’s Niçoise mafia, they are unlikely to be able or willing to work with the RN.
LFI also maintains an open door to the fringes, and a recent map of extreme left groups exposes their reactionary nature: they follow the exact distribution of the most active right-wing groups across Lyon and mid-sized southern cities like Albi. The moral dishonesty of the cordon sanitaire is an excuse for violence for the entitled children of local elites who play at being racaille – it is telling the late Quentin was half-Peruvian and the son of a guest worker, while his suspected murderers were the brats of local academic and political parasitic elites.
While it is true that the situation on the margins is beginning to spiral, neither the courts nor deputies are prepared to act against this by dissolving left-wing organisations. This is partly, especially in the court system, due to sincere anti-right sentiment, but it is also probable that Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin, who allegedly wrote for the magazine of Action Francaise as a student, and less stupid parts of the left, are aware any situation of sustained violence in France would be swiftly won by the right, even in allegedly left-wing areas, and so the state prioritises the suppression of rightist ‘groupuscules’ rather than their left-equivalents. Disturbingly, and in a likely sign of things to come, Bardella responded to the assassination by promising to ban ‘ultra’ groups on both the right and left; it was left to the grown-ups of the centre-right crook parties to attempt the legwork of dismantling leftist cells.
Had Macron even been the equal of McSweeney, or had someone who was, LFI could be illegal now and its members barred from entering the US; instead, he is stuck in his bright schoolboy act, randomly breaking character to say difficult things then defaulting to governing as a libtard. The effectiveness of a ‘stop antisemitism’ attack on the LFI was briefly a great boon for the right, but as the ruins of Reconquête stumble into open Likudism and running West Bank settlers as municipal candidates, the charge is rapidly losing its sting. The ‘united front against antisemitism’ strategy was more viable in the 2010s than the 2020s for obvious reasons, and that ship has likely sailed.
You may be wondering why we have spent so much time discussing small groups of people that have little to no influence on national elections; this is because French public life is an extremely small world, and the routes into it are much narrower. The highest advanced school for would-be politicians, École nationale d’administration, spits out only a couple of dozen graduates a year. ‘Second career’ politicians are rare, and politics is lucrative due to much greater opportunities for corruption and the common practice of holding multiple offices simultaneously. Unlike in Britain, the barrier between even established parties and fringe political organisations is very porous. Zemmour’s 2022 campaign staff was largely drawn from royalist, identitarian and far-right regionalist street movements, LFI employing the antifa fringe and running candidates who support the FLN terrorists of the Algerian war. In a political environment that prefers symbolic gestures to boring legislation, and in a country content to leave the concrete to its bureaucracy, left-right street conflicts occupy a larger share of public consciousness.
Britain has become considerably more like that in recent years, but we are still some way off best-selling magazines predicting open ethnic civil war and retired generals’ fantasising about military coups. The critical thing to remember is that this imaginary conflict, contrary to the lavender-mafia stylings of Camus or Douglas Murray, will absolutely never happen, and anyone claiming it is as deluded as the old Marxists who thought the 1926 general strike marked the beginning of Britain’s ‘revolutionary fervour’.
This sort of hysteria has a long pedigree and was deployed against Protestants and supporters of the Monarchy in different eras. France’s colonial history, which involved an attempt to make a 10% white Algeria an integral part of France, used something closer to the Portuguese model than the British imperial system, and its centralised state based on linguistic unity, aimed at suppressing European ethnolinguistic minorities who, before the twentieth century, made up a near-majority of the population, gives a totalitarian and non-ethnic character to France that is hard even for the extreme right to overcome.
A glance at the foreign names of prominent far-rightists — Ciotti, Zemmour, Bardella — gives away their peripheral status. Ciotti is the mayor of Nice, a fine city, sadly subject to the second-worst Islamist terror attack France has experienced, but also one that visually resembles Genoa or Turin more than it does Paris, which only became part of France in 1860, and where massive coercion was required to suppress a popular movement to join the unified Italy well into the 1910s.
France’s self-styled saviours are an Algerian-born Sephardic Jew who moved to France in the 1960s, an Italian with a support base in an obviously Italian city, the late equivalent of a Welshman, and an Algerian-Italian guy who looks like he could be selling shit on the side of the Vieux Port in Marseille. I am being snotty now: Bardella looks far more professional than he used to and appears to have reasonable instincts. But he is boring in an age that prefers characters, and would probably make a better prime minister than president. After the 2017 elections, Le Pen senior said that if he had been a few decades younger, he would’ve run an outrage campaign like Trump and, unlike his cautious daughter, would have won.
I believe this is true, and the most likely candidate for a high-profile president remains Eric Ciotti. Unfortunately, the recent actions of the Great Satan, of whom Ciotti has long been very supportive, make this less likely. The RN have been smarter on both the Israel issue and the America problem (they paid back the last of their Russian bank loans in 2022; there was likely some residual influence of the ‘old’ party on the former debate), and I doubt the relatively small electorate of the pro-RN UDR faction will allow them to insist, as they would have to were the country to be properly governed, on filling enough of the French great offices of state.
I will continue to complain about Bardella, but I will start by pointing out that he is young, clearly very motivated, knows how to follow a plan (this is all sounding a bit Starmer-y), and has managed to avoid the endemic moral and financial corruption of political life. Thanks to his background, he can win over voters who might otherwise avoid the RN. He is notably intractable in his opposition to the provocation politics of the AfD and, even if uninspiring, clearly has a long future ahead of him.
Jordan and Kevin are archetypal beauf names, a stereotype of the usually southern, nightmare ‘brother-in-law’ (beau-frère) who enjoys the crude pleasures of life, dresses badly, and holds loud views. Bardella is of mixed Italian and Kabyle Algerian ancestry; he grew up on a council estate in an area roughly equivalent to Edmonton. The Arabs and Italian/Portuguese inhabitants who arrived in the mid-twentieth century began to be replaced by sub-Saharan blacks from the 1980s, a group that now forms a supermajority in that area; Bardella once got in trouble for mentioning there were no white people left at his old school. This remark, and even pointing out Bardella’s ancestry, is controversial in strictly race-blind France, and it is normally left-wingers who do so; there was an expose of Jordan’s ancestry in Jeune Afrique that claims discussing it is taboo within the party.
Bardella joined the FN/RN young and had a meteoric rise within it, dropping out of his bachelor’s degree to focus full-time on politics. Though France is not quite Germany in expecting three master’s and a doctorate from its public figures, it is not far off, and his background and youth mark him out as unusual. For many years, he was in a serious romantic relationship with Marine Le Pen’s niece; thereby joining the family honour roll:
Louis Aliot: RN Mayor of Perpignan, Marine Le Pen’s common-law husband
Philippe Olivier: RN MEP, part of the liberal-conservative faction and who resisted the Philipot dalliance with economic leftism, formerly romantically linked to Marie-Caroline (Marine’s sister) and by her father of Nolwenn Olivier, Bardella’s long-term girlfriend
Lorrain de Saint Affrique — ex-lover of the teenage Marine, JMP loyalist, early member of Reconquête
Marion-Marechal Le Pen: JMP’s granddaughter, former RN deputy, who carried out the successful wrecking of Zemmour’s EU parliamentary grouping in 2024. Something seems very off about her.
There are doubtless further examples I have missed, but the point is clear: the intention of this little clan, like the British royal family, is to cover all the likely political outcomes of the ongoing disintegration of Republican France and ensure someone with blood or marriage ties to the family sits on top of it at the end. The French equivalent of Hello! Magazine claims Bardella is now involved with one of the outposts of the Bourbon family. They will not save their heads with such nonsense.
Unlike the royals, and though, with old de Benoist, I agree that nothing good will come of that family, they have my personal respect and should have yours too: the childhood home of Marine was destroyed with a car bomb, the perpetrators were allowed to escape, the chaotic family lives of all involved are no doubt mostly because they are French but will not have been helped by their status as national hate figures, and they have exposed themselves to real physical danger in a way very few politicians have in modern Europe.
JMP, who died at the same age as the queen, continued making podcasts until almost the end of his life, with the increasingly heavy assistance of Lorrain de Saint Affrique as co-host. In one of the very last episodes, in response to some gloomy prediction, JMP made a very telling remark that there is no ‘end’. In any situation, future generations could find a better or worse policy to follow.
I don’t want to end too darkly, but it has seemed obvious to me for a while that every party to this sorry story is preparing for Le Brésil francais. Bardella will win, hopefully the brighter sparks of the old LR hardliners will trim some fat and do a mild ‘parasite cleanse’ for the put-upon French taxpayer, but this only means the Brazil years will begin with a period of relative stability and economic growth. There is absolutely no prospect of mass returns of third- and increasingly fourth-generation arrivals without an ethnic civil war; should such a war happen, a remote possibility but one the obsessive fantasies of both left and right make more likely, it will be between two primarily white camps making shifting alliances with different ethnic groups, groups whose participation in the conflict will guarantee their presence afterwards.
Should chaos descend and the gravy train stop, ‘Arabs’ and ‘Blacks’ are going to lose any vague ‘people of colour’ appellation and turn on one another, probably with greater hostility than any conflicts involving the native population. The relative concentration of the former in the south and the latter around Paris is also an obvious sign of further fragmentation of the project for a centralised France – practical concerns can keep it together, but the National Republican state is on borrowed time. Just as the right gained a certain position by foreseeing the guest-worker disaster, there will be an advantage to those who jump first in abandoning the dead old states for a Europe that is, essentially, France anyway.
The form this should take is beyond the scope of anything we can say here, but it is my sincere hope the French will not be distracted by reactionary fantasies of gouty Kings stumbling back into the hall of mirrors, nor a weird recreation of French Algeria in the Languedoc. They must work to dismantle their nation and its symbols, the calculated treason of de Gaulle remembered, take down the flag, abandon the empty show and false promises of ‘French Catholicism’ — no, you do not believe in the bodily resurrection of the dead, you just like wearing silly hats — and throw themselves into Europe. The horrible, grand and insupportable abuses of the Republic have gone on for too long.
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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