La France actuelle expliquée aux britanniques

Across Europe mainstream parties facing populist rebellions are in a bind over their response. If they choose accommodation they will be punished by markets and accused of pandering to demagogues – call it the “playing with fire” charge. If they ignore the insurgents, they will be punished at the polls and accused of ignoring the travails of ordinary people – call it the “malign neglect” charge. Most governments try to steer a middle course – in Britain, for instance, the re-elected Conservatives will hold a referendum on Europe while sticking with otherwise pro-business policies – drawing fire on both counts. In France, the blame game is particularly virulent. The anti-immigrant Front National is Europe’s biggest anti-EU party with about a quarter of the vote, and is set to be a major force in the 2017 presidential election. How has it come to this?

Christophe Guilluy, a geographer, belongs firmly to the “malign neglect” camp. In recent years he has popularized a new “social geography” that has put the gap between skilled and unskilled workers literally on the map. In La France périphérique, he highlights the growing divide between “global cities”, which are hotbeds of wealth creation and upward mobility, and a hinterland where those who struggle in this high-tech world are stuck. By Guilluy’s reckoning “peripheral France”, as he calls the latter, accounts for 80 per cent of municipalities and 60 per cent of the population.

Unlike other critics of globalization, Guilluy does not focus on the gains made by a tiny elite. Forty per cent of France’s population live in the thriving cities and their orbit – including migrants who scoop up the unskilled jobs. Still, Guilluy contends, the modern economy hurts the majority: “France’s adaptation to the rules of the world economy, the free movement of goods, capital and people, has a hidden cost: the sidelining of the classes populaires” – i.e. the working and lower-middle classes.

Eric Zemmour’s sole purpose is to afflict the comfortable, not comfort the afflicted

These people – typically white – feel marginalized both economically and politically. For decades French governments of all stripes allowed markets to rule. Guilluy, whose own sympathies lie with the old Left, understands why those who feel betrayed by such policies should turn to the Front National. Their revolt, he adds, has only just begun. Millions of people across peripheral France don’t bother to vote: any party that can fully tap into their discontent over trade and immigration stands to make big gains.

Guilluy challenges conventional wisdom on several points. For instance, he includes the impoverished banlieues that ring French cities within the “metropolitan space”. This is controversial. The banlieues and their increasingly immigrant population have long been the main focus of social policy. However, as Guilluy notes, they are not ghettos, but areas of rapid social mobility whose population is constantly being renewed. One study showed that 61 per cent of residents in France’s poorest housing estates had lived there less than ten years. Typically, the newcomers replace families who move to better places. Immigrants, Guilluy concludes, are among the beneficiaries, not the victims, of globalization.

Equally contentiously, he regards the white flight from banlieues as a natural response, not a sign of hostility to foreigners. “No one wants to be in the minority”, he writes. He is scathing about urbanites who look down on poor whites from the comfort of their gentrified city centres. “At a time when the classes populaires are being regularly lectured about their populism, their racism, their isolationism, it transpires that the better off increasingly practise a form of isolationism they deny to humbler folk.” In Guilluy’s view the ruling establishment, from the pro-business Right to the multicultural Left, has torn up France’s social contract. The “metropolitan model” they have promoted, he writes, is “diametrically opposed to the Republican model” – an ancient pact based on equality, national unity, and the stamping out of ethnic divisions.

Sweeping as this indictment is, Guilluy couches it in the sober tones of the social scientist. Not so Eric Zemmour, a high-profile journalist and scourge of the bien-pensant. His latest book, Le Suicide français, is an apocalyptic broadside against an entire generation of leaders. Unlike Guilluy, who believes a new radical movement is emerging in peripheral France, Zemmour offers no positive conclusions. His sole purpose is to afflict the comfortable, not comfort the afflicted. The French nation is dead.

How did it come to this? France, according to Zemmour, has suffered a two-pronged assault since 1968. First the leftists, who lost the initial political battle, have won the culture war: individual rights have triumphed over collective endeavour. The rebels were assisted in the 1980s by free-marketeers who tore down borders. L’État – always capitalized in French – built the modern nation after the Revolution; it steered the post-war recovery and shared the fruits equitably, reaching its apogee under General de Gaulle in the 1960s. Four decades later, an alliance of leftist firebrands and neo-liberal technocrats has reduced it to an empty shell.

Le Suicide français chronicles key events in several spheres – from low culture to high finance – that have marked the evisceration of the nation state. It offers the ultimate “malign neglect” theory. Those who have turned their backs on France include not just politicians, but central bankers who have surrendered economic sovereignty; crusading humanitarians and muckraking journalists who bully governments; bosses who move jobs abroad; sports stars who sell themselves to the highest global bidder; an artistic avant-garde bent on offending the public that subsidizes it; a “libertarian, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie” that has reshaped Paris in its own image but would be equally at home in New York or Shanghai. This break from the people is encapsulated in a striking phrase: “the secession of elites”.

It is tempting to dismiss Zemmour as a crank. His nostalgia for the paternalistic Gaullist state, his views of America, Germany – and the rest of the world, for that matter – as eternal threats to France, and his denunciation of every significant event in the past forty years as another step towards catastrophe are hard to take seriously. Nevertheless, Zemmour deserves to be. Strip away the hyperbole, and Le Suicide français provides a comprehensive account of a revolution. France has changed more radically than most other Western democracies since the 1960s. Judges mounted a coup de force by starting to veto laws; the media now routinely challenges authority; the advent of civil society has been remarkable in a country where – as Tocqueville lamented – the citizenry traditionally rose from its dormant state in revolutionary spasms only.

Zemmour is a skilful polemicist. His expressed views on immigration are controversial. He calls the policy of family reunification, which led to ethnic enclaves across France, the “posthumous revenge of the supporters of French Algeria over General de Gaulle”. How so? Those who opposed Algerian independence, he notes, had argued that two cultures could live in harmony in a single country and that France could afford to lift millions of impoverished Arabs out of poverty. Both arguments were rejected by de Gaulle, who opted for separation; but they eventually prevailed with the triumph of multicultural capitalism. Zemmour, who is sometimes accused of racism, mischievously turns the tables by pointing to apparent similarities between his critics and the French Algeria lobby, which included fascists.

There are deep flaws in the malign-neglect theory as presented by Guilluy and Zemmour. By blaming globalization for all of France’s ills, they ignore purely domestic failings such as an unreformed state. Other countries have been better at mitigating the disadvantages of open borders. Guilluy and Zemmour’s prescriptions, a return to protectionist dirigisme, would not help the vulnerable. Both writers make a powerful case that feckless elites are pushing voters towards the Front National, but branding their opponents as destroyers of the Republic does nothing to encourage serious discussion of the issues they raise.

The far Right is posing a serious threat to democracy and other parties are sleepwalking to disaster

A similar mixture of cogent observation and self-defeating grandiloquence is in evidence on the “play-with-fire” side. Edwy Plenel, a veteran investigative journalist, represents everything Zemmour hates. A former Trotskyite, Plenel has been exposing political shenanigans for three decades. His latest book, Pour les Musulmans, denounces what he views as a deeper scandal: an “obsessive Islamophobia” stalking the land. He has a point. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of French people believe Islam to be incompatible with French values. Plenel blames an “expanding sphere of hatred” not on the Front National, which has always been xenophobic, but on mainstream figures who should know better. “The supposedly governing parties of both Right and Left”, he writes, have tried fighting the far Right on its own intolerant terms and “only succeeded in legitimizing the Front National’s agenda”.

He warns against the lumping together of all Muslims and the idea that the problem lies within their religion: “To confuse an entire community with the acts of a few individuals who claim it, is to condone injustice”. He notes, as others have, that such prejudice is a gift to religious fanatics who peddle the idea of a clash of civilizations. Plenel attacks the French obsession with the Muslim headscarf or veil – which was banned in public schools in 2004 – as though a “piece of fabric” posed a mortal danger to French identity. The ban, he argues, is based on a warped understanding of the country’s secularist tradition.

Unfortunately, Plenel gets carried away by his own outrage. He quotes approvingly a report stating that “the Muslim has replaced the [pre-war] Jew in the representation and construction of a scapegoat”. Really? The body that counts Islamophobic acts recorded 133 across the country in 2014 – most of them insults. That is 133 too many, but a far cry from the rampant anti-Semitism of the 1930s. Plenel also attacks the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for saying last year that “there is a problem with Islam in France”. Recent events have lent credence to this view. Widespread reluctance among French Muslims to rally in support for free expression after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January suggests that many are more attached to Islam than to Enlightenment values. It is debatable whether there is such a thing as “Islam in France”, as Finkielkraut claims, but Plenel resorts to abuse rather than debate. He dismisses the suggestion as being beyond the pale, and falsely accuses Finkielkraut of supporting the ideas of Renaud Camus, a xenophobic essayist who has described immigrants as “foreign occupiers” chasing away the natives from conquered areas.

Plenel puts a dark interpretation on the mildest expressions of alarm about Muslims. In 2013, the then Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, vowed to “demonstrate that Islam was compatible with democracy”. Plenel takes Valls to task for even raising the issue, accusing him of “putting France on a war footing”. Plenel may be right to condemn fearmongering, but he uses scare tactics himself. Anxiety over a repeat of the events of the 1930s is central to the “playing with fire” claim. Then, as now, the far Right is said to be posing a serious threat to democracy and other parties to be sleepwalking to disaster.

The analogy comes readily to French minds in tense political times. Les Années 30 sont de retour, written by a quartet of historians and left-leaning journalists, is the most thorough attempt to develop the theme. It makes a number of good points. When, in the 1930s, Europe was hit by a financial crisis that had originated in the United States, the French disastrously stuck to austerity and tight money. Eighty years on, the authors argue, eurozone leaders are repeating the same mistake. The book also points to the parallels between the democracies’ feeble response to Hitler’s redrawing of the map of Europe and their reluctance to confront Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The best chapter highlights similarities between “neo-reactionaries” – such as Zemmour and Guilluy – and the “anti-conformists” of the 1930s, another mixture of radicals and conservatives that defied conventional categorization. They, too, were convinced that France had been betrayed by wicked elites and that money-grubbing capitalism was leading it to ruin. But like Plenel, the authors overstate their case. The rise of populists across the Continent, they write, “is unprecedented since the time of the Brown Plague”. The fact that the modern far Right has no stormtroopers and is trying to win power solely at the polls is mentioned only parenthetically. Likewise, the parallel drawn between attempts to restore order in the banlieues and colonial campaigns against restive villages in North Africa is silly. The Arabs in the 1930s wanted to shake off the French yoke; the migrants of today seek to be recognized as full members of the nation. By conflating the two, the authors undermine their own valid dismissal of the view of Muslims as a fifth column.

The debate about the Front National is what the French call a dialogue de sourds. The opponents are screaming past each other. As they trade accusations of betraying the country’s core values, there is little prospect of either side listening to the other’s arguments, or sharpening its own.

Henri Astier is a BBC journalist.