Julie got involved in school politics just a few weeks after our arrival when she rather naively inquired about the possibility of joining a parents’ committee. Our school principal’s first answer was a flat non. By the end of the morning, Julie understood why. Parents don’t volunteer in France; they run for office.
Every fall, two French associations present parent-candidates in school elections across the country. After being directed to a parent meeting taking place at a café down the street from our school, Julie found herself running for La liste indépendante (the independent slate), which was looking for a parent available at the last minute to complete their slate of fourteen candidates. After a brief discussion, one father took a head shot of Julie, posted the list of candidates in the display cabinet on the front wall of the school, and voilà, Julie was running in a French election.
Luckily she didn’t win. The day after the election a parent from the opposing party, the FCPE (Fédération des conseils de parents d’élèves), informed her that La liste indépendante was “right wing and religious,” definitely not Julie’s crowd.
Before learning that there are political parties, and that parents choose camps according to political ideology, the thing that amazed us most about school politics in France was the voting process itself. If anyone needed proof that the French take voting seriously, this is where it is. The school election process is governed by the French state. School votes take place simultaneously across the country. Nothing is improvised: there are voters’ lists, voting booths, and real ballot boxes. Of the 600-odd parents at our school, some 188 voted, an impressive turnout in a country where beyond helping children with their homework, parents aren’t supposed to stick their noses into school business.
Of course the fact that school elections actually had institutionalized, ideologically opposed parties shouldn’t have surprised us. The French did invent the political “Right” and “Left,” after all. The concepts arose from how members of France’s National Assembly were seated at the beginning of the French Revolution—those in favor of the royal veto (the aristocracy and the clergy) sat on the right side of the king, while those who opposed it sat on the left. The cleavage became more entrenched when the Right went on to unite ultraroyalists and counterrevolutionaries, and the Left brought together revolutionaries, liberals, and those defending individual liberties.1
In addition to the left-right distinction, the French coined dozens of new words during the French Revolution, some of which went on to lead successful international careers in other political systems: like “revolutionary,” “vandalism,” and even the term “terrorism.” Others, like the term Jacobinisme (from the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary movement), referring to proponents of extreme centralization, remain part of political vocabulary in France and are still commonly used even though they sprouted from a phenomenon that took place over two centuries ago. Yet whether at school, municipal, or national levels, politics is a radically different art in France, and talking about it requires mastering completely novel concepts and an entirely new class of vocabulary, much of which doesn’t translate. You can’t even begin to understand what’s going on until you know the nomenclature.
Strangely, when it comes to devising new political terminology, the French ignore the language purism that bridles them in other areas of life (like education or publishing, as we saw). During our stay in France, French socialists were trying to cope with France’s burgeoning conservative movement, which was leading the protest against same-sex marriage and assisted reproductive technology. In the process, French conservatives invented a term that became their rallying cry, familiphobie (family-phobia), which they used to implicitly accuse socialists of destroying family life by changing its definition. Progressive politicians, meanwhile, shot back with a new expression to discredit the influence of conservatives on the right: la tea-partisation (the Tea Party-ization) of French politics. While that was going on, the proponents of a growing antitax rebellion in France repopularized the medieval protest terms jacquerie (peasant revolt) and fronde (seditious revolt). And with both the French Right and Left in an identity crisis, a term coined by the late singer Serge Gainsbourg in 1977 came back into style: aquoiboniste (from à quoi bon?, what’s the use?), for proponents of “what’s-the-use-ism” (fatalism). It certainly captured the mood of many French the year we were there.
And then there are all the parties themselves. Under France’s Fifth Republic (the name of the regime after France’s constitution was rewritten in 1958), there have been 789 registered political parties so far. Even for Quebeckers, like us, accustomed to a political environment with half a dozen parties spread over two levels of government, it’s hard to grasp why the French could possibly need so many political parties. Between them, France’s two traditional political family trees have about five separate trunks: right, center-right, communist, socialist, and ecologist, each of which has a dozen national parties. Innumerable parties then sprout from these like different-sized branches, or sometimes just twigs, each embodying a subtle ideological distinction. Part of the plethora of parties can be explained by the fact that some exist at only one level of government, like the famous Parti Chasse, pêche, nature, et traditions (Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Traditions Party), which won 7 percent of the vote in the European elections of 1999, and only operates at the European level. There are also a number of parties that present candidates only in France’s regional elections, notably in Brittany.2
And if this isn’t complicated enough, some political parties in France are essentially nothing more than organized followings of a single charismatic politician, who for some reason decided to stick to the same platform but gather his or her admirers under a different party banner. For instance, the only difference between the Socialist Party and the Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen (Citizen and Republican Movement) is the latter’s founder, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The same is true of the Communist Party and the Parti de gauche (Left Party), whose members are followers of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a brilliant orator but notorious loose canon who can’t seem to function inside the bounds of an established party. On the right, one can see how the strong personalization of French politics endures beyond the grave with the chronic debate over who is Gaullist (follower of General de Gaulle, who passed away nearly five decades ago) and who isn’t. The cult of leadership even spawns subparties within parties. When the media speculate over whether something is Hollandais or Aubryen, they sound like they are talking about cheese or sauce (au brie, Hollandaise), but in fact they are pondering distinctions between the policies of President François Hollande and those of his socialist nemesis, Martine Aubry.
The extrapoliticized French media are the trailblazers in this endless political branding exercise. French journalists love using one popular device in particular to inject drama into political stories: they label political figures by their initials, like DSK, for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former socialist minister and director of the IMF. Using their initials somehow endows them with larger-than-life status, whether good or bad. During most of 2014, France’s left-leaning weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur was hard at work rebaptizing France’s new generation of political leaders by their initials, starting with Prime Minister Manuel Valls who became “MV,” and Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who became “NVB.”3
The French press also scrambles to report on the latest petite phrase (sound bite) from a politician’s mouth, and by doing so, sanctions new expressions as mainstream political vocabulary. Politicians’ crafty—or clumsy—words can keep them in the news for months. When we arrived in September 2013, political commentators were still having a ball with a blooper the former prime minister François Fillon had committed—four months earlier. Fillon was talking about the upcoming municipal elections and tweeted: “J’appellerai à voter pour le moins sectaire des candidats” (I’m asking voters to choose the least partisan among the candidates). The intended message was that he wasn’t going to support the National Front, but the phrase was meaningless, verging on silly (it’s pretty hard to imagine a nonpartisan candidate in party politics) and consequently sparked a wave of ridicule. The media continued to badger Fillon about the comment for months.
Politicians’ televised New Year’s wishes, les vœux, is another topic the media love to dwell on, often for the whole month of January. French politicians are expected to start off the year by eloquently expressing good wishes to their constituency in televised speeches. The press spends the weeks leading up to the speeches anticipating what politicians might say and editorializing about what they should say. To be fair, the speeches are substantive. President Nicolas Sarkozy told the French one year that he “understood their frustration”; François Hollande promised to “fight unemployment.” But les vœux are above all an important ritual in French democracy. The French actually write back to politicians, even to the president himself, to tell them what they thought about their speeches and present their own vœux. The media then continue to dissect the speeches for a few more weeks.
One term coming out of politicians’ mouths while we were in France turned out to be more serious than it initially sounded to us: le ni-ni, meaning “neither-nor.” (The term has no relation to the English “ninny” despite the similarities.) The ni-ni had quite a history, we learned. It was originally an anarchist expression, taken from the title of the nineteenth-century socialist libertarian journal Ni Dieu ni Maître (Neither God nor Master). François Mitterrand repopularized it in the 1980s when he defined his policy as one of “neither nationalizations, nor privatizations.” In the next decades, the ni-ni served politicians as a popular pirouette (clever evasive reply) to legitimize indecisiveness: it’s a way of saying what you won’t do by not saying what you will.
But ni-ni took on a whole new significance when France’s National Front Party appropriated it, starting in 1995. The rapidly growing support for this party was the political topic during our year in France, and a baffling phenomenon, even for the French. Everybody (except those who voted for it) wondered how an extreme-right party was managing to take center stage in French politics. Part of that had to do with the ni-ni.
It would be a mistake to try to explain the success of the National Front as a strictly French phenomenon. France does not float in a political void. In the European elections in May 2014, extreme-right parties fared well all over Europe, from the United Kingdom to Denmark and Austria. In the U.S., the Tea Party was part of the same trend. In Europe, new political blocs and coalitions were emerging everywhere, possibly because the fear of communism no longer cemented right-leaning parties in Europe, and the rejection of capitalism was no longer binding the Left. There is no reason this wouldn’t happen in France, too, all the more so since the National Front, which was founded in 1972, was a well-structured populist party well before the Berlin Wall collapsed. It’s now poised to cash in on the shifting political mood across Europe.
The National Front’s rise in popularity has not been steady or regular. Since its creation, and until recently, electoral results have swung between 3 percent and 15 percent of the vote. The ups and downs had a lot to do with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s success, or failure, in attracting populist electors from either the Right or the Left. That was the reason he pounced on the ni-ni concept. Le Pen originally used it in the slogan Ni droite, ni gauche (Neither right, nor left), a slogan designed to convince voters the National Front was the anti-system party, fighting the established “system” of French elites and political parties. In the same vein, Le Pen coined and popularized the acronym UMPS, a clever linguistic twist that presents his principal opponents, the Gaullist, right-wing Party Union pour un movement populaire (Union for a popular movement, known by its initials, UMP), as one and the same as the PS (Parti socialiste, Socialist Party), even though they are ideological opposites. Le Pen’s message was that France’s traditional parties are stagnant and that only the National Front can really change anything.4
Since his daughter Marine Le Pen took over the party leadership in 2011, National Front scores have been steadily climbing. In 2013 and 2014, we watched two French elections: municipal elections in March and European elections in May. In both cases, the National Front scored alarmingly high, well above the 25 percent line. The French were even wondering (though not for the first time) if the party could win more than one seat in the National Assembly or maybe even the French presidency.
Part of Marine Le Pen’s success owes to how she cashed in on the ni-ni slogan by actually adopting a centrist platform (including many features of the Socialist program). She has also worked steadily to rid the National Front of the stigmatization that long hampered its growth—her father’s anti-Semitic outbursts in particular. To do that, she coined and popularized yet another new term, dédiabolisation (de-demonization), which essentially chastises the French for “demonizing” the far right in the past. To prove that the National Front was turning a page, Le Pen demoted her father from president to honorary chairman of the party. In 2015 she actually kicked him out of the party. The stratagem worked: Marine Le Pen has been steadily luring voters from outside the National Front’s traditional far-right support base, from moderate right-wing parties, and even from the French Left. It would be an exaggeration to say that 25 percent of the French population (the National Front’s current level of support) actually holds fascist-leaning, far-right beliefs. But Marine Le Pen’s “far-right light” façade has been potent enough to garner support from France’s lower classes, whether left or right leaning. In the fall of 2015, a survey credited her with as much as 31 precent of voter intent. During the regional elections of December 2015, the National Front won an overall 27.7 percent of the vote. In two regions, in the north and in the southeast, it got about 40 percent of the vote and was in the lead in four more regions out of a total of thirteen in continental France. The four overseas regions are definitely not leaning toward the National Front.
The fact that Marine Le Pen is rallying people who would have voted for the Communist Party fifteen years ago is one of the most fascinating and harrowing developments in French politics in years. Unfortunately, her success owes to more than clever branding. She is supplying many French with something no other party has ever dared give them. As the former prime minister Laurent Fabius (now the minister of foreign affairs under Hollande) put it in the 1980s, the National Front “asks good questions even if they yield bad answers” (pose de bonnes questions, mais apporte de mauvaises réponses). The “good questions” to which Fabius was referring are ones about the European Union, the euro, the economy, immigration, French identity, and, broadly speaking, the “system,” or France’s static political establishment. As the French writer and journalist François de Closets argued, in the old days of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen made these issues taboo among France’s Left just by talking about them.5 In effect, for the last thirty years, the French Left has played Le Pen’s game by leaving the field open to him—and now to his daughter—when it comes to talking about sensitive issues in the country. Laurent Fabius was harshly criticized within the Socialist Party for even broaching the topics, let alone suggesting they represented valid concerns among the French.
Though it’s hardly what you would expect from a country of conversationalists who value their liberté d’expression, the French can be amazingly punctilious about certain issues from their past, and about the question of national identity. These two topics push the French to get as close as they ever will to being “politically correct.” France’s colorful record in capital punishment is a good example. Before we visited Paris’s Conciergerie, the former tribunal cum prison where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned before she was guillotined in 1793, today a museum, we had heard that the actual guillotine used to kill the queen would be on display. As it turned out, the museum only had a sample guillotine blade—not even the blade. When we asked an employee where the actual guillotine was, he replied that French museums have not been allowed to display guillotines since 1981, the year France abolished the death penalty. We thought it odd that the French would disavow one of the key symbols of the revolution of 1789. The French state is officially secular but that has never prevented museums from displaying crucifixes or other religious symbols. Yet it turns out the French are more adamant about ignoring some aspects of their past than we had imagined. On one of the rare occasions when the guillotine was brought out of mothballs, in 2010, for an exhibition called Crime and Punishment at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, the museum published a disclaimer warning visitors that “certain works” in the exhibition might heurter la sensibilité (offend the sensitivities) of visitors.6
It’s completely paradoxical, but in France, the world capital of conversation, the inability to discuss a number of politically sensitive topics is fueling the rise of the Far Right. No other political party in France will go near two issues in particular: patriotism and Europe. Much of Marine Le Pen’s success comes from the fact that, where those taboos are concerned, the National Front is the only drinker at an open bar.
Though we’d seen France’s Bastille Day (fourteenth of July) parade on the Champs-Élysées before, we thought it was only natural to take our daughters to see it when we were there. For the occasion, Jean-Benoît fashioned a periscope out of cardboard and mirrors so we could see over the crowds—we knew there would be a million other people in Paris trying to see the parade with us. We even carted a stepladder and a climbing stool to the parade, both useful when we found ourselves at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and avenue Montaigne, craning to see the parade from behind twenty rows of spectators. For an hour we watched as ninety planes and helicopters swept across a patch of Paris sky above our heads, and hundreds of vehicles and thousands of soldiers marched down Paris’s most famous avenue. Yet one of the most striking sights of the day was the complete absence of flags. City authorities had decorated the area with red, white, and blue ribbons and cocardes (cockades). But there wasn’t a soul in the crowds actually waving a flag. This was a sharp contrast to any parade we had seen in North America, particularly the Martin Luther King Day Parade we attended in Mesa, Arizona, in 2010, where our daughters bought their first American flags and waved them for the rest of the evening, imitating paraders. Generally speaking, the only people who dare wave flags in France are tourists or members of the Far Right (or soccer fans, but even then, it’s often other countries’ flags). The French do not raise flags on their front lawns. They will brag about the French republic, or more specifically about republican “values,” but rarely about their country, per se. In moments of collective emotion, like sports events, they sing France’s national anthem, “The Marseillaise.” But a substantial part of the crowd will abstain. During the 2007 presidential elections, Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal was viewed with suspicion by many voters on the Left who did not appreciate her demonstrations of patriotism, like flag-waving and singing “The Marseillaise” at political rallies. Five days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, following a particularly moving speech by Prime Minister Manuel Valls, French members of parliament broke out into a spontaneous Marseillaise. It was the first time members of parliament sang the national anthem at the National Assembly since the armistice of 1918.7
Flag-waving began in earnest in January 2015 following the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher grocery. It was regarded as an excusable oddity. But in the minutes that followed the news of the November 13 attacks, French citizens of all political stripes began waving the tricolore (nickname for France’s three-colored flag) and posting it on social media. For the state funeral of the victims, President Hollande actually asked citizens to display the flag everywhere they could, to the extent that companies selling flags ran out of stock. Such flag-waving had not been seen in France since World War II, and will certainly liberate the expression of patriotism in France, which was previously limited to far-right circles.
The French allergy to expressing overt nationalist sentiment has owed mostly to France’s experience during World War II, when the country was partly occupied by, and collaborated with, Nazi Germany. The French had their own fascists, and like Germany and Italy, fascism was closely linked to nationalism. At the end of the war, after France was liberated from the Germans, the French threw the nationalist baby out with the fascist bathwater and, until the terrorist attacks of 2015, most French intuitively equated displays of nationalism with fascism.
And that’s where the National Front comes in. The French still love their country. But the National Front was the only political party that expressed that love openly and gave the French the opportunity to feel good about saying they love their country, too. This is one of the main keys to explaining its growing support. A party willing to ignore the taboo of nationalism appealed to many French who don’t necessarily have far-right sympathies.
There is no doubt that President Hollande’s willingness to use the flag as a rallying symbol was a first attempt, by the Socialists, to steal some of Marine Le Pen’s thunder. And indeed, his personal popularity ratings, which had been abysmal until then, have more than doubled to reach 50 percent. In the regional elections of December 2015, which everyone had expected to be a Socialist rout, it was actually Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, Les Républicains, who suffered. Hollande’s Socialists made a stronger show than predicted.
Europe is the other taboo that Marine Le Pen has slyly turned to her advantage. Paradoxically, Marine Le Pen’s only electoral seat for most of her political career has been as a member of the European Parliament, a strange quirk in French politics since the National Front is profoundly anti-European. But the irony doesn’t seem to bother National Front supporters. The rest of France’s political class, whether Right or Left—the National Front dismisses both as “the system”—has almost universally supported the creation of Europe’s institutions, including the euro, which were built as a rejection of European nationalism on the whole. However, the French population’s attitudes about the EU are mixed, leaning toward negative. When President Jacques Chirac held a referendum on whether to ratify the European Constitution in 2005, 55 percent of the French voted no (a ratified treaty was voted by the European Parliament in 2007).
Once again, the National Front is happy to step in as the only political party in France that dares reject the European Union outright. And as in the case of nationalism, that stance has won it support from both the Left and the Right. On the right, many French resent how the European Union has supplanted national sovereignty in areas like immigration. But even on the left, people feel that France’s membership in the EU has cost it control over social and economic policies. Tough economic times usually make the French more hostile to the European Union.
A lot of Marine Le Pen’s populist support comes from disenfranchised socialists and communists who feel that the traditional Left no longer promises them protection. Many of France’s anti-Europe sentiment is the by-product of the political class’s own cowardice. French politicians have been using the European Union as an excuse for every unpopular economic decision they’ve ever made in the last forty years. Even in cases where there has been a good rationale for budget cutting or eliminating programs, French politicians have tended to dump the blame on Europe. And when the investigation over the November 13 attacks in Paris showed that the attackers had used Brussels as a rear base, and that some of them were non-Europeans who had circulated freely within the European Union, Marine Le Pen simply announced, “I told you so,” and let the continuing police investigation speak for her.
The National Front has also built support by capitalizing on the resentment many French feel toward Paris. Repressed defiance toward Paris and toward other elites has always simmered throughout France. As we saw earlier, France itself was built as a virtual colony of Paris. In 1983, the French state attempted to appease generalized resentment toward Paris by creating regions, a new level of local administration, but that had little effect on negative attitudes toward Paris. France’s regions don’t have much power—much less than a German Land or a U.S. state. And worse, whenever regions actually do question Paris’s authority, political operators in Paris strike back by arguing that “doing things locally” somehow violates the principles of the French Republic. In 2014, President François Hollande unilaterally decided to reduce the number of regions from twenty-six to seventeen without consultation. To the French population beyond the walls of Paris, this was just proof that the establishment is deaf to local sensibilities. And that, in turn, means more votes for the National Front.
The National Front is also cashing in on the growing defiance the French have toward their own elites, whether in Paris or elsewhere. Fifty years ago, when only 10 percent of the French population had more than a grade 11 education, it made sense to train political and managerial elites in special schools and grant them certain privileges in exchange for taking on the responsibility of managing France (and the elites did prove to be quite efficient). Producing this elite was the exclusive prerogative of France’s famous highbrow universities, les grandes écoles. But things in France have changed. Today nearly 75 percent of the population has the equivalent of a grade 13 education and 42 percent of twenty-five- to thirty-four-years-olds have a university degree, 7 percentage points above the European average. High unemployment is endemic in France, around 11 percent when we were there. Together, this makes it hard to justify a two-tiered education system where the most expensive and exclusive schools are specifically designed to select and confer privileges on an elite. It’s also hard to see what France still has to gain from this system. Stories of ridiculous decisions by France’s elites have become a staple of the French media, as in 2014, when France’s national train company ordered 341 trains for regional transport. The wagons turned out to be too wide for the railway platforms in some thirteen hundred stations outside of Paris, which consequently had to be widened by a few inches, at a total cost of 50 million euros ($65 million). Apparently no one at France’s state-owned railway company thought to check with local train stations to see how wide they were, before ordering new trains. The story was actually leaked to the press when the national train company tried to get the regional governments to foot the bill. Stories like this just feed the growing dissatisfaction of the French populace with their Parisian leaders, who they regard as utterly out of touch with reality.
Education is actually part of the problem with France’s leadership. When we were in France, the OECD published a study comparing the education systems of its thirty-four member countries. France did not shine particularly brightly. More important, the study pointed out that France’s educational model no longer performed the role it did a century ago, which was to provide equal opportunities to all and promote the best candidates on the basis of merit alone. Instead, it was just helping the country’s higher socioeconomic classes hang on to their advantages. This was eye-opening news to those French who still believe that their education system operates as a social equalizer. Anyone can see that is no longer the case. Our neighborhood in Paris, the Latin Quarter, is considered one of the most prestigious spots to live in the country (although it’s not the wealthiest). Some families we knew were living in minute apartments they could barely afford just to secure a place for their offspring in one of the quarter’s elementary schools, which operate as feeder schools for prestigious secondary schools, the collèges and lycées. Attending those, in turn, will help you get into a prestigious university. Everyone knows you get ahead in France by attending these schools.
In an influential study on why France’s popular classes choose the National Front over the Communist or Socialist Parties (who historically defended them against the rich), the renowned French demographer Hervé Le Bras blamed France’s elites for hijacking France’s education system to perpetuate themselves, a syndrome that has become more pronounced over the decades, he argues. According to Le Bras, even thirty years ago, a large proportion of France’s political elite came from the popular classes. Today, only half do. A high proportion of those who get elite educations—the only ticket to the high management jobs—are the children of people who already had them, the lucky ones who made the cut a generation ago.8
The self-perpetuating reflexes of this class are remarkable. France’s elites are alarmingly conservative in their attitudes about anyone who doesn’t completely fit the established pattern of a future French leader. Typically, elites qualify these people as hors des cadres (outside of the usual processes and frameworks), but in France this is not a compliment. France’s famous pro-market think tank, the Institut Choiseul, made the news in 2014 when it published a ranking that identified the one hundred leaders économiques de demain (economic leaders of tomorrow). The group included many young French who were not graduates of the main grandes écoles, and many of them had worked, or were working, abroad. After the study was published, one of the members of the group indulged in a bit of provoc by creating a Facebook page characterizing the one hundred young leaders as les Barbares (the Barbarians). It is a great commentary on the entrenched elitist mentality that still reigns in France: the French actually call people with high potential, who think out of the box, “barbarians.”9
Local or informal initiatives are still considered strange things in France. For that matter, the French administration has always looked at local initiatives with a suspicious eye. The celebrated French writer Alexandre Jardin also founded a movement to promote initiative among citizens, businesses, employees, and associations, which he dubbed Les Zèbres (the zebras), in reference to his most famous novel Le Zèbre, but also to the expression drôle de zèbre (oddball). Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when the French political class discussed the role of local administrations, they characterized them as debates over le droit à l’expérimentation (the right to experiment), implying that the notion of giving local administrations power was, itself, risky.
Such political taboos about the nation, Europe, “the system,” and individual initiatives have created a climate in France that just provides more fodder to the only political party that dares discuss them (though badly): the National Front.
Like nationalism and patriotism, another set of French taboos—religion, immigration, and national identity—are also feeding support for the Far Right, too. And once again, the main problem is that the French can’t figure out how to address them directly.