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Posted on 05/05/2002 5:59:45 PM PDT by Pokey78
A SPECTRE is haunting Europe. It is not the spectre of renascent fascism. It is the spectre of a popular uprising against the ruling elites and their brainchild, the European Union. At present it is still a revolt; it may become a revolution.
The presidential duel of the past fortnight has brought France to the brink of chaos. Although four out of five French voters supported Jacques Chirac, his is the most pyrrhic of victories. The President emerges as a diminished, lonely figure, kept in power only by the Left. Jean-Marie Le Pen, on the other hand, consolidated and even increased his vote against considerable odds. He is now the second most important figure in French politics.
It is, however, more than likely that Chirac will draw the wrong conclusion from the campaign. He may assume that, despite his promises to the contrary, he can carry on much as before. If so, the republic is probably doomed.
The attempt to isolate and marginalise Le Pen has been a disaster. A political system which cannot accommodate democratic change, which denies legitimacy to one of the two main candidates, which makes the survival of the republic conditional upon the popular acclamation of the incumbent, is a system rotten to the core. It is not Le Pen who may prove to be the gravedigger of the Fifth Republic, but those who have masqueraded as its guardians: Mitterrand and Chirac, Socialists and Gaullists, the intellectuals and mandarins who have exploited the system and excluded the masses.
More, however, is at stake here than the constitution hastily improvised by General de Gaulle during the Algerian emergency. The entire architecture of European union depends on the French buttress. The dissolution of the federalist consensus in France would signal not merely a national crisis, but a continental one.
The great revelations of this extraordinary campaign have been not only the impotence of the embattled French oligarchy, but its illiberalism. Rather than confront the threat posed by Le Pen, they have sought to suppress it. Chirac has evaded every opportunity to debate with his challenger. He has avoided interviews and television appearances, thereby enabling the media to deny Le Pen a platform on the spurious ground of equity. The authorities have closed ranks against the National Front leader in a manner which simply could not happen on this side of the Channel, but which in France seems entirely normal. The English concept of the Establishment is inadequate to describe the power, arrogance and homogeneity of the French political class. This is an elite which has never had the slightest hesitation in crushing its enemies - if necessary by executing them.
To understand Le Pen's appeal, one only has to listen to him. That, however, is the last thing self-respecting members of the French elite have ever done. His speeches and interviews are rambling, inconsistent, "amateurish", as Julian Barnes wrote dismissively in the Guardian. But their spontaneous, saloon-bar quality is, of course, part of their strength. Le Pen's discourse is rich in symbolism, spiritual and moral, evocative of past glories and urgent with apocalyptic warnings. It is the antithesis of the technocratic jargon of the mainstream politicians. Where the latter speak to the head, Le Pen speaks to the heart. If Chirac treats France like an unfaithful husband, Le Pen woos her like a romantic lover.
None of this is to deny that Le Pen does represent the reactionary, xenophobic, anti-semitic rump. His policies are a bouillabaisse of populism and prejudice, from reintroducing the death penalty and leaving the EU to closing borders and expelling illegal immigrants. Le Pen's ideology draws on Catholic moral and social doctrine, yet he and the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger, are united only by mutual antipathy. The Cardinal's Jewish background is not the only reason why he disapproves of Le Pen: the pro-family, pro-life policies of the National Front are probably more popular with the Catholic laity than with the liberal clergy of the Gallican Church. Similarly, Le Pen's economic policies, including the abolition of income tax, are strongly reminiscent of Poujadism, the shopkeepers' movement of the 1950s which first propelled him into politics. Now the octogenarian Pierre Poujade himself has disowned his former protégé. Le Pen is too much of a political mountebank for those who might have conferred respectability on him. Yet many of his most shocking pronouncements are less original than many suppose. De Gaulle himself referred to the Jews as "an elite people, self-assured and domineering". As I argued on this page a fortnight ago, Le Pen is the revenge of Vichy, but anti-semitism is ubiquitous across the French spectrum, alas.
The profound resonance of Le Pen's nationalism cannot be explained away by Dr Johnson's aphorism about patriotism: he may be a scoundrel, but patriotism was his first refuge, not his last. It is Jacques Chirac's born-again patriotism that sounds hollow, especially by contrast with a veteran of the Resistance, Indochina and Algeria. It is as true today as it was in Montaigne's time that, in France, the only true nobility is conferred by the profession of arms. Yet the old soldier is still underestimated by the noblesse de robe, the political class which owes its status to a combination of education and nepotism. A French mandarin last week dismissed Le Pen's slogan - that he is socially Left, economically Right, but above all national - by pointing out that Hitler had said much the same thing in 1933. The trouble is, Hitler won.
If the English invented the two-party system, it was the French who invented the distinction between Left and Right. Both the Left and the Right in France belong to a post-revolutionary brand of ideological politics ("ideology" is another French coinage) which is usually intolerant and incipiently totalitarian. The French Enlightenment, unlike its Anglo-Scottish counterpart, was no less illiberal than its opponents. Voltaire's attitude to Christianity was simple: "Ecrasez l'infame!" [Stamp out superstition]. He was even more intolerant of Judaism. The French monarchists, Catholics and romantics who fought against the Enlightenment, the Revolution and Napoleon - men such as Joseph de Maistre or Chateaubriand - were not liberals, but they spoke for an essential part of France which rulers ignore at their peril.
Le Pen's roots reach down into this substratum of the Right, just as both de Gaulle and his enemy Marshal Petain did before him. Indeed, it was this common legacy of patriotism, piety and patriarchy which enabled de Gaulle to bridge the gulf between resistance and collaboration. His successors have largely detached themselves from that legacy, rather than modernising it to meet present discontents. Le Pen has moved into the vacuum created by the disappearance of the Gaullist Right up its own fundament. France is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave, a pogrom against the Jews appears to be taking place with impunity, and the economy creaks under the weight of taxation and regulation.
What will happen now? The legislative elections next month will show whether the Socialists are capable of recovering from their humiliation, though there is little they can do about their lack of credible leadership. As for Chirac and the Gaullists, it may well be said of them, as Talleyrand said of Louis XVIII and the royalists, that they have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. Le Pen has posed a series of problems to which France has, despite yesterday's endorsement of Chirac, no persuasive answer.
"A political system which cannot accommodate democratic change, which denies legitimacy to one of the two main candidates, which makes the survival of the republic conditional upon the popular acclamation of the incumbent, is a system rotten to the core."-This is the most profound underlying issue here and, incredibly, it seems to have been lost on many observers.
You really have to laugh at a country that gets so worked up about losing their culture as a result of a few McDonalds, yet has no problem with being over-run by unassimilated immigrants.
And which they are trying assiduously to reproduce on a Europe-wide scale in Brussels. He failed to mention, in addition, the massive corruption and collusion between the poltical and "business" classes in France, and throughout Europe. They make Clintoon's masappropriations of funds look like amateur hour.
Great point!
It was an overwhelming attack by the media, to foist their opinions on a nation.
Any situation between immigrants and French aboriginals over the next four years; that leads to bloodshed will only strenghten the National Front, a pyrrhic victort indeed.
I doubt if there is an intellectual in France capable of writing a "J'Accuse" letter against the assinine policies of the Left.
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Actually, I think they DO get it, but are hoping that if they just pretend not to see it, it will go away. Plus I wonder how many of them, deep down inside, have serious reservations about the EU and are themselves worried about the take-over of what's left of their countries by foreign peoples who are militant adherents of a religion that shares none of their (few remaining) values?
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