Much has been made of the surname of Jordan Bardella, who might on July 7 become Prime Minister of France at the tender age of 28.

The president of the National Rally party — the National Front as it was called when founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen — is of Italian origin.

He plays on that fact when talking about what he regards as the failure of many Muslim immigrants to integrate into French society. His parents managed it when they arrived in France in the 1960s, so why can’t they?

What Bardella hasn’t revealed is why he’s called Jordan. He was born in the suburbs of Paris in 1995; there weren’t many “Jordans” there at the time and there aren’t three decades later.

Perhaps his mum and dad were a fan of Michael Jordan, the legendary NBA Basketball star, or maybe they named their son after Jordan Knight, the lead singer of New Kids on the Block, an American boy band who were all the rage in the early 1990s.

Bardella isn’t the only National Rally MP to sport an Anglophone Christian name. There’s another Jordan — Guitton, born the same year as Bardella — and a couple of Kevins.

There is no ambiguity about who is responsible for introducing Kevins into France. According to the book The French Archipelago by Jerome Fourquet, probably France’s most renowned social scientist, 160,000 boys were christened Kevin in France in the 1990s. Some parents did so because they loved the 1990 blockbuster movie Home Alone, in which the child actor Macaulay Culkin played “Kevin”, a boy who riotously defends his home against burglars; others conferred Kevin on their offspring because of Kevin Costner’s performance in the 1991 film Dances with Wolves.

Now that those Kevins are men not all appreciate their name; the filmmaker Kevin Fafournoux says his name has been a burden, “whether in terms of our self-confidence, professional credibility or in relationships”. He’s even made a documentary about the curse of being called Kevin, a name regarded by the more bourgeois French as signifying “redneck, illiterate, geek, annoying”.

Uncle Sam’s influence increasingly reaches into every corner of French society

One reason Eric Zemmour’s political career has been a failure is his inability to conceal his Parisian snobbery. Having long complained about parents giving their children Arab-Muslim first names, the right-wing commentator then declared in 2021 that “giving a first name like Jordan or Kevin is, among the French working classes, a symptom of de-Francisation and Americanisation”.

His remark was not appreciated among that demographic and helps explain why, when Zemmour launched his right-wing Reconquest party in the same month, it never took off.

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has become the party of the white working-class, home to the Kevins and Jordans of France. Incidentally, among new-born girls in the 1990s, Cindy was particularly popular, either spelt that way (in tribute to the American Supermodel Cindy Crawford) or “Cyndi”, as in Lauper, the American singer.

Zemmour was right, however, to use the word “Americanisation” in describing how Uncle Sam’s influence increasingly reaches into every corner of French society.

French teenagers dress no differently from American ones; they wear the same labels, the same trainers, the same baseball caps. Boys listen to the same rap and hip-hop music, albeit with French lyrics, and the girls are as obsessed with Taylor Swift as their American sisters.

They are avid watchers of Netflix — France is fifth on the number of subscribers — and bon dieu, do they love their Big Macs. France is the biggest consumer per head of McDonalds outside the States with sales of over 6 billion euros and 2 million customers a day.

A 2022 report by the influential think-tank, Fondation Jean-Jaurès, identified a “McDonald’s Generation”: French people aged between 18 and 35 who eat at the chain at least once a month. Most of this generation are too young to remember what happened in 1999 when a French agricultural activist, José Bové, used his tractor to demolish a McDonald’s in the southern town of Millau.

It was the desperate act of a man raging against the dying of an old world. It is not just McDonald’s that is booming in France. In 2023, sales of fast-food broke the €20 billion mark for the first time. Burger chains are the preferred choice, but sandwich shops, fried chicken and pizza restaurants are also surging in popularity. So are sales of donuts and tacos, the latter enjoying a 26 per cent in sales in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The under 40s in France haven’t the time to spend an hour or two in a restaurant, washing down a confit de canard with a glass of red.

Wine is also falling out of favour with the French. The consumption of wine has dropped in France from 120 litres per person per year in 1960 to less than 40 litres in 2020. In 2022 there was a symbolic first for France; that year beer surpassed wine to become the country’s tipple of choice.

According to Jérôme Fourquet, what he describes as the “excessive Americanization” of France has three distinct phases. “[It] began in the 1950s-1960s in cinema, music and fashion, and continued in the 1980s-1990s with the appearance of new first names [Jordan, Dylan…], before spreading to food,” he says.

The most recent American import into France has the potential to be the most harmful. The “woke” identity politics that began to take hold on American campuses at the start of this century are now prevalent in many French universities, particularly the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris.

Students recently held a series of sit-ins in support of Palestine, similar to the ones staged by their American peers. In an interview with Le Figaro newspaper, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a French-educated Senegalese philosopher who teaches French and African philosophy at Columbia, said: “I’m not surprised by what’s happening today at Sciences Po. It’s the most American of French universities.”

Sciences Po and Columbia offer a double degree, and critical race theory has made its way across the Atlantic where it has found a receptive audience among the children of the French elite at Sciences Po.

The Americanisation of France has infiltrated every facet of French life, influencing the proletariat and the privileged in its different forms. Students at Sciences Po sneer at people called “Kevin” or “Jordan”, and they respond by snarling at their far left dogma.

It’s even reached into the political arena. Emmanuel Macron holds US-style rallies in vast stadiums and Bardella uses social media to get his message across just as a former Republican president did to great effect.

Neither of them have yet vowed to “Make France Great Again”, but it’s probably only a matter of time.