This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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On 9 June 2024, Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of the National Assembly. Parliamentary elections in France are held in two rounds; the day after the second round, on 8 July, the country woke to an Assembly divided into three parties of roughly equal weight, none of which seemed willing to ally with either of the two. In France, unlike in the United States, the government must have the support of a majority in the Assembly to be able to carry out its duties — or at least, it must not have against it a majority of MPs ready to overthrow it by voting a motion of censure.

In the new Assembly, this condition seems impossible to meet. France risks returning to the situation of chronic governmental instability that prevailed before the Fifth Republic, a situation in which, to have any hope of lasting, governments must meet Churchill’s description of Stanley Baldwin’s government in 1936: “Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent”.

However, on 30 June, after the first round, one party looked set to win a majority of seats and form the next government: the Rassemblement National (RN). In the first round, the RN and its affiliates won a third of the votes cast, far ahead of all the other parties, and projections for the second round predicted a number of seats close to an absolute majority. But on the evening of the second round, despite having the largest number of votes, the RN found itself a long way from the majority it had hoped for, with 123 of the 577 members of parliament.

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What had happened? Between the two rounds, all the other parties rallied against the RN and called on their voters to “block” the RN candidates at all costs — very effectively. In French political parlance, this phenomenon has a name: the “republican front”, and it’s nothing new. For around 30 years, the RN (which before 2018 was the Front National) has been making steady progress at the ballot box, election after election. But every time this progress could have given it access to major positions of responsibility, the “republican front” stood in its way.

The notion of a “republican front” against the RN/FN implies that this party would be “anti-republican”, i.e. that its arrival in power would mean nothing less than the end of democracy. According to this view, the RN is not an opposition party like any other that participates in a vigorous democratic debate; it is a party of reprobates, the accursed, those whose ideas exclude them from polite society altogether.

Admittedly, this view is held by some sections of the population — but it simply does not correspond to reality.

In terms of ideas, the RN today defends positions that were, broadly speaking, those of the so-called Gaullist right until the early 1980s: it is hostile to what the European Union has become and would like to return to forms of cooperation between European nations that are more respectful of the sovereignty and particularities of each; it is very critical of the effects of immigration, particularly non-European immigration; it continues to defend the old-fashioned idea that crime calls for punishment, not rehabilitation of the criminal; that the function of school is to teach children to read, write and count, as well as the history and geography of their country, and not to repair “social injustices”. In short, the RN could be characterised schematically as the party of national law and order. It has also become protectionist and a fervent defender of “French social model” welfarism.

These political views may be considered wrong, but it is hard to see how they pose a threat to the French Republic. What’s more, as all the opinion polls reveal, and as any attentive observer of French civic conversation can see, the RN’s diagnosis of the country’s situation, particularly on the issues of immigration and crime, is widely shared.

This growing support even has a name: insofar as, since its inception, the Front National, now Rassemblement National, has always been led by a member of the Le Pen family (first Jean-Marie, the father, then Marine, the daughter), political commentators have referred to this progression for a good 20 years as the “Lepenisation of minds”.

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Even if its ideas are gaining ground, at the decisive moment, the “national right” still does not inspire confidence, in the sense that it cannot convince people that it is capable of governing without causing a disaster, in much the same way as a nine-year-old child would have difficulty convincing his parents to let him drive their car, even if they approved of the destination that he proposed.

How can we understand this phenomenon, which has ultimately paralysed our political life and led to the institutional impasse in which we find ourselves?

Certainly, as Pierre Manent recently wrote, “the RN’s excommunication was for the political class a resource of government and a means of social and moral control which it used and abused in a way that profoundly altered the freedom and sincerity of civic conversation in our country”.

Making the RN the party of the reprobate, of those with whom no serious debate or compromise was possible, enabled other political parties, for a time, to win electoral victories on the cheap. Any criticism of immigration was effectively equated with racism, and any defence of national sovereignty in the face of the encroachment of the European Union was seen as “nationalism”, which led straight to war, or even the reopening of concentration camps (this argument was actually put forward). Being publicly accused of “defending the same ideas” as the FN/RN was practically a political and social death sentence, and in an election, having a FN/RN candidate as an opponent was almost always a guarantee of winning.

The latest to use this tactic is Emmanuel Macron, who has done everything to ensure that French political life is reduced to a duel between “the forces of progress”, led by him, and “the extremes”, essentially meaning the RN. This ensured him two very easy victories in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections against the RN president, Marine Le Pen.

However, this political tactic would not have been able to produce all its effects if the “national right” had not, since its appearance, given a lot of ammunition to its opponents.

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The Front National was founded in 1972, and in its early days it brought together those who could indeed be considered the untouchables of the French right: reactionaries nostalgic for the Vichy regime, staunch supporters of fascism or Nazism, rabid anti-Gaullists inconsolable over the loss of the French Empire.

Amongst its founders were two former Waffen-SS soldiers who fought in the Charlemagne division (an SS division made up mainly of French volunteers) and a former member of the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète), a paramilitary organisation of fanatical supporters of Algérie française who, on several occasions, attempted to assassinate de Gaulle.

Leading the party from its inception until 2011, Jean-Marie Le Pen came from a slightly different mould. After studying law, this son of a Breton fisherman, who died in 1942 after his boat was blown up by a German mine, chose to join the French army. He served for four years as a paratrooper and took part in France’s last colonial wars, in Indochina and Algeria. He would never forgive General de Gaulle for granting Algeria its independence.

In 1956, at the age of 27, Le Pen was elected as a member of parliament on the UDCA (Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans) ticket, a populist movement that combined the defence of small shopkeepers against the tax authorities with the defence of French Algeria. He was re-elected in 1958 on the ticket of another of the micro-parties that proliferated under the Fourth Republic, the CNIP (Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans).

In 1963, he was campaign manager for Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a lawyer who had made a name for himself defending the collaborationist writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the general Raoul Salan, who had attempted a military coup against de Gaulle in 1961. Tixier-Vignancourt obtained just over 5 per cent of the vote in the 1965 presidential election.

Compared to the exalted “revolutionary right” who made up the bulk of the Front National’s meagre troops in 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen appeared almost like a moderate. He had the enormous advantage of political experience, having twice been a member of parliament.

From this motley collection of people who had little more in common than their hatreds, Jean-Marie Le Pen succeeded in building a major political movement. He couldn’t stand in the 1981 presidential election, because he hadn’t even been able to gather the necessary support (the French Constitution stipulates that, in order to stand as president, you have to collect the signatures of 500 people holding an elected office).

In 2002, he reached the second round of the election, against incumbent president Jacques Chirac. By 2024, the Rassemblement National has become France’s leading political party in terms of the number of voters it attracts.

To achieve this, the FN/RN had gradually taken on the subjects that the so-called moderate right no longer dared to defend, or only defended with lip service and increasingly transparent bad faith: national sovereignty, patriotism, the desire to preserve France’s culture and unity, firmness in the face of crime, etc. What enabled Le Pen to transform a tiny group into a party capable of attracting millions of voters is also what blocked his path to power, however.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was chosen in 1972 because he possessed the authoritarian and fearless temperament needed to lead his disparate and undisciplined troops, and because he knew how to galvanise a crowd from a podium. But it soon became clear he was more interested in fighting than in winning and wielding power. In his temperament was a strong dose of anarchism and a pure spirit of contradiction, as well as an immoderate taste for brawling, whether verbally or physically.

In his long career, one episode has remained justly famous, an episode that illustrates better than a long speech what made Le Pen such a good leader of the French far right and such a bad contender for government responsibilities.

It was 30 May 1997. The campaign for the legislative elections was in full swing, and Jean-Marie Le Pen had come to support the candidacy of one of his daughters, Marie-Caroline, who was standing in Mantes-la-Jolie, a constituency in the Paris region. He was immediately greeted by hostile demonstrators, who surrounded his car.

Furious, Le Pen (who was 69 at the time) got out of the car and started fighting with the demonstrators. In the process, he roughed up the Socialist mayor who was amongst the protesters. His bodyguards and a few police officers restored a precarious calm. Le Pen then marched through the streets of Mantes-la-Jolie, whilst shouted at and jeered at. In front of the television cameras, which had filmed everything from the start, he boasted: “Whenever I’ve been attacked, I’ve never been afraid of another man. Or even several!”

A little later, he tried again to start a fist fight and had to be restrained by his bodyguards. He called out to a demonstrator: “I’m going to make you run, ginger, you’ll see. What? Faggot!” Grinning from ear to ear, he gloated and said: “Ah! That makes me feel younger!”

The televised footage immediately made the rounds of France, and it is still easy to find on the internet. The whole of Le Pen is there: physical courage and brutality, machismo, a taste for bravado and defiance, a flair for the formulaic and a complete disregard for the consequences of his own words. The expression “a loose cannon” perfectly describes his temperament.

On several occasions, Le Pen was convicted by the French courts for defence of war crimes and incitement to racial hatred — although unfortunately, in the current state of French legislation and jurisprudence concerning freedom of expression, this didn’t prove much. Is Le Pen racist and anti-Semitic, as he has often been accused of being? When he took over the leadership of the Front National, he was surrounded by racists and anti-Semites, which obviously didn’t bother him.

Since then, he has regularly made outrageous puns and used deliberately ambiguous formulas, which have shocked his opponents as much as they have dismayed his movement’s cadres (in 1987, he described the gas chambers as “a mere detail in the history of the Second World War”). But it’s impossible to know whether these remarks reflected his deep convictions or his immoderate passion for anything that might “choquer le bourgeois”.

The Mantes-la-Jolie episode underlines another very important element: the clannish nature of the Front National. If Le Pen started a fist fight in front of the television cameras, it was because he had come to support the candidacy of one of his daughters. Indeed, over the years, he transformed the Front National into a sort of small family business.

The Front National was Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the more so because the personal fortune he inherited in 1976 from Hubert Lambert, a childless descendant of a wealthy industrialist family, enabled him to be the main funder of his party. As a result, only someone bearing the Le Pen name could have succeeded him at the head of the party. That someone would be his youngest daughter, Marine, to whom he finally, reluctantly agreed, at the age of 83, to hand over the reins.

It is therefore easy to understand that what earned Jean-Marie Le Pen the unwavering loyalty of his party’s militants was also what prevented him from gaining access to power. Even if one might agree with some of his diagnoses of the state of the country and some of the proposed remedies — and a growing number of voters did — it was impossible to trust someone to govern France who was clearly a brutal, egocentric and uncontrollable clan leader.

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When Marine Le Pen took over the leadership in 2011, she set about erasing some of the more off-putting aspects of the party that she had inherited from her father.

With her in charge, there were no more obnoxious and provocative little phrases, and little by little the least presentable figures in the party were pushed towards the exit. The aim was to turn the Front National into a party with all the trappings of respectability. Jean-Marie Le Pen clearly took this as a form of betrayal and very quickly opposed his daughter, multiplying criticisms and polemical remarks, until, in 2015, she finally expelled him from the party he had created.

This “de-demonisation” strategy sought by Marine Le Pen had its raison d’être, and it undoubtedly contributed to her twice reaching the second round of the presidential election. But the fact that she was soundly defeated on both occasions, and the disappointment of the last legislative election, show that her diagnosis was incomplete, to say the least.

In the 40 years since the “national right” first appeared on the political scene (the Front National’s first electoral successes date back to the municipal elections of 1983), it has been incapable of creating the smallest trade union, the smallest network of associations, the smallest publishing house, or of acquiring the slightest base of social influence or prestige, whether in the media or the universities. In short, it has been incapable of transforming its electoral base into a social base.

In fact, as Pierre Manent again says, the FN/RN has “prospered not through the energy or quality of its action, but in response, or rather as a mechanical backlash so to speak, to the increasingly gaping failings of successive governments”.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was never really interested in running France. His role as a noisy provocateur was enough to keep him happy, and the patrimonial control he exercised over his party was incompatible with making it capable of governing.

Marine Le Pen may have more desire than her father to exercise the supreme responsibilities of the State, but she is no better prepared than he was. She continues to wait for power to fall into her lap through the failings of the opposite camp.

Thus, “de-demonisation” has not only consisted of putting an end to racist or anti-Semitic provocations; it has also consisted of talking less and less often about controversial subjects — notably immigration and Islam — and talking more and more often about subjects that are supposed to be more electorally profitable, namely the wallets of the French people.

The very simple idea was that it was no longer necessary to talk about these dangerous subjects, because everyone was supposed to know what the RN thought about them. It was therefore possible to concentrate on other issues and attract new voters without losing those it already had.

In short, the tactic of de-demonisation supposed that the debate was closed on the issues that were not being raised, that what the RN was defending was “common sense” so self-evident that only a kind of collective hypnosis prevented us from considering it as such. If only it kept quiet long enough, the spell would wear off and the obvious would become clear.

But no major political issue is ever definitively closed. There is never an end to the thankless and painstaking task of transforming broad principles into practical and efficient proposals. Making the right diagnosis and coming up with the right remedies are two different things, particularly in a modern democracy, whose workings are complex and where official and unofficial checks and balances abound.

To desert this terrain is simply to abandon it to the adversary. It is also tantamount to abandoning the hope of rallying to one’s side those for whom “common sense” is not enough and who, because they have some experience of public affairs, know that there are no simple solutions, in other words, to put it briefly, the “elites” — who are millions strong.

The fact is that, in the nearly 15 years since Marine Le Pen took it over, the RN has made no progress whatsoever in acquiring the broad social base that is essential if one is to govern democratically a great nation. Whilst here and there a few individuals belonging to the “elite” rally to the RN in the hope of being elected, no large organisation, no official body, no prestigious or influential society ever supports its positions or declares itself in its favour. Quite the contrary, in fact. The way the party operates remains just as clannish as ever.

As proof of these two assertions: who did the Rassemblement National put forward during the legislative elections that have just ended? Who was destined to become prime minister if the RN won a majority of seats in the Assembly? Jordan Bardella: a 28-year-old with no professional experience, no experience of handling public affairs and no experience of holding any kind of leadership position outside his political party. He had never achieved anything in his life, not even a modest higher education, had never carried out a difficult project, and had never experienced a serious failure.

His only real claim to fame, and the one that seems to have earned him his meteoric rise in the RN, was his ability to shine on television and to attract almost two million subscribers on TikTok — and, according to some malicious tongues, to have a relationship with one of Marine Le Pen’s nieces.

This choice alone proved conclusively that the RN was totally unprepared to assume the responsibilities it demanded. Either the RN (meaning, in fact, Marine Le Pen) does not understand what it means to run a country like France and the kind of qualities that this requires, or its ranks are devoid of figures offering the minimum guarantees necessary.

In either case, the result is the same: that of the last legislative elections. It will be the same over and over again, as long as the French consider competence and experience to be politically relevant requirements.

The RN is now by far the leading party in France, but it is a party that more than two-thirds of the French regard as unfit to govern. This means that political alternation, the lifeblood of democracy, has become impossible and that France’s representative institutions are in the process of breaking down.

One of three things is possible: either the RN faces up to this truth and admits that it still has a lot of work to do before it can legitimately claim to take the final step; or it doesn’t see what the problem is and considers these legislative elections to be a great victory that heralds even greater ones (in the same way that Marine Le Pen considered her defeats in 2017 and 2022 to be resounding successes); or it sees where the problem lies but believes in its lucky star and that the French, in a moment of folly or supreme exasperation (the two are often the same), will end up entrusting their country to it.

The first hypothesis is the least likely.