Last February the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its convention in Washington, D.C. This annual gathering is a kind of right-wing Davos where insiders and wannabes come to see what’s new. The opening speaker, not so new, was Vice President Mike Pence. The next speaker, very new, was a stylish Frenchwoman still in her twenties named Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.
Marion, as
she is widely called in France, is a granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the
founder of the far-right National Front party, and a niece of Marine Le Pen,
its current president. The French first encountered Marion as a child, beaming
in her grandfather’s arms in his campaign posters (see illustration on page
46), and she has never disappeared from the public scene. In 2012, at the age
of twenty-two, she entered Parliament as the youngest deputy since the French
Revolution. But she decided not to run for reelection in 2017, on the pretext
that she wanted to spend more time with her family. Instead she’s been making
big plans.1
Her
performance at CPAC was unusual, and one wonders what the early
morning audience made of her. Unlike her hotheaded grandfather and aunt, Marion
is always calm and collected, sounds sincere, and is intellectually inclined.
In a slight, charming French accent she began by contrasting the independence
of the United States with France’s “subjection” to the EU, as a member of
which, she claimed, it is unable to set its own economic and foreign policy or
to defend its borders against illegal immigration and the presence of an Islamic
“counter-society” on its territory.
But then
she set out in a surprising direction. Before a Republican audience of private
property absolutists and gun rights fanatics she attacked the principle of
individualism, proclaiming that the “reign of egoism” was at the bottom of all
our social ills. As an example she pointed to a global economy that turns
foreign workers into slaves and throws domestic workers out of jobs. She then
closed by extolling the virtues of tradition, invoking a maxim often attributed
to Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the cult of ashes, it is the transmission
of fire.” Needless to say, this was the only reference by
a CPAC speaker to a nineteenth-century German composer.
Something
new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic
populist outbursts. Ideas are being developed, and transnational networks for
disseminating them are being established. Journalists have treated as a mere
vanity project Steve Bannon’s efforts to bring European populist parties and thinkers
together under the umbrella of what he calls The Movement. But his instincts,
as in American politics, are in tune with the times. (Indeed, one month after
Marion’s appearance at CPAC, Bannon addressed the annual convention of the
National Front.) In countries as diverse as France, Poland, Hungary, Austria,
Germany, and Italy, efforts are underway to develop a coherent ideology that
would mobilize Europeans angry about immigration, economic dislocation, the
European Union, and social liberalization, and then use that ideology to
govern. Now is the time to start paying attention to the ideas of what seems to
be an evolving right-wing Popular Front. France is a good place to start.
The French
left, attached to republican secularism, has never had much feel for Catholic
life and is often caught unawares when a line has been crossed. In early 1984
the government of François Mitterrand proposed a law that would have brought
Catholic schools under greater government control and pressured their teachers
to become public employees. That June nearly a million Catholics marched in
Paris in protest, and many more throughout the country. Mitterrand’s prime
minister, Pierre Mauroy, was forced to resign, and the proposal was withdrawn.
It was an important moment for lay Catholics, who discovered that despite the
official secularism of the French state they remained a cultural force, and
sometimes could be a political one.
In 1999 the
government of Gaullist president Jacques Chirac passed legislation creating a
new legal status, dubbed a pacte civil de solidarité (civil
solidarity pact, or PACS), for long-term couples who required legal
protections regarding inheritance and other end-of-life issues but did not want
to get married. Coming not long after the HIV/AIDS epidemic,
the PACS was largely conceived to help the gay community but soon
became popular with heterosexual couples wanting a more easily dissolved bond.
The number of straight couples pacsés annually is now
approaching the number of those getting married, and the arrangement for gays
and lesbians is uncontroversial.
To build on
that success, during his campaign for the French presidency in 2012 the
Socialist candidate François Hollande promised to legalize same-sex marriage
and open up adoption and additional rights to gay and lesbian couples. Mariage
Pour Tous—marriage for everyone—was the slogan. Once in office Hollande
moved to fulfill his campaign promise, but he repeated Mitterrand’s mistake by
failing to anticipate the strong right-wing reaction against it. Shortly after
his inauguration, a network of laypeople drawn heavily from Catholic
Pentecostal prayer groups began to form. They called themselves La
Manif Pour Tous—the Demonstration for Everyone.
By January
2013, just before Parliament approved gay marriage, La Manif was
able to draw over 300,000 people to a demonstration opposing it in Paris,
stunning the government and the media. What especially surprised them was the
ludic atmosphere of the protest, which was more like a gay pride parade than a
pilgrimage to Compostela. There were lots of young people marching, but rather
than rainbow banners they waved pink and blue ones representing boys and girls.
Slogans on the placards had a May ’68 lilt: François resist, prove you
exist. To top it off, the spokeswoman for La Manifwas a
flamboyantly dressed comedienne and performance artist who goes by the name
Frigide Barjot and played in a band called the Dead Pompidous.
Where did
these people come from? After all, France is no longer a Catholic country, or
so we’re told. While it’s true that fewer and fewer French people baptize their
children and attend mass, nearly two thirds still identify as Catholic, and
roughly 40 percent of those declare themselves to be “practicing,” whatever
that means. More importantly, as a Pew study found last year, those French who
do identify as Catholic—especially those who attend Mass regularly—are
significantly more right-wing in their political views than those who do not.
This is
consistent with trends in Eastern Europe, where Pew found that Orthodox
Christian self-identification has actually been rising, along with nationalism,
confounding post-1989 expectations. That may indicate that the relationship between
religious and political identification is reversing in Europe—that it is
no longer religious affiliation that helps determine one’s political views, but
one’s political views that help determine whether one self-identifies as
religious. The prerequisites for a European Christian nationalist movement may
be falling into place, as Hungarian president Viktor Orbán has long been
predicting.
Whatever
motivated the many thousands of Catholics who participated in the
original Manif and similar demonstrations across France, it
soon bore political fruit.2 Some of its leaders quickly formed a
political action group called Sens Commun, which, though small, nearly helped
to elect a president in 2017. Its preferred candidate was François Fillon, a
straitlaced former prime minister and practicing conservative Catholic who
vocally supported La Manif and had close ties to Sens Commun.
He was explicit about his religious views during the primary of his party, the
Republicans, at the end of 2016—opposing marriage, adoption, and surrogacy for
gay and lesbian couples—and surprised everyone by winning. Fillon came out of
the primary with very high poll numbers, and given the Socialists’ deep
unpopularity after the Hollande years and the inability of the National Front
to gain the support of more than one third of the French electorate, many
considered him the front-runner.
But just as
Fillon began his national campaign, Le Canard enchaîné, a newspaper
that mixes satire with investigative journalism, revealed that his wife had
received over half a million euros for no-show jobs over the years, and that he
had accepted a number of favors from businessmen, including—Paul
Manafort–style—suits costing tens of thousands of euros. For a man
running on the slogan “the courage of truth,” it was a disaster. He was
indicted, staff abandoned him, but he refused to drop out of the race. This
provided an opening for the eventual victor, the centrist Emmanuel Macron. But
we should bear in mind that despite the scandal, Fillon won 20 percent of the
first-round votes, compared to Macron’s 24 and Marine Le Pen’s 21 percent. Had
he not imploded, there is a good chance that he would be president and we would
be telling ourselves very different stories about what’s really going on in
Europe today.
The
Catholic right’s campaign against same-sex marriage was doomed to fail, and it
did. A large majority of the French support same-sex marriage, although only
about seven thousand couples avail themselves of it each year. Yet there are
reasons to think that the experience of La Manif could affect
French politics for some time to come.
The first
reason is that it revealed an unoccupied ideological space between the
mainstream Republicans and the National Front. Journalists tend to present an
overly simple picture of populism in contemporary European politics. They
imagine there is a clear line separating legacy conservative parties like the
Republicans, which have made their peace with the neoliberal European order,
from xenophobic populist ones like the National Front, which would bring down
the EU, destroy liberal institutions, and drive out as many immigrants and
especially Muslims as possible.
These
journalists have had trouble imagining that there might be a third force on the
right that is not represented by either the establishment parties or the
xenophobic populists. This narrowness of vision has made it difficult for even
seasoned observers to understand the supporters of La Manif, who
mobilized around what Americans call social issues and feel they have no real
political home today. The Republicans have no governing ideology apart from
globalist economics and worship of the state, and in keeping with their
Gaullist secular heritage have traditionally treated moral and religious issues
as strictly personal, at least until Fillon’s anomalous candidacy. The National
Front is nearly as secular and even less ideologically coherent, having served
more as a refuge for history’s detritus—Vichy collaborators,
resentful pieds noirs driven out of Algeria, Joan of Arc
romantics, Jew- and Muslim-haters, skinheads—than as a party with a
positive program for France’s future. A mayor once close to it now aptly calls
it the “Dien Bien Phu right.”
The other
reason La Manif might continue to matter is that it proved to
be a consciousness-raising experience for a group of sharp young intellectuals,
mainly Catholic conservatives, who see themselves as the avant-garde of this
third force. In the last five years they have become a media presence, writing
in newspapers like Le Figaro and newsweeklies like Le
Point and Valeurs actuelles (Contemporary Values),
founding new magazines and websites (Limite, L’Incorrect),
publishing books, and making regular television appearances. People are paying
attention, and a sound, impartial book on them has just appeared.3
Whether
anything politically significant will come out of this activity is difficult to
know, given that intellectual fashions in France change about as quickly as
the plat du jour. This past summer I spent some time reading and
meeting these young writers in Paris and discovered more of an ecosystem than a
cohesive, disciplined movement. Still, it was striking how serious they are and
how they differ from American conservatives. They share two convictions: that a
robust conservatism is the only coherent alternative to what they call the
neoliberal cosmopolitanism of our time, and that resources for such a
conservatism can be found on both sides of the traditional left–right divide.
More surprising still, they are all fans of Bernie Sanders.
The
intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which
come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist
Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin
Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic
philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically leftist,
culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—“uprootedness
uproots everything except the need for roots”—get repeated like mantras.
They predictably reject the European Union, same-sex marriage, and mass
immigration. But they also reject unregulated global financial markets,
neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism,
and AGFAM (Apple-Google-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft).
That mélange may
sound odd to our ears, but it is far more consistent than the positions of
contemporary American conservatives. Continental conservatism going back to the
nineteenth century has always rested on an organic conception of society. It
sees Europe as a single Christian civilization composed of different nations
with distinct languages and customs. These nations are composed of families,
which are organisms, too, with differing but complementary roles and duties for
mothers, fathers, and children. On this view, the fundamental task of society
is to transmit knowledge, morality, and culture to future generations,
perpetuating the life of the civilizational organism. It is not to serve an
agglomeration of autonomous individuals bearing rights.
Most of
these young French conservatives’ arguments presume this organic conception.
Why do they consider the European Union a danger? Because it rejects the
cultural-religious foundation of Europe and tries to found it instead on the
economic self-interest of individuals. To make matters worse, they suggest, the
EU has encouraged the immigration of people from a different and incompatible
civilization (Islam), stretching old bonds even further. Then, rather than
fostering self-determination and a healthy diversity among nations, the EU has
been conducting a slow coup d’état in the name of economic efficiency and
homogenization, centralizing power in Brussels. Finally, in putting pressure on
countries to conform to onerous fiscal policies that only benefit the rich, the
EU has prevented them from taking care of their most vulnerable citizens and
maintaining social solidarity. Now, in their view, the family must fend for
itself in an economic world without borders, in a culture that willfully
ignores its needs. Unlike their American counterparts, who celebrate the
economic forces that most put “the family” they idealize under strain, the
young French conservatives apply their organic vision to the economy as well,
arguing that it must be subordinate to social needs.
Most
surprising for an American reader is the strong environmentalism of these young
writers, who entertain the notion that conservatives should, well, conserve.
Their best journal is the colorful, well-designed quarterly Limite,
which is subtitled “a review of integral ecology” and publishes criticism of
neoliberal economics and environmental degradation as severe as anything one
finds on the American left. (No climate denial here.) Some writers are
no-growth advocates; others are reading Proudhon and pushing for a
decentralized economy of local collectives. Others still have left the city and
write about their experiences running organic farms, while denouncing
agribusiness, genetically modified crops, and suburbanization along the way.
They all seem inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ (2015),
a comprehensive statement of Catholic social teaching on the environment and
economic justice.
Coming out
of La Manif, these young conservatives’ views on family and
sexuality are traditionalist Catholic. But the arguments they make for them are
strictly secular. In making the case for a return to older norms they point to
real problems: dropping rates of family formation, delayed child-bearing,
rising rates of single parenthood, adolescents steeped in porn and confused
about their sexuality, and harried parents and children eating separately while
checking their phones. All this, they argue, is the result of our radical
individualism, which blinds us to the social need for strong, stable families.
What these young Catholics can’t see is that gay couples wanting to wed and
have children are looking to create such families and to transmit their values
to another generation. There is no more conservative instinct.
A number of
young women have been promoting what they call an “alter-feminism” that rejects
what they see as the “career fetishism” of contemporary feminism, which
unwittingly reinforces the capitalist ideology that slaving for a boss is
freedom. They are in no way arguing that women should stay home if they don’t
want to; rather they think women need a more realistic image of themselves than
contemporary capitalism and feminism give them. Marianne Durano, in her recent
book Mon corps ne vous appartient pas (My Body Does Not Belong
to You), puts it this way:
We are the
victims of a worldview in which we are supposed to live it up until the age of
25, then work like fiends from 25 to 40 (the age when you’re at the bottom of
the professional scrap heap), avoid commitments and having children before 30.
All of this goes completely against the rhythm of women’s lives.
Eugénie
Bastié, another alter-feminist, takes on Simone de Beauvoir in her book Adieu
mademoiselle. She praises the first-wave feminist struggle for achieving
equal legal rights for women, but criticizes Beauvoir and subsequent French
feminists for “disembodying” women, treating them as thinking and desiring
creatures but not as reproducing ones who, by and large, eventually want
husbands and families.
Whatever
one thinks of these conservative ideas about society and the economy, they form
a coherent worldview. The same cannot really be said about the establishment
left and right in Europe today. The left opposes the uncontrolled fluidity of
the global economy and wants to rein it in on behalf of workers, while it
celebrates immigration, multiculturalism, and fluid gender roles that large
numbers of workers reject. The establishment right reverses those positions,
denouncing the free circulation of people for destabilizing society, while
promoting the free circulation of capital, which does exactly that. These
French conservatives criticize uncontrolled fluidity in both its neoliberal and
cosmopolitan forms.
But what
exactly do they propose instead? Like Marxists in the past who were vague about
what communism would actually entail, they seem less concerned with defining
the order they have in mind than with working to establish it. Though they are
only a small group with no popular following, they are already asking
themselves grand strategic questions. (The point of little magazines is to
think big in them.) Could one restore organic connections between individuals
and families, families and nations, nations and civilization? If so, how?
Through direct political action? By seeking political power directly? Or by
finding a way to slowly transform Western culture from within, as a prelude to
establishing a new politics? Most of these writers think they need to change
minds first. That is why they can’t seem to get through an article, or even a
meal, without mentioning Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci,
one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, died in 1937 after a long
imprisonment in Mussolini’s jails, and left behind mounds of notebooks with
fertile thoughts on politics and culture. He is best remembered today for the
concept of “cultural hegemony”—the idea that capitalism is not only
sustained by the relation of forces of production, as Marx thought, but also by
cultural assumptions that serve as enablers, weakening the will to resist. His
experience with Italian workers convinced him that unless they were freed from
Catholic beliefs about sin, fate, and authority, they would never rise up and
make revolution. That necessitated a new class of engaged intellectuals who
would work as a counter-hegemonic force to undermine the dominant culture and
to shape an alternative one that the working class could migrate to.
I don’t
have the impression that these young writers have made their way through
Gramsci’s multivolume Prison Notebooks. Instead he’s invoked as a
kind of conversational talisman to signal that the person writing or speaking
is a cultural activist, not just an observer. But what would counter-hegemony
actually require? Up until this point I have portrayed these young
conservatives, perhaps a little too neatly, as sharing a general outlook and
set of principles. But as soon as Lenin’s old question comes up—What is to
be done?—important and consequential divergences among them become
apparent. Two styles of conservative engagement seem to be developing.
If you read
a magazine like Limite, you get the impression that conservative
counter-hegemony would involve leaving the city for a small town or village,
getting involved in local schools, parishes, and environmental associations,
and especially raising children with conservative values—in other words,
becoming an example of an alternative way of living. This ecological
conservativism appears open, generous, and rooted in everyday life, as well as
in traditional Catholic social teachings.
But if you
read publications like the daily Figaro, Valeurs actuelles,
and especially the confrontational L’Incorrect, you get another
impression altogether. There the conservatism is aggressive, dismissive of
contemporary culture, and focused on waging a Kulturkampf against
the 1968 generation, a particular obsession. As Jacques de Guillebon, the
thirty-nine-year-old editor of L’Incorrect, put it in his magazine,
“The legitimate heirs of ’68…will end collapsing into the latrines of
post-cisgender, transracial, blue-haired boredom…. The end is near.” To bring
it about, another writer suggested, “we need a right with a real project that
is revolutionary, identitarian, and reactionary, capable of attracting the
working and middle classes.” This group, though not overtly racist, is deeply
suspicious of Islam, which the Limite writers never mention.
Not just of radical Islamism, or Muslim men’s treatment of women, or the
refusal of some Muslim students to study evolution—all genuine issues—but
even of moderate, assimilated Islam.4
All this
grand talk of an open culture war would hardly be worth taking seriously except
for the fact that the combative wing of this group now has the ear of Marion
Maréchal. Marion used to be difficult to place ideologically. She was more
socially conservative than the National Front leadership but more neoliberal in
economics. That’s changed. In her speech at CPAC she spoke in culture
war terms, giving La Manif as an example of the readiness of
young French conservatives to “take back their country.” And she described
their aims in the language of social organicism:
Without the
nation, without the family, without the limits of the common good, natural law
and collective morality disappear as the reign of egoism continues. Today even
children have become merchandise. We hear in public debates that we have the
right to order a child from a catalogue, we have the right to rent a woman’s
womb…. Is this the freedom that we want? No. We don’t want this atomized world
of individuals without gender, without fathers, without mothers, and without
nation.
She then
continued in a Gramscian vein:
Our fight
cannot only take place in elections. We need to convey our ideas through the
media, culture, and education to stop the domination of the liberals and
socialists. We have to train leaders of tomorrow, those who will have courage,
the determination, and the skills to defend the interests of their people.
Then she
surprised everyone in France by announcing to an American audience that she was
starting a private graduate school to do just that. Three months later her
Institute of Social, Economic, and Political Sciences (ISSEP) opened in Lyon,
with the aim, Marion said, of displacing the culture that dominates our
“nomadic, globalized, deracinated liberal system.” It is basically a business
school but will supposedly offer great books courses in philosophy, literature,
history, and rhetoric, as well as practical ones on management and “political
and cultural combat.” The person responsible for establishing the curriculum is
Jacques de Guillebon.
Not many of
the French writers and journalists I know are taking these intellectual
developments very seriously. They prefer to cast the young conservatives and
their magazines as witting and unwitting soldiers in Marine Le Pen’s campaign
to “de-demonize” the National Front, rather than as a potential third force. I
think they are wrong not to pay attention, much as they were wrong not to take
the free-market ideology of Reagan and Thatcher seriously back in the 1980s.
The left has an old, bad habit of underestimating its adversaries and
explaining away their ideas as mere camouflage for despicable attitudes and
passions. Such attitudes and passions may be there, but ideas have an
autonomous power to shape and channel, to moderate or inflame them.
And these
conservative ideas could have repercussions beyond France’s borders. One possibility
is that a renewed, more classical organic conservatism could serve as a
moderating force in European democracies currently under stress. There are many
who feel buffeted by the forces of the global economy, frustrated by the
inability of governments to control the flow of illegal immigration, resentful
of EU rules, and uncomfortable with rapidly changing moral codes regarding
matters like sexuality. Until now these concerns have only been addressed, and
then exploited, by far-right populist demagogues. If there is a part of the
electorate that simply dreams of living in a more stable, less fluid world,
economically and culturally—people who are not primarily driven by xenophobic
anti-elitism—then a moderate conservative movement might serve as a bulwark
against the alt-right furies by stressing tradition, solidarity, and care for
the earth.
A different
scenario is that the aggressive form of conservatism that one also sees in
France would serve instead as a powerful tool for building a pan-European reactionary
Christian nationalism along the lines laid out in the early twentieth century
by Charles Maurras, the French anti-Semitic champion of “integral nationalism”
who became the master thinker of Vichy. It is one thing to convince populist
leaders in Western and Eastern Europe today that they have common practical
interests and should work together, as Steve Bannon is trying to do. It is
quite another, more threatening thing to imagine those leaders having a
developed ideology at their disposal for recruiting young cadres and cultural
elites and connecting them at the Continental level for joint political action.
If all
French eyes are not on Marion, they should be. Marion is not her grandfather,
though within the soap-operatic Le Pen family she defends him. Nor is she her
aunt, who is crude and corrupt, and whose efforts to put new lipstick on the
family party have failed. Nor, I think, will her fortunes be tied to those of
the Rassemblement National né Front National. Emmanuel Macron
has shown that a “movement” disdaining mainline parties can win elections in
France (though perhaps not govern and get reelected). If Marion were to launch
such a movement and make it revolve around herself as Macron has done, she
could very well gather the right together while seeming personally to transcend
it. Then she would be poised to work in concert with governing right-wing
parties in other countries.
Modern
history has taught us that ideas promoted by obscure intellectuals writing in
little magazines have a way of escaping the often benign intentions of their
champions. There are two lessons we might draw from that history when reading
the new young French intellectuals on the right. First, distrust conservatives
in a hurry. Second, brush up your Gramsci.
- This past summer
both she and the National Front changed their names. She has dropped Le Pen and
insists on being called simply Marion Maréchal. Meanwhile her aunt has
officially rebranded her party as the Rassemblement National (RN). Rassembler is
French political jargon for bringing in and unifying people for a common cause,
something like “big tent” in American English. ↩
- It also
inspired the spectacular Mishima-like suicide of one of its supporters, the
nationalist historian Dominique Venner, who a few days after passage of the gay
marriage law left a suicide note on the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral and then
blew his brains out in front of over a thousand tourists and worshipers. ↩
- Pascale
Tournier, Le vieux monde est de retour: Enquête sur les nouveaux
conservateurs (The Old World Is Back: A Study of the New
Conservatives) (Paris: Stock, 2018). ↩
- One night I
attended a dinner with some young writers in a bistro whose owner, obviously a
National Front supporter, was complaining loudly that a public television
station was about to run a special for Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of
Ramadan. Curious, I watched the show when I got home. It was utterly banal, an
extravaganza that resembled a wedding, with tables of guests watching pop
performers. The hostess went around asking those guests what Ramadan meant to
them, and one young woman’s response was typical: “I want to live my life, as a
woman, and succeed.” A self-made Muslim businesswoman, obviously quite successful,
was also interviewed and spoke of her faith…in herself. It was an
assimilationist’s dream.