The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  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 b
ar.

  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 g
randes 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.