Christopher Caldwell writes for the Claremont Review of Books:
* [Jean Marie] Le Pen died in January at age 96, two weeks before Trump returned to office. Half a century ago, Le Pen called for an uprising against a dawning era of human rights, abortion, sexual liberation, transnational governance, and—above all—mass migration. He won the near-unanimous loathing of his country’s journalists and intellectuals, who accused him of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. For a time he was the most despised major politician in the West, rivaled only by Britain’s Enoch Powell. Not all of his views have been vindicated—far from it. But his general vision, which passed through Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul and Brexit on its way to Donald Trump, has triumphed…
* In 1972 France enacted its so-called Pleven Law, meant to fight racism. It could be described as France’s equivalent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But there was a twist: France’s principle of non-discrimination applies not only to races and sexes but also to citizenship status. Newly arrived migrants had the same rights to benefits, housing, and so on that French citizens did. As historian Éric Zemmour has noted, this turned the Pleven Law into a “program to melt the French nation into a planetary magma.” Bad enough for France. For Le Pen and others, it became impossible to argue for any limits on immigration without being accused of racism.
* In the winter of 1984—after Dreux and just before his breakthrough in European Union elections that spring—Le Pen was invited onto the popular television show L’heure de vérité (Moment of Truth) for an extensive interview with several of the country’s top journalists. It was an ambush. The financial writer Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber peppered Le Pen with racist statements drawn from various sources, many of them years old and none of which had been verifiably made by Le Pen himself, but all of which involved a person who could be tied to him in some way.
… the entire exercise seemed to be aimed at amalgamating Le Pen’s views on immigration and abortion with the worst enormities of modern times. There was something scurrilous about Servan-Schreiber’s drawing up a list of things for which Le Pen was not responsible and calling on him to disassociate (désolidariser) himself from them. That was a problem not only for Le Pen. The French had begun to notice that many journalists considered themselves entitled to drive dissidents out of public life on the flimsiest of accusations. Holding a politician to account no longer required proving wrongdoing. It was enough to assert that he had “refused to disassociate himself from” a misdeed he hadn’t committed, or “shared a platform with” somebody he didn’t know.
* Taboos erected around causes universally deemed worthy are the most powerful social institutions in human life. For that reason, they attract people who are attracted by power. The more irreproachable the cause, the stronger the attraction. That Holocaust remembrance in France, like civil rights in the United States, could be weaponized against political challengers did not discredit the moral core of it. But Le Pen’s voters noticed that his adversaries were trying to prosecute him out of the public square.
In a way, it helped him. The Pleven Law, again like the Civil Rights Act, generated litigation, giving a semi-official role to a non-profit sector that came to think of itself as an anti-racist police. The French referred to these pressure groups simply as les associations. Once the devastating effectiveness of guilt-by-association was proved for race questions, the practice became general. If Le Pen could be held responsible for anything another member of the National Front said, then ordinary people could be held responsible for any part of their political outlook that overlapped with Le Pen’s. This felt like censorship, and not just to Le Pen voters. Baiting of the media seemed to earn him public support.
* Days after his death, The New York Times wrote that Le Pen had been “considered so odious that many opponents refused to debate him.” One could just as easily say that he was so formidable in debate that his opponents invoked his odiousness to avoid humiliation. Le Pen was more like Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi than Donald Trump—he had a deep classical education and was at ease in his country’s literature and culture.
* In 2002, when Le Pen made his shocking advance into the second round of elections, Jacques Chirac announced he would not debate him, saying, “I cannot accept the banalization of intolerance and hate.” This marked the national triumph of the cordon sanitaire, a strategy of refusing all recognition and cooperation with Le Pen. First proposed by Socialists in 1987, not long after Chirac and Le Pen’s electoral alliance in Dreux, it has prevailed ever since, to disastrous effect. Singling out elected representatives for exclusion from supposedly neutral government institutions is a form of tyranny of the majority. In a populist era, it tends to win short-term tactical gains for the establishment at the cost of validating the ideological vision of the party it tries to exclude: the AfD in Germany, the Trump-era Republican Party in the United States, and the National Front in France. In all of these places, there has been a penultimate period when the establishment conservative party gets one last chance to prove itself to voters alienated from the political system—and then fails to. That moment came for the United States with the Bushes, father and son.
* The National Rally, as Marine Le Pen has renamed it, is now the largest political party in France. Only the persistence of the cordon sanitaire keeps her out of power, though the justifications for resorting to it have become increasingly bizarre. Last summer, French president Emmanuel Macron joined with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) in a “republican front” against Le Pen’s daughter in the second round of national elections, even as Mélenchon pursued an increasingly racial, sectarian, and anti-Israel politics on behalf of the immigrant-descended population that he calls the “New France.” Possibly due to the attachment of immigrant groups to the Palestinian cause, the Le Pen party, now firmly pro-Israel, took a sizable percentage of the Jewish vote in 2024. Even the Holocaust historian and activist Serge Klarsfeld, long an opinion leader for leftists in Paris, backed the Le Pen-led “Right” over the Mélenchon-led “Left.”
* …he set a kind of extremism in motion in the 1970s and ’80s. But it became outright dangerous to France only when interested elites tried to freeze out dissent—first through moral disapproval, then through litigation, and finally by extending the definition of “extremism” to embrace much of mainstream politics, from skepticism about immigration to defense of traditional sexual morality. French people didn’t want to follow Le Pen—and they never did. But the country changed and his ideas made inroads. Eventually voters, in France as elsewhere, would come to think of populism as the worst form of political uprising except for all the others.
