Forward: Samuel Johnson’s riff on female preachers and walking dogs — “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all” — comes to mind with the news from France of the creation of the UPFJ, a bland acronym that stands for the Union des Patriotes Francais Juifs, or the Union of French-Jewish Patriots.
That Jews can be French patriots is, of course, not surprising. Ever since the events of 1789 transformed them into citizens, French Jews have long privileged their Frenchness over their Jewishness. What is surprising, though, is that French Jews would join the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and (formerly) anti-Semitic party Front National.
Yet this is the raison d’être of the UPFJ. The organization, which recently held its first meeting, is the brainchild of Michel Thooris. When not working as a gendarme, Thooris — whose mother is Jewish — serves on the FN’s central committee. While the UPFJ has no formal ties with the FN, Thooris coordinated its creation with Louis Aliot, vice president of the FN and companion of Marine Le Pen. (A few years ago, Aliot, who accompanied Thooris on a visit to Israel in 2011, revealed that his maternal grandfather was an Algerian Jew.) Thooris acknowledges the informal but intriguing ties between his fledgling movement and the FN: “Everything that I say or do [as president of the UPFJ] will be seen” in the light of his membership in the FN.
Will Thooris, to echo Johnson, do it well? Will the UPFJ become a robust organization, dedicated to the goal of proportional voting (a mainstay of the FN platform) and to the ideal of a “non-communitarian” France (which aligns with Le Pen’s repeated attacks against the “communitarianism” of French Muslims)? Or will it, instead, remain little more than an idea? (As such bringing to mind another Johnson riposte, this time against a dim-witted critic: “Sir, you’ve just one idea, and it is the wrong idea.”)
For the moment, the organization is as skeletal as its website, carrying little more than its logo: a Jewish star framing Marianne, the personification of French republicanism. Only the coming months, as the political parties prepare the ground for the 2017 presidential election, will tell if Thooris can make this logo stick — if he, in a word, can do it well.
Should we be surprised, though, that Thooris has done it at all? It was not that long ago that the sight of a French Jew rallying to the FN was not just surprising, but shocking. The Front National, after all, is the 40-year-old vehicle of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Bolted together with scratched but salvageable parts from the ideological junkyard of France’s dimmer past, the FN at times sputtered, at times soared on the fumes of anti-Semitism. A political movement many believed was destined to become a detail of history instead proved to be remarkably resilient, not least because its leader insisted the Holocaust was itself a mere detail of history. While Le Pen’s repeated anti-Semitic forays limited the FN’s appeal to a wider public, they also galvanized his party’s base, composed of those who waxed nostalgic for the days when France was still Catholic, Algeria was still French, and the nation’s watchwords were “work, country, family.” (As for “liberty, equality, fraternity,” not so much.)
Inevitably, the occasional Jew nevertheless insisted on joining a club that, in principle, did not want him in the country, much less in its ranks. Most notable is the case of Robert Hemmerdinger, who after having fought in the Resistance became, like Jean-Marie Le Pen, a diehard militant of French Algeria. In the 1980s, after losing as an FN candidate for the European Parliament, Hemmerdinger founded the Cercle National des Français Juifs. While Hemmerdinger failed to square this particular circle — under his watch, the CNFJ never amounted to more than a curiosity — the FN nevertheless resurrected it in 2011. Its aim, as Aliot announced, was to counter the attacks made against the FN by the leaders of the French Jewish community.
