Right Brained

Andrew Hussey has a very interesting piece about the rise of Marseille, Lyon and Lille (I shall do as he does, and drop the retention in English of the archaic silent s, long discontinued in French, at the end of each of the first two of those place names), with all that that entails for national politics, including the forthcoming Presidential Election.

However, Hussey, a profoundly seasoned observer of the French political scene, seems to marvel that the University of Lyon 3 employs Bruno Gollnisch, Vice-President of the Front National. He compares it to the employment of David Irving as Registrar of the University of Manchester.

But pace Hussey, Gollnisch holds an academic rather than an administrative position, as Professor of Japanese. Hussey has missed the crucial point. The Humanities Division at Lyon 3 is well-known as an academic centre of the French Far Right because in France, as in many other Continental and Latin American countries, the Far Right has intellectuals. In Britain, it has to make do with David Irving.

Neo-Paganism would be laughed out in Britain. Liberal Protestantism proved easy prey to the Nazis, but the British version, by something not less than a miracle, instead maintained close ties to the opposition that was figures such as Barth. The heresy of intégrisme, so fundamental to the Fascism of the Latin world, is almost unknown to any of our Catholic subcultures. Had there still been all those kings, princes, grand dukes and the rest doing their stuff in their apparently funny uniforms across German-speaking Europe or the Italian Peninsula, then there would have been no gap for Hitler or Mussolini to fill. There is no such gap in Britain.

The Republic of South Africa was proclaimed as a specific act of anti-British revenge, while its Rhodesian satrapy was born in treason against the Queen. Just as there is no equivalent of the pro-Vichy tradition on which a BNP or EDL intellectual might draw, so there is no equivalent of the pro-OAS tradition, either. The pieds-noirs wanted to stay French. Ian Smith wanted to stop being British.