Tuesday 8 May 2012

Front Anti-National?

Like the UMP and its numerous Gaullist and Giscardien predecessor formations, the Front National, rather than individuals, factions and tendencies within it, is not immediately easy to locate within René Rémond’s theory of the three French right wings, les trois droites.

Both the UMP and, to a lesser extent, the FN now exhibit, far more than they used to, Orléanism as the bourgeois and economically liberal Franco-Whiggery against which stand both the populist traditionalism of the Legitimists and the populist authoritarianism of the Bonapartists. There is a certain continuation of Legitimism in the more-or-less Lefebvrist wing of the FN and its electorate, but also in the Social Catholicism of a section of the old UDF and of those who look to the Gaullist conception of the strong French State with a strong Head to deliver the goods. Not for nothing did Philippe de Villiers withdraw from the UDF over Maastricht as surely as Charles Pasqua withdrew first internally and then externally from the RPR.

Although Gaullism does have obvious Bonapartist roots, just as Boulangism did, yet the popular followings for either and both were and are at least as much Legitimist, especially deep in the countryside. Especially there, the anti-Gaullist Right is not entirely Orléanist, either; not for nothing did it most recently rally to a man whose name was not merely Giscard, but Giscard d’Estaing.  And where does anyone think that the popular constituency for an anti-Marxist Socialist Party first came from, or very largely still does come from?

Mitterrand could never decide whether he wanted to be Louis XIV or Napoleon. But he certainly wanted to be one or the other. Deep down, at least, one or the other was what huge numbers of his voters wanted him to be, too. Otherwise, he would never have won. And when he did win, he gave a job to Poujade, in whom the Legitimist and Bonapartist populisms of the Right met, who had endorsed him and who did so again. To all of which, what says François Hollande, who was endorsed, after all, both by François Bayrou and by Jacques Chirac?

But more, what says the quite possibly disintegrating UMP? Like the Carlists and the Jacobites to whom they were so closely related ideologically and dynastically, the Legitimists celebrated patois (it was more than a century after the Revolution before anything more than half the population of France spoke French), local festivals and folk-customs, the ancient provincial boundaries, and everything else that Jacobins, Whigs, and their imitators or collaborators would wish to iron out, to put it at its very mildest, in the name of progress. The Fueros in the Carlists’ Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey.

A section of Carlism has also swung firmly to the Left in observing how capitalism erodes all four of those to nought. Far from the centres of power, among the more or less politically excluded subcultures of Catholics, High Churchmen (and then first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish Episcopalians), Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers, an ancestrally Jacobite disaffection with the legitimacy of the State, its Empire and that Empire’s capitalist ideology produced the American Republic (where Stuart-granted Fueros were very much to the point, as were such concerns again in the states’ demands for the ecclesiastical and other protections set out in the Bill of Rights), Tory action against the slave trade, Tory and Radical action against domestic social evils, Tory and Radical extensions of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars.

At present, the FN has a thoroughly républicain approach, not only to regional peculiarities, but also and increasingly to secularism. However, if a new movement is indeed arising out of much or most of it and much or most of the UMP to give voice to those who would thus rise in electoral revolt against an increasingly Islamised, or at least to their mind no longer recognisably French, Île-de-France, then such a movement is likely to be most popular the further from Paris one travelled both geographically and culturally. It is likely to be a movement very largely conducted in Breton and Corsican, in Provençal and West Flemish, in Occitan and Franconian, in Catalan and Alsation (already spoken by a goodly number of FN supporters), even in Basque.

And even in places not quite as different as that, the call will be for ever-greater rural, traditional, Catholic, even French-speaking autonomy from a centre actually or apparently less and less characterised by such features, or even tolerant of them. Thus, a movement sincerely intended to save France might very well end up destroying her.

1 comment:

  1. 1. The "theory des trois droites" is certainly quite weak, I agree with you there.

    2. How is the FN Orléaniste, or, especially, how can you say they are increasingly orléaniste? In fact, (JM) Le Pen was once a Poujadiste deputy, a tendency that might have been considered sort of radical anti-socialist Whig, with some sociological overlapping with bonapartisme. In the 1980s, he was pro-US and Thatcherite (ultra-libéral). Now the party is domestically social-democratic and clearly still conservative on more authoritarian issues of State centralisation, security, immigration, etc.

    In a sense, it began as a sort of Orléaniste party for the lower-middle-class, with Legitimiste allies, and has ended as a relatively homogeneous working class bonapartiste group!

    2a. I was in Paris for the days around the election. MLP's focused her rhetoric on nationalising the banks and ending the oligarchy of financial capital...something I would argue lies at the heart of the Orléaniste grand bourgeois-corrupt aristocrat power alliance.

    2b. I do not understand the description of the thoroughly liberal Poujade as a Legitimist-Bonapartist.

    3. There is no point in conflating the motivations of support for Orléanistes like VGE with residual Legitimisme. I think voters consciously distinguish between programmes of national-Catholic statism (if not also imperialism) and Euro-federalist, liberal and (vaguely) Christian-Democratic tendencies. De Villiers' politics is still closer to the FN than to Francois Bayrou.

    4. Is it right to equate the average Whig with a Jacobin and not a Girondin?

    5. The FN's current secular republicanism is tantamount to bonapartisme and may be seen as a continuation of the social-Gaullist tradition.

    5a. The FN is also the best parallel to a Tory-Radical alliance.

    6. Whenever I see FN rallies (of a national scale), there are always Bréton flags. I think they also cooperate with Alsatian sovereigntists, despite generally favouring State centralisation.

    7. For what it matters, one must remember that Lefebrvistes are disproportionately powerful not so much in French politics but among French Catholic activists (or just conscious Catholics) as, on many Sundays, they form the *majority* of broadly Catholic church attendees. Still, they probably vote mostly for the UMP and diverse droite (esp. MPF - de Vililers), yet probably disproportionately for the FN in spite of Marine.

    8. I am not sure I understand your conclusion, but if it says what I think, I cannot concur. If we talk about rural autonomists or federalists, these are concentrated in the places you list. Except for Alsace, these regions tend Left. A common thread might be a decent vote by the ex-Christian Democratic and largely federalist MoDem (ex-UDF < Democratic Force < Social Democratic Centre < Christian Democrats). But MoDem is basically a social-liberal group obsessed with austerity and Euro-federalism. Some of these regions are very anti-clerical (particularly the Southwest, bastion of the Left Radicals). Only Alsace fits the mould, and it has a huge FN vote.

    The FN deserves support.

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