Marine Le Pen is the dynastic standard-bearer for a continuously minoritarian tradition that regards the French Republic as illegitimate. That can make it through to the second round of a Presidential Election, but it can never win one, no matter what the political issues of the day. The other candidate is bound to defeat it and become President. In 2022, that should have been Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In 2027, it absolutely must be.
Last year, enough of Mélenchon's supporters decided that Emmanuel Macron was the lesser evil. But he was not, and it is now beyond dispute that he is not; he is just a different evil, when he is even that. It came as no surprise when Macron's supporters gave two of the six Vice-Presidencies of the National Assembly to Le Pen's. In my day, and no doubt still, A-level History students had to unlearn the GCSE fiction that Nazism had been a working-class phenomenon. Nor is Fascism a product of traditional conservatism, whatever alliances it may forge, or whatever symbolism it may adopt.
Consider the growing authoritarianism of Justin Trudeau's Canada. Consider the tendencies of Joe Biden, and of Liz Truss, whom it is easy to laugh off now, but who was Prime Minister very recently. Consider the records of Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer. Consider to whom and to what Mario Draghi has ceded. Such is the Franco-American republican tradition that arose from the international transmission of English Whiggery through the Masonic Lodges.
The liberal bourgeoisie keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all. Mélenchon poses such a threat. Let battle commence.
How did " the Franco-American republican tradition that arose from the international transmission of English Whiggery through the Masonic Lodges" come to keep in reserve " a continuously minoritarian tradition that regards the French Republic as illegitimate"?
ReplyDeleteWhat is now the Rassemblement National is not immediately easy to locate within René Rémond’s theory of the three French right wings, les trois droites.
DeleteIt now exhibits, far more than it 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, but 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.
At present, the RN has a thoroughly républicain approach, not only to regional peculiarities, but also and increasingly to secularism.