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From Emile Zola’s
J’accuse to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Left
Bank politics, France is credited
with inventing the figure of the
public intellectual: the writer as a
spiritual guide for society.
But the nation whose vast scope of
thinkers has ranged from
Enlightenment heroes to
Bernard-Henri Lévy, in his white
shirt unbuttoned to the navel, has
been plunged into a moral crisis
over the dominance of a
controversial new type of talking
head: the reactionary, right-wing TV
intellectual. A
group of media-savvy French
intellectuals, deemed the “new
reactionaries” for their political
views and cultural conservatism, are
at the centre of a furious row,
accused of being a dangerous threat
to France by stoking racism,
intolerance and a fear of
immigration.
Dominating the covers of magazines
and newspapers this month, winning
large ratings on prime-time TV and
topping bestseller lists, the
diverse band of thinkers and pundits
argue that they are the only ones
brave enough to challenge political
correctness and defend the ideas of
national identity by highlighting
the dangers of immigration and the
fears of “ethnic French” people, who
no longer feel at home with so many
foreigners. Their detractors warn
they are fuelling a dangerous
atmosphere harking back to the
extreme rightwing ideas of France in
the 1930s. The
profile of the new reactionaries,
which has been building for over a
decade but recently escalated, is
seen to reflect the tense public
debate in a country where the far
right now holds about 30% of the
vote and polls show that at least
70% of people think there are “too
many foreigners” in France. The
intellectuals have been accused of
giving credence to the ideas of
Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front
National, although they have no
connection to the party. Laurent
Joffrin, editor of the left-leaning
French daily newspaper Libération,
this week warned their domination of
the airwaves now amounted to “a
cathode-ray apocalypse”.
Alain Finkielkraut, the
controversial and high-profile
philosopher, is at the centre of the
row after defending Nadine Morano, a
former government minister, who
repeatedly insisted France was a
“white race” country. This week,
Morano was banned from running in
the regional elections for Nicolas
Sarkozy’s rightwing Les Républicains
party.
Finkielkraut’s 2013 bestselling
book, The Unhappy Identity, warned
of the dangers to French national
identity from mass immigration and
multiculturalism. The son of a
Jewish Polish leather merchant who
survived Auschwitz, Finkielkraut was
elected last year to the prestigious
Académie Française, the institute
that defends the purity of the
French language, but was nearly
blackballed as some claimed he was
too reactionary and divisive.
As he publishe d another book this
week, Finkielkraut, who was once
classed as being on the political
left, reiterated the immigration
problems and dismissed anyone
calling him right wing, racist or
who puts him on what he derided as a
“blacklist of neo-fascists”. He told
France Inter radio it was “dreadful
and catastrophic” that as soon as a
thinker dared to “look at reality”
they were accused of being far
right. He said a witch-hunt was
being conducted by the anti-racism
lobby. Michel
Onfray, the leftwinger often hailed
as France’s favourite contemporary
philosopher, was accused of lurching
to the right this month when he
questioned the photo of the Syrian
boy, Alan Kurdi, who was found
drowned after his parents tried to
reach Europe, and said “old school”
French people might feel
marginalised and betrayed by the
arrival of migrants. Libération
accused Onfray of abandoning the
ideals of the left and playing “Le
Pen’s game”. He hit back, accusing
the newspaper of “hatred”.
Behind all this looms the figure of
Éric Zemmour, a TV intellectual and
French newspaper columnist, who
topped the non-fiction bestseller
list with Le Suicide Français, in
which he argued that millions of
Muslims might be colonising and
transforming France and should be
repatriated. Zemmour was cleared
last month of inciting racial hatred
after saying on radio that “bands”
of foreigners were “stealing,
assaulting, stripping” the country.
In 2011 he was found guilty of
incitement to racial hatred after
telling a TV chatshow that drug
dealers were mostly “blacks and
Arabs”. The
political debate in France has seen
increasing references to the “great
replacement” theory by the
controversial writer, Renaud Camus,
who has argued that local French
populations will be replaced by
newcomers who reproduce faster. He
was convicted of incitement to
racial hatred last year.
As a counterpoint, Nicolas Bancel, a
historian at the University of
Lausanne, has co-authored a new
book, Le Grand Repli, which warns
that France and the country’s
political debate is turning in on
itself with a rise in intolerance
and more outspoken racism. He said
the rise of what he termed
“reactionary” thinkers, who focus on
immigration and Islam rather than
the old concerns of salaries, gender
equality and integration, was in
part due to a 24-hour media culture
that courted controversy while
sidelining more reasoned university
academics. “Themes,
which aren’t new – such as the
French nation, fear of immigration,
stigmatisation of the Muslim
outsider – now translate into
votes,” he told the Guardian,
arguing that Front National was
presented as the only party able to
return France to the way it was 30
years ago. He said the mood was
bolstered by high unemployment and
the fragile situation of the lower
middle class and working class.
Sylvain Bourmeau, a journalist and
associate professor at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
(School for Advanced Studies in the
Social Sciences) in Paris, said:
“There’s an unhealthy climate that
has been brewing for a long time. It
reflects the impact of the Front
National on French political life.
What is worrying is a form of brazen
racism displayed more and more
openly ... I feel this wouldn’t be
as possible in the UK.”
He said there was a huge divide
between the essayists and pundits
dominating media headlines and
university academics.
The philosopher, Régis Debray, when
asked this week about the row over
rightwing thinkers, said: “Politics
has been emptied of all intellectual
and moral content so it’s normal
that intellectuals fill that gap.”
But he warned people not to lash out
so harshly, quoting the French
writer George Bernanos: “The
intellectual is so often an imbecile
that we should always take him for
one until he proves the contrary.” |
