Prior to setting out on our journey, which took us over France, the far right Rassemblement National (National Rally) party of Jean Marie Le Pen, backed by many wealthy entrepreneurs, led after the first round. There was great concern that France would once more fall into the hands of the Vichy. We know how that turned out in the 1940s. With Germany, Italy, and Austria all experiencing far right surges, France was watched with bated breath.
A long time ago I had studied French politics as part of a degree course. It amounted to a comparative analysis with the US political system. The French model, I didn't find all that stimulating despite having an interest in the country's philosophers such as Camus, Sartre, Foucault and Derrida, its Marxist theoreticians in the mould of Althusser and Poulantzas (originally from Greece), and of course its gifted writers à la Voltaire, whose quips and acerbic wit I first became accustomed to during the blanket protest while reading a religious magazine - when they were still allowed. Martin Livingstone still quotes Voltaire to me from that magazine almost fifty years later.
What attracts me most about France is its laïcité, the country's secular culture about which much ado was raised when it went full throttle during the Olympics opening ceremony. Laïcité should have infused French society with a culture of safety for a wide range of beliefs and lifestyles that would have ensured nobody was murdered for their beliefs, including the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo who regaled France and further afield with their mocking irreverence. When they were murdered by the Islamic equivalent of the Ku Klux Klergy, we headed to Dublin to stand in solidarity with French nationals at the Spire. Today the loyalists of 'Coolock says no' would throw petrol bombs at the French 'invaders.' igniting their Molotov cocktails with incendiary touch paper from the pages of books by Renaud Camus on the Great Replacement theory.
When in Paris a few years back we paid a visit to the then closed Charlie Hebdo offices where the massacre occurred. I was later interviewed by one of its journalists who seemed to drink more than he talked or wrote.
While favouring the prohibition of any facial covering in public life including the burka, KKK hoods, balaclavas or whatever, I feel laïcité has acquired a serious blemish as a result of targeting the burkini. That is simply to have a go at Muslims and is in large part pandering to the country's far right which had for years been threatening to make serious inroads in French political life.
In our hotel room we watched in amazement as the same far right was forced into third place. There was no stunned silence - my wife's whoops of delight ensured silence was off the menu. The bottles of champagne ready to be popped at National Rally HQ, if they were uncorked at all, served only to drown sorrows. I downed victory Tequila.
Defeated by a left wing Popular Front alliance standing on a platform which, unlike that of the British Labour Party, proposed taxing the rich, huge public investment and a substantial increase in public sector wages. Even today in Belfast Hilary Benn reaffirmed Starmer's commitment to Tory economics when he ruled out financial investment as a means of tackling the far right. Hilary Benn is an apple that fell quite far to the right from his father's tree.
In calling a snap election in response to National Rally success in the European elections Emmanuel Macron had played a card similar to the one used by David Cameron that sparked the Brexit debacle. Macron had calculated that the Left would be so fragmented that the electorate would see sense and vote for his party over the far right. He risked the French electorate possibly asking for Barnabas. As it turned out the man on the middle cross didn't make the cut. The Popular Front guy on the cross to the left of him stole the show, and not in the sense that US presidential idiot Donald Trump would use the term.
Macron has been outmaneuvered and the far right humiliated. Stalingrad Square in Paris seemed the most symbolic of sites in which to sing the Internationale, conducted by the leader of the Popular Front. It was in Stalingrad that the rout of the Nazis began. Yet the broader fascization of French political life has certainly not been halted let alone sent scurrying back along the road to Berlin. In the sombre words of Bertolt Brecht: for though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again. Fascism is breathing fires of hatred that will need much more than songs and a love extinguisher to douse them.
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