Some weeks before the American presidential election, Robert Paxton, the most distinguished American historian of 20th century France — and author of a classic book on fascism — abandoned his previous scepticism about designating Donald Trump as a fascist. What changed his mind was 6 January. To Paxton, the assault on the Capitol was dangerously reminiscent of the anti-parliamentary riots that took place in Paris on 6 February 1934, an event that many on the French Left saw as a botched “fascist” coup.
This example should remind us that, though people typically associate fascism with Germany and Italy, there is also a French story. Ernest Nolte, one of the first historians to study the ideology, published a 1963 book called Three Faces of Fascism which argued that Action Française, an antisemitic nationalist movement founded in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, was the precursor of modern fascism. Most did not agree: Action Française is a counterrevolutionary movement that lacks the dynamic radicalism of fascism.
That did not stop Zeev Sternhell, a Polish-Israeli scholar, from locating the origins of European fascism not in Italy but in the convergence of the anti-liberal Left and anti-liberal Right in late 19th century France. Yet other historians have debated whether the so-called French Social Party (PSF), a genuinely mass movement which could have won elections in 1940, might be fascist too. It’s surely no surprise that the party’s slogan of “Work, Family, Fatherland” was adopted by the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Pétain.
After the collapse of Vichy, extreme Right politics was discredited in France. The postwar populist movement of Poujadism proved a flash in the pan. The extremists who resorted to terrorism against de Gaulle’s policy of accepting Algerian independence had little popular support. It was only in 1983 that the extreme Right remerged as an electoral force, when the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which had its roots in several extreme Right traditions, scored its first electoral victories. Today that party, now rechristened the Rassemblement National (RN), looks a contender to win France’s next presidential election.
This alarming situation is the subject of Ugo Palheta’s Marxist analysis, Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen. Marxist interpretations of fascism have always linked it to economics. In the interwar years, the Communist Third International always stressed that fascism was a result of the crisis of capitalism, as the bourgeoisie resorted to extreme methods to preserve its power. The argument was that since capitalism was in terminal crisis, communist parties should steer clear of any attempt to shore up democracy: democratic socialists were as much the enemy as the Nazis. This eased Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany. As for France, the Communists hastily reversed course and allied themselves with socialists and even liberals in the so-called Popular Front. This was an updated version of the old policy of “Republican defence” going back to the Dreyfus Affair — in which parties of different political stripes temporarily joined forces in the higher cause of defending democracy.
Reading Palheta’s book evokes an odd sense of nostalgia, as all those rancid debates of the last century come flooding back. In the Seventies, we are told, the “crisis of capitalism” caused the bourgeoisie to opt for “neo-liberal” solutions: which duly paved the way for “neofascism”. Then, in the Eighties and Nineties, the “triumph of capitalism” allowed the far-Right to revive and take root, before a “crisis of capitalism” “put fascism back on the agenda” by eroding “the foundations of bourgeois hegemony” and pushing the “ruling classes” to opt for more authoritarian solutions. Macron’s “centrist authoritarianism”, we are confidently informed, is the last gasp before fully fledged fascism can emerge in the form of an RN victory. Etc, etc, etc.
In reality, there are significant differences between what was once considered to be “fascism” and the RN. Though one can be legitimately suspicious of the genuineness of Marine Le Pen’s detoxification of her party, it shows no insurrectionary tendencies. There is no sign that it intends, or would be able, to dismantle the institutions of French democracy and impose a dictatorship. The comparison with Meloni in Italy might be instructive here. That said, whether or not one wants to call it fascism, the extreme ethnonationalist and identitarian authoritarianism of the RN is a genuinely worrying threat. Among other things, a planned policy of “national preference” would condition access to social rights, including health care, to those with French citizenship. At the same time, Le Pen may end up actively discriminating against France’s million Muslim citizens, not least in her erstwhile enthusiasm for banning the Islamic headscarf in public spaces.
In a couple of years, then, France could soon be faced with a mix of Trumpism, Orbánism and Pétainism — clear enough from the polling numbers. Between the elections of 2017 and 2022, after all, the RN’s final vote rose from 34% to 41%. It is possible that Marine Le Pen herself may be ineligible to run, unless her recent court conviction for financial fraud is overturned. But her “dauphin”, the inexperienced Jordan Bardella, is no less popular, and his policies are largely indistinguishable from hers.
So how is this threat to be combatted? Palheta’s book briefly offers an answer in the last chapter. It proposes establishing “popular, anti-racist and pro-feminist defence structures” and “local committees” to fight for “real democracy”. Etc, etc, etc. Who would organise and mobilise this grassroots activism? The suggestion seems to be that only the populist La France Insoumise (LFI) movement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon offers the “anti-liberal, anti-productivist rupture” that might block the path to fascism. But if Palheta is right that the LFI is the only hope, then there is no hope.
All the same, this depressing prospect does, at least, prompt some thoughts about the history of the French Left in general. In the interwar years, Léon Blum, leader of the French Socialist Party and the most morally inspiring leader in the history of European socialism, desperately tried to hold on to the party’s Marxist ideology: partly because he feared being outflanked by the Communists to his Left. He resisted any “revisionist” ideas that offered a plausible non-Marxist programme. All the while, Blum tied himself in knots by distinguishing between the so-called “exercise of power” and the “conquest of power”. Yet what he patently failed to do was reflect on the kind of policies that the Socialists might actually pursue once in power. According to Marxist dogma, after all, this was only a provisional step towards the final revolution.
Those revisionists who tried to escape from this binary straitjacket of reform or revolution were dismissed as heretics. This was the fate of the most brilliant interwar Socialists, the Belgian Henri de Man, who had a wide following in France. The rejection of his ideas pushed him, and some of his followers, toward fascism. He ended up collaborating with the Germans.
After 1945, partly because of the example of people like de Man, the French Socialist Party refused to rethink its Marxist theory while in practice participating in governments that carried out torture in Algeria. There was never in France, as in Germany, a “Bad Godesberg moment”, when the SPD abandoned Marxism in 1959. On the western banks of the Rhine, “social democracy” remained taboo. In 1971, though, the defunct Socialist Party was hijacked and reconstructed by François Mitterrand, a man who had no previous Socialist beliefs or culture. Yet his supreme political skills allowed him to outmanoeuvre Michel Rocard, the figure in the party who offered a new version of revisionism. Rocard was a representative of the so-called “second Left”, which offered a less statist vision. He had no truck with the rhetoric of a “rupture with capitalism” espoused by Mitterrand, who, for his part, was politically cynical and economically illiterate.
The result was predictable. Mitterrand, elected in 1981, had abandoned most of his policies within two years, while never actually offering any kind of doctrinal rethinking. He lurched from socialism in one country to ultra-liberalism in less than a decade. This was the beginning of the end of the French Socialist Party. Its death rattle took the form of François Hollande, whose inner Mitterrand prompted him in 2012 to offer some fiery rhetoric about his enemy being “money” — only to completely reverse course within a year of being elected.
This void on the Left offered an opportunity to Mélenchon, a former member of the Socialist Party. Enter La France Insoumise, which performed well in the presidential elections of both 2017 and 2022. Yet if LFI identifies Macron as its main enemy, it is an ironic mirror image of Macronism in that it exists solely as a machine to allow one man to take power. La Meute: Enquete sur la France Insoumise, a recent book by two French journalists, has exposed the party’s authoritarianism, bullying and sectarianism. The slightest criticism of Mélenchon leads to immediate exclusion. This, after all, is the man who once uttered the words: “La République, c’est moi”. Also problematic is Mélenchon’s admiration for Chavez and Putin, and his posturing on the Middle East. One must not fall into the trap of lumping all critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as antisemites: most are clearly not. But Mélenchon goes beyond anything that Jeremy Corbyn was (perhaps unfairly) accused of, not least when his party described the October 7 massacre as “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces”.
The idea, then, that this man, at this moment, offers a path to the “real democracy” that Palheta craves is delusional. That, of course, still leaves the question of how to deal with the RN. Unfortunately, there is nothing better on offer than the old policy of “Republican defence”. The liberal centre has moved so far to the Right, in France as elsewhere, that a lot of nose-holding will be necessary. In the years before the Popular Front of the Thirties, the Communists used to say that the choice between the parliamentary centre and the anti-parliamentary Right was like plumping for “plague” over “cholera”. However bad things may have become in France today, they are not quite that bad. The choice, for now, is between “plague” — and maybe measles or flu. The RN is definitely the plague.
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