How Fascism Returned to French Politics

This possible return of fascism is generally dismissed out of hand by the commentariat: How could the French Republic, the self-proclaimed homeland of human rights, give rise to fascist barbarism? Was not France “allergic” to fascism throughout the twentieth century, as many mainstream French historians have long argued?

Does not the Front National (FN), which became the Rassemblement National (RN) in 2018, claim to have abandoned the political project that it upheld since its foundation in 1972? Has not this party hit an electoral glass ceiling, as has been so routinely claimed across the past three decades? Are we not actually seeing a revival of French capitalism, helmed by a young president who is finally carrying out the “reforms” France supposedly needs?

Fascism in France is currently embodied in organizations such as the FN/RN (a party that is now more than fifty years old), Reconquête (founded in 2021 by the Islamophobic pundit Éric Zemmour), and a number of other movements and sects (Action française, the Identitaires, “revolutionary nationalists,” and so on). It doesn’t mean that any of these organizations is a fully fledged fascist mass movement. Yet each is a vehicle — or more precisely a collective producer, organizer, and amplifier — of fascist desires, ideas, strategies, and practices.

The idea is hard to accept, because we’ve probably given too much credence to the idea of “never again.” Or rather, because many people misunderstood it: this should have been seen as a call to action, aimed at opposing all resurgence of a fascism lurking at the heart of capitalism. Instead, it has been mistaken as a promise or a guarantee that the “democracies” that had defeated Nazi fascism in 1945 could not, by their very nature, give rise to fascism. We have not taken seriously enough playwright Bertolt Brecht’s warning: “The womb is still fertile, hence arose the foul beast.”

After 1945 and decades in which the heirs of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were marginal, fascism has survived and been reborn. It has done so while getting rid of the outward markers of the particular fascism that developed in the interwar context: the style with which fascism is so stubbornly associated in our minds, because it was so evocative, could be abandoned, or considerably overhauled.

From this point of view, we have to agree that neither Marine Le Pen, Zemmour, their respective lieutenants, nor the far-right YouTubers and influencers who have emerged in recent years are fans of brown shirts and swastikas. But they appear as the diverse avatars of a neofascism for the present moment, and more exactly, in the case of the FN/RN, as a more institutional branch of fascism, such as has always existed within this political current. It is, indeed, already present at the heart of French society (and more broadly of neoliberal capitalism), but biding its time and preparing the ground to become a practice of power.

But fascism is not limited to these organizations. It also manifests itself through a series of molecular shifts and transformations, at both the ideological and institutional levels, which pave the way both for an electoral victory of the far right and for a qualitative transformation of the state in an authoritarian and racist direction. These shifts and transformations can be encapsulated in the concept of fascization.

Since 2007–8, with the great financial meltdown and its aftermath, capitalism has plunged into a crisis from which only the blindest of business-press pundits thinks they see the way out. Indeed, this crisis regime seems to have become the normal way of managing the economy and society. Surely one expression of this crisis is the weakening of what we call democratic institutions.

In France, the civil liberties and social rights won by the working class and its organizations over the last two centuries have been worn down by a series of governments. The traditional mechanisms of parliamentary democracy are systematically undermined, marginalized, or hollowed out by the ruling class itself, in favor of unelected bodies or procedures to circumvent its processes (for instance, constitutional Article 49.3, used to pass laws without a vote, or else rule by decree).

In other words, the current political forms of capitalist domination, which guaranteed certain rights to social protest or parliamentary opposition, and whose main function was to build broad social compromises that could have a stabilizing effect, are breaking down. Moreover, racism is increasingly visible in the public arena, notably in the form of anti-migrant xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Currently ubiquitous reactionary ideologues make excuses for systemic discrimination against non-European immigrants and their descendants, while introducing the idea of the possible deportation of millions of Muslims (now rebranded “remigration”). Finally, far-right forces have made significant electoral gains in France and beyond.

However, over the last ten years or so, the possibility of a fascist threat has often been too readily dismissed, simply because of the way this specter has been used for several decades. It has, indeed, been cynically wielded by a Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, or PS) that became social-liberal in the 1980s and then liberal-authoritarian under François Hollande in the 2010s, but also by the Right, particularly in the days of Jacques Chirac.

“Refuse to vote for us, in the first or second round, and you will have the return of fascism on your conscience,” their leaders have constantly told us. Such blackmail, combined with the policies pursued by these parties (borrowing in many respects from the far right’s own agenda), has had the effect of trivializing the specific danger represented by the FN/RN: What good is sounding the alarm if those who talk about a threat and claim to avert it are also clearly working to make it a reality?

We only have to compare the massive popular reaction when Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002, and the lesser response when his daughter did the same in 2017 and 2022, even though the latter’s score ended up much higher (41.5 percent in 2022 compared with 18 percent in 2002), to see that this election-night pseudo-anti-fascism is increasingly losing its hold.

In recent decades, we have seen a constant worsening of the working and living conditions of millions of employees; a state of emergency wielded to prevent social mobilization and then to manage the pandemic; the use of authoritarian procedures to undermine labor rights and pensions; migration and security policies that are increasingly indistinguishable from the ones advocated by the far right; and an Islamophobia that is today endemic in French society.

These shifts were pushed by the Gaullist party under Chirac and then Nicolas Sarkozy, by the Socialist Party under Hollande and Manuel Valls (among others), and since 2017, also by Macronism. All this has weakened public sensitivity to the real threat posed by the FN/RN, including among those who surely have the most to fear from today’s neofascist dynamic in France.

Why should anyone fear a party that is known to be violently hostile to liberation movements, foreigners, and Muslims, and more broadly to minorities, when successive governments have already laid the foundations for emergency legislation targeting so-called “enemies within”? These policies have struck at Muslims, Roma people, migrants, residents of working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, but also those whom the Macronist right has described in recent years as “eco-terrorists” or “Islamo-leftists.”

Pandering to the FN/RN electorate all year round, only to denounce the far-right threat in the days ahead of some decisive electoral runoff, has been a losing strategy. This is quite unambiguously demonstrated by the electoral progress of Marine Le Pen and her party.

Did not Hollande himself legitimize the FN/RN by inviting it to the Élysée Palace after the terrorist attacks in November 2015? Did not Emmanuel Macron endorse the far right by granting a lengthy interview to Valeurs actuelles, a reactionary weekly magazine recently convicted of racially insulting La France Insoumise MP Danièle Obono?

Has not the French ruling class, led by Macron and his ministers, already borrowed heavily from neofascist language, when it speaks of “growing savagery,” “de-civilization,” the “great replacement,” or of a France “drowning in migration”? Is it any wonder that there are too few people left who think it’s worth confronting the far right head-on, and that the proportion of voters willing to vote against it in runoff elections is slowly but surely being whittled down?

Moreover, a vote for Macron’s party, Renaissance, and even more so for traditional right-wing party Les Républicains (LR), which has sunk ever deeper into a fusion of neoliberalism and nationalist identity politics, can only temporarily ward off the danger. It is an illusion to expect anything from them.