In late summer 2023, the Parti Socialiste MP Laurent Baumel was sitting with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, shocked.
The two men were drinking tea in a tent at Amfis, the annual festival of ideas hosted by Mélenchon’s radical-left France Insoumise (LFI) movement. In the previous year’s presidential election, Mélenchon had scored 22 percent, almost making the second round — before forging an alliance of left-wing parties called the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES) for the subsequent parliamentary elections.
The NUPES alliance pitched Mélenchon as a potential prime minister, ready to engage in a testy “cohabitation” with newly reelected president Emmanuel Macron. NUPES fell short of that goal but did manage to deny Macron a majority in parliament. This set off years of parliamentary chaos marked by undemocratic maneuvering by the president’s camp, culminating in fresh elections in summer 2024. In that contest, the new version of NUPES, this time dubbed Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), won a plurality of votes, though Macron and conservative parties denied it the chance to govern.
Mélenchon, who left the Parti Socialiste in 2008 to build a more radical movement, was, at the time of his tea-drinking with Baumel, at the height of his influence over the older left-wing parties. This traditional left had been nearly wiped out in the 2022 presidential election. Its parties were desperate to save their seats from an extinction-level event — hence their readiness to accept alliances with Mélenchon. But they were also eager to accept his pitch as the elder statesman of the Left, writing books and leading the Institut La Boétie think tank, rather than playing a more active political role.
In short, by 2023, France’s traditional left was ready for a moderated Mélenchon. His position had been consolidated over a decade of “sound and fury.” Now politicians like Baumel were ready to pay lip service to him as a mascot of the united left, while looking forward to the day when he stepped back from the struggle.
But to Baumel’s horror, at Amfis he instead found himself listening as Mélenchon “launched into a long monologue” explaining how early twentieth-century socialist Léon Blum had been wrong to reject Vladimir Lenin’s twenty-one conditions of admission to the Communist International.
“Fundamentally, Blum was wrong to resist Lenin on the twenty-one conditions,” Mélenchon told Baumel.
In a famous speech at the Tours Congress in 1920, Blum had broken with Lenin and the Bolshevik path. Blum, later the leader of the Popular Front government, condemned the military hierarchy of Leninist organization and the periodic purges that it required. Class struggle, Blum claimed, couldn’t justify ignoring the fight for democracy and freedom — values he believed were absent from Soviet communism.
Blum’s rejection of Leninism, then, is almost the origin story of the Parti Socialiste, in the moment of its split with the Bolshevik-inspired Parti Communiste Français (PCF). In questioning Blum’s decision, Mélenchon was essentially attacking the founding myth of the modern Parti Socialiste.
“Mélenchon was justifying rigid Leninism,” Baumel told the authors of a new book, La Meute, still scandalized.
The political content of La Meute, an investigation into France Insoumise by two French journalists, Charlotte Belaïch and Olivier Pérou, published this May, is largely animated by this sense of outrage and shock.
Take the book’s narrative at face value and LFI is a broken, undemocratic party, and Mélenchon a would-be autocrat. The book is a bestseller, with over 80,000 copies sold and eight print runs by late June. It has prompted endless media discussion. After its publication, PCF leader Fabien Roussel even called LFI a “cult,” echoing a criticism from the book.
“He wasted everything,” multiple disappointed sources told the authors, complaining that Mélenchon and a radicalized LFI were unwilling to tone things down for a chance at power as part of a social democratic coalition. If Mélenchon is elected, we’ll have to leave the country, some politicians shiver between its pages. They’re not even really joking.
The book asks whether Mélenchon was always like this. Its interviewees are split. One narrative tells of a Mélenchon who’s always had a deep thirst for power, now emboldened by his political successes. Others say that he used to be a respectable member of a compatible left — one which challenged for government but didn’t fundamentally contest the system — and that he’s betrayed his principles for what he sees as his final shot at power. His approach, they claim, lies in appealing to young Arab voters in the cities — a politically demonized constituency in a France obsessed with reactionary backlash against Muslims and African and Arab immigrants.
One message is clear throughout: elect this man and his movement, and France will plunge into a dark period. France might take a firm stance against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Uneducated members of France’s working class might become the mayors of major cities. Mélenchon might keep his word and — shock, horror — implement the program he was elected on.
The book’s primary function is a political attack on LFI. It’s an attempt to disrupt the movement’s hegemony over the Left. Though the book tries to detail (and at times does) a series of moral failings on the part of the movement and its members, it makes clear that its chief sin is its radical politics.
Yes, LFI is unwilling to compromise with the traditional left parties’ complacency faced with Israel’s genocide in Palestine and France’s complicity in the slaughter. Yes, LFI is the only party on the Left with a clear position rejecting the feverish racism and Islamophobia coursing through France’s veins. And yes, LFI’s enemies are right to fear that if it takes power, it will actually exercise power without compromise, and against the oligarchical forces who are the enemies of most French people.
For its enemies, these are bad things. But for those who support revolution in France, they are good — and the book serves as a useful reminder of this.
But first, what isn’t good. Not all of this book is original reporting. Some of it is a summary of past scandals and journalistic investigations into the movement.
These are recounted comprehensively. There are cases that deserve criticism. The way that the movement has handled sexual harassment hasn’t always lived up to its principles, or even come close. MPs and activists using their political networks as hunting grounds for sex is a persistent problem across political life which LFI has not been immune to. No one doing this deserves impunity. While LFI established an internal committee to discipline members, some members considered more valuable are treated more leniently. That can’t continue.
The book details allegations of inappropriate behavior by MPs like Éric Coquerel, Ugo Bernalicis, and Thomas Portes, all of whom faced few repercussions despite internal concern and complaints. No alleged behavior of this sort was found in court to be criminal, but the movement clearly needs to hold itself to a higher standard than that. Some powerful members like Clémence Guetté, an MP who has led LFI’s parliamentary strategy, are described as paying particular attention to some of these affairs and taking a strong line on them internally — but it shouldn’t be left to people like her to enforce that line.
The book also summarizes the Quatennens affair, a particularly damaging moment when it was revealed that Adrien Quatennens — LFI’s then coordinator and at one time the widely acknowledged successor to Mélenchon — had slapped his wife, Céline, and sent harassing torrents of texts during their divorce. Mélenchon defended Quatennens, shamefully, despite the MP acknowledging his guilt and a court finding him responsible for his actions.
Mélenchon said that Quatennens deserved a path to political redemption. He fiercely criticized those who raised doubts over his own response, which focused largely on the damage of the affair to Adrien, not Céline. To its credit, many in the movement disagreed, and Quatennens was pressured out before the 2024 parliamentary elections.
I won’t defend any of these stances. These are problems in wider society and especially need to be driven out of left-wing movements. The way that Mélenchon and some allies handled these cases undermined the party’s principles and demoralized many militants. LFI missed the chance to draw a red line against violence against women, and it shouldn’t have been the responsibility of the rank and file to push Quatennens out (though the fact that they did calls into question the idea that Mélenchon’s personal whims alone control the movement).
Belaïch and Pérou present this as a defining moment in the movement’s history — and link it to the eventual departure of some historic LFI MPs who would later describe themselves as purged before the 2024 parliamentary elections.
“Far from being one of these passing crises which a political party, whatever its politics, experiences sooner or later, it was a crucial moment, characteristic of France Insoumise,” the authors claim.
This narrative flattens the political divisions behind the dissidents’ departures, which are important to understand because many, who are critical sources for the book, cite it as the moment they decided to leave.
“Governing requires loyalty,” Mélenchon is quoted as saying in June 2024, after some of those former allies weren’t chosen as candidates.
Left unspoken is the fact that they had remained in the movement for years. And had they been picked to run as LFI candidates again, not all would have left.
The authors would have us believe that they were pushed out because they were the only ones with the temerity to criticize Mélenchon. But what were they criticizing him for? Were they telling the truth? And what is Mélenchon loyal to?
One source of discontent among dissidents, including MPs like Alexis Corbière, Raquel Garrido, and François Ruffin, was how LFI handled Macron’s undemocratic push to raise the retirement age. The broad strategy of the Left, including the unions, was to allow the measure to go through the National Assembly so that a clarifying vote could be held, with the promise that those who supported it would be politically punished in the future.
LFI took a different tack, piling amendments onto the bill to stop it from being voted on. Macron’s then prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, had to force through the bill using a constitutional measure that let the government skip the vote. The retirement-age rise became law without ever being approved by elected MPs.
For LFI, the result was simple: what had been established only through parliamentary tricks could be annulled exactly the same way, if a left-wing government was ever in place. This displeased the other left-wing parties and the unions, who viewed LFI’s maneuvering as an example of its unwillingness to accept their leadership.
LFI’s sustained rise is an existential concern for other left-wing parties, heading into next year’s municipal elections and 2027’s presidential contest. The municipal elections are a particular source of concern, with plausible prospects of LFI winning in big cities like Paris and Marseille. A debate on this played out at the Parti Socialiste’s conference in June, with conservative forces in the party arguing against any alliances with LFI.
Palestine is another area where LFI has taken a lead, to the chagrin of the traditional left-wing parties. It has been the only consistent voice speaking out with moral clarity and anger about France’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
For Belaïch and Pérou, this consistency has been a series of “blunders,” which “import the Israel-Palestine conflict” into France, and “risks damaging the Republic and its values.”
Ever since the European elections last year, Mélenchon has been accused of “instrumentalizing” the Israel-Palestine conflict, in a cynical attempt to come to power post–October 7.
On September 22, 2024, the authors complain, Mélenchon spoke of a “genocide” in Gaza. Even more shamefully, he claimed that the “human and physical destruction” taking place was “worse than the Second World War.”
But who now would say that Mélenchon was wrong, when the prospect of the Palestinian people starving en masse has pushed even Israel’s most unfailing allies to issue PR-conscious rebukes?
For the authors, Mélenchon’s full-throated defense of Palestine is just more evidence of his latent antisemitism — another myth that French and international media has promulgated with glee.
The book recites the traditional catechism of antisemitic incidents and outrage Mélenchon is accused of, with everything from accusing a French minister of being in thrall to finance to the completely spurious accusation that he subscribes to the antisemitic premise that Jews deserve persecution because they “killed Jesus.”
On May 13, 2024, the book complains, Mélenchon explained that “accusations of antisemitism have become empty of any reason, and are purely political, ever since they’ve been used abusively by . . . [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his political allies in France.”
The examples the authors list multiply, and they’re not just confined to Mélenchon.
Rima Hassan, the courageous LFI member of the European Parliament who joined the sea mission to break Israel’s blockade in June, is dismissed as motivated by ambitions of high office. She is cast as a figurehead of LFI’s radicalized “red guards” who see Palestine as a tool to win Muslim votes. Hassan figured prominently in the 2024 European election campaign, when LFI campaigned on a pro-Palestinian line, and was criticized by the neoconservative establishment after appearing with Mélenchon wearing a keffiyeh the night of the parliamentary election results. David Guiraud, a talented and uncompromising MP who represents the northern city of Roubaix, is also described in scandalized terms because in January 2025, he advocated ending the National Assembly’s France-Israel friendship group.
Mélenchon’s position on Palestine is frequently portrayed, without much real argument, as self-evidently shameful, and part of a vulgar, naive geopolitical radicalism.
“In his eyes, American imperialism is the principal danger in the world,” the authors intone with concern, next to shocked stories about Mélenchon spending one amiable Christmas with Communist Party of China bureaucrats.
The authors are right on one thing: Israel would not enjoy impunity from France under an LFI government. Under such a government, Mélenchon said recently, the French Navy would be deployed to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza and bring in urgently necessary food aid.
Even ostensibly left-wing critics put these commitments to the side and take up the threadbare charges of antisemitism against Mélenchon.
“I can’t take this absence of empathy for Jews,” Clémentine Autain, a former LFI MP, tells the authors.
It’s impossible to believe that these complaints are anything but an attempt to disqualify Mélenchon from running for president in 2027. Autain, along with a group of MPs led by Ruffin, last summer reportedly dined with at least one wealthy funder to make plans about who should be their presidential candidate in 2027.
This means a performative rejection of radicalism in favor of a familiar soft social democracy. “I’m socdem-ing myself,” Ruffin joked in 2022, when plans to run were already coming together. Whatever reasons he presents for his split with Mélenchon (his own book claims Mélenchon showed contempt for rural voters, focusing only on running up high scores in cities), he planned to leave long before he actually did. Autain and Ruffin have both since announced that they’re running for the presidency, ostensibly through a primary — a process that many potential left-wing candidates including Mélenchon and the Atlanticist Europhile Raphaël Glucksmann have already rejected.
Mélenchon is “a political animal, the kind that only comes around once a century,” Henrik David, a left-wing critic, comments.
That’s true — and it’s the politics of this animal that provoke so much ire.
We shouldn’t be blind to criticisms about the moral conduct of LFI’s representatives or become apologists for any behavior that needs rooting out of left-wing organizing. But much of what is condemned in this book is only bad if you consider radical politics as inherently impractical and evil. Today’s France is dominated by the megarich, with the remnants of the social Republic enfeebled, and steady efforts to dismantle the country’s reputation as a place where people aren’t completely dominated by the ruling class. Some think that’s an inevitable process — but Mélenchon and LFI don’t. Their stand is a good thing for the millions who look to them to deliver the country from mounting poverty and the collapse of social services.
“I am very dangerous,” Mélenchon told an audience of students at University College London through a thick French accent in 2013. This book proves that’s still the case. And that Mélenchon’s trained a pack of killers who don’t think politics is a game. That’s a good thing. A very good thing.
Great Job Marlon Ettinger & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
