Marine Le Pen Analysed by Caroline Fourest.

Caroline Fourest is a feminist, a fierce defender of French secularism, critic of Islamism,  and a ferocious opponent of the Front National.

Caroline Fourest  has just published, with Fiammetta Venner, what promises to be the French political book of the Summer, on Marine Le Pen.

On France-Inter this morning (see Here.) she made some important points.

• Marine Le Pen’s ‘modernising’ turn does not mean a break with the extreme right. Her closest advisers are from the ‘third way’ nationalists. That is those who advance the concept of a ‘communitarian’ nationalism.
• They are anti-globalisers, and even appear anti-capitalist (drawing imagery from the left). This side of the ‘revolutionary’right remains linked to an idea of a fight against those conspiring ‘behind’ globalisation – guess who. 
• They can be concerned with identity – agitating against non-European immigration.
• They are attempting to appropriate French secularism, while retaining a  strong bond to French Catholic culture.

As Fourest points out this is full of contradictions.

Here are some.

To be secularist, but to be strongly Christian, to support the French republic, but to defend the heritage of the French far-right which loathes the French Revolution, to be nationalist, yet in favour of European civilisation, to be anti-capitalist but to support French enterprises, and, above all, to be ‘revolutionary’ but respectable.

 

Naturally one would need to go a lot deeper into the social basis of Front National support (at present outriding the Socialists, and the left). That the FN may be the ‘first party’ of the French working class, and certainly has strong roots in the popular classes, as well as in more traditional lower middle and conservative bourgeois circles,  has deeper causes than Marine’s rhetorical turn and the talents of her publicists. But Fourest make a good step in the right direction by not reducing it, as British observers, particularly those on the left, do to ‘Islamophobia’.

This morning Fourest referred to Le Pen, père, and his liking for the Iranian regime.

On s’en doutait…