The French National Front (FN), now National Rally (RN), is the grand old dame of European right-wing populist parties. Whereas Fratelli d’Italia and Alternative für Deutschland, for example, were established recently—in 2012 and 2013 respectively, in the wake of the eurozone crisis—FN is now more than half a century old. In one respect it is a party from another age, drawing its initial inspiration from small-business tax concerns and the belief that French pride depended on hanging onto Algeria. Yet even in 1972 our current reality was taking shape, in the sense that Western global supremacy was coming to an end and there was a growing feeling that the global technical system did in fact have limits.
The FN was not to administer a true shock to French society until the twenty-first century, when its founder and leader, the xenophobe and anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen, succeeded in pushing the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin into third place in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. At that point, half a year after 9/11, there emerged a widespread sense that the landscape of French politics had shifted, and that old familiar disputes between Left and Right, socialist and conservative, manual workers and intellectual workers, capital and labour, had somehow been suspended—that political polarities had in some ways reversed, and that long-buried forces were becoming visible in a way that seemed to portend a dark future.
The shift in leadership from father to daughter in 2011, and then the name change to RN in 2018, signalled a wish to distance the party from its most vulgar and unseemly elements, in order to generate greater ‘mainstream’ appeal. A superficial observer might claim that perpetual anxiety about the ‘rise of the FN’ was not justified by the succession of events over the next two decades: in 2007, Jean-Marie came fourth, with 11 per cent of the vote; in 2012, Marine came third, with 18 per cent, the ‘Left’ winning with François Hollande; in 2017, the year in which Emmanuel Macron exploded onto the scene and destroyed Hollande’s Socialist Party, she came second with 21 per cent but was defeated two to one by Macron in the second round. In 2022 it was a similar story, with Le Pen winning 23 per cent in the first round but losing three to two in the second round. On the one hand, there was a steady if slowing increase in the proportion of the electorate willing to give their votes to a party still seen as anti-immigrant, nationalistic and authoritarian; on the other hand, during the twenty years since that first shock in 2002, the ceiling on that increase has remained, with the mainstream Right and centre together always able to easily thwart RN’s presidential ambitions.
But the presidential elections are only one story: another is the National Assembly. In 2007, the FN failed to win a single seat; by 2012, it had still only managed to acquire two; in 2017, a similar percentage yielded eight deputies; but in 2022 huge gains were achieved, with eighty-nine seats, though with 577 seats in the Assembly this was still very far from a majority. Which brings us to 2024 and Macron’s decision to hold a snap election for the National Assembly, after RN won more than twice the votes, and twice the seats, of any other party in the French European election held on 9 June. The collapse of Macron’s vote in the European election seemed to trigger in him the idea that by striking fast, he might have a chance to retrieve his own parliamentary situation before the Left and Right could further undermine and outflank him. In the first round, it would not prove to be: RN came out ahead with a third of the vote, while the hastily cobbled-together left coalition managed 28 per cent and Macron’s own Ensemble alliance only 21 per cent—a disaster for the incumbent president. In the second round, tactical withdrawals by Ensemble and especially the Left’s New Popular Front in seats where they were the two frontrunners meant that RN did not repeat its success, and was pushed into third place. Even so, Le Pen’s group ended up with 143 deputies, a huge gain, and a severely damaged president left the next presidential election a wide-open race. Despite the surprise of the second round, it could still well be maintained that the real winner was Le Pen.
The story of the rise of the FN/RN is often told as a ‘return’ of nationalism, racism and totalitarianism from a past that we were foolish enough to think had been left behind during the Thirty Glorious Years following the Second World War. In this narrative, our mistake was a lack of vigilance—deceiving ourselves, either as defenders of democracy who ought never to forget that irrational forces are always waiting to prey on our good democratic intentions, or as leftists who ought never forget that capitalism engenders fascistic monsters that we must be perpetually ready to resist or crush. From each of these perspectives, the far Right is defined by its willingness to identify scapegoats (immigrants, criminals, unfit parents, and so on), and exploit fear and resentment for the sake of achieving power, deluding the unreasoning masses who in this way become the enemies of political virtue, whether democratic or activist. Once this enemy has been identified, the strategy becomes a matter of taking up whatever weapons will defeat it—and if it is the electorate itself that is taken as this enemy, the defenders of democracy and ‘the people’ increasingly find themselves in the position of saving this democracy and this people ‘from themselves’. In so doing, democrats and leftists all too easily enable themselves to be portrayed as, if not to become, the enemies of free speech, the liberty of the individual, anti-authoritarianism and the rights of the ‘common man’—all political virtues with which in earlier times they had been clearly aligned.
What, then, is wrong with this picture? After all, Le Pen and her fellow travellers undoubtedly do identify scapegoats and exploit fear and resentment. First of all, such stories take Le Pen and her party as a cause, as the evil, rather than as what she is and what it is—a symptom—just as Donald Trump is perpetually taken as an evil rather than as a symptom, never mind the fact that doing so has never had any effect other than to increase his popularity. Second, in doing so, one grants oneself permission to make all of these scapegoating politicians into scapegoats themselves—to load them with all the sins of the present, with the consequence that those susceptible to those kinds of resentments, and susceptible to becoming far-right voters, feel that their resentments are confirmed and justified, and that they are the scapegoats. What other result could one expect from statements such as that of Eva Joly, Greens presidential candidate in 2012, who characterised the result obtained by the FN at that election as being an ‘indelible stain on the values of our democracy’, a comment akin to Clinton’s 2016 reference to a ‘basket of deplorables’, which was counter-productive beyond belief? By taking symptoms for causes, and by thereby making those symptoms into scapegoats, one also allows oneself to remain blind to the fact that these voters feel these kinds of resentments because they themselves are suffering, and one thereby excuses oneself from reflecting on, diagnosing and taking care of this suffering.
Of what is the FN/RN a symptom? With what kind of suffering are their voters and sympathisers afflicted? And what is the alternative to scapegoating the scapegoaters? Answering these three questions would require more space than is available here, but they are the questions raised by Le Pen’s unprecedented results this year, and to avoid them is to deny them. What’s more, this denial is widespread. It is therefore obligatory to at least give a few hints.
As mentioned already, the limits of the global economico-technical system were already beginning to show at the time of the FN’s foundation, leading to the Conservative Revolution of the 1980s (that is, Reagan, Thatcher and above all Milton Friedman) in which every welfare system, every regulatory system, every cultural system—every system capable of adjusting to or taking care of the consequences of approaching those limits—was threatened, weakened or dismantled. This would later include dismantling those regulatory and institutional systems for taking care of financial investment, but it was nevertheless only with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 that the catastrophic nature of this ‘revolution’ for financial institutions and governments themselves was fully revealed. This crisis would then, of course, strike ‘Europe’ itself, giving every appearance that the continental project was nothing more than a globalising strategy accelerating deindustrialisation and immigration, and in that way contributing to the destruction of every form of locality, and first among them the nation, including that economic destruction to which whole nations—first of all, Greece—would prove to be vulnerable as a consequence of allowing investment to be turned into speculation. While these European nations may have told themselves that they were protected from the consequences of deindustrialisation because Europe would always be a generator of ideas and technological innovations—even if these were manufactured elsewhere—this was largely a fantasy, and the reality for millions of Europeans was the irreversible elimination of their future prospects, perpetually justified by an ideology claiming that there was no alternative to the relentless pursuit of such neoliberal, and then ultraliberal, policies.
Whenever the ability to address real systemic problems and limits is lost, the temptation to seek scapegoats is inevitable, whether this consists in blaming immigrants for unemployment or blaming labour costs (and therefore unions) for deindustrialisation. But the suffering that leads to resentment is not only a question of these ‘economic’ realities, which strike ‘labour’ first of all, making it possible for this group which throughout the twentieth century was associated with the Left to begin to reject any affiliation with notions of progress and through that to identify itself with FN ideas. If we can refer to these ideas as political populism, it is because we believe that they are not really ideas, but slogans and strategies arising from persuasive techniques designed to manipulate populations by appealing not to their true desires, but to their basest drives—to fear, stupidity, denial and madness. And yet we know very well that such techniques are common to all political parties today, and have been especially since the rise of television: a telecracy in a wider sense. And we further know that if this is the case, it is so because all these political populisms are themselves species of the more general reign of marketing, advertising, public relations, the cult of celebrity and so on—all phenomena of what we could call industrial populism. All of these phenomena make use of analogue and digital audio-visual technologies to short-circuit desire and target the drives, to eliminate everything exceptional in favour of the average, to undermine every form of local specificity in the name of economies of scale and the conquest of the widest possible market, to destroy all investment in the long-term so as to generate the quickest returns, to undermine every form of knowledge in order to replace it with informational messages, to sever intergenerational bonds and authority, and to have descendants dictate their purchasing wishes to ascendants—and above all, to interrupt every process for the cultivation of attention and replace it with a logic of addiction to distraction. It is all of this, in combination with the economic and material upheavals that it supports, conceals and generates, that continuously tends to reduce citizens to consumers, and in so doing to eliminate all the conditions of the feeling of existing—if it is true, as André Leroi-Gourhan said in the 1960s, that a minimum of participation is necessary in order to feel.
As Macron collapses and Le Pen gains an increasing foothold, the fantasy that Macron was a ‘bastion’ against the rise of RN equally falls apart, the postponement he made possible fades away, and the ‘nightmare’ threatens to recur with greater virulence. The success of the left coalition in the second round of the election might be seen as a defeat for the forces of telecracy, but what does it harbour for the 2027 presidential election in the absence of an alternative to the current consumerist system based on industrial populism and generating political populism? What is the alternative? Or: what is the alternative to those alternatives purveyed by all the ‘hucksters of resentment’ trying as hard as possible to appeal to those who feel, with reason, that, if democracy implies the kratos, the capacity for governance of a demos, then we are no longer in a democracy, because we no longer form a demos capable of bearing the responsibility of any kratos—citizens having regressed to consumers (including as consumers of political populism) and democracy having regressed to telecracy? Telecracy makes its electorate industrially by every performative marketing technique, today operating more rapidly and powerfully than ever via big data, supercomputing, social networks and so on. Yet one perverse consequence of this process is that parties themselves converge towards an industrially—and increasingly, algorithmically—generated average, reflected in an increasing indifferentiation of policies. Which is not to deny that there are also differences: in the case of Macron, it is a matter of drifting to the Right; in the case of RN, it is reflected in all those forms of ‘softening’ that meant the party abandoned its call for the restoration of capital punishment, changed the tone of its anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric, reduced its commitment to protectionism, dropped its opposition to the euro and moderated its stance on both the European Union and NATO.
In reflecting on the situation we and France are now in, it is worth considering the wider social and psychological processes presently underway. The cultivation of the capacity to pay attention in children depends on adults possessing the knowledge of how to pay attention to those children in a way that raises them up to want to pay attention. Today, adults and collectives know very well that no real attention is being paid to them, and they both lose the ability to pay attention themselves and feel the wish to react—to force attention back upon them—by refusing and rejecting all those institutions and authorities that ignore them, all the while telling them of their paternalistic benevolence. If there is an alternative, it consists in turning back to real causes and addressing them, and in the first place this means those causes that lie in an industrial, technological and economic process of the destruction of attention—of the rulers to the ruled, and of the ruled to the real conditions of the world—and everything it makes possible, including every possible long-term desire. Which means every possible future. Such an alternative implies a politico-economic transformation, because it strikes at the heart of the industrial model driving the current economico-technical system headlong past its limits. But without such an alternative, the suffering produced by this self-destructive system will only intensify, the resentment that wants to identify the guilty and sacrifice the scapegoat will only grow stronger, and the possibility of avoiding the worst outcomes will be lost.