The Economist November 20th 2021 85
Books & artsFrenchnationalismThe less accused
“N
ationalism is thesafeguarding of
all those treasures that are at threat
without a foreign army crossing the bor
der, without the physical invasion of terri
tory. It is the defence of the nation against
the stranger from within.” Thus wrote
Charles Maurras, a reactionary and anti
Semitic French author, in “My Political
Ideas” in 1937. After the disgrace and trau
ma of Vichy France, which officially brand
ed Jews the stranger within, such thinking
was for most of the postwar period ban
ished to the fringes of French intellectual
life. For decades it was intellosfrom the po
litical left who dominated the salons and
newspaper columns of Paris.
Today, however, France is seeing a dis
concerting revival of ultranationalist
thinking, and with it the rehabilitation of
onceostracised reactionary writers. Rob
ert Laffont, a respected Paris publisher, re
printed the collected works of Maurras in- This year a rightwing French pub
lisher reissued “The Great Replacement”,
which first came out in 2011; its author, Re
naud Camus, is a hardright writer current
ly appealing a conviction for incitement to
racial hatred. As some nativists allege of
America, Mr Camus argues that France is
undergoing a demographic “conquest”, in
this case involving the relentless replace
ment of the “French people” with those
from its former colonies.
Assorted micromovements and indi
viduals on the extreme and ultraCatholic
right have long claimed to be the inheritors
of reactionary fin-de-siècle thought. But
these peripheral voices were dignified
with neither serious scrutiny nor polite de
bate. Now, outlets such as Valeurs Actuelles,
a rightwing magazine, and CNews, a
French 24hour news channel likened to
Fox News, discuss little else. Mr Camus has
turned from recluse to televisionstudio
guest. Eric Zemmour, a pundit and polem
icist, doubles as a populist radical hopingto stand in next April’s presidential elec
tion. His latest bestseller, “France Has Not
Had Its Final Word”, is a lament for “the
death of France as we know it”. Dressed in
an intellectual veneer, the book identifies
at every turn a threat to “the French people,
their customs, their history, their state,
their civility, their civilisation”.
Two sinister underlying obsessions
link this contemporary discourse to the
earlier reactionary and nationalist French
essayists. The first is a belief in an immuta
ble “eternal France”. Maurras, who was a
leading figure in Action Française, a politi
cal movement that was founded in 1899 to
defend “true France”, termed this le pays
réel(the real country): a land of church
spires, ancestral soil and family tradition.
It was to be distinguished, in his view,
from le pays légal(the legal country), or the
artificial structures of the anticlerical
republican administration. Old enemies and new
Identity in this sense is not a fluid multiple
construct, but rather is fixed and rooted in
the earth. “The land gives us discipline,
and we are the extension of the ancestors,”
declared Maurice Barrès, another influen
tial nationalist writer who was close to
Maurras, in 1899. The iconography of Vichy
France later embraced this bloodandsoil
identity, celebrating rural life, church,
family and work on the land. Indeed, Mr
Zemmour entitles a chapter of his latest
book “The Land and the Dead”, after a
speech of that name by Barrès. In it, MrP ARIS
Far-right ideas are gaining respectability in France. They have deep roots→Alsointhissection
86 HenryKissingeronAI
87 A historyoftheweek
88 The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi