Before night falls: An American’s letter to France
by
Michael Deibert
It
has been a wrenching few years in France, hard to witness for an American like
me who holds the country in great affection. From the attack on the satirical
journal Charlie Hebdo (itself a champion of an inclusive, liberal, secular
France) in January 2015 to the Paris attacks in November of that year, to
sundry assaults in Nice, Magnanville, Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, the
Champs-Élysées and elsewhere, France has had its sense of security badly
shaken. Layer on top of this an anemic economy that grew at a rate of barely
more than 1% in 2016, national unemployment that hovers at close to 10%, and
youth unemployment that sees nearly one in four under 25 years old out of work, and
it is no surprise that a sense of malaise and pessimism has settled on the
country. The two traditional major political currents, today represented by the
left-wing ruling Parti Socialiste and the right-wing opposition Les
Républicains, seemingly utterly out of ideas for how to address these severe
challenges.
And
now, I fear, France might build upon these terrible events with a self-inflicted
wound that would be the greatest tragedy of all: Electing Marine Le Pen as
president.
It
is a testimony to how much the traditional political system in France has
broken down that in last month’s presidential election, the two top vote-getters
who proceeded to the second (and final) round were Le Pen, of the extreme-right
Front National, and Emmanuel Macron, a former finance minister whose own
political party, En Marche!, was only formed in April of last year.
As
Le Pen and Macron head into the 7 May runoff election, most polls put Macron
comfortably ahead, but threats of abstention by France’s far left (whose
candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has declined to advise his voters to support
Macron) raise worrying specters of the 2016
U.S. election, where two candidates with no serious program for the
country siphoned off just enough votes from Hillary Clinton in key states to
give Donald Trump the White House (Clinton lost Pennsylvania by 44,312 votes.
while Jill Stein and Garry Johnson, neither of whom had any chance of winning, drew away
49,947 and 146,711, respectively).
As
the far left and the far right attempt to paint Macron as a tool of the establishment
given his background as investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque (a
barely concealed antisemitic dog whistle among France’s far right), observers
like myself are left to gaze upon the disheartening spectacle of one of the
world’s most highly educated and wealthiest democracies having so many of its
voters potentially seduced by a political figure who represents, in word and
deed, a number of the demonic tendencies in France’s body politic that many
thought they had left behind.
Marine
Le Pen took over the Front National from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man
of intemperate speech who once suggested that Nazi gas chambers that killed
Jews and others during the Holocaust were “a detail of history” and praised
Philippe Pétain, who headed France’s collaborationist Vichy government during
World War II, a transgression for which he was fined by a French court. When
the elder Le Pen reached the 2002 general election for president (which he
would lose to Jacques Chirac), Le Monde ran an article accusing him of having
tortured prisoners during Algeria’s war of independence, during which Le Pen
served as a lieutenant in a paratroop regiment.
Though
the young Le Pen succeeded in expelling her father from the party in August
2015 and has attempted a (largely cosmetic) makeover, the Front National
remains a deeply nasty organization, a party overflowing to the brim with
Holocaust-deniers and assorted antisemites, virulently and violently
anti-immigrant agitators, Islamaphobic harpies and royalist quacks
Just
last month, referring to the Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver, a Nazi-directed mass
arrest against Parisian Jews that took place in July 1942 (an enterprise aided
by French police), after which children as young as 18 months old were shipped
off to Auschwitz and killed, Le Pen said that “I don’t think France is
responsible.” After Le Pen made a grand show of stepping down as leader of the
Front National to “feel more free and above all, above party politics,” the man
who replaced her, Jean-François Jalkh, was forced to step down after he told
journalists that it was “impossible” that the chemical agent Zyklon B was used
“in mass exterminations.”
All
that aside, Le Pen has a clear and piercing message that resonates in a deeply
pessimistic country: France has been betrayed by global elites, is being
overrun by dangerous migrants (conveniently ignoring the fact that almost all
perpetrators of recent terrorist attacks in France were native-born) and that
only by returning to a vanished and idealized past (which never really existed)
can France recapture its “greatness.” It is a message that should seem
disturbingly familiar to those of us living through Brexit Britain and the current
Trumpian dystopia of the United States. And it has already seduced some of the
opportunists populating France’s political establishment. Only last week,
failed presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the Debout la France
party announced his willingness to serve as Le Pen’s Prime Minister.
As
an American who lived in and loves France, it is my sincere hope that this
country that has given the world so much does not make this Faustian bargain.
We
have had a long friendship, France and the United States, and we have seen one
another through some wrenching times. The Marquis de Lafayette abandoned his
comfortable life in France and spent the agonizing winter of 1777 with George
Washington and the the Continental Army in Valley Forge (only a few miles from
where I grew up) because of his commitment to the American cause. In later
generations, thousands of American soldiers would give their lives on the
beaches and in the fields of France to help free it from tyranny.
African
Americans like Sidney Bechet found relief in France’s embrace from the scalding
racial prejudice of the Jim Crow South. Others, such as James Baldwin and
Richard Wright, joining Americans such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller, came to bask in the country’s rich
cultural ambiance. Beyond the U.S., refugees from wars such as those that
afflicted the Balkans and Algeria in the 1990s (I am aware, of course, of
France’s tangled colonial relationship with Algeria) also arrived and found in
France the democratic and pluralistic embrace they could not find at home.
Lest
you think my affection comes from delusion, ignorance or romanticism, let me
assure you it does not. Both of the neighborhoods I lived in, Château Rouge and
Bagnolet, were immigrant-heavy and lower-middle class, but were vibrant and
welcoming to an outsider such as me, and I would often stop off at the local
bars along Rue Léon like Les 3 Frères or L'Olympic, where the bartenders and
patrons of Maghrebian, West African, European and other extraction would sit,
some drinking a Leffe or a glass of vin rouge, some drinking tea or coffee, in
easy, democratic amity. When Paris was attacked in November 2015, it pierced my
heart the way few things have since I stood in Manhattan in 2001 and watched
our iconic buildings fall, walking home over the bridge to Brooklyn with debris
raining down on me.
I
stood and saw with my own eyes the ashes of the police station at
Villiers-le-Bel during the riots there in 2007, and visited Clichy-sous-Bois to
listen to and understand the reality of the people who lived there. I traveled
through the villages of Normandy and stood on the D-Day beaches there and
thought of the sacrifice of those brave soldiers (like my grandfathers) who
fought fascism and racial hatred in Europe and the South Pacific, and whose
blood and ashes intermingled with those of other patriots on French soil. I
discovered the sublime beauty of regions like the Bouches-du-Rhône and the
Camargue, and the simplicity of village life in the Vallée de la Loire. I myself
hail from an area of southern Pennsylvania not that different in its fading
economic model from a place like Amiens, and to some of Marine Le Pen’s
wavering supporters, I say this: As a child of the American, if not French,
working-class, I share at a molecular level your feeling of betrayal by the
political and economic elite.
But
I have also seen how fast populist demagogues can destroy a society and hollow
out its institutions, leaving a bitter pantomime of civilization in its place.
I have seen this first hand in places like Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Haiti and
Nicaragua, and watched it from afar elsewhere, in Russia, Turkey and Venezuela,
to name a few. I am seeing the beginning of it now in my own country under
Trump
The
violent naysayers on the left and the right will tell you that France must
close in upon itself, be afraid, shut out the world, or that Emmanuel Macron is
too young, too inexperienced, too much a product of the establishment to ever
dynamite France out of the deep sense of ennui in which it now dwells. They
will tell you that only by leaping into the unknown, by violating the social
contract and political norms, by taking a chance on those with a conspiratorial
gleam in their eyes - who tell you that in order for some French people to rise,
others must be brought low - can France drag itself out of the mire it finds
itself in.
My
advice to you from embattled America, where we find ourselves, on multiple
fronts, forced to fight Trump every day: When the sirens of extremism arise,
demanding your support and your obedience, telling you they love your country
but truly only loving power itself, tell them to go to the devil.
Michael
Deibert is the author of Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books,
2017).
