At Stake in France’s Election: What It Means to Be French

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/opinion/at-stake-french-elections-what-it-means-to-be-french.html

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PARIS — On April 23, France’s voters avoided the most dangerous of traps: a red-brown runoff between two authoritarian demagogues — Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far left and Marine Le Pen on the far right. Both offered similarly reckless policies: Exit the European Union and NATO. Adopt economic protectionism. Get cozy with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Ms. Le Pen — a political goddaughter, if ever there was one, to Donald Trump — remains in the running for president. But instead of Mr. Mélenchon, on Sunday she must face Emmanuel Macron, a young pro-Europe centrist who is given a good chance to defeat her.

He’s not elected yet, but his first-place showing two weeks ago clarified the choices in France’s severe crisis of identity. About half of those who voted chose Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Mélenchon or some other extreme populist. Is the strength of demagogy just another example of the populist winds blowing throughout the West? Or is France uniquely cursed — the sick man of Europe?

The story behind the answer begins in 1940: France never got over its collapse after Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg and the collaboration that ensued. To be sure, Charles de Gaulle and the Resistance formed a heroic minority around which could be woven a comforting myth of greatness. In 1945, that was enough for France to be counted as one of the war’s winners. It also allowed France to repress the humiliation of surrender and, after the war, to embark on ill-timed military exploits to restore its self-confidence as a global power. In Indochina and Algeria, it defended its empire, and with Britain at Suez it sought to maintain its Middle Eastern influence. But those efforts failed. By 1962, France had lost most of its overseas possessions — most notably Algeria, since 1830 the jewel in France’s crown.

The Algerian debacle was also repressed — again by de Gaulle. He spun a new myth of France’s global importance and prepared France’s economy for modernization. He and his successors gave the French atomic bombs, supermarkets, Ariane rockets and high-speed trains. Through the Cold War, they promised new frontiers for influence in Western Europe that could make up for the painful loss of empire and the trauma of 1940 — in short, a Gallocentric Europe.

German reunification put an end to such illusions. With the European Union incorporating Central European countries, Germany again became the continent’s epicenter. And because Germany focused on making its economy more efficient, it distanced itself from its neighbor, ensuring that Europe would never be a Grande France. Indeed, the 1990s and 2000s brought Europe a new paradigm driven increasingly by Anglo-American ideals: the market society, multicultural and neo-liberal.

Here the French held their ground, clinging to their own vision of a secular, centralized welfare state. No longer the center of the world, France now swam against the current of history. An aging diva whose charms had long masked her narcissism no longer embodied modernity.

And so, today’s conundrum: What does it mean to be French? What is France’s calling in a globalized world? No one, least of all the political elite, has had an answer. As the French mourn their past (or imagined) grandeur, the resentful among them have turned their backs on Europe and shut themselves off from the world.

This identity crisis conceals yet another, now erupting to sow fear and rare violence. The place of Islam in France, a fallout from the Algerian era, has became a national neurosis. From 1954 to 1962, France waged a terrible colonial war: eight years long, fought by more than two million draftees, leaving 300,000 to 400,000 dead on the Algerian side and 25,000 soldiers and 3,000 civilians among the French.

The repercussions in France have been unique: A million “pieds noirs” returned to French cities and their European origins when hostilities ended. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians and other North Africans joined them to work in France’s thriving factories. But unemployment skyrocketed during the 1970s oil crisis, just as their families gained permission to follow the workmen; this completed the reunion of all the participants in the Algerian tragedy but with little or no inclination to reconcile.

Instead, memories and guilty consciences too long in the shadows re-emerged to plague all sides. Old prejudices and stereotypes — Arab, colonist, white man, noble savage — clashed. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper in Algeria and the father of Marine, founded the xenophobic National Front. Identity conflict arose among many of the grandchildren of 1960s and ’70s immigrants, driving some to political Islamism.

Today, most French people see their Islamist compatriots as separatists. The jihadists who attacked in 2015 and 2016 were not foreign; they were French citizens killing other French citizens.

In the face of all this, France needed brave, visionary leaders; it got, as its last two presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande — mediocre politicians who flaunted big words without risking ambitious reform. Mr. Sarkozy spoke of change — a shift to neo-liberalism and a reinforcement of law and order; instead, he kept the socialist 35-hour workweek and cut 10,000 employees from the police force. Mr. Hollande swore to wage “war on finance gone wild,” but taxed the middle class instead.

Thus, France let a decade go to waste. Unemployment and debt remain high; competitiveness and purchasing power decline. In the right-wing primaries for this election, Mr. Sarkozy was eliminated in the first round. On the left, Mr. Hollande didn’t dare run.

On the right, François Fillon set out to be the white knight. A former prime minister, he made speeches with Churchillian overtones, asking sacrifices to save the land. A Catholic father of five, he vowed to be a model president. He is now suspected of embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds to pay his wife for a no-show parliamentary job. For a generation or more, the motto of the French political class might have been, “I serve the state so I can use the state to my own convenience.”

So, on April 23, the French decided to wipe out Mr. Fillon and his Socialist rival, Benoît Hamon, the candidates of the two parties that had dominated French political life for nearly 60 years.

The death of that system on April 23 left the runoff this weekend a referendum on Ms. Le Pen. Perhaps it is fortunate that her National Front is strongly nationalist and xenophobic, with a fascist past that recalls the shame of Vichy France. That may spare the French another 1940 — one more debacle.

But even if it does, Mr. Macron would inherit a fractured, ungovernable France, recalling Germany’s Weimar Republic. Its red and brown extremes would keep spinning their webs, refuse to help him, and wait for the Republic’s final collapse. For that reason, Mr. Macron would have to quickly and decisively build a new, myth-free vision of France and its identity in Europe, working on the home front and with whoever is Germany’s chancellor, as he promised to do during his campaign.

That kind of cleareyed partnership could finally offer a new horizon to the bewildered French. There’s still time to resolve their conundrum — by guaranteeing France a central role in a European counter-model to Mr. Putin’s Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and Mr. Trump’s America.