“For many French citizens of Jewish faith, our party is a shield against Islamist ideology. » If we are to believe the president of the National Rally (RN) Jordan Bardella, speaking shortly after the October 7 attacks, his party went from an enemy of the Jews of France to an ally. Its claimed position against anti-Semitism today takes the form of an “unconditional” attitude. support Israel’s war against Hamas – and condemning the failure of the left to do the same. Interviewed on Sunday, Bardella insisted that the label “anti-Semitism” did not fit – noting that perennial candidate Marine Le Pen had distanced herself from her father Jean-Marie on this very issue. Pushed to comment on the historic founder of the party, Bardella replied that he “does not believe that Jean-Marie Le Pen is anti-Semitic”.
The tense of the verb was strange: Jean-Marie Le Pen, convicted Holocaust denier, is still alive. But by working to “mainstream” its brand, the RN must touch up its own past. In her 2017 memoir, Marine Le Pen insists that her father did it “I don’t want to hurt anyone» when he described the gas chambers as a “detail of history”; Bardella, 28, deflects this controversy by saying he is “too young” to have witnessed it. But the RN is not the only one to move the lines. Take Marion Maréchal. Tuesday she insisted that if his grandfather Jean-Marie Le Pen “was more listened to on immigration and Islamization forty years ago, there would certainly be less anti-Semitism today”.
Maréchal, leader of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquest party, is leading a rival campaign to Bardella’s RN list for the European elections in June. But both make a similar claim about the origins of anti-Semitism: the left, in particular Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, moved closer to the Islamists in the interest of winning the “Muslim vote”, while those who defend national identity and support Benjamin Netanyahu are the true friends of the Jews. This Sunday, the two far-right parties will join a march against anti-Semitism in Paris; France Insoumise will be absent, insisting that it refuses to march alongside.Nazis» or that walking is a “meeting for friends of unconditional support for the (Israeli) massacre» in Gaza.
The presence of the far right at the demonstration – called in response to a series of anti-Semitic incidents last month, including a stabbing in Lyon – caused difficulties for its organizers, including the president’s allies. Emmanuel Macron warned against “confusing rejection of Muslims and support for Jews.” Comparable gatherings in the past, for example a march in 2018 after the murder of Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, saw Marine Le Pen either shouted down or blocked from attending. This time, its presence is not really called into question, and that of Reconquest even less. The center-left leaders are proposing a “republican cordon” by which they would be visibly separated (the socialist leader Olivier Faure had initially called “all political forces» to join the march, but later clarified that he did not want to include Le Pen’s party).
that of Faure Criticisms The opportunism of the RN underlined that the party seeks to “distance itself from its past and some of its own elected representatives” – or at least “has not broken with its past”. He also notes the “sham” of using anti-Semitic fears as a weapon to demonize Muslims. Unlike France Insoumise, however, the other left-wing parties considered it important to attend the rally rather than risk the formation of a “republican front” without them. As in the comments cited above, the far right obviously seeks such a delimitation of the political space, presenting anti-Semitism as an evil imported by immigrants, in contradiction with French national(ist) history.
But the emphasis placed on the origins of the RN constitutes only part of the question. Firstly because this framing offers him too easy a “way out” by proclaiming that he is moving away from a doubtful but distant past. He will surely have been delighted to see Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld » says conservative journalist Eugénie Bastié that he welcomed the RN’s decision to join the march as a sign of its “progression towards republican values”. But there is also a more fundamental problem: it is wrong to imagine that the long history of European anti-Semitism is today replaced by Islamic anti-Semitism. Or imagine that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are clearly separable, even opposed, phenomena.
In this sense, relying on the Italian researcher Valério Renzi, we can see a fundamental distinction in much far-right discourse between two opposing avatars of Jewishness. On the one hand, there is what Renzi calls the “sovereignist Jew,” in fact an ethnonationalist vision of Israel as an outpost of Western resistance to Islamic and Islamist barbarism. On the other, the “cosmopolitan Jew”, posed in terms of uprooting, disloyalty and preference for abstract and “ideological” schemes rather than for the realities of the nation and identity. This allows the far right to “wash Netanyahu” of its anti-Semitism, while rephrasing classic warnings about the “Judeo-Bolshevik” threat in modernized language.
The two visions are articulated through versions of Renaud Camus’s “Theory of the Great Replacement”, invented in 2010. This evokes a plot orchestrated by impenetrable “globalist interests” or named Jewish individuals like financier George Soros, in concert with “cultural Marxist” ideologues. , to replace rooted families (European, Christian, etc.) with atomized and rootless immigrants. Zemmour, leader of the Reconquest party and ardent opponent of “Islamization”, openly adopts the theory. While Le Pen did the same thing in the past, since 2014, the RN management has generally avoided the expression “Great Replacement”. Rather, he asserts that “the major financial circles using immigration to lower wages» and condemns Soros or the “pseudo-NGOs” financed by him as organizers of mass migrations.
If Le Pen insists that this is a “pragmatic” rather than a “conspiracy” reading, she is based on a classically anti-Semitic vision in which “national” producers (French workers, French industrialists) are victims of uprooted speculators. It expresses a “social anti-Semitism”, in which social conflicts are expressed through ethnonationalist avatars. However, as Michel Eltchaninoff maintains in his In the head of Marine Le Pen, it is common in her rhetoric that she both claims a disinterest in “theories,” alienating to most voters, and that she simultaneously alludes to their arguments. References to controversial issues (like “veiled women demand separate opening times at swimming pools”) create a clear image in the listener’s mind – Muslims are in charge – without actually saying the words.
As Eltchaninoff shows, this also applies to the use of 19th century anti-Semitic ideas, disseminated in RN propaganda and in Le Pen’s books. Hence the reformulation of old anti-Semitic tropes in ideas such as the “hyperclass” seeking a “new man, cut off from his roots, nomadic, useless, slave to the market order” in a world “virtualized”; liberal reference to names such as the Rothschilds; or, echoing far-right ideologue Alain Soral, the idea of ”the Bank” and what Le Pen calls the “unfree” politicians who have “submitted” to it, “waiting for the words of the credit agencies as if they were waiting for the word of the credit agencies. of the Messiah. » As Eltchaninoff concludes, if the anti-Semitic intention is not explicit, the anti-Semitic listener “will find something to feed his obsession”.
This approach echoes many far-right forces abroad who similarly evade accusations of anti-Semitism. Bardella’s arguments that he is “too young” to draw inspiration from the past, or the RN’s relations with Netanyahu’s Likud party, closely resemble the example of Italian Giorgia Meloni. Having long promoted Grand replacement theoryMeloni now claims that the reference to orchestrated “ethnic substitution” has no “racial” connotation, although in a book published in September she accuses Soros of “maneuvering” to stimulate African migration with the sole aim of diluting European identity. This in no way prevented Meloni from “integrating” his party into the international conservative ranks, through a studied conformity to Euro-Atlantic foreign policy.
In this month of May NatCon meetup in London, supporters of Viktor Orbán distributed books which drew similar lines of demarcation in order to challenge the Hungarian government’s allegations of anti-Semitism. In addition to comments about the safety of Jews on the streets of Budapest, the story and interviews included specifically address the issue of Soros – regularly the target of ruling party propaganda, which accuses him of orchestrating the mass immigration. We are variously told that (i) Soros’ Jewishness is inauthentic or (ii) he is criticized not as a Jew, but regardless of his Jewishness, and (iii) in any case, Orbán is strongly pro-Israeli.
Today, RN leaders like Bardella accuse the European Union of not being sufficiently supportive of Israel – even expressing disagreement with Israel. I hope to visit the country. This position is not universal on the far right: in fact, small groups like Action Française and the Union Defense Group (GUD) have criticized the RN for “following the Tel Aviv line”. A series of recent cases have highlighted the staff And financial Connections between the RN and the GUD – as well as the diversity of extra-parliamentary activist groups today under the aegis of Reconquête. The existence of such formations, often drawing directly on the imagery and heroes of French fascism from the Second World War, hardly supports the idea that anti-Semitism is an Islamic import.
As Sunday’s demonstration approaches, we can nevertheless observe a creeping normalization of the National Rally, similar to that achieved by Meloni’s party in Italy. In this, it is really important to get rid of the anti-Semitic label. The media of the English-speaking world such as Spectator now they regularly promote it and tout its detoxification. Even an article in the liberal newspaper Guardianon a subject similar to that of the present article, has hardly contributed to fueling contemporary anti-Semitism in the RN, beyond the embarrassments of its “booted” origins: it was first published under the title “The support of Marine Le Pen to Israel seen as a move away from the party.” Antisemite Past”, before a later edition.
We can of course “see” this as a move away from anti-Semitism. But if we understand the place of social anti-Semitism in today’s far right, or the role of conspiracy theorists’ ideas on the destruction of national identity, then Le Pen’s support for Netanyahu is not the only thing worth noting.