
The French Right: Still Alive!
Never before has the national Right achieved such a result in France, to the point of surpassing the governmental Right. New perspectives are opening up for the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Never before has the national Right achieved such a result in France, to the point of surpassing the governmental Right. New perspectives are opening up for the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
“As long as our contemporaries have not been made to understand once again that without saints there are no heroes, we will be condemned to fall.”—Jacques de Guillebon
Europe is immersed in an exercise of self-denial that will become self-destruction if a new course is not found.
From the desert of modernity, there is a path, and that is the path of tradition and return—as in the soul’s return to God.
The founder and patriarch of the family, Jean-Marie Le Pen, chose to speak out in the political-family feud that finds his daughter and granddaughter on opposite sides. He gave his full support to Marine Le Pen for the presidential campaign.
Zemmour regularly claims in his speeches his affiliation with the former RPR, and his desire to achieve a “union of the Right.” He hopes to gather within his candidacy all the families of the French Right attached to national identity, sovereignty, a certain economic liberalism, and a (moderate) social conservatism.
Of the three dominant types of welfare states, it is not easy to extract one that would be palatable to both social conservatives and social democrats—it is possible though. The path to a compromise can be found by navigating the dynamics between political methodology and political theory.
In our own time, we have seen the rise of calls for Burkean ideals on the Left. Think only of the Social Democrats in the UK, a party that had some influence in the 1980s but are almost entirely unknown today, who are against the wokeism dominating the current political debate, and who seek to preserve local customs, and use the very conservative sounding slogan “family, community, nation” as their header on their website.
The distribution of votes among the various right-wing candidates resembles a game of communicating vessels. Marine Le Pen is ploughing her own furrow. Eric Zemmour puts ‘des mots sur des maux’ (words on evils): it is what he does best. He can participate in the reconfiguration of the French right. Will he go much further?
The strategy of the super-woke failson anticipates resistance by using terms and premises that the establishment cannot rebuff without rebuffing its own basis. He acts as real-world, unpaid HR department officer. This is a means for proving his ambition and ability to police discourse, that is, his managerial competence. At bare minimum, this provides an escape valve for the frustrated failson to take his anger out on culturally deprivileged groups (‘hicks,’ ‘deplorables’) while reinforcing hegemonic discourse.