French philosopher Michel
Onfray | FAROUK BATICHE/AFP/Getty Images
J’accuse:
Leftist intellectuals turn right
Unusual
ideological bedfellows in France are uniting against globalization
and the euro.
By PIERRE BRIANÇON
10/16/15, 5:30 AM CET Updated 10/16/15, 7:04 AM CET
PARIS — When the
newspaper Libération last month accused self-professed “left of
the left” philosopher and best-selling author Michel Onfray of
“doing the [far-right party] Front National’s bidding,” French
intellectuals circled the wagons.
Riding to the rescue
from the left and right to defend Onfray, they did what intellectuals
do in these cases: organize a public debate. The headline of the
event, to be hosted at the Maison de la Mutualité on October 20 by
political weekly magazine Marianne in support of its sometime
contributor Onfray, sets a new standard for navel-gazing: “Can we
still debate in France?”
Spoiler alert: The
fury stirred up by the controversy offers a good clue to the answer.
Onfray is only the
latest French thinker whom government-friendly media and Socialist
party officials accuse of pushing ideas similar to those of the
far-right — on immigration, the role of Islam in society and the
need to restore France’s battered sense of self.
They include the
moralist philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, a former left-wing radical
and now member of the French Academy who has written several books on
the waning of France’s traditional republican culture and the
country’s “unhappy identity” (the title of one of his books);
Régis Debray, a 1960s companion of Che Guevara who later became an
adviser to former Socialist president François Mitterrand; Eric
Zemmour, a far-right journalist and TV debater whose book “Le
suicide français” (‘The French suicide’) on “the 40 years
that destroyed France” became an unlikely best-seller last year;
and even Michel Houellebecq, the recluse novelist whose latest book,
“Submission,” describes a future France as an Islamic theocracy.
The new ‘new
reactionaries’
The controversy has
simmered for a long time. In 2002 the left-leaning magazine Nouvel
Observateur was already putting Finkielkraut on its cover to wonder
whether he was part of the “new reactionaries.”
But it is now
pervasive and part of the permanent French debate. And it hasn’t
been restricted to the realm of high-brow discourse.
After French Prime
Minister Manuel Valls recently criticized Onfray for one of his
tirades, he was called “a moron” in return by the philosopher.
And earlier this year, Valls was deemed “a bore” by Houellebecq
after venturing that he didn’t agree with the writer’s somber
vision.
Libération’s
outburst was prompted by the latest in a long string of provocative
statements Onfray has made in recent months, attacking the Socialist
government’s policies and principles.
In an interview with
Le Figaro on September 8, the writer criticized what he called “the
emotional response” to the picture of a dead refugee child that
made headlines around the world and prompted French President
François Hollande to soften on the issue of quotas for accepting
asylum-seeker quotas.
Onfray, who declined
a request for comment for this article, went on to accuse France’s
successive governments of “being contemptuous of the people” —
what he calls, using the English term, “the ‘old school’
people”: French blue-collar workers, the unemployed, the poor, the
pensioners.As for National Front leader Marine Le Pen, he said: “I
don’t resent her as much as I resent those who made her possible.”
The dispute comes a
few weeks after Jacques Sapir, an economist from the far left who has
long campaigned against the euro, suggested the creation of an
“anti-euro national liberation front” that might extend up to and
including Le Pen’s party.
Sapir added, in a
Libération interview, that it was undeniable that the far-right
National Front had “changed in the last years.” He is also one of
France’s staunchest defenders of Vladimir Putin’s policies, and
the author of a blog hailing what he sees as the Russian president’s
many “successes” both economically and on the international
stage.
Trojan horse of
globalization
Onfray has called
Sapir’s idea of an anti-euro alliance “interesting.” Some of
the philosopher’s critics see a bitter irony in the fact that in
2002, he created a “People’s University” in Normandy, where he
resides, to counter the rising influence of the National Front’s
ideas. That’s the year when the party’s founder Jean-Marie Le
Pen, father of current leader Marine, made it to the second round of
the French presidential election against then-president Jacques
Chirac after having defeated Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin.
The real split in
French politics, as Onfray now sees it, is between the ruling,
pro-European elites of both the conservative and socialist parties
and the French people, who, he often says, have been betrayed “since
1983” — when then-president Mitterrand, a Socialist, converted to
pro-market policies.
Ideological overlap
between the National Front and France’s far left is not entirely
new. The nationalist party has long sought and received support from
French workers disillusioned by the mainstream left parties. Some
former communist strongholds are now areas where the FN gets its
largest support.
‘This
government from the left can’t seem to find an intellectual on its
side.’
Marine Le Pen
herself stands a serious chance of winning the Nord-Pas de Calais
district in the upcoming regional elections in December. The
industry-dominated area was long ruled by the socialist or communist
left. The anti-capitalist, anti-U.S. and populist platform of the
National Front strikes a chord with voters who resent the changes
brought by globalization.
“Europe is seen by
those intellectuals as just the Trojan horse of globalization,”
said Laurent Joffrin, the editor of Libération who led the
anti-Onfray charge. “What unites those intellectuals is opposition
in general to modern times — to the governing left, to
market-friendly Europe, to immigrants seen as the armies of Islam.
They never venture to tell us what should be done.”
‘The people vs.
the euro’
Leftists like Onfray
now find themselves agreeing with the other end of the political
spectrum on a couple of key themes.
The first is the
fate of France’s poor and working class – the “proletariat”
Onfray says has been abandoned by the right and the left alike. In
that vision, the governing left’s policies favor the globalized
elite and the well-to-do, while catering to the needs of minorities
(“the margins,” says Onfray) — such as immigrants, homosexuals
and women.
The second theme is
the visceral hostility towards Europe and the euro, seen as
constraining economic and social policy and a fatal blow to the
infamous “exception française,” a large and costly welfare state
that’s supposed to shield the French from the turmoils of the
global economy.
The drama is being
played daily in the court of public opinion. Think of it as “the
people vs. the euro.”
“The latest
eruption doesn’t come in a vacuum,” said Pascal Bruckner, an
essayist and fiction writer, and one of the few French intellectuals
who still presents himself as “pro-Europe, and rather Atlanticist.”
“There has long
been a tradition of intellectuals defining themselves against the
government, and if Valls thinks he can be a book critic, then the
reaction is understandable,” Bruckner said. “What’s striking
today is that it looks like this government from the left can’t
seem to find an intellectual on its side”
Meanwhile, France
continues to struggle with the economic crisis. Even as unemployment
in the eurozone as a whole has declined steadily since early 2013, it
keeps rising in France and may soon go above the monetary union’s
average.
France’s
intellectuals grapple with globalization, as does the rest of the
society.
“This increases
the disillusion of traditional left voters,” said Joffrin, “because
the government so far can’t show results for its pro-euro, fiscally
strict policies.”
The zeitgeist is
summed up by the term “sinistrose,” the deep-rooted pessimism
that has long passed as a trait of the French psyche but is taking a
turn for the worse in times of economic and political uncertainty.
The anti-European
feeling even permeates the governing left. When Marine Le Pen last
week addressed Hollande in the European Parliament by calling him
[Merkel’s] “vice-chancellor for the France region,” she was
only slightly more aggressive than Hollande’s former economy
minister, Arnaud Montebourg, who was fired from the government last
year after saying that France’s austerity policies were “dictated
by Germany’s right.”
“Europe here
serves as proxy for globalization,” said a government adviser, who
didn’t want to be identified for fear of “adding fuel to the
fire.” “I call it the defeatist wing of French intellectual life:
There’s no chance we’ll be able to make it, so let’s retract
and retreat.”
And, yes, debate.
The new talk-show
culture
The “Saving
Philosopher Onfray” operation has no shortage of theatricality. It
involves best-selling authors, whose pictures more often than not
grace the covers of glossy news magazines, complaining about a “media
conspiracy” to silence them.
Onfray’s
best-selling books provide frequent cover stories for the news
weeklies, and Finkielkraut seems like he has a permanent seat on
French TV talk shows. Even government-supportive media, such as
Libération or L’Obs, are eager takers for interviews with the
supposedly silenced reactionaries.
Authors with more
established “intellectuel” credentials, such as Finkielkraut, are
pushing back against what they consider an anti-racist or
“anti-fascist” thought police. The philosopher recently defended
the right of Nadine Morano, a French MP from Nicolas Sarkozy’s
party Les Républicains, to say France was a “white race”
country.
Le Pen’s party, he
writes in his most recent book, “La Seule Exactitude,” must be
criticized for itself — because it is a “party of demagogues,
ignoring both the complexity of political action and economic laws,
promoting the cult of the strong man to the point of making Vladimir
Putin not only an ally but a role model.”
Bruckner said it
remains to be seen whether the controversy will be “just a prairie
fire, chased next week by another piece of news” or a sign that
“the divorce will become permanent between the ruling left and the
intellectuals.”
In the meantime
there is whispering that the big Mutualité meeting might be canceled
after all — especially since neither Onfray nor Finkielkraut has
agreed to appear as a witness for his own defense.
Authors:
Pierre Briançon
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