The Rise of Le Front National
The 1980s and 1990s in France are often seen, and not without some
justification, as the years of the `new consensus'. That is to say, the
1980s and 1990s were an era in which politicians from diverse and hitherto
opposed political traditions and parties found much common ground on which
they could agree. There emerged then, from the beginning of the 1980s
onwards, a new shared understanding of and agreement on the proper role of
government, state institutions and so on. From economic policy (e.g. the
strong franc, commitment to low inflation) to defence (e.g. supporting the
allies in the Gulf War), there was consensus (see Morris: 1994
pp.130-152).
However, in the midst of this `new consensus', the rise of the Front
National and its extreme policies stands out as something of an exception
and disrupts our picture of France since the 1980s. The Front National
when it came to prominence in the early 1980s rejected this common ground
and offered its own radical proposals: reintroducting the death penalty,
criminalizing abortion, blocking moves towards further European
integration, isolating AIDS sufferers and, of course, clamping down on
immigrants.
Although France has its own specific tradition of a radical Right, it
might be assumed that the events of the Second World War (occupation,
Vichy etc.) would have discredited it and debarred any such party from
playing a major role in France's postwar politics. Moreover, France's
increasing economic prosperity during les trente glorieuses and the
kind of nationalism that de Gaulle espoused was successful in
marginalizing the radical Right until the 1980s.
Although the Front National was originally founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in
October 1972, it occupied the margins of French political life until the
early 1980s. In the 1974 presidential elections, for example, the Front
National won only a 0.7% share of the vote. It was a marginal party even
at the beginning of the 1980s and in 1981 it won only 0.3% of the vote in
the legislative elections of that year. However, this represented its
lowest point and for the rest of the decade it began to break into French
political life as a significant political force with its populist
championning of `La France et les Français d'abord' and its
stigmatization of France's ethnic minorities, particularly those from
North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
By 1984, the Front National gained 11% of the votes cast in the European
elections and around 10% in the parlimentary elections of 1986 and 1988.
In the presidential election of 1988 it polled 4.4 million votes or 14.4%
of the total vote in the first ballot (Morris: 1994 p.148). Although the
Front National has had its share of problems recently, it remains a
powerful and durable political force with the consistent support of at
between 8-14% of the electorate nationally in a variety of elections,
although in some areas this is much higher, and with an influence on
national debates about immigration and France's ethnic minorities. At the
time of writing (16th March 1998), the Front National have recently won
around 15% of the vote nationally in France's regional elections, rising
to as much as 30% in some areas of the south.
Members of the Front National come from a variety of sources: some clearly
from the anti-republican Right (often pro-Vichy or reactionary Catholics)
but some are also top businessmen, civil servant or right- wing
intellectuals. Its electoral appeal, although predominantly masculine
(around 60%) and non- practising Catholic, cuts across class boundaries
and extends itself to the unemployed as well as the self- employed,
farmers and small shopkeepers, manual workers and cadres supérieurs
(higher executives). Certain groups, such as the elderly, women, educated
professions like teachers and, stangely, both the irreligious and
practising Catholics are most likely to remain indifferent to the appeal
of the Front National.
Before moving on to consider the reasons for the Front National's recent
electoral sucesses, it is useful to consider some of the ideas that they
represent. Although the details of their political programme undergo
slight changes from year to year, there are a number of important areas of
consistency. The Front National has been consistently hostile towards:
The Personality Factor
Some have attributed the success of the Front National to its charismatic
leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratroop officer, and his assertive
public performances. In speeches and interviews, Le Pen has consistently
played up his humble French roots and devotion to his country. He has been
forceful in his television and radio appearances, belittling his opponents
and deftly deflecting serious intellectual objections to his party, and he
is a lively and combative interviewee. Even apparent gaffes, like his
description in September 1987 of the Nazi gas chambers as `minor point of
detail' in the history of the Second World War, have been interpreted as
clever publicity ploys.
Le Pen's agressive style has often led him into difficulty and in April
1998 he was barred from seeking or holding public office by a court in
Versailles for having attacked Annette Pleuvast-Bergeal, a Socialist
candidate for Mantes-la-Jolie during the 1997 elections.
However, although the personality of Le Pen explains some of the success
of the Front National, it cannot explain it all. Indeed, such an
explanation stresses the individual (charisma of strong leader,
spell-binding leadership qualities etc.) at the expense of a proper
consideration of the wider issues involved. One might argue, rather, that
much more of the success of the Front National is attributable to the
political context of the 1980s and 1990s.
Political Factors
It is commonly agreed that President François Mitterand's introduction of
proportional representation in April 1985 helped increase the electoral
success of the Front National. Some commentators claimed that Mitterand
cynically manipulated the electoral system to discredit the centre Right
politically as well as divide the Right-wing vote (MacMillan: 1990 p.216).
Whatever the truth of this first claim, it is undoubtedly the case that
proportional representation split the Right-wing vote and allowed in the
Front National. In the legislative elections of 1986, for example, the
Front National gained 9.8% of the vote and 35 seats - a far better result
than that they would have secured under the old system. However, much as
this explains the electoral successes of the Front National in the
mid-1980s, it does not help to elucidate the appeal of their political
ideas and electoral programme.
More significant, perhaps, was the growing dissatisfaction amongst the
electorate, or rather, amongst certain parts of the electorate in certain
parts of the country, for the inability of governments of both the Left
and the Right, to address the issues that were felt to be of particular
concern, namely l'immigration, l'insécurité (we might
loosely translate this as law and order) and le chomâge. These
issues, which we might loosely describe as `quality of life' issues, were
largely ignored by France's mainstream parties who failed to pick up on
their importance to large sections of the electorate. The Front National
exploited this failure and the popular discontent with the government, and
indeed with France's major political parties which Le Pen dismissively
termed la bande des quatre (the gang of four, i.e. PS, PCF; RPR;
UDF). To put it simply then, the Front National were quick to say out loud
what large sections of the French population were thinking.
Throughout the 1980s the Left was somehow perceived to be unable to
provide credible solutions to the problems large numbers of the electorate
were facing. The Socialist government, the PCF, the French Communist Party
and the CGT, the powerful and Communist-dominated trade union all lose
support and public confidence in these years. It is interesting to note
that a significant percentage of supporters of the Front National are
disillusioned former Left-wingers of one sort or another.
The Right too, were also seen as powerless to address the problems facing
so many French men and women during their periods in power in the 1980s
and the 1990s and were frequently criticized by the Front National.
Chirac's failure to reform the nationality laws or `get tough' on
immigration, for example, were greeted with particualr derision from Le
Pen and his colleagues. A significant proportion of the Front National's
voters, it should be remembered were initially voters for one or more of
the parties of the Right.
Social and Economic Factors
Another major explanation for the rise in popularity of the Front National
was the concern many began to feel in France about a number of social and
economic developments. The growing economic crisis which emerged at the
end of les trente glorieuses and which became particularly acute
after 1979 was one major source of concern. Higher levels of unemployment
and increasing anxiety about job security is a key factor in the success
of the Front National who, in speeches and electoral propaganda, made an
explicit link between unemployment and immigration (Trois millions de
chômeurs, ce sont trois millions d'immigrés de trop). Despite the
crude logic and the ignorance of France's recent economic development that
this argument reveals, it had an undoubted appeal with a certain section
of the French electorate.
The detorioration of the social fabric that unemployement inevitably
engendered in certain areas of France, in particular its banlieues,
and the accompanying fear of crime and civic unrest is another factor that
the Front National has successfully exploited and is clearly related to
the Front National's racist agenda. It is interesting to note that, in
general, the popularity of the Front National is most prominent in those
départements, banlieues or quartiers with a high
ratio of ethnic minorities and/or pieds noirs. Popularity is
therefore particularly strong in the south from the Pyrenées Orientales to
the Alpes Maritimes (i.e. France's Mediterranean coastline which is in
relatively close proximity to North Africa), the depressed industrial
areas of the north/north-east and the troubled banlieues around
major cities like Paris, Lyon and Marseilles (i.e. where most immigrants
settled from the 1950s onwards).
In a related point, the Front National claimed that immigrants were
responsible for draining France of vital resources that might have
otherwise been spent on les Français de souche. This misconception
was another that was sucessfully exploited to electoral gain. For example,
in 1988 Albert Peyron, a Front National deputé, claimed that:
France's Identity Crisis
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Front National's electoral
sucess is due to its exploitation of anxieties about immigration and the
presence in France (particularly in the Île de France, Rhône-Alpes, and
Provence-Côte d'Azur regions), of large numbers of North and Sub-Saharan
African immigrants and their children. These anxieties, as Brian Jenkins
has claimed, are related to fears about France's future in the context of
increasingly supranational modes of political organisation (the European
Community) and the globalisation of the economy:
What is implicit in this way of talking about, or discourse on,
immigration is a certain idea of France as a culturally homogeneous
nation. Within the discourse of the Front National, France is constructed
as a community sharing the same race, culture, language, history and
religion and whose integrity is threatened by waves of foreign invaders.
This model of the nation relies heavily on a crudely dualistic model of
`us' and `them' to clarify complex social and economic problems and one
might argue that is is precisely this simplicity of argument that appeals
to so many who feel their lives threatened by forces they do not fully
understand and that are often beyond their control.
The discussion text for the seminar on Le Front National is available at
The Discourse
of Le Front National.
J. Wrench & J Solomos, Racism and Migration in Western Europe
(Oxford: Berg, 1993)
The Political Ideas of Le Front National
On the other hand, the Front National has shown great support for:
Explaining the Rise of Le Front National
... la France est devenue la sécurité sociale de la planète entière.
(quoted in Schor: 1996 p.)
The rise of the Front National may be seen as a symptom of the
difficulties of transition and adaption to a post-industrial,
post-colonial, post-national society. Le Pen's movement feds on the
insecurities engendered by this process, appealing to those who feel most
threatened by market globalism, and exploiting in a racist direction the
ideological space opened up by the mainstream parties' abandonment of
nationalist discourse. Significantly, the FN's nationalism is not geared
to the development of a coherent and credible political programme, but to
the populist exploitation of identity crisis at both local community and
national level.
In the context of economic decline, unemployment and the perceived erosion
of `national identity' as France became increasingly involved in European
political and economic unification and `invaded' or `flooded' by
immigrants, xenophobia became increasingly pronounced. The Front National
consistently played on these fears and their speeches are full of words
like invasion, colonisation, marée, naufrage,
and catastrophe to describe the phenomena of a France which was
being destroyed by non-European immigrants. In March 1993 Le Pen went so
far as to claim that this process was akin to the ethnic cleansing that
took place in the former Yugoslavia:
(Jenkins: 1996 p.5)
L'épuration ethnique, au détriment des Français de souche, est en cours
dans notre pays.
For reasons that are partly historical (ancient conflicts between
Mediterranean Europe and Arab North Africa) and partly cultural
(Christendom versus Islam), North African immigrants were particularly
targeted for this kind of rhetorical attack. The Front National opposed
the construction of mosques in many French towns and cities and campaigned
more generally against the perceived growth of Islamic culture in France -
Non à l'islamisation de la France was one of the slogans used.
Exploiting fears of the `foreign' and an underlyng anxiety about France
becoming a kind of breeding ground for Islamic extremism and even
terrorism, the Front National called for a new French Résistance to
combat a new occupation étrangère.
(quoted in Schor: 1996 p.)
Further Reading
For more details on the Front National, click on The Front National Homepage and Bruno Megret:
L'Alternative nationale: Les priorités du Front national).