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.

The Political ideas of Le 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 dominant political parties - the Front National is very much an `anti-party' party and Le Pen frequently denounces la bande des quatre of the PS, the PCF, the RPR and the UDF - who he accuses of being both corrupt and devoid of practical ideas to solve France's problems;
• the Left, i.e. Socialists, Communists, trade unionists, in particular, all of whom have contributed to the `degeneration' of the French nation;
• immigrants and ethnic minorities, especially those from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, who are draining France's resources, causing crime and unrest and undermining the integrity of French national identity;
• closer European integration and Brussels-based bureaucrats;
• homosexuals - Le Pen advocates isolating AIDS sufferers from society by placing them in a special `sidatorium';
• intellectuals, especially those of the Left or homosexuals (see above);
• the `permissive society', encouraged by Left-wingers, homosexuals, and feminists in the 1960s and 1970s;
• reproductive choice for women (especially abortion).

On the other hand, the Front National has shown great support for:

Explaining the Rise of Le Front National

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:

... la France est devenue la sécurité sociale de la planète entière.
(quoted in Schor: 1996 p.)

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:

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.
(Jenkins: 1996 p.5)

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:

L'épuration ethnique, au détriment des Français de souche, est en cours dans notre pays.
(quoted in Schor: 1996 p.)

The discussion text for the seminar on Le Front National is available at The Discourse of Le Front National.

For more details on the Front National, click on The Front National Homepage and Bruno Megret: L'Alternative nationale: Les priorités du Front national).

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