By Sam Wainwright
PARIS — It is certainly not exaggeration or scaremongering to call the National Front (FN) fascist. Of course, given France's experience of Nazi occupation, the FN hotly rejects the label. But its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, recently said that President Chirac had "dirtied French honour" by acknowledging France's role in the deportation of Jews during the war and asserted that there were "good people" in the Vichy government.
The FN's policy documents and leadership speeches are an eclectic mix of Catholic fundamentalism, Jewish conspiracy theories and French nationalism. Like fascist movements before it, the FN uses a lot of anti-system demagogy, claiming to be "Neither right nor left but French". Le Pen attacks "powerful lobbies", "roving capital" and "intellectuals" while posing as the friend of the suffering (white) working man. He even invokes revolution:
"Only the FN can tear the country out of decadence. There is a time when all this will end and that will be revolution ... you must prepare for it. People's anger will sweep away the smoked salmon right and the caviar left."
This claptrap strikes a chord with some elements because French people have suffered increased unemployment, cuts to social services and declining wages at the hands of both conservative and Socialist Party (PS) governments in the last two decades.
Anti-immigrant racism has proved to be the FN's electoral winner. As high unemployment began to bite, the FN went to the polls in 1978 under the slogan "One million unemployed means one million too many migrants". Ever since then the FN's electoral results have been on the rise.
Crucial to this development was the fact that all the major political parties (including the PS) participated in the creation of the "immigration problem" myth as a way of finding a scapegoat for the hardship they were imposing.
The FN has even managed to recruit some "stars" to its racist crusade. Film "legend" and animal lover Brigitte Bardot is one of its supporters. Following an anti-Arab outburst, she managed to wriggle out of the "incitement of racial hatred" case brought against her by claiming she was only referring to the ritual slaughter of animals!
Last August 23, the government sent in police to handcuff, tranquillise and tape the mouths of illegal immigrants sheltering in the Saint Bernard church in Paris before bundling them onto planes for deportation.
Speaking of the church members who provided the shelter, the FN's "cultural" spokesperson condemned "the emasculated Christians who welcome niggers". The FN calls for all immigrants to be deported, illegal or otherwise. What this sad episode illustrates is the way the FN feeds off the government's "respectable" racism and then in turn softens up public opinion, marking out new ground for government policy.
A particularly worrying dimension of the FN is its very conscious effort to embed itself in community life. FN members work their way into all sorts of community organisations, from school councils to pensioner groups.
In the towns it controls, it manipulates the library collection and has even tried to stop school canteens providing non-pork meals for Muslim and Jewish children. The organisation has a weekly newspaper, holds public mobilisations and puts up posters around the suburbs.
Sensing its isolation from the big workers' protest and strike movements that have gripped France for the last 18 months, it has even tried to establish its own "trade union" organisations. Fortunately, these have met with relatively little success.