Trump’s supporters have been repeating a series of arguments which seem, at first glance, perfectly reasonable. Harvard, they point out, has an endowment of more than $53 billion. Why does it need government subsidies? And if the university does need outside funds, why can’t private enterprises provide them? Isn’t it hypocritical for Harvard to take government money while refusing any government oversight, especially when the university faculty and student body lean so very heavily to the Left? Finally, doesn’t the government have a responsibility to withhold funds when the university lets antisemitism run wild on campus?

But like many superficially reasonable arguments, these are all in fact incorrect. If they have been widely accepted in US public opinion, it is in part because until this year universities like Harvard never needed to explain to the public how they operated. The basic system of research funding had been in place for decades, for the most part quite uncontroversially. And, since January, the universities have been caught flat-footed, uncertain whether to negotiate with the administration (as Harvard initially tried to do), or to defy it, even while trying to apologize for and staunch the very real spread of antisemitism on their campuses over the past year. Harvard arguably has quite a lot to answer for, but not in the way the Trump administration thinks. The administration’s actions are both unlawful and destructive.

Consider the issue of government support. It’s correct that Harvard, the wealthiest university in the world, doesn’t need “subsidies”. But the research funding that it receives is not a subsidy. For many decades now, the US Congress has held that it is in the national interest for the government to invest in long-term scientific research. It has mandated, through legislation, that federal agencies, most importantly the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allocate research funds for the purpose of investigating issues such as cancer, infectious diseases, cardiac disease, aging, drug addiction, and the like. Each year, Congress appropriates funds specifically for these purposes, and charges NIH and other agencies with choosing the best research projects, and then monitoring the results. In other words, Congress, working through the agencies, is paying universities to carry out research in the national interest. It is not handing over funds that the universities can use for any whatever purpose they choose; these funds are more akin to fees paid for specific services.

It’s true that in addition to the direct funding of research, the NIH also pays hefty “indirect costs” to universities to cover expenses shared between many different individual projects, including infrastructure in particular, as well as some equipment and labor costs. This is a long-standing practice that the agency has negotiated with universities, in large part to avoid having to split the expenses in question among many individual research projects. In the past, universities abused the “indirect cost” system, but more recently NIH has established much closer oversight.

Could private companies take over the role currently played by the federal government? In some cases, yes, but in most, not. The research Congress and agencies like the NIH fund is the sort that private companies will likely shy away from, because the discoveries in question might not generate revenue for decades — or the payoff might come in the form of improved public health, rather than in monetary form. Understandably, companies want a return on their investment.

Could a university like Harvard pay for the research itself out of its endowment? For a time, but only with difficulty. Like most universities, Harvard’s endowment is not a single pot of money, but a collection of thousands of different accounts, most of which have been donated for specific purposes: financial aid; an overseas study center; a professorship etc. At most elite US universities, no more than 15% of the endowment is “unrestricted” — legally capable of being used for any purpose. And these universities also consider it their fiduciary responsibility not to spend down the endowment, but only to use the annual return, which can average out to as little as 4%. In other words, even if Harvard decided to use all the returns from its unrestricted endowment to fund scientific research (starving other areas of the university in the process), it would be unlikely to come up with much more than $320 million a year. This is a lot, but it is much less than the sum the government is currently paying Harvard to conduct research in the national interest.

In any case, this spending has been mandated by Congress — a democratically elected body. The sole responsibility of the government’s executive branch is to ensure that Congress’s stated goals are being pursued in the most effective manner possible. Congress has never required that scientific research needs to accord with the president’s ideological agenda, and it has not given the president, nor the executive branch he oversees, permission to cut funding arbitrarily.

But surely universities need to accept government oversight if they take government funds? Indeed — and they have done so, for decades. This oversight was established by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that universities accepting federal funds cannot knowingly allow the civil rights of their students, faculty and staff to be violated. If other forms of government oversight are to be imposed beyond this, it is for Congress to do, not the president.

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The Trump administration knows this, and so it has justified its actions by referring to the Civil Rights Act. It has accused Harvard of violating Titles VI and VII, which forbid discrimination on the basis of race and religion. And it points to student protests that in many cases undoubtedly did cross the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, and made many Jewish students fear for their safety. Just this week, Harvard released a report that portrayed the university struggling to contain expressions of hatred and intimidation that frequently crossed far over the blurry line separating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. (A companion report found that 47% of Muslim respondents at the university did not feel physically safe on campus.)

But the Civil Rights Act also lays out a procedure for the federal government to follow if it believes that Titles VI or VII have been violated. It must start a formal inquiry, produce a formal report, and give the university a chance to respond. If, after the conclusion of this procedure, the government finds against the university, then it can withhold funds — but only to the parts of the university in which the violation took place.

The Trump administration has not followed any aspect of this legislatively mandated procedure. It has not produced a formal report, nor has it given Harvard a chance to respond. It has above all cut off funds to Harvard Medical School, which was the site of virtually no protests or antisemitic incidents. Moreover, the list of demands it sent to Harvard in mid-April did not only include addressing issues of campus antisemitism. As noted, it called for Harvard to overhaul its governance, disciplinary mechanisms, admissions procedures and hiring procedures. It called for steps to be taken to ensure “viewpoint diversity” on the campus — meaning the hiring of conservatives to offset the faculty’s overwhelmingly liberal political stance.

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Now, there is a case to be made that Harvard could use a greater degree of viewpoint diversity than it currently enjoys. Its faculty indeed lean pretty far Left, and the intellectual climate could benefit from less groupthink, more real debate. The university also needs to squelch the sort of horrid antisemitic activity that took place last year. It needs to ensure that the harassment and intimidation of Jews described in this week’s report are ended, along with the harassment and intimidation of Muslims. If President Trump wants to urge Harvard in this direction, fine. But he should do so in a lawful manner.

And, in any case, while the Harvard faculty and student body do lean pretty far Left, that does not mean that the entire university is somehow in thrall to “woke” ideology, as Trump’s supporters seem to believe. Harvard is a massive operation. It has schools of medicine, dentistry, engineering, and business — none of them known as bastions of wokeness. They barely featured in the report, and yet they will still be penalized.

Indeed, the destructive effects of Trump’s actions will fall most heavily on the least political parts of the university. It will be hard for Harvard to replace the funds that the federal government is taking away, and even harder for institutions with smaller endowments. The result is that research programs that have contributed immeasurably to scientific knowledge, technological advancement and public health will be pruned back or shut down altogether. Harvard and other leading universities will no longer attract some of the best minds from around the world. Thousands of people at Harvard alone — people who had nothing to do with the protests — could lose their jobs, while companies that supply equipment to university researchers could go bankrupt. This level of harm is wildly disproportionate to whatever faults the university allegedly committed, and it is not lawful. Even if you think “Harvard had it coming”, the Trump administration’s assault is not the answer.

For the moment, Le Pen’s chances of success look slim. Her National Rally party was caught red-handed illegally diverting into party coffers more than €4 million designated for the support of its European Parliament delegation. But regardless of the case’s ultimate outcome, it will very likely generate a stress test for French democracy, heightening polarization and threatening the legitimacy of key institutions. As we have seen from similar cases around the world, even when trials of political figures are fully warranted, the results for democracy can still be disastrous.

First consider the American cases. In the eyes of most Democrats, the procedures against Trump proved that he was a corrupt, criminal figure, entirely unfit to hold high office. On the principle that no person is above the law, they believed he deserved trial and conviction for trying to overthrow the US government, for criminally mishandling secret government documents, and for illegally bribing a porn star to stay quiet about an affair. And they had a strong case. Many of them also supported the Colorado Supreme Court when it dubiously attempted, without a trial, to bar Trump from the state’s presidential ballot on the grounds that the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment prohibits insurrectionists from running for office (the US Supreme Court overruled that decision last March).

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For most Republicans, on the other hand, it was not Trump that the trials called into question, but the justice system itself. It had been corrupted, weaponized, and transformed into a vehicle of “lawfare”. Trump’s offenses, they believed, were either a figment of the liberal imagination, or trivial, the sort of harmless peccadillos that would have earned anyone else only the lightest possible reprimand. An old hand at evading prosecution, Trump ultimately slithered out of all but one set of indictments — the bribery charges on which a New York City jury found him guilty, but which failed to hurt him in the polls or lead to a prison sentence. But Trump’s success did nothing to quell his supporters’ suspicions of the legal system — or of the federal government in general.

Procedures of this sort are all the more fraught because the law is never entirely neutral — in real life, an entirely abstract and objective set of rules never applies to all in exactly the same manner. In practice, prosecutors always enjoy discretion as to whether to prosecute, and how to prosecute. It is hardly unheard of for them to seek an excessively severe penalty for a lesser offense because they don’t think they can obtain a conviction for a more serious one. It would be nice to think that political considerations never influence their decisions, but when prosecutors from one party target defendants from another, suspicions of political motivation can be hard to dismiss. In the case of the Manhattan “hush money” case, even many liberal commentators criticized District Attorney Alvin Bragg for overreach.

To be sure, the Democrats hardly have a monopoly on possible prosecutorial overreach. When Attorney General Pam Bondi recently threatened to charge people caught destroying Teslas with “domestic terrorism”, she zoomed straight past mere overreach into flagrant prosecutorial abuse. Trump’s blithe forgiveness of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for endangering American pilots in “Signalgate”, after threatening ad nauseam to have Hillary Clinton “locked up” for a far less serious breach of national security, is only the most recent example of his own massive hypocrisy when it comes to the justice system.

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Another depressing example of how even entirely justified trials of politicians can corrode democracy comes from Israel. In 2019, a court indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on well-substantiated charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Of course, Netanyahu and his conservative base claimed that the prosecution was both baseless and politically motivated. Even as the legal procedures ground on (they have not yet reached a conclusion), Netanyahu’s government proposed sweeping changes to the Israeli judiciary, which would strip the court system of much of its autonomy. These moves, clearly related to Netanyahu’s own vested interest in staying out of jail, prompted the largest protests in Israeli history, and further polarization of an already furiously divided country. Last week, Netanyahu upped the ante even more by moving to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who had opposed his changes to the judiciary. Today, with Netanyahu all the more desperate to stay in power to avoid not only the corruption trial, but answering for Israel’s horrific intelligence and defense failures on October 7, Israeli democracy looks more fragile than ever.

Yet another recent example comes from Romania, where in November the constitutional court annulled the first round of voting in the presidential election because of blatant Russian interference. Last month, the country’s electoral commission followed up on the decision by barring independent Right-wing candidate Călin Georgescu, who had come first in that vote, from a future ballot. The events risk deepening the country’s political turmoil.

The case of Marine Le Pen could well produce a similar outcome in France, even as it illustrates a related problem with the prosecution of political figures. The fact is that standards as to what constitutes corruption have changed greatly in the past two decades or so. Through the end of the 20th century, France’s Fifth Republic tended to treat certain forms of relatively petty corruption essentially as perks of office. During François Mitterrand’s two terms as president, his mistress and their daughter lived rent free in a spacious government apartment. The fact was widely known in Parisian circles but prompted no judicial action. No-show parliamentary jobs served as a convenient way of steering extra funds into party coffers or family pockets. But in the past quarter-century, what was once winked at has become sternly punished. In 2011, a Paris court found former president Jacques Chirac guilty of embezzlement in a case involving no-show jobs and gave him a two-year suspended prison sentence. Courts have now found Chirac’s successor Nicolas Sarkozy guilty in two separate corruption cases. With Sarkozy already under a version of house arrest, and wearing an electronic bracelet, authorities this past week requested a seven-year prison term for him for accepting illegal Libyan assistance in his 2007 presidential campaign.

Ironically, one of the political figures who called most stridently for imposing stricter corruption standards in French politics was Marine Le Pen herself. In the early 2000s, as she prepared to take over the party from her dreadful father, its founder Jean-Marie, she deployed the slogan “Hands clean, heads high” to distinguish what was then called the National Front from the mainstream parties. In a televised appearance in 2004, she exclaimed: “Everyone has stolen money except for the National Front! And they say it’s normal, not serious! They say the French are sick of hearing about it. But the French are not sick of hearing about it. They’re sick of it happening!” These attacks formed part of her successful strategy to “de-demonize” the Front and expand its appeal beyond the extreme Right. The morning after Le Pen’s sentencing, the Communist newspaper L’Humanité led with the headline, “Hands dirty, heads low.” The French idiom “l’arroseur arrosé” (“hoist by one’s own petard”) would also have worked.

But as a result of the sentencing, what is now called the National Rally may well end up “re-demonizing” itself as it fights to turn French public opinion against the court and denounces “political justice”. In televised appearances after the verdict, Le Pen and her faithful railed against the “tyranny of the judges” (a line frequently heard of late from Elon Musk in the US as well) and reverted to the violent rhetoric of the party’s early days. Le Pen herself claimed that “the system has brought out a nuclear bomb… the people who are always talking about the rule of law are generally the first to violate the rule of law”. Her supporters fancifully compared her to the murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and to victims of political persecution in Iran and Venezuela. The publications and media outlets owned by conservative mogul Vincent Bolloré (especially CNews, France’s version of Fox News) have incessantly echoed the charges, trying to mobilize as much of the population as possible against “the system”.

Will the sentencing of Le Pen follow the American and Israeli patterns and end up damaging democracy and benefiting another Right-wing politician-turned-criminal-defendant? Possibly not. The fury on the Right could die down well before the 2027 election. And the National Front/National Rally has suffered from many debilitating bouts of internecine warfare in the past — including Marine Le Pen against both her father, and her niece Marion Maréchal. If the appeals court upholds Le Pen’s sentence, her 29-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella might unite an enraged party behind him. In another scenario, rivals might fall on him and cause a damaging split. At this point, anything is possible.

But French democracy is in a fragile state. President Emmanuel Macron is deeply unpopular. Budget constraints are putting pressure on the economy and raising the specter of social unrest, even as the unraveling of the Western alliance has led Macron to request significantly increased military spending. A minority government under Prime Minister François Bayrou is stumbling forward only at the sufferance of the National Rally and Marine Le Pen. And she could withdraw her support at any moment.

France does not need more instability. Unfortunately, though, it’s not always possible to reconcile the need for political peace with the needs of justice. While prosecutors should always take the possible political consequences of their actions into account, and examine their own political motivations for filing charges, they can’t ignore glaring cases of criminality. Were American prosecutors supposed to ignore January 6? The ridiculous national security breaches that included keeping top-secret documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom? Yet tragically, their attempted prosecutions of Trump probably contributed to his victory, and his subsequent full-blown assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Few weapons in Trump’s ideological arsenal have proven as deeply effective — and corrosive of democracy — as the charge of “lawfare”. The French can only hope and pray that the sentencing of Marine Le Pen does not have similar consequences.

His talent for miscalculation is undeniably impressive. His high-handed dissolving of parliament in the summer produced a hopelessly divided National Assembly which lasted just three months — the shortest on record for the Fifth Republic. Macron now has the near-impossible task of finding a new Prime Minister who can manage the same Assembly, pass a budget, and address accelerating economic woes. Sisyphus had an easier time of things, and, at this point, if the boulder of political impossibility rolls back over Macron, crushing his presidency and forcing his resignation, most of the French will cheer.

But does Macron really bear the biggest share of blame? France is hardly the only Western democracy in crisis. The United States just elected Donald Trump to a second term. Germany is in political meltdown. In Britain, Reform has moved ahead of Labour in the polls. Everywhere, it seems, populist forces have the whip hand. Nor did Macron single-handedly spur the rise of France’s hard-Right. The party then called the National Front began its steady advance in the Eighties, when he was still in primary school. The first Le Pen to make it into the final round of a presidential election was Marine’s ghastly father Jean-Marie, 22 years ago.

And the French are not just angry at Macron. According to a striking poll published this week by Le Grand Continent, fully 43% of them think EU membership hurts France, 46% think the Union is corrupt, and 26% want to see France leave it at once — the highest figure on record, and astonishing for the country at the heart of the European project. So perhaps Macron is not Sisyphus, suffering divine punishment for his misdeeds, but just another hapless victim in the path of a tidal wave.

Perhaps. But individual actions have played an important role in all these countries’ recent political misfortunes. Think, for instance, of Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to remain in the 2024 presidential race until it became too late for the Democrats to recover. It is always possible to make a bad situation much worse. And ever since Emmanuel Macron’s first election in 2017, he has shown a remarkable talent for doing so.

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Much of the problem goes back to his misinterpretation of the French presidency itself. When he was still Economics Minister to Socialist President François Hollande in 2015, Macron gave a strange speech in which he spoke of the inherent “incompleteness” of French democracy, thanks to an “absence” at its heart — the absence of a king. Referring to the execution of Louis XVI well over two centuries ago, he mused that “the Reign of Terror left an emotional, psychic, collective vacuum: The King is gone!” But, he suggested, the regal presidency created by Charles de Gaulle for the Fifth Republic in 1958 had the capacity to fill the gap, providing France with impartial, unifying, Olympian leadership, far above the political fray. During his victorious 2017 campaign, Macron mused about governing in a “Jupiterian” fashion, and his first official portrait as President showed him posing at a Louis XV-style desk, with de Gaulle’s memoirs prominently displayed on it. He summoned the two chambers of parliament to hear him speak at the former royal palace of Versailles.

But 2017 was not 1958, and Macron was no de Gaulle. In 1958, France had been a broken country: the short-lived Fourth Republic was utterly paralysed, the colonial empire was dissolving, and the bitter struggle for Algerian independence had raised the spectre of civil war. De Gaulle himself was a towering, heroic war leader whose political movement, while broadly conservative, included many different ideological tendencies. He could, in fact, play the king, and did so quite successfully until the tumult of 1968. But by 2017, the Fifth Republic had settled into political banality, with persistent but manageable economic stresses and party squabbling. The incumbent, François Hollande, had promised to serve as a “normal president” — de Gaulle would have shuddered at the expression — and although he was widely mocked for his failures, he was not hated. Macron, meanwhile, was an almost entirely untested 39-year-old who had never run for office. He was a chemically pure product of France’s ultra-elite educational institutions and possessed a full share of the excessive self-confidence they so often instil in their graduates. His vision of politics was largely intellectual — or, rather, pseudo-intellectual (he had retained just enough from his early philosophy studies to sound learned in the subject without really being so).

Still, for a time, his youth and vigour excited support. His promise to govern from the centre, balancing neoliberal reforms with a strengthening of the social safety net, raised the hope he might move past politics as usual. And with the Socialists and the neo-Gaullists both in a state of collapse after a failed presidency for each (those of Hollande and his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy), Macron won the 2017 election, handily defeating Marine Le Pen in the second round. Foreign observers swooned. In 2018, Politico even titled a story “How Emmanuel Macron Became the New Leader of the Free World”.

But soon enough, his desire to play the king, and to lecture the French on what was good for them, eroded the good will. For all his talk of the social safety net, Macron was at heart a neoliberal who believed France had to be shaken out of its bad old statist ways to become competitive in the world economy (he had spent formative years at the Rothschild investment bank). If doing so caused people to lose jobs, well, they could always reboot. In September 2018, when an agricultural worker complained to him about being unable to find a job, Macron told the man to retrain in the service sector. “You’ve got to do it!… I could cross the street and find you a job right now.” Within his first year in office his government overhauled the labour code, making it easier for employers to fire workers, and abolished a “solidarity tax” on the wealthy — all in the name of economic efficiency. And, warning of climate change, Macron approved a large hike in gasoline taxes, in a country where gas already cost more than twice as much as in the United States (and average household income was 40% lower). That last decision triggered the furore of the Gilets Jaunes whose dramatic and sometimes violent protests brought hundreds of thousands into the streets. The movement only subsided with the arrival of the pandemic in early 2020.

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The protests did not leave Macron chastened. Indeed, in the years after the Gilets Jaunes revolt he sometimes seemed to take seriously Bertolt Brecht’s quip that “the government should dissolve the people and elect another”. The people reciprocated the disdain, and in early 2022, after a small pandemic rebound, his popularity had fallen to 37%. Even so, without a viable opponent from outside the extremes, he tottered to reelection that spring. But the enthusiasm that had marked his first victory was long gone. Marine Le Pen received over 40% of the vote, and in the parliamentary election that followed, the National Rally scored the greatest success of any hard-Right party since the 19th century. Macron was forced to govern without a parliamentary majority, but even so, he continued to pursue a program of austerity. Article 49.3 of the Fifth Republic’s Constitution allows governments to enact laws by decree, and Macron’s third Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, resorted to it 23 times during her 20-month tenure between 2022 and 2024. Most controversially, she did so to pass a hugely unpopular measure that raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. It provoked further massive protests, eventually led to Borne’s replacement by Gabriel Attal, and contributed to the National Rally’s European election breakthrough. If the Rally then failed to gain a parliamentary majority, the credit lay not with Macron, but with the Left-wing parties that hastily organised themselves into a New Popular Front, winning a plurality of seats in the National Assembly.

It is probably unfair to criticise Macron for mishandling the political situation since the summer because, in truth, no one could have handled it successfully. He chose to tack Right, picking a conservative hardliner on immigration, Barnier, as his third Prime Minister of the year, and relying on the National Rally’s tacit support to stave off a no-confidence vote. But facing a fiscal crisis, with France’s national debt having risen far past the caps mandated by the EU, Barnier tried to make severe cuts to the social security budget. Although he backtracked on many of them in the face of criticism from Le Pen, last week he still had to resort to article 49.3 to pass the bill. Two days later the National Rally and the New Popular Front came together to vote a French government out of office for the first time since 1962. In joining forces with the Left, Le Pen had a clear ulterior motive, since she is currently on trial for misusing public funds and in March faces both a possible jail sentence and a five-year ban from electoral office. She would love to force Macron’s resignation and a new presidential election before that occurs.

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Macron’s reaction to the defeat, meanwhile, has been, well, classic Macron. In a speech on Thursday, he ruled out resignation, and, while acknowledging his overall responsibility for the political situation, also said that his decision to dissolve parliament in the summer had been “misunderstood”. And he added that he would never accept blame for the “irresponsibility of others, especially members of parliament who have chosen in good conscience to torpedo the budget and the government of France a few days before Christmas”. He called them an “anti-republican front”. Charles de Gaulle, in his day, also grumbled at the ingratitude of the French. Yet when he lost a referendum in 1969, he took responsibility and resigned. That is a lesson that Macron has obviously not learned.

In the conclusion to his speech, Macron changed his tone. He boasted of his success in hosting the Paris Olympics, and in rebuilding the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which reopened to the public in a grand ceremony on Saturday. “This reconstruction that was thought impossible… Well, we have managed it.” And he finished with a flourish: “Wherever the Nation has grown fragile, rebuild it; wherever outbursts and insults have raged, restore wisdom; wherever there is division, choose unity; wherever some yield to anguish, bring hope.” It was grand, beautiful rhetoric, worthy of a king, just as the stunning reconstruction of Notre Dame is a project worthy of a French king.

Emmanuel Macron still longs to be that regal, Jupiterian figure. But this vision of the presidency was already long past its sell-by date when he first ran for office, and in the seven years since it has only grown more stale, more inappropriate, and more profoundly irritating to the French people. Notre-Dame, and pictures of him alongside Trump and Zelensky, has brought a small rebound in his popularity, but it is very unlikely to last. Whether or not he finishes out his second term, his legacy is not a pretty one, and if he doesn’t deserve all the blame for France’s current political shambles, he still deserves a very large share of it. On this issue, the French people have it exactly right.

While Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are both frequently described as “charismatic”, they clearly have very different sorts of charismatic appeal. And this “charisma divide” helps explain why Harris, despite her almost flawless performance since replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee — uniting the party behind her, staging a close-to-perfect convention, and besting Trump in the 10 September debate — has had such difficulty pulling ahead in a presidential race that still stands on a knife edge. A comparison with Barack Obama’s victorious 2008 campaign is illuminating in this regard: a part of the electorate that saw Obama as charismatic and attractive in 2008 does not feel the same way about Harris 16 years later.

This difference is not just a matter of the candidates, for charisma is not just a personality trait — the ability to attract, charm and inspire others. It is more properly understood as a social relationship, an intense emotional bond forged between an individual and a community of admirers. Different communities find different things charismatic, and, depending on their political and cultural leanings, often dismiss as “fake” in one person the qualities they find deeply attractive and inspiring in another. Between 2008 and 2024, it is not just the candidates who have changed. So has the electorate.

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Donald Trump, love him or hate him, has by any measure succeeded in forging the most intense charismatic bond with his supporters of any American politician in recent memory — perhaps, of any in history. Part of the reason is that he projects an image of strength — even if it is the strength of a bully, and mostly false. He also knows, instinctively, how to reach supporters in their own language. Elite commentators mock Trump for his garbled syntax and spelling, for his love of crude insults, for his language of “us versus them”. They compare him with the proverbial drunk uncle ranting at the holiday table. But, of course, many people have ranting relatives. You may not take them seriously, but they are still family. And social media only heightens the sense of familiarity that Trump instils — and that is crucial to the charismatic bond — because their feeds deliberately mix posts from politicians with ones from family members and friends. Trump fits right into the feed in a way that most Democratic politicians have failed to do. Harris sounds like a politician on social media. Trump does not.

Most important — and this is a point that elite commentators generally miss — Trump’s charismatic bond with his supporters is reinforced, rather than shaken, by his constant outrages: his lying, his law-breaking, his racism, his threats of violence. The point is not whether his supporters believe him, take him seriously, or are ready to follow him in an attack on democracy. The point is that he so flagrantly, and joyfully, breaks the rules of American society and politics, again and again. For men and women who believe that those rules are rigged against them by corrupt and feckless elites, this behaviour is thrilling. The fact that Trump is transgressing matters far more than the particular rules being transgressed.

Of course, the hard core of MAGA supporters who feel the bond most intensely amounts only to a minority of the electorate, concentrated among whites with non-elite educations — although not just struggling ones (if one paradigmatic Trump voter is an unemployed factory worker on disability, another is a successful car dealer). But the elections of 2016 and 2020 have both shown that plenty of other Americans are sufficiently tolerant of Trump and receptive to his message to keep the presidential election agonisingly close.

Which brings us to Kamala Harris, and her brand of charisma. In most ways, it is much more conventional than Trump’s, in line with that of Democratic politicians going back to John F. Kennedy. Harris is unquestionably glamorous: a beautiful woman who dresses elegantly if not extravagantly and has a 500-watt smile. She speaks passionately and inspiringly about the subjects she cares about the most. During her debate with Trump, she was hesitant, even floundering for the first 15 minutes, and then came a question about abortion. In a moment, her voice grew stronger, her sentences more fluid, her emotions came to the fore. And as she gained confidence, she began to needle Trump more effectively, bringing the ranting uncle to the surface. Among her supporters, her gender and racial background are also, inescapably, central to her charismatic appeal. For voters who appreciate the continuing power of sexism and racism in American society, Harris’s story is naturally seen as that most instinctively appealing of narratives: the triumph of the underdog. But at the same time, most voters see Harris, with her long career in politics, as a member of the American elite — far more than Trump, the perennial angry outsider despite his vast fortune.

Harris has done an excellent job of exciting her base of supporters, but, overall, her support remains softer than Trump’s. Trump’s charismatic appeal has, by this point, turned the MAGA movement into a cult. He can do and say virtually anything, and his supporters will not desert him. The Democratic Party is a more normal political party. Members of its progressive wing support Harris, but also distrust her recent shifts towards the centre on economic policy, on immigration, on foreign policy in general (where she is hawkish in a way reminiscent of Hillary Clinton), and especially on Israel-Palestine. Put simply, Harris’s support is less stable than Trump’s. She has the tricky job of holding onto her base, while convincing the small number of centrist swing voters left in the swing states that she is not a madly woke socialist. This is what will decide the election. So far, she has accomplished the first task (thanks to the perceived danger of Trump and the lack of credible Left-wing alternatives) but not the second.

Harris’s challenge is similar to that of the only other person of colour to have received a presidential nomination (and another unquestioned member of the American elite): Barack Obama. Her charismatic appeal is also similar to his, as a (relatively) young, fresh, inspiring person of colour who has overcome great odds to rise to the top of the American political system. Obama is a far better orator than Harris, but Harris does better than Obama in personal interactions with voters. She has an instinctive ease and sympathy that Obama often seems to lack (he moves too easily into lecture mode). If I have one serious criticism of the Harris campaign so far, it is that it has not done nearly enough to highlight this side of the candidate, most likely out of fear that a verbal flub or mistake might go viral — and Harris is indeed prone to such moments. She has been criticised as well for her changes of position over the years, and her lack of specific policy proposals, but these are charges that could be levelled against most American politicians, and, in any case, Trump is far worse on both scores. But Harris should be doing town halls, and sit-downs with ordinary voters at every possible opportunity, and she is not.

This is not the only reason why Harris, despite everything she has done right, has been unable to reach beyond her base and pull ahead of Trump in the polls. Many things have changed in America since 2008, and there are simply no longer many white swing voters left who might be swayed by Harris’s charisma — almost certainly fewer than was the case with Obama.

The problem, then, is not Harris’s lack of charisma, but a change in her audience. For one thing, populist distrust and resentment has grown far stronger than it was in 2008, turning many more voters against any candidate perceived as elite. In 2008, Obama carried Ohio, Indiana and Iowa, three midwestern states whose white working-class populations had already suffered strongly from the loss of factory jobs. These jobs have mostly not returned. In addition, Republicans have worked hard to present immigration as the principal cause of social decline and as a threat. In Indiana and Iowa, the percentage of foreign-born residents has doubled, or close to it, since 2008. In Ohio — where Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have lied about Haitian immigrants eating household pets — it has gone up by 50%. Perhaps not surprisingly, all three states are now firmly in the Republican column. A large number of white voters in these states — even those without elite education — still saw Obama as charismatic 16 years ago. They don’t see Kamala Harris in the same way. The same factors challenge her in other swing states, especially all-crucial Pennsylvania (a state which, as a friend of mine quips, consists of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and “Pennsyltucky”).

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Secondly, the partisan political divide in the US has petrified to an almost unbelievable extent, not only because of Trump, but because of the Republican Party more generally, and also a changed media environment. Soon after Obama’s inauguration in 2009, anger at Washington for not punishing the finance industry for the previous year’s financial crisis led to the birth of the “Tea Party”: the direct ancestor of Trumpism in its conservative nationalist populism, and its scorn for the niceties of American political life. In the House of Representatives, Tea Party members adopted scorched-earth policies towards the Obama administration, exciting their supporters, defeating perceived “RINOs” (“Republicans in Name Only”) in primary elections, and forcing the entire party to double down on the obstructionist brand of political total warfare first pioneered by Newt Gingrich in the Nineties. Meanwhile, Fox News expanded its influence and inspired imitators (notably the Sinclair group of local TV stations). Social media, still in its infancy in 2008 (Facebook was four years old that year; Twitter, two) grew into a behemoth. More than ever, today, Americans live in media bubbles, reading only heavily partisan stories that reinforce their existing opinions. For this reason as well, there are simply far fewer white voters than in 2008 who can be swayed by the charismatic appeal of a candidate like Obama or Harris, and these are the voters Harris needs to win.

And finally, Obama had one massive advantage that Harris lacks: he was running as the insurgent, against a Republican Party that had presided over a disastrous war and, in the fall of 2008, a terrifying economic collapse. His very simple campaign message — “change” — met the moment and drew enough swing voters to give him a powerful victory.

Kamala Harris cannot exactly run a “change” campaign. Yes, her core supporters hate Donald Trump even more than they hated George W. Bush. Trump’s own record in office — despite his absurd and mendacious boasts — was marked above all by his disastrous handling of the worst American health emergency in a century. Democrats don’t want him back and will turn out in large numbers to say so on 5 November, and this matters. But in the country at large, memories of the Trump administration’s failures have faded, and Joe Biden’s apparent inability to contain inflation has cast Trump’s good luck with the economy in a retrospective golden glow (in fact, the Biden administration dealt with what was a world-wide post-pandemic phenomenon far better than almost any other nation, but no matter — Americans don’t pay attention to foreign news).

And so, in an America where membership of “the elite” has become more politically toxic than ever, where Trump’s rule-breaking gains a sneaking sympathy from more people than ever, and where the political divide seems set in granite, Kamala Harris’s smile, passion and inspiring story may not be enough to get her over the top. It is Donald Trump’s brand of charisma that may yet win the day.

Why such turmoil? While French economic growth has been sluggish since the pandemic, the country is not in recession, inflation has receded and unemployment has dropped since Macron took office. France has not experienced a major terrorist attack in recent years and faces no immediate international crises. Is this simply another example of grumpiness on the part of a people who, as the writer Sylvain Tesson put it, “live in paradise but think they’re in hell”?

The explanation is more complicated. Much of it, of course, goes beyond France itself, and relates to the global wave of populist discontent that first crested with Brexit and Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. In country after country, large numbers of voters, predominantly older, predominantly from outside major cities, feel abandoned and disrespected by their national elites, unprotected from what they perceive as gale-force economic and cultural change (exemplified above all by migration), and receptive to populist leaders such as the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen, who promise to bring back eras of past national stability and greatness. Anxieties prompted by the pandemic and war, the lingering pain of post-pandemic inflation and the outrage-intensifying effects of social media have all reinforced the trend.

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But another part of the explanation comes from deep in French history. Since the Revolution of 1789, France’s political culture has been marked by an inordinate distrust of faction that has, again and again, crippled the development of a stable party system. In the United States, where the party system is paralytically stable, populist extremism could only succeed by capturing one of the two dominant parties. In France, Macron himself toppled the weak system that had prevailed for much of the history of the Fifth Republic, opening a breach through which Le Pen’s National Rally now threatens to sweep.

The birth of French democracy in the Revolution was marked by ideological strife accompanied by tragic, large-scale violence. But that very experience generated a desperate desire on the part of successive governments to transcend faction and restore national unity. Despite the country’s reputation for ideological passion, since 1789, genuine radicals have only held power for relatively short periods, such as during the Reign of Terror and Vichy. Otherwise, nearly all France’s regimes — republican, royal, and Bonapartist — have at least paid lip service to the idea of national cohesion. The historian Pierre Serna has gone so far as to characterise post-revolutionary French politics as a repeated return to what he calls the “extreme centre”. As often as not, this has been a politics focused less on ideology than on personality, from Napoleon and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to Charles de Gaulle.

When the Fourth Republic collapsed in 1958 amid the strife of the Algerian War, the new constitution put in place by and for de Gaulle included a powerful presidency that would, in theory, stand at a remove from partisan politics and serve as a focus of unity. De Gaulle reluctantly conceded that in order to campaign for the presidency and secure support in parliament, he could not do without a party of his own, but that party accommodated different ideological strains, and went through many incarnations, as shown by its comically frequent name changes (Union for the New Republic, Union of Democrats for the Republic, Rally for the Republic, Union for a Popular Movement, The Republicans).

Over time, the Gaullists did show signs of coalescing into a relatively stable centre-right movement, not hugely different from counterparts throughout Europe such as the West German Christian Democrats. Meanwhile, a relatively stable ideological opponent seemed to take shape in the Seventies after François Mitterrand forged a congeries of Left-wing groups into a new Socialist Party. (French socialists had earlier eschewed the label of party altogether, preferring to call themselves the French Section of the Workers’ International.) In 1981, Mitterrand’s election as president was hailed as proof that the Fifth Republic had finally become an ordinary Western democracy, with regular alternation between Left and Right parties. The dominance of the Gaullists and the Socialists was especially pronounced on the local level, where each built up powerful organisations.

On a national level, however, the party system remained relatively weak, with both the Gaullists and Socialists divided into competing “currents”, and with a constantly shifting constellation of smaller parties nipping at their heels. In theory, the Fifth Republic’s mandatory two-round election system should have helped the major parties, since they had the greatest strength for prevailing in the second, run-off round of both presidential and parliamentary votes. In practice, it turned the first round into repeated opportunities for cost-free protest, in which discontented electors voted their “hearts rather than their heads”, giving unexpected support to extremists including, especially, Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie. Already in the 1988 presidential election, Le Pen senior managed to score more than 14% in the first round, just two points behind a respected centrist former prime minister. Fourteen years later, he shocked the political world by edging ahead of a Socialist and winning a place in the run-off against incumbent Gaullist Jacques Chirac (which he lost massively).

In this century, the party system grew even weaker for several reasons. For one thing, a well-meaning constitutional reform set both the presidential and parliamentary terms at five years (the presidential one had previously been seven), in order to reduce the possibility of “cohabitation”, or split government between the executive and legislative branches. It succeeded in doing so, but at the cost of increasingly turning parliamentary majorities into personal ones, tied to the incumbent president rather than a party. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen took over the party then called the National Front from her father and began a concerted campaign to “de-demonise” it, notably by renouncing his notorious antisemitism and actively cultivating Jewish support. (This year, the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld has announced he will vote for the National Rally.) Her vote totals steadily rose, and in the last two presidential elections she made it into the run-off round against Macron, scoring an astonishing 41% in 2022. It also helped that an even more extreme party, “Reconquest”, emerged to her Right, allowing her to play the moderate. In the 2022 legislative elections, the National Front gained the largest number of deputies of any far-Right party since the late 19th century.

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But the largest blow to the party system came with the disastrous presidency of Socialist François Hollande and the rise of his successor, Macron. At first, Hollande’s defeat of incumbent neo-Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 seemed like another successful “alternation”. But Hollande quickly faced a perfect storm of calamities: an embarrassing personal scandal over his affair with an actress; a string of horrific Islamist terrorist attacks; the ongoing European debt crisis; and large-scale protests against his proposed labour and pension reforms. By late 2016, one poll placed his approval rating at an humiliating low of just 4%.

The presidential election that took place a year later went a long way towards exploding the system altogether. Hollande’s ambitious former economics minister Macron declined to run as either a Socialist or neo-Gaullist, and instead created his own centrist political party. It was an entirely personal vehicle — no coincidence that its initial name, “En Marche”, had the same initials as the candidate. Amid the wreckage of the Hollande presidency, in the first round Macron managed to whip past both neo-Gaullist François Fillon and Socialist Benoît Hamon, who scored just 6%, thanks in large part to competition from Left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon who had founded yet another new party, France Unbowed (La France Insoumise). In the second round Macron easily defeated Marine Le Pen. And then, in the legislative elections that immediately followed, his party (now called “La République en Marche”) won a convincing majority.

Since Macron’s election, French politics has again been very much an affair of personality — his — more than ideology. Both the Socialists and the neo-Gaullist Republicans remain in dire straits, the former wrestling for support with Mélenchon’s party, the latter desperately trying to stanch the bleeding of their support to Le Pen. The Socialists even had to sell off their Parisian headquarters. Macron himself, despite his objectively reasonable economic record, has alienated voters on all sides with his remarkable aloofness and arrogance. Anger especially boiled up in the spring of 2023 when, lacking a parliamentary majority to pass a hugely unpopular pension reform, he resorted to constitutional fiat (“article 49.3”). His approval level, while not yet at Hollandian depths, now stands at just 24%. In the recent European election, the National Rally list, led by Marine Le Pen’s charismatic 28-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella, became the chosen instrument with which the French would vote their disapproval of Macron. The Republicans have now split, with part of them willing to take part in a National Rally government.

Can the National Rally translate the upsurge of protest into a parliamentary majority? In recent days, Macron’s party (now rebranded yet again as Renaissance) has rebounded somewhat in the polls, while the various Left parties have joined into a “New Popular Front” in the hopes of blocking the extreme Right. But the situation remains enormously uncertain.

A hung parliament could actually be a worse outcome than a National Rally victory. Macron, in taking the gamble to dissolve parliament, clearly thought that bringing the far-Right into government, where he could check it with his presidential powers and heap on it the blame for everything that goes wrong, might actually help keep Le Pen from the presidency in 2027 (Macron himself cannot run again due to a constitutional term limit). But if no group gets a majority in the législatives, and Macron’s own party ends up wiping out, the pressure on him to resign, forcing a new presidential election, might become irresistible. For the moment, Macron has said he will remain in office until 2027, “come what may”. But can he keep that promise? If not, France’s long pursuit of national unity and the “extreme centre” may falter, and a government of the extreme Right could come to power sooner than anyone expected.

Could history ever become a truly scientific discipline? In the past few years, a number of thinkers have found new ways to say yes. I am not so sure. Visions of history as science go back long before Asimov: during the Enlightenment, philosophers impressed by the advances being made in natural science wondered if they could discover laws of social change equivalent to the physical laws governing such things as motion or gas pressure. Looking at the indigenous peoples of the Americas, they saw similarities to the ancient Greeks and Romans and concluded that all human societies followed the same basic path of historical evolution from “savagery” to civilised modernity (exemplified, of course, by themselves).

In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed to have discovered a different universal pattern of historical change: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” Engels, in particular, did not hesitate to call history a science. Throughout the 20th century, both Marxist and non-Marxist social scientists developed elaborate quantitative models to explain why, for instance, revolutions broke out in some times and places but not in others. All these approaches had in common the assumption that throughout history impersonal forces greatly circumscribed the scope of human free will. As Marx wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”

But in the late 20th century, social scientific model-making lost its attraction for most historians. Following the so-called “cultural turn”, the discipline increasingly looked to literary studies and cultural anthropology for inspiration and experimented with “microhistories” of single individuals or incidents, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, or Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre. History-writing of this sort, grounded in a close reading of texts, did not easily lend itself to sweeping theories of change over the centuries. Historical sociologists continued to pursue the work of model-building, but increasingly in isolation from their colleagues in history departments.

More recently, the field’s turn towards “global history” did partially revive interest in the large-scale, quantitative modelling of change. Kenneth Pomeranz’s influential 2000 book The Great Divergence, for instance, developed a theory of why certain countries successfully industrialised that placed heavy emphasis on the availability of coal and other natural resources. But much of the new “global” work is deeply bound up with issues of race and has a distinctly moralising character. The authors tend to hold European imperialism and white supremacy responsible for the ills of the modern world (not without reason, of course). But moral responsibility and blame can only be imputed to those who had the ability to choose — not to those who acted as the blind instruments of impersonal historical forces.

At the same time, new attempts at a scientific history have begun to appear. A field calling itself “cliodynamics”, spearheaded by the polymath biologist Peter Turchin, has attracted considerable attention, in part because in 2010 Turchin predicted that the United States was heading for massive instability exactly 10 years later. Turchin argues that history can become a “mathematised science” and explicitly compares himself to Asimov’s “psycho-historians”. Meanwhile, an increasing number of historians have been using data compiled by actual scientists about past physical changes in the world (especially climate change) to offer new explanations for political and social events such as the fall of the Roman Empire. For the moment, most historians remain either ignorant or sceptical of these new approaches. But should they once again embrace the banner of science?

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Cliodynamics is strongly reminiscent of the social scientific approaches of the mid-20th century. Peter Turchin’s complex mathematical models of social change put great weight on what he calls “elite overproduction” as one warning sign of coming social strife. As he puts it in his new book End Times, when the “social pyramid has gotten top-heavy”, with “too many ‘elite aspirants’ competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper levels of politics and business”, civic cohesion weakens and social fracture grows. The sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix came to some of the same conclusions in their classic study Social Mobility in Industrial Society, published in 1959, which in turn inspired many historians of revolutions.

More generally, Turchin puts far greater weight on material factors — above all, the competition for wealth and power — than on ideology, culture or sheer accident in explaining why societies undergo extreme stress. For example, he argues that the American Civil War was not “fought over slavery”, but rather “over ‘slavocracy’” — that is to say, to challenge the wealth and power of slave-owning elites. In a previous book, he and a collaborator offered a long and detailed explanation of why France fell into chaos during the Wars of Religion of the 16th century without discussing… religion. Their assumption — shared by French Marxist historians of a previous generation — is that the Reformation would not have caused such strife in the absence of underlying social pressures. To quote the Marxist Janine Estèbe, writing in 1975, “social antagonisms” were “covered by a religious cloak”. But as Natalie Zemon Davis replied to her, simply pointing to such antagonisms tells us very little about how and why people resorted to violence. “We must stretch our definition of ‘social tensions’ well beyond the issue of wealth and poverty,” Davis wrote. “Rather than being ‘covered by a religious cloak,’ the social face of the Reformation is as real as its obverse, the spiritual face, different sides of the same coin.”

Turchin makes great claims for the mathematical rigour of cliodynamics, but in fact for his model to work he has to put the math aside and resort to some very traditional — indeed, commonplace — historical interpretations. For instance, he argues that the same combination of material factors that led to the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War also threatened Great Britain with civic strife in the 1830s. But Britain avoided revolution. Why? Because emigration served as a safety valve; because of intelligent institutional reforms by a series of flexible governments; and because workers managed to claim new rights for themselves. These points can be found in most textbooks. In addition, like his social scientific predecessors, Turchin gives too little attention to the dynamism of historical events. The American Civil War may not have started as a war to end slavery, but at a certain point, as the fighting intensified, it became one. Why? The answer can’t be found simply by measuring the forms of social stress that led to the initial crisis.

Another problem for cliodynamics is that so much historical data is simply unreliable. In the earlier book, in a chapter on medieval France, Turchin and his collaborator repeatedly acknowledged that “demographic data are hard to come by for the medieval period… the data are very crude… there are no systematic wage data… the Forez and Bar-sur-Seine data cannot be directly compared”, and so forth. Nonetheless, on the basis of a plausible but by no means certain data set, they ventured confident conclusions about the way a large decline in the population of French nobles solved the problem of “elite overproduction” and helped end a period a severe political instability.

Despite the exaggerated claims, Turchin’s work can be serious and thought-provoking, and follows in a distinguished line of social scientific analysis about the origins of social crises. But it tells us much less about how such crises subsequently develop, how they can lead to such different outcomes and how they generate such wildly different ideas and ideologies. And the crises are themselves only a part of the hugely rich and complex tapestry of the human past. To reduce “history” to the mathematical modelling of social crisis would be impoverishing in the extreme.

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If few practising historians have yet embraced the cliodynamic version of scientific history, more and more are approaching the past with techniques borrowed from the natural sciences, often in collaboration with actual scientists. A fascinating recent article in The Guardian by Jacob Mikanowski surveys this new work: examples range from genetic testing of leather to see if the ancient Scythians tanned human skin (they did), to measuring air pollution as recorded in ice cores to see when Roman silver production crashed (the third century CE), to discovering that a nun who died in 1100 had traces of expensive lapis lazuli on her teeth — probably transferred while painting an illuminated manuscript. Mikanowski might also have cited the innovative use of historical linguistics by historians of medieval Africa, who use reconstructions of past vocabulary to trace the movement of peoples across the continent.

Overall, this new work falls into two broad categories. One is principally empirical and aims at simply determining such things as past temperature variations, drought conditions or the movement of peoples, animals, and commodities. Especially when the historians in question also draw on archaeological evidence, they are here following in a distinguished, long-established tradition. After all, to study the history of peoples who left no written records we have no choice but to turn to various forms of physical evidence. But as techniques have improved and evidence has accumulated, some historians have grown more ambitious — often by introducing climate change as a key driver of historical change. In perhaps the best-known recent example, the historian Kyle Harper suggested that the Roman Empire flourished and expanded in large part thanks to “a phase of warm, wet and stable climate”, only to run out of luck when the climate turned unstable, and a set of deadly infectious diseases rampaged across the Mediterranean world. Harper’s dissertation advisor, Harvard’s Michael McCormick, has offered similar arguments, and enthusiastically embraced the new marriage of history and science. The partnership, he told Mikanowski, is currently at the same stage as astronomy “when Galileo first looked up with his telescope”.

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The Georgetown historian Dagomar Degroot has offered a particularly engaging example of how “proxy data” collected by scientists can enrich our understanding of even well-documented parts of human history. In his book The Frigid Golden Age, he showed that while the early modern “Little Ice Age” posed massive challenges for all European societies, some adapted and thrived. The Dutch in particular demonstrated considerable resilience in devising techniques for dealing with record cold (perfecting ice skates, for instance). They also mastered the period’s new Atlantic wind patterns to shorten voyages for their commercial fleet and to devise effective naval tactics against enemy fleets. But while Degroot collaborated with scientists to ascertain past temperatures (for instance through a study of tree rings — narrower rings indicate colder winters), he took most of his evidence from traditional documentary sources.

Where such sources are less plentiful, or more ambiguous, the work of interpretation becomes harder, and the ability to draw “scientific” conclusions more dubious. Historians of late antiquity, for instance, have devoted enormous attention to the year 536, which Science magazine in 2018 labelled “the worst year to be alive”. Evidence from tree rings and ice cores indicates that as a result of large-scale volcanic eruptions the world experienced the coldest summer of the past two millennia. Some written records, meanwhile, suggest that at the same time the deadly “Justinianic plague” devastated Mediterranean societies. McCormick, Harper and others speculate that this one-two punch shattered the late antique world, marking the real fall of the Roman Empire. Its surviving, eastern portion, ruled from Constantinople, moved away from the Roman heritage, embracing a fervent, zealous Christianity — in a word, turning Byzantine. But other historians have countered that the plague did not in fact have world-changing effects, and that 536 may not have been particularly disastrous. One of them, Lee Mordechai of the Hebrew University, is currently writing a book arguing that the “536 event” has served as a sort of blank screen onto which the present day projects its own fears of climate disaster.

But in any case, even as these new partnerships open up new perspectives, they can still only illuminate a relatively limited range of subjects. Climate historians define the “Little Ice Age” as having lasted from the late Middle Ages to the early 19th century: a period that includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the European encounter with the Americas, the creation of the slave plantation, the Enlightenment, the American, French and Haitian Revolutions, Britain’s rise to global supremacy, the birth of Romanticism, the start of the Industrial Revolution, and much, much more. Climate change may have served as a contributing factor to many of these things, but it cannot serve as the principal explanatory factor for any of them. Human history is simply too gloriously, too colourfully and often too tragically complex to be reducible to single variables of this sort. Climatic variation, like “elite overproduction”, can help illuminate some parts of the canvas, but not others. Any explanation of change requires a willingness to bring together very different, and often incommensurable phenomena: social, economic, political, cultural, religious, environmental. While scientific methods can cast light on some of them, the idea that human history itself, in all its fantastic variation, can be reduced to a science remains a chimera.

Even Isaac Asimov recognised that sheer chance could play an outsized role in history. In his Foundation series, the “psycho-historians” forecast the fall of a galactic empire, and for centuries events turned out exactly as they had predicted. But then came along an unexpected development: the rise of a mutant human with sinister telepathic powers known as “the Mule”, who started carving out an empire of his own. Suddenly, none of the predictions panned out. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the most capacious scientific history writing.

The two cases differed in important respects. The first came after the German regime, actively supported by much of the population, had launched the most murderous war in world history, and committed the worst crime in world history. Palestinian Arabs bore nothing like this responsibility. The first expulsion, though, took place largely after Germany had surrendered, while the second occurred in the middle of a conflict in which Palestinian leaders called for driving Jews from the land between the river and the sea — and welcomed an invasion by Arab armies to achieve this goal. In other differences, the ethnic Germans still had a German state in which to make new lives, while the Palestinians — though they could seek refuge among fellow Arabs — had no country of their own. But in both cases, massive numbers of mostly innocent people ended up in miserable refugee camps.

The two stories, however, then took radically different turns. Three quarters of a century later, the descendants of those expelled ethnic Germans have built a permanent existence in new homes and no longer dream of reclaiming towns and villages that most of them have never seen. As late as the Eighties, lobby groups of the expellees remained visible in West Germany — I remember coming across a small protest in Munich in 1983 in which old men and women carried banners reading “Schlesien bleibt unser” — “Silesia is still ours”. But these groups had little political influence and have largely faded away as the last survivors have aged and died. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still live in what are called “refugee camps”. More than five million have the formal status of “Palestinian refugee”. They raise their children on stories of the towns and villages that were theirs, and that might be so again. Many of them support terrorist attacks on Israel, claiming that it is the only way they have of recapturing their lost homeland.

I am not drawing this contrast to cast blame on Palestinians for not following the example of the ethnic Germans. Jews like myself, who have chanted “next year in Jerusalem” every Passover for many centuries, can hardly lecture others on the need to “move on”, and to forget a lost homeland. My point is rather that in the modern world it is actually the experience of the ethnic Germans which has become increasingly unusual. Fewer and fewer conflicts have as decisive and permanent a resolution as the Second World War, and this change has had decidedly mixed consequences.

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Before the era of the French Revolution, peoples around the world mostly accepted that military victory conferred certain legitimate rights upon the victor. The Yale historian James Whitman has argued that in 18th-century Europe, jurists viewed battles as akin to legal procedures, their outcome having legal force that peace treaties would then codify. When Prussia seized Silesia from the Austrian Empire in the 1740s, for instance, contemporaries accepted the conquest as legitimate because of Frederick the Great’s battlefield victories, not because of arguments as to whom the province rightfully belonged. That particular transfer of territory did not involve a transfer of population, but others did.

Starting in the late 18th century, however, a belief in what Whitman calls the “law of victory” began to fade. Jurists increasingly defined all war not waged for strictly defensive purposes as illegitimate, and thereby denied that acquisitions achieved by force could ever acquire the force of law. Already in the 1790s, when the French Revolutionary state took over new territories, it took care in most cases to legitimise the annexation through plebiscites. After the First World War, transfers of territory, at least in theory, likewise depended on the will of the population in question. And since the 19th century, nationalist movements have insisted on the unbreakable and eternal right of particular peoples to sovereignty over their historical homelands. Go to Hungary today and you will see maps of the country that still adhere to the boundaries of 1918 — when the country included all of present-day Slovakia, most of Croatia, and large chunks of present-day Romania and Serbia.

In this history, the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe stands out as exceptional for the modern period. Joseph Stalin’s determination to punish Germany for its aggression and ensure the future safety of the USSR trumped what had become the usual pattern of European conflict resolution. The cataclysmic scale of the conflict, and of Soviet losses — with more than one in seven Soviet citizens killed — encouraged the allies to go along. As late as 1940, when absorbing the Baltic States and eastern Poland, the Soviets had first staged sham elections to choose representatives who then “requested” annexation. But when, in 1945, the USSR added half of East Prussia to its territorial gains, it effectively did so on the basis of the law of victory. It had no historical claim to the territory, whose pre-war population was 85% German. At the same time, Stalin insisted that Germany surrender its other eastern provinces. The expulsions followed.

It would be natural to applaud the eclipse of the “law of victory” as a triumph for enlightened human values. How can a civilised society possibly accept an idea that boils down, in essence, to might makes right? When Whitman writes that “18th-century wars were more contained and civilised than the wars that have been fought since 1860, not less”, he is surely uttering an absurdity. Or is he?

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By David Patrikarakos

The paradoxical consequence of this shift away from the “law of victory” is that, today, international conflicts often prove almost impossible to bring to a definitive conclusion. In case after case, each side endlessly accuses the other of illicit aggression, of violation of sovereignty, of illegitimate seizure of territory, of illegal expulsion of populations. Even when the actual fighting ends, or dribbles down to the occasional skirmish, definitive peace agreements prove frustratingly elusive. Instead, we are left with “frozen conflicts” that drag on for decades, often accompanied by the emergence of new states that have a shadow existence, unrecognised by others and unable to join the United Nations: Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Kosovo, etc. Of all these frozen conflicts, Israel-Palestine is the most prominent — although “frozen” seems a singularly inappropriate term for such a ferocious situation.

Meanwhile, encouraged by international opinion and homegrown nationalists alike, national leaders refuse to contemplate ceding even an inch of their legally recognised territory to military opponents. Is there anything sacrosanct about the present-day borders of Ukraine, which Soviet politicians drew in the Fifties for reasons that had very little to do with history, or the desires of the affected populations? The Crimean Peninsula in particular has a largely ethnic Russian population, and historical ties to Russia — which itself, admittedly, seized the territory by force from the Ottoman Empire, which in turn seized it from someone else. But Ukraine has absolutely refused to contemplate ceding Crimea or anything else within its borders to Russia, insisting on the integrity of its territory, and (quite reasonably) protesting that any legitimation of Russia’s aggression will only encourage more of the same. But the alternative has meant leaving Crimea in legal limbo for the foreseeable future, along with the eastern Ukrainian territories that Russia has occupied, even as the Russia-Ukraine war devolves into yet another frozen conflict.

The conundrums created by renouncing the “law of victory” are all the greater because the modern world recognises no statute of limitations on aggressive conquest. Very few living Israelis played a part in the events of 1948-49, but, in the eyes of much of world opinion, the present-day Israeli population still bears responsibility for correcting them. For that matter, do the United States, or Canada, or Australia or New Zealand have legitimate sovereignty over their territories? According to increasingly popular theories of “settler colonialism”, they do not: colonists stole these territories from their rightful, indigenous owners, which retain at least a moral claim to sovereignty.

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One result, in the US, is the spread of “land acknowledgments” in which various institutions make public statements that they exist on illegitimately seized land (I happen to be writing this essay on the ancestral lands of the Lenape people). In practical terms, such statements make little difference, but people who see their own state as fundamentally illegitimate because of events that happened hundreds of years ago are unlikely to treat the dispossession of the Palestinians as a settled issue, particularly when they cast Israelis as “colonists” — although a majority of the Israeli population descends from Jews who lived in the Muslim world, and were themselves expelled in the wake of 1948.

Obviously, these conundrums are not going to be resolved any time soon. The principle that aggressive war cannot be countenanced or encouraged is too powerful to resist, and in part for good reasons. But it might help if states at least did more to acknowledge that the conundrum exists, and that, as Whitman argues, our enlightened principles have often produced surprisingly dark outcomes. It might help as well if states more readily conceded that as time passes, even if the rights of a dispossessed people remain valid, the form in which they deserve restitution should be open to change. We need to recognise the difference between people reclaiming land that they personally lived on, and land that their grandparents lived on, now inhabited by grandchildren of the people they accuse of having dispossessed them. Even in the space of less than a generation, at some point it may make sense for contending parties to reach an agreement in which compensation takes a non-territorial form. An insistence on justice should not condemn us to conflict without end.

In fact, the RN leader has been denouncing a “new antisemitism” for many years, and trying to build Jewish support for the party. She instigated the party’s greatest rupture with its own past in 2015 when she expelled Jean-Marie from it, and has increasingly sold herself as French Jews’ “shield against Islamist ideology”, in the words of her co-leader, Jordan Bardella. But for much of France, the far-Right is still built upon and tainted by antisemitism. Le Pen’s change of position is certainly strategic; whether it is a genuine change of heart is a different question. But the contradiction is telling: it is of a piece with the complex and paradoxical history of the Jews in France, stretching back many centuries.

At first glance, this history can seem overwhelmingly dark. During the Middle Ages, French Jews suffered frequent pogroms, blood libels, and expulsions from the country. After the last of these, in 1394, Jews did not return to France for centuries. As late as the 18th century, the Alsatian town of Colmar imposed a tax equally on all Jews and heads of cattle entering the town. In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte issued the so-called “Infamous Decree” that presumed all Jews in eastern France guilty of illicit business practices, unilaterally cancelled debts to Jews, and restricted Jewish movement and commerce. In 1832, the betrayal of a charismatic royalist leader by a Jewish-born advisor unleashed a torrent of antisemitic hatred.

Worse was to come. A new wave of antisemitism began in the late-19th century, propelled by Édouard Drumont’s vile 1886 book La France juive, one of the greatest bestsellers in French history with over 100 reprints in just its first year. In 1894, the conviction of Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus on trumped-up treason charges prompted yet more ferocious attacks on Jews, many of the worst rhetorical ones delivered from church pulpits. Even after irrefutable proof of Dreyfus’s innocence came to light, a second trial confirmed his conviction, and he did not win his exoneration until 1906.

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Then, in 1940, the antisemites achieved real power. Following the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the Germans occupied much of France, but allowed a quasi-independent state to survive in the south, headquartered in the former spa town of Vichy. Acting on its own initiative, the Vichy government banned Jews from most professions, forced them to wear yellow Stars of David, seized property, and ultimately deported some 76,000 to the death camps. Its emblematic figure was the half-mad Louis Darquier, subject of Carmen Callil’s remarkable biography, who headed its General Commission of Jewish Affairs and helped organise an infamous roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942. After the war he claimed, from his refuge in Franco’s Spain, that only lice had died in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Yet alongside this history there developed another one running in parallel — very different, and considerably more hopeful. Already in the late-18th century, influential French writers such as Henri Grégoire were arguing in favour of full civil rights for the Jews. And these rights were actually granted in the early years of the French Revolution. Even as Napoleon passed the “Infamous Decree”, his armies were demolishing ghetto walls in central Europe. He also set up a system of “consistories” to mediate between French-Jewish communities and the government that has survived to the present.

The Third Republic established in the 1870s opened up unprecedented opportunities for Jews in French politics, business, law and academia. At a time when Jews were still largely banned from American universities, figures such as Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson rose to the heights of the French university system. Jewish families like the Camondos, the Ephrussis, and the Rothschilds compiled massive fortunes, and used them to build elegant townhouses and villas full of rare art that they later bequeathed to the French state, as James McCauley recounts in his study The House of Fragile Things. In French Algeria, Jews gained full French citizenship in 1870, a status unavailable to most Muslims. The Dreyfus Affair, painful as it was for French Jews, did end in Dreyfus’s exoneration. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, France welcomed hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. Today, France has the third-largest Jewish population in the world, after the United States and Israel.

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To be sure, even some of these apparently favourable turns of fortune were hardly unalloyed. Henri Grégoire, the champion of Jewish civil rights, nonetheless described the Jews as a degraded and clannish people, and saw their emancipation as a step not only towards full assimilation, but towards their ultimate conversion to Christianity. The authors of the French Revolutionary rights legislation, meanwhile, insisted that the Jews “must make up neither a political body nor an order within the state”. In other words, they needed to restrict their Judaism and Jewish identity entirely to the realms of private life and private conscience.

These principles have endured to the present, and do much to govern the lives, not only of Jews, but of other minority groups in France as well (especially, today, Muslims). The French “melting pot” does not allow for what Americans call “hyphenated” groups (such as Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans) whose strong sense of community identity helps to shape civil society in general. This is one reason why, even if France has had many notable Jewish writers and artists, few of them wear their Jewishness on their sleeves in the manner of a Philip Roth or Woody Allen. Meanwhile, the patriotic generosity of families such as the Camondos did not save them from Vichy’s persecutions — and even deportation to the death camps.

In the past few decades, the history of both French Jews and French antisemitism has taken a radically new turn, in both cases thanks to immigration from North Africa. On the one hand, decolonisation, coupled with rising antisemitism in the Arab world, brought hundreds of thousands of Sephardi Jews to the French metropole, where they soon outnumbered the older Ashkenazi communities of largely Alsatian and Eastern European origin. And the migration of much larger numbers of North African Muslims led to the establishment of communities in which many people principally associate Jews with Israel.

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Since the Eighties, the perpetrators of the most serious antisemitic attacks in France have been Muslims who have seen their actions as an extension of the Middle East conflict. These attacks include everything from assaults on a synagogue and a well-known Jewish restaurant by Palestinian terrorists in the early Eighties, to the numerous murders of Jews by radicalised young French Islamists, including at a kosher supermarket in January 2015. The Jewish victims have been largely Sephardi. The principal target of the horrific November 2015 attacks by Isis terrorists was the Bataclan theatre, which had just been sold by its long-term Jewish owners. In this context, it is not surprising that far-Right leaders such as Marine Le Pen now rush to defend France’s Jews. If anything, their Islamophobia has trumped their residual antisemitism.

With the Israel-Hamas war, antisemitic incidents in France have risen once more. There are stories across France of Jewish men covering their kippas and Jewish families removing the mezuzahs from their doorways. The November 12 march offered a welcome response. But with world attention already swivelling to Israeli tactics in Gaza, and Hamas’s horrendous October 7 attacks already receding in memory, this sort of public support for French Jews may also soon fade. The resolutely anti-Israeli socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon refused to join the march, and his point of view resonates with much of the French Left, and may well become more popular. But however the situation develops, onlookers should resist the easy temptation to see it as the simple continuation of French-Jewish history — this history defies the simple interpretation that would suit either side.

The word charisma is ubiquitous today. Marketers use it to sell everything from shampoo to perfume to olive oil. But it arrived relatively recently into common usage. Back in the Fifties, my father, then a journalist at Fortune magazine in New York, used it in a profile of the labour leader John L. Lewis. His editor sent a draft back to him with the word circled, and the comment: “What the hell does this mean?”

My father had taken the word from the great German social theorist Max Weber, who, in the early 20th century, adapted it to describe a form of disruptive authority based on an intense, emotional connection between leaders and followers (its original, much older meaning was theological: a gift of divine grace). For decades afterwards, charisma remained a technical concept in the social sciences. But in the Fifties, writers such as my father found it useful in analysing an American political scene increasingly dominated by television and other mass media. John F. Kennedy seemed to embody the quality better than anyone, and ever since his election in 1960, journalists have routinely counted charisma as a key component of presidential politics.

In their usage, charisma is a purely personal quality: you either have it, or you don’t. Weber, however, offered a more subtle and persuasive interpretation. As he pointed out, it is not enough for leaders to have unusual talents and a magnetic personality. The followers need to perceive them as doing so. Charisma, in other words, lies at least partly in the eye of the beholder. In extreme cases, such as in totalitarian societies, charisma can effectively be manufactured. Thanks to pervasive, unrelenting propaganda that presented the secretive mass murderer Joseph Stalin as a heroic superman, a large proportion of the Soviet population saw him as intensely charismatic. Many North Koreans today probably feel the same about Kim Jong Un.

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Recent American history also illustrates Weber’s point. Most American liberals saw Barack Obama as intensely charismatic. He exuded energy and hope, and was a brilliant, incantatory speaker. But his magnetic appeal was entirely lost on most Republicans, who dismissed him as a phoney huckster, and mocked his reputation among liberals by calling him their messiah. Donald Trump, by contrast, both horrified and disgusted most liberals, but has appeared as a quintessential American hero to his supporters, and almost God-like to the most fervent of them. To the Republican base, he remains the very embodiment of charisma.

Still, in free societies without Stalinist-level propaganda, charisma can’t simply be manufactured, and personal qualities remain crucial. Kennedy wouldn’t have been perceived as charismatic without his youthful vigour, his easy, sexy manner, his brilliant smile, and his ability to give an enthralling speech. Obama has genuinely extraordinary oratorical powers. And Trump, whatever one thinks of him, is an enormously talented entertainer, and has an uncanny ability to sense and express his supporters’ most visceral feelings. He has a neural connection to the Republican id.

Charisma hasn’t always been this partisan. In fact, as I argued in a recent book, it has often played an important, positive, unifying role in democratic societies. Charismatic leaders have inspired trust even among their political opponents, thereby helping to bring fractured nations together. By the power of their oratory, they have broken through political logjams and brought about needed action. They have put warm flesh on the bones of abstract constitutional principle. At the start of the democratic age, figures such as George Washington in the United States, Toussaint Louverture in Haiti and Simón Bolívar in South American all exemplified these uses of charisma, even if the fervour they inspired in their followers also tempted the last two towards dictatorship. In the United States, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy, while each the target of fierce criticism, also exerted a charismatic appeal that went well beyond their own political camp, as illustrated by the nation-wide outbursts of grief that followed their deaths.

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But for charisma to have these positive, unifying effects, ordinary people need to at least be open to the possibility of seeing figures from the other camp as charismatic. The record of the Obama and Trump presidencies suggest that America is now far too divided for this recognition to take place. And as a result, charisma has lost much of its positive role in the United States. No matter how brilliant the personal qualities, they only work on followers already ideologically disposed towards the candidate in question.

The rise of virulently partisan radio and television, of social media, and of internet algorithms have all exacerbated the problem enormously. Thanks to my own browsing history, literally every time I open a new tab, Microsoft shows me a news story about the awfulness of Trump. A conservative cousin gets the same horror stories, but about Joe Biden. The same forces make it all the easier for ordinary people across the world to feel a charismatic bond with populist politicians like Trump, or Narendra Modi, or Viktor Orbán, who appeal directly to the emotions. By contrast, technocrats like Emmanuel Macron, who last week sternly scolded French families for not raising their children with sufficient “authority”, are all the easier to mock as elite and out of touch.

All this brings us to the current presidential campaign, and the figures of Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis. Biden, whatever one thinks of him, has been a significant president with some important achievements to his name. He succeeded in passing a massive infrastructure bill and an “Inflation Reduction Act” which will allocate unprecedented sums to fight climate change. He strengthened the Western alliance in the face of Russian aggression and cannily resolved the debt ceiling crisis. During his administration, unemployment has hit a 50-year low, and inflation is returning to normal levels after the pandemic.

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But Biden gets very little credit for these achievements, even from people who voted for him. Barely 40% of the American population approves of his record as president, while more than 54% disapprove. To be sure, conservative Republicans loathe him, seeing him as corrupt and disruptive. But their opposition alone cannot explain these dire numbers. A better clue comes from a recent column by Pamela Paul of The New York Times, who lamented the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024. Surely, she moaned, we can do better than these two visibly declining old men. She first damned Biden with weak praise, allowing that he has restored norms and “been decent”, but then went on to damn him, full stop: “That old age is showing. Never an incantatory speaker or a sparkling wit, Biden seems to have altogether thrown in the oratorical towel.” In other words, she ignored Biden’s actual record as president, and focused on his charisma, or rather his lack of it.

Lack it he does. On video, Joe Biden unquestionably cuts a poor figure. He looks his age. He moves haltingly. His speech stumbles, stammers and wanders. It is all too easy to portray him as senile. Yet the same conservative critics who call him a senile puppet will often, in the very next breath, denounce him as a criminal mastermind. Both can’t be true, and in fact Biden’s record as president very much belies the charges of senility. As president, he has made no memorable speeches, to say nothing of incantatory ones. Instead, he has effectively applied skills he perfected in his long career in the Senate: glad-handing, making deals and crafting coalitions behind the scenes. But in the eyes of journalists like Paul, these skills, and what Biden accomplished with them, matter less than his glaring lack of charisma.

On the other side of the political abyss, DeSantis’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination illustrates equally well the way Americans continue to over-emphasise charisma. Nine months ago, after winning re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20%, DeSantis looked poised to replace Trump as the Republican Party’s darling. He was “Trump without the chaos”, “Trump without the baggage”, “Trump without the nonsense”. At 44, he had vigour, obvious intelligence and a record of challenging and provoking liberals at every turn. In February, a conservative columnist anointed him the Republican Kennedy. Whatever one thought of his actual policies (I, for one, thought him a menace), he seemed an obvious frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Unfortunately, he also turned out to be “Trump without the charisma”. As the campaign began, it became painfully obvious that he lacked Trump’s easy rapport with crowds, his neural connection to them. In public, indeed, DeSantis appears incapable of relaxing. His voice vibrates with tension. He has no visible sense of humour. Charisma, as Weber emphasised, requires the ability to establish an emotional connection with followers, and DeSantis seems, at crucial moments, either to shrink away from them, or to laugh maniacally in an awkward attempt to bond. It should not be surprising, then, that DeSantis currently lags Trump by more than 30% in most polls, and just this week has cut more than a third of his campaign staff. Barring an unexpected turn of events, he might well end up withdrawing from the race before a single primary vote is cast.

Is it possible, in our current moment, to imagine a figure whose charismatic appeal might help unite the country instead of further dividing it? It is not implausible that our political divisions will get even worse, leading to government paralysis, violence, and a crisis severe enough to shake Americans out of their ideological certainties. In that case, they might well flock to a charismatic figure promising to restore unity. But would that figure respect democratic, constitutional norms? The historical record is not encouraging. In one of the most prominent cases, the bitter partisan divisions of the French Revolution opened the door for Napoleon Bonaparte, who ruled as a dictator while sacrificing millions to his wars.

But meanwhile, in the short term, the most likely upshot of America’s continuing obsession with charisma is that it will help Donald Trump back into power 15 months from now. That alone is an excellent argument for not putting too much emphasis on it.

But if the barricade remains a symbol of revolution, the burning car mostly represents impotent rage — and France’s political petrification. Street barricades had an important and clear purpose — to take control of neighbourhoods and to prevent the forces of public order from circulating through cities. True, the builders of 19th-century barricades usually went down to defeat, at least in the short term. In June of 1848, the army killed thousands in Paris, spelling an end to the radical phase of the short-lived Second Republic. In the spring of 1871, conservative republican forces slaughtered thousands more as they crushed the radical Paris Commune. But, in both cases, the people had shown their power, and in subsequent decades French governments moved to grant at least some of their demands. In the decades after the Commune, French workers gained paid vacations, a minimum wage, old-age pensions, the right to strike, and public works programs. Church and state were separated, and the educational system put under state control.

By contrast, the burning car of the 21st has done little for the communities in question, or to help advance the rioters’ professed goals. Quite the contrary, in fact. Most immediately, the cars themselves belong overwhelmingly to members of the same communities as the rioters. And in the longer term, the events of the past week are most likely to benefit the far-Right, possibly even bring it to power in the next presidential election. This is not the fault of the rioters, who have desperately few options for constructive action. It is rather the product of France’s changing political landscape in the 21st-century.

The rioters’ professed goals are easily summarised. They want an end to police violence against members of their community, and more broadly an end to discrimination against them. They wanted the same things in 2005, even if hooligans took advantage of the unrest for their own purposes, as they are doing now.

The communities in question are, as the French put it, “issued from immigration”, principally from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. When they started arriving in France in large numbers in the Fifties and Sixties, they followed many other waves of foreign immigrants to the country: of Italians, Jews, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese and others. It is often forgotten, but between the wars France was the leading country of immigration in the Western world, and by the Eighties fully a quarter of the French population could count at least one grandparent born elsewhere. These earlier immigrant groups often met with discrimination, violence, and even — under the collaborationist Vichy regime of World War II — deportation to Nazi death camps (a fate that also befell Jewish families with French roots going back centuries). But after the war their story gradually turned into a French success story, as assimilation took its course. The process was aided by the state’s heavy-handed insistence, implemented above all through an authoritarian school system, that groups could only gain acceptance if they wholly abandoned their earlier national identities and embraced a French one. Today, it is not unusual to find people with Italian, Polish, Jewish or Iberian surnames in the wealthiest and most visible strata of French society.

But this process has, so far, happened far more slowly and less completely with the newer immigrant groups, especially those from North Africa. Cultural differences have been greater than with the earlier groups, while the schools lost much of their earlier zeal for turning students into model French citizens after the uprising of 1968 led to a massive overhaul of the French educational system. Most importantly, the new groups have been shunted away into suburban housing projects — the so-called cités — out of sight and out of mind of the country’s ruling elites. Numbers are hard to come by, because the French state, in the name of treating all its citizens equally, refuses to keep statistics on the relative economic performance of different ethnic and religious groups (or even their numbers). But every major French city is ringed by cités where people of North African and black African descent dominate, and where rates of unemployment, poverty and crime far exceed national averages. The government does admit that nearly six million people, or a tenth of the country’s population, inhabit so-called “urban policy priority districts”.

Writing after the 2005 riots, I concluded that “the French Republic… desperately needs to find some way to offer the youths of the suburbs a meaningful form of integration into broader society.” Needless to say, this has not happened. True, even before 2005, a steady stream from the new immigrant populations was escaping the cités and joining the French middle class, and that pattern has continued. President Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet today includes Rima Abdul-Malak, from a Lebanese Christian background, as Culture Minister, and Pap Ndiaye, son of a Senegalese father, as Education Minister. But the cités themselves remain as miserable as ever. Meanwhile, the horrific Islamist terror attacks of 2015, which killed hundreds, led the state to grant expanded powers to the police — in particular, loosening the restrictions in use of fatal force when officers feel threatened — which did nothing to reduce social tension.”

Since Macron’s election in 2017, several things have only made the situation worse. Macron himself initially insisted that he would balance his plans for liberalising the economy with ambitious social policies aimed at relieving the cités’ problems. But he never fulfilled the promise. At the same time, the continuing threat of Islamism — as seen notably in the 2020 beheading of a suburban schoolteacher after he had shown a class cartoons of the prophet Mohammed — reinforced the vision that much of the French white population already had of the cités as occupied territory in need of “reconquest” by the Republic (Prime Minister Manuel Valls already used the word, redolent of Spanish crusades against the Moors, in 2015). Further strengthening this vision has been the growing influence of the conservative cable news channel CNEWS — France’s equivalent of Fox News.

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In both the presidential and parliamentary elections last year, this vision helped the French far-Right achieve its greatest political successes since the 19th century (at least, when not helped by the Wehrmacht). First, it bolstered the presidential campaign of hardline journalist, and former CNEWS commentator Éric Zemmour, who founded a political party called “Reconquest”, committed to ending immigration, expelling existing immigrants who supposedly resist assimilation, and placing Muslim houses of worship under strict state surveillance. When Zemmour’s performance faltered, his supporters moved over to Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, who won over 41% in the second-round presidential vote against Macron — the greatest for any far-Right candidate in the history of the Fifth Republic. Then, in the legislative elections in June, the National Rally gained 89 seats in the National Assembly, the most for any far-Right party since the 1880s.

The effects of these victories can be seen in the reactions to the killing of Nahel in Nanterre. While the Left-wing party La France Insoumise has condemned the police violence (which onlookers’ videos clearly showed to be excessive), National Rally politicians and police unions have called the rioters “savage hordes” and even “vermin”. In comparison with 2005, there are more public figures ready to speak in these terms, and to dismiss both police violence and the condition of the cités as irrelevant to the principal task of restoring public order. And that position is gaining traction in the population at large. In a poll conducted on June 28-29, the politician whose reaction to the crisis received the most positive score was Marine Le Pen with 39%, compared to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin with 34%, and Macron with 33%. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, scored only 20%.

The riots will doubtless burn out over the next few days. And Macron will most likely survive the crisis, just as he survived the widespread strikes and public anger this spring. The situation in the cités remains explosive, though. And Macron has already exhausted the political capital he gained after his reelection. But unlike in the 19th century, and the case of its barricade-builders, no reforms will be enacted that might alleviate the frustrations and anger of the car-burners. On Friday, Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s niece, and the vice-president of Reconquest described the riots as “civil war” and warned Macron’s government against any such measures. She characterised them as a form of “appeasement of the cités”, as if these parts of France were indeed the redoubts of foreign enemies, and the year was 1938.  But as she knows very well, the more that violence consumes the French streets, the closer the far-Right comes to power.

Please. While the current crisis has worrisome elements, for the moment it still fits squarely into a pattern that has prevailed in French political life for decades. Protestors against Macron’s raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 have staged large-scale strikes and demonstrations and engaged in some theatrical violence, starting fires in the streets, and clashing with police. But very much the same thing happened in 2016, when the administration of François Hollande introduced labour law reforms, making it easier for companies to lay off workers. It was the same story in 2010, when the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age from 60 to 62. And also in 2006, when the administration of Jacques Chirac eliminated certain labour protections for young workers. And in 1995, when the Chirac administration introduced a slew of reforms, including raising the retirement age for railroad workers (then set at 55).

Each time, yes, there has been the potential for the confrontations to escalate into something greater. But there is a reason that the great sociologist Charles Tilly called one of his books The Contentious French. To a certain extent, this is simply how contemporary French politics works. In each of the cases just mentioned, the Government insisted that without reform, France would slide into fiscal disaster and economic calamity. In each, the protestors insisted that the reforms would leave France’s vaunted social security net irretrievably shattered. Both sides were in fact engaged in the classic French tactic known as the surenchère — roughly, “overbidding” — and the dire consequences they predicted failed to materialise. In some of the cases, such as in 1995, the administration retreated. In others, such as in 2016, it persevered. French life has gone on. In recent days, the numbers attending the protests have apparently diminished, and it looks more likely than not that Macron will succeed in securing the pension reform.

The contentious pattern of the past few decades can largely be explained by the structure of France’s current Fifth Republic. The republic’s founder, Charles de Gaulle, created a powerful executive that would supposedly exist high above the political fray. In theory, the president would serve as a source of national unity, bringing the people together for the common good. In practice, he has more often acted like an irritable schoolmaster, preaching to the people about what is good for them. It does not help that he is surrounded by cadres of elite technocrats from the so-called grands corps de l’état, who are generally confident that they know better than anyone else how to manage economic and social development. Indeed, for all but seven of the past 30 years, the president has been a graduate of the super-elite École Nationale d’Administration, which finally became such a lightning rod for criticism that Macron, himself a graduate, closed it in 2021.

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Macron is the platonic ideal of this type: supremely well-educated, hyper-intelligent, arrogant, and largely tone-deaf to the concerns of his fellow citizens. At the beginning of his first term, in 2017, he boasted that he wanted to preside over France in “Jupiterian” fashion. He and his technocratic advisors convinced themselves that raising the retirement age was crucial for the fiscal health of the French state — though not all analysts agree — and have insisted on pushing the reform through, regardless of the extent of opposition.

The President’s “take your medicine” paternalism has especially rankled because of the way it collides with a widespread egalitarian sensibility that has much deeper roots in France’s republican political culture than the current constitution. Significantly, the arguments that have done the most to galvanise the current protests put less emphasis on the generalised hardship of having everyone work an additional two years, than on the unfairness of asking underpaid workers — especially women — to work extra years for the same inferior retirement benefits. In addition to women, the protests have drawn particularly large numbers in smaller, poorer provincial cities like Morlaix in Brittany, where close to a quarter of the population have turned out for some marches.

The most worrisome thing about the current crisis is not (yet) the degree of violence or the damage caused to the economy by repeated general strikes. The Fifth Republic has weathered worse crises, including the far larger strikes and protests that briefly sent President De Gaulle fleeing to a military base in Germany in the spring of 1968, as well as horrific Islamist terror attacks in 2015, and the Covid pandemic (not to mention an attempted coup d’état in 1961). The biggest danger stems from the fact that by obstinately insisting on pushing through this reform without serious consultation, Macron has thrown away whatever popularity he still enjoyed after his re-election last year and virtually guaranteed that he will not be able to achieve anything substantial in the remaining four years of his presidency. To make things even worse, he pushed through the retirement reform by using a constitutional provision that allowed him to enact a law without approval by the National Assembly, further enraging the opposition while cementing his reputation for arrogance. Younger protestors, for whom retirement remains on the distant horizon, have cited the use of this provision as a principal reason why they have turned out in large numbers.

Macron’s approval rating has not yet fallen into the single digits, as his predecessor Hollande’s did, but it is heading in that direction. Meanwhile, his own election and re-election have accelerated the decomposition of France’s two major political parties, the Socialists and the Republicans (the descendants of the Gaullists). Macron’s own party, now called Renaissance, remains essentially a personal vehicle that is unlikely to outlive its creator’s political career (he initially called it “En Marche”, and the initials “E.M.” were no coincidence). On the French political scene today, it is two figures from the extremes — Jean-Luc Mélenchon of “La France Insoumise” on the Left, and Marine Le Pen of the “Rassemblement National” on the Right — who enjoy the most consistent support. When Macron leaves office in 2027, as he must (he cannot serve more than two terms), the populist Le Pen may finally grasp the prize that she, and her father Jean-Marie, have striven for since the Eighties. In 1988, Jean-Marie received 14.4% of the first-round voting. In 2022, Marine made it into the runoff round, and got 41.45%. Après Macron, le déluge?

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Perhaps, but here again, the historical record suggests some caution. France enjoys a reputation for ideological extremism, but in the 234 years since the start of the French Revolution, genuinely radical governments, of either the Left or Right, have held power for less than 20 of them. For far more time, the country has been governed by what the historian Pierre Serna has called the “extreme centre”: regimes, some of them nakedly authoritarian (such as those of Napoleons I and III), that posed as unifying and even apolitical. And while France enjoys a reputation for political instability, it is worth remembering that in nearly all cases, professedly centrist French regimes have only collapsed in a context of military crisis or defeat, from the First Republic trying to stave off the Second Coalition in 1799 to the Fourth Republic during the Algerian War in 1958.

Absent such a crisis, the odds are against the Fifth Republic coming anywhere near the brink of the abyss over the next few years, even if Macron continues to provoke strikes and protests. More likely is the continuation of the current, familiar political theatre. And while a Le Pen victory in 2027 is certainly not impossible, for the moment it seems more likely that yet another ephemerally appealing centrist candidate will pop up, as Macron himself did in 2017. And French life will go on.