I wasn’t surprised when I heard about the location: first, because national school protest waves always seem to start off in the Parisian suburbs, and second, because in the Nineties, I spent a year as a language assistant at a lycée nearby. Marcelin Berthelot in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés was, and still is, a feeder institution for the top universities, known collectively as the “grands écoles”. The high-achieving students there were extremely diligent, reserved, and polite, except during a countrywide protest in the Spring term, when they suddenly started running up and down the corridors breaking classroom windows. Footage from earlier this month shows armed police trying to deal with teens amassing in front of my old workplace. Plus ça change and all that.

Further back in 1990, as a teen myself on a gap year, I was supposed to be attending a Strasbourg lyćee during another massive national round of demonstrations; though the fact I can’t remember it is probably due to the fact I spent most of my time bunking off, wandering around the city center, smoking and shivering and attempting to look like Betty Blue. (For some reason I also can’t recall, I didn’t have a coat.) By then, sometimes violent protests of lycéens had been a feature of the French landscape for at least 20 years, and university demonstrations for longer than that. The latter feature in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, set in 1848, where the hero Frederic asks a stranger why groups of students are facing off with policemen: “I haven’t the least idea,” replied the other, “nor have they, for that matter! ‘Tis their fashion just now! What a good joke!”

So despite Trump’s latest in-depth analysis, there is a lot more happening here than another simple tale of mass migration gone wrong. A quarter of public schools are now involved, and — though French law strictly forbids data collection on race or ethnicity — press footage of the crowds show white faces very much to the fore. In truth, a familiar script is being rehearsed, albeit with a somewhat more diverse and volatile cast than in former productions. And certain narrative elements remain indispensable.

First, you need an impeccably conscientious pretext, as if some swotty committee were running protest HQ — which in some sense they are, since French lycées are unionized. This year, the justification for direct action is a lack of teachers and crumbling facilities; in 1990, it was a lack of adequate security and resources; in 1998, it was overcrowded classrooms; and in 2005, it was proposed reforms to the baccalauréat exam. One tries to imagine British school kids self-organizing over such worthy matters, as opposed to joining riots initiated by others. One fails.

Next, you need resistance to spread, something that happens a lot faster now with the help of the smartphone. You also need a classically over-the-top police response early on, preferably involving riot shields, tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon, so that the kids can more easily imagine themselves as heroes and keep going. Turmoil must ripple outwards through already tense banlieues and Northern cities, where immigration and deprivation are high and police skirmishes common. The ensuing aggression by opportunistic casseurs will introduce a note of extremity and chaos, nicely furnishing Right-wing headlines, which will in turn be recycled as galvanizing proof you are on the spiritually correct track.

As media attention arrives, some rich white boys from fancy lycées will become confident spokesmen for the movement, hoovering up attention while talking grandly of equality and fraternity with minorities. And, as with the avuncular presence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leader of socialist party France Unbowed — there must be old socialists and communists hovering around for the photo ops, praying that working-class revolt will soon be sparked. During the fabled student protests of May 1968, still glorified by ancient hippies today, what started as university sit-ins culminated in 10 million workers walking out on strike, and an attempt to set the Paris Stock Exchange on fire.

Naturally, along with these hackneyed elements, there is also some youthful sincerity and idealism. French student movements often begin with a genuine grievance, for the state is massive, sclerotic, and haughtily self-satisfied, often resulting in frustrating indifference to young people’s interests. In 1968, universities were overcrowded, impersonal, dilapidated places, and the original uprising at Nanterre made reasonable demands. In 2026, the young people also have a point: demoralized teachers are leaving the public school system in droves; classes are overcrowded; 56% of schools were built before 1970, and many are now unfit for purpose. A senate report from before the crisis estimated that renovating them adequately would require 1.5 billion euros every year til 2050. Of course, thanks to recent arson and vandalism, the bill will now be a lot bigger, but adolescent minds lost in anarchic ecstasy are unlikely to join the dots.

Conscious reasoning aside, there are deeper currents too. As an interested Francophone, over the years I have mused about what makes les Français so prone to radical acts. Along with a lot of others, I’ve concluded that the national tendency to sentimentality has something to do with it. As Edmund Burke told France, the nation has been “long misled” by “high and romantic sentiments”; and many others have pointed out the connection between revolutionary carnage and the romantic rejection of austere Enlightenment ideals. In the run up to the blood-soaked 1790s, Diderot was calling for a tear-soaked theater, with plays that would liberate tender feelings after years of repressed neoclassical fare. Greuze was painting queasy pictures of little girls mourning dead birds. Rousseau was emoting all over the page and urging others to do likewise. Love was supposed to undo oppressive social hierarchies; self-love, romantic love, love for one’s fellow man. Shortly afterwards, the impossible imperative to lovingly embrace millions of unknown fellow citizens would produce quite a lot of hatred in practice. Who knew?

But even after all that, the appeal of transforming sentiment into something immensely lofty lingered. It is still there in all of those twinkly eyed French films featuring unlikely romantic couplings from across the tracks; or the ones that present emotionally unhinged women as romantic leads (like that frankly bonkers arsonist Betty Blue, in fact). It’s also evident in the camp delivery of French television presenters, always chasing “des petit moments d’émotion” for their audiences, and sometimes even crying uncontrollably on screen. And it is also present in the inherited mythology of school protests, as generation after generation pretend to themselves that sowing some civic chaos is an expression of solidarity and love.

The kids presumably have read their history; even May 1968 was mostly over by June. They know they are unlikely to gain much power collectively, though a few will become media personalities. There is no long-term plan of engagement here, nor genuinely revolutionary intent. They are mostly doing an enjoyable reenactment of the country’s greatest hits, but with the safety catch firmly on. Though there have been some horrible incidents — a hand blown off and a jaw fractured by police — with the sheer numbers of people involved, personal chances of self-destruction are slim.

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Thankfully, although there are plenty of protests in the UK, they are not a crucial part of our national mythology. Equally, despite its uptight reputation, British culture still lacks the precise formality and impersonality of the French version, to which all that sentimental excitability seems to be a reaction. Even now, there are lots of unspoken rules: you must say “Bonjour” or “Bonsoir” when you enter a place; you must not use “tu” for the wrong people; you must not eat on public transport; you should not hug strangers but only kiss them (a norm which to awkward English people seems completely the wrong way round). As a clueless 20-something in Saint-Maur, I once phoned up the local council about an administrative matter, and made the mistake of asking for a particular person without prefixing her name with Madame. Three decades later, I can still hear the stinging rebuke.

So I suspect that in France, protest stands to mannered formality as adultery stands to marriage: both are time-honored ways of letting off some steam. Had the country rarely seen mass direct action from the young like this, it would be a lot more shocking; but actually, it is almost touching in its conservative recreation of the past.

Sooner or later, politicians will promise a tiny bit more money for school improvement; the disorder will peter out, and kids will troop back to class. The taxpayer will foot the bill for cleaning up, and immigrants will do most of the work. Rich boys from nice parts of Paris will move on to grands écoles like their parents before them; and, like their parents before them, they will now have a war story to tell. Deprived suburbs will revert to being places where violence against authorities doesn’t get a particularly noble framing. As Thierry Garnier might have said with a Gallic shrug: bof.

At first sight, there is not much new here: after a decade or so of street violence, from the demonstrations of the Gilet Jaunes to the recent protests against pension reform, taking in the 2023 riots against the police killing of young North African in a Paris suburb along the way, the French public is now accustomed to scenes that in any other country would look like freeze-frame snapshots from a war zone.

It is, however, the vicious quality of the violence from young people which has been genuinely shocking. Notably, in Paris, a lone young trainee female police officer was pursued, tripped and then battered on the ground by a gang of youths. In Belfort, a city in northeastern France, a plain-clothes officer was almost killed by a “lynch mob” — so-called by the press — of hooded teenagers who pinned him to the ground and repeatedly kicked his head. And in Marseille, a young woman at a bus stop was sprayed in the face by an improvised flamethrower wielded by a laughing kid.

Equally terrifying is the eerie, almost incomprehensible way that the violence, which has erupted outside schools all over France, from Lille to Marseille, came apparently out of nowhere. So far, over 1,000 secondary schools have “mobilized”, which means student strikes, barricades and fires in school buildings. The damage will cost millions of euros to repair. Over 3,000 arrests have been made, mainly of young people.

The unrest began at the end of September, taking the form of a series of reasonable protests in the Paris region by school pupils. They decried the degraded state of the French educational system, making legitimate complaints about poor timetabling, lack of teachers, and rotten buildings in a state of Soviet-style shabbiness: freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer heatwaves. It is not only the students but also the teachers who have been complaining about these conditions. My friend Laurence has taught science in a variety of Parisian schools over the past 10 years and testifies that she has never seen conditions so bad or students so angry. “It is as if the government actively despises us,” she said.

Student anger has also focused on the “Parcoursup”, an online system that, in 2018, replaced the old university application system. Parcoursup offers students the ability to apply to many more universities than previously, and allows universities to rank applications via perceived merit rather than allocating them by lottery, as its predecessor did. But the basis of the rankings is opaque, with the Left arguing that it privileges better-off students, that France is not a true meritocracy, and that this is an assault on the core concept of “égalité”.

This has been one of the rallying cries of the radical Left party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The party is the closest challenger to the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls for the presidential elections next year. The LFI has been courting school-age students and teachers for years, with their strategies for further investment and a reshaping of university policies, controversially opening up elite colleges to educationally disadvantaged students. But this is the first time that the Macron government has explicitly pointed to the LFI’s role in deliberately stirring up subversion. This at least was the view of the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who, while calling a crisis Cabinet meeting last Friday, pointed the finger directly at Mélenchon, stating that “the LFI and its ultra-Left proxies are at the origins of this movement”.

His accusation has been given substance by the sight of the LFI Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, jubilant and dancing in front of the burning shell of the Lycée Paul Eluard. There have also been calls by the LFI activist Ritchy Thibault “to march on the Elysée Palace and burn it down”. Intelligence agencies for the police have also spent much time tracking preparations for the disorder on social media since early September, noting among the calls for “armed action”, the language of the far-Left — notably “the end of neo-Liberal democracy”, “disrupting the social order”, “challenging state violence”.

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, leveling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a “Sixth Republic” — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and “a New France”. Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants. The aim is not assimilation into an old order, but destroying it altogether.

All of this has the potential to backfire on Mélenchon. Two years ago, the Minister for Justice, Gérald Darmanin, identified the overall LFI strategy as “bordelisation” — a word that is hard to translate but roughly means in slang terms “deliberately creating chaos”. More recently, Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and a presidential candidate for 2027, described the LFI as “an absolutely seditious party with a fascination for violence” and called for a debate on banning the LFI. Mélenchon’s slyly sarcastic response to Retailleau was that this was “absurd” and that not a single LFI document could be traced to recent disturbances, unless he had incited them “by telepathy”.

Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the “Old France” — which still makes up the majority of French people. With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s. A recent poll in the newspaper Le Figaro found that 78% of French people thought that the LFI was “aggressive”, and 70% thought they were actively “dangerous”.

The precedent for all this violence and rebellion is of course the near-revolution of 1968, still a nostalgic meme for Old Leftists. Students and school kids who were in revolt angered the older generations so much that they effectively delivered Right-wing governments until 1982.

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But the 21st century is a totally different political landscape in France, shaped by tensions over race, religion and ethnic identity as much or more than the neo-Marxist dreams of revolution cherished by the LFI. This is why Le Pen also has a substantial youth vote to match or even overtake the LFI, a youth which craves order and discipline over anarchy. I have been to enough RN rallies over the years to see how Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young and handsome protegé and president of the RN, is greeted with pop-star style adulation when he speaks to an often hip and well-informed young audience. We are a long way from the fascist brutes of the old days of the Front National, the predecessor of today’s RN.

Le Pen has now come out on national television, accusing Mélenchon of stirring up trouble in the schools. Her prescription, sidestepping the issue of immigrants, is for new, stricter laws to punish so-called “casseurs” — the most destructive of the rioters.

None of this stops Mélenchon from invoking the specter of “fascism” when he talks about his opponents, and especially Le Pen and the RN. The more he does this, however, the more even centrists and those on the Right, normally opposed to Le Pen, see the sense in her analysis of the situation. Put simply, the harder Mélenchon drives the strategy of chaos, the more deeply retrenched even the milder conservatives become, scared of the forces yet to be unleashed and what their country might look like if Mélenchon ever comes to power.

It would be a savage irony if the LFI, the party of insurrectionary challenges to the “bourgeois order”, also turned out to be the party that opened the way for an RN presidency.

Cusk is brilliant, but her skill has always been at reducing the human to the mathematical product of cold existential forces: the violent struggle between men and women; the primal wounds left by abuse; the emptiness at the heart of identity. In other words, obviously, a Cusk book about you is never going to be flattering. 

Is this what happened? Chatter in New York literary circles says that Cusk’s upcoming novel, Life of M, is based on Cusk’s relationship with Portman. The novel, which will be published next month, is about a famous actress, M, and a nameless writer-friend’s project to chronicle her. M’s key biographical information is very similar to Portman’s. The actress’s dissatisfaction and betrayal at the finished product, as recorded in the final pages of the book, is also said to be true to life. If so, it’s ironic in the extreme, since the impossibility of identity itself — and thus of anything being, truly, “true to life” — is the book’s central theme, a fact that says more about Cusk than it ever could about Portman.

The author-character points this out to the angry actress, but to no avail.

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Life of M begins: “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport.” The writer-narrator goes on to explain that she met M in a bookstore (“M is interested in books”) and that “in addition to being a film star, she was the model for a major brand, and her image looked out everywhere, from shop windows and hoardings and the rain-streaked perspex of bus shelters.” 

Portman, famously, pulled back from acting in order to attend Harvard from 1999 to 2003, following her casting in the Star Wars franchise. She runs a book club, and often posts book-selfies on Instagram — with a coy eye peeking around the cover of whatever she’s currently reading —  so she is clearly “interested in books.” She is a global brand ambassador for Christian Dior, the face of the Miss Dior perfume since 2011; in an atomized media landscape, she is one of the few actresses whose faces still really are everywhere. The two characters live in an unnamed European capital with a central river, which could be Paris, where both Cusk and Portman reside, though the details are rendered in Cusk’s usual palette of flattening-neoliberal-global-dystopia: well-groomed men and women run along the river “like gods in the sun,” others “lived in tents beneath the stone bridges and brushed their teeth in the water fountains.”  

Such material could be true of many stars, and the comparison is more pointed than this. The narrator tells us, also in the opening sequence, directly after an allusion to a book about a woman who was sexually abused as a child, that M became famous as a child, and that “the script of her first film originally included several scenes in which the child was shown wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character.” The scenes were cut after M’s mother objected, Cusk writes. 

Portman, famously, was catapulted to stardom by her turn in the 1994 Luc Besson film, Léon: The Professional, filmed when she was 11 and 12 years old. In that movie, before we see her face, the camera dwells lovingly on her skinny and formless child’s legs and thighs — a detail perhaps more shocking in 2026 than in 1994, but uncomfortable even in that era. The Professional’s plot is about Portman’s character’s Lolita-like (though unconsummated) relationship with an adult hitman, Léon, played by Besson stalwart Jean Reno. It’s a matter of public record that Portman’s mother demanded that more explicitly sexual material be cut from the script. Nonetheless, Portman’s beautiful baby-face and gangly body are lavishly sexualized by the camera, and Portman has called her adult relationship to the film “complicated.” She has also revealed that she was harassed and slut-shamed as a child after its success, which was traumatizing for her, an experience shared by M. 

There is more. M claims in the novel’s final pages that the author-character has made her “identifiable,” yet “filled the book with things she herself didn’t recognize.” M says the book is full of factual errors, so many she gave up keeping track of them. She hasn’t been to the places the author describes or done the things the author says she has. “It isn’t you,” our narrator-author replies. “It isn’t anyone.” The portrait in the book is what anyone could have written, based on M’s publicly available work and biography. 

The statement, of course, is that of a fictional character, and unless Portman does come forth to correct the record, the truth will never be known — nor can it really matter, except to Portman. Cusk is a slippery and layered writer, and has long trafficked in the roles and archetypes that plague even ordinary mortals. The exploration of a character who is explicitly playing herself, or is trying to, but has no real self underneath, as she characterizes M’s existence, would naturally be attractive to her. In her cosmology, it is a universal condition of the haute-bourgeoise. And a character whose “self” is an object or commodity also has rich Cuskian appeal. She has always seen us as vessels; M’s container is merely more valuable than most. 

The resulting book is a feat, simpler and more direct than 2024’s Parade, with its multiple plot lines and experimental structure, but also more crystalline and just as complex beneath the surface. Cusk is also at her best with aphorism and insight here, always a strength of her work. For readers who have yet to fall in love with Cusk, this might be the book to start with. 

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the book also brims with juicy revelations about M’s psychology. It feels like we’re catching a glimpse of Portman. “M had told me that starring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end,” the author-narrator recounts. This event, with its swirling undercurrents of sexual abuse, is a primal violence of a kind that the author also believes she has suffered, a violence that detaches both women from reality and their own identities. The writer is secure in her craft, but it becomes the actress’s healing quest “not to create, but to try to make her life seem more normal.” M occasionally picks up her own children from school; she goes to parties and talks to non-famous people; she reads the news with touching sincerity, as if it will teach her how to be human. 

M wants to be real, but for her “there was nowhere to go back to. There was no dream country where the original self might one day be found.”

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To anyone other than Cusk, it might seem cruel to dash M’s dreams of normality and selfhood. But a darker, more fascinating portrait of celebrity emerges, in which M is both bewildered perpetrator and victim. Yes, she lives in a cold, palatial house that is “like a big doll’s house, with her as a doll inside of it.” She attends meetings in gloriously expensive, ruthlessly designed rooms, takes vacations in equally luxurious faux-farmhouses, and goes to a spa that is “a stern and celestial oasis in the sky.” Everywhere doors are magically opened for her, conveniences are arranged, and she is served by people with “specialized roles,” there “to do M’s bidding.” Cusk’s penchant for satire of this nature — especially the embedded satire of the movie star with pretensions to reading — could not possibly have pleased the real-life Portman, if the behind-the-scenes speculation is true.  

And M wants to live this way. She is secretly irritated when ugliness and inconvenience intrude on her environments: the farmhouse’s sick caretaker coughing, for example. When a visiting relative is hit by a car, and M has to supervise the recovery, it isn’t an opportunity for compassion and connection, but “an episode of primal confusion.” She finds listening to friends talk about themselves in cafés a little challenging, and so on. Still, we feel sorry for her, as the true extent of her alienation sinks in. The bodies of the homeless that litter the story begin to seem a metaphor for M herself.  

It is one of Cusk’s regular narrative innovations to include in her works sections told in a choral “we” voice. Here, the “we” may be intended to represent the narrator and other writers like her, but it also may be intended to speak for herself and M, the pair of friends. In one of these sections, she speculates that “we” have lost the capacity to love — something about “our” separation from reality, or “our” awareness of the underlying truth that such separation is the basic human condition — prevents it. In this matrix, love is attached to the (naive, illusory) experience of the real. “We” are left with hatred. In a beautiful, terrifying passage, she writes about “our” longest love relationship, which ended in a “meticulous and detailed” hatred that appeared “to form a total condemnation of our character…. The hate felt like the stone or the pit that was left when all the fruit of love had been eaten.” 

Cusk tends to land in such places: hatred, somehow, instead of love. The cold intellectualism with which she approaches the human seems to naturally produce this result. As an artist, she has never spared herself the bitter fruit of her own creation — including in several memoirs. M surely should not have expected anything else from the narrator. And if the result of the two women’s friendship is a very strong Cusk book indeed, everyone should be happy — including, if her art-appreciation is real, Natalie Portman.

Parisian police officers might take some hope from the fact that relations between France and Senegal have never been as fractious and bitter as those between France’s former colonial possessions in North Africa. Indeed, Senegal achieved independence without a bloody war of the kind that has scarred Algeria. But the Senegalese in France have high rates of unemployment and poverty, and as such form a central part of the marginalized populations of the banlieues. 

This is the same population that brought havoc to Paris only two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Champions League final between Arsenal and PSG. Once again, battle lines were drawn in the glamorous heart of the French capital between the riot police and so-called casseurs — meaning “wreckers” — the name given by the media and politicians to the nihilistic hooligans who so regularly enjoy a fight.

Within minutes of the end of the Champions League match, the French news channel BFM had already switched its coverage from a football match to the center of Paris, where you could watch in real time bins being set alight, youths dancing on burning cars, hire bikes on fire, shop windows being smashed and shops being looted. Bare-chested youths were flinging their arms open wide, goading the police to attack, while their comrades fired an onslaught of acid-filled bottles, fireworks and homemade mortars, often launched at police lines from cars or scooters in full flight. 

It was not the first time that a PSG victory in the Champions League had led to riots — last year’s triumph over Inter Milan had led to similar scenes. But on this occasion the police were prepared. On the morning of the final, the police had deployed 8,000 officers in central Paris and 14,000 more officers throughout France. In the event, there were 890 arrests — 45% more than last year — with 178 police officers injured, some of them seriously. One officer was badly burnt by a mortar firework and another run over by a stolen car.  

These scenes were not confined to Paris. More than 71 cities, towns and villages reported “violent incidents” through the night across France. If you did not know that this was in the name of a football match which had just taken place in another, distant country, you might have thought that France was in the throes of full-scale insurrection. As President Emmanuel Macron greeted the victorious footballers at the Elysée Palace on Sunday, he was moved to add a comment on the riots in his congratulations. “We are sick of it,” he said. Certainly, by midnight on Saturday, to most viewers this was less a celebration of a football victory than it was a scene from a war zone. 

That was also the immediate reaction of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), whose leaders were quick to condemn the violence. First to attack the government’s handling of the riots was Julien Odoul, an RN spokesman from Burgundy who decried the “unpunished hordes” and accused Macron of leading a government in “fire and blood”. The President of the RN, Jordan Bardella, was quick to follow up, using the same language, and denouncing “scenes of a near-civil war” in Paris and the provinces. On Monday morning, Bardella also made it clear that “there is obviously a clear link between our 30-year failure to manage immigration and the conflicts in question”.  

The response from the Left was less incendiary, less accurate and less honest. The Left-wing newspaper Libération barely mentioned the violence, preferring to devote its first six pages on Monday morning to the death, at the age of 104, of the distinguished Leftist sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin (who was, a rarity amongst French intellectuals, a football fan). At the same time, throughout France, representatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) were arguing lamely about poor “police mismanagement” of the “celebrations”, with lightly veiled accusations of police heavy-handedness. Clémence Guetté, Vice-President of the LFI in the Assembly National, went one step further and explicitly accused the police of “arresting people for no reason, firing grenades at families and young people simply because they had come together in a crowd”. Guetté said that there was a need for more “fan zones” and “better planning” to avoid future conflicts.  

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This was at best disingenuous, and amounted to a slur on those officers — publicly thanked by Macron at the Elysée alongside the triumphant team — who had literally been in the front line against an out-of-control mob of some 20,000 people on the Champs-Elysées. Understandably, the police argued strongly against the LFI’s version of events. In the pages of the conservative Le Figaro, Yoann Maras, the spokesman for the police union, said that it was too easy to launch “a witch hunt” against the police. “We refuse to accept the growing gap between official discourse and the reality lived by our colleagues on the ground,” he said. He went on: ‘There was not a single incident in Budapest (where the Champions League took place). We have this only in France.” The question Maras left hanging in the air was why this should be so.  

There is in fact no easy answer to this. What was clear to the police, however, who had been following encrypted messages on social media for weeks before the Champions League final, was that most of the casseurs on the Champs-Elysées were not city-center-dwelling Parisians but had flooded into Paris from the banlieues, which have fast, direct links to Charles de Gaulle Étoile, the vast metro station beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The common theme on social media was that the casseurs were planning to “bouffer les flics” (“devour the cops”). Many of them had little or no football affiliation. “I’m not really that into football,” said Raphaël D., arrested for drunkenness and insulting the police. “I’m more into basketball,” he said to a reporter from Le Parisien outside his court hearing. But he had come with his mates anyway for the ruckus. The same applied to Hichem S., an Algerian normally resident in Barcelona, who had also been arrested. Hichem S. presented himself in court as an unconvincing PSG supporter, having traveled from Spain to “kick up some trouble” with his mates in Paris.

Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, compared the phenomenon of street violence in France with British football hooliganism. The British problem had been solved, he wrote in Le Parisien, only by “extreme repression”. This, he said, was the only solution. For Bauer, the violence was therefore a problem of policing rather than a political issue. 

Nobody in France, on the Right or Left, really agrees with Bauer: his is a quite simplistic form of wishful thinking. Rather, it has been clear for several decades that the make-up of the French population has changed, partly due to mass immigration and the reluctance, generalized in most EU countries, to tackle this issue head-on. Immigration is only part of the story, however. The real political issue is that there is a substantial part of the population which hates the French Republic and which likes to take this hatred out on the most visible part of the Republic: the police.

One of the paradoxes here is that the French team is largely made up of players from an immigrant background. The tough training grounds of the French banlieues produce some of the best players in the world. Certainly most of Senegal’s best known exports to France and Europe are made up of footballers, including Sadio Mané, formerly of Liverpool, and Benjamin Mendy, formerly of Manchester City. 

On recent form, the French team, partially made up of players from the banlieues, are already looking like they could win the World Cup again. They have a formidable attacking force, not just with the speed of Kylian Mbappé but also with the likes of Ousmane Dembélé, Rayan Cherki and Michael Olise — who scored a hat-trick in the recent friendly with Northern Ireland — all looking to make their mark. 

Each of those players, being of immigrant heritage, are part of what the LFI is now calling “the new France”. It is a term first used, and sometimes still used, to describe the French colony of Quebec, but it has been reinvented by Mélenchon, who also speaks hopefully of the “creolization” of France. Mélenchon is enthusiastic about this strategy because he sees it as a genuinely new “revolutionary” strategy to transform France. His own family background — he was born and raised in post-Independence Tangier — is also a factor in determining his sympathy for the Arabic-speaking Muslim vote. (Mélenchon himself speaks a workable street Arabic.) For Mélenchon, “the new France” describes the hybrid demographic of the banlieues, a demographic whose votes the LFI are deliberately targeting as part of a campaign of “infiltration”: taking the voting system into areas which traditionally have a low voting record. 

This strategy is perhaps laudable, at least from the point of view of making democracy more accessible and even necessary to a disillusioned and disenfranchised section of the population. The RN, too, would like to court these votes, if only to break the deadlock which prevents them finally taking power at each successive presidential election. 

The stumbling block here, however, is that the RN is less prone to denial and euphemism. The Left likes to talk about les jeunes du quartier, as if they were a sparky group of teenagers rather than coked-up rioters; the RN talks about voyous — criminal hooligans. This language naturally sets them at odds with the voters in the banlieues, who often feel stigmatized and angry. 

Yet the “old France”, so despised by Mélenchon and his party, has not yet gone away. The political fall-out from the violence after the Champions League final — an almost universal howl of outrage from all parts of the center and the Right — proves as much. It remains to be seen, however, how long this low-key civil war in France between the “old” and the “new” can last before the current proxy war between the banlieues and “official France” becomes real — and therefore ever more vicious. Such a development would deepen the fractures in an already fragmented and damaged country.

Soon enough, the basic facts became clear. On 13 November 2015, 10 years ago today, ISIS-inspired terrorists brought death to the city by the Seine. Three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, killing one. Yet it was the roving commandos in the city’s heart that were most shocking. Spreading havoc from a rented SEAT Leon, one group of gunmen killed dozens of innocents in cafés and restaurants. Worst of all, though, was the Bataclan, the music venue where 1,500 rockers were attending a concert. Ninety were mown down in the theater as they danced; 132 died overall.

Now, a decade on from the massacre, the killings still seem unreal. Naturally, France does its best to memorialize the slaughter. Last Sunday, some 2,000 runners wended their way from the Stade de France to the Bataclan for the so-called Marche de Liberté (“Course for Freedom”). That’s been shadowed by more official homages. Today, Emmanuel Macron and Mayor Anne Hidalgo will unveil a memorial garden at the Town Hall, and the Eiffel Tower will be bathed in the colors of the tricolor. Yet if all this happens under the rubric of Paris se souvient, Paris remembers, that barren bewilderment endures. For all the official homages, the attacks of November are still barely understood, and closure seems a very long way away — bad news for the Republic and the capital both.

In some ways, of course, France has found closure. Quite aside from the commemorations and vigils this week, there have been innumerable films and books covering the mayhem from every possible angle. One striking recent example is Paris, 13 Novembre 2045, written by the sociologist Amélie M. Chelly. Her novel follows the survivors of the attacks and the nightmares that haunt them. More prosaically, the Abécédaire du 13 Novembre, edited by Catherine Brun, covers the atrocity from a kaleidoscope of different directions, covering everything from songs to poems to graphic novels.

Then there were the trials of 20 people charged with involvement in the 2015 attacks, an epic affair lasting 10 months from September 2021. The longest criminal trial in modern French history, it encompassed over 300 lawyers and represented 2,500 plaintiffs, and was greater in scale than even the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and infamous “Butcher of Lyon” during the Second World War.

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Beyond their simple vastness, the trials exposed France to countless tales of tragedy. Among the stories was that of Maia, a young architect, who was sitting that fateful night at an outdoor café with Amine, her Moroccan husband. When the attackers came, Amine was killed instantly; Maia was stunned by the sudden silence when the firing finally stopped. Then she heard the gasping and wheezing of a young man she did not know. He was leaning on her, squeezing out his last breath. Maia later said that she would never forget him, but also that she would never know his name.

Beyond these stark personal revelations, incomprehension arguably endures on a societal level. In part, this is explained by the subsequent direction of French politics. For sure, there have been further Islamist attacks, yet the full-scale confrontation between France and jihadi, promised by ISIS among others, never materialized. This was partly due to the hard-headed police and military response to potential threats. A much-improved intelligence service doubtless helped too. Among other things, that involved tightening communications with other agencies, especially the Belgians whose laxity had created a security “black hole” exploited by the terrorists.

All this has arguably meant that France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned the 2015 attacks — an ideology which, as an article in the ISIS magazine Dabiq paraded in the aftermath, involved sharing photos of semi-naked corpses. Perhaps more telling was the article’s English headline: “Just Terror!” Amid the gloating, this represented a genuinely new slant on terrorist violence. What ISIS announced here was that indiscriminate murder was not merely a weapon of war, but also a perverted form of justice. It represented a shockingly direct challenge to both Western morality and the West’s conception of justice, based as it is on secular and utilitarian principles.

France, for all its secular earnestness, has yet to truly level with this fact. Certainly, political Islam remains a question to which no one has provided an adequate answer. For the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it’s simply a matter of integrating Islam into a non-sectarian Republican program: an impossibility given Islamist extremists violently oppose the very concept of the Republic. The far-Right, for its part, talks openly of “a war” against “foreign religions”: specifically targeting Islam. But, again, this is mere shadow boxing. Actually tackling France’s internal enemies would, among other things, involve targeting a sophisticated propaganda network and a prison system that fosters the formation of Islamist cells. Stuck in the middle, Macron applies more and more hardline secular principles, even as senior civil servants lately warned of Islamist “entryism” into the French state.

Yet amid these high-flown political tensions, it’s perhaps Paris itself that has most struggled to come to terms with the Bataclan. At the end of the last century, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote an influential essay called “Paris, Capital of the 21st Century”. Following Walter Benjamin, he argued that Paris could regain its Belle Époque position as “Queen of the World” — by opening itself to outside, non-European cultures. The massacres of 13 November shattered such heady utopianism, revealing the multi-ethnic capital as riven by hatred, especially in its forgotten banlieues where the French-born terrorists lived. This lays bare the identity crisis as the heart of modern France: how a secular, democratic Republic can contain the factions that loathe it.

To be fair, some are still trying to grapple with the attacks. One good example is “Programme 13/11”, an interdisciplinary research program under the auspices of the Sorbonne. Directed by the historian Denis Peschanski, it is gathering first-hand testimony for future generations. Peschanski himself has called the scheme a kind of “living monument” — even as he believes that, somehow, the savagery of the terrorists can be met with the “sciences” of the French academic system.

Perhaps: yet there is scant evidence to show that many radical French Muslims have been “deradicalized” by such initiatives. That’s shadowed by other traumas: a so-called “French Intifada” may not have happened, but the country has continued to be wracked by jihadi terror, from the 2016 Nice truck attack to the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty. It all points in the same direction: towards a deepening trauma across France’s collective memory.

Yesterday, every Paris resident received a special edition of À Paris, the city’s listings magazine. Inside, Anne Hidalgo addresses her public, proclaiming a message of “liberty and hope”. But as a Parisian myself, I can say that few of us really believe this — the wounds are still too raw.

This weekend witnesses a re-opening ceremony and a concert attended by heads of states as well as by the US president-elect Donald Trump — if not by the Pope who believes his presence might be a distraction. On Sunday, there will be a celebratory mass. Accompanied by TV cameras, Macron has already walked through and up the renovated cathedral. Addressing some 1,300 craft workers he said: “The shock of the reopening will be as great as that of the fire.”

It is hard to disagree. In the words of the late Kenneth Clark — “Lord Clark of Civilisation” — Notre-Dame is “not perhaps the most lovable of cathedrals”, yet its scale and geometric rigour, its long and dramatic history, and its sheer presence on the Île de la Cité have made it a magnet for countless millions of people of whatever faith or none from around the world.  For Parisians, and the French at large, the cathedral fire was nothing less than a national tragedy. Notre-Dame is a symbol of the city, an architectural and ecclesiastical patroness for the country even.

And yet, watching videos and studying photographs of the interior of the restored building, it seems as if hundreds of years of history have been somehow disinfected and washed away. Notre-Dame nouvelle seems so very shiny, so antiseptically bright, especially with its glistering procession of gilded electric chandeliers. Strangely, given the construction of its great nave began almost 850 years ago, it appears all but brand new. Those scrubbed walls and vaults. That gleaming floor. Those vibrant colours: reds and lapis lazuli blues.

While unsettling, this sense of the revamped Notre-Dame being more of a grand civic hall than a place of worship makes a certain sense. Since the French Revolution, the state has pretty much owned Notre-Dame, lock, stock and spire. Its fortunes and its appearance have oscillated with the swings of the political pendulum.

In 1793, Catholic worship in Paris was banned. The philosophical reasoning had been long in the making. “Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian religion in horror,” declared Voltaire. “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” railed Denis Diderot. These writers died before the storming of the Bastille and the ministrations of Madame Guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, yet their influence on the course of late 18th-century French politics and culture was profound.

The mob in their Jacobin caps stormed Notre-Dame. Early 13th-century statues of 28 Kings of Judea adorning the west facade were wrenched down and decapitated. The baying anti-clerics mistook them for kings of France. The interior of the cathedral was looted and then used, among other secular purposes, as a wine depot. In November 1793, a pointedly paganistic Festival of Reason was held in the nave.

“Religion,” the Franco-German philosopher Baron d’Holbach had written from his apartment in the Rue Royale, “has ever filled the mind of man with darkness and kept him in ignorance of the real duties of true interests.” This darkness would be dispelled by the bright light of Reason, although at the time there were no gilt electric chandeliers to do the job on behalf of French philosophy and the Revolutionary state.

Soon enough, Notre-Dame was auctioned off to a building merchant. This ignominious sale was cancelled by Napoleon Bonaparte when, seizing power in 1799, he disbanded the Revolutionary government. The dynamic young general had Notre-Dame redecorated for his coronation in 1804. Not that the new French emperor had any great love for the Church. While under construction in the style of a Graeco-Roman temple, Napoleon decreed that the vast new church we know as La Madeleine should be designated the “Temple to the Glory of the Grand Army”. Even with Napoleon defeated on the battleground, exiled, dead and gone, plans were made to complete the Corinthian temple as a railway terminus. It was finally consecrated as a Catholic church in 1842 when Louis Philippe I was on the throne.

It was during Louis Philippe’s reign that Victor Hugo’s Gothic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was published, sparking a popular call for the conservation of medieval architecture and, especially, the cathedral itself. From 1844, the architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus were charged with the complete restoration of Notre-Dame, while France underwent another revolution with the appointment of its first president, Louis Napoleon, in 1848, and crowned emperor four years later,. Funded by the government, the restoration project symbolised a remarkable turn in the cathedral’s fortunes. During the July Revolution of 1830 that had brought Louis Philippe to the throne, the damage caused to the building was so great that Parisian officials had seriously considered demolishing it.

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Whether Revolutionaries, kings, emperors or presidents, Notre-Dame has certainly been something of a plaything of French rulers.. The top-down handling of the cathedral is perhaps a reflection of French cultural politics. It is a French way of doing things that has not gone away. Ever since 1958 and the birth of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, French presidents, as embodiments of “the spirit of the nation”, have used architecture and its conservation as a conspicuous political tool.

Think of all the “grand projects” of successive Fifth Republic presidents. There was Georges Pompidou’s modernising Centre Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Musée d’Orsay, and François Mitterrand’s Louvre Pyramid. These buildings established their cultural credentials, their largesse and semi-regal power, and aligned them with the very kings, queens and emperors republicanism had overthrown. Their names are attached like stone plaques to these cultural monuments. Now, there’s Emmanuel Macron’s championing of Notre-Dame.

Arguably no one did this better than President de Gaulle, who left matters monumental to France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux. Novelist, art philosopher and genuine wartime Resistance hero, Malraux is the kind of minister of culture we may never see again: Not only cultured, but brave too. An agnostic, he believed in aesthetic spirituality —that through the artistry of its design and construction, a secular building can convey a sense of the numinous, while in churches visitors can experience this same spiritual feeling without professing a faith.

Significantly, Malraux gave the oration at the 1965 state funeral of the architect Le Corbusier. It was held not in Notre-Dame but in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, the museum founded by the Revolutionary government in 1793 to display great works of French art including those confiscated from the nation’s churches. An atheist, Le Corbusier designed the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. A building of great originality, its lyrical profundity haunts the hillside on which it stands. Under its shell-like roof, it shrouds an interior lit as if by some latter-day angel.

If this hillside chapel close to the Swiss border has a far greater sense of sacred mystery than the restored Notre-Dame in Paris, perhaps this should be no wonder. It is not a grand state monument. It is not presidential. This, for better or worse, and for all the heroism and craftsmanship involved in its reconstruction, is the fate of Notre-Dame. Of course, the freshly unveiled cathedral will be popular with the crowds and congregations, who will throng here from this week. Certainly, it is wonderful to hear its bells ringing across the Seine again. It just appears to be that little bit too political, too civic and, spiritually, a little cold. But that, in the end, is its purpose. Whether or not the restored Notre-Dame is enough to save or redeem President Macron, or to allow him to rise like a phoenix in years to come, is another, quite secular, matter.

This is nothing short of a miracle. There was disruption on every level in the run up to the Games: roadworks, metro stations closed, massive fences thrown up across every pavement, the filthy pollution in the Seine. As for the audacious opening ceremony: how safe could a 6km-long floating stage and a roving ceremony through the middle of a capital city be? Alain Bauer, a respected police and terrorism expert, sent shivers down everyone’s spines when he declared that “such ceremony on such a scale is criminal madness”.

With their inimitable petulance, Parisians planned to flee the follies. If something was going to go horribly wrong, they didn’t want to witness it first-hand. “I will be like an ostrich with my head in the Normandy sand for three weeks,” my neighbour joked as he left just after Bastille Day.

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Was he right to make his exodus? Perhaps, we thought, as residents of the “grey zone” on either side of the Seine were told they could only access their homes with a QR code. Shops, cafés and restaurants emptied — and closed. My local café remained open but only so its manager could complain all day long about the lack of consumers to the few remaining die-hards like myself… and claim compensation after the Games. It felt just like lockdown.

As if our patience hadn’t been tried enough, we then had to contend with rail “sabotage”, stranding nearly a million passengers, and an attack on fibre-optic cables, creating mobile and fixed-line outages across the country. While Russians were initially suspected, leaks from the investigation showed the culprits might have been homegrown. “The modus operandi is that of far-Left groups,” said the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. That same weekend, he announced that dozens of activists from the self-styled eco-warrior group Extinction Rebellion had been detained on suspicion of fomenting violent actions against the sporting competitions.

Astonishingly, none of this actually derailed the opening ceremony, which was a wild and idiosyncratic combination of the universal and the quirky, including Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, drag queens and a “naked blue smurf” who, we learnt later, was meant to portray the Greek God Dionysus. But as British commentators sneered — The Times  called it “a damp squib” — the French were “dazzled” (a happy 86% of them according to a poll). Never had an opening ceremony been done like this, on such a scale. That night, a reset button was pressed in France. There would be a before and an after Paris 2024.

Before Paris 2024, shortly before the Olympic chaos landed, French voters caused chaos themselves in the first round of a snap election. Only to then distance themselves from Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right party in the second. There was some relief as a coalition of the Left and centrists were victorious. But we were left with an overriding feeling of uncertainty. France has become such a divided country, with two very vocal and disruptive political extremes, that it has become almost impossible to imagine politicians rising to the challenge for the sake of national harmony. President Macron declared a political truce during the Games. We would deal with this later.

And then the heavens opened, along with the Games, and with it came a new joie de vivre. As Raphaël Enthoven described it: “Collective happiness, shared jubilation, Paris both deserted and full, a sublime opening ceremony, triumphant athletes, French champions who love their President, the far-Left suddenly silent… Ah, if only the Games could last forever.”

Obviously French victors have helped the French mood. But another thing has cast a compelling spell. The Olympic decors are breathtakingly beautiful. The beach volley beneath the Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the fencing under the glass dome of the Grand Palais built for the Exposition Universelle of the following year, the triathlon athletes diving from Alexander III bridge into the Seine, the BMX competitions on the 18th-century Place de la Concorde, the cycling races going up and down Montmartre, through the Left Bank boulevards, the equestrian competitions in Versailles. “There is a perfect harmony between those historical settings and the Olympic achievements of the world’s greatest champions,” wrote Pierre Chausse in Le Parisien. “Long ago Parisians stopped believing their city was among the most beautiful in the world. It’s as if the Games have reignited their love for their city.

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International broadcasters concur. NBC Sports published its figures for the first week of the games showing that 4.5 billion minutes had already been streamed, more than the entire Tokyo Games of 2021. Warner Bros Discovery reached in two days more visitors to its platform than for the entire 2021 games. And the Paris Games has sold 9.1 million tickets so far, already breaking the record held by Atlanta 1996.

Paris is, indeed, both deserted and full. The grumpy and worried have left in droves, leaving the sport fans who are simply happy to be here. Tourists and locals alike, those left roam the streets with one thing in common: they can’t stop beaming and marvelling at everything. The Parisians who have remained out of curiosity have unexpectedly fallen back in love with their home. Optimism is a heady feeling. France should always remember what it feels like. It will come handy when we form our next government.

The leader of this movement in the United States was Robert Crumb, a fogeyish eccentric whose explicit visions lit up hippy San Francisco. In addition to his big asses, visitors to the Pompidou will see Crumb’s early hit Zap Comix, with its cover promising “gags, jokes, kozmic trooths”, and Dirty Laundry Comics, a Seventies collaboration where Crumb and his late wife Aline depict themselves nude while a lady in the background yells “Get dressed!”.

Raised by a sadistic father and amphetamine-addicted mother, Crumb’s cartoons were both a means of escape and a vital outlet for the toxicity of his Philadelphia childhood. His elder brother, Charles, became a tormented recluse who lived with his mother and bathed once every six weeks, while his younger brother, Maxon, admitted to a history of molesting women. That Crumb transcended such horrors is a miracle.

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In spite of, or perhaps because of, his sordid obsessions, Crumb became the most unlikely ladies’ man since Philip Larkin. With his big, eye-warping glasses, moustache, fedora, nasal whinge and jutting Adam’s apple, Crumb resembled at once a grandfather and a teenage boy. He prowled the epicentre of the hippy movement but preferred blues to psychedelic music, and eschewed long hair and bell-bottoms for the look of an insurance salesman. “I have a compulsion to reveal the truth about myself, for better or for worse,” he told the Louisiana Literature Festival in 2019. “Maybe it’s like a guy who exposes himself in public.”

At what point did this underground icon — described by the critic Robert Hughes as “a kind of American Hogarth” — emerge into the mainstream? Perhaps it was 2009, when Harold Bloom reviewed his graphic novel adaptation of the Book of Genesis in the New York Review of Books? Or else 2018, when a drawing of his character Fritz the Cat sold at auction for $717,000?

In fact, the cartoonist’s apotheosis came in 1994, with the release of Crumb. This remarkable documentary shows why all his lurid depravity matters: Crumb is an artist who draws utterly without fear, putting his darkest fantasies and prejudices on the page. His productions tread the line between art and porn, art and trash, from depictions of industrialisation and louche spiritual gurus to fantasies about nuns who want to chop off his penis. In today’s media landscape, when so much time is devoted to second-guessing how something will be received before it has even taken shape, it is almost impossible to imagine someone making art as provocative and uninhibited as Crumb’s. In one strip from Zap Comix titled “You may not think it’s funny, but I’ve got a morbid sense of humour”, a bespectacled artist resembling Crumb guffaws and sketches a woman as she is crushed by a bus.

In his early work, Crumb lifted the cute look of early 20th-century cartoons from the Fleischer Brothers, honed from a job at a greetings card company, and gave them an LSD-fuelled twist. One story depicts a spate of mysterious meatball attacks that are thrown from off-camera and change the personalities of their victims. (“Respected men in high places were getting hit,” it reads. “Bertrand Russell got hit.”) It escalates into a full-on downpour as meatballs rain over Los Angeles. Another, “Joe Blow”, mimics the style of a homely Fifties sitcom until its nuclear family descends into an incestual orgy.

Yet Crumb also embraced terrible racist caricatures from the Thirties and Forties. In the 1994 documentary, the journalist Deirdre English tears apart one of Crumb’s strips, the excruciatingly titled “Ooga-Booga”, calling it “a mockery of black people, a vomiting-up of Crumb’s own racism, his own deepest hostilities and fears”. Crumb’s insistence on playing with racist imagery has lost him friends: fellow cartoonist Art Spiegelman stopped speaking to him after he drew a story called “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America”. “When it comes into my head, I think ‘Oh I gotta do it’,” Crumb said in 2019. “I’m gonna get hell for it, but I know I have to do it.”

The generous interpretation of these strips is that he is simply bringing out into the open stereotypes that are already simmering in the cultural soup. “I use the old-time comic stereotypes to reveal myself to myself,” he wrote in the introduction to one of his art books. “I don’t believe Crumb’s a racist for one second,” says Steve Marchant, learning coordinator at the Cartoon Museum in London. “You can compare the golliwog-style drawings in some of his comics to the beautiful illustrated trading cards he did about 20 years ago about blues legends of America… really nice, sensitive cartoon portraits of all of his heroes.”

Crumb was also criticised for his fetishistic depictions of sexual violence. Whether female cartoonists sided with him (Lynda Barry was one of his main supporters) or against him (Trina Robbins was outspokenly anti-Crumb), they were undeniably influenced by his autobiographical narratives. Here, again, I sense the overwhelming alienness of the Sixties: a lot of the media that was considered edgy or liberating back then would now be dismissed as sexist. Plus Crumb’s art is not without self-criticism: in 1992, he drew “The R. Crumb Dartboard”, a caricature of himself as a predatory goon for his angry female readers to cut out and assail with darts. (“Have at me, girls!”) “He’s never cast himself in a glamorous light, both in the way that he draws himself and in the things that in his stories you see him doing or thinking about doing,” says Marchant. “He’s always his own worst critic.”

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“I think it is the role of cartoonists across the spectrum to lower the tone,” says political cartoonist Martin Rowson. His business is satire, to hurl rocks at the establishment. Crumb, he suggests, occupied a similar niche initially, as his subversive comics snuck into beatnik hangouts and children’s bedrooms. “We are not artists. We are something else.” He points out that the pioneering political cartoonists of the 18th century, such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, also drew pornography. Apart from a “really boring” and conventional comic adaptation of the Book of Genesis, Rowson says, “I can’t think of a single Crumb image I’ve seen which has bored me. It’s disturbed me, it’s amazed me, it’s delighted me, but it’s never bored me.” By contrast, he says, “an awful lot of contemporary comics are just badly drawn people standing talking to each other”.

Everywhere you look in modern comics, Crumb’s inky fingerprints are visible. Take the monochrome comics journalism of Joe Sacco, which oozes Crumb-like confessional. More recent small-press comics and graphic novels have used the biographical elements and shock tactics Crumb pioneered to talk about atrocities, trauma and sexual assault in a far more earnest, 21st-century way. “A form that is built around stereotypes… has become one of the main mediums by which the world’s most disenfranchised populations have their stories documented and recorded,” says Dominic Davies, senior lecturer at City, University of London. We’re a long way from “Ooga-Booga“. You can see why even Crumb might be tempted to start self-censoring: a New York Times interviewer in 2022 proposed that he is now “gazing less directly at a bigoted, violent world and instead examining his distance from it”.

“It’s always possible to do everything,” says Rowson; “it’s a question of whether it gets published. And even in the last five to 10 years, what can and cannot get published has shifted.” There are still plenty of weirdos making depraved small-press comics today, such as James Unsworth’s venereal ninja turtle orgies and Maia Matches’s BDSM-loving character “Bitch“. Then there is a more well-known British successor: Viz. From the Fat Slags to more up-to-date parodies (a turtleneck-wearing forager called Foodie Bollocks, a Right-wing conspiracy nut called The Male Online), the comic is “very much channelling” the spirit of Crumb, Marchant says.

Crumb’s sensibility “has now leached into the water supply, like the acid they were meant to have thrown into the reservoirs in the Sixties,” says Rowson. “It’s got there, and it’s the sea through which we swim.” His work has a dark honesty, revealing a side of human nature that tends to go unexamined in the name of good manners. And comics, with their ability to elicit shock and laughter at the same time, are the perfect medium to express it. Thirty years on from his documentary, Crumb’s story must be revisited: it is a convincing case that, now more than ever, we need mavericks who scorn civility and create without fear.

The buses took residents off to a slew of temporary shelters as far away as Toulouse. Abdelkarim was sent to a hotel in the town of Épinay-sur-Orge in the outer suburbs of Paris — though with a stay limited to just 15 days. “Two weeks later, we were on the street,” he says, searching for words in a language he is still learning.

Squats are not an uncommon sight around the French capital — a city whose average real estate prices tripled between 2000 and 2020, and which loses around 12,000 inhabitants every year largely due to its high cost of living. But this particular squat in Île-Saint-Denis — inside the abandoned property of cement producer Unibéton — had the misfortune of being located a quick stroll away from the Olympic Village. When the 2024 Paris Olympics kick off in July, this 52-hectare neighbourhood of glitzy residences will be filled with athletes and team officials — and thanks to the police intervention this year, VIP visitors will likely be spared the sight of migrants.

The prefecture of the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, which carried out the eviction, insisted it had nothing to do with the Olympics. But Faris Youss, a 31-year-old refugee from Chad who leads the activist group Réfugiés autonomes (Autonomous Refugees), rejects the official narrative. “The prefecture doesn’t want to own up to the reality,” Youss tells me. “We had meetings with elected officials from city hall, where it was said: ‘the Olympics are coming soon — you’re going to have to leave here.’”

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Abdelkarim, along with dozens of former residents of Unibéton, has since moved to another squat in an industrial zone in the suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine, far away from the bright lights of Paris and the Olympic Village. When I visited in late November, I had a glimpse of the alarming conditions of this makeshift residence: a busted ceiling in the stairwell; bedrooms crowded with multiple occupants; limited common space overwhelmed by drying clothes; trash overflowing in dumpsters outside; a slew of space heaters to protect against the looming winter. Abdelkarim, who now sleeps in a roughly 15 square meter room with two other people, says: “The best solution is social housing. In Île-de-France, there’s a lot of people [who want it]. There aren’t many people who can get it.”

It all casts doubt on the notion that the eviction of the squat was somehow beneficial to the residents. “It didn’t resolve any problems in the long-run,” says Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for the group Le Revers de la Médaille, a coalition of prominent anti-poverty, migrants’ rights, and affordable housing groups critical of the Olympics. “What it did was cross off a location on the map for the prefecture and disperse 500 refugees across Île-de-France.”

The clampdown at Unibéton not only illustrates the staggering failures of the French state to welcome migrants and refugees — it is also symptomatic of another problem: the 2024 Summer Olympics threaten to aggravate Paris’s affordable housing crisis. Already, the Games are piling pressure on the housing market, affecting not just refugees, but also students and working-class residents.

In October, Le Revers de la Médaille published a harshly-worded public letter to the Olympic organising committee, warning against a “social cleansing” of the Paris region that would affect the homeless and others living on the margins. The coalition called for a better “handling of people in situations of precarity and exclusion before, during, and after the Games”. Meanwhile, in an interview with UnHerd, Alauzy lamented the recent installation of fencing around the Charles de Gaulle bridge in southeastern Paris, a spot frequently used by homeless people for shelter.

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University students are also feeling the pinch. Earlier this year, the Paris affiliate of the Crous, a public institution that manages student housing, announced plans to seize flats during July and August 2024 to make way for Olympic volunteers and partners — thereby removing 3,000 students from their residences two months ahead of schedule. The ministry of higher education has promised a €100 cheque and two tickets to the Olympics to each student affected.

“It feels like a joke,” says Esther Laudet, spokesperson for the student union Solidaires. “I don’t think students care much about tickets to the Olympics. What students want are places to live, meals, and dignified conditions to study.” However, it is still unclear whether the plans will go through: Solidaires has filed lawsuits against Crous, with key decisions expected in the coming months, according to a lawyer involved in the cases.

If Crous does get its way, it will effectively force students into the punishing private sector, where they will have to compete with other low-income earners. “The reality is that students are accepting conditions that are pretty indecent because they don’t have the choice,” Laudet says. “In Paris, it’s impossible to find housing for less than €400 [a month]. Or at least, it’s really, really hard to do so.”

The problem is most acute around the Olympic Village, which sprawls across the three municipalities of Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis and Île-Saint-Denis. Featuring scores of modern, environmentally-friendly flats to be converted into social housing after the Games, the Village represents the crown jewel of the organisers’ pledge to deliver a socially responsible Olympics. But it may well become a symbol of the emptiness of that promise.

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The lead project developer has promised that at least 25% of the Olympic Village flats will be reserved for social housing. But that number isn’t nearly as generous as it sounds. For one thing, the pledge of 25% is in line with the minimums required by French law. The number also falls below the current rates of social housing in the cities of Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen, former bastions of industrial workers long governed by the French Communist Party. Then there’s the fact that developers are yet to announce what type of social housing will be hosted: will it be reserved for low-income residents, who make up the majority of housing requests, or middle-income ones? “They don’t want to give the numbers,” says Cécile Gintrac, a Saint-Denis-based teacher and activist with the 2024 Olympics Village Committee, sounding exasperated because she has been asking for such details for years.

Meanwhile, the flats intended for the private sector are wildly more expensive than existing houses in the area. Vinci, one of the main developers in the Olympic Village, is already advertising flats at around €7,000 per square meter — roughly five times the median monthly household income of the département. “There are very few of these that are going to be accessible to residents of Seine-Saint-Denis,” Gintrac said.

Beyond the Olympic Village, Gintrac is also concerned about the Games constricting housing supply next summer — and in particular Airbnb swallowing up much-needed apartments as landlords pivot to more attractive sources of income. “These big events tend to result in reduced housing supply for the most precarious people and the number of available flats more generally in the private sector,” says Gintrac, pointing to this autumn’s Rugby World Cup.

While Airbnb has come under fire in Paris proper, it is rapidly expanding in the banlieues, which now account for roughly half of the flats rented out on Airbnb in the Paris region. A November report from researchers at the Université Paris Cité and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) found that, from 2015 to 2022, the number of flats on Airbnb in Seine-Saint-Denis rose from 1,311 to 9,341. Will Airbnb continue its expansion here after the Games as landlords discover that short-term rentals can be more profitable than renting to financially-strapped tenants?

At the squat in Vitry-sur-Seine, the Olympics don’t appear to be viewed with any fondness. When I asked Abdelkarim about them, he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a big festival, it’s good for France, it’s good for Paris, but for us…” He trails off.

That sense of ambivalence could turn to hostility if the ultimate legacy of the Paris Olympics comes to resemble that of its predecessors: low-income residents of Athens, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro all experienced well-documented forms of displacement, and even the 2012 Games — which were supposed to be different — failed to deliver on the ambitious vision of “social inclusion” promised in East London. Despite this grim record, French authorities still cling to the notion that the Paris version will somehow be exceptional. But the early signs aren’t encouraging: next summer’s spectacle may well reproduce an experience of urban exclusion that has become painfully ordinary.

We already know that the “sale and carrying of all fireworks with their launch mortars” has now been forbidden until Saturday morning, though councils and cities will be allowed to have their official displays. All city-surface public transport (buses and tramways) came to a halt at 10pm yesterday (9pm in Lyon) and are not running today — a measure intended to protect the drivers and their buses. Around 130,000 police, gendarmes and auxiliaries are on patrol. “The order is to immediately arrest any troublemakers,” announced Home Secretary Gérald Darmanin, a man who has Elisabeth Borne’s job in his sights and doesn’t care who knows it. An additional “40,000 firemen will be deployed” he added, confirming that Bals des Pompiers will indeed be off the table, except in villages and very small towns. The whole day will have a Jacques Tati feel, with a side order of apocalypse.

How did France get there? It’s a well-known trope of professional French-watchers abroad to moan that “the French live in a paradise and say they live in hell”. Cue patronising theories on how we don’t know how good we have it. And it doesn’t help that the type of French people doomscrolling through such analyses in foreign broadsheets would, to mangle Orwell’s great quotation, feel more ashamed of standing to attention during La Marseillaise than stealing from the modern equivalent of a poor box. It’s easy to love the status quo when the status quo serves you, and to concur with sophisticated foreigners when they peddle the upscale touristy clichés you profit from.

The truth is that France, a country that built herself (not always unsuccessfully) on fits of revolutionary violence punctuated by stretches of authoritarianism, has rarely been satisfied with her lot. Talleyrand, the shrewd defrocked bishop who led France’s foreign policy from Bonaparte’s first victories to the Congress of Vienna, used to say Qui n’a pas connu les années qui ont précédé la Révolution ne sait pas ce que c’est que la douceur de vivre (“Anyone who hasn’t lived through the years leading up to the Revolution does not know what the sweetness of life is.”)

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Note the elegiac past tense. The great movies of the Thirties harked back to the Belle Époque; those of the Fifties to the interwar years. It’s no coincidence that the intervening disaster of 1940-1944, when France was occupied by the Nazis, saw the Pétain collaborationist government inspired by the ideologues of the Révolution Nationale, the young and eager theoreticians of French fascism. Part of their own particular anger came from feeling they needed to brutally overthrow a national rudderless langueur that had cushioned the country from the worst but condemned it to a slow but inexorable decline. (It’s always been hard to make lines move in France, hence the strikes that spoil all of Europe’s holidays.)

Looking back, the country that taught the rest of the world, from Kossuth to Lenin or Pol Pot, how to révolutionner, rarely liked the end result of her recurrent, temporary frenzies. The denunciation letters sent to magistrates in the years before the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants show the same eager zeal that brought a steady stream of suspects to the tender mercies of Fouquier-Tinville during the Terror, or of the Milice and the Gestapo in 1940-44. (“I know X, who says he’s a good Catholic, really belongs to the RPR [Religion Prétendument Réformée]”, one neighbour writes, coveting the poor man’s possessions, in the time-tested style of snitches everywhere.) The popular, Protestant-turned-Catholic King who attempted to reconcile the French after the Wars of Religion, Henry IV, was only assassinated for his pains. His successors learned their lesson.

Duff Cooper, the wartime minister, compulsive diarist and one-time Ambassador to Paris, wrote in his elegant biography of Talleyrand that there was a historical reason for Britain and France’s divergent political systems. The British aristocracy had peacefully seized power in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in effect ushering in parliamentary monarchism, whereas the Fronde of French nobles, led by Louis XIV’s own cousins the Duchess of Montpensier and the Duc de Condé, failed miserably 30 years earlier. Crucially, it scared the 15-year-old Louis XIV so much that his policies for the next six decades were devoted to creating an absolutist, centralist model where the smallest decision rested on the King alone. And a great deal of that rigid Colbertian model remains, reworked by Napoleon and adopted by La République. Ask yourself, then, where the contemporary heritage of the Révolution truly lies?

The country’s current frustration is in great part due to the kinetic immobilism practised by Emmanuel Macron over the past six years. His whirl of activity — world travel, walkabouts and international initiatives — nevertheless produces no movement. Fond of invoking de Gaulle, Macron, who wears the costume fashioned in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, is in fact the Général of May 1968, reduced to calling in men in uniform, (though Gérald Darmanin is no Jacques Massu). He has filled the National Assembly with pale clones of himself — though not yet the Senate, which currently wears the protective colouration of a senior chamber with a junior role, but would actually be well-equipped to restore proper democracy.

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The logical conclusion is that France is due an actual revolution, not a fancy parade and a formal garden party in the park of the Élysée palace. The problem is that most of the French have forgotten how to go about it, and find themselves divested of all institutions of remembrance. French unions are weak — especially compared to the election-winning 1936 Popular Front. So are the political parties, their final signs of life extinguished by Macron’s centrist clarion, “en même temps de droite et de gauche”. And they don’t teach children their history in our schools — what’s not been cancelled is disdained by professors who believe chronology, personalities and linear history are irrelevant.

The French workplace was long the everyday replica of the absolute monarchy, and largely still is. France has no Dilberts, but instead a healthy industry of kitchen aprons and fridge magnets that decline 10 ways in which “Même quand il a tort, le boss a toujours raison [Even when he’s wrong, the boss is always right].” It’s a phrase one should never forget when dealing with the French. Therefore quiet-quitting is the order of the day, not rebellion. The last revolt of the banlieues was, despite activists’ efforts, non-political. It was driven by anomie, a lack of opportunities, and the consumerist instinct. As always, France’s self-destructive passions have lost a balance between the individual and the collective that was never very strong in the first place. No Bastille Day holiday, quiet or riotous, will change this for now.

This isn’t the siege of Aleppo, it’s a scene from Romain Gavras’s Athena, set in one of France’s burning banlieues. Amid the smoke grenades, police and Athenians engage in brutal fighting at close quarters, with metal rods and batons. Later, the police use fire ladders to scale the walls of a tower block. Athenians on wheels circle around a beleaguered police testudo, firing makeshift mortars at point blank range. Men on both sides are visibly shell-shocked.

Athena, a fictitious banlieue, has taken up arms following the death of 13-year-old Idir, apparently at the hands of local police officers. A viral video seemed to confirm it. But rather than being just another anti-cop movie protesting police brutality, Athena never makes it clear whether the police did actually kill Idir. The audience is denied a clear, anti-racist, political message. We are left to choose our own villains.

While the police lay siege to Athena, Idir’s three brothers select very different paths. Karim, the youngest, becomes Athena’s general and messiah, railing against police brutality, masterminding the looting of a nearby police precinct, and manning the defences of Athena. Mokthar, the eldest, is just trying to save his drug empire amid the chaos. The middle brother, Abdel, is a decorated veteran who fought with the French army in Mali, and wants justice for Idir but without bloodshed. The movie is driven by this central tension: between the vengeful idealist, the violent cynic and the honour-bound poster child for French assimilation.

Athena is a dramatisation, shot in Évry-Courcouronnes, just south of Paris — but it could be a documentary set in any of France’s toughest neighbourhoods. Over the past few years, the police have been expelled from these areas (only to come back in massive numbers, for short periods of time, and preferably never at night). Évry-Courcouronnes itself has been rocked by a series of gang-related murders and unspeakably violent clashes. Across France, newspapers overflow with stories of ambulances, firetrucks and police cars being bombarded with fridges, pétanque balls or Molotov cocktails in similar neighbourhoods. The authorities are powerless, just as they are in Athena. As one Athenian boasts while looting the police precinct: “we are the police”.

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The banlieues are ruled by drug cartels, which thrive where economic opportunity is lacking. They generate an estimated €4.2 billion annually in France (the publishing industry, for comparison, generates €3.75 billion) and employs a total of around 21,000 full-time workers. Over the last four decades, successive French governments have poured tens of billions of euros into extraordinary plans banlieues and other “Marshall Plans” to renovate these neighbourhoods and attract businesses, but these territories remain deeply segregated and unattractive. Drug-dealing remains one of the few steady jobs.

Take Kassim from a Marseilles banlieue, interviewed for the BFMTV documentary “Marseilles, the drug war”: he describes his stable, well-paying job as a chouf (who keeps an eye for the police or rival gangs, from the Arabic “to watch”). He is adamant that he is not a gangster, and is proud of the long hours he puts in: “I work just like everyone.”

The cartels are not the only separatist force in these neighbourhoods. The rise of radical political Islam has further alienated parts of the banlieues from the French state. According to the scholar of Jihadism Hugo Micheron, more than 2,000 individuals in France are considered to constitute a direct Jihadist threat, while another 20,000 are closely monitored by French intelligence. But there’s a much larger group of up to 750,000 who sympathise with radical Islamist ideas, according to the pollster Jérôme Fourquet. The Islamist movement is far from united, but it nevertheless educated a significant portion of the next generation to defy the infidel (French society) — a rejection tracked by polls over the last decade.

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In Athena, as in reality, the rebels’ attachment to France fluctuates. After looting the police precinct, a young Athenian in a stolen van proudly waves the tricolore, hinting that the young insurgents seek to do more than avenge the slain Idir. It’s tempting to see the insurrectionists as heroes fighting for a fairer French Republic. But later in the movie, some rebels with a taste for war reinforce the “us and them” narrative. Karim calls his war-hero brother Abdel a “whore in uniform for France”. For having fought for the French army in Mali, Abdel is accused of being an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his “real” community — which sees itself as outside the nation. Are the banlieues even part of France?

French culture seems obsessed with this question. There is currently a proliferation of movies depicting civil wars in banlieues. One of France’s top-grossing movies in 2021, Bac Nord — based on a true story — depicts a confrontation between police and local gangs in the rough north of Marseilles. And Athena itself grew out of 2019’s Les Misérables, which staged a similar banlieue uprising, from the cops’ point of view. It was directed by Ladj Ly, one of the main screenwriters on Athena, and although the confrontation between the police and the locals does not escalate into an all-out war, Gavras has explained: “The idea with Athena was to start with the next riot” — following the events of Les Misérables — “the spark of a confrontation that has not yet happened and that could unfortunately lead to the beginning of a civil war.”

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The French are haunted by their history of civil war. The last one was only 60 years ago: its embers are still warm — something Gavras alludes to by including the occasional Algerian flag in Athena. Some on the French Right, notably Eric Zemmour, have long capitalised on this anxiety, by predicting a new civil war between the “true” French and the Islamised youth. More recently, such fears have spread beyond the far-Right. The country has been seriously rocked by a series of brutal attacks by Islamist terrorists. Last year, polls showed that while only 45% believe that France will soon have a civil war, 86% believe that in some cities and neighbourhoods, the laws of the Republic no longer apply, and 73% that French society is disintegrating.

A year ago, two open letters, written by dozens of retired general and then-anonymous serving soldiers, warned of the looming civil war. They called for the government to reinstate the authority of the state in these neighbourhoods — or, as they called them, these “lost territories of the Republic”. While most officers remain strictly apolitical, the letter got sizeable public support, with 58% of the French backing its authors.

Even centrist politicians wield this kind of rhetoric these days. “Separatism” or “Islamist separatism” are terms commonly used to express concern about these territories. Macron’s former minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, delivered a resignation speech in which he worried that while the French were currently living “side by side”, they might soon be “face to face”, given that in many banlieues, “the law of the drug dealers and of the radical Islamists replaced that of the Republic”. Former President François Hollande admitted that he believed there is a “problem with Islam”, and that France is on the path towards “partition” because of the nation’s inability to integrate a “never-ending” flow of migrants.

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Macron himself, once more of a centre-Left multiculturalist comparable to a young Tony Blair, has steered significantly to the Right on matters of identity and immigration. In a controversial attempt to win support from voters to his Right, he gave an interview in the staunchly Right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles, in which he suggested a need “deport those who don’t belong here”. Following the assassination of Samuel Paty, the Macronist-dominated Parliament passed a bill which, among other provisions, considerably enhanced the state’s capacity to oversee the organisation and financing of religious associations. It was soon dubbed the “separatism law”.

While some fear civil conflict, others desire it and prepare for it. In Athena, the threat of far-Right groups is ever-present, waiting to capitalise on the chaos. The French state claims that such groups ran a false flag operation to frame the police for Idir’s death. In real life, these cells seem currently too disorganised, or embryonic, or under too much surveillance, to pose a real threat in the short-term. But there’s a distinct possibility that under-the-radar groups or individuals will decide to blindly assassinate those they consider a threat. In 2019, an 83-year-old man tried to burn a mosque in Bayonne, only to get caught red-handed by local parishioners. He shot them on the spot. Gavras did not have to invent much to depict a French society caught between the anvil of Jihadis and the hammer of the far-Right.

It’s hard to imagine any immediate improvement. In fact, things are likely to get much worse, as inflation and the cost of living crisis put even more pressure on France’s poorest neighbourhoods. Politicians on the Right and far-Right will exploit the crisis and imitate the recent successes of Giorgia Meloni and the Swedish Democrats. But policy ideas are few and far between. For a country that spends so much producing stunning civil war narratives, there’s a distinct lack of potential solutions in play. Those being offered range from the laughably insufficient — limiting immigration flows by opposing international trade deals — to the horrifyingly drastic — creating a ministry for “re-migration”.  Athena will not be the last movie of its kind: under a flailing government, the French will continue to fear, and fantasise about, civil war.

These fanatics were the night-time ogres of my childhood, the threat that never stopped growing, one that came closer and closer, became more and more visible. During the Nineties, on Moroccan campuses, the Islamists took power. The battle of ideas was being lost. On the news, we got used to that now-familiar word: “attack”. In Paris, Luxor, Algiers. In my family, we didn’t underestimate them. We knew that the more educated among them were ready to do anything to defend their vision of the world. My parents implored me to be prudent — me, who didn’t know how to shut my mouth and who played at being the rebel adolescent. No one asked me to stand my ground, to defy them. On the contrary: I was told that you had to fear them — bend the knee, keep a low profile, shut up. How do you answer parents who love you and warn you: “Don’t take risks, don’t provoke them, stay safe from their violence”?

I was 15, I was living in Rabat, and I learned to keep quiet and accept. You accepted that you had to hide when eating during Ramadan, to be afraid that somebody might smell food on you. You accepted that you had to roll up empty wine bottles in opaque bags and drive a few miles to throw them in the dustbin. You accepted that you had to listen in silence to the furious speech of a professor of religion who claimed that Jews and Christians could never go to Paradise, and you wept inside for all those you loved who weren’t Muslims, and so were exiled from Paradise. You accepted being insulted by a customs officer in Casablanca because in your suitcase, in the middle of the New Year holidays, there were things he’d identified as Christmas presents. You accepted being treated as a slut and a sinner on the beach where you’d played as a child, because now your body was an offence to God.

You accepted, and you lived both in fear and in shame. The shame of our cowardice, of the denials that fed and grew on it. The shame of not being able better to defend the Islam of my grandfather, who is in Paradise with his Christian wife. “A thousand little stings of self-reproach that add up not to remorse but to a vague unease.”* That’s what you felt. You felt ugly and small. For reassurance, you said to yourself that it’s we who have right on our side, that we know the frontiers of Good and Evil, of reason and barbarism, and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t dare defend them at the top of your voice. We have to save our skin. Our limp, feeble, losers’ skin — but our skin all the same.

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There was one moment when I didn’t feel afraid. One moment when I felt brave. It was enough for me to close my office door, open up my computer — it was enough for me to start to write, and the fear vanished. That was why I became a writer. To purge my nightmares, to calm my terrors. When I write, I feel capable of anything. I’m no longer a polite little girl, a virtuous woman. I’m not trying to please or to seduce. I’m not afraid of provoking anger or scandal. For me fiction is the terrain of total freedom, the place where you can give expression to ambiguity, fuzziness, uncertainty, where you can contradict yourself and voice bad thoughts.

Tomorrow, at my work table, will I feel as free as before? Tomorrow, taking the stage for a discussion, will I be thinking of Salman and will I fear being attacked myself? Today, a lot of Muslim writers are afraid, and censoring themselves. I don’t judge them; I understand them, and I too think of my family and children. But fear and shame have to switch sides. We have to speak more loudly, become more persuasive, become the voices of Enlightenment, the voices of liberty and dignity. As writers, it’s the only way to be: stifle fear as soon as it appears; have faith in the intelligence of readers; be insolent and irreverent. Write, write, write. Do not submit; do not get down on your knees.

*From Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” (Translator’s Note).
Translated by Boyd Tonkin. The original French can be read here.

Nationally, the polls suggest that this strange, long-frozen election will be a close-run thing — much closer than seemed possible two or three weeks ago. New survey data even suggests Le Pen could sneak victory, though Macron probably still has the edge.

My village Culey-le-Patry has no crime, no obvious suffering and no immigrants apart from myself and a couple of other Britons. Nonetheless, Marine Le Pen — far-Right, anti-migrant, anti-EU, enthusiastically pro-Putin until February — will sweep to local victory here in both rounds of the election. The same thing will happen in thousands of villages across France.

Village by village, that vote is tiny. Culey only has 280 electors, and a population of 355. There are, however, 30,000 angry villages in France: angry at petrol prices; angry at poor services; angry without really being able to explain why they are angry.

Yet this anger is nothing new — nor is it entirely Macron’s fault. In the second round in 2017, Le Pen got 34% of the vote across France; in my village, she got 44.7%. In the first round, Macron led the poll nationally; in Culey-le-Patry, he came fourth, while Le Pen came first with 29% of the votes. She may get over 50% this year.

Historically, Normandy is not fertile territory for the far-Right — unlike, say, the struggling parts of the industrial North or the Paris-hating South-East. And yet rural Normandy has been swinging gradually towards the Le Pens, father and daughter, for two decades. The smaller the village and the greater the distance from a large town, the bigger the Le Pen vote.

Little by little — it started long before Macron and the Gilets Jaunes — villages like Culey-le-Patry have changed political sides. They used to be the bedrock of the centre-right, Gaullist and soft-Left status quo in France. They have become, almost without realising it, a breeding ground for a tear-it-down populism which seeks to destroy France’s outward-looking, pro-European post-war consensus.

And yet few people in Culey or similar villages care about politics or follow political events from day to day. Several people I spoke to were unaware that the opinion polls had shifted dramatically in recent days. They assumed Macron would win but intended to vote for Le Pen. I did not find a single person who said they would vote, or had ever intended to vote, for her far-right rival Eric Zemmour. His rise (and fall) was largely a metropolitan/suburban phenomenon.

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Zemmour’s decline was partly fuelled by his long history of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin. This is something shared by Le Pen, but she has soared in the last three weeks, mostly at Zemmour’s expense, by focusing on high prices and low wages. The overall far-Right share of the vote (32-34%) has scarcely changed.

In my conversations, not one person brought up the war. They spoke of the high petrol and diesel prices caused partly by Putin’s invasion without mentioning it directly. An exception was our mayor, Marie-Christine Danlos. “I think people here do care about Ukraine,” she said. “Certainly they do. We are surrounded by the memories and scars of war from the summer of 1944. I certainly hear no pro-Russian feeling. None at all.”

“But in the end most people here are tightly wrapped in their own lives. They live for today and tomorrow. They feel sympathy for Ukraine but they are very, very angry about petrol and diesel prices. They are angry and worried about rising food prices. Who do they hear on TV talking most persuasively about the cost of living and purchasing power? Marine Le Pen.”

Mme Danlos, 70, is a retired social worker. She has always voted for the Left. This year she will vote for the hard-Left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not because she likes his extreme positions against the EU and Nato, but because he is the only Left-wing candidate with a slim chance of reaching the second round.

“I’m afraid of Le Pen,” Mme Danlos said. “And do you know why? Because I find myself nodding in agreement with her when I see her on TV. She speaks good sense about prices and low incomes. She comes over these days like a traditional candidate of the Right, not the far-Right.

“I fear that it hides a great deal. None of it will be good for this country or the people of Culey-le Patry. And yet she will get a lot of votes here and in the surrounding villages. A lot.”

***

Culey-le-Patry is in the valley of the river Orne, about 40 kilometres south of Caen. The commune, including a main village Le Bourg and ten hamlets, stretches five kilometres from the western bank of the river to the ridge of the highest hills in Calvados. The whole area was mistitled La Suisse Normande — Norman Switzerland — by a British journalist a century ago. It is more like Shropshire or Herefordshire than Switzerland.

When I first came to live here, 24 years ago, there were still 20 or so farms, large and small, including two tiny, scarcely-mechanised dairy ones in my own hamlet (population: 8). There are now just five, highly-mechanised farms in the eight square kilometres of the commune — and none in the hamlet.

Year by year, I have watched as the Caen suburbs march southwards along the main roads and climb up the hillsides. Our main village has its own small estate of a dozen bungalows, inhabited by people who drive every day to work in Caen. There is no tension with the long-time locals; there is no contact with them at all.

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One by one, many of the wonderful local characters that I got to know 20 years ago have died or moved away. There was Jean-Michel, the hippy-farmer who drove his tractor backwards because all the other gears no longer worked. He moved south and last I heard he was an agricultural inspector.

There was Bernard, a successful farmer who was delivered by an SS doctor during the height of the Battle of Normandy, in July 1944. He flew his own bright-yellow light aircraft off one of his fields until one day, after morning-milking, he failed to come home.

He is buried in the Culey cemetery, next to Sergeant Maurice “Mike” Wilson of the Royal Australian Air Force, whose Spitfire crashed in the commune in June 1944, just before the SS doctor delivered Bernard. The doctor (a resolute Nazi until the end) used to visit Bernard — calling him “my French son” — each summer from the mid-Seventies until he died in the late Nineties.

The commune used to be divided socially between farmers and non-farmers (whom the former tended to despise). It was also divided between “the people of the church” who voted centre-right and “the non-church people” who voted to the Left.

Along with the school, Culey church closed, except for funerals, in the Eighties. The bar-restaurant shut ten years ago. Of the remaining population, perhaps only 150 are Culey born-and-bred (although that includes three of the eight people in my hamlet, who have lived there for 80 years or more).

In the 20 years that I have known it, Culey-le-Patry has become younger and more prosperous but its sense of community has diminished. That may change. We have 50 local children (the highest figure for a long time). They know each other much better than their parents do. They all travel to school together on the bus.

I see no evidence of great poverty or suffering but people keep their secrets to themselves. Mme Danlos, the mayor, says several local families rely quietly on the “Restos de Coeur” and Catholic food charities.

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There are seven doctors within ten kilometres; a health centre; a council gym; loads of shops in the valley; a cheap bus service into Caen. A fast broad-band cable system, installed by hardy teams of contract workers of Polish and North African origin, will be switched on for every house in our obscure commune this month.

Neglected, rural France? Not really. Not all of it.

What is lacking is a local source of prosperity and pride — the small dairy farms on the hills and the factories and iron-ore mines which once provided jobs down in the valley. We are now a community with no clear raison d’être and no longer any real sense of community.

Other places in France may have more specific reasons for their anger with the establishment and the elites — crime, unemployment, immigration. In Culey, there is anger at high fuel and food prices. But that is a temporary phenomenon. There is also an  ill-defined feeling of marginalisation and loss: of not belonging to the successful, outward-looking France of Paris, Toulouse and Bordeaux, but no longer having any clear local identity either.

Denis, 78, a retired farmer told me: “Farming, living from the land, not just in the countryside, used to be what brought us together here. Now we farmers and ex-farmers are a small minority. People — and not just these new hoursins (incomers) from Caen — are furious if they have to wait for a tractor blocking the road.”

Denis has always voted centre-right — for De Gaulle in 1965, for Chirac in 1995 and 2002, for Sarkozy in 2007 and 2012. In 2017, he spoiled his ballot rather than vote for Macron or Le Pen in the second round. This year, he will vote for the centre-right in Round One and Le Pen rather than Macron in Round Two. “I don’t like her but she is not going to win anyway and I can’t stand Macron,” he said. “Even after five years I just don’t know who he is.”

Jean-Philippe, 28, is a plumber who drives 40 kilometres to work in Caen each day. He was very active in the Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which began partly in protest against pump prices when diesel was €1.50 a litre.

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Last month, after the Ukraine war began, diesel rocketed to €2.20 a litre but has now subsided to €1.80, partly thanks to an €0.18 a litre government rebate. Jean-Philippe said: “The price of diesel and petrol is still much too high. Sometimes I wonder if I can afford to go to work. I would be better off claiming unemployment pay. It’s fine the government blaming Russia and the war. But why don’t they cut the 20% VAT on fuel to 5.5% like Marine Le Pen says she will? The politicians would rather give the money to  migrants, or to themselves, than help rural people like us.”

Who will Jean-Phillippe vote for? Le Pen in both rounds.

One of my most eloquent guides to Culey politics had always been my next-door neighbour’s cousin, Catherine, aged 58. “It’s complicated,” she says.  “It’s very complicated. Don’t say it’s all about xenophobia and immigration because that would not be correct. If an Arab family moved to Culey, they would be treated like everyone else. No one would scrawl graffiti on their house.”

“And yet the vote for the far-Right goes up at every election. Why? There is no crime, no sense of being insecure. Most people, like me, if they go out for a few minutes will leave their door unlocked.”

“There is a kind of submerged racism here. People see brown and black faces on the TV news or in the French football team. It’s not the France they know. They feel threatened, even though there is no direct threat to them. They vote Le Pen as a kind of protest or gesture…”

As Catherine says: “It’s complicated.”

***

Macron’s rural failure is not so much to have failed to invest in La France Profonde. Whatever the Gilets Jaunes may say, successive French governments have hugely subsidised rural France from urban and suburban taxes. Rather, Macron’s rural failure is part of his wider inability to persuade the whole of France that it can share in the outward-looking confidence and prosperity of its thriving cities.

When she slipped from view during Zemmour’s rise last year, Le Pen embarked on a village Tour de France. She gained lots of positive publicity in local papers, unnoticed at the time by the Paris and foreign media, including me. Her message was always the same: “Village France is the real France. The rebuilding of the real France starts with you.”

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It was a flattering message but a deeply misleading one. There can be no future for village France if France as a whole is not prosperous. Le Pen’s policies — disconnection from Europe, discrimination against immigrants — would turn the whole of France into a village, isolated from Europe and the world.

From the ridge above Culey, you can see the flatlands of western France which stretch all the way to the Pyrenean foothills. We are just one pebble in thousands of similar pebbles on that beach, all no doubt with a similar ill-defined feeling of lost local pride and prosperity. The suffering of such places is finally more existential than economic. This is not a question of Somewhere and Anywhere. It is a sense of Somewhere-Lost.

Neither Marine Le Pen nor her 5% VAT on fuel will bring a sense of identity and pride to the many Culeys out there. They will, all the same, vote massively for her tomorrow.

*Some have names have been changed.

Putin has admirers and apologists in many countries, from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson in the United States to Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. He bought the German political establishment with gas pipelines and part of the British Conservative Party with roubles.

In France, however, the self-proclaimed, patriotic forces of anti-elite politics — on both the far-Right and the hard-left — admired Putin for free (give or take a Russian bank loan to Marine Le Pen in 2017). There is no equivalent degree of overt Putin worship in any other large, Western country — except possibly the United States.

When he held a peace summit with Emmanuel Macron just before he sent his tanks into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin humiliated the French president. But he also did him an unwanted favour: war in Ukraine has raised Emmanuel Macron’s chances of re-election in April from “pretty good” to “near-certain”.

After the first bombs fell, the Moscowteers  scrambled to distance themselves from the Russian president. Now, with scarcely a mea culpa, they have reverted to blaming the West for not giving in to Moscow on Nato expansion, and have resumed their mockery of Macron for his ill-fated peace missions to Putin last month.

This approach will appeal to part of their core support, which is viscerally anti-European, anti-American, and anti-Nato. But it is unlikely to impress the wider electorate.

Last Friday, Zemmour gave a strangely incoherent speech to a cheering and flag-waving rally of his faithful supporters in Chambéry in the French Alps: he both criticised Putin and defended him, appealing for peace and glorified war. “We know the Russians and the Russians know us. Putin’s Russia exists in the 19th century and regards war as a way of defending its strategic vision,” Zemmour said. “But the countries of the West no longer have the stomach for war… We need to consider the consequences of that.” The West, he implied, should actually be fighting “wars of civilisation” which “our elites will not accept”. In other words, he meant wars against Islam.

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Perhaps more surprising is what Zemmour didn’t say: he made no mention in Chambéry of Putin’s repeated threat to use nuclear weapons. The man who presents himself as the saviour of his nation now finds himself aligned with a man threatening to destroy it. So does Marine Le Pen and so does Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

As a result, I believe that the presidential election is all but over. President Macron has until Friday to enter the race formally. Despite the failure of his peace mission, the war will freeze the campaign and swing many moderate, non-ideological voters behind him.

Macron may or may not have been too indulgent with Putin last month. But three of his main adversaries have praised or idolised him for years. Even the centre-Right challenger Valérie Pécresse — no Putin fan — represents a party whose last Prime Minister, François Fillon, was until last week a salaried Moscow ally. After enormous pressure from Pécresse, Fillon finally resigned last week from the board of the Russian petro-chemical giant, Sibur.

Of course, Macron’s opponents still have a couple of straws to cling to: most damagingly, the confrontation with Russia will worsen fuel and food inflation, which was already threatening a Macron second term. It will, however, also give the President political cover to take action, such as temporary tax cuts, to ease price rises — steps that would normally have been impossible just before a presidential vote.

Meanwhile, Moscow will doubtless turn several armoured divisions of online trolls and fake social media accounts on the French campaign. Yet a Moscow blitz of fake news against Macron was expected anyway. Its effect will also be limited: it will mostly be seen by the anti-European, anti-Nato, Macron-detesting portion of the electorate, which would never have voted for him in any case.

This raises a more fundamental question: why was Putin so popular in France in the first place?

The 2022 election may be over, but the fellow-travelling of the three leading election candidates is a stark reminder of the fragility of the French political status quo. Disaffected French cultural figures, from Gérard Dépardieu to Michel Houellebecq, are also long-standing Putin fans, infected by a variant of the pro-Soviet virus which swept through much of French intellectual life in the Fifties.

Will the surge of nationalism in French politics be damaged by its association with Vladimir Putin? In the short term, yes. In the longer term, however, the same problems will produce the same resentments and the same arguments. The key man here is Éric Zemmour.

On the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a Jurassic politician, fighting his last election. For him, defending Putin was part of the unthinking baggage of being anti-American, anti-Nato and anti-European. Ditto for Marine Le Pen. In any case, her political star is waning. Moscow certainly thinks so; she was refused Russian loans this time around.

Of the Three Moscowteers, Zemmour has the most to lose. He represents — or represented — a rising power in French politics, if not for 2022 then for 2027.

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For Mélenchon and Le Pen, Putin was their “enemy’s enemy”. Their thinking went no deeper than that. Zemmour epitomises something else: the strange attraction that Putin has come to hold on parts of the intellectual hard-Right in France and elsewhere. Zemmour admires Putin not despite what he is but because of what he is. Although Jewish himself, he has long idolised Putin as a defender of “Christian values” and “male values” against the onslaught of liberalism, feminism and gay rights.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that a new hashtag has appeared on French Twitter in recent days: #VladimirZemmour. French media and political opponents have started to trace the many links and similarities between Putinism and Zemmourism. Both men exploit tendentious narratives of national decline and national betrayal. Both shamelessly rewrite their country’s history to exaggerate past glories and nurse grudges against rival nations or the forces of “internationalism”.

For Putin, the indivisible Russian people and Russia’s natural right to be one of the world’s great powers have been betrayed by his weak or foolish predecessors and by the anti-Russian aggression of the West. For Zemmour, France’s natural superiority and right to cultural domination have been eroded over the centuries by foreign and internationalist conspiracies and by the betrayals of its own political classes. The latest betrayal is “le grand remplacement” — an allegedly deliberate plan by “international finance” and “the elites” to replace the white race by brown and black people.

In 2016, Zemmour wrote that the Russian President was “the last bastion against the hurricane of the politically correct which, starting in America, has destroyed all the traditional structures of family, religion and nation”. He is “the only European leader to defend traditional society, rooted in its own history and culture. All other Western leaders have turned the rootless, self-empowered individual into a jealous and demanding God.”

Two years later, he added: “I dream of a French Putin emerging but there is none…” Three years after that, Zemmour stopped being an essayist and TV pundit and decided to run for the role of “French Putin” himself.

In the large back-library of Zemmour’s Putin panegyrics, you will find scarce mention of the dismantlement of any semblance of democracy in Russia, and the imprisonment and poisoning of opponents. But while Western governments and businesses have ignored or chosen to live with these crimes. Zemmour has implicitly endorsed them. As recently as last September, Zemmour said that France should abandon Nato and the EU and enter a “Russian alliance…that would be far more reliable”.

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Until now, Zemmourist converts from the centre-Right — mostly very young or retired, well-educated and well-off — have brushed off such excesses. They prefer to focus on Zemmour’s energy and his eloquence in skewering the failures and evasions of the liberal, pro-European consensus. Yet they are now confronted with facts that they preferred to ignore: Zemmour’s gut instincts are authoritarian and undemocratic. His Putin-worship is not a tangential flirtation to annoy “the elites”. It is the core of Zemmourism.

As I have argued before, Zemmour’s political project was always long-term. It hoped to succeed over two election campaigns, not one. But I believe that Zemmour has been lastingly discredited by his Putin worship. In his place, another figure will doubtless emerge to pursue his vision of a strong, nationalist anti-European Right into the 2027 campaign (when Macron, if re-elected, cannot run again).

One of the likely candidates for that role is Marine Le Pen’s estranged niece, Marion Maréchal — although she is another long-standing Putin-fellow-traveller. Yet the New Right will not go away in France any more than it will in the United States. Memories fade. The core issues of identity, fear of Islamism and the need for better-shared prosperity will remain.

Part of the identity of the New Right is to mock international and European institutions, even the very idea of human rights or international law. No doubt the muddles and compromises of Nato and the EU will be mocked again and again in the coming months or even years as those flawed organisations struggle to support Ukraine without firing a shot and risking nuclear war.

It would, all the same, be pleasant to imagine that some on the new, nationalist Right — and not just in France — might start to reconsider and regret some of the Strange Gods they have worshipped in recent years. Vladimir Putin — a corrupt, violent, anti-democratic man who detests the values of the West — has been recruited as a poster-boy for French and American ultra-patriotism. Many people who, like Eric Zemmour, are sincerely devoted to the values of the past, now find themselves trapped on the wrong side of history.

The girls were well turned-out; many of them came from the kind of well-heeled or intellectual families once called “BCBG” — bon chic, bon genre — living in the western arrondissements of Paris. Others came from Neuilly-sur-Seine, the richest commune in France, just outside the city boundary (where Nicolas Sarkozy was once the mayor).

Whenever I see Valérie Pécresse I think of those walks. She has the same cheerful, determined, understated “BCBG” look. That is hardly a surprise; she was educated at that same convent school as my daughters.

The dual aim of Sainte-Marie de Neuilly is to turn out faithful and traditional Catholics girls but also tough, intelligent young women capable of competing with men in a men’s world. My non-French daughters hated it for the most part, but it educated them well.

Pécresse, 54, now stands at the entrance to a labyrinth which could lead her next year to win a competition which no French woman has ever won: to be President of the Republic. Last weekend, she became the first woman to be chosen as presidential candidate for the French centre-right, the political family of Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Ten years ago ,that would have made her one of the favourites, even the favourite, to be the next President. But life is more complicated now — and it is growing more complicated by the day: part of the centre-right has emigrated to President Emmanuel Macron, while other sections have shifted to two far-Right candidates, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour.

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Meanwhile, Pécresse — who has been President of the greater Paris region, Ile-de- France, since 2015 — is little known outside the Paris area; and Paris is not liked in the rest of France. Before she won a closed primary of the main centre-right party, Les Républicains, on Saturday she was running a poor 4th in the national opinion polls on 8 to 10% of support for the first round of the presidential election on 10 April.

But two post-primary polls in recent days have boosted her to 14% and 17% respectively. In other words, she is already pushing for a place, ahead of her two far-Right rivals, in the two-candidate second round on 24 April.

The election is, of course, still a long way away. Opinion polls bounces come and go. Just ask Eric Zemmour, who is sinking steadily after surging from 0% to 19% in the Autumn. The only exception to this rule seems to be President Macron, who continues to float serenely ahead of the pack on 23 to 25%.

All the same, Macron and his chieftains and supporters are worried. They are confident that the President would beat either Le Pen or Zemmour if they reached the second round. They are far less certain that he would beat Pécresse.

They know fully well that she appeals to a chunk of the electorate which dislikes Macron and would like a change, albeit not too much change. The prospect of a woman as President would, in itself, appeal to the perpetual French dissatisfaction with incumbents; there has been no female leader in France since the regent Marie de Médicis four centuries ago.

Pécresse, though more socially conservative and fiscally stringent than Macron, would also be more acceptable in a run-off to parts of the French Left — simply because she is not Macron.

But can she reach Round Two? Ultimately, in the first round, some of her advantages become handicaps.

A large part of the wider French Right and even her own party want radical change on crime, migration and Europe. Pécresse may be more socially conservative than Macron: she was once a leading figure in a movement to try to block gay marriage, though she now accepts “marriage for all” should not be challenged. But the French Right regard Pécresse, correctly, as a continuation of the centrist consensus which has survived, with a few twists and turns, from Chirac through Sarkozy, François Hollande and Macron.

And unlike Le Pen and Zemmour, Pécresse is a typical product of the French political elite. After jumping two classes at Sainte-Marie-de-Neuilly and gaining the top mark in the baccalauréat at the age of 16, she went to a leading business school and to the elite civil service college Ecole Nationale d’Adminisration (ENA). She then taught at the leading political school, Science-Po. She is pro-European and pro-business. She is married to an engineer-turned-senior-businessman and has three children.

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As a result, the response by harder-line Républicains or by Zemmouristes to her victory at the weekend was brutal. They called her a “girouette” (weather-vane), “Valérie Princesse”, “Valérie Traitresse” and “Macron in a skirt”.

Perhaps anticipating this, Pécresse promised in her acceptance speech to be a new kind of President: one who would break with the past and keep promises. She also emphasised that, unlike Le Pen and Zemmour, she was capable of winning on 24 April and “turning the page on Macron”.

In truth, she will struggle in the next four months to keep her own party together, let alone unite the wider French Right. Even her acceptance speech was publicly criticised by the man she crushed 61-39% in the second round of Les Républicains’ primary.

Eric Ciotti, who represents Nice in the French national assembly, is closer in most respects to the views of Zemmour and Le Pen on Islam and migration than those of Pécresse. He complained that her victory oration omitted his most eye-catching proposal: a French Guantanamo for suspected Islamist radicals and an end to the “droit du sol” — the right to French citizenship of anyone born on French soil.

In response, Pécresse again rejected both those ideas but promised that Ciotti would be a big part of her campaign; her first visit was to his village in the mountains above Nice. It was a shrewd move and her political skills should certainly not be underestimated. Pécresse says she is “two parts Angela Merkel and one part Margaret Thatcher”. She is not, she says, une dame de fer (iron lady) like Thatcher but une dame de faire (a woman who gets things done).

Yes, she was given little chance by pundits (including this one) of winning the five-candidate primary last week. But she proved herself with talent and cunning.

The number of Les Républicains party members zoomed from 80,000 to 140,000 in the weeks before the vote as “sympathisers” handed over €30 in annual party dues. All five candidates had encouraged supporters, in effect, to buy votes. The Pécresse camp, with the enormous population of greater Paris behind it, “bought” the most (quite legally). And it undoubtedly had an impact: she beat the favourite, the former EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, by only 1,200 votes in Round One to go forward in second place to round two.

Yet there were other factors, too. In the four televised primary debates, Barnier looked tired and grouchy; Ciotti slick and passionate. Pécresse, meanwhile, was calm, fluent and well-drilled. She appealed to the party’s hard Right wing by proposing two constitutional changes to make it easier for France to block migration and deal with radical Islam. She shone like a beacon in a deep pink jacket among the shiny dark suits.

But now comes the real campaign. And this is where her troubles could begin.

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One way to look at this election is that France, like Gaul under Julius Caesar, has been divided into three parts. The Left — remember them? — still commands just under 30% of the votes. They are divided, irretrievably it appears, between seven different candidates: two Trotskyists, a Communist, two Socialists, a Green and the hard-left nationalist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. None, at present, has more than 11% of the vote. They are unlikely to get near the top four, never mind the top two, in the first round.

There is then a wide band of pro-European, pro-business, centre and centre-right — in effect politics as usual — candidates, taking in Macron but also Pécresse. They have maybe 30% to 40% support.

Finally, there is a chunk of just over 30% of far-Right and hard-Right voters who want to turn everything on its head. They are anti-European, ultra-nationalist and anti-migrant. They detest what they see as a Left-tinged media consensus against strong action to reduce European power, end migration, tackle crime and shackle Islam (not just radical Islamism). They include the supporters of Le Pen and Zemmour, but also a big slice of members and voters of Les Républicains — two-fifths of them judging by the result of last Saturday’s primary.

Eric Ciotti has said that, faced with a choice between Macron and Zemmour in Round Two, he would vote for Zemmour. Yet in 2017, Pécresse voted for Macron rather than Le Pen. She left Les Républicains two years later because she said they were drifting towards the far-Right, and only rejoined just before the primary. In other words, she and Ciotti are in the same party but not in the same ideological “third” of France.

To win next April, then, Pécresse has to persuade many hard-Right and far-Right voters to take another chance on a mainstream politician who says that she shares their anger and fears. She needs, above all, the Zemmour bubble to burst, but not to burst too much; she needs his supporters who have abandoned Le Pen to stay with him. Otherwise, Le Pen will return to an unassailable first round position, just behind Macron.

At the same time, Pécresse needs to reclaim some of the moderate, pro-European centre-right voters who now support the President. That will be difficult if she is also to make a full-blooded pitch to the Ciotti-Zemmour-Le Pen third of France.

Her BCBG cheerful toughness will appeal to some voters. It will enrage others. If she can find a way to balance all those things — and that is a big ask — the race for second place in the first round on 10 April could be a three-way tie until the finishing line. It could be decided by just a handful of votes. If Pécresse has those votes, she could beat Macron two weeks later.

What would that change in France? Not much. Pécresse would bring a change of style. She would be marginally tougher than Macron on migration. She would be less ambitious about France’s role in Europe and Europe’s role in the world.

But the fundamentals would change little. The deep political divisions in France would persist; they might even deepen. The real battle for the soul of France is coming — but probably not until 2027.

There’s no business like intello-business, and for centuries it came from Paris: Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir once defined both public engagement and intellectual glamour — the ultimate in intersectional cool.

As far back as the 18th century, Diderot famously boarded with Catherine the Great while Voltaire, a steadfast correspondent of Catherine’s for decades, visited Frederick the Great at his Sanssouci for two years. Victor Hugo, somewhat unfairly, destroyed Napoleon III’s reputation in posterity for good (he dismissed him as “Napoléon le Petit”). Jules Verne predicted the future; Proust and Céline, at opposite ends of the spectrum, illuminated the precipices opened by the Great War.

Marc Bloch opened up historical studies to social sciences and painstaking assessment of primary sources in context, while Fernand Braudel mapped out mentalities and trends over centuries in the Mediterranean. Sartre and de Beauvoir travelled across Russia, China and America, sprinkling intellectual pixie dust at universities from Cornell to Smith and Wellesley ­— or endorsing Communist dictators from Mao Zedong to János Kádár.

When the young André Glucksmann, one of the bright stars of the Nouveaux Philosophes, organised the public reconciliation between Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1979, the encounter took place in the office of President Giscard d’Estaing at the Élysée. Le Président looked on benignly from the sidelines, obviously enjoying a validation that in everyone’s mind bested the popular vote he’d won five years earlier.

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Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, for all their Left Bank rich boys swagger, had rightly called the end of the French intelligentsia’s love affair with the radical Left: no more fellow-travellers, no more Odes to Stalin (from France’s greatest 20th century poet, Paul Éluard, no less); no more apologias for Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Even staged, it was momentous.

But perhaps the more pertinent question is: who would a Nazarbayev, Kim Jong Un or Lukashenko invite today, assuming they even saw the point? Where are the successors to Sartre and Aron? To curry favour with their president, Kazakh oligarchs found more soft power value in buying Prince Andrew’s decaying marital home. Kim Jong Un had to make do with Dennis Rodman. Contracts with Tony Blair’s associates have replaced correspondence with Voltaire.

Camus died in 1960, Merleau-Ponty the following year, while Sartre’s death in 1980 was followed by Aron in 1983, Foucault the year after and de Beauvoir in 1986. Derrida lingered on until 2004, pre-deceased by Bourdieu in 2002; but by that time they had become their own statues, only of use to radicalised Ivies at $60,000 a pop, to spruce up their toxic mix of race/gender/linguistics/post-colonial studies. The only French novelist of true international note is Michel Houellebecq, a misanthrope and a pessimist whose protagonists embody anomic failure.

Compare our four most recent Nobel Prizes for literature — Claude Simon (1985), Gao Xinjian (2000), J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008), Patrick Modiano (2014) — with their predecessors (Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre) and the problem becomes obvious. Of all the works by current aspirants to the title of Public Intellectual, you can probably take Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to the barricades, but it’s a dry read at 976 pages. (Piketty’s most publicised political stance was his public support for François Hollande in the 2012 presidential election. It has not aged well.)

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When the talented Le Figaro columnist, Eugénie Bastié, recently asked Éditions Gallimard’s residing sage Pierre Nora, 89, what he thought of the state of intellectual life in France today, Nora couldn’t find enough epithets to characterise his disdain. “Do we have an intellectual life left? It has collapsed. Well,  subsided, really. Shrunk… Ran out of steam… French intellectual life is provincialised.” (And no worse insult is possible from the heart of the Septième Arrondissement.)

Back in 1980, Nora co-founded the influential Le Débat bi-monthly review with the sociologist, historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet, who to this day — aged 75 — sits in the next-door office at Gallimard. A trio of Paris publishing houses set the Parisian intellectual tone, issue excommunications and sweep up the majority of literary prizes, a situation which has not changed since Balzac’s Lost Illusions. I once witnessed the editor of a lesser intellectual review paying court to Gauchet in hopes that they might publish a joint issue with Le Débat. It was straight out of the Duc de Saint Simon’s Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV. The joint issue never happened.

Called upon to answer Bastié’s question, Gauchet doubled down, stating that “Intellectual life nowadays is non-existent.” And just to emphasise the point, he and Nora closed down Le Débat last year. Bastié, who’s 29, agrees with this downbeat assessment. “Fifty-thousand people walked behind Sartre’s funeral procession [in 1980],” she writes in the newly-published La Guerre des Idées. “Nowadays it’s Johnny Hallyday’s they follow.”

In many ways, France’s intellectual life suffers from the same conformism as French politics, or French society at large. Just as our vaccine roll-out was plagued from the start by pusillanimity, negativity and the structural incapacity of France’s top-heavy bureaucracy to think imaginatively or admit to mistakes, French universities or Grandes Écoles haven’t produced a critical mass of robust dissidents. Conformism is the key to good grades and social advancement, whether in government, the private sector or in an intellectual community where the gatekeepers have sometimes held the same job for half a century. Outliers — they do exist — take years to receive some sort of acknowledgement; and this is more often conferred by newspapers opinion pages or cable channels talk shows, neither of which make for solidly grounded arguments.

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How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

What we get, in keeping with the rest of the world, are strident debates. Thoughtful thinkers like Alain Finkielkraut, once a promising Gallimard author, now a member of the Académie Française (an honour that usually smothers its holders to complete irrelevance), has become little more than a conservative columnist. Finkielkraut is regularly targeted by the Left: cancelling attempts, as early as 2005, by Le Monde, Libé and L’Obs, lumped him in a group of right-of-centre commenters as a Nouveau Réactionnaire (boo, hiss).

Finkielkraut still publishes books that sell well and has a France Culture (think Radio Three) weekly programme, but his influence in Parisian circles of power is non-existent. Unlike in the United States, non-personhood in France isn’t followed by the actual destruction of your professional life; you just become an intellectual ghost.

As for French intellectual soft power nowadays, it lives more in old symbols than in actual argument. There are no French Jordan Petersons to polarise public opinion and draw crowds of thousands (even if on Zoom these days) to demonise or applaud their latest pronouncements. Foucault and Bourdieu, being safely dead, cannot protest the uses they are put to in American universities: their former students refute most of these, but this isn’t much heard beyond our borders, and not just because the French language is in full retreat.

The language barrier has to some extent protected us — so far — from the excesses of identity politics; but as a cultural rampart, it’s a Maginot Line. It’s a sad retreat from what politicians up to Jacques Chirac used to praise as le rayonnement de la France (“rayonnement” can either refer to the benevolent light of the sun’s rays, or to atomic radiation; in today’s performative anti-colonialism it’s the second meaning that’s more often implied). French intellectuals need to be less retiring and limelight-shy — and there’s a sentence I never, ever expected to write.

But if you thought that Emmanuel Macron’s floundering over the Covid crisis, and especially his drunken sailor pas de deux with Angela Merkel over the AstraZeneca vaccine, might ring in a measure of rarely-seen humility among the French ruling elite, think again.

No matter that one day Le Président says the Oxford jab is unproven and useless on the over 65s, only to perform the mother of all reverse ferrets three weeks later, and forbid vaccinating the under 55s with it, after a four-blood-clots scare over 15 million shots. No matter that the instant Mutti blinks and decides to suspend AZ vaccinations in Germany, France’s Covid Conseil de Défense, after being interrupted by a telephone call from Our Man In Berlin, rules that France will blindly follow suit.

In the immortal words of a thousand French novelty aprons and fridge magnets, Même quand il a tort, le boss a toujours raison (“even when the boss is wrong, he is still right”). Our President, who last year took most decisions on the handling of the crisis alone, whether following or contradicting the Scientific Council, found early on the ideal piñata: les Anglais, which in French means the British (with apologies to Celtic readers). Because we love to hate the English, too.

He has been helped in this strategy because the groundwork being generously laid for almost five years over Brexit. Emmanuel Macron, toujours lui, was still harping on about it for his New Year wishes last January, assuring Britain that France remained her “friend and ally” despite her choice to leave in a Brexit born of “lies and false promises”, coming across like a man moaning about custody rights and alimony during a family reunion five years after his divorce.

And while we usually protest that French ill-feeling towards the British is nothing, nothing compared to British naked aggression about all things French — yes, that Up Yours, Delors still rankles — the truth is that we love casser du sucre sur le dos des Anglais (to break sugar cubes over the backs of Brits, a popular colloquialism for badmouthing).

You may have invented the wrong sort of leaves to excuse your pathetic excuses for proper trains (for which read: French trains); we can discourse for hours about the wrong way in which Brian Moore won tries, and matches, over a technically better French rugby team. We could have invented the term “beautiful losers”, because even when France loses, it is with so much more élan than when the English win. Oh, and Emmanuel Macron even said for a long time that Britain actually vaccinated the wrong way, and France had performed better in terms of the proportion of people getting the full two-jabs. (No, I don’t understand the maths either; it’s all about “taking dangerous risks”, and he may not have been entirely correct.)

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The likelihood that the AZ vaccine would have been similarly targeted by a series of damaging official statements if it had not been invented in Britain seems close to zero. The urge to do down les Rosbifs was too strong, even at the risk of encouraging antivaxxers over the Continent. In fact it’s the one cultural trend France has successfully exported in recent years: while we used to be Europe’s leaders in vaccine scepticism, with 43% of the population unwilling to take the needle, that number is now up to 61%; but similarly, 55% of Germans would now refuse the AZ vaccine (up 15%), as well as 43% of Italians and 52% of Spaniards (up 27% in each). And a good deal of it was born of the age-old French uneasy contempt for the British.

We don’t understand you. We don’t trust you. We don’t trust those among us who suffer from that terrifying disease, l’Anglophilie. There’s a certain kind of bon chic, bon genre French bourgeoisie who dress their daughters in kilts, send their children for a couple of terms in minor public schools in the Home Counties so that they’ll speak English more fluently than almost all our presidents, who mourned the disappearance of Marks & Spencer from Paris, and worship the Royal Family unironically. Just as Remainers pine for Provence and Tuscany after the second glass of Prosecco, France’s social equivalents wax lyrical about Glyndebourne, serve Pimms in the wrong sort of glasses, and think longingly to this day of Tony Blair. This sort of Anglophilia is not a vote-winner with the rest of the country, as politicians from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to Édouard Balladur have found out.

A quick vox pop among friends hit unexpected Yellowstone-sized geysers of animosity. It starts with use of unregulated longbows at Agincourt, encompasses burning Joan of Arc at the stake, finds its stride with Pitt’s flooding fake assignats to devalue French paper money during the Revolution (typical of the perfidiousness of Albion in all things financial, and probably present in the subconscious of Brussels regulators as they deny City financial institutions either passporting or equivalence rights), but truly flourishes when it comes to Napoleon.

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“Les Anglais conspired to break the Peace of Amiens in 1803, led the entire continent into war, and managed to pin it all on Napoleon!” one friend raged. And on to St. Helena, to Kitchener’s stand-off against Marchand at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898, and of course to the sinking of a good chunk of the French Navy at Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 by the Royal Navy, rather than risking it fighting on for Vichy. Yes, we do hold grudges.

But a great deal of Anglo-French antagonism is probably due to a discomfort on both sides as to who, really, is coolest — not that anyone will openly admit to failure. From the 1960s onwards Paris has played second fiddle to London, home to the Beatles and Rolling Stones and countless other musicians — even Berlin has at times appeared more cutting-edge — but with fashion Paris remains king. Even London’s couturiers, graduates from St Martin’s School, have not truly made it until France’s warring luxury titans, Bernard Arnault of Dior and Givenchy or François Pinault of Gucci and Chloé, had given them whole Paris ateliers to play with. Frenchwomen may be better dressed than their British opposite number, but Englishmen of a certain class beat too-dapper Frenchmen in narrow suits hollow — although no one would say that of all Englishmen.

We win at food, but you steal our chefs. It’s worth it, in order to escape your legacy of baked beans for breakfast, of frozen peas the colour of hazmat suits with the consistency of grapeshot, boiled meat falling in lank grey strands on the plate into congealing gravy, and at puddings you could play rugby with. We eat your fish (not so much these days, because Brexit spite trumps le brunch du dimanche) but you drink our Bordeaux and our champagne, one clear instance where you win hands down. Mostly, the French do not understand Marmite; but some cultural practices must just remain a mystery.

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By Agnes Poirier

Sport is more complicated: a friend cursed you twice, once for stealing Eric Cantona from us, the second for returning him. Business is even worse: thirty years on, one of the negotiators over the Channel Tunnel contracts was still smarting over British “cheats”. “How so?” I asked. “The minute they’ve signed, they endlessly amend, change, revise contracts! It’s like trench warfare! You think you’ve got something to rely on, they want to adapt and adapt all the time!”

As we hashed it over, it became obvious that two entire philosophies were clashing: British pragmatism against French theory; British nimbleness against French top-down hierarchy. “Business in England starts when 20 shopkeepers get together in a café near the docks, and decide to finance a ship to the West Indies,” he said: “They find a captain, networks, information, insurers. In France, you go to the King; he gives you letters of marque against a cut in your profits; all is done in his name. Nothing has really changed: today, most large cross-border deals need the approval of the Direction Générale du Trésor at the Ministry of Finance.”

It was a perceptive point, and explains a lot of the different ways that Britain and France have handled the Covid vaccination effort. For the French, les Anglais appear to have won the war, despite losing so many earlier battles; but we cannot help that feeling there is something perfidious about it.

Sentimental, I know. I think what I found moving was that the Communards, including most of their leaders, were ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Here was a crisis not of their making or choosing, but one they seized nonetheless.

At the crack of dawn on 18 March 150 years ago, the French government sent troops to repossess a large number of cannon in the possession of the Paris National Guard, the citizen militia. Crowds of Parisians turned out to stop the troops and, in a panic, the government, the army, the police and the senior civil service fled. Paris was left in the hands of its people.

A week later, they elected a city council, the Conseil de la Commune. Soon after that, clashes with government troops began in the suburbs, and intensified over the following six weeks. On 21 May, soldiers climbed over the city walls, and there followed a week of fighting which left whole streets in ruins, major public buildings in flames, and the streets strewn with corpses. Many hundreds of people were summarily executed, 40,000 were marched away as prisoners and over 4,000 were subsequently exiled to penal camps in New Caledonia. The Paris Commune seemed utterly defeated.

That the Commune and the “Communards” should still be remembered by so many people, however vaguely, is itself something of a mystery. Nineteenth-century Europe was not short of urban uprisings and bloody massacres. But only specialists recall the Warsaw rising of 1830, the revolts in Vienna and Prague in 1848, or the Roman Republic of 1849.

Part of the reason must be that it concerns Paris. But apart from Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People and Les Misérables, most know nothing of the half-dozen other Parisian uprisings of the century. Marx wrote importantly about the Commune, which must be another part of the reason. But then he wrote importantly about the June 1848 revolt and the December 1851 coup d’état, without that being enough to place them within popular folklore. So is it the name “Commune” which resonates both with hippy dreams of anarchic togetherness and with Communist narratives of history?

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For Marxists (although Marx was privately unsure) the Commune was a political and theoretical breakthrough: “the form at last discovered”, he wrote, “for the emancipation of the working class”. The Communards, he argued, had hit on a non-oppressive and yet fully revolutionary way of exercising power, by abolishing all oppressive institutions — army, church, police — and giving power directly to the people themselves.

Marxists took it for granted that the industrial proletariat of Paris must have been the most dynamic and forward-looking element. Engels elaborated further by defining the Commune as the first “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the transition to a classless society. Lenin (whose body was to be shrouded in a Communard flag) was more critical: it was the Commune’s defeat that was really significant. It had failed because it did not have the leadership of a disciplined party, and because it was insufficiently ruthless in combatting class enemies. So the Communards were retrospectively enrolled for nearly a century as pioneering ancestors in the long march to Communism.

But a heretical counter-explanation emerged in the 1960s in the work of a young French historian, Jacques Rougerie: the Commune was not the first of a new kind of revolution, he said, but the last of an old one. Rougerie was brutally attacked by the Communist Party for his suggestion that the Communards were the descendants of the sans-culottes of the 1790s. Not an industrial proletariat, but skilled workers in traditional industries (engravers, joiners, cobblers), small businessmen, shopkeepers, clerks. Not looking forwards to Communism, but backwards to self-managed workers’ cooperatives and the republics of 1848 and 1792: they officially adopted the revolutionary calendar, which placed them in the Year 79. So, concluded some historians, the Commune was really the last gasp of the French Revolution.

But historians have a weakness for pioneering movements, which after all give their research projects extra glamour. A popular view in the Swinging Sixties was that the Commune was a bit like May 1968, a carnival of anarchy, even a “total revolution, as one historian suggested fancifully. Or was it a revolution to take back control of space that had been appropriated by bourgeois urbanism?

Particularly in the United States, it was reinvented as an act of feminism. It was the women of the Commune, the notorious pétroleuses, who made it unique. This had once been a label of shame for the (mythical) women who supposedly went round setting fire to buildings. Now it became a title of honour. Communard women not only spoke up for themselves and their collective interests, it was argued, they actually fought on the barricades.

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For some American historians, it was their organised use of violence that was the significant novelty of 1871: emancipation by the gun. The most recent reinterpretation is that the Commune was an event in global history, the most fashionable historiographical trend.

Old? New? Leninist? Anarchist? Feminist? Urban? Global? There are plenty of reasons for commemorating its 150^th anniversary. But there are also simpler explanations for why the Commune is still remembered by many as inspiring and meaningful.

First is that it was short: two months. As Marx noted, this was only enough to indicate what might have been — and, of course, that includes almost anything. So it is easy to project things onto the Commune, things we would like to imagine as possible. And it also means that it didn’t have time to go really wrong. Yes, there were plenty of errors and some sinister aspects, but compared with the 1793 Terror or Stalinism, the Commune was innocent. It didn’t have time either to moderate into bourgeois banality, or to start devouring its own children. So always unfulfilled, its promise undiminished, it remains (in the words of a famous song written by one of its leaders) “le temps des cerises” — the cherry time.

The other reason it is remembered, as Marx also noted at the time, is because of the ferocity with which it was crushed during the last lurid “Bloody Week” of barricade fighting amid a city in flames. Around 7,000 people were killed — a unique bloodbath for the 19^th century. This turned its followers into martyrs, and created a heroic legend.

There is still an annual pilgrimage to one of the killing sites, the Mur des Fédérés in the Père Lachaise cemetery. But the intention was commemoration, not repetition: in future, the French Left would fight at the ballot box, not on the barricade. Quite a number of prominent Communards returned as elected politicians or city officials. Two lived to be ministers in the French national unity government of 1914. Put all these elements together, and you get a powerful if enigmatic memory which can serve a range of purposes, including sentimental nostalgia.

But is this all the Commune can tell us 150 years later? I think there is something else, something that is not so often celebrated: namely, that the Commune was fundamentally about popular democracy. Today, we might even call it “populist”.

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France since the implosion of the Revolution in the mid-1790s had lived under a succession of oligarchies, whether under republics, emperors or kings: a roundabout of elites. But the defeat by Germany in 1870-71 had discredited both mainstream Left and Right, and created a political vacuum. It looked as though this would end in another period of monarchy — rule by another section of the elite, with nothing to offer except repression spiced with paternalism.

But the Communards said no: this time the people themselves would rule. Of course, their defeat in war marked a far more dramatic break than anything we have so far experienced in the West. But today’s impatience with politicians, technocratic bureaucracies and establishment “experts” certainly invites some comparisons. Certainly, too many progressives today seem to prefer the elite: they have abandoned the idea that people who are poor, or even those who do ordinary jobs or who have not been to university, have ideas and experience of their own, and an equal right to a political voice.

Populism is feared and denigrated as reactionary. Yet the most basic principle of the Communards was that power should be shared as equally as possible, and that every person (well, every man) had an equal right to make decisions. Office holders at every level would be elected, and if they failed in their duty their electors would dismiss them: not just politicians but officials and magistrates, too. Wherever possible, citizens would perform public duties themselves — for example, as members of the National Guard, they would be their own police force. The aim was freedom and emancipation: to be treated as adults.

This was the purpose behind the secularisation of schools and a widespread demand for technical education: so that, wrote a Communard newspaper,  “those who can handle tools can also write books”. It lay behind the aspiration to workers’ cooperatives for women and men. The multiplication of political clubs across the city showed a thirst among ordinary people to have their say on political and social matters, often speaking for the first time in public.

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The pithiest expression of the Communard spirit is the famous Internationale, written by a member of the Commune, Eugène Pottier. It includes this: “there are no supreme saviours, not God, not emperors, not politicians … let’s save ourselves; … enough of languishing as dependents, equality demands other laws.”

It is, of course, easy to pick holes in this. Not much was put into practice in seven weeks of civil war, and if it had been it wouldn’t have worked for long: what normal person wants to spend all their evenings in political meetings, sitting on local committees, or patrolling the streets in National Guard uniform chasing prostitutes and bakers illegally working at night (two of the Commune’s slightly eccentric reforms)? Besides, there were plenty of Communards who were a bit too keen on repressing opinions they didn’t like, persecuting harmless priests and nuns, and dreaming of a return to the Jacobin Terror.

Nevertheless, the Communard leadership were reluctant to introduce censorship, disliked locking people up and refused to use the death penalty: the guillotine was fetched from its shed and publicly burnt. Yes, in the end a number of hostages were killed, some even nastily lynched: mainly gendarmes and priests, including the Archbishop of Paris. But this was done in the last desperate days, as Communard prisoners were being slaughtered by the army, and it was never officially sanctioned. As the writer and Commune member Jules Vallès put it, even in defeat they wanted to go down in history “unstained by the filth of the abattoir”. How many revolutionary leaders can say the same? Lenin’s conclusion was that they were fools who were defeated because their “excessive magnanimity” held them back from the “implacable extermination” of their class enemies —not a weakness he ever yielded to.

The Commune was doomed anyway. No government was going to permit that level of democracy. If the French army had not defeated it, the German army, which was still camped outside the city, would probably have done so. Or it might well have collapsed of its own accord: as one of its members lamented, they were really just “a talkative little parliament” and they were haemorrhaging support. As we have seen over and over again in history, most people sooner or later (and often sooner than later) want to get back to normal boring life.

But had the Communards anticipated Lenin’s retrospective advice, or followed the example of Robespierre’s Terror, the Commune would not have left the enigmatic but positive legacy it has — this wistful, always unfulfilled aspiration to true democracy.

There remains something profoundly moving in that aspiration; moving enough for me to make my annual journey up to Montmartre. For on the whole the Communards did their best, according to their lights, for democracy, for their city, and for their fellow citizens. They were people for whom Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were more inspiring than Censorship, Identity and Victimhood. In that sense, at least, their actions still resonate today.

Today, with most Western countries reverting to type and responding to jihadist terror with obscurantism and denial, it looks like far fewer people were Charlie than was actually claimed. Not so in France, though, which is more or less united behind President Macron’s decision to confront the country’s domestic Islamist movement. In one poll at the end of last year, a staggering 79% of French citizens agreed that “Islamism has declared war on the Republic”.

To his critics, Macron’s hard line was a cynical manoeuvre designed to reduce the electoral threat to his right posed by Marine Le Pen and National Rally. But such a claim ignores the threat that Islamism does pose to France. It is also to misread who is directing the country’s conversation on extremism. For the truth is that the impetus behind France’s skirmish with Islamism doesn’t come from the Right, but from the Left.

This shift did not happen overnight. Way back in 2002, the left-wing feminist collective Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives) was founded following a series of high-profile organised gang rapes known as tournantes – or “pass-arounds”. They soon became vocal advocates against escalating misogyny and violence against women. But they were particularly concerned with the French authorities’ empowerment of Islamist and Salafist groups to tackle the social ills of drugs and crime, which to the feminists culminated in an Islamist culture of sexual repression, misogyny and extremism.

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This was famously attempted in the commune of Trappes, some 30km from Paris, where the Salafist community was enlisted to steer young members away from criminality and delinquency. One resident gushingly described how “mothers saw their children return to religious practice. It was a relief.” By 2013, however, it became starkly clear that this experiment in activist Salafism had all but failed. Trappes was seized by religious rioting and the commune set an ignominious national record in sending 80 jihadist recruits to Syria. At the time, Ni Putes was denounced for being “Islamophobic”. But, if anything, the riots acted as a vindication of their warning.

Yet Ni Putes was hardly an isolated example, a fringe outlier on the peripheries of French debate. In the same year as its launch, a collection of essays titled Les Territoires Perdus de la Republique, or The Lost Territories of the Republic, was published, which warned of rising antisemitism and radicalisation among second and third generation Muslims. In the book, a number of schoolteachers – those tasked not just with imparting knowledge, but the values of the Republic – pointed out that classrooms were disintegrating along ethnic and religious lines, that the ideals of secularism and universalism were facing an unprecedented challenge.

That isn’t to say that the teachers’ sense of urgency — or that of Ni Putes — was widely shared on the Left, or even the centre. In fact, as late as 2014, national discussion surrounding Islamism was still, to an extent, plagued by cringe-inducing naivety. In April of that year, journalist David Thomson appeared on a typically French news programme to assess the steady exodus of jihadist recruits to ISIS’s nightmarish project in Iraq and Syria. Thomson, who by this point had interviewed dozens of French jihadis, calmly explained that that French jihadis see France as a legitimate target, as an “enemy of Allah”.

For this now painfully obvious insight, Thomson was humiliated on national television. Facing the indignation of seven panellists and a presenter, the journalist – barely allowed to finish a sentence – was accused of “populism” and “stigmatising” French Muslims, while other guests drew comparisons between ISIS recruits and the anti-fascist volunteers of the Spanish Civil War. Of course, France was a target. And an honest attempt to understand Islamism and its militant jihadi offshoots would have made this clear. As one anonymous imprisoned jihadi made clear recently: “France is a symbol, an enemy. If you can push it into a civil war, if you’re able to make France lose its strength, its social contract, then you will have an open door to a victory in Europe.”

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It wasn’t long before Thomson’s every word proved correct: just one month later, a Frenchman fresh from the Syrian jihad, Mehdi Nemmouche, gunned down four people at the Jewish Museum of Brussels. Later, between the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the assassination of Father Jacques Hamel in July 2016, jihadists would kill a total of 239 people in France. Thomson, for his troubles, ended up on a jihadi kill-list and went into hiding.

For much of the French centre and liberal-left, afflicted by what Thomson labelled “jihadoscepticism”, the attacks proved a rude awakening. In particular, the shootings at Charlie Hebdo’s offices struck at the core of the French Left’s secular, anti-clerical values. (Despite the British media’s portrayals of the magazine as Islamophobic and racist, it sits firmly within the traditions of the Left.)

Since then, every section of French political society has woken up to the threat of Islamism. Just as with Ni Putes’s vindication, one of the contributors to The Lost Territories, a history teacher named Iannis Roder, has found himself exonerated and thrust into the public eye. The decision to invite him to deliver a Ted Talk in 2017 signalled his total rehabilitation by the liberal professional classes. To this day, Roder still challenges the escalation of classroom “separatism” through an influential left-leaning think tank, Fondation Jean-Jaurès.

More significantly, a raft of left-wing commentators and politicians have stepped into the rhetorical and ideological territory carved out by Ni Putes and others. Then Prime Minister Manuel Valls adopted a firmer stance than his fellow socialists on security, secularism and Islamism, though he paid for it electorally. Journalist Caroline Fourest and Marianne magazine, firmly of the Left, became fierce and fearless public advocates against Islamism, while prominent socialist voices such as Gilles Clavreul and Laurent Bouvet offer full-throated criticism of the far-left’s indulgence of it.

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Even the academics have got on board. Echoing the explosive 2002 essay collection, leading scholar Bernard Rougier published Les Territoires Conquis d’Islamisme, or The Territories Conquered by Islamism, detailing the growth of Islamist movements of France – and, more importantly, where Islamists have become the de facto local authorities. Soon, long-held truisms about the socioeconomic causes of radicalisation were subjected to rigorous questioning, exemplified in the work of Hugo Micheron. Why, for instance, does Trappes hold the record for jihadist foreign fighters but a neighbouring commune with the same socioeconomic profile account for zero? What made the tiny affluent Southern town of Lunel “the capital of French jihad”, but Marseille, a big city with its own share of social ills, immune to the lure of extremism?

Crucially, all of these developments have taken place in the mainstream. A culture of public intellectualism sees those such as Roder, Thomson, Fourest, Rougier and Micheron on TV shows and in newspapers in a way that their British colleagues might only find themselves in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. It’s a refreshing reminder that the West’s understanding of Islamism doesn’t have to be hampered by political tribalism: for the Left in Britain, the cause is Western foreign policy; for the average liberal-minded academic, it’s economic and social marginalisation; while for the far-right and certain sections of the Right, Islam is to blame.

In recent years in France, though, the centre-left has shed this deadweight and articulated arguments against Islamism and for the values of the Republic. Yes, the far-left remains obsessed with “anti-imperialism” and identity politics. But there can be no doubt that those not on the fringes now focus on the political dimensions of Islamism, without implicating ordinary French Muslims in the manner of the far-right.

That is particularly important, as few things have boosted the Western far-right like the perception that the establishment is unwilling to confront the thorny issues of the day. Yet in France – and perhaps there is a lesson in this for us in Britain – the Left and the centre are pulling the rug from beneath the far-right’s feet. It follows that the former darling of centrist liberals, Emmanuel Macron, has been on the very same intellectual journey. The only question for France remains whether or not this is too little, too late.

The great M and S Post-Brexit sandwich famine of 2021. Sign in the Marks and Spencer at Porte Maillot in Paris today. "Because of new govt regulations on trade between the UK and France , we received no shipments from the UK today." pic.twitter.com/3ngJpR7O50

— John Lichfield (@john_lichfield) January 4, 2021

Within a few minutes, my timeline was filled with wails of despair from British expats in Paris — and also from many Parisians. This is taking Brexit too far, they protested. Who cares if Paris is the world’s self-appointed culinary capital (when the restaurants are open at least)? How can we be expected to survive without daily supplies of bacon, lettuce and tomato or egg mayonnaise sandwiches? Or crumpets? Or scones? Or chicken tikka massala? Or Wiltshire sausages? Or strawberry trifle?

Four days later, food shipments to the Marks and Spencer outlets in Paris — and Lille and Dublin and Prague – have still not been fully restored. The M&S franchised food store at Porte Maillot in western Paris has been reduced to filling its refrigerated cabinets with cut-price bunches of kale. Shades of the Soviet Union circa 1974. Other stores have closed temporarily.

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The Spectator and the Daily Express have tee-heed about Brexit-related “food shortages in France”. Here is proof, they suggest mischieviously, that Brexit is a problem for the French and for the rest of the EU, not for the UK.

Well, not really. France, as far as I can establish, is not facing starvation. There is plenty of camembert and paté de foie and boeuf bourguignon to go around. Only a tiny percentage of French people, and a few thousand British migrants, are concerned by the prospect of a collapse in the easy availability of British food delicacies in a few French cities.

The problems for M&S are in fact a microcosm of wider problems for UK PLC as it struggles to adjust to a new, less open relationship with its biggest, and nearest, trading partner.

M&S has 21 small, franchised food outlets in France, including 19 in the Paris area. Until the New Year truck-loads of goodies from the company’s main depot in Northampton could roll into France each day as easily as they could roll into Lancashire or Cornwall. No longer. Since January 1^st, daily supplies from Britain have been halted, while the company gets its head around the 1,200-page, post-Brexit trade deal.

Food exports are still allowed tariff-free into the EU under the last-minute deal struck by Britain and Brussels. But they now have to meet EU food standards. And prove it. They must pay tariffs if they contain ingredients imported from non-EU countries. Each product in each consignment must travel with the relevant documents. These are not new rules to punish Britain. They are the standard rules for access to the European single market that Britain helped to build in the late 1980s and has decided to abandon.

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Should M&S not have prepared for this event many months ago? Possibly. In November the company announced that it had “invested in technology to track goods and meet new customs and certification requirements that will come into effect in January”. But the precise terms on which Britain would leave the European single market were unclear until details of the deal were published on 26 December — five days before the change.

The company now says that it is “transitioning to the new processes”:

“It is taking a little longer for some of our products to reach stores, but we are working with our partners, suppliers and relevant Government agencies and local authorities to quickly improve this.”

M&S tell me that they hope, eventually, to restore the full range of supplies to their franchised stores in France and other EU countries. French officials suggest that this process may not be so easy. Lagardère, parent company of the firm that franchises M&S food in France, says that the disruption could continue until the end of January. There is a possibility that some of the sandwiches beloved of French office workers (cheese and ploughman’s pickle, prawn and avocado) may permanently fall foul of EU rules on the importation of fresh produce. So might some British processed meats such as sausages.

Do not the French have sausages, you ask? An expat (me) writes: “Yes. Some are quite good. But they’re not the same as British bangers.”

There is already a long and complex history between M&S and France — an unlikely love affair, punctuated by frequent misunderstandings. The retailer opened its first Paris store in 1975. For a while M&S — there were 18 large stores across France at one stage — became a successful ambassador for the British way of life and underwear. Princess Grace of Monaco shopped at the flagship Boulevard Haussmann store, opposite Galerie Lafayette. She was reported as saying that she went there to buy stock for her charity jumble sales. Not everyone believed her.

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When that first store opened in Paris, M&S saw no reason to supply French translations for its produce. The staff that worked there advised London HQ that Parisians were buying packets of dried flowers and using them as herbal teas, with disappointing results. Translations were provided. Pots of M&S branded marmalade arrived with labels which declared that they were sans préservatifs, which means in French “without condoms”.*

More recently, there has been another cross-Channel linguistic faux-pas which has not yet been corrected. M&S “mini-bites” — small chocolate rolls or flap-jacks — are rightly popular in France, as they are in Britain. The labels never fail to produce hilarity among young French people. “Une bite” in French is slang for a penis. So a “mini-bite” is…

M&S profits in France nose-dived in the late 1990s, partly because the pound sterling was very high against the franc, partly because the store faced competition from other brands like Gap. British fashion sense — all the rage for a while — failed to keep up with French expectations. As Les Echos, the French equivalent of the Financial Times put it in 2001: “Design and buying was concentrated in London … In the last few years English green and mauve has no longer excited  people.” Françoise, a 35-year-old Parisienne told the newspaper: “Their women’s clothes are comfortable but not very elegant. They are … irretrievably English.”

M&S closed its French stores abruptly in 2001, firing its staff by e-mail, causing a cross-Channel diplomatic incident. Soon afterwards, a friend overheard the following conversation between two mothers in a Parisian playground:

Maman Numéro Un: “Isn’t it terrible about Marks & Spencer? Last Christmas, I bought these bizarre things there… You pull them at either end, they explode and everyone has a present to put by their plate.”

Maman Numéro Deux (amazed): “Only the English could think of something like that.”

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Ten years later M&S opened a new store mostly for men’s and women’s clothes on the Champs Elysées, ignoring advice from experts (including myself) that the 21st century French adored M&S food but not M&S clothes.

The clothes departments were frequently empty. A small food section at the back was besieged by office-workers and ransacked daily. Within five years, the shop closed.

The newspaper, Le Parisien, reported that the Champs Elysées store (opposite the flagship store of the luxury brand LVMH) had been visited mostly for its haricots à la sauce tomate (baked beans), or its viande aux œufs (scotch eggs) which “are fine representatives of gastronomy across the Channel.” Lucie, 22, told the newsaper: “I come often but only for the food … They have wonderful stuff to serve with aperitifs or brunch, crackers and little sausages.”

Soon afterwards M&S, finally seeing the light. sponsored a series of small, franchised food stores in railway stations, airports and shopping centres. They have been very successful.

The third French coming of M&S is now threatened. Brexit was supposed to bring the apotheosis of a new Global Britain. Maybe, one day, it will. But one of its first achievements may be the eviction of the British Sausage from France. Maybe, even the mini-bite.

Quel dommage.

* My source for both these stories was one of the original store managers, interviewed for The Independent in 2001.

Luckily, The Wedding at Cana by Veronese could be rolled around a cylinder. So could Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. But Delacroix’s Crusaders, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and all the Rubenses were too fragile and had to be hauled away on a special open truck made to transport the set designs and murals of France’s state theatre company, the Comédie Française. The Raft of the Medusa, weighing nearly one and a half tons, stood in the open-air truck covered only by a giant blanket.

Masterpieces were categorised in order of importance: a yellow circle for very valuable ones, a green circle for major artworks and a red circle for world treasures. The white case containing the Mona Lisa was marked with three red circles. In a letter to the curator who was in charge of travelling with the painting also known in France as La Joconde — and who did not yet know the full burden of his responsibility — Jaujard broke the news by telling him: “Old friend, your convoy will be made of eight trucks. I have to tell you that the Chenu truck which will be departing from 5 rue de la Terrasse, with the plate number 2162RM2, contains a case with the letters MN written in black. It is the Mona Lisa.” Leonardo da Vinci’s finest work was travelling in an ambulance specially fitted with elastic-rubber-sprung suspension.

A convoy of 203 vehicles transporting 1,862 wooden cases set out one morning in late August to eleven castles in France — where they would wait, anonymous and secure, for what would come. Grand châteaux on the Loire, such as Chambord and Cheverny, were used, but Jaujard also requisitioned more inconspicuous and privately-owned estates conveniently ‘lost’ in the French countryside, far from any strategic locations. Every convoy had a curator and staff attached to it. Their mission: to look after the art collections in their new homes for as long as was necessary. Whole families were displaced and relocated. For those dedicated museum employees, it was an adventure that would last more than five years.

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Did they ever ask themselves what the world treasures they were guarding with their lives were worth? The most expensive painting ever sold at auction, Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was bought for $450 million in 2017. What would the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, be worth if France sold it? A rhetorical question? Not for French tech entrepreneur Stéphane Distinguin who estimates its value at €50 billion (£44.7 billion) and thinks the French State should sell it to fund post-Covid recovery. His thinking is as simplistic as his maths:

“As an entrepreneur and a taxpayer, I know that all the billions spent in the covid crisis are real and will necessarily cost us. An obvious idea is to sell off a valuable asset at the highest price possible, but one that is the least critical as possible to our future.”

Mr Distinguin is wrong on two counts. Even if sold for €50 billion, the Mona Lisa would offer only a brief financial respite from France’s huge post-Covid public debt. It would certainly not cover all the losses. Besides, to say that the Mona Lisa serves little purpose in our future is to be blind to the ageless, universal and immaterial quality of art.

This doesn’t mean of course that artists or cultural institutions can’t support war or pandemic efforts. After Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, died in March, his widow announced she would auction five original drawings estimated at €100,000 (£90,000) each to support health caregivers and French hospitals. The sale will be held in Paris on 26 May.

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Likewise, the Mobilier National, the office responsible for furnishing official buildings in France, which owns 130,000 precious rugs, ceramics, desks, chairs, chandeliers, said it would hold an auction on 20 and 21 September. For sale will be 100 art objects dating back to the 19th century — and of little heritage and historical value. All the proceeds will contribute to the national effort to support hospitals.

Those initiatives should be encouraged. However, to suggest that France should do away with its most precious and totemic possessions, simply because they are worth billions and could stopper a financial hole, is a step too far.

The Mona Lisa tells stories that keep people warm in moments of crisis or during national catastrophes. Its sheer existence — the fact it has survived hundreds of years of wars and tumult — helps us live through tough or strange times. It is not just a work of great beauty and a masterpiece from history’s most celebrated artist, it is also an inspiration. In fact, in the national imagination, certain inanimate objects such as the Mona Lisa take a life of their own. They are family.

The French take pride in knowing that it was a French King, François I — an artistic visionary and an intrepid young sovereign — who saw genius in Leonardo da Vinci. At the time, the Pope had abandoned the artist, and everybody in Florence was looking down on Da Vinci. France, a great patron of the arts, gave the old Leonardo a grandiose shelter to freely create in the 1510s, until his death in 1519.

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When I started writing my book Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950, I knew I had to start with the Mona Lisa, and how she escaped from the hands of the Nazis thanks to the brave and visionary Louvre director.

The Louvre finally reopened to the public on 10 July 1945. Its first post-war exhibition was called, simply, ‘Great Masterpieces’. Its collections repatriated from their hiding places, the French public realised that not one piece had been damaged, thanks to their saviour-in-chief, Jacques Jaujard, and the thousand anonymous keepers defended them. This was an emotional reunion.

So, too, had been the return of a well-wrapped-up acquaintance three weeks earlier. The photographer Pierre Jahan had been allowed to take pictures of a moment that would immediately travel the world and make headlines: the opening of a white poplar case marked with three red dots. Waterproof layers of protection were carefully removed, one by one, until the last one, a thin sheet of fire-retardant fabric woven from asbestos fibres, appeared. It was then torn open, revealing the face of the Mona Lisa. She had come home, finally.

When the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, reopens after Covid-19 is tamed at last — hopefully not in six years time as during the Second World War — many French visitors will no doubt feel emotional too. Those emotions are part of a nation’s history. They are priceless.