Both parties engaged in a campaign to mainstream this ideology, most recently through a rejection of the far-Right’s most infamous association — antisemitism. Faced by the Hamas attack on Israel, they have made a point of affirming their freedom from this taint: Marine Le Pen is one of a clutch of far-Right leaders denouncing Hamas, flatly stating that “the security of the Israeli people is non-negotiable”. Zemmour, himself Jewish, took part in a march in Paris in solidarity with Israel on 12 October. Indeed, it has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical Left group La France Insoumise, whose ambiguity over the attacks has attracted the most criticism. The French Prime Minister, Elizabeth Borne, whose father survived Auschwitz, called Mélenchon’s stance “revolting”.

However, excising old hatreds is just one part of this new wind which is reshaping French politics. For a start, there is no contradiction between the youth of its leaders and their beliefs, with over 40% of 18-34-year-olds voting Le Pen in the second round of the last presidential election. To be in these posts is doubtless a vast responsibility for a young man and woman with no experience of international relationships or of government beyond local level. Yet, as activists since their teens, they act with the swagger of revolutionaries, dedicated to a radical politics built on Euroscepticism, national sovereignty, minimal immigration, strengthened families, raising Europe’s declining birth rate, and the regeneration of the Christian faith. It is a direct challenge to liberal politics of every stripe, at a time when liberalism itself is under several kinds of attack.

They have a better than even chance of success, with a combined third of the country polling for both parties in the lead up to next year’s European elections, ahead of the Left alliance and Macron’s own party. And if they achieve any elected office, they will transform more than France. They will destroy a Franco-German geopolitical engine, fuelled by constant pro-EU leadership in both states, which has kept the European Union together for decades, and without which most EU officials believe it will sputter and fail. But though they have this ambition in common, Maréchal and Bardella are near-opposites in constitution and character. Between them, they capture two faces of this new politics, and explain how it has managed to attract such a large section of French society.

Marion Maréchal is, in the world of fringe politics, the establishment candidate, brought up within the wealthy Le Pen family. Her grandfather is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who originally founded the Front National but is now 95 and only occasionally heard from. For some years Maréchal took his name and her adoptive father, Samuel Maréchal (married to Yann Le Pen, who has taken no part in her family’s politics), was leader of the National Youth movement. At the age of two, she was already appearing with Jean-Marie in election posters.

She joined the RN, successor to Front National, at 18, and became the youngest member of the French National Assembly at 22. At around this time, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie and Maréchal‘s aunt, inherited the party from her father, and set about trying to rid it of his obsessive antisemitism and white supremacism, while retaining its core nationalist and anti-immigrant positions. In November last year, she passed over the leadership of the RN to her protégé, Bardella, taking for herself the leadership of the much-enlarged party in the Assembly, with the intention of standing once more for the presidency in 2027.

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Bardella’s youth was nothing like Maréchal’s — aside from his passion for far-Right politics. He was born to a family of part-Italian origin and grew up on a social housing estate in Drancy, a north-eastern suburb of Paris. He joined what was still the Front National at 16, saying he was inspired by Marine Le Pen, and became a regional secretary at 19, before launching a group called “Patriotic Suburbs”, aimed at reaching out to voters “in the forgotten territories of the Republic”. He would go on to be part of Le Pen’s 2017 presidential campaign and thereafter, supported by her, was raised through the ranks to the leadership.

In the course of that rise, he has learned how to enthuse his own supporters. I bore witness to his abilities when, at a Fête de la Nation in Le Havre on 1 May this year, he declared his party had the ability to govern France “tomorrow”, before he gestured for the audience to rise. Unbidden, they broke into a chorus of the Marseillaise. He continued in his speech, excoriating Macron — then at a low ebb in popularity — and at the end, they sang the Marseillaise again.

But he is also more than capable of taking the fight to his opponents. In August, Macron sought to regain the domestic initiative with a 12-hour discussion with all the party leaders, lasting until 3am. Bardella, in a near 15-minute exchange with the President, reportedly pressed him strongly for better security, stronger controls on migrants and a referendum on the public’s views on immigration — a demand which was met with a neutral response. Along with the other participants (though more politely than those from the Left contingent), he later expressed disappointment that the marathon deliberation had led nowhere.

This is typical of him and the modern RN: committed social conservatism and nationalism, but without the sulphur of Jean-Marie. Bardella doesn’t like same-sex marriage, but when in power, he says he would not ban it, nor tamper with more recent trans legislation. He would, however, refuse access to social services for illegal immigrants: like many in the working or lower-middle class everywhere, low wages and shortage of money have sharpened his eyes for diversion of public money into what are seen as underserving pockets. “My family,” he has said, “didn’t follow politics. If I’m active politically, it’s because I saw injustice very early social: at the end of the month, my mother didn’t have more than €15.”

Maréchal is cut from a different cloth — not just in birth and upbringing, but also in the way in which she has played the hand dealt to her. From the moment of her birth, she became a scion of a family which, uniquely among the far-Right parties of Europe, is a dynasty as well as a centre of activism and ideology. Her father Samuel was close to Jean-Marie, acting as his head of communication when the former leader was still in his prime in the Nineties and early 2000s and who, in his five attempts to win the presidency, positioned himself as the only politician who fully endorsed “a France of national patriotism” — a claim often spiced with derogatory comments about Jews.

Jean Marie led the Front National until he passed over the presidency to Marine in 2011, when Maréchal was 22. After her father separated from her mother in 2007, she remained close to her grandfather. A member of the RN, and a member of the Assembly in 2012 when it had few far-Right members, Maréchal joined the party’s executive board and was talked of as a future presidential candidate. But in 2018, after losing a regional election in the south of France, she retired from active politics and founded a college (the Institute of Social Sciences, Economics and Politics) in Lyon. From 2019, however, she was seen accompanying the well-known Right-wing journalist Éric Zemmour, who founded his party Reconquête as a direct competitor on the far-Right to RN. In 2022 — endorsed by Maréchal, who made her apostasy from the Le Pen family public — he came fourth in the first round of the presidential election.

The split with her aunt was a bitter one: resigning from the RN, she said that Le Pen had brought about “incessant ideological and programme changes… [which showed a] lack of logic and vision”. Le Pen, clearly distressed, said the decision was “brutal, violent and painful”. But this ideological split had been brewing for some time, a product of Marine Le Pen’s attempts to moderate her party. When she fired her father Jean-Marie from the party in 2015 — after he said the Holocaust gas chambers were a “detail” of history and that France should unite with Russia to save the “white world” — Maréchal did not follow her aunt’s lead, failing to condemn her grandfather.

Her social conservatism has more in common with her grandfather than her aunt. A strict Catholic (she has been on at least one pilgrimage, in 2018, from Notre Dame cathedral to Lourdes), she sees Islam as a dangerous opponent to her certain idea of France. She has said that, as a mother of two girls, “the prospect of them growing up tomorrow in a country where the veil and the abaya [a loose-fitting Middle-Eastern female dress] are a daily issue, a country that is shaped by the destruction wrought by riots, rapes, and gratuitous murders committed by illegal immigrants, is a prospect that makes me despair”. Marine Le Pen, who also warns constantly of the Islamist menace, would be unlikely to use such language.

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Yet while Maréchal emerges as someone determined to succeed in the far-Right political milieu, she has shown less consistency in pursuing her goal than Bardella, a trait which may mar her leadership. The young man from the Drancy housing estate has been rock-like in his attachment to Le Pen, a careful study and practitioner of stump rhetoric, with a self-confidence which allows him to happily battle the President of France. This will be an asset going forward — Marine Le Pen was demolished by Macron on economic issues in the presidential debate of 2017.

In her affection for her grandfather, her conservative Catholicism, and her alliance with Zemmour (who attributes France’s decline to feminism and egalitarianism, and has been convicted of incitement of hate against Muslims), Maréchal presents herself as on the harder, older Right than Bardella. He has worked diligently to be where he is now, and retains a sense of the unfairness of lower-class life, which neither Zemmour nor Maréchal appear to share. And his seriousness in political debate appears to have impressed Macron — who reportedly told aides that “he was the only one of the party [of opposition leaders] who understood what the exercise was about and who really worked on preparing for it”.

Yet for all the popularity and abilities of their protégés, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have made a gamble in promoting them. Firstly, because these bright young things will likely still struggle to do as well as their elders expect; and secondly, because, for all their rhetorical and political strengths, they remain short of experience at the head of a sustained and brutal political battle. Their calibre will be tested next June, in the European elections: after which, should they survive at the top, they will meet an ordeal by fire in the presidential elections. Still, youth will have its fling, as the song from The Mikado goes — and, whether or not they make it to the top, this particular dalliance promises to shake Europe in the years to come.

At a political rally in the Normandy port town of Le Havre, an elderly man with flowing white hair and beard waves a tricolour gently in my face. On it is written “Ni Fascio, ni BoBo [bourgeois bohemian, akin to radical chic], mais Patriot”. It’s a neat triangulation, intended to paint his party, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, as the sensible, “love-my-country” alternative to mainstream politics. Less subtle are the party T-shirts worn by the RN Jeunesse (members under 30), which bark the slogan: “Nous n’avons pas fini d’etre Francais!” Rassemblement are on the march, spurred by the collapse in President Macron’s domestic authority after his pension reform devolved into a festival of protest and violence. They believe that, after decades spent as political outsiders, they can lead the next French government.

The challenge posed by the European New Right is now too insistent to ignore. In the last year, it has won an election in Italy and joined a government in Sweden. Alongside the established administrations in Poland and Hungary, which share its stances on immigration, globalisation and social morality, a new bloc of national dissent inside the European Union is emerging. It would be greatly augmented if Marine Le Pen, the architect of the modern Rassemblement and its co-leader, wins the presidential election in 2027. And she is leading recent polls.

Le Pen has long understood that she can only win if she can present the party as cleansed of extremism, racism and, above all, antisemitism. Performative sanitisation has been the project of her leadership since 2011. And that included clearing out her father, Jean-Marie, now 94, and changing the party name associated with him (Front National) in 2018. When Jean-Marie reached the second, decisive round of the presidential in 2002 against the centre-Right Jacques Chirac, the 82% who re-elected Chirac — including many on the Left — repeated (with scorn) the slogan: “Better to vote for a crook than a fascist!” Jean-Marie was certainly something like a fascist, and harboured a pronounced hatred of Jews. When he referred to the Holocaust as “a detail”, his daughter finally threw him out of the party. Since then, it has reached the cusp of power — two presidential final round contests against Emmanuel Macron, in which it increased its vote from 33.9% in 2017 to 41.5% in 2022.

Last Monday, Rassemblement choreographed the rally in Le Havre to toast its opponent’s misfortune. The event was a Mayday Fête de la Nation, involving 1,500 party members drawn from across France. Hosted in a large modern hall overlooking the harbour, and seated at long tables radiating out from a central stage, the party faithful were treated to a leisurely lunch of duck terrine, and glasses of kir and red wines. The real treat, however, came in the form of two speeches by the party’s joint-leaders who encapsulate its cross-generational appeal — 53-year-old Marine Le Pen and 27-year-old Jordan Bardella. Having joined the party at 16, Bardella is a political prodigy and protégé of Le Pen. Aged just 19, he became the party’s local secretary for the département Seine-Saint-Denis, a poor suburb north of Paris that is important for Rassemblement because of its long association with the working-class Left. He is now President of the party, while Le Pen leads its 89 parliamentary deputies in the Assemblée Nationale.

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Bardella followed Le Pen onto the stage as the lunch was ending, and roused the audience into an enthusiastic peal of applause and vigorous flag-waving (each table was issued with a stack of petites tricoloures). “La politique,” Le Pen began, “est un acte d’amour”: and love was the focus of her speech, love of her nation’s villages, of its people, of France itself, and above all of its sovereignty, of its freedom to be what it has ever been, “grande et belle”. Yet, in a more melancholy register, she articulated the catastrophes which had befallen it: “chaos become endemic, an atmosphere of exhaustion, of violence rising up from nowhere”. Her solutions: ending the flow of migrants, preserving the ecology of France through an end to globalisation, and conquering the subtle enemy within, “wokeisme”, which threatened “the end of thousands of years of history and of culture”.

Bardella, as fluent and passionate as his patronne — to whom, in his first public speech as party president, he made both a verbal and a physical bow — was given the glad duty of a frontal attack on Macron. This avatar of a failed liberalism, Bardella said, was responsible for the suffering of the French, for the crumbling of public services, for the degradation of France’s history. Imagine, he begged his audience — their repast complete, now waving their tricolours almost without pause — a country “where every Frenchman and French woman were living under the same flag, the same language, the same culture”. As his voice rose in fervour, he gestured for the audience to rise, and they did, breaking into the Marseillaise — “Allons, enfants de la Patrie!”

Rassemblement is now substantially in tune with French public opinion on Left and Right. The daily Figaro, on the centre-Right, carried an editorial the day before the Fête which remarked that “the polls show that the French are no longer listening to the government”, adding that, after she failed to push Macron’s pension reform through parliament, “the Prime Minister [Élisabeth Borne] and the President are no longer on the same wavelength”. Le Monde, which leans Left and has a habit of quoting liberal intellectuals, hosted the historian Pierre Rosanvallon, who saw a population “united by being held in contempt” (by Macron), and said the French are reminding him: “We are there, we exist, you can’t make us shut up.” And Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose political career took him to the top of the IMF (from which a sex scandal ejected him), has said that Macron’s mistake was to push for an extension of the working life at a time when the French had other problems. The general sense in the French public sphere is that raising the pension age might be a good idea, but now is not the time to do it.

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The combined Left, quarrelsomely united under the umbrella organisation La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and led by the 71-year-old radical socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also sees the turbulence as an opportunity for political transformation. Speaking in Paris at a Mayday demonstration, Mélenchon shouted that, “We have had no master since 1789 but the people themselves … The solemn appeal I bring to you is: ‘Never give up!’ Nothing, never. The struggle continues.” A little way away, before Paris’s city hall, a prominent young Insoumise deputy, Antoine Léaument, was giving the media what they craved: a direct call to a revolution. “We must nourish the flame of this kind of revolutionary moment, right up to July 14th (Bastille day).” Mélenchon also mentioned the talismanic date, on which, Léaument believes, the world will be turned upside down, and witness “a great coming together of social revolt … Our sole limit will be an attack on the physical integrity of individuals.”

At the same time, on a stage 200 kilometres away, Bardella was claiming the votes of the workers for Rassemblement, calling Mélenchon “the past” and curtly dismissing the Left as “irresponsible, with no plan for France”.  And, though over 50% of France now votes for the hard Left or the hard Right, Insoumise is wracked by internal disputes. L’Express magazine recently carried a poll which showed that Mélenchon himself was substantially less popular than a likely challenger, the 47-year-old journalist and Insoumise deputy for La Somme, François Ruffin. With such dissent, Mélenchon’s momentum and command seem unstable, and any leadership struggle will only benefit Le Pen.

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When Bardella and Le Pen descended from the stage, signalling the closing of the Fête, they could barely move for half an hour, besieged by autograph-seekers, selfie-snappers and endless handshakes. Every so often, before departing the hall, groups would strike up chants of “Marine President, Marine President!” The speeches were a reminder that the purpose of this party is not merely to move a little to the Left or to the Right while preserving the same social order, but to bring that order to a close.

The uncompromising and emotive patriotism of  Le Pen and Bardella encases a nationalist politics against which Macron has fought through all of his first five presidential years. But, as his internationalist project has faltered, he has had to reckon with the ardent attachment of many French towards the Patrie of which they are enfants — and not the borderless European Union which he has seemed to prioritise. Rassemblement have bet that the French people will reject his cosmopolitanism outright — and, more crucially, that they will judge the party sufficiently cleansed of its fascist taint for it to govern.

The facts are appalling. They are grindingly familiar and disturbingly novel – a collision between the murderous certainties of fundamentalist Islam; a well-meaning school lecture; and the mendacious, conflagratory power of the internet. On October 6, Mr Paty, 47, a much-liked history and geography teacher in a dull Paris suburb, produced for his middle school civics class a pair of the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed which provoked the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine five years ago.

How can publishing such cartoons be justified, he asked the teenagers, if they offend people of the Islamic faith? Where does the freedom of expression end and respect for others’ feelings begin?

These questions are not easy, Mr Paty explained. That is why fundamental principles exist in democratic states such as France to help people of different faiths and opinions to get along without murdering one another (as they have in not-so-distant parts of French history). The complexities are the lesson. But this lesson cost Mr Paty his life. Ten days later he was dead – decapitated by a 19-year-old Chechen refugee to France as he walked home from school.

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One of the pupils, a 13-year-old Muslim girl, had given her father a misleadingly lurid account of the lesson – from which she was absent. The father, with the help of a radical imam, started a campaign on the internet to have the teacher sacked. The lesson – or a false and inflammatory account of the lesson – became a cause celèbre on radical Islamic sites on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Parents at the school received as many as 10 messages day, some from Algeria and other Islamic countries, calling Mr Paty a “criminal”, a “thug” and a “paedophile” and demanding that he should be sacked.

The murderer, Abdullakh Anzorov, was a Chechen Muslim, born in Moscow 19 years ago. He did not know Mr Paty or the school. He lived in Evreux in Normandy, 60 miles away.  It is likely — but not certain — that he acted alone, enraged by the lies that he had read on the web.

Anzorov followed Mr Paty as he left the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, north west of Paris last Friday evening. He attacked him with a 12-inch butcher’s knife, stabbing him in the arms and abdomen and then beheading him. Anzorov was shot dead by police a few minutes later.

Twelve people have been arrested, including his father, grandfather and brother and the parent and imam (apparently unknown to Anzorov) who started the hysterical hue and cry online.

I happen to know Conflans-Saint Honorine. I used to go to a Lycée close to the Collège du Bois d’Aulne to talk to their English classes about journalism, football, France and Britain. Conflans is not the sort of the troubled inner Paris suburb where poverty and crime is rampant. It is a pretty village now encased in a concrete commuter belt for the modestly well-off of several different origins and  religions. The kids I met there were always polite and curious.

A large, shocked crowd of pupils, parents and other well-wishers which gathered outside the school on Saturday included many Muslims. “Something like this, here? It’s unthinkable,” said Brahim, a local man who is running a campaign to build a mosque (without any opposition).

In the grim litany of islamist terror attacks in France in recent years, the killing of one teacher may seem relatively unimportant. It will soon be the five-year anniversary of the Bataclan and associated attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 which killed 130 people. Nine months earlier, in February 2015, 17 people died in the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket – for which 12 alleged associates of the terrorists are currently on trial.

But forget the numbers. Mr Paty’s lone murder has struck a raw and angry nerve in France – and not just because of the appalling manner of his death. Tens of thousands of people turned out to mourn and honour the teacher in demonstrations in Paris and other French cities on Sunday.

Secularism is France’s state religion, the soil in which French democracy grows. The state guarantees a freedom to believe, and a freedom not to believe. It must otherwise be neutral on all religious questions. Teachers in state schools, though poorly paid and often criticised, are regarded as a front-line infantry, or secular priesthood, which passes on these Republican values of tolerance, freedom of expression and secularism to new generations.

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The fact that Mr Paty was brutally murdered precisely for trying to explain these principles has made him into a kind of Republican martyr. There is talk of him being buried in the Panthéon, the secular cathedral on the Paris left bank which is the last resting place of great French men and women.

Mr Paty, though, was not the only target of last Friday’s attack. Anzorov also left a garbled message for the President, posted moments after the murder: “To Macron, leader of the infidels, I have executed one of your dogs of hell…Calm down others like him or we will inflict on you a severe punishment.”

This was obviously influenced by the furious response in parts of the Islamic world to a speech Macron had given in Les Mureaux two weeks ago. Les Mureaux is a more troubled, multi-racial, outer suburb of Paris in the Seine valley 20 kilometres west of Conflans. In the speech, the President proposed new action to prevent French Muslims from becoming a separate community who give their allegiance wholly to the Koran rather than French laws or values.

He promised a law on “secularity and liberty” to combat extremist Islamist indoctrination by forbidding the teaching of children at home after the age of three and by ending the “importation” of foreign-financed imams. Mosques will be placed under greater surveillance. State funding will be available to mosques which sign a charter on secularism and democracy.

Macron rejected calls to ban or restrict French Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public. He recognised that many of France’s Muslims had been let down by successive governments. He admitted that France had created its own social and economic “separatism” by dumping poorer people in suburban ghettoes with poor housing and few jobs.

The speech was – with some quibbles — generally well-received by moderate Muslim organisations in France. It produced a storm of fury amid more radical French Muslim groups and some governments of Islamic countries, including the Chechen one. It was also savaged by some successful and well-integrated Muslims in other European countries, including Britain. They accused Macron, inter alia, of racism, insulting Muslims and trying to create a “caliphate” or “French Islam”.

Macron wants to centralise Islam with state approved imams, institutions, and texts. If he succeeds, it would make France the rightful heir to the Ottoman Empire and the first Caliphate in western Europe. He will succeed where the Muslim Brotherhood failed. I'm living for it tbh

— Mehreen Khan (@MehreenKhn) October 2, 2020

Much of this criticism was rooted in ignorance of French history and the principle of state secularism. France is not a ‘Catholic country’ but the state owns all the churches and rents them to ‘The Church’. Creating a similar system of state aid to support a moderate Islam with a French accent does not, in that context, seem so outlandish.

France has, proportionally, the largest Muslim population in Europe – between five and six million, or just under tenth of its people. Many – probably as many as a half – are non-practising. The great majority are law-abiding and accept the primacy of national laws. But there has been a shift in the last 20 years, even among moderate muslims, towards a more overt expression of their faith and sense of Islamic identity.

There has also been a rise in home-grown Islamist terrorism. Most of the atrocities committed in the name of Islam in France in recent years — from the attack on the jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, to the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacking in 2015 and the Nice truck attack in July 2016 — have involved French-born or long-term French domiciled Muslims.

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Macron’s speech, clumsily worded in places, offered no snap solution. It offered a long-term strategy to create a barrier between the majority of the French Muslim population and a minority of extremists. This approach has been attacked, in the wake of Paty’s murder, by the Right and Far Right in France as a feeble response to the Islamist threat. Marine Le Pen of Rassemblement National called for a “real war against the poison of radical Islam…a real war to eradicate it finally”. Bruno Retailleau of the centre right Les Républicains said that “Islamism” must be “thrown out of the country by force”.

These are largely meaningless words. What sort of force exactly? What kind of real war? Most of France’s muslims are French and French born. They are not going anywhere. Any violent attempt to isolate an extremist but often submerged minority could prove disastrous.

The attitude of some Muslim intellectuals is equally obtuse. Their criticism of Macron’s speech seemed to float in a moral  vacuum in which events like the Bataclan or 9/11 or Manchester Arena for that matter – never occurred. Anti-muslim feeling exists in France — and did so before radical terrorism. But to minimise Islamist violence, and dismiss all attempts to contain it, as products of  endemic, European  “Islamophobia” is disingenuous or dishonest. A section of the French Left – certainly not all – has also been complicit in this intellectual dishonesty.

Some supposedly moderate Muslims reacted to the attack by blaming France and the French culture of free speech. Roshan Salih, editor of the British muslim news site Five Pillars, tweeted on Saturday: “Charlie Hebdo must be shut down immediately by French authorities. This racist, Islamophobic rag is causing community relations to completely break down with its repeated provocations.”

#CharlieHebdo must be shut down immediately by French authorities. This racist, Islamophobic rag is causing community relations to completely break down with its repeated provocations. They are literally crying fire in a crowded theatre. Freedom of speech isn't worth civil war.

— Roshan M Salih (@RmSalih) October 17, 2020

Salih and others say that Charlie Hebdo is clearly “islamophobic” because it would never similarly attack the Catholic church. Oh no? The magazine once published a front page cartoon in which the Bible, the Torah and the Koran were shown as giant toilet rolls. Charlie Hebdo is religiophobic. It is also frequently crude and unfunny — and in French law and according to the French cultural tradition, it has the right to be so.

Macron’s long game to remove the extremist influence from Islam in France isn’t without its flaws. But if not this approach, then what? Separating the great majority of moderate, hard-working, law-abiding French Muslims from the violent, anti-western propaganda of the extreme is in their interests. Their lives are already complicated by every Islamist atrocity. They would suffer most from the kind of ill-formulated civil war that Ms Le Pen contemplates.

There are reasons for hope, however. Extremist anti-western Islam has tried to foment retaliatory violence against the Muslim community — and thereby push more of them towards their own destructive misreading of Islam. Overall, that strategy has failed. The radical strategy was also to bring to power in France, and other western countries, a generation of hard-line politicians who would pursue anti-Muslim policies — not just anti-terrorism policies. That has not happened yet either.

But simple-sounding responses and explanations, whether offered by French politicians or by radical Muslim intellectuals, are not the solution. They are part of the problem. We should heed Mr Paty’s lecture to the 13 and 14-year-olds of Collège du Bois d’Aulne at Conflans-Saint Honorine.We should cling to the principles of tolerance and freedom which western societies have evolved from their own dark centuries of intolerance and violence. The principles are often muddled and confusing. But that is the lesson. Complexity is the lesson.

There have been many rounds of “father vs daughter” battles — culminating in Jean-Marie’s expulsion from his far-right political party, and family business, five years ago.

There is a personal and political rivalry, still unresolved, between Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion.

Now the clan that has dominated the far-right of French politics for the past half-century has developed a potential, new split — between Marine, the party president, and her vice-president and former romantic partner, Louis Aliot.

Aliot, 50, was the twice-divorced Marine’s lover for a decade until they separated last year. Last month, he scored an impressive victory in the French local elections.

Already a member of parliament for the Rassemblement National (né Front National), he became mayor of Perpignan in the southwest, the biggest French town to fall to the far right in 25 years.

“This was a great victory, a game changer,” Marine, the RN president, said. Her party had defeated, she pointed out, a second-round “Republican alliance” of all the local parties, both left and right.

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Well, not quite.

Aliot, the party’s number two, did not run as a Rassemblement National candidate. He ran as the leader of a hard-right alliance, including the RN.

Although he remains officially a fervent “Mariniste” he refused to invite her to a single campaign meeting. He ran on a different message — avowedly right-wing, rather than the RN’s official mantra of  “neither left nor right”.

His campaign was heavily influenced by Robert Menard, the hard-right but not RN, mayor of a nearby town, Béziers, who has split publicly with Marine Le Pen in the past three years. Menard joined Aliot at campaign meetings. Marine was kept away.

Some party insiders insist that Aliot is politically loyal, and suggest that he lacks the energy, skills or inclination to become a political rival. “He is not a very active man. As vice president of the party, he has been almost invisible. Being mayor of Perpignan will be more than enough to keep him busy,” one senior party member said.

Other RN insiders worry all the same about the informal alliance between Aliot and Menard, which threatens to widen an ideological split in the Rassemblement National between its southern and northern tribes.

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Menard is a left-wing journalist turned far-right politician who has built a power base in Béziers in the past six years. Since 2017, he has been campaigning openly for a new post-Le Pen leadership of the French nationalist-populist, anti-muslim, anti-European right.

He told French TV viewers recently that there was no prospect of Marine Le Pen winning the 2022 presidential election — despite the unpopularity of President Emmanuel Macron; despite the deep post-Covid economic recession which threatens France this year and next.

Menard, re-elected easily in the first round of this year’s local elections, said that a repeat Macron vs Le Pen second round in May 2022 was “Macron’s insurance policy that he will win a second term”.

“That statement confronts the Rassemblement National with two problems”, says a senior party official. “First, Menard has been campaigning with Louis Aliot in Perpignan. Secondly, Menard is saying publicly what many people inside the party think privately. Marine can’t win in 2022.”

Outside France, commentators often assume — with fear or with fond hope — that Macron’s troubles may bring the far right to power in France in two years’ time. The opinion polls — though long-range and unreliable — suggest that Menard is right. Marine Le Pen has made up some ground since 2017 but is still a long way off.

She lost in the second round three years ago by 66% to 34%. A recent IFOP poll suggested that Macron and Le Pen would once again reach the two candidate run-off in 2022 and that the President would be re-elected comfortably but less crushingly than last time – by 55% to 45%. Another put the gap even wider, at 61-39.

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Emmanuel Macron's alienating ambition

By anne-elisabeth moutet

The results of last month’s local elections — three town halls won, two lost — were also disappointing for the RN. They had originally targeted 50 towns.

Why, Marine’s critics inside the party ask, has she failed to draw significant dividends from the gilets jaunes rural and outer suburban rebellion in 2018-9? Why has she failed to gain political advantage from the Covid-19 crisis (when she made a series of strident, self-contradictory statements)?

The party’s chaotic finances — undermined by two prosecutions for alleged fraud, a failure to repay a Russian loan and the dethroned patriarch Jean-Marie’s demand for repayment of several million euros — are a partial explanation. So is the increasing divide between the RN tribes of North (blue collar, ex-left-voting, anti-immigrant, pro-big state) and South (ex-centre-right, anti-state and anti-muslim).

There is a section of the RN membership — and a large part of the wider French hard right and ultra-right — that would like to see the back of the Le Pens. The family name and family control of the party is, they believe, a barrier to the kind of success that the nationalist-populist anti-European right has enjoyed in Italy or Austria.

There is no prospect of such a change before the next presidential election. The family’s financial and emotional stranglehold on the RN is too great. If Marine fails for a third time, that will change but no obvious successor is yet apparent.

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Why Britain needs a De Gaulle

By Peter Franklin

Marine’s niece Marion Maréchal was once spoken of as a possible future leader but she has now left the party and dropped the “Le Pen” from her name.

Are there any real ideological differences between father, daughter and niece? Yes, but there are also differences of ambition and political strategy.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, 92, is a sincere anti-semite and racist, descended from an extreme nationalist tradition in France which goes back well before fascism. Arguably, he never had an interest in power or government only in the “purity” of his ideas and the force of his own personality and rhetoric.

Marine, 51, is a second generation manager of a family enterprise. It’s not clear that she believes in anything very much. She is convinced that “Le Pen PLC” can only be truly successful if re-branded as patriotic, not racist (while constantly exploiting fears of an alleged Islamisation of France).

She is likeable but limited, especially in her grasp of economics. She does not want to ally with the centre-right but to replace its shaky hold on the conservative middle class — just as the RN has already become the most popular single party with the white, working class. Hence, her slogan “neither left nor right”.

Influenced by her own constituency in the ex-mining and industrial north of France, she has moved the party away from its Poujadiste, anti-state, anti-Communist, racist origins to something much more statist and interventionist — in other words both nationalist and socialist.  She has stamped out all overt signs of anti-semitism or racism (but not hostility to Islam).

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Is this Marine's moment?

By John Lichfield

Marion, 30, is an old fashioned Catholic conservative (despite her own divorce). She is fiercely intelligent but lacks her grandfather and her aunt’s charisma. She has taken a break from active politics to found a nationalist-Catholic political science university in Lyon.

She believes that the French Right — both far right and centre-right — should be merged and refounded as a nationalist movement based on traditional Catholic and free market values.

These tensions within the party — and the family — were laid bare last month by the 80^th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s BBC radio appeal from London for French resistance against the Nazis.

Marine Le Pen likes to use De Gaulle as a symbol of her efforts — partially successful — to detoxify the Le Pen brand since she became party president in 2011. When I interviewed her the previous year, she told me that she would have been pro-De Gaulle in 1940, not pro-Vichy (the |Nazi-sympathising regime which ran part of France for four years until 1944).

For the 80^th anniversary of De Gaulle’s London appeal on 18 June she went much further. She wrote an article lionising De Gaulle as a “great man”. She said that le général foreshadowed the same nationalist, “neither left nor right values” that she did.

She attempted to gate-crash celebrations on the Ile de Sein off Brittany — a Gaullist shrine because all of its men sailed away to join the general in London in 1940. She was booed and jeered by the islanders.

Marine’s failed takeover bid for Gaullism was widely mocked in the French media. It also did her enormous harm within a traditionalist section of the party — especially in the South.

Her father, Jean-Marie, detests De Gaulle and Gaullism. In the first volume of his memoirs published two years ago, he wrote that De Gaulle “will always for me be a horrible source of suffering for France”.

Few RN members would now claim to be the spiritual descendants of Vichy. Many still support or remember nostalgically the cause of French Algeria, betrayed, they believe, by De Gaulle in 1962.

Almost all of them — “pieds noirs”, French north African colonists or their descendant or sympathisers — live in one of the RN heartlands in the lower Rhone valley and the coastal plain of the Mediterranean from Toulon to the Spanish border.

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What is the Mona Lisa worth to France?

By agnes poirier

“The whole De Gaulle anniversary episode was ill-conceived. It illustrates the poor quality of the young and ignorant people who now surround her,” a senior party insider said.

To Marine, being a latter-day Gaullist is just clever politics — a way of breaking down the walls which still divide the right and far right in France. It is a way of identifying herself and her rebranded party with official French identity and history (however simplified).

To others in the party — and the harder and further right outside the party — it confirms their view that Marine is lightweight and not a sincere nationalist. She misunderstands, and even disapproves of, the core identity of a movement which is all about identity.

Marine is already disliked by the ultra-Catholic tribe within the RN for being twice divorced, for being a female politician, for being pro-abortion and for having gay men in her entourage. She has now angered another, mostly southern, anti-Gaullist tribe by insulting their alternative view of French history.

A former senior party official said: “The De Gaulle escapade may have helped her with some new RN voters or members who don’t know about, or prefer not to known about, the party’s origins. It was very damaging to her in the south.”

*

The campaign that Louis Aliot ran this year in the struggling French-Catalan city of Perpignan (over 20% unemployment) ignored some of Marine’s favourite themes and arguments. It was based on the strategy of Robert Menard (who is himself a pied noir) in Béziers, 50 miles to the north.

Aliot attacked the clientelism and corruption of mainstream parties. He promised to be tough on crime. So far so normal for the RN.

But he also stressed “southern” and local identity and values. He promised to bring religious and ethnic communities together. He avoided most — not all — of the normal RN Muslim-baiting themes.

Above all, he kept Marine away and kept the RN name and logo off his campaign posters and literature.

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Why French farmers are plotting revolution

By John Lichfield

Parts of the far-right electorate in the French south have long ago split from Lepennism and thrown in their lot with the alternative, regional movement, the Ligue du Sud, started by the ex-Lepennist mayor of Orange, Jacques Bompard, 10 years ago. Bompard also stresses the “authenticity” of “warm” southern French values compared to the alleged arrogance and elitism of Paris and the north.

Marion Maréchal (then Maréchal-Le Pen) was seen as a possible future southern queen for the RN (then FN) when she was elected member of parliament for Carpentras in the Rhône valley, aged  22, in 2012. Her political ambitions now seem to be outside her grandfather and her aunt’s movement.

Menard — never a Lepennist but once part of the wider “Bleu Marine” coalition — has hinted in a TV interview in recent weeks that he will consider running for president himself in 2022. He will then be 69; he is a successful mayor but poor orator and uncharismatic TV performer.

Some within the RN fear — others maybe hope — that his alliance with Aliot in Perpignan is not just temporary or local. They think that he wants to groom Marine’s former boyfriend as her successor — not for 2022 but for 2027.

The soap opera continues…

Her imitator and friend, Matteo Salvini, has taken his once marginal far-Right party, La Lega, to a share of power and increasing popularity in Italy. The populists are in government in Hungary, Poland, and Austria. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is increasingly infirm and no longer embarrasses her with his thoughts on the Holocaust or the “correct behaviour” of German troops in France during World War Two.

This is surely her moment.

And yet she has had a disastrous time in the 20 months since she was crushed by Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the presidential elections. She has failed to establish herself as the de facto ‘leader of the opposition’. If anything, that role has been seized by her populist rival on the hard Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

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Jean-Luc Mélenchon: a smarter Jeremy Corbyn

By John Lichfield

She is, according to one of her most senior economic advisors, who recently quit the party, economically illiterate and incapable of understanding even the most basic fiscal questions.

Euro or no Euro? Low-taxation or big-state interventionism? It was these same confusions that Macron gleefully tore apart during Marine’s calamitous performance in a television debate just before the second round vote last year. Since when, little has changed, save the name of the party – and her popularity.

Marine’s poll rating as ‘potential future President’ has fallen to around 16% . Her party remains more resilient than its leader electorally, but financially it is in a mess. The Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, is struggling to keep afloat after being denied €2 million of government election funds, for defrauding the European Parliament.

It also faces an embarrassing trial of two of its former campaign finance officials. They are accused of defrauding both the French state and the party’s own grassroots candidates, with Marine Le Pen’s blessing. They, and she, deny all wrong-doing.

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What do Sheffield and Paris have in common?

By Peter Franklin

Florian Philippot, her estranged former number two and the man who masterminded the de-toxification of the FN, has painted a chaotic picture of the party in his book Frexit, published last month, Few party officials are capable of writing a speech or preparing a candidate for a TV interview, he claims. Those who are capable rarely bother. The Front National under Marine, he wrote, became a “universe of laziness”.

His old boss, he concluded, knew after her defeat in May 2017 that she had failed and would continue to fail. She knew that she would never be elected to high office.

And yet Marine Le Pen shows no sign of giving up. The RN/FN is a family business as well as a political party. Some disgruntled ex-Frontistes say that it is a family business before it is a political party. No serious challenger has emerged, or probably can emerge, to the hegemony of the Le Pens over the ex-FN.

Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal, only 28, but “retired” from politics, may eventually become a new kind of leader for the party, but not for many years and certainly not before the next presidential election in 2022. This family “ownership” structure is one of the principlal factors preventing the RN, name change or not, from emerging seriously as a potential party of government.

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Is there still room for the Republicans in France?

By Marie Le Conte

Philippot, defenestrated by more traditional-minded LePennists in March, has now launched a rival party, Les Patriotes, which pursues his Nigel Farage-like conviction that “sovereignty” and confrontation with the European Union are the proper route to power for nationalists – not the FN/RN’s traditional fixation with racial and cultural “identity” and immigration.

He is almost certainly wrong about that. There is a latent, grumbling euro-scepticism in France but no widespread desire to challenge the country’s membership of  the single market, the Euro or the Brussels institutions.

Without Philippot’s influence, the Rassemblement National has moved back closer to the identity politics of Le Pen père – though without Jean Marie’s vulgarity, his anti-Semitism or his obsession with the Second World War. Marine Le Pen has returned to the themes of allegedly uncontrolled immigration and the internal threat from militant Islam. Unlike her father, she tries to put these issues into a “Republican” rather than “racial” context. Like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she portrays Islam as a threat to western traditions of tolerance and democracy.

Further reading

What does Flyover France see in Le Front National?

By Nabila Ramdani

She has however failed to clarify her economic policies. French membership of the EU and the Euro are still in theory up for debate, but scarcely mentioned. It would be difficult to see how the RN could run on such a programme in next May’s European elections – if it were not for the fact that voters care little about European election manifestos. The same will not be true in the next presidential campaign in 2022.

To understand the schizophrenic nature of the FN/RN, to understand why it has been tearing itself apart since Marine became president in 2011, you have to consider geography as well as ideology. The old FN had many tribes – ex-Vichy sentimentalists, expatriate Algerian white settlers (pied noirs), Catholic fundamentalists, pagan believers in white supremacy and former members, like Jean-Marie Le Pen himself, of Pierre Poujade’s anti-elite, anti-tax and anti-regulation party of the mid-1950s.

Somehow, give or take the odd split or revolt, Jean-Marie kept this collection of mutually distrustful clans together. He was helped by the fact that the FN of the 1980s and 1990s was mostly implanted in the South, in Alsace and the hard-scrabble, lower-middle-class suburbs of big cities. Marine, encouraged by Philippot, conquered new territories in the post-industrial North and East, recruiting many blue-collar voters who once supported the Communists or Socialists. She has also built a big following in rural France, especially among older people and the unemployed young.

Further reading

The brutal truth about forgotten France

By Douglas Murray

In the first round of last year’s election, Marine racked up votes of between 30 and 70% in villages in Normandy or on the remote eastern steppes of France, which know no crime or immigration but feel ignored and disfranchised by the multi-racial, global-minded, Europhile, broadly successful France of the cities and big towns.

To appeal to these new electorates, Marine and Philippot bolted on to the old Frontiste, anti-Socialist, small-government doctrine a statist devotion to early retirement, high pensions, industrial intervention and agricultural protectionism. No attempt was made to rationalise the conflicting programmes or explain how they would be funded.

Thus the Marine Le Pen FN/RN became two parties – a nationalist-socialist party in the North and East and a Poujadiste-fundamentalist Christian and white “identity” party in the South. Philippot’s ejection has brought the party back closer to its Southern, Poujadiste, pied-noir roots – but not entirely. Marine Le Pen’s parliamentary constituency, Hénin-Beaumont, is near Lille in the ex-industral North. She is unwilling to surrender her fiefdom or her ex-Leftist voters to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. Result: confusion and continuing tension and suspicion between the “northern” and “southern” wings of the party.

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Autocratic Macron must remember his popularity is paper-thin

By Michael Burleigh

In any case, economic political coherence and abstract political theory are not Marine’s strengths. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is doubtless a sincere racist – not a fascist but a pre-fascist, someone who drew his political beliefs from an ancient French strand of anti-semitism and a mystical belief in “patrie”, “race”, “blood” and “soil”. Marine Le Pen gives the impression – both in public and in interviews and private conversations – of being a rather pleasant saleswoman and TV host. It is difficult to dislike her. It is also difficult finally to take her seriously.

She is a good public speaker. She usually performs well on TV. She has had some success in her campaign to “de-demonise” the FN/RN.  Her defeat last year should not disguise the fact that she managed to persuade over 30 per cent of French voters to cast a ballot for a hard-right candidate – far more than her father ever achieved.

But she is also responsible for two big failures. The first is the incoherence of her economic programme, which Macron joyfully exploded live on TV. The second, more surprisingly to non-French readers perhaps, is her failure to turn the FN/RN into a genuine grass-roots party.

In travelling all over France covering politics over the last 20 years, I have repeatedly stumbled across this paradox. The ex-FN is a populist party and, in some areas, a popular party. But it has great difficulty in recruiting local candidates or even local, political operatives. Its candidates are often people from head office. In one campaign that I visited in Lorraine, the party’s standard-bearer was Le Pen senior’s chauffeur, who rarely visited the constituency. For a party which claims to represent “the people” against “the elite”, this is embarrassing.

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Why rural France is fertile ground for Le Pen

By John Lichfield

Those candidates that are recruited locally often turn out to be more extreme on racial questions than the detoxified Mariniste version of the FN officially allows. Just as awkward is the fact that they don’t stay in office for long: of the 54 Front National regional councillors elected in 2015, only 42 remain. The rest have resigned over petty quarrels or switched parties.

Marine Le Pen will not go away easily or soon. She is stubborn and, in any case, the family business is the family business.

Some things are going her way. Macron is less popular than the unpopular François Hollande was at the same stage of his presidency. The new leader of the main centre-right party, Les Républicains, Laurent Wauquiez has set out to steal the ex-FN’s clothes and voters. He has failed. His poll ratings are disastrous. Her clever niece Marion, who was emerging strongly as rival to her aunt, has given up politics, for the time being at least.

The RN will probably perform well in the European elections in May. The low turn-out always favours parties outside the mainstream.  But this is unlikely to be the “game-changer” that Marine Le Pen pretends. She will have to do very well indeed to match her stunning performance in the last European elections, when she took 25 per cent of the French seats. The fact that she is not leading the RN list herself will be a handicap. She has chosen to keep her seat in the National Assembly rather than try again for a seat in Strasbourg. Under a new French law, she cannot have both. The RN European campaign will probably be led by her romantic partner, Louis Aliot, the party’s vice President. He is a poor campaigner and a poor public speaker but in the RN/FN family comes first.

Marine Le Pen, barring an unforeseeable development, will be the RN presidential candidate in four years’ time. She will, once again, be one of the top three or four candidates jostling to reach the two candidate second round. Her best chance of ultimate victory – would be a Mélenchon v Le Pen run off in May 2022. This is highly unlikely since the hard left and hard right electorates overlap, especially in post-industrial and rural France.

In any case, the French two round system permits insurgent candidates in the first round but stacks the odds against them in the second. Unless you are an insurgent of the centre like Emmanuel Macron, the rest of the electorate tends to combine against you.

Macron’s absurdly charmed life has come to an abrupt halt this year. All the same, he remains lucky in his likely principal opponents in 2022. Florian Philippot may be sour and parti pris but he is probably right. Marine Le Pen’s moment has come and gone.

Further reading

Our new political order: Ins v Outs, not Left v Right

By Henry Olsen