A Tale of Two Wars
NICOLAS TENZER
JUN 30, 2024
The fascist “Russian March” in Moscow’s Lublino district. November 4, 2017.
Photo: Matthias Berg
Fascism is back in Europe. It reigns in Russia. It threatens in the United States. Some countries have succeeded in erecting more or less solid dikes, but none is guaranteed to hold forever.
Fascism? Some are quick to dismiss the term, as if to minimize its influence, including in Russia. However, as Timothy Snyder has masterfully demonstrated, the current Russian regime is in fact fascism—and, in this case, totalitarianism. Fascist parties often seek to borrow masks as if to hide their intentions. Some, perhaps, have more diverse facets—one usually thinks of Georgia Meloni’s Italy—and do not take part in the international struggle of fascism against Western democracies, even if they corrode their principles. But more often than not, their characteristics are those of fascism, as described by Umberto Eco in a 1995 text that has often been commented on: irrationalism, refusal of critical thought, banishment of diversity, playing on frustrations, conspiracy, the cult of death, the destruction of the individual and his or her rights, and the flattening of language, which has become stereotyped and simplistic.
The term “fascism” is more appropriate than “populism” because it highlights the total destruction of freedoms that lies at the heart of its intentions. The idea of populism could still lead us to believe that the “people”—a largely mythologized figure, incidentally—would decide, whereas in reality, effective power would be in the hands of a group in power, turning this “people” into an inert mass used as a club against singular individuals. Populism is the first stage of fascism, which may or may not take hold depending on the historical, social, institutional and political circumstances of each country. Fascism is populism made real. There are certainly fascisms that have borrowed from left-wing doctrines or are at least partially derived from them, but concrete fascism is always extreme right-wing, even if it claims to be on the side of the “workers” or the “oppressed” ones. The rhetoric is just a cover.
In a war waged by a fascist state, the primary risk is the conjunction of fascisms. Extending the zone of fascism is the state’s primary means of achieving its ends. This is by no means a historical novelty. This certainly does not mean that all fascist states will go to war alongside the main aggressor power—Franco’s Spain, let alone Salazar’s Portugal, did not go to war alongside Hitler’s Germany—but that they will, to varying degrees, support the revisionist power, mainly by sabotaging all measures to help the aggressed state and join the Allies—Portugal was also an exception there. One could almost say that a country’s degree of fascism is measured by its support for a criminal state—now essentially Putin’s Russia. We need hardly remind you of the mutual support between Moscow and almost all of Europe’s far-right parties.
On the evening of July 7, we will know whether Russia has succeeded in bringing under its control one of the two most important countries in the European Union, France, which is the only nuclear power, the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and which still has the fourth largest diplomatic network in the world. We will know whether the country which, after years of weakness and complacency towards Moscow, had finally taken decisive steps in support of Ukraine, has gone over the wall. I won’t go back over the possible scenarios after the parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, the reasons why the French President could hardly oppose the pro-Russian policies of the far right—I’ve talked about this at length here—and even less over the reasons why, if any, for Emmanuel Macron’s reckless gamble, taken in the absence of any consideration for Ukraine, Europe and security, but will attempt to explore the territories of this European fascism of which France has become, I fear, one of the most revealing examples. If the French far right wins the majority of seats in the National Assembly, it will become the only case where it has been able to win alone. This speaks volumes about its power and the way it has invaded and perverted souls.
French fascism and others
In an important interview conducted a year before his death, the historian Zeev Sternhell returned in part to the quarrel that his work on French fascism had provoked. This dispute is far from over, and isn’t confined to France—Sternhell considered that Israel was not immune to fascism—and some of Sternhell’s opponents can be found on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. It’s not always certain that they understood the meaning of his thought precisely because it was radical. Curiously enough, even Raymond Aron tended to play down the role of one of his friends in fascist, even pro-Nazi circles, forcing Sternhell to set the record straight a few years later.
My purpose here is not to discuss in detail Sternhell’s theses as they apply to individual cases. Rather, I'd like to consider what provoked the epidermal reaction of certain critics, beyond these specific cases. Overall, the intention of most critics—before undoubtedly losing the historians’ battle—was to minimize the importance of French fascism. They have refused to see that it largely pre-existed the National Revolution implemented by the Vichy regime from 1940 onwards. As early as the 1890s, and even more so in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist ideology flourished in many circles and intellectuals. That openly fascist circles were few in number says nothing in fact about the way ideas infuse, develop underneath and eventually explode as soon as circumstances allow.
The fact that French fascism was reburied after 1945 in no way meant its demise. Pétain continued to be honored, including by French presidents, although the alibi of presenting him as the “victor of Verdun” (1916) does not hold water historically. Many of those involved in implementing the Statute of the Jews returned to their posts after the war. Antisemitism—which I witnessed at first hand in my youth—continued to flourish in certain circles of the French Catholic bourgeoisie. The hatred of the foreign and the different, the glorification of ethnicity, a certain French spirit that is not that of the Enlightenment, continued to turn some souls inward. Putinism blew on these embers even more intensely than Nazism and Fascism at the time. It has continued to win over a large proportion of French conservatives—without which the upsurge of this new fascism could not have taken place—but it has also long since captured a section of the working classes who had long abandoned their vote for the Communist Party. Sternhell is also right to assert that “the National Front (predecessor of the Rassemblement national) belongs to the intellectual structures of the right”.
Logically enough, this French fascism is in line with the structure of Putin’s thinking: racialist narrative, national pride, distinction between inferior and superior peoples, structural anti-Semitism—even if it is denied, including through open support for Israel or rather its government against a backdrop of anti-Islamic reaction—, rewriting history to excuse the crimes of the past and exonerate those of the present (no far-right leader has ever called for Putin and his assassins to be tried by an international tribunal), playing games with the truth, conspiracy thinking, the cult of force, contempt for international law and the Constitution, little appetite for the independence of the judiciary, and so on. Not only are the links between several elected representatives or candidates of the French far right, like many others, and the Russian regime extremely strong, but there is also an ideological connivance whose long-term effects are potentially even more lasting and invasive.
Of course, France is not the only European country with this predisposition to fascism, even if it is not yet in the majority in the country. Germany has both counter-fires and facilitating factors. The factors of resistance are essentially linked to the shameful historical memory of Nazism, as evidenced by the mobilization of Germans against the rise of the AFD. But it did happen, which shows that, in the end, no dike is completely watertight. The people of the former East Germany, in particular, were not educated in the memory of the Holocaust in the same way as those in the West. But in Germany too, the 1980s witnessed the Historikerstreit, with some historians, while refraining from rehabilitating Nazism, nonetheless attempting to turn it into a historical parenthesis alien to certain currents of German culture, or even to blame it on the mass crimes of Stalinism. At the heart of this dispute was also the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, over and above that of German guilt. As for Italy, it did not fully seek to disseminate in the public mind a history of the roots of fascism, giving it also the opportunity of a revival. In France, Germany, Italy and several other European Union countries, the facts of complicity with fascism and collaboration have not always given rise to significant cleansing. The work of remembrance, as the saying goes, also shows its limits when there is a presumption that the past cannot be conjugated with the present.
Fascism versus the constitution— a civilizational challenge
Beyond the complacency, if not complicity, of most extreme right-wing movements with Russia’s criminal power—and sometimes a few others—the hallmark of these movements is contempt, sometimes hatred, for the very idea of the Constitution and the fundamental principles attached to it. The rule of law, freedom of opinion, human dignity and equality, the independence of the judiciary and media pluralism are all objects of detestation. This rejection is even more marked towards supranational rules—the European Union Treaty, the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Convention of Human Rights of the Council of Europe and even the United Nations Charter—and international law as such. The far right constantly invokes the people, whose alleged will it opposes to the law, and, in this respect without much difference from the communist parties of the former USSR or the People’s Republic of China, claims to embody it.
The extreme right therefore intends to scuttle the rule of law in all its aspects, in order to submit it to the government and a parliament under orders, and to abolish all forms of regulation, whether by the supreme or constitutional courts, or by the authorities responsible for guaranteeing media pluralism. Its contempt for justice is regularly expressed, reflecting its rejection of checks and balances. This is the very nature of fascism: to hinder any challenge to power by free institutions, from the judiciary to the media—whose criticism is also constant—before attacking academics, intellectuals and any dissenting opinion. The institutions of civil society must be either brought to heel or destroyed, before leaving individuals, unprotected, face-to-face with power. Individuals who are “different” because they are dissidents, of a different skin color or nationality, Jewish, LGBT+, etc., are rejected from the national community. The human person as such is destined to be broken progressively after a series of gradual steps for which dictatorial and sometimes totalitarian regimes have provided the instructions. Each person enters a situation of maximum insecurity, which begins with harassment, then intimidation, then increasingly direct threats, before they are carried out.
We can’t say it often enough: we know how the far right gets into power, sometimes legally, but we also know how difficult it is to get out—and sometimes impossible, at least peacefully. It uses every possible means to hold on to power, and even when elections can still be held legally, the infiltration of institutions, including the appointment of judges close to the government, the control of the media and the strengthening of a police force under orders, make the return to power of the democratic opposition an increasingly difficult task as time goes by. Depending on the country and the state of civil society, the test of institutional resistance may not be conclusive. History shows us that institutions collapse more easily than they are built. Sometimes, institutions and laws built up over decades can collapse in just a few short years. It would be foolhardy to bet on their resilience.
The far right has adopted a “civilizational” discourse that Marie Peltier has shown to be central to conspiracy thinking. It has largely served the people of this movement to exonerate and above all deny mass crime, whether that of Putin’s “Christian” Russia or that of supposedly “secular” regimes such as those of Saddam Hussein and the Assad clan. It is precisely this civilizational narrative that needs to be turned on its head: the division of the world does not take place between different civilizations conceived as closed entities devoid of history, and therefore of evolution. The fixist historical perspective of the far right—which correspond to creationism in biological science—is that of a petrified history that separates geographical areas locked in their cultures, religions and traditions, which has always served to legitimize dictators who would somehow be the “representatives” of their civilization.
The relativist discourse on civilizations can and must be countered by a universalist and normative discourse on the principle of civilization, which would define this term as the possibility of openness for every society and culture. Everywhere in the world, contrary to the Orientalist vision, there are common rules that people, more than governments, want to make their own: the rule of law, the defense of freedom, respect for the human person above and beyond the characteristics (religion, skin color, ethnic group, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) of each. However, all over the world, it is this universality, linked to our historicity, that the extreme right intends to abolish. As soon as there are no longer any rules that apply to everyone and cannot be abolished, whether international law or the domestic constitutional law of liberal regimes, both of which are founded on largely shared principles, the history of freedom comes to an end. The only alliances that emerge are those between regimes whose rules are contempt for the law, and often crime.
Elements for a fight
Before coming to power, the far right often uses a reassuring rhetoric. Beyond the many concealments, the case of the French election seems to show that this classic rule has, in many respects, not been completely validated. Newspapers widely reported remarks, old and new, by far-right candidates revealing racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic statements, as well as climate change truthism and anti-vaccine stances. During a televised debate, the leader of the National Rally even ironized the emblematic figure of the Resistance, Jean Moulin, tortured and murdered by the Nazis. Another of his representatives made it clear that the Constitutional Council was an obstacle that had to be circumvented, if not knocked down. Far-right leaders have already begun to cast suspicion on dual nationals, whom they plan to bar from sensitive civil service posts. They have made it clear that they will no longer help Ukraine to defend itself with every possible weapon. They could return to their initial demands, back in 2014, to lift sanctions against Moscow. Many also point out that racist speech has become even more liberated since the far-right gained the upper hand, auguring the worst.
We can see all too clearly the path that the extreme right would take, with potentially far worse consequences than in Italy: multiple forms of discrimination in access to the law and public services, particularly for immigrants, a spoils system in the civil service, the gradual rewriting of school textbooks, the withdrawal of aid to associations deemed hostile, threats to public service radio and television deemed too critical of the government, efforts to combat foreign interference, a growing conflict with the European Union over the implementation of provisions contrary to the Union Treaty and European directives, a blocking position within the Council of the Atlantic Alliance, and so on. All this would weaken France’s position within Europe, NATO and the UN. The unpredictability of the outcome would also discourage direct investment in France by foreign companies, except from the new allies of the extreme right. For a few years, the Constitutional Council and the judicial institutions could hold out, but if the far right were to remain in power in the 2027 presidential election and the next legislative election, normally scheduled for 2029, by 2031 a majority of Constitutional Council judges could belong to the far right, making anything possible. Of course, we haven’t reached that point yet, but we need to weigh up the possible consequences of the far right coming to power.
In the meantime, we can certainly imagine that civil society, associations, unions, intellectuals and the majority of academics would react. But power, at a certain point, always weighs more heavily.
We cannot conceal the sense of powerlessness felt by many defenders of the rule of law and whistle-blowers. In France, as in other countries suffering from an extreme right-wing at a high level of approval, the truth about the extreme right has been revealed time and again. During the European and parliamentary election campaigns, the reality of its links with Russia, the very origin of the party (then the Front National), which counted Nazi collaborators and some who had worn the uniform of the Waffen SS among its founders, the anti-Semitism of several of its candidates, etc., were demonstrated with ineffective effect on the electorate. The same is true of the economic and social disaster that would result if its program were to be implemented, particularly for the poorest, and of the total incompetence of its leaders. This seems to serve no purpose, not only because the hatred of the supposed “elites”, and in particular of Emmanuel Macron’s own person, beyond all rationality and elaborate criticism, is so strong that it obliterates any argument, but also because, more seriously, for part of the far-right voters, we may have moved from a vote of rejection of others to a vote of adhesion that corresponds to what might be called the Putinization of minds. Even the argument I defend here of a resurgence of genuine French fascism is often brushed aside as an exaggeration and an ill-timed warning that this past is behind us. This dismissal of a return of evil is rather analogous, mutatis mutandis, to the argument often heard about Russia that the early warnings we issued, well before 2014, were exaggerated. Even today, they continue to dismiss as a matter of principle any attempt to compare Putin and Hitler. If we fail, with convincing words, to show this fascist nature of today’s far right, we will have already begun to lose the battle.
I can’t go into all the causes of the rise of the far right in France, elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Each situation is just as specific. In the case of France, the responsibility of all governments is high. The failure of education is certainly a long-term structural cause. The complacency of certain political leaders towards the themes of the extreme right is another. Above all, we must not forget that advocacy of constitutional rules, independence of the judiciary, human rights and, as I have often referred to here, international law, has been rare on the part of politicians from the various parties. As a result, many citizens have ceased to consider them part of their common heritage. Of course, there has also been an inattention on the part of most governments to people’s suffering, to their sense of dereliction and abandonment, and an indifference to their real ills that many have refused to consider. How many times have I heard ministers and senior civil servants say, “We mustn’t exaggerate” about education, extreme poverty, problems of purchasing power, mass unemployment and insecurity? Not only has the feeling taken hold of people’s souls that they can no longer control anything, that they no longer have a grip on their future, but that governments themselves have lost that control. Even in the most necessary reform processes, the feeling arose that these were incapable of bringing about a better future. Since this category of the future is not, as it should be, at the heart of politics, some people prefer to rely on those who are definitively preparing, like Putin in Russia, to destroy this very category.
All this is happening at the very moment when, in Europe, a war has resurfaced, the outcome of which will determine the future for decades to come and determine the destiny, free or enslaved, of future generations. In addition to this external war, there is now a form of internal warfare, which may as now seem gentler and still appear to take the forms of democracy, but which carries within it powerful seeds of destruction. As in other dark camps, we are faced with two wars. Either we will win them both, or both can engulf us.
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Fascism is back in Europe. It reigns in Russia. It threatens in the United States. Some countries have succeeded in erecting more or less solid dikes, but none is guaranteed to hold forever.
Fascism? Some are quick to dismiss the term, as if to minimize its influence, including in Russia. However, as Timothy Snyder has masterfully demonstrated, the current Russian regime is in fact fascism—and, in this case, totalitarianism. Fascist parties often seek to borrow masks as if to hide their intentions. Some, perhaps, have more diverse facets—one usually thinks of Georgia Meloni’s Italy—and do not take part in the international struggle of fascism against Western democracies, even if they corrode their principles. But more often than not, their characteristics are those of fascism, as described by Umberto Eco in a 1995 text that has often been commented on: irrationalism, refusal of critical thought, banishment of diversity, playing on frustrations, conspiracy, the cult of death, the destruction of the individual and his or her rights, and the flattening of language, which has become stereotyped and simplistic.
The term “fascism” is more appropriate than “populism” because it highlights the total destruction of freedoms that lies at the heart of its intentions. The idea of populism could still lead us to believe that the “people”—a largely mythologized figure, incidentally—would decide, whereas in reality, effective power would be in the hands of a group in power, turning this “people” into an inert mass used as a club against singular individuals. Populism is the first stage of fascism, which may or may not take hold depending on the historical, social, institutional and political circumstances of each country. Fascism is populism made real. There are certainly fascisms that have borrowed from left-wing doctrines or are at least partially derived from them, but concrete fascism is always extreme right-wing, even if it claims to be on the side of the “workers” or the “oppressed” ones. The rhetoric is just a cover.
In a war waged by a fascist state, the primary risk is the conjunction of fascisms. Extending the zone of fascism is the state’s primary means of achieving its ends. This is by no means a historical novelty. This certainly does not mean that all fascist states will go to war alongside the main aggressor power—Franco’s Spain, let alone Salazar’s Portugal, did not go to war alongside Hitler’s Germany—but that they will, to varying degrees, support the revisionist power, mainly by sabotaging all measures to help the aggressed state and join the Allies—Portugal was also an exception there. One could almost say that a country’s degree of fascism is measured by its support for a criminal state—now essentially Putin’s Russia. We need hardly remind you of the mutual support between Moscow and almost all of Europe’s far-right parties.
On the evening of July 7, we will know whether Russia has succeeded in bringing under its control one of the two most important countries in the European Union, France, which is the only nuclear power, the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and which still has the fourth largest diplomatic network in the world. We will know whether the country which, after years of weakness and complacency towards Moscow, had finally taken decisive steps in support of Ukraine, has gone over the wall. I won’t go back over the possible scenarios after the parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, the reasons why the French President could hardly oppose the pro-Russian policies of the far right—I’ve talked about this at length here—and even less over the reasons why, if any, for Emmanuel Macron’s reckless gamble, taken in the absence of any consideration for Ukraine, Europe and security, but will attempt to explore the territories of this European fascism of which France has become, I fear, one of the most revealing examples. If the French far right wins the majority of seats in the National Assembly, it will become the only case where it has been able to win alone. This speaks volumes about its power and the way it has invaded and perverted souls.
French fascism and others
In an important interview conducted a year before his death, the historian Zeev Sternhell returned in part to the quarrel that his work on French fascism had provoked. This dispute is far from over, and isn’t confined to France—Sternhell considered that Israel was not immune to fascism—and some of Sternhell’s opponents can be found on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. It’s not always certain that they understood the meaning of his thought precisely because it was radical. Curiously enough, even Raymond Aron tended to play down the role of one of his friends in fascist, even pro-Nazi circles, forcing Sternhell to set the record straight a few years later.
My purpose here is not to discuss in detail Sternhell’s theses as they apply to individual cases. Rather, I'd like to consider what provoked the epidermal reaction of certain critics, beyond these specific cases. Overall, the intention of most critics—before undoubtedly losing the historians’ battle—was to minimize the importance of French fascism. They have refused to see that it largely pre-existed the National Revolution implemented by the Vichy regime from 1940 onwards. As early as the 1890s, and even more so in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist ideology flourished in many circles and intellectuals. That openly fascist circles were few in number says nothing in fact about the way ideas infuse, develop underneath and eventually explode as soon as circumstances allow.
The fact that French fascism was reburied after 1945 in no way meant its demise. Pétain continued to be honored, including by French presidents, although the alibi of presenting him as the “victor of Verdun” (1916) does not hold water historically. Many of those involved in implementing the Statute of the Jews returned to their posts after the war. Antisemitism—which I witnessed at first hand in my youth—continued to flourish in certain circles of the French Catholic bourgeoisie. The hatred of the foreign and the different, the glorification of ethnicity, a certain French spirit that is not that of the Enlightenment, continued to turn some souls inward. Putinism blew on these embers even more intensely than Nazism and Fascism at the time. It has continued to win over a large proportion of French conservatives—without which the upsurge of this new fascism could not have taken place—but it has also long since captured a section of the working classes who had long abandoned their vote for the Communist Party. Sternhell is also right to assert that “the National Front (predecessor of the Rassemblement national) belongs to the intellectual structures of the right”.
Logically enough, this French fascism is in line with the structure of Putin’s thinking: racialist narrative, national pride, distinction between inferior and superior peoples, structural anti-Semitism—even if it is denied, including through open support for Israel or rather its government against a backdrop of anti-Islamic reaction—, rewriting history to excuse the crimes of the past and exonerate those of the present (no far-right leader has ever called for Putin and his assassins to be tried by an international tribunal), playing games with the truth, conspiracy thinking, the cult of force, contempt for international law and the Constitution, little appetite for the independence of the judiciary, and so on. Not only are the links between several elected representatives or candidates of the French far right, like many others, and the Russian regime extremely strong, but there is also an ideological connivance whose long-term effects are potentially even more lasting and invasive.
Of course, France is not the only European country with this predisposition to fascism, even if it is not yet in the majority in the country. Germany has both counter-fires and facilitating factors. The factors of resistance are essentially linked to the shameful historical memory of Nazism, as evidenced by the mobilization of Germans against the rise of the AFD. But it did happen, which shows that, in the end, no dike is completely watertight. The people of the former East Germany, in particular, were not educated in the memory of the Holocaust in the same way as those in the West. But in Germany too, the 1980s witnessed the Historikerstreit, with some historians, while refraining from rehabilitating Nazism, nonetheless attempting to turn it into a historical parenthesis alien to certain currents of German culture, or even to blame it on the mass crimes of Stalinism. At the heart of this dispute was also the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, over and above that of German guilt. As for Italy, it did not fully seek to disseminate in the public mind a history of the roots of fascism, giving it also the opportunity of a revival. In France, Germany, Italy and several other European Union countries, the facts of complicity with fascism and collaboration have not always given rise to significant cleansing. The work of remembrance, as the saying goes, also shows its limits when there is a presumption that the past cannot be conjugated with the present.
Fascism versus the constitution— a civilizational challenge
Beyond the complacency, if not complicity, of most extreme right-wing movements with Russia’s criminal power—and sometimes a few others—the hallmark of these movements is contempt, sometimes hatred, for the very idea of the Constitution and the fundamental principles attached to it. The rule of law, freedom of opinion, human dignity and equality, the independence of the judiciary and media pluralism are all objects of detestation. This rejection is even more marked towards supranational rules—the European Union Treaty, the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Convention of Human Rights of the Council of Europe and even the United Nations Charter—and international law as such. The far right constantly invokes the people, whose alleged will it opposes to the law, and, in this respect without much difference from the communist parties of the former USSR or the People’s Republic of China, claims to embody it.
The extreme right therefore intends to scuttle the rule of law in all its aspects, in order to submit it to the government and a parliament under orders, and to abolish all forms of regulation, whether by the supreme or constitutional courts, or by the authorities responsible for guaranteeing media pluralism. Its contempt for justice is regularly expressed, reflecting its rejection of checks and balances. This is the very nature of fascism: to hinder any challenge to power by free institutions, from the judiciary to the media—whose criticism is also constant—before attacking academics, intellectuals and any dissenting opinion. The institutions of civil society must be either brought to heel or destroyed, before leaving individuals, unprotected, face-to-face with power. Individuals who are “different” because they are dissidents, of a different skin color or nationality, Jewish, LGBT+, etc., are rejected from the national community. The human person as such is destined to be broken progressively after a series of gradual steps for which dictatorial and sometimes totalitarian regimes have provided the instructions. Each person enters a situation of maximum insecurity, which begins with harassment, then intimidation, then increasingly direct threats, before they are carried out.
We can’t say it often enough: we know how the far right gets into power, sometimes legally, but we also know how difficult it is to get out—and sometimes impossible, at least peacefully. It uses every possible means to hold on to power, and even when elections can still be held legally, the infiltration of institutions, including the appointment of judges close to the government, the control of the media and the strengthening of a police force under orders, make the return to power of the democratic opposition an increasingly difficult task as time goes by. Depending on the country and the state of civil society, the test of institutional resistance may not be conclusive. History shows us that institutions collapse more easily than they are built. Sometimes, institutions and laws built up over decades can collapse in just a few short years. It would be foolhardy to bet on their resilience.
The far right has adopted a “civilizational” discourse that Marie Peltier has shown to be central to conspiracy thinking. It has largely served the people of this movement to exonerate and above all deny mass crime, whether that of Putin’s “Christian” Russia or that of supposedly “secular” regimes such as those of Saddam Hussein and the Assad clan. It is precisely this civilizational narrative that needs to be turned on its head: the division of the world does not take place between different civilizations conceived as closed entities devoid of history, and therefore of evolution. The fixist historical perspective of the far right—which correspond to creationism in biological science—is that of a petrified history that separates geographical areas locked in their cultures, religions and traditions, which has always served to legitimize dictators who would somehow be the “representatives” of their civilization.
The relativist discourse on civilizations can and must be countered by a universalist and normative discourse on the principle of civilization, which would define this term as the possibility of openness for every society and culture. Everywhere in the world, contrary to the Orientalist vision, there are common rules that people, more than governments, want to make their own: the rule of law, the defense of freedom, respect for the human person above and beyond the characteristics (religion, skin color, ethnic group, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) of each. However, all over the world, it is this universality, linked to our historicity, that the extreme right intends to abolish. As soon as there are no longer any rules that apply to everyone and cannot be abolished, whether international law or the domestic constitutional law of liberal regimes, both of which are founded on largely shared principles, the history of freedom comes to an end. The only alliances that emerge are those between regimes whose rules are contempt for the law, and often crime.
Elements for a fight
Before coming to power, the far right often uses a reassuring rhetoric. Beyond the many concealments, the case of the French election seems to show that this classic rule has, in many respects, not been completely validated. Newspapers widely reported remarks, old and new, by far-right candidates revealing racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic statements, as well as climate change truthism and anti-vaccine stances. During a televised debate, the leader of the National Rally even ironized the emblematic figure of the Resistance, Jean Moulin, tortured and murdered by the Nazis. Another of his representatives made it clear that the Constitutional Council was an obstacle that had to be circumvented, if not knocked down. Far-right leaders have already begun to cast suspicion on dual nationals, whom they plan to bar from sensitive civil service posts. They have made it clear that they will no longer help Ukraine to defend itself with every possible weapon. They could return to their initial demands, back in 2014, to lift sanctions against Moscow. Many also point out that racist speech has become even more liberated since the far-right gained the upper hand, auguring the worst.
We can see all too clearly the path that the extreme right would take, with potentially far worse consequences than in Italy: multiple forms of discrimination in access to the law and public services, particularly for immigrants, a spoils system in the civil service, the gradual rewriting of school textbooks, the withdrawal of aid to associations deemed hostile, threats to public service radio and television deemed too critical of the government, efforts to combat foreign interference, a growing conflict with the European Union over the implementation of provisions contrary to the Union Treaty and European directives, a blocking position within the Council of the Atlantic Alliance, and so on. All this would weaken France’s position within Europe, NATO and the UN. The unpredictability of the outcome would also discourage direct investment in France by foreign companies, except from the new allies of the extreme right. For a few years, the Constitutional Council and the judicial institutions could hold out, but if the far right were to remain in power in the 2027 presidential election and the next legislative election, normally scheduled for 2029, by 2031 a majority of Constitutional Council judges could belong to the far right, making anything possible. Of course, we haven’t reached that point yet, but we need to weigh up the possible consequences of the far right coming to power.
In the meantime, we can certainly imagine that civil society, associations, unions, intellectuals and the majority of academics would react. But power, at a certain point, always weighs more heavily.
We cannot conceal the sense of powerlessness felt by many defenders of the rule of law and whistle-blowers. In France, as in other countries suffering from an extreme right-wing at a high level of approval, the truth about the extreme right has been revealed time and again. During the European and parliamentary election campaigns, the reality of its links with Russia, the very origin of the party (then the Front National), which counted Nazi collaborators and some who had worn the uniform of the Waffen SS among its founders, the anti-Semitism of several of its candidates, etc., were demonstrated with ineffective effect on the electorate. The same is true of the economic and social disaster that would result if its program were to be implemented, particularly for the poorest, and of the total incompetence of its leaders. This seems to serve no purpose, not only because the hatred of the supposed “elites”, and in particular of Emmanuel Macron’s own person, beyond all rationality and elaborate criticism, is so strong that it obliterates any argument, but also because, more seriously, for part of the far-right voters, we may have moved from a vote of rejection of others to a vote of adhesion that corresponds to what might be called the Putinization of minds. Even the argument I defend here of a resurgence of genuine French fascism is often brushed aside as an exaggeration and an ill-timed warning that this past is behind us. This dismissal of a return of evil is rather analogous, mutatis mutandis, to the argument often heard about Russia that the early warnings we issued, well before 2014, were exaggerated. Even today, they continue to dismiss as a matter of principle any attempt to compare Putin and Hitler. If we fail, with convincing words, to show this fascist nature of today’s far right, we will have already begun to lose the battle.
I can’t go into all the causes of the rise of the far right in France, elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Each situation is just as specific. In the case of France, the responsibility of all governments is high. The failure of education is certainly a long-term structural cause. The complacency of certain political leaders towards the themes of the extreme right is another. Above all, we must not forget that advocacy of constitutional rules, independence of the judiciary, human rights and, as I have often referred to here, international law, has been rare on the part of politicians from the various parties. As a result, many citizens have ceased to consider them part of their common heritage. Of course, there has also been an inattention on the part of most governments to people’s suffering, to their sense of dereliction and abandonment, and an indifference to their real ills that many have refused to consider. How many times have I heard ministers and senior civil servants say, “We mustn’t exaggerate” about education, extreme poverty, problems of purchasing power, mass unemployment and insecurity? Not only has the feeling taken hold of people’s souls that they can no longer control anything, that they no longer have a grip on their future, but that governments themselves have lost that control. Even in the most necessary reform processes, the feeling arose that these were incapable of bringing about a better future. Since this category of the future is not, as it should be, at the heart of politics, some people prefer to rely on those who are definitively preparing, like Putin in Russia, to destroy this very category.
All this is happening at the very moment when, in Europe, a war has resurfaced, the outcome of which will determine the future for decades to come and determine the destiny, free or enslaved, of future generations. In addition to this external war, there is now a form of internal warfare, which may as now seem gentler and still appear to take the forms of democracy, but which carries within it powerful seeds of destruction. As in other dark camps, we are faced with two wars. Either we will win them both, or both can engulf us.
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