[Cet article a été publié pour la première fois sur notre site en 2003, et republié le 7 janvier 2025]
How could the French vote for a demagogue of the caliber of Jean-Marie Le Pen? We had forgotten that Le Pen is also France, a France that we are not used to seeing. Either, Charles de Gaulle was able to convince the whole world that he was France. But the France he stifled, that of Le Pen, had never really disappeared. She was standing backstage.
Le Pen is the revenge of Vichy, the small spa town symbol of collaboration but which also evoked less ephemeral things: deep France*, the provincial bourgeoisie, retirees, the common people who fear strangers and dread the foreigners.
Sunday April 21 [lors du premier tour de la présidentielle 2002]the south of France was unfaithful to Chirac, preferring Le Pen by far. From the crook or the fascist, Mediterranean France, the one who did not repent after 1940, the one who never forgave de Gaulle for having betrayed French Algeria*, the one who despises the Fifth Republic as it despised the previous Republics, this France chose the fascist.
Waiting for a new Bonaparte
Every medal has its other side; that of the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty, equality and fraternity, it is the France of the Terror, the France of Fouché, minister of police under Napoleon, the France of the Dreyfus affair and that of the 'ant
France
