France’s new reactionaries

When President de Gaulle was asked to authorise the criminal prosecution of Jean-Paul Sartre for civil disobedience during the Algerian war, he declined. ‘One does not lock up Voltaire,’ he added, unhistorically. In France, ‘public intellectuals’ have a quasi-constitutional status, so it’s not surprising that a furious bunfight has broken out over a handful of philosophers known as ‘les nouveaux réactionnaires’.

The new reactionaries do not see themselves as a group, but they defend a common point of view about the causes of France’s diminishing status and influence. They look back on a golden age that started with the French revolution and continued for nearly 200 years as France — driven by the republican principles of freedom, equality, brotherhood and the rights of man, plus anti-clericalism — pursued its worldwide ‘civilising mission’. Today the pressures of globalisation threaten France’s identity and a nation that once imposed its vision on the world is having to swallow ideas the very opposite of those it has always preached. The importance of ‘the French model’ is drilled into the nation’s schoolchildren daily. But in the view of these philosophers, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ political correctness (‘la bien-pensance’) has poisoned teacher-training courses, which have become ‘gulags of knowledge’. The new reactionaries are convinced that one of the cornerstones of French culture, ‘freedom of expression’, is dying. They reject ‘post-colonial guilt’ and are appalled by ‘cultural relativism’. To get down to the nitty-gritty, they take the view that France’s sovereignty is under threat from Arab immigration. Europe’s migration crisis has highlighted their fears, and the lip service that President Hollande pays to Angela Merkel’s refugee-quota system — widely unpopular in France — has further aided the reactionaries’ arguments.

A leading figure is the right-wing political journalist Éric Zemmour, who is Jewish and descended from pieds noirs (French citizens formerly living in the colony of Algeria).