Another reading from France

Marine Le Pen's defeat was predictable, but it surprised me nonetheless: because these days any positive news comes to us with a certain sense of unreality, as if it doesn't sympathize with the moment, or as if deep down we don't deserve it .

In the case of the French elections, many of us awaited the results with the confused impression of having already gone through all this, since five years ago the general coordinates were similar: after the serial catastrophes of 2016 —Brexit, Trump's victory , the explosion through the air of Catalan society and the defeat in a plebiscite of the Peace Accords in Colombia—, it seemed that the stability of the world was hanging by a thread, or its sanity, and that this thread was the confrontation between Macron and LePen.

When the National Front lost and we breathed again,

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Macron clearly imposes himself on Le Pen in a fractured France

After those elections, all of us—not just us, the more or less unrepentant Francophiles—were left with a problem in the form of a question: what had happened in France to make Marine Le Pen go to the second round?

Or: what had happened so that a racist, xenophobic, denialist extreme right against climate change and heir to the tacky anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen obtained the vote of more than ten million citizens?

When I lived in Paris, at the end of the nineties, I had to attend the enormous scandal that arose when the patriarch Le Pen repeated some opinions that he had given ten years ago: the Nazi extermination gas chambers, he said, were just "a detail ” of World War II.

The disapproval of what we call public opinion was immediate and unambiguous.

Another day we would have to discuss the very issue of public opinion, which now, in times of the internet and social networks, is a very different thing from what it was a quarter of a century ago;

For the purposes of this article, however, it must simply be said that this was the case, that public opinion condemned Le Pen's statements, and moreover did so so firmly that her daughter, determined to protect her political destiny, had to declare herself in frank disagreement.

But the Le Pen family shares a strange account of the war, or views it through at least a complex prism that is like a window into the deep psychology of the far right.

In 2010, Marine Le Pen referred in a speech to Muslims temporarily closing a neighborhood street to pray, comparing them to the Nazi occupation of France.

In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen openly praised Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy collaborationist regime, and this time it was not enough for his daughter to disavow him: the vote of his own party had to remove him from the scene, the only way to clean the facade that had been left dirty with words that could not be said.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, like Éric Zemmour now and like so many far-rightists in so many parts of the world,

he finds in the thoughtful provocation a way of communicating with his electorate;

but to her daughter, embarked as she was on a careful process of demonizing the National Front, breaking taboos had ceased to seem like the most convenient political strategy.

That was how the father left the scene.

But in April 2017, in the middle of the presidential campaign, Marine Le Pen made some statements about the Winter Velodrome that at the time seemed like just another incident, just another controversy, but which I now read differently.

, as this moment of shame is known in France, is the roundup in 1942 —by the French police— of some 13,000 Jews who were sent to the extermination camps.

For years, the traumatized post-war country, unable to find the story that would explain what happened during the occupation, denied the responsibility of the Republic, or rather restricted it to those who physically intervened in the deportation.

This version of the story came alive and kicking to Mitterrand;

For the story to change, we had to wait for Chirac, who in 1995 said that on that day "France committed the irreparable."

Later came Sarkozy and Hollande, who held the same national agreement on those uncomfortable memories, and it seemed that way the matter would remain.

Until Marine Le Pen said no: that France was not responsible.

I remember thinking that something very big had been broken in France, or that something had to be seriously transformed out of sight for ten million French people to give Le Pen their vote after she crossed that red line.

The French narrative about the country's past - especially the past after 1939, which includes Vichy and collaborationism, the Indochina war and the Algerian war - is full of red lines, of things that should not be said, of consensuses that they are being imposed in the midst of extremely tough social negotiations and that provide a certain balance to a country accustomed to treating itself with the utmost intransigence.

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Of Le Pen in the case of those painful national episodes outraged the press, of course, but apparently the press was already divorced from the people, or lived in a different reality.

Or she hadn't noticed something that Le Pen was seeing clearly.

And it is this: that there is a whole sector of the French psyche that is sick of feeling guilty.

Of whatever it is: of the past of the war, of colonialism, of the difficulty that the country sometimes has to live up to its wonderful creed.

There may be an explanation for the short-lived rise of Éric Zemmour, who spent months stroking nationalist sentiment and wrapping himself in cozy flags while finding culprits everywhere—immigrants, Muslims, Europeanists, elites, the theory of the “great replacement” conspiracy—but who caused a particular scandal when he argued that Pétain had, after all, done what he did to save French Jewry.

Collaborationism, in this story, was the heroic way in which Pétain protected the French from suffering:

the suffering that the Nazis had caused to those who had resisted them.

It is the thesis of the shield and the sword, according to which Pétain (the shield) would have given De Gaulle (the sword) time to carry the resistance to the end.

The thesis, of course, has only one objective: the

.

The extreme right is doing similar things everywhere: if left-wing populisms promise a better future all the time, right-wing populisms have discovered how profitable it can be to promise a better past.

Which has the obvious advantage that you don't have to do anything.

It is enough to speak, tell a reassuring story and thus ward off the ghosts that haunt us at night.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

is a writer.

His latest novel is

(Alfaguara).

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