Associate researcher at Iris, Jean-Yves Camus directs the Observatory of Political Radicals of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation (think-tank).
LEFIGARO. - Tuesday, May 30, during the Council of Ministers, the President of the Republic called to no longer use "moral arguments" to fight against the rise of the extreme right. On Sunday, Elisabeth Borne had judged that the National Rally was the "heir of Pétain", on Radio J. Historically, who is telling the truth? Is there a Petainist legacy of the RN?
Jean-Yves CAMUS. - Historically, it is indisputable that leaders of various associations maintaining the memory of Marshal Pétain, including his dimension as head of the French State, belonged to the National Front. This is the case of Hubert Massol, who chaired the Association nationale Pétain-Verdun (ANPV) until 1982 and then the Association to defend the memory of Marshal Pétain (ADMP) from 2009 to 2020. However, he only joined the FN in 1985 and left it for the Mégretiste MNR in 1998. A Nantes, Robert de Périer, presided over the ANPV and organized on July 23, 1991, in the church of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, a mass for the fortieth anniversary of the death of Marshal Pétain, in the presence of Jean-François Jalk, then a member of the political bureau of the FN. In Lyon, Charles Berthémy, elected FN in the early 1990s, wrote in the regional bulletin of the ADMP. It is equally indisputable that when the FN was created in 1972, its vice-president was the former militiaman François Brigneau, author in 1991 of a panegyric of the Marshal. There were other former collaborators with the FN. Their political project often went far beyond the ideology of the national revolution: for those who came from Doriot, Déat, Bucard or who had worn the SS uniform on the Eastern Front, Pétain was an estimable man, a heroic soldier, but he was reproached for being a reactionary and not pushing collaboration far enough. Did these people leave a legacy to the RN? I quote Marine Le Pen's tweet on July 16, 2022: "Let us never forget the horror of the Vel d'Hiv roundup and the crimes of collaboration. 13,000 Jews, including 4000,<> children, were sent by the Vichy government to the death camps. No Pétainist can accept this questioning, finally clear, of the regime led by Pétain. I cannot know if among the militants of the RN, this line is shared by everyone, but Jean-Marie Le Pen would never have written that.
The RN is judged by its voters on the face it presents to them through its local or national elected representatives, and on its program, which no longer includes the repeal of memory laws and which bears no resemblance to fascism.
Jean-Yves Camus
Does Elisabeth Borne's anti-fascism strategy, inherited from the 80s, still work today? What for?
The moral disqualification still weighs on the RN, it still surely influences the voting choices of a fraction of voters but it is not enough to contain the electoral progress of the party. Moreover, it was never enough since the "point of detail" affair (1987) did not prevent Jean-Marie Le Pen from reaching the second round in 2002. The anti-fascist strategy of the 1980s and 1990s was justified by Le Pen's multiple provocations and by the regular exhumation, by the press, of the collaborationist or radical past of this or that FN candidate, sometimes openly negationist writings of another. But these people are dead or inactive, or they have left the RN for more radical shores. Others have been excluded. The RN is judged by its voters on the face it presents to them through its local or national elected representatives, and on its program, which no longer includes the repeal of memory laws and nothing resembling fascism. It is therefore on the ground of ideas that we must deconstruct point by point the proposals of the RN if we want to beat it at the ballot box. And it must be done with a demand for results.
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By invoking Pétain, should we see in Macronism an inability to build new imaginaries capable of projecting the French into the future?
No, the president's point does not suggest that. He places himself precisely in a very concrete perspective that makes him place first argumentation and political action, not moral judgment, even if I have no doubt that he carries one. The real questions are whether his project will show its results before the next presidential election, and whether whoever will wear the colors of his camp in this election will have the same vision as him.
