Fractured France
Footnotes to myself
I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why.
Fractured France, by Andrew Hussey
One of my missions is to read much less about the big American political stories — I will still have interest in issues that affect us — and more about European political developments. The flowering of online writing means it’s never been easier.
Hussey is an excellent writer but the book’s appeal lay elsewhere too — not least in its city-by-city architecture, with each chapter devoted to a different French city. Then, on opening the book, I discovered a chapter on Marseille, a city I find endlessly absorbing and am keen to revisit. On the whole a worthy read, full of corners of France — historical and geographical — I wasn’t familiar with.
‘This is our version of Brexit, I was told by a gilet jaune supporter at one of the weekly demonstrations in Paris in late 2019. He too described himself as ‘neither Right nor Left’ but had come to the demonstration in Paris to express his disgust at being left behind and ignored, mired in debt and poverty no matter how hard he worked (he was a dairy farmer). He explained his support for the cause of the gilets jaunes: ‘We are losing faith in democracy because whichever way we vote, nothing ever changes.’
This is, of course, an echo of the rhetoric of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally or RN), previously the Front National (National Front or FN). This does not mean that France is inexorably on the way to a far-right government. But it does explain why democracy in present-day France isn’t working.
This point has been said so many times that I am honestly afraid to type it, but we lose so much by focussing on American politics instead of European. The conditions of European democracies are far more similar to our own in terms of population, finances, problems etc.
In an interview given in late 2021 for Le Figaro, Christophe Guilluy described how the democratic model perpetuates itself by raising the spectre of a Fascist victory, which so far has never arrived but means that people preserve the likes of Macron or similar technocrats in power. He wrote: ‘There is no loyalty toward Macronism. Only a vote out of fear.”
The motto of every centrist still clinging to power, and a tactic that is already being adopted by Starmer to ward off a potential Reform government.
Astrid Leplat talked about the charisma of Marine Le Pen.
She had only met her once but was obviously flattered and star-struck that Marine had known her name. ‘She is impressive, said Leplat. ‘It’s hard to describe, but she has a kind of star quality.
You can easily see her as a true leader of a new France. Even as a leader of Europe, of France in the world.
Of course, Astrid Leplat was exactly the kind of candidate that the FN wanted to promote in its new post-toxic era. For one thing, she was quite self-effacing, the very opposite of the pushy media-savvy politician. She said modestly that her only ambition as a politician was to help people, in the same way that she tried to help them in her daily life. There was no reason to disbelieve her.
Her husband, who shared her working-class regional back-ground, was indifferent to politics, but he knew, too, that she was a good person trying to do the right thing. Like Pauline in the film Chez Nous, the FN’s Astrid Leplat is a nurse. Jean-Pierre Legrand explained to me that this was why she had been hand-picked by Marine Le Pen to stand as a regional councillor.
The party has adopted a policy of recruiting fonctionnaires (civil servants), especially those who work in the health and support services. This is partly to demonstrate that the FN has left behind its neo-Nazi origins and is now the party of everyday folk, but also to undermine the dominance of public services by the Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party).
This may be a strategy Reform look to emulate, as their “rising status as the default party amongst non-left wing provincial voters has opened up to them millions of normal people, who may better suited to fill Reform’s benches than former Tories or their most vociferous — and online — supporters.”
It began with a call to arms. In April 2021, the right-wing Valeurs actuelles published an open letter from military generals addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron. In the so-called lettre des généraux, twenty retired generals and more than a thousand French soldiers condemned what they saw as an attack on French values, emanating everywhere from Islamism to ‘the hordes from the banlieues, who were all either gangsters, drug dealers or jihadist terrorists.
The letter’s signatories targeted ‘anti-racists’ who ‘speak of racialism, indigenism and decolonial theories. ‘But behind these terms, the letter said, ‘these hate-filled, fanatical partisans seek only racial war. They hate our country, its traditions, its culture, and want to smash it into pieces. The letter concluded that ‘a civil war will bring an end to the growing chaos, and the dead, for which you will be responsible, will be in the thousands!
France obviously has a much more storied history of military interference in civil government so this is unthinkable in Britain; however, given the current political treatment being meted out to veterans, I’m not so sure the silence of military leaders on all issues is a good thing. As ever, a happy medium would be most welcome.
I asked her, in the light of this, whether she thought Brexit had been an act of folly or, as described by Michel Houellebecq, ‘an act of courage’.
‘Brexit was neither an act of madness nor an act of courage,’ she said. ‘It was simply an act of sovereignty, and I am an admirer of sovereignty. I have respect for people who want to have a hand in their own future. After that, they can do what they like with that future.’
She went on to say that the Brexit model would be a good thing for all European nations, including France: ‘In fact, it’s not Brexit which will determine the future of the British people, but the decisions which will be made with this new, reclaimed freedom. What has really struck me has been the insults thrown at the British people and their leaders, simply because these leaders asked the British people what they wanted to do. These insults from the European elites show you what they really think of the people - how they think the people are just obstacles, and that they can get around them, or just go above their heads. If I understand correctly, according to the recent statements by Emmanuel Macron, you have to even take these people on and fight them.’
This did not seem to me to be a softening of Le Pen’s Eurosceptic position; rather, it was the opposite - a straightforward condemnation of the European elite, by which she meant the EU, and its relation to the multiple countries for which it legislates.
I think history will take Le Pen’s view, particularly if Britain continues to fail to diverge from Europe significantly, and Europe fails to diverge from the EU significantly.
In recent times, there have been strange and unpredictable conflicts in this area. The most dramatic and widely reported example was the battle between Chechen and North African immigrants in Les Grésilles in 2020. On 12 June, a sixteen-year-old Chechen was badly beaten up by North African drug dealers as a ‘warning’ to the Chechens to stay out of the local drugs trade.
According to Chechen sources, the police took no action, so the community decided to take the law into its own hands. A call to arms went out on social media and, suddenly, on the night of 13 June, Les Grésilles was packed with Chechens, apparently from all over France and Belgium, some armed with iron bars and baseball bats, some of them flaunting Kalashnikovs for selfies and social media, although you couldn’t tell whether they were real or fake. Cars were set alight, and any young male who looked North African was set upon.
The chaos deepened when a group of a hundred or so Chechens came into central Dijon to smash up a cafe called Le Black Pearl on the boulevard de La Trémouille, near the busy Place de la République. This was a shisha bar known to be the hang-out of the North African gang leaders. Eyewitnesses posted videos of the Chechens storming the cafe. A young Chechen called Lamro, originally from Saint-Etienne, claimed in the pages of Le Bien Public to be a member of the group that attacked Le Black Pearl, and testified that the assault was not on Dijon or its inhabitants but specifically targeted the drug dealers. This did not reassure any of the Dijonnais, who saw only wild destructive forces invade their city that night.
The next few days saw a kind of guerrilla warfare between the Chechens and the North Africans, as the North Africans tried to reclaim their ground around Les Grésilles. At one point, a car was driven at top speed into a group of armed Chechens. The car overturned, and its driver, who was badly injured, was dragged out of the car by hooded men, who cried ‘Allahu Akbar’. The police struggled to contain the violence; there were blockades, fires, smoke and gunshots.
Things are bad here, but by the grace of God they are worse elsewhere.
Yet on leaving Le Guim’s, I felt a simmering sense of unease that deepened as I headed back to central Dijon - a half-hour walk away. There was no logic to this. I had been met by nothing but smiles and friendly banter in Les Grésilles. My disquiet came rather from the feeling that Les Grésilles was technically France but somehow not quite French. This was nothing to do with the ethnic composition of Les Grésilles, but simply the feeling that lives were being lived here which would never connect with mainstream French society. There seemed to me to be a potentially dangerous decalage - a French word which is hard to translate but often means ‘lack of concordance’.
Dijon is one of the major capitals of what is often termed la France profonde (’deep France’). This is a term which has several loaded meanings.
Most often, it has been used in the twentieth century to describe a now-lost France - a traditional, usually rural part of the country whose language, dialects, culture and politics stood apart from the sophisticated ideas and ideologies of Paris.
This was an imaginary version of French history but one that was useful for the ideologues of French fascism, most notably the writers Charles Maurras and Maurice Barres, who in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century developed a vision of France which was quite literally rooted in its soil - a nationalism of land, peasants and the “pays réel’, meaning ‘real'‘ France. It is easy to see how this vision persists in the culture of the far right in France: Marine Le Pen is only the latest and loudest cheerleader for this version of France which resists im-migration, rootlessness, globalization.
Edmund White, an admirer of Giono and an occasional visitor to Manosque, saw in Giono’s depiction of Haute-Provence that human beings are indivisible from what he describes as the beauty and terror of nature in its raw state. Giono wrote that there were two fundamental truths in his work: ‘The first of these truths is that there exist people who are simple and nude; the other is that this earth [is] fleeced with woods... this living earth exists without literature. Giono elaborated on this theme in his late work Le Haut Pays (The High Country), where, echoing Walt Whitman (Giono greatly admired Whitman and called him ‘the American Homer’), he saw the landscape as all alive.
Nothing much to say here, other than I this was a snippet of history I didn’t know much about and found interesting - as I did the clear similarities between la France profonde and Deep England.
Looking back now, the 2013 Year of Culture was a chimera.
Marseille is now tougher than ever. On my most recent visit to the quartiers nord in spring 2024, I was reliably informed that the Price of a Kalashnikov - known as ‘un kala’ - imported from the Balkans was 350 euros, and soo euros ready-loaded with ammunition. The same source - a young lad from the i3th arrondissement who drove me around his home area in his taxi, cheerfully pointing out which gangs control which cité - told me that one reason why the quartiers nord were relatively quiet during the summer riots of 2023, which had convulsed many other parts of France, was because the drug gangs had no interest in stirring up trouble and disturbing business. They were not political in any way. But he went on to say that there were so many weapons in the quartiers nord that if the gangs had wanted to launch a real war against the police, they would have won it.
‘The police are outgunned and they know that.” The gangs also kept the Islamists in line, which also explained why Marseille has seen so little of the Islamist radicalism present elsewhere in France. ‘The intégristes (Islamists) don’t dare fuck with the gangs, he said. ‘They know who is in control.’
This was not the gritty glamour of The French Connection but rather a description of a secular hell, a Hobbesian world of endless conflict, struggle, brutality, disorder, with everyone pitted against everyone else and with no way out other than prison or death. For this reason, Pujol seemed to be a very moral writer describing an amoral world.
He seemed pleased with this. ‘Like George Orwell, I just try and describe the way things are as plainly and as accurately as I can, he said. ‘I am not trying to make a case for social justice.
That is for other people. Anyway, I am not sure that the problems of the quartiers nord can be explained away by a simple lack of resources or money. There are bigger forces here, a globalized drugs trade and so on. There is plenty of money here, of course, but it is all in the hands of the wrong people: the voyous and their bosses.’
Marseille can’t really be compared to another European city in terms of the effects of migration, largely because of its status (historical and current) as the most important port for North African and Middle Eastern illegal trade into Europe. Rotterdam and Antwerp also have a problem with illegal drugs and migration, but they aren’t as intertwined as they are in Marseille, which has always been Europe’s seedy underbelly. The harbour still retains an Ambleresque quality.