Book Reviews: Fractured France by Andrew Hussey, and Why Fascism is on the Rise in France by Ugo Palheta

Even by French standards, the current administration, and with it the country, is in crisis. Andrew Hussey, a well-known commentator on French culture and affairs, has lived in Paris for two decades and knows the country and its politics well—knowledge he wears lightly and engagingly in his Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation. The book's cover and blurb suggest that it focusses on the bitterly contested lines of political and social unrest in modern France, a seemingly permanent feature of the news these days, the crises being underscored by collapsing governments. But it is as much a personal memoir and travelogue of his time in France, whether as a student, academic, contributor to TV news programmes in the UK or writer for the British press. As such, the book itself feels somewhat fractured.

It starts solidly, setting the scene for the populist anger felt by both left and right in France, encapsulated by the widespread gilets jaunes movement of 2018–2020, an eruption of anger across France by those who felt they had been left behind by government policies enacted by distant and uncaring metropolitan elites in the capital and rich cities. The trigger was a proposed fuel-tax rise, something which would have disproportionately affected those in the provinces (it is easy to underestimate the size of France and the distances to be travelled within it). Such populist agitation was not, and is not, restricted to France, but the country's tradition of widespread revolt assured it special attention and, indeed, sartorial visibility. Hussey witnessed it first-hand in Paris, recognising familiar protest being taken to a higher level of anger: ‘the new reality is that France is an increasingly divided country, with class divisions now hardened by geography as well as economics’. The movement was brought to a halt more by the Covid pandemic than by an effective governmental response.

What follows in Fractured France is Hussey's recollection of meeting political, academic, cultural and ordinary people across a few select areas of the country, coupled with incongruous personal reminisces of his own. Thus, he has a productive chat with Christophe Guilluy, author of the hugely influential Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery and the Future of France (2018), highlighting the plight of many French people in the country's vast rural regions and peripheries of the great cities—the ‘new citadels’—where they cannot afford to live. The term he used and which is often used for the privileged was ‘bobos’, bourgeois bohemians, which Hussey explains is a label for the professional classes—academics, media workers, lawyers, high-level civil servants and politicians—‘who think of themselves as liberal left but who are entitled and superior in manner’: ‘their policies do nothing for the French working class—whose problems are low wages, job security and poor social housing—but they are intent on showing a virtuous face to the wider world’. In other words, vested interests rule. It was ever thus.

Again, in a familiar refrain seen across Western democracies, the French elites disdain the boorish masses as ‘ploucs’—‘gormless’ yokels who should leave the running of the country to their betters. Those on the old political, non-identitarian left and right are alienated—and often united—by their own contempt for what they see as the rule of the wealthy, with Emmanuel Macron being the ‘President of the Rich’. It is the radical/far right which preoccupies Hussey, not least the question of immigration and no-go ghettos in the banlieues. The Rassemblement National (National Rally), formerly the Front National, makes repeated appearances, as does its leader, Marine Le Pen. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of its opposite and competing left-wing Popular Front grouping, hardly gets a look in; this is all the more surprising given how closely Mélenchon's side is at the heels of Rassemblement National, and his recent book, Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, reviewed in this issue, is the sort of text usually sharper on Hussey's radar.

Hussey, of working-class, left-leaning origins, is admirably sceptical of elitist pseuds he encounters, such as the famous French novelist and proleophobe Edouard Louis. Here, as throughout the book, Hussey makes a number of perceptively aphoristic observations: ‘The message is clear: freedom for the working class is possible. But only if they are prepared to be shown the way by university-educated intellectuals.’ However, on occasion, he is a little tone deaf to his own establishment snobbery. In the heavily ethnic town of Roubaix, where 75 per cent of butchers are halal, Hussey meets with two supporters of Le Pen's party. Despite their politics, with which he strongly disagrees, he rather condescendingly admits: ‘I could not bring myself to dislike [them].’ If political persuasion is to be the defining characteristic of personal association, then there is little hope of transcending embittered partisanship. This partisanship has led to much talk in France of impending civil war. The divisions are deep, especially, as he repeatedly shows, between indigenous French and Arab populations, but Hussey is rightly sceptical of such a cataclysmic outcome.

The book succeeds extremely well when it maintains its focus on the social and political divisions in France, and there really are some powerful passages—not least on the shocking, barbaric drug murders in Marseille—but the lengthy digressions dilute the impact and feel a little indulgent. Do we need a potted five-page history of the Nazi occupation of Lyon? Twelve on Albert Camus and how Hussey met his daughter? Eleven on Hussey's friendship with the minor English Situationist artist Ralph Rumney? A description of his hallucinations while on LSD? Plenty, such as on Camus and on the remarkable food scene in Lyon—France's gastronomical capital—are hugely enjoyable to read; they just feel that they belong in another book. One, I hasten to add, I would be eager to read. Readers who would prefer a meatier take on France's current ills might care to take up Brigitte Granville's superb 2021 What Ails France?

The subject of fascism comes up frequently in Fractured France. Like the media hype around civil war, its menace is over-estimated. Hussey makes clear that its spectre is useful in keeping it firmly suppressed, as it leads to repeatedly successful formations of anti-Le Pen blocs at the ballot box. This fear of Le Pen keeps the likes of the universally detested Macron in power. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the genuinely far right is rising in France in the face of political alienation and fundamental cultural challenges. This is the topic of an altogether different book to Hussey's, Ugo Palheta's focussed and earnest Why Fascism is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen. (The volume, originally published in France in 2018, is updated in this translation by David Broder, author of a book from 2020 which charts the rise of the populist right in Italy.)

Palheta is an academic at the University of Lille. As the co-editor of the online Marxist journal Contretemps, it is not surprising that he treats the growth of fascism as a real and present danger. Again, this fear is, I believe, thankfully overdone in France for the reason given above. Being a Marxist, Palheta possibly has a more embracing definition of fascism, one that goes beyond the limits of some historical experts such as Kevin Passmore, who did not regard the Front National as being far enough right to be deserving of the label fascist. Thus, there is obfuscation over what actually constitutes fascism today: for some, it has to be anti-democratic; for others, hard-right policies suffice. Yet Palheta is acutely clear-sighted on the hazards of mislabelling all and sundry on the right as fascists, as this prepares the ground on which true fascism can travel.

Palheta gets off to a superb start in his trenchant attack on the deliberate, pejorative and polemical misuse of the term ‘populism’ to denounce any, be they from the left or the right, who threaten the established status quo. While the term is more generally applied to the right, he cites on the left the examples of Syriza's Alexis Tsipras in Greece and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain: the former stopped being called a ‘nationalist populist’ when he dropped ‘the [anti-austerity] programme on which he had been elected’; the latter trying to implement, in Palheta's view, ‘a traditional centre-left Keynesian programme’. The demonisation of populism in turn allows us to ‘equally identify a powerful neoliberal demagogy’. He sensibly observes that appealing to the people is simply ‘a dimension of all politics in the age of democracy’. Even President Macron, in his early electioneering days, declared he would ‘upset the established order’. The term ‘populist’ then is one of ‘political delegitimation’, reflecting ‘the elitist prejudice that the people is ignorant and irrational, impulsive and incoherent, easily manipulated and prone to authoritarian excess and frenzies of xenophobia’—the disaffected ploucs vividly brought to life in Hussey's book.

Palheta acknowledges that the likes of Rassemblement National and Éric Zemmour's further right Reconquête party are not ‘fans of brown shirts and swastikas’; rather, he sees them and their ilk as vehicles for potential fascism. Their development and the current exigencies have been fostered by ‘the weakening of what we call democratic institutions … worn down by a series of governments’, not least by Macron's recourse to constitutional Article 49.3, by which laws can pass without a vote (‘rule by decree’). Palheta writes how labour rights, pensions, working conditions and communal solidarity are being undermined against a background of serious unemployment (‘around 15 per cent of the active population’); all the while, he argues convincingly, authoritarianism creeps into place.

Palheta offers a truly insightful explanation of recent French politics, not least Macron's rise to power and what he has done while holding it, consolidating the ‘realignment of the political field around the ‘extreme centre … cohering it around a neoliberal matrix that is also authoritarian, imperialist and xenophobic in character’. This matrix, argues Palheta, had been facilitated by the socialist prime minister and president Lionel Jospin and François Hollande. Palheta excoriates the Socialist Party for selling out to the neoliberal agenda, having already resuscitated the early, struggling Front National, providing it with the oxygen of publicity in order to split the vote on the right. Nearly half the book is devoted to the Front/Rassemblement National and its rise, Palheta displaying once again his credentials as an impressive chronicler of contemporary politics in France.

This excellent book is not without drawbacks. It is disappointing that the book comes with neither a bibliography nor an index, but it is fully referenced. In complete contrast to the accessible Fractured France, the writing here can be quite dense in places and is, as the author acknowledges, often concerned with theory. Palheta's Marxist propensity to apportion culpability to unfettered free markets is also problematic: ‘there is every chance that capitalism—in its neoliberal, authoritarian and racist configuration—will drag us to the [fascist] abyss’. He makes a good case why capitalism can contribute to fascism, but this is not enough. His Marxist concentration on the economy leads him to downplay the changing ethno-cultural forces at work, seeing these more as an excuse to jump on the racist/fascist bandwagon. It is clear from Hussey alone that this is not the case. Nor is it entirely convincing to say ‘Islamophobia in France is quite clearly distinguished by the fact that it has been a top-down construct, and more precisely a state ideological formation’; sometimes governments respond to perceived popular feeling. This is one of those books in which I found the analysis and knowledge of the highest order, while at the same time disagreeing and agreeing in equal measure with the author's conclusions and proposed remedies. But that is the mark of a fully engaging and intellectually stimulating book.

The great drama of French politics will continue to unfold up to the next presidential election by Spring 2027—and no doubt long afterwards. These two books will help guide the reader through the mazes and smokescreens.

Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation, by Andrew Hussey. Granta, 318 pp. £25

Why Fascism is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen, by Ugo Palheta. Verso. 244 pp. £19.99