In an interview with the once-communist newspaper L’Humanité this week, Emmanuel Macron went on a violent offensive against the Rassemblement National—and to a lesser extent Reconquête—which he intends to reject “outside the republican arc.” This phrase is used to exclude some parties from the field of political ‘legitimacy’ as being beyond the pale. This heightened aggression must be seen as a concern about the RN’s predicted results in the forthcoming European elections—more than 10 points ahead of the President’s party in recent polls—and a desire to shatter the idea of any right turn in his policies since the start of 2024.
Since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th, the Rassemblement National has temporarily benefited from a positive aura by taking a clear stand on the side of Israel, whereas the French far Left clearly displayed its support for Hamas. On various occasions—such as the march against antisemitism organised on November 12th—a number of public figures have been able to testify in favour of the respectability of the Rassemblement National despite the statements made by its founder, which are now considered ancient history, and to plead for its full integration into French political life, encouraged by the existence of a group of 88 RN MPs in the National Assembly.
But this state of grace is about to come to an end.
The situation began to deteriorate with the death of lawyer Robert Badinter, former justice minister under socialist president François Mitterrand and responsible for the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981. While a national tribute was planned to honour the memory of this public figure, the late lawyer’s family made it known that they did not wish representatives of the Rassemblement National to attend, given the major ideological differences that opposed Badinter to the national Right party. Out of respect for the members of the Badinter family, the Rassemblement National representatives, therefore, refrained from attending the ceremony organised on Wednesday, February 14th at Place Vendôme, at the foot of the Ministry of Justice. In their view, this was a personal request that had to be respected.
A similar situation arose with the announcement of the entry into the Panthéon on Wednesday, February 21st of the Armenian resistance fighter Missak Manouchian, accompanied by a group of 23 foreign resistance fighters—seen by the French president as a symbol of universal commitment against Nazism during the Second World War.
This is due to be a public ceremony. As leader of the Rassemblement National parliamentary group in the French National Assembly, Marine Le Pen received a protocol invitation to attend. But Emmanuel Macron was keen to send an unambiguously negative message that her presence was not desired, in a lengthy interview with the newspaper L’Humanité on Monday, February 19th. “The far-right forces would be well advised not to be present,” he explained, equating the Rassemblement National and Reconquête, Éric Zemmour’s party, for the occasion.
The signal sent out by Emmanuel Macron with this interview is very strong. It is the first time in history that a President of the Republic has chosen the columns of L’Humanité to address the French people, and with good reason. L’Humanité is a historic newspaper of the French Left. Founded in 1904 by the socialist Jean Jaurès, it became the official organ of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1920 until 1994. Since then, institutional links with the PCF have been severed, but the paper remains a far-left publication.
The Armenian resistance fighter and poet Missak Manouchian, who is due to be inducted into the Panthéon, was a communist activist who immigrated to France and was a member of the Communist International. He joined the internal resistance and was promoted to head the FTP branch (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, the communist resistance fighters) for the Paris region. He was shot by the Germans in 1944. While he played a very active role in the French Resistance, Manouchian was also a fervent communist, obeying the directives of the Communist International in the anti-fascist struggle from 1934 onwards.
Today, the communists, who are delighted that one of their own has been honoured, find it inconceivable that the Rassemblement National should be associated with the event. For the occasion, the French Left is reviving one of its favourite myths, that of the troubled origins of the Rassemblement National, a party they describe as the heir to Marshal Pétain and which they claim was founded by collaborationists.
The historical truth is quite different: as with any political party founded after 1945, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National includes members of the Resistance as well as collaborators—collabos, as the French say. Famous members of the Resistance include the likes of Jean-Louis de Camaret, winner of the Military Medal, Croix de Guerre 39-45 with commendations, Croix du Combattant volontaire de la Résistance, former member of the France combattante and Forces Française de l’Intérieur (FFI) networks, and Jean Valette d’Osia, a Lieutenant General who escaped and then went to London and Algiers in 1944, and founder of the Glières maquis—to name but a few. But the left-wing press generally prefers to use the convenient formula of the Front National ‘founded by former Waffen-SS’ (in this case in reference to Pierre Bousquet, a former member of the Division Charlemagne and treasurer of the Front National). They are keen on forgetting that former French President François Mitterrand worked for Marshal Pétain and was awarded the Francisque by him, and that the socialist president himself was surrounded by many former collaborationists. The legacy of the Second World War in France is not brown, white, or red, but streaked with a thousand and one shades that are very difficult to distinguish.
The newspaper L’Humanité is also pretending to forget its troubled past when, at the time of the German-Soviet pact, its management negotiated with Nazi Germany to keep the publication going despite France’s entry into the war against Hitler and its suspension by the French authorities. Alexis Brézet, the managing editor of Le Figaro, spoke to Europe 1 about this complex period and the division of responsibilities: if the same jurisprudence were applied to all parties, neither the representatives of the Socialist Party nor those of Les Républicains would be allowed at the ceremony today.
While Marine Le Pen kept a low profile at the time of the tribute to Badinter, she has no intention of bowing to the general pressure imposed on her regarding the Manouchian induction into the Pantheon. She has announced that she will attend, despite Emmanuel Macron’s warnings that she and her party are undesirable: for the candidate who was defeated in 2022 and intends to take her revenge in 2027, this is a matter of principle. She denounced the “outrageous” remarks made by the President of the Republic against her in L’Humanité. In addition to inviting her to take a back seat at the Pantheon, the President made his case worse by saying that the Rassemblement National and Reconquête were “outside the Republican arc,” thereby contradicting the words of his own Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, who said at the beginning of February that the RN and the “millions of French people who voted” were indeed part of it.
After the fiasco of the vote on the immigration law, which was imposed and then gutted, Emmanuel Macron, stunned by the rumours that have temporarily made him out to be a man ‘veering to the Right,’ is rushing with grotesque energy to send out as many signals as possible to the Left—including by resurrecting the famous cordon sanitaire that we might have thought was dying. It remains to be seen whether French public opinion will give any credence to this pitiful staging.