And so Pedro told Tony his life story: his rustic childhood in Villa Clara, his polio diagnosis, his days in Havana, his stint as a lector in a cigar factory, reading adventure novels to the cigar rollers. Pedro also told Tony about the greatness of the United States. One day, sitting on the porch, Tony made a promise to his grandfather: when he grew up, he would “lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba”.

Even after Little Tony had become US Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio, he never forgot that promise. In his memoir An American Son (2012), in which he reminisces about that Miami porch, he describes Pedro as his “tutor”. And it seems he is still trying to make him proud. Since January, the Trump administration has been closing in on Cuba. It has tightened its embargo and sent the US navy to circle the island like a shiver of sharks. The US Justice Department has also indicted former leader Raúl Castro for murder. As always, the Cuban people are bearing the brunt of the US campaign of maximum pressure. Blackouts take place daily, and food and medicine are hard to come by. And as always, the pinchos grandes are comfortable in their fortified mansions, with their back-up generators and well-stocked fridges.

Against this dramatic backdrop, rumors abound that the US will invade. “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years,” Trump mused back in May, “and it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.” Rubio’s message has been much the same of late. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba,” he said, “as long as these people are in charge.”

Whether this is fighting talk or just bluff is anyone’s guess. Given the Iranian quagmire, Trump and Rubio might choose instead to play the long game with Cuba. “What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves,” Rubio told Axios last week. “One of the things we’ve lost in American foreign policy is the concept of patience and persistence. My level of confidence is that when this administration is over, at a minimum, Cuba will be on an irreversible glide path toward a different future.” The future Rubio envisions is pretty clear: he wants to bring down the communist leadership and privatize the economy. And he is prepared to wait. It’s difficult, however, to imagine Cuba resisting for that much longer. 

For Trump, getting the better of Cuba is a crucial part of his Donroe Doctrine. After getting rid of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, he wants to further US dominance in the Southern Hemisphere. Despite its tiny size, Cuba carries huge symbolic significance. It was the outpost of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and today is a Chinese ally. American presidents since John F. Kennedy have tried to oust the communist regime. Not one has even come close. To pull it off would be legacy-defining. After Trump’s humiliating climbdown in Iran, he needs a win to restore his tough-guy image — and Cuba makes for easy prey.

For Rubio, however, this is personal. He has been harboring a grudge against Cuba’s leaders since childhood, biding his time. Dale tiempo al tiempo, as the Latin American proverb goes. Give time to time. Now, at last, he may be nearing his grand finale. In a video message in Spanish to the Cuban people, Rubio promised “a new path between the US and a new Cuba”. He added, “The only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.” 

Their country is also Rubio’s, although he has never set foot there. He was born in Miami in 1971, 12 years after the revolution which saw Fidel Castro sweep into power in Havana. Castro promised to free the island from the rule of Fulgencio Batista, a military strongman backed by the US. But it soon became obvious that Castro had no interest in democracy. In 1961, he came out as a Marxist-Leninist and aligned with the Soviet Union. Between 1959 and 1973, more than 600,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States. Castro called them gusanos (worms). They called themselves exiles. The vast majority settled in Miami, congregating south of downtown in a cheap neighborhood now known as Little Havana. Soon there were Cuban eateries and Cuban barber shops and Cuban jewelry stores. Castro’s kid sister, who hated him, even opened a pharmacy there.

Rubio grew up not far from Little Havana. Although he lived between the ages of eight and 13 in Las Vegas, where his father worked as a hotel bartender, he is a true product of Cuban Miami. He liked to tell people that his parents fled Cuba in 1959, the year of the revolution. This origin story fueled his rise in the Republican Party of Florida and later in national politics. In 2009, during his run for the Senate, he tweeted: “Thank you USA for welcoming my parents 50 years ago.” Two years later, Rubio told an interviewer that “the direction we’re going in Washington, DC, would make us more like the rest of the world, and not like the exceptional nation that my parents found when they came here from Cuba in 1959.”

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Except that’s not quite how it happened. In 2011, two American reporters, Manuel Roig-Franzia and Alex Leary, broke a big scoop: Rubio’s parents had actually settled in Miami in 1956, three years before the revolution. At the time, Castro was in Mexico plotting the revolution. This means the Rubios left Cuba in search of the American dream, rather than to escape communism. In Miami’s exile community, pre-Castro economic migrants are derided as verduleros (vegetable street vendors).

One can guess why Rubio preferred to say his parents arrived in 1959: it surely made for a better, neater story. Critics who insisted he lied purely for “political gain” were missing the point. His attempt at self-mythology tells us a lot about how he sees himself and his political mission. It seems Rubio has internalized his community’s history. Three years naturally makes a big difference to journalists, but I imagine they make little psychological difference to a Cuban kid growing up in Miami.

“Look, that’s not the way it was discussed in our family or by many people in the exile community,” Rubio explained after the story broke in 2011. “It’s more about the loss of their home country.” In the minds of Cuban exiles, their native island is akin to the promised land. “Next year in Havana!” is a popular slogan in Miami, a riff on the Jewish phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem!”, pronounced during Passover.

Besides, Rubio’s grandfather, Pedro, did leave Cuba after Castro’s takeover. He had actually first moved to the US in 1956 to be closer to his daughters, according to Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of Rubio. But after the revolution he moved back to the island. He struggled to make a living in the US and didn’t want to be a burden to his family. At the time, there was still hope that something positive would come out of the revolution. Pedro even found a decent job as a clerk in a government ministry. But he couldn’t stand the oppressive atmosphere. Soon, he was back in Miami.

Immediately after the revolution, Cuban exiles began plotting ways to reverse it. Young Rubio wasn’t the first to dream of toppling Castro. As early as 1960, the US government had set out its Cuba policy in a secret memo: “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US.” How would it do that exactly? “Covert action.” And who would carry that out? Cuban exiles, for the most part.

The opening shot in the contrarrevolución came in 1961, when the US landed 1,500 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba. Castro’s forces were ready for them and struck back hard. The only chance of success would have been for the US to provide air support. President Kennedy refused, and the invasion was defeated. But the exiles, and the CIA, never stopped plotting to take down Castro. Through the decades, Miami buzzed with intrigue. 

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Rubio came of age in this feverish urban swamp. At home or in his car, he would tune in to Radio Mambi or WQBA, which broadcast round the clock about the evils of Castro and the heroism of the exiles. This time, the master plan would work out, this was the one. Next year in Havana! Business deals and secret plots were hatched at corner tables at restaurants like Versailles or the Tropical. And violence was never far away, as journalist Ann Louise Bardach reveals in her 2004 book Cuba Confidential. Hardline exiles targeted anyone deemed too soft. Dialogueros, who supported negotiations with the Cuban government, were traitors. And there was only one way to deal with traitors: with a bullet to la cabeza. Between 1973 and 1976, anti-Castro groups carried out more than 100 attacks in South Florida. The exile banker Bernardo Benes told Bardach that “Miami is like Guatemala”. Benes lived in constant fear for his life after brokering a deal in 1978 that freed 3,600 political prisoners from Castro’s jails. “No one is interested in free speech in Dade County. Only in Havana.”

The exile community was hierarchical. The Rubios, who had working-class jobs and went out for pancakes every Sunday morning, were nowhere near the top. El jefe was the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the billionaire founder of the Cuban American National Foundation. His statue now overlooks Miami Beach. He was a power broker who spoke like a heavy in a Forties film noir. Once, when lobbying a congressman, he reportedly said: “If you cooperate with me you get the honey. Otherwise, I hit you with the jar.” Another heavyweight exile was Rafael Díaz-Balart, former brother-in-law of Fidel. At the turn of the century, two of his sons went into politics and were elected to the US Congress. In Little Havana, they were hailed as the chosen ones, destined to free their homeland. 

Yet it was a young campaign volunteer who would reach the top. By now, people called him Marco. After graduating from law school in Miami, Rubio set his sights on a political career. At 34, he became the speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Five years later, a US senator. And at 53, Secretary of State. Among ambitious Cuban-Americans, he was never the most likely to find himself in this position. Others were richer, better connected. And yet here he is. A talented, hungry politician with a killer instinct. 

Now comes his biggest political test yet. Rubio has long been seen as the archetypal Republican hawk. His idol is Ronald Reagan. Growing up, he writes in his memoir, his grandfather Pedro would tell him: “America must be a strong country.” That belief in American exceptionalism motivates Rubio as much as his hostility towards the Cuban regime. To be sure, US leaders shouldn’t conduct foreign policy based on desires of revenge. And if they are the children of immigrants, they shouldn’t import their parents’ feuds. But this isn’t the case here: Rubio’s feud with Cuba is also America’s feud. The island nation remains a hub in the anti-American axis. 

When Rubio was 13 and still went as Tony, his grandfather Pedro was admitted into hospital. He didn’t have long. Tony was at his bedside throughout, and as Pedro died he took his hand. “I swore I would do something with my life and make him proud,” Rubio wrote in his memoir. Decades later, he is in the unique position to vanquish one of America’s oldest foes, and avenge his family. Will he succeed?

And as he planned it, so it is. Later this week, in Chicago, the Barack Obama Presidential Center opens its doors to the public, making it the 14th presidential library in the United States. For a $30 admission fee — by far the most expensive of the lot — visitors will be treated to the Obama greatest hits. It’s been a while, but surely you can intone them: Yes We Can, The Audacity of Hope, Change We Can Believe In.

Like other presidential libraries, the Obama Center is a vanity project that tells us how its namesake wants to go down in history. But it feels too on the nose to convince anyone beyond starry-eyed supporters. According to its website, the Center has four floors of “dynamic exhibits” that “explore the promise and power of democracy through the legacy of President Obama and Mrs. Obama” and connect them to the “social movements that made their work possible”. Picture John Lewis leading civil rights activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, or Martin Luther King waxing lyrical about his dream in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The implications of all this dynamism: Obama is the moral conscience of America. And why not? After all, just like Dr. King, and unlike the sitting president, he has a Nobel Peace Prize.

To top it all off, there’s also a full-size replica of Obama’s Oval Office, where visitors can sit at the resolute desk and play commander-in-chief for a minute or two. While that might sound like it’s worth the price of admission, former presidents have been building replicas of the Oval Office since Harry Truman in 1957. And admission to the Truman Library, in Independence, Missouri, is only $12.

Modern US presidents all have their own presidential libraries, financed by private donations. Though these “presidential temples” have gotten more extravagant since Truman’s time, they all serve the same dual purpose: they contain an exhibit on the tenure of each president, and house the archives of his administration. More than a million people visit them every year, according to the most recent figures. The most popular, with nearly 250,000 tourists, is the Reagan Library in California.

Not for long. Over the next year, 700,000 visitors are expected to flock to the South Side of Chicago, the high temple of the Midwest messiah. Like all auspicious sites, the location wasn’t picked at random. With presidential libraries, setting is storytelling. For instance, the Eisenhower Library is in his hometown of Abilene, Kansas (population: 6,000), which serves to underscore his folksy nature. The Reagan Library, meanwhile, sits atop a hill surrounded by open space. As the historian Sarah Mackay points out, this reinforced the conservative’s image as an intrepid cowboy. As for the power-hungry Lyndon B. Johnson, one location wasn’t enough for him. In addition to his official library in Austin, he also built a replica of the house where he was born in the Texas countryside. He wanted the world to be wowed by his hard-scrabble background.

Much has been made about how Obama chose — scrap that, insisted on — the South Side, historically where Chicago’s working-class black communities have lived. It was there, too, that the former president spent his formative years as a community organizer. “The best education I ever had,” Obama later said. Placing his library on the South Side is a way to bring economic opportunity to the people who made him.

Or so the official narrative goes. But as David J. Garrow, author of the definitive Obama biography explains, the 44th president’s library is actually located at the top of the South Side, near Hyde Park, which “for decades has been this integrated, middle class, upper middle class island built around the University of Chicago and very separated” from the rest of the South Side. “Going further south,” Garrow says it’s important to realize, “there’s another 70-plus blocks”.

There are other question marks too. Obama’s first job in Chicago was deep in those blocks, in the neighborhood of Roseland. And yet, Garrow says, “it’s still not connected to the public transit system,” and “it’s virtually all black”. Had the Obama Center been built in Roseland, it would have been a godsend for the people there. Instead, in Garrow’s laconic observation, “we just get a little bit of an extension of Hyde Park.”

In a similar vein, the almost mythical connection between Obama and Chicago’s progressive activist circles is grossly exaggerated. As Garrow shows in his book, as soon as Obama went to Washington to become a senator, he ghosted them. Politics is ruthless, yes, but not everyone has behaved like this. Presidents from JFK to Reagan were loyal to their collaborators. They knew they could trust them more than Washington courtiers. Obama preferred the latter. As Hermene Hartman, one of his early backers and an influential figure in Chicago’s black community, put it back in 2011: “In Chicago politics, that’s rule number one: be loyal… I was very loyal to Barack, but he has not been loyal to some of the people who were there for him from day one.”

If the narrative around the Obama Center is spurious, at least the building itself looks good, right? Obama is nothing if not stylish. He knows how to do vibes. Alas, not this time. The Center is as disappointing as the man once you learn about him. This doesn’t really come as a surprise given that the architecture of presidential libraries usually reflects their subjects. It’s like the concrete embodiment of their psyche.

Take the LBJ Library, an awesome edifice, all hard lines and travertine. When it opened, Newsweek dubbed it “the big daddy of all US presidential libraries”. It showcased the gargantuan hubris of a president who had sworn he would build a “great society” and ended up being responsible for the Vietnam debacle. By contrast, the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, is a modest neoclassical building. From afar, it looks like it could be your local high school. That’s the point: it befits a taciturn president who avoided the spotlight, even during the Great Depression.

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Designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the Obama Center is more Johnsonian than Hooverian. A thick tower with sharp, angled faces, it’s covered in gray granite. There are barely any windows. At the top is a “sky room”. The shape of the building, Obama Foundation deputy director Kim Patterson informed us recently, is “meant to mimic four hands coming together to show the importance of collective action”. Some social media users have compared it to a trash can. While that’s taking it a bit too far, there’s nothing architecturally distinctive about the Obama Center. It looks like the HQ of a Fortune 500 company.

Spread around the tower is a “campus” that feels more like a mall. There’s a branch of the Chicago public library (because Barack is an intellectual), a gym with basketball courts (because Barack is sporty), artwork from emerging and renowned artists (because Barack is hip), a cafe and fine dining restaurant where you will “experience the vibrant connection between food and community impact” (because Barack is a foodie with a social conscience). Of course, there’s also a shop to “grab your swag”.

Credit where it’s due: the Obama Center has way more going on than other presidential libraries. Amenities are usually restricted to a cafeteria and a gift shop selling bobbleheads, themed plates and books. But, yet again, this corporate sensibility was to be expected. Since leaving office a decade ago, Obama has been in his mogul era, signing lucrative deals with Netflix and Spotify.

What presidents do after the White House, especially when they are relatively young, is always revealing. Jimmy Carter was a failure in office but went on to dedicate himself to humanitarian work. Thanks to his efforts, guinea worm disease has been nearly eradicated. Bill Clinton, too, has made a positive difference with the Clinton Foundation. George W. Bush, at least, has had the decency to keep a low profile.

Despite his reputation as a high-minded intellectual, Obama is enamored with the trappings of wealth and status. Not without reason did he like to say that his favorite “perk of being president” was having his own plane. His post-presidency has been one long succession of flexes signifying nothing. One week, he’s with Oprah and Bruce Springsteen on a yacht in French Polynesia. Another, he’s hanging with George and Amal Clooney in Lake Como. In between, he’s imparting his wisdom about democracy to the readers of the New Yorker. Ultimately, the former president is like the ambitious hero in a Balzac novel: all style, no substance. As Garrow concludes in his biography, “while the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.”

And so is the Obama Center. Nothing makes this point more plainly than the fact it is a presidential library without any archives. Every other library has a research room — operated by the National Archives and Records Administration — where anyone can go and examine records from that president’s time in office. But in the case of the Obama Center, the research room is “digital” only. It’s just a website. There is no physical space for historians to actually work.

To understand quite how absurd this is, you have to go back to why presidential libraries even became a thing. The year was 1941, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. Up until then, no system existed to catalog the archives of US presidents. Some went to the Library of Congress in Washington, others to the president’s relatives or private collectors. FDR changed that with the FDR Library, a colonial-style cottage erected on his family estate in Hyde Park — not Chicago, but leafy Upstate New York. For the first time, Roosevelt said, presidential archives would remain “whole and intact in their original condition, available to scholars of the future.”

Nearly 80 years later, I was one of those scholars, at the FDR Library for my Master’s dissertation. I remember feeling emotional while holding ink-stained letters FDR had received after his first fireside chat in March 1933. It was the height of the Great Depression, and the country was starving. Ordinary Americans were pouring their hearts out to the president, telling him how much he meant to them. One lady even compared him to Moses. The experience would have been infinitely less moving had I been on a laptop in my bedroom.

Then there’s the intellectual camaraderie of the research room. During my PhD, I spent long days poring over obscure Cold War archives at the JFK Library in Boston. At lunch, me and my fellow researchers would grab sandwiches and discuss our interpretations of the Kennedy presidency. The absence of a research room at the Obama Center will prevent such scenes from ever happening. What a failure of community building for a man who never lets us forget that he was once a community organizer.

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Yes, presidential libraries are vanity projects. FDR himself wasn’t entirely altruistic when he dreamed up the first. As an opponent said at the time: “Only an egomaniac would have the nerve.” Every egomaniac since has had the nerve. Even Richard Nixon, who had an exhibit about Watergate absolve him of any wrongdoing, presenting the whole thing as a “coup” by Democrats. (It was updated after his death to be historically accurate.)

Some libraries take that idea of legacy even further. Eight presidents, including FDR and Reagan, are buried on the grounds of their libraries. When you come to think of it, that’s the kind of thing you’d expect from kings: to build shrines dedicated to their memory. It’s a reminder that long before Donald Trump, who plans to open a gold-decked library in Miami, American presidents have been behaving like monarchs. All too often, the American people have merrily played along.

And yet the US also has a deep-running democratic culture. Presidential libraries, for all their pomp, are a testament to that. By giving anyone access to archives, they are the ultimate democratic space. As Reagan put it when he broke the ground of his own library: “There’ll be much to study here, much to discuss, and much to mull over. This library will allow scholars of the future to cast their own judgment on these years, and I would not presume to predict the result of their researches.”

This prospect probably unsettles Obama. He craves adulation and has enjoyed a ridiculously easy ride for most of his career. Outside of shrill conservative pundits, who he can dismiss as hacks, Obama has been feted by the mainstream media and pop culture. But that won’t last. As years go by and memories of his magnetism fade, he will be treated like any other president. And just like any other president, the only thing that will matter is the record.

No one rates FDR or Reagan because of how cool they were, or how impressive their libraries are, but because of their transformative records. And while it’s too soon to render a historical verdict, Obama’s record isn’t looking like that of a significant president. His domestic achievements were lackluster, and his foreign policy left America weaker. Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act; the Snowden leaks; the Iran nuclear deal; the never-enforced “red line” in Syria; the advent of wokeism in the Democratic Party: all will be scrutinized for decades to come.

And there’s nothing Obama can do to stop that. Research room or not, scholars will still access his archives — by law they must be made available over time — and cast their own judgment. The Obama Center, with its dynamic exhibits and shiny basketball courts and sky rooms and fine dining and swag, won’t make a difference.

With dark hair, a round face and a large nose, Louis Alphonse, 51, looks every bit the part of the roi. Clearly, blue blood doesn’t dilute. Louis Alphonse is directly descended from a long lineage of French monarchs that includes Saint Louis, Louis XIV and the hapless Louis XVI, guillotined during the French Revolution. As head of the House of Bourbon, he’s heir apparent to the throne. Were the hand of providence ever to crown him, he would be Louis XX.

But while Monseigneur may look the part, he doesn’t quite sound the part. Born in Spain — his second cousin is Felipe VI — Louis Alphonse speaks French with a thick Spanish accent. He often grimaces as he stumbles his way through declarations about the eternal virtues of royalty. Think Manuel in Fawlty Towers rather than Antonio Banderas in Zorro.

The crown isn’t Louis Alphonse’s sole preoccupation, either. Unlike his forebears, the man has to earn a living for his family. Every day, he grinds. A financier by training, Louis Alphonse worked for years for Banco Occidental de Descuento, a Venezuelan bank owned by his billionaire father-in-law, a self-proclaimed “socialist” said to have been tight with Hugo Chavez. Since 2019 he has also been honorary president of a foundation that promotes the memory of his great-grandfather on his mother’s side: General Franco, who he claims “created the Spanish middle class, built dams and roads [and] prevented the installation of communism”.

Yet, right now, Louis Alphonse’s heart aches for his ancestral homeland. With France mired in political chaos —  and polls ranking Emmanuel Macron as the most unpopular ever leader of the Fifth Republic — Louis Alphonse has pitched himself as a king-in-waiting. “I see France in a situation of total blockage and I am dismayed,” he told France’s most-watched news channel last October, adjusting his webcam with customary panache. His message: “If France asks it of me, I will be at her service.” But he won’t go further. Like a Hollywood star angling for an Oscar, he lets his supporters campaign on their own initiative.

***

Far from Paris, in the small village in Corrèze, central France, a man dreams of helping Louis de Bourbon claim what fate stole away. Damien Pennes, 39, is a shopkeeper who has always felt a deep attachment to the monarchy. More than a year ago, he founded the royalist political party Lys Royal de France. It currently has around 142 members, though it punches above its weight on social media. Its spokesperson, a young woman who posts as Madame de France, has racked up nearly 200,000 likes on TikTok. It has a celebrity supporter too: Yellow Vests icon Jacline Mouraud, the hypnotherapist and accordionist who helped spark the protests that rocked France in late 2018.

Lys Royal is only fielding three candidates in the municipal elections next month — but that’s just the start. “Our aim, without pretense, is to run in the presidential election,” Pennes tells me. Still, should Lys Royal by some freakish miracle win, Pennes has no intention of governing. He would “do away with Lys Royal de France — as with all the other parties — in favor of the return of the monarchy”. He continues: “We have nothing else to gain from this… we are just simple French people. There are no nobles here, no great fortunes. We are shopkeepers, employees, care workers.”

The musketeers of Lys Royal aren’t alone. Other small outfits also advocate for a restoration. The most infamous is Action Française, an Orleanist movement long associated with the prewar nationalist Charles Maurras. Orleanists believe Jean d’Orléans, the descendant of the last French King Louis Philippe I, should be king; Legitimists back Louis Alphonse; Bonapartists aren’t really a thing since Napoleon was a proud product of the Revolution. 

But while they are divided on who should rule France, the monarchists are broadly unified on the question of how they should rule France. Most of them loathe UK-style parliamentary monarchy. The ideal is a Catholic sovereign who actually rules, albeit with devolved powers at the local level. Above all, what they long for is a strong leader who can embody an ultraconservative idea of France. For Emile Chabal, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh and the author of France, royalism may be “a negligible force in both French political and intellectual life,” but it is “one of the available far-Right ideological toolkits” in France today.

The monarchists share the same preoccupations as France’s far-right: the defense of national identity, opposition to high levels of immigration and hostility towards the European Union. Frexit is even on the agenda. Still, this doesn’t mean they support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally or Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête. Most abstain in national elections and reject the Left/Right divide, which they see as a dreadful by-product of the Revolution (which is, after all, where the very idea of a Left/Right divide comes from). Zemmour, who extols France’s Catholic heritage, is probably the most monarchy-coded French politician. In Chabal’s view, he combines a “reactionary, old-fashioned” program with “a celebration of a hierarchical vision of Frenchness”. But even that isn’t enough for royalists. Zemmour plays the Republican game — and that sin can’t be absolved.

This rejection of the very idea of French democracy means that royalists, perhaps inevitably, play a negligible part in actual French democracy. Still, they do know how to put on a good show. Every year, they commemorate the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 with a torchlight march across Paris organized by Souvenir de Louis XVI. This year, more than 700 people showed up. Their slogans: “À bas la République!” and “Vive le Roi!” 

And they also represent something far bigger than their small number. Some 17% of the French electorate support replacing the President with a King, according to a 2016 poll, and 39% say it would have positive consequences for national unity. Royalists are quick to cite these figures as vindication. The truth is that it’s more complicated. Most people aren’t familiar with royalist thought and probably picture a King as a French Charles III — rather than a divinely appointed ruler. 

But where French royalism is most relevant is in its opposition to liberal democracy. Across the West, we are witnessing a growing rejection of liberal principles, a backlash that has intellectual roots that go back to 1789. It draws on doctrines espoused by French royalists who abhorred the Revolution’s promise of democracy. In other words, the reactionary vibes of French royalism haunt our moment.   

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald formulated a grand critique of the Revolution: la contre-révolution. To them, the new system was illegitimate. Sovereignty didn’t come from the people but from God. It was mediated on Earth by long-established institutions: the monarchy, the Church and the family. Worse, democracy was a dangerous illusion. Far from leading the masses to happiness, it ruined them by unleashing their basest impulses. Chaos inevitably followed. The only winners were the new ruling elites gaming the system.

The return of the King was the prerequisite for the return of the old divinely sanctioned order. Royalism, therefore, became the animating force of the contre-révolution. And it was a force to be reckoned with throughout most of the 19th century. There were three kings after Napoleon’s fall. Even at the outset of the Third Republic in the 1870s, a restoration seemed on the cards. “There was a real hope of restoration for monarchists,” the historian Baptiste Roger-Lacan tells me, “and this hope engendered a republican reaction”. 

Even after royalism lost majority support in the 1880s, it retained the power to disrupt. The monarchist group Action Française took off in the early 20th century at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. “By its ideological radicalism and its capacity to attract intellectuals it became an intellectual touchstone on the Right and the far-Right,” says Roger-Lacan. Its maître à penser, Charles Maurras, espoused a doctrine of “state-anti-semitism” believing French democracy had been captured by “internal enemies”: Protestants, Freemasons, foreigners and, of course, Jews. 

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At its peak in the Twenties, Action Française counted 60,000 members and reached many more with its newspaper. Today, it claims to have 3,000 members (journalists say the number is far fewer). Among them is Robin Vaillant, 24, a brewer who lives in the North of France. He insists that antisemitism is no longer part of Action Française’s doctrine. In his view, it was never central to Maurras’s royalist project and can be “taken out” without undermining its coherence. Historians tend to disagree, seeing Maurras’s visions as inextricably linked with Vichy.

Still, its vision for France is reasonably clear: Action Française continues to support “a decentralized monarchy”. The King would hold “regalian powers”: justice; national security; defense and diplomacy; state finances. The French Parliament would be abolished, and local assemblies would spring up all over the realm. These assemblies would be elected to deal with everyday life. People would also join corporations — or guilds — to represent their interests. 

France would also no longer be secular. The King would be Catholic, and Catholicism would become the official religion — though other faith groups would still be allowed to practice. What about the will of the people? Royalists reject this too. There are issues, they argue, where vox populi should hold its tongue. “Can a French person give an opinion on nuclear energy when they aren’t informed, [or] on geopolitics, I don’t know, in sub-Saharan Africa?” asks Vaillant. “No, you need experts and the King sort of embodies that eminence with his ministers.”

People would only get involved where they know best. “People should give their opinion on questions where they are concretely knowledgeable: local and community life, the economy, the distribution of tax.”

The Legitimist vision of the restoration isn’t so different from this Orléanist version. It might differ on the details, but the basics are the same. “Action Francaise pinched all the good bits from the Legitimist doctrine,” says the good-humoured Loïc Baverel, head of the Cercle d’Action Légitimiste, who laments the fact that French monarchists spend more effort arguing among themselves than communicating with the public. “Our efforts of communications and interactions should be directed towards everyday French people,” he tells me, “not sniping at each other between telephone booths.”

Unlike in the UK, the King would not be a ceremonial figure in Baverel’s France. He would wield real power and head a royal council made up of a principal minister and specialized ministers. For royalists, liberal democracy has led to decline. It has unleashed progressive forces, eroded France’s Catholic identity and sold off its sovereignty to the EU and giant corporations. 

But the critique goes even deeper than that — it aims at the very idea of an elected government. Royalists believe that transferring power every few years to a new president — who comes with a new agenda and needs his party’s support to implement it — is reckless. It impedes strategic planning. Baverel’s initial attraction to royalism came from his frustration at “the inability of politicians to carry out long-term structural economic policies, which may require actions that are unpopular at first, because of electoral deadlines”.

So, the dreamed-of restoration would not just be a radical departure from what France is today. It would undo centuries of political development since the Enlightenment. It’s literally a reactionary project; its roots lie in the reaction to the French Revolution. Like de Maistre, today’s royalists defend a hierarchy they consider natural. In the imagined Kingdom of France, society would no longer be organized around the individual, but around traditional institutions and “organic” communities. The King would be the great arbiter. He would ensure, in Baverel’s words, “that society functions harmoniously and that justice is respected between the different intermediary or constituent bodies”.

But France is no longer where the reactionary party is at. These 21st century French counter-revolutionaries would surely have more success in another Republic born of revolution: the United States, where an unlikely band of monarchists are riding the coattails of President Trump, who has long fancied himself an American monarch. He has posted memes where he wears a crown with the tag “Long Live the King”. And he recently said that the only limit to his power is “his own morality”. Not even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, would have dared utter something so brazen.

Under Donald I’s reign, a movement dubbed the Dark Enlightenment is emerging. Its leading figure, Curtis Yarvin, is a tech bro de Maistre. He has decried democracy as “weak” and wants the US to become a monarchy. But he envisions an even more powerful king than the French royalists: a CEO monarch who runs the realm like a Silicon Valley tycoon. Yarvin has reportedly influenced the White House and counts Vice President JD Vance as a reader. Elsewhere in the Magasphere, the far-Right streamer Nick Fuentes brags about being “a reactionary” and dreams of turning the US into a “Catholic monarchy”.

But while Yarvin and Fuentes borrow gleefully from the counter-Revolution, their visions of monarchy are ultimately dictatorial. They aren’t interested in theories of regalian powers and decentralization. Roger-Lacan points to “post-liberals” such as the Catholic political theorist Patrick J. Deenen and the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule as closer in spirit to the French contre-révolutionnaires. “The American post-liberal movement really introduces in the US elements of counter-revolutionary doctrine that come from Europe,” he says. For him, post-liberals are “anti-moderns and anti-liberals who consider that liberal democracy is a catastrophe for humanity and that it was the last step of the separation, or the collapse, of Christian society.”

But the MAGA Right doesn’t just import reactionary ideas from the old continent. It is also obsessed with the aesthetics of traditional Christian Europe — cathedrals, medieval castles, Renaissance paintings — and fears this ancestral heritage is under threat. In its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration blames the European Union and migration for the “loss of national identities and self-confidence”. Europe itself risks “civilizational erasure”. At the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the “sacred inheritance” shared by Americans and Europeans. 

Ironically for European reactionaries, it’s the United States that is now boosting their message — and it’s a message that increasingly chimes with voters. In the UK, according to a 2025 Channel 4 poll, half of Gen Z believe the country “would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”. In France, things aren’t much better. A recent survey found that 41% of the population would favor “a leader who governs without parliament and elections”.

Amid this profound crisis of liberal democracy, it’s clear that French royalists have a card to play. Will they succeed? They are tiny in number but determined. “I tell people who feel discouraged by the numbers… the one thing that’s certain is that if we do nothing, nothing will happen,” says Loïc Baverel. While the monarchists will play basically no role at all in next year’s presidential elections, that’s not to say the ghost of their King won’t hover over it. Macron himself once remarked: “There is in the democratic process an absence. In French politics, the absent one is the figure of the King, whom I fundamentally think the French people didn’t want to die.” As such, the French “have tried to reoccupy this emptiness, to put other figures there”.

Whoever comes out on top in 2027 will be the leader who manages — if only temporarily — to occupy this emptiness. Charles de Gaulle did so in 1958 at the outset of the Fifth Republic. Napoleon did so in 1804, when he crowned himself Emperor. He reportedly said: “I found the crown of France in the gutter.”  

One day, royalists hope, the crown will rest once again on the King’s head.

The year is 1981, and Herzog, then in his late thirties, is shooting Fitzcarraldo, an epic about a manic dreamer who hauls a steamship over a mountain in search of rubber, in the hope of making enough money to build a glorious opera house in the rainforest. The filming of Fitzcarraldo, chronicled in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams, was more dramatic than most Oscar-winning dramas. Herzog insisted on shooting in the Amazon, where the starry cast slept in humid tents, fought off snakes, and dodged poisoned arrows hurled at them by disgruntled locals. He also refused to use special effects and insisted on actually pulling a steamship over a mountain — a feat which required months of grueling engineering, and the help of Amazonian tribes.

Few directors have ever gone so far in pursuit of a vision and come out with a cinematic masterpiece. Directing Fitzcarraldo, Herzog gazed into the abyss, but the abyss didn’t dare gaze back at him. His dream was too magnificent, too irresistible. It had to be woven into the fabric of reality.

Since then, Herzog has realized many more dreams. He’s directed feature films, documentaries and even operas; he’s written poetry, essays and a novel. In the process, Herzog, now 83, has become a pop-culture icon, acclaimed for his lyricism and erudition — as well as his hypnotic voice and thick Bavarian accent. Like his countryman Friedrich Nietzsche, he has a knack for coining aphorisms (a favorite: “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness”). In an era of shallow influencers, he has struck a chord with audiences hungering for meaning.

Now comes a new book grandly titled The Future of Truth. Think of it as DMT in hardback. Beautifully translated from German by Michael Hofmann, it’s a collage of reflections, visions and stories about what constitutes truth.

Look up the definition of “truth” and you’ll learn it is “conformity with fact”. But this doesn’t impress Herzog. “It’s a definition of a complete dimwit,” he tells me when I ask him over Zoom. The director is sitting in his study in Los Angeles, looking down at the camera. “If facts constituted truth, it would be fairly simple, but it is not,” he continues. “We would have the accountant’s truth, and not something much deeper.”

Herzog tells me there exists no scholarly consensus on what truth really is. “It may be related to facts to some degree. But at the same time, the question arises: what are facts? And what is reality?” he says. “Reality is hotly disputed as well. What is the reality of the man in the lunatic asylum who believes he is Napoleon Bonaparte or Lenin or Jesus Christ?”

For Herzog, it doesn’t matter that we have no definitive definition of truth. “It is within the human condition that we know that we are in search of truth,” he says. “We know vaguely where it is, vaguely a direction, and all the rest is nothing but search, an expedition into the unknown, a quest, an endeavor never ending.”

It’s an endeavor that has animated Herzog since he first picked up a camera as a teenager. From the glaciers of Antarctica to the dunes of the Sahara, he’s been on a personal expedition for what he calls “ecstatic truth” — truth beyond facts.

“I’m speaking now purely of art,” Herzog warns, making clear that if you are in the business of political journalism, “you better do fact checks and you better not mislead your audience”. But for artists, he continues, “departing from the clear, understandable, natural facts can enhance the truth of something”.

Herzog gives the example of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in St Peter’s Basilica which depicts Jesus in the arms of Mary after he was taken down from the cross. “His face is correctly the face of a 33-year-old man,” Herzog explains, “but when you look into the face of his mother, the mother of a 33-year-old man is probably only 15. So I immediately asked myself the question: did Michelangelo try to give us fake news, did he try to cheat us?” Yet the opposite is true. “He gives us a deeper truth, something deeper about the essence of the two figures.”

In a nutshell, that’s Herzog’s approach too. Take his 2001 film Invincible, set in Berlin at the outset of Nazism, which follows the tribulations of Zishe Breitbart, a Jewish strongman who performs nightly in a cabaret. The cabaret’s owner, Erik Jan Hanussen, is a clairvoyant who dreams of becoming Hitler’s Minister of the Occult. Given the rampant antisemitism, Breitbart cannot perform under his own name, since Jews are supposed to be weaklings. Hanussen therefore makes him play the part of a Germanic folk hero — until Breitbart resolves to reveal his true identity.

Though Breitbart and Hanussen were real historical figures, their paths never actually crossed. Breitbart died in 1925, nearly a decade before Hitler gained power. Herzog sculpted a fictional story around their real lives. “Who cares that I invented a meeting that could have not taken place?” he says. “It doesn’t matter. I am a poet, period.”

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In Invincible, poetic license illuminates a reality that eludes facts. The film illustrates the sinister spell Nazism cast on Germany and how it affected Jews. Herzog, who was born during the Second World War and is part of the generation of Germans that had to confront the Nazi past, said of the film: “That’s my answer to the darkest history of Germany.” It’s an answer that doesn’t replace the study of history but completes it.

Watch any Herzog film, and you’ll see the same process at play. Many of them are inspired by true stories, but Herzog sublimates those stories to reveal their essence. Just don’t ask him to explain what that essence is. He once referred to Fitzcarraldo as “a big metaphor”, adding, “but don’t ask me what the metaphor means, because I wouldn’t know”.

Even before he picked up a camera, Herzog was chasing the ineffable. At the age of 13, growing up in the Bavarian Alps, Herzog was briefly a devout Catholic. “There was a deep void in me and a longing for something transcendent, so that was probably the deeper reason behind all this,” he tells me. He then leaps elegantly from his youthful flirtation with Catholicism to his search today for “ecstatic truth”. “Ekstasis in Greek means to stay out, to step outside of yourself,” he tells me. “You see that in late medieval mystics and the kind of insight they have on the nature of faith by stepping outside of their existence.”

Herzog likens this experience to that of ski jumpers. In 1975, he released The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, a documentary about Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and ski-jumping champion. “[Steiner] defies gravity and flies off ramps, and he has the experience of ecstasy, stepping out of his existence and morphing into a bird,” Herzog tells me. “And it’s strange,” he continues, “because I wanted to be an athlete when I was very young, I wanted to become world champion of ski flyers.” He quit after his best friend had a “catastrophic accident”. But “even if I had continued”, he adds, “I wouldn’t have gotten even close to what [the greatest ski jumpers] are capable to do”.

But Herzog’s youthful desire to be an extreme athlete helps to explain his radical approach to filmmaking. For Herzog is to cinema what Steiner was to sport. When Steiner jumped off a ski ramp into the void, he hadn’t lost his mind. He knew exactly what he was capable of. What appears insane to us appeared possible to him. And it was possible. Ditto with Herzog. His career is a masterclass in how to discipline the mind’s eye. He’s a practical visionary; a poet with the discipline of an engineer.

Herzog has long gravitated toward characters who, like him, reject limits, from scientists working in Antarctica to cops who flaunt the law in New Orleans. Then there’s Elon Musk, whom Herzog interviewed in his 2016 documentary about the internet, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.

“Elon Musk, I think, he’s not one of these imposters,” he says, when I bring up the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. “He’s a serious businessman, but he knows about the power of myth… This is why he keeps insisting on colonizing Mars with a million human beings.”

Herzog doesn’t share Musk’s enthusiasm for the red planet. “Speaking about colonizing Mars with a million is an obscenity by itself, because we should keep our own planet habitable and not try to make a hostile planet habitable for us,” he says. “So there’s something wrong about it… and it is not attainable. It cannot be reached.”

He’s clearly given the project some thought, however. We’d need “to fire salvos of rockets, thousands of them almost at the same time”; we’d need to build “robots who construct huge domes”; we’d need to detonate “atomic explosions at the poles of Mars for melting water”. And if that wasn’t enough, we’d need to build pipelines to transport the water. “Now, please, how do you construct the pipelines?” Herzog asks. “It is ridiculous. We know that. You don’t need to be a chicken to know the egg is rotten. You don’t need to be an astrophysicist to know that.” If the man who pulled a steamship over a mountain calls for time-out, you know you’re in trouble.

But Musk’s Martian hype is cunning PR. “He acquires the aura of the visionary. That’s important,” Herzog says, “because when you buy an electric car, you do not buy it from the Chinese because it’s just a factory in China. If you buy one of his cars, you buy the car of the visionary. It’s an attribute that goes into mythologizing the product. I’m sure he’s aware of that. He’s not a stupid man.”

Musk also dreams of creating a new life form: artificial intelligence. It’s a prospect that unnerves Herzog. In The Future of Truth, Herzog acknowledges that AI will lead to extraordinary breakthroughs, but also foresees “the possibility of comprehensive, mass supervision of disinformation, of manipulation on a vast scale”. This echoes the haunting epilogue of his memoir, Every Man For Himself and God Against All, in which he imagines a world “turning away from thought, argument, and image… a darkness filled with fear, with imaginary monsters”.

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In this dark new world, nobody will read. Herzog has long warned that the decline in reading spelled doom for humanity. New studies highlight how serious it is: reading for pleasure has collapsed, and even elite university students now struggle with long texts. “Students read less and less and less, and young filmmakers do not read at all,” he tells me. “I keep telling them, I keep hammering into them: if you want to become a filmmaker, you may become a mediocre filmmaker at best, but you will only become a good filmmaker if you read.”

“Read, read, read, read, read,” Herzog says, like a mantra. “That’s of fundamental importance for our future.” Only by reading widely can we develop critical thinking. “Your mind engages with the soul in the thinking of someone else, and then you read another book, and you have another worldview, and all of a sudden you start to balance it out… and see our daily reality in critical terms,” he says.

In The Future of Truth, Herzog calls on us to discern fake news by consulting a plethora of sources. Don’t take anything on blind faith. Only then can we hope to build a “more nuanced version of what reality might be”.

“It has to become second nature for us the same way it was apparently second nature for prehistoric men, hunters and gatherers,” Herzog continues in a flight of poetry. “They would go out and pick berries and mushrooms, and I’m certain they did not pick the poisonous ones. Over long, long experience, they would know. And I keep saying: I’m fairly certain that these people did not hate nature because there was poison in it… It’s the same thing today. You do not have to hate the world as it is. You just have to get acquainted with doubt and critical thinking.”

The search for truth, as Herzog tells us in his book, is eternal. Our ancestors looked for it on the walls of prehistoric caves; we can’t now forsake it for the shiny screens of our smartphones. “Truth has no future, but truth did not have a past either,” Herzog tells me. “But we must pursue it. We have to continue, we must, we shall continue to search for it.”

***

The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann, is published by Bodley Head.

France, after all, has descended into chaos. The national debt has hit record highs. No budget has been voted for 2026. And the government is unlikely to last more than a week.

Prime Minister François Bayrou is on track to lose a confidence vote on 8 September. Since there is no majority in the National Assembly, no one knows what comes next. President Emmanuel Macron could try to appoint a new prime minister — if anyone can command enough support — or call snap legislative elections.

Not if Mélenchon gets his way. The founder of the La France Insoumise party (LFI) wants Macron’s head. The President must resign. “We are in a regime crisis,” he declared, channeling his inner Robespierre. “What is on the agenda now is moving to a Sixth Republic.” Since Macron won’t oblige, he has ordered his MPs to file a motion to impeach the President. It stands no chance of succeeding, but that doesn’t matter to Mélenchon. He has also supported a mass strike on 10 September.

These aren’t just the hijinks of an aging Trotskyist longing for the revolutionary frissons of his youth. Mélenchon is a leading personnage on the French political scene. He ditched the Parti Socialiste to form his own outfit in 2008. Nearly 20 years and a few name changes later, LFI is a force to be reckoned with. It holds 71 seats in the French Parliament, making it the third largest group after Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble.

But Mélenchon has loftier ambitions than parliamentary democracy. His obsession is the presidency: he has run three times. He posted his best result in 2022, finishing third in the first round with 22% of the vote, just behind Le Pen at 23.2%. Fear not, though, the révolution was merely postponed. Everyone in Paris knows he’s gearing up for another run in 2027 — or sooner if Macron throws in the towel.

Mélenchon is unlikely to become president — and he probably knows it. He is too radical to win over the majority of voters at the ballot box. But that’s not his real concern. A revolutionary at heart, Mélenchon wants to foment chaos and become the uncontested leader of the shambolic French Left. The LFI as well as the Communists, Greens, and Socialists came together at the last election under the umbrella of the Nouveau Front Populaire. But the alliance exists only on paper. Its leaders can’t agree on anything. Mélenchon wants all of them to follow him. Only then will the Left be saved.

But far from being the savior of the French Left, Mélenchon is its executioner. His craving for power has led him to betray every principle the Left is supposed to uphold. La France Insoumise runs counter to Republican ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is the mirror image of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Both parties are built on exclusion. They just disagree about who is to blame for France’s troubles.

To even call LFI Left-wing is to besmirch the long tradition of French socialism as a force for progress. Mélenchon’s party spurns the animating ethos of the French Left: universalism. All citizens are equal in the eyes of the Republic. Race and religion aren’t important. That’s not to say the French Left ignores discrimination — it doesn’t — but the fight against discrimination is ultimately a fight for everyone to be treated the same.

Not so in the eyes of LFI. The party is openly sectarian. It flirts with Islamists — including groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — and exploits religious grievances. Look no further than its attacks on laïcité (secularism): the Republican principle that religion belongs to the private sphere. When Macron’s government banned the traditional Muslim abaya robe from schools, LFI was up in arms. Mélenchon accused the government of being “obsessed” with Islam. His sycophantic sidekick, Manuel Bompard, fumed that secularism was being exploited “to stigmatize one religion in particular”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Banning teenage girls from wearing the abaya in the Republic’s schools is no more anti-Muslim than banning the kippa is antisemitic or banning the turban is anti-Sikh. To pretend otherwise is a deliberate provocation. In a country scarred by repeated Islamist attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher, that’s indecent.

Indecency, however, is hardwired into the DNA of LFI. Any greatest hits compilation would have to include its press release on 7 October 2023. “The armed offensive of Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of Israel’s policy of occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” it began. “We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian dead.” It ended by calling for a “ceasefire” and “the end of colonization”. Nowhere does it mention that the Islamist group had killed more than a thousand Jews in a pogrom of medieval barbarity.

Believe it or not, it’s only gone downhill from there. Mélenchon and his henchmen have refused to call Hamas terrorists. For them, the plight of the Palestinian people is just a political weapon. The target: anyone who expresses even a modicum of support for Israel. In many cases, it reeks of antisemitism.

And in this respect, Mélenchon leads the pack, of course. He accused Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish President of the National Assembly, of “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre”. He also attacked his former friend, the Jewish Socialist Jérôme Guedj, for “pleading for an ‘in-between’ between genociders and supposed supporters of the ‘erasure of Israel’.” In reality, Guedj is a steadfast supporter of the two-state solution and a vocal critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-Right government. His only crime: defending Israel’s right to exist — and being Jewish.

But there’s no low Mélenchon won’t stoop to. “What’s interesting,” he added about Guedj, “is watching him fidget around the post where the leash of his affiliation keeps him tied.” Guedj’s response says it all: “I must say of the man I deeply loved that he’s become an antisemitic bastard.”

How did that happen? And how did LFI become so toxic? To figure that out, you have to go back to the very beginning of Mélenchon’s political career.

Mélenchon started out on the far-Left in the Seventies. But he wasn’t just on the far-Left, he was a Trotskyist. And he wasn’t your milquetoast Trotskyist either, he was a Lambertist. Lambertists took their name from Pierre Lambert, the leader of the revolutionary Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). Mélenchon spent three years in the OCI. Although he doesn’t like to talk about them, he has admitted they were “very important years in my intellectual formation”.

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Mélenchon learned operating principles in the OCI that still guide him today. For one, the leader is always right. Lambert was domineering and distant — there was no internal democracy at OCI. What the red godfather said went. Mélenchon runs LFI the same way. It’s his fiefdom. When talking to the media, he likes to portray himself as a mentor to fledgling progressives. “We never had youth organizations for one reason,” he said recently. “The young people were the ones who were running the show!” Ever the altruist, he added: “I’m just one element.”

But that’s propaganda even Pravda wouldn’t have run. “La France Insoumise is me!” he once exclaimed. According to La Meute, a new exposé by French muckrakers Charlotte Belaïch and Olivier Pérou, Mélenchon runs his party like a “cult”.

“This isn’t about the angry outbursts of an authoritarian man, but about domination and submission,” Belaïch and Pérou write. “It’s not about the discipline needed to win power, but about control.” As one LFI MP told the reporters: “Normally, you wouldn’t let anyone treat you the way Jean-Luc treats you. Not even your mother or your father could make you crawl like that.”

Like his old boss Lambert, Mélenchon loves nothing more than a good purge. Every few years, he “renews” the movement and promotes the youth. Supposedly, it keeps his finger on the pulse of the masses. In truth, it’s a smokescreen. Mélenchon can’t stand anyone stealing his limelight. Far from mentoring a new generation, he crushes anyone who shows promise. Even if that means dissing collaborators who have stood by him for decades.

Instead, Mélenchon has packed LFI with dunces, charlatans and fanatics. They’ve turned the National Assembly into a crèche. The breakout star has to be Sébastien Delogu — a trade union representative and Mélenchon’s former driver, now MP for Marseille North. “Mélenchon is God, and me, I am the son of God,” Delogu likes to say.

The 38-year-old speaks five words a minute, so profound are his thoughts. He once admitted on live radio that he didn’t know who Philippe Pétain was. “I’ve heard about him, and I know that apparently he’s a racist,” Delogu said.

Mélenchon learned another important lesson from his time with Lambert: you must be willing to do anything to gain power. What set Lambertists apart on the far-Left was their duplicity. Lambert realized it would be impossible to stage a revolution. It wasn’t 1789 anymore. He had no popular support. So, instead, he adopted a strategy of entryism. He planted undercover agents in other Left-wing movements, such as the Parti Socialiste. Mélenchon joined the party in 1976, shortly after leaving the OCI.

Some Socialists now speculate that Mélenchon was one of Lambert’s moles. “With hindsight, I think: he looked every inch the mole,” said Claude Germon, the former mayor of Massy in the Paris suburbs who hired Mélenchon as his chief of staff in 1978. Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist strategist and erstwhile ally of Mélenchon, agrees. In his book Qui Est Mélenchon, he suggests the latter played a double game for years.

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Yet it didn’t pay off: Mélenchon never gained power in the Socialist Party. He spent 20 years as a senator, a marginal post in French politics, and never held a major cabinet role. The best he could manage was a short stint as Minister Delegate for Vocational Education. Whatever Mélenchon did, others did better. He had neither the intellectual heft of Dominique Strauss-Kahn nor the killer instinct of François Hollande. Doomed to be an extra, he quit the Socialists, high on his own ressentiment.

At first, Mélenchon tried to build a traditional Left-wing movement. His objective was to win back the working class from Le Pen’s far-Right. In 2012, he ran to be an MP in the industrial wastelands of Northern France for the Front de Gauche, the precursor of LFI. But, there too, he failed. “It’s the worst campaign I’ve ever had,” he reportedly said, complaining he couldn’t connect with poor white voters. “You understood nothing they said… They were sweating alcohol from morning… They smelt bad… Almost all obese.”

Five years later, Mélenchon failed again: he didn’t qualify for the second round of the presidential election. He was 600,000 votes short. And so he abandoned his plan to compete with Le Pen. That wouldn’t catapult him into power. His new base would be the banlieues — those forgotten corners of the Republic. As Dray explains, “the 600,000 missing votes could be found… in these relegated areas that have gradually become ethnic ghettos with large immigrant populations, where Islam is settling in an endemic way, becoming the only active political force.”

Like a true Lambertist, Mélenchon shed his old skin and reinvented himself. If that meant forsaking his core beliefs, so be it. The end justifies the means. He once waxed lyrical about secularism. He once loathed Islamism. He once called the burqa “degrading” and compared women wearing it to “ghosts”. No matter. The new Mélenchon will play footsie with Islamists and defend the abaya.

The irony is that Mélenchon poses as the defender of French Muslims, but his strategy betrays how little he must think of them. He seems to believe they will be won over with sectarian dog-whistles. Rather than speaking to French Muslims as French citizens, he speaks to them as Muslims. In this respect, he resembles Le Pen.

Herein lies the fatal flaw of Mélenchon’s electoral strategy: it underestimates a diverse Muslim electorate. Yes, it might get him the handful of votes he needs to qualify for the second round of the next presidential election. But it risks alienating many Muslims — and large swathes of the electorate.

Mélenchon doesn’t care. A theory making the rounds in Paris is that Mélenchon doesn’t seriously believe he can be president. If he faced a far-Right candidate — either Le Pen or Jordan Bardella — in the second round, they would trounce him. Where he has pursued a strategy of radicalism, they have pursued one of “de-diabolisation”. In the eyes of the majority of French voters, the devil is now Mélenchon. That suits him just fine: deep down he remains a Trotskyist. His bet is simple. If the far-Right wins, civil war will erupt between the state and the banlieues. You can guess who will lead the Résistance.

Such is the excitement about his brooding star power that Luigi: The Musical, which recently opened in San Francisco, sold out within hours. Set in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, it follows the accused assassin’s interactions with fellow celebrity inmates Sean “Diddy” Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried. In the grand finale, half-naked and bathed in smoke, he belts out that “every human being’s life has worth, so I’ll shoot everybody until there’s peace on Earth.” Yes, it is as terrible as it sounds, but the Luigi-fanverse is lapping it up.

Tributes to the still unconvicted assassin are popping up all over the world. Artists from Seattle to London have painted murals of him. In one, Mangione is depicted as a Catholic saint, a halo around his black curls. His divine patronage: “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All.” There have been protests, too, outside the New York Criminal Court: in February, hundreds braved the cold to chant: “We the people want Luigi free!”

Perhaps the groundswell of support shouldn’t surprise us. Mangione is as American as cherry pie. He’s the latest incarnation of an archetype that recurs throughout US history: the outlaw. And Americans have always loved an outlaw.

The outlaw is almost always a troubled young man. He’s the American version of the social bandit found in cultures the world over. What separates social bandits from ordinary criminals is that they represent a cause bigger than themselves. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, they “are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported”.

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Long before Mangione arrived on the scene, there were the gunslingers of the Wild West. Take a young lad named William H. Bonney. You’ll know him as Billy the Kid. In the late 1870s, he took New Mexico by storm. It was a poor territory, ruled by a handful of powerful men who terrorized the local Hispanic community. But the Kid wasn’t afraid. He stole cattle from rich ranchers and went after corrupt lawmen. And he shot to kill. That made him a folk hero.

After the Kid was arrested, crowds came out to support him, as was the case with Mangione. “A precious specimen named ‘The Kid’ whom the sheriff is holding… is the object of tender regard,” wrote the governor of New Mexico Territory in 1879. “I heard singing and music the other night; going to the door, I found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison.”

The Kid has been played on the big screen by the stars of each generation: Robert Taylor in the Forties, Paul Newman in the Fifties, Kris Kristofferson in the Seventies, Emilio Estevez and Val Kilmer in the Eighties and, more recently, Dane DeHaan. Hollywood is addicted to him.

Mangione could well be next. In addition to the San Francisco musical, he’s been the subject of several documentaries and podcasts with more on the way. And Mangione has an edge over Billy the Kid: social media. A multitude of accounts have sprung up to chronicle his story in real time. Among them are CEO Slayer on X and Latinas for Mangione on Instagram. Unsurprisingly, they take a sympathetic line towards the accused killer, posting thirst traps (he does have killer abs) and silly memes. The effect is to mythologize him — turning him into a digital folk hero.

Another gun-toting outlaw of Mangione’s ilk is Jesse James — played on screen by Tyrone Power, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson (again), Rob Lowe, Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt. A Confederate rebel, James led the James-Younger Gang in a string of train robberies in Missouri after the Civil War. He had a keen sense of PR, writing letters to newspapers to justify his actions. “We are not thieves — we are bold robbers,” he declared in one. “We rob the rich and give to the poor.” There’s no evidence James gave a cent to the poor, but that didn’t matter. He was worshipped by Southerners for his derring-do, bolstered by sympathetic coverage from local journalists.

Mangione, too, has fans in the media. Comedian Margaret Cho joked that “he puts the rizz in terrorist”. American journalist Taylor Lorenz, meanwhile, was slammed for “fangirling” over Mangione in a CNN interview. “You’re going to see women especially that feel like, ‘oh my God, here’s this man who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart, he’s a person that seems like a morally good man,’ which is hard to find,” Lorenz said.

But that’s tame compared with what Kansas City Times reporter John Newman Edwards wrote about James. After the James-Younger Gang pulled off a spectacular robbery in 1872, he gushed: “It was a deed so… diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it.”

During the depths of the Great Depression, a new generation of outlaws — this time, bank robbers — came on the scene. The timing was no accident: the outlaw thrives in times of economic strife. There was Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow — immortalized on celluloid by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Like Mangione, they were known by their first names: Bonnie and Clyde.

But the most intrepid robber was a fella the FBI dubbed “Public Enemy Number One”: John Dillinger. With his slicked-back hair, magnetic eyes, and defiant smirk, he instantly captured the public’s imagination. Dillinger understood — as Mangione does today — the power of a good pose. “He had none of the look of the conventional killer,” noted The Chicago Daily News.

Dillinger, who was captured on film by Johnny Depp, was cheered across the country. When newsreels about him played in cinemas, audiences broke into applause. “In point of popularity,” observed one journalist, “they ranked in that order, Dillinger first, President Roosevelt second… thereby actually making the notorious thief, thug and cold-blooded murderer the outstanding national hero of the hour!”

The Dillinger fandom got so out of hand that Roosevelt went on the radio to remind Americans that, well, crime was bad. “Law enforcement and gangster extermination cannot be made effective,” he said, “while a substantial part of the public looks with tolerance upon known criminals, or applauds efforts to romanticize crime.”

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Yet no matter what their beloved president said, Americans didn’t see Dillinger as a baddie. “He wasn’t any worse than bankers and politicians who took the poor people’s money,” one Indiana man wrote in a letter to his local paper. “Dillinger did not rob poor people. He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor. I am for Johnnie.”

Mangione has elicited a similar reaction. “I love that fucking CEOs are fucking afraid right now,” said comedian Bill Burr, after Mangione’s arrest. “By and large,” he continued, “you’re all a bunch of selfish, greedy, fucking pieces of shit, and a lot of you are mass murderers. You just don’t pull the trigger.”

Therein lies another key to the primal appeal of the outlaw: he picks targets despised by the masses. His crimes, therefore, feel like acts of collective retribution. Mangione raged against one of the most hated industries in the US: “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” read a note in his backpack the day he was arrested. Tens of millions of Americans have an axe to grind with their insurers. After Thompson was shot, social media exploded with horror stories about the US healthcare system: sick people who died because their insurance refused to cover them; families drowned by debt to pay for medical care; lives broken by a system that treats healthcare like a luxury. This doesn’t excuse Thompson’s murder — nothing can — but it explains why swathes of American society supported it.

Mangione knew exactly how his actions would land in the court of public opinion, according to documents filed with the New York State Court in May. His diary indicates he first considered bombing the UnitedHealthcare headquarters, but decided against it. “So say you want to rebel against the deadly, greed-fueled health insurance cartel. Do you bomb the HQ?” he wrote in his diary. “No. Bombs=terrorism. Such actions appear the unjustified anger of someone who simply got sick/had bad luck and took their frustration out on the insurance industry, while recklessly endangering countless employees.”

Instead, prosecutors allege, Mangione opted to “whack” Thompson at UnitedHealthcare’s investor conference in New York. “It’s targeted, precise and doesn’t risk innocents,” he wrote. “Most importantly, the point is self-evident.” Evidently, Mangione was right. In death, Thompson has been stripped of his humanity, reduced to a symbol: the greedy CEO getting rich off the back of ordinary Americans.

In recent months, conservative commentators have tried to depict Mangione as a purveyor of “Left-wing violence” — a modern equivalent of the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground. But that’s missing the point. The outlaw is political, yes, but not especially politicized. And he’s neither on the Left nor on the Right.

That appears to be the case with Mangione too: his digital footprint shows he had problems with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He dislikes wokeness, abhors big corporations, and is clearly no fan of capitalism. His favorite thinkers include Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, and Jonathan Haidt — hardly radical ideologues. And his supporters stem from the Right as well as the Left.

Ultimately, what draws people to Mangione goes beyond politics; it is pure wish fulfillment. Here is a man who allegedly went after the powerful. In their darkest moments, stripped of the pretenses of civilization, many secretly long to do the same. Taking justice into your own hands is an old American urge. As Bruce Springsteen sings in “Jack of All Trades”, a song composed after the 2008 crash, “If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight.” Like every outlaw, Mangione makes Americans feel the thrill of acting out their fantasies without paying the price.

There is one final lesson in the myth of the outlaw: he always dies young. Billy the Kid was gunned down by a sheriff. Jesse James was murdered by a gang member. The robbers of the Thirties were hunted down by the FBI.

If the Trump administration gets its way, Mangione will meet a similar fate. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the US government is seeking the death penalty. “If there was ever a death case, this is one. This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man,” Bondi told Fox News.

It’s easy to see why the Trump administration has chosen to turn the Mangione case into a public showdown. Like others before them, they want to make an example out of the outlaw. Not so much because of what he’s done, but because of the support he commands. It reveals an ugly truth about popular rage: if you stare long enough into the eyes of the outlaw, a broken America stares back at you.

This is one of the most memorable scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, a rollicking action comedy which premiered 100 years ago this week. To mark the occasion, the silent film is returning to cinemas worldwide in a 4K restoration. And it hasn’t aged a day.

The Gold Rush is set in the 1890s, when chancers flocked to the Klondike region of Canada, near Alaska. Rumor had it that the world’s largest gold reserves were buried there. Most returned home empty-handed; an unlucky few never came back at all. Causes of death included avalanches, typhoid fever, alcoholism, murder and starvation.

Into this perilous world Chaplin drops his most famous character: the Tramp, played by Chaplin himself, in his trademark bowler hat, cane and ragged suit. The Tramp, ever the optimist, fancies his chances of hitting it big.

A century on, The Gold Rush still packs a wallop. Chaplin — who not only starred in the film, but also wrote, directed, produced and edited it — has lost none of his genius. If anything, the film’s snappy gags and raffish sense of play makes it well suited to our TikTok age. In today’s world, the moment Chaplin picks up two loaves of bread, sticks forks into them and makes them dance like little feet would almost certainly go viral.

But The Gold Rush is far more than just good entertainment. It always is with Chaplin. The film is a biting critique of free-market capitalism. It lampoons an ideology — influential in the Twenties — in which everyone was expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Chaplin shows what happens when that doesn’t work: you end up eating your own boots.

The film’s political commentary rings as true today as it did in 1925. Faith in unfettered markets lives on. Since the neoliberal reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, governments have preached individual responsibility while dismantling the welfare state and removing checks on corporate power.

The results are plain to see: Western societies are marked by wealth disparity and precarity. Take the United States, where Chaplin spent most of his career. The richest are getting richer at record speed. Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans have less than $500 in savings. And only one in five has more than $5,000. Any emergency could put them on the streets. “I don’t want the old rugged individualism,” Chaplin once said. “Rugged for a few, ragged for many.”

Work hard, we’re told these days, and you’ll succeed. But in The Gold Rush, Chaplin tells us the opposite: fortune doesn’t favor the industrious, it favors the lucky. At the end of the film, the Tramp becomes a millionaire. But his success has nothing to do with merit. One night, his cabin is caught up in a snowstorm and carried right next to a gold deposit. The Tramp literally struck gold in his sleep. It’s the ultimate send-up of the American Dream. As George Carlin, another comedian, quipped decades later: “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Ultimately, The Gold Rush argues that the rich and powerful aren’t all that special. They owe their status more to quirks of fate — or accidents of birth — than to any intrinsic worth. It’s no wonder, then, that it was Chaplin who told this story. He always identified with outcasts — a habit which stemmed from his Dickensian childhood in London at the tail end of the 19th century. His father was out of the picture. His mother suffered from severe mental health issues, and was in and out of asylums. When she was institutionalized, a young Chaplin was sent to the workhouse. There, like Oliver Twist, he was berated for his plight. “To me it was a prison and a house of shame,” he said later. “We had gone through extreme poverty, and poverty was a crime. Even at the early age of seven I realized this.”

No matter how rich he became, Chaplin never forgot what it was like to be down and out. “My memory is so clear of the days when meat once a week was a luxury,” he told a colleague. Chaplin was certain that if only a few things had turned out differently, he’d have spent his life as a member of the underclass. “I might have become a thief in the London streets. I might have been buried in a pauper’s grave,” he said.

Instead, Chaplin became one of the most illustrious men of the 20th century. He got his start in vaudeville in the West End of London. By 24, he was in Los Angeles starring in a new art form called moving pictures. By 28, he was a global star making more money than almost anyone else on earth.

Chaplin’s extraordinary rise personified the American Dream: the penniless immigrant who became a legend in sun-drenched California. He was supremely talented — as inventive in front of the camera as behind it — but he worked damn hard too. The irony is that he did pull himself up by his own bootstraps. His creative process was simple: “sheer perseverance to the point of madness.”

It would have been easy for Chaplin to portray himself as a self-made man. That he chose instead to make the Tramp his on-screen double is a testament to his powers of empathy. No matter what, he was always Charlie from the workhouse. A shrink at the time looked into his case. “He always plays only himself as he was in his dismal youth,” wrote Dr Sigmund Freud. “He cannot get away from those impressions and humiliations of that past period of his life.”

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With the Tramp, Chaplin set out to lessen those humiliations not just for himself, but also for the huddled masses. His goal was to give the poor and downtrodden their dignity back. Humor was his weapon: “We must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature — or go insane,” he said.

Chaplin was a rare kind of artist: a megastar who was also genuinely subversive. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. You know subversion is dead when Barbie is called subversive, or when Kneecap, a band that projects “fuck Israel” at gigs and chants “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”, is treated as brave.

But Chaplin never missed his target. In Modern Times (1936), he went after industry. In The Great Dictator (1940), he went after Adolf Hitler. Next, at the dawn of the Cold War, Chaplin came out with Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a dark comedy that condemned the capitalist system. It was also his first film without the Tramp. Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a man who loses his job of 30 years during the Great Depression. To support his disabled wife and son, Verdoux turns to crime. He uses his considerable charm to marry wealthy women, then murders them to get their money. Verdoux is the mirror image of the Tramp. Where the latter takes misfortune on the chin, the former goes for the jugular. As Verdoux himself puts it: “This is a ruthless world, and one must be ruthless to cope with it.”

Monsieur Verdoux was satire, but it revealed the ugly toll that exclusion takes on people. “One thing I know is that poverty taught me nothing,” Chaplin said, “but on the contrary distorted and twisted my sense of values, gave me a wrong concept of life.”

Chaplin paid a high price for his subversion, as the historian Scott Eyman recounts in Charlie Chaplin vs. America. In 1922, the FBI had opened a file on him on account of possible “socialist beliefs”. Over the next 30 years, the Bureau accumulated nearly 2,000 documents on the filmmaker. By the early Fifties, Chaplin had become public enemy number one. The Cold War was in full swing, and the red threat was everywhere. Criticizing capitalism was now anti-American. The FBI, never one for nuance, denounced Monsieur Verdoux as “anti-capitalist propaganda”. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Congressional body that investigated Soviet influence in Hollywood, suspected Chaplin of being a communist.

To make matters worse, Chaplin’s private life also shocked Puritan America. He’d been married four times and had a penchant for younger women. His fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, who would remain with him until his death, was 18 when they tied the knot. Chaplin was 54.

Before he met O’Neill, Chaplin had been romantically involved with a 21-year-old named Joan Barry. After they broke up, she became pregnant and claimed Chaplin was the father. He denied it, and Barry took him to court.

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The US Department of Justice seized the opportunity to smear Chaplin, prosecuting him for transporting Barry across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”. He faced 23 years behind bars. But the case was flimsy — all Chaplin had done was take Barry on a trip to New York. In the end, he was acquitted.

Nor was Chaplin the father of Barry’s child. A blood test made that indisputable. However, back then, blood tests weren’t admitted in Californian courts. Chaplin was therefore ordered to pay alimony for a child that wasn’t his.

Although Chaplin was ultimately vindicated, the trials bruised his public image. In the court of public opinion, he was not only a communist but also a pervert. For many, the two went hand in hand anyway.

And so in 1952, when Chaplin traveled abroad, the Department of Justice barred him from re-entering America, revoking his visa, even though Chaplin had lived in the country for 40 years. The Attorney General called him “a menace to womanhood”; Congress blasted him as “left-wing and radical”. Chaplin didn’t try to go back. “Whether I re-entered that unhappy country was of little consequence to me,” he said later. “I was fed up with America’s insults and moral pomposity.”

Chaplin settled in Switzerland with O’Neill and their children. He made two more films — neither one good — and only returned to the US in 1972 to pick up an honorary Oscar. He died five years later at 88.

One question remains: was there ever any truth to the charge that Chaplin was a communist? The answer is a resounding no. How could anyone believe that the maker of The Great Dictator could support any totalitarian system?

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Clearly, Chaplin was a critic of capitalism. But that didn’t make him a communist. Rather, the filmmaker believed that the market should be subservient to a democratically elected government. Power should lie with the people. And a government of the people, by the people, for the people should look out for the common welfare. The reason: there can never be true freedom while some struggle to get by.

Chaplin’s politics were in the vein of the economist John Maynard Keynes and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal of the Thirties, which was based on Keynesian principles and carried out by FDR, was perhaps the most successful experiment in reclaiming power from the market. It delivered prosperity and social justice. FDR dedicated it to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”, or, if you will, to the Tramp.

Throughout his life, Chaplin never wavered in his commitment to the Tramp and his ilk. He supported shorter hours for the working man, and a generous minimum wage for both skilled and unskilled labor. He also supported a “national dividend”, or what we would call today universal basic income.

Chaplin’s vision has lost none of its relevance. Precarity is on the rise. Governments look more impotent than ever. And AI threatens to kick millions out of the job market. In this context, we would do well to remember what Chaplin stood for. “Naturally, I am progressive,” he said. “I just want to see everybody pretty well happy, and satisfied.” In his view, no one should ever be so hungry they have to eat their shoe.

But the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam just couldn’t be licked. Their tenacity was an insult to America’s national pride. And, if you believed US policymakers, an existential threat too. If the communists won in Vietnam, they would take over other Asian countries. They wouldn’t stop there, though. Commies never do. They wouldn’t rest until they dominated the whole wide world. This was known as the domino theory. “If we quit Vietnam tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week, we’ll have to be fighting in San Francisco,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said.

Young men like Trump were cannon fodder in the showdown against the red threat. Every week, his peers were drafted into the military and dropped in Vietnam’s muggy jungles. They fought and bled and returned home in body bags. Between 1964 and 1967, nearly one million Americans were conscripted; in 1968, an additional 300,000 were.

Trump was supposed to be one of them. Until May 1968, he had been a university student, which ensured him automatic draft deferments. But after graduating, he no longer had a reason to dodge his patriotic duty. The time had come for him to put America first.

There was no way he was going to do that. “You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam,” Trump reportedly told his lawyer years later. And he didn’t. He avoided the draft thanks to a medical exemption. In the autumn of 1968, as others his age were shipped off to Saigon, Trump went to see a podiatrist in Queens. Miraculously, the foot doctor found that he suffered from heel spurs — bony growths on both his heels. And just like that, ’Nam was null.

It was all a little too convenient. A New York Times investigation suggests that the diagnosis was fake. It had apparently been given as a “favor” to Trump’s father. The podiatrist, it turned out, was one of his tenants.

Just because Trump didn’t go to Vietnam doesn’t mean it left no mark on him. The war, which ended 50 years ago today with the victory of the Vietnamese communists, was the defining event of his generation. It traumatized Americans, leaving scars on the national psyche like napalm on human flesh. The casualties were huge: nearly 60,000 US soldiers and as many as three million Vietnamese. That it ended in ignominy for America only added to the trauma.

The conflict tore America apart, dividing families, triggering mass protests, and polarizing politics. At the time, it really did feel like the apocalypse was now. Trump couldn’t help but soak up the vibes. And those vibes stayed with him, shaping his view of America’s role in the world. Half a century on, the Vietnam War can help us understand Trump’s seemingly erratic foreign policy.

As historians Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms have shown, the President has held a consistent worldview since the Seventies. To him, the US is a sucker, spending tons of money underwriting the security of other countries; in some cases, like in Vietnam, it even sends soldiers to fight and die for them. The outcome is always the same: America loses bigly.

For the President, the Vietnam War was a turning point. Before Vietnam, America was great. After Vietnam, it was in decline. “Prior to Vietnam, we never lost a war, right?” he said in 2015. “Vietnam was a loss. Nothing else you can call it. And then after that… we don’t even think about winning.”

Trump appears to have learned two lessons from America’s defeat at the hands of Vietnamese communists. The first: don’t wage war in faraway lands for spurious ideals like freedom and democracy. “I thought [Vietnam] was a terrible war,” Trump said in 2019. “I thought it was very far away. At that time, nobody had ever heard of the country.”

Of course, that wasn’t true. By 1965, when US troops were sent to Vietnam, the country had been the focus of relentless press coverage for two decades. Vietnam was initially a French colony. In 1941, communist leader Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh to achieve independence. But France wasn’t on board with Vietnamese self-determination, and the Indochina War broke out in 1946.

The US didn’t sit on the sidelines. A new cadre of policymakers in Washington believed that Vietnamese communists couldn’t be allowed to win. The Cold War was underway, and the free world needed every inch of land it could get. America backed the French, supplying them with weapons and treasure. It made little difference. France lost anyway, and in 1954 Vietnamese communists established their own state in North Vietnam.

South Vietnam, however, fell under the protection of the US. For the North, an American puppet state on Vietnamese soil was intolerable. And so they fought for reunification. At first, America sent only military advisers. Their role: to train and mentor the South Vietnamese army. But that didn’t move the needle. Eventually, the US sent its own soldiers to do the fighting.

Despite the hyperbole, Trump’s point stands. Vietnam meant little to Americans. And it turned out that a poor country in Asia turning communist didn’t endanger US national security. The proof is that Vietnam did become a communist state after 1975. Needless to say, San Francisco didn’t become the battleground of World War Three.

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It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that Vietnam turned Trump into a peacenik non-interventionist. In fact, the very opposite happened. The second lesson Trump learned from the war is that losing is unacceptable. If America does fight, it must win by any means necessary. Failure is not an option. “I guess if you do it, you have to go to win. We didn’t go to win [in Vietnam],” he lamented in 1999.

These two lessons are now guiding Trump’s actions on the world stage. Since returning to office, he has been reducing US support for Ukraine. He looks hellbent on forcing some sort of peace settlement, even if it ends up rewarding Russia for its aggression and destabilizing Europe. At this moment, Vietnam is surely in the back of his mind: Trump believes that if the Ukraine war drags on, the US will eventually get sucked in. Steve Bannon, the godfather of the MAGA movement, has said as much. “If we aren’t careful, it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam,” he told Politico in January.

It’s a glib historical parallel. For one thing, the Vietnamese were fighting each other; the Ukrainians are fighting an imperialist invader. For another, there’s little risk that American troops would end up in Ukraine. If any countries were to put boots on the ground, it would most probably be European ones.

Another reason Trump is disengaging from Ukraine is to redeploy US power to the Indo-Pacific. The President has long believed that China threatens America. In 2000, he warned that the country was “our biggest long-term challenge”. Ten years later, he said, “I don’t see greatness [for America] unless we do something about China.” Unsurprisingly, he has surrounded himself with China hawks.

Yet the Trump administration will struggle to contain an assertive China. Far from being a genius geopolitical move, abandoning Ukraine signals that the US is no longer willing to stand by its democratic allies. That makes it more likely that China will invade Taiwan in the near future. And this, in turn, could result in a showdown between the US and China. Ironically, in trying to avoid another Vietnam, Trump may well be precipitating a massive conflict in Asia.

As former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd argued in his 2022 book The Avoidable War, the risk of “armed conflict between the US and China… has become a real possibility”. Beyond a potential war over Taiwan, Rudd points to one in the South China Sea, where China is sabre-rattling: “Perhaps one of the most likely — albeit unintentional — scenarios would arise from a collision between Chinese and American vessels.” It’s not difficult to imagine how a larger US presence in the Indo-Pacific could trigger exactly that kind of scenario.

In recent weeks, Trump’s tariffs on China have been another source of friction. In response, China has hinted at a possible fight with the US. “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” the Chinese government said.

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There are signs that the American mindset is similar. In a secret memo leaked last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to prepare for war with China. “China is the Department’s sole pacing threat,” Hegseth wrote, “and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the US homeland is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.”

Trump is probably well aware of these risks. He may even be at peace with the prospect of facing China. After all, the second lesson he took from Vietnam is that if America goes to war, it has to win. Make no mistake, though: a conflict with China would be unwinnable.

For starters, nuclear weapons could come into play. If that happened, to borrow a line from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the living would envy the dead. The devastation on both sides would be total. “The United States would suffer unimaginable levels of death and destruction,” says defense analyst Alex Alfirraz Scheers, who modeled an America-China nuclear war in his paper “The Illogic of Strategic Superiority”.

But even if it didn’t involve nuclear weapons, the war would not go well for America. The fighting would occur mainly in the seas and skies of the Western Pacific. “It would be a strategic quagmire,” warns Scheers. China makes for a formidable enemy: it has the largest military in the world, with more than two million active personnel, and a navy that now outshines the US.

The Vietnam War would look like a mere skirmish by comparison. And this time, the stakes would be of another order of magnitude. After all, America was able to walk away from Vietnam. The war broke its confidence, yes, but it didn’t destroy its status as a superpower. Even after the humiliation of Vietnam, the United States remained the global hegemon. The American century marched on.

A war with China could bring the American century to an end. What a legacy that would be for a president obsessed with big, beautiful wins.

Gibson, a staunch Catholic, was livid about a ceremony conducted at the Vatican in 2019. During the Amazon Synod, held to discuss the Church in the Amazon region, wooden statues of the Amazonian goddess Pachamama were dotted around the Vatican gardens. At one point, inside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis led a prayer while facing a small carving of the Pachamama.

For Gibson, who has been appointed Special Envoy to Hollywood by President Trump, this episode represents everything that has gone wrong with the Church. He blames it on “an inside job”. And, in his eyes, it all started at the Second Vatican Council — or Vatican II — which took place from 1962 to 1965. Its purpose: to modernize Catholicism. After that, the Church became “something else” entirely, Gibson told Rogan. That something else, as far as he is concerned, is a sham. “I don’t adhere to a post-conciliar Church,” he said.

He doesn’t sound like your ordinary disgruntled Catholic. In fact, Gibson was echoing the key tenets of a ragtag movement known as sedevacantism.

The sedevacantists take their name from the Latin phrase sede vacante, meaning the See of Rome is vacant. The phrase is typically used to describe the period between the death of a pope and the election of his successor, when the papacy is unoccupied. Sedevacantists, however, believe that the papacy has been unoccupied since Vatican II. There have been six popes since then, but none are considered legitimate.

There are at most 30,000 sedevacantists in dozens of distinct organizations worldwide. The movement originated in Mexico in the mid-Sixties, where a priest named Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga came up with its core tenet: the Church post-Vatican II was “headless”. Predictably, that didn’t go down well with His Headless Holiness, and Sáenz y Arriaga was excommunicated. The movement spread in the Seventies, after it was endorsed by Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers, a French friar and the personal confessor to Pius XII. As the last pope before Vatican II, Pius is considered the last legitimate pontiff by sedevacantists. This makes Guérard des Lauriers something of a cult hero.

Now, the movement has moved online. The meme-posting page Novus Ordo Watch boasts more than 25,000 followers on X and 13,000 followers on Facebook. Its logo is a sketch of Pius XII (of course), with the tagline: “Unmasking the Modernist Church of Vatican II”.

So, what really happened at this dreadful council that left the sedevacantists stricken? The conventional narrative of Church reform goes like this: Vatican II was called in 1959 by Pope John XXIII, who thought the Church was in dire need of aggiornamento — an update. He believed that if it wanted to thrive in the 20th century, Catholicism would have to ditch dusty dogmas and embrace the modern world. “Through Vatican II, the Church sought to re-engage with an increasingly secularized world,” the historian Jessica Wärnberg told me.

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This re-engagement crusade took several forms. Vatican II did away with the belief that there was no salvation outside the Church. From then on, non-Catholics could be redeemed. Religious liberty was embraced as the unalienable right of every human being: other religions were to be held in esteem, and antisemitism was denounced.

Vatican II also overhauled the liturgy. Up until then, Mass had been conducted in Latin; the priest had his back to the congregation and faced the altar. But at the council, it was decided that Mass would be conducted in the national language so as to be more inclusive. The priest would face the congregation. The Latin Mass wasn’t abolished, but it became much rarer.

This was a seismic moment for practicing Catholics. For many, it was as if the religion they had followed since childhood, that had given meaning to their lives, had suddenly been taken away from them. The refashioned Mass hit particularly hard. At the time, French President Charles de Gaulle is said to have remarked that Vatican II was “the most important event of the century, because you can’t change the prayer of a million men and women without affecting the balance of the planet”.

Millions of conservative Catholics felt aggrieved. Most of them, however, didn’t embrace sedevacantism. It was too radical, too weird, for them. Rather than flee their besieged Church, they chose to stay in it and fight. Their mission: the preservation of the old ways.

These Catholics are usually referred to as traditionalists, and they share many of the same grievances as sedevacantists. They attend Mass in Latin and are critical of the direction of the Church. Yet they stop short of breaking ties with the Holy See, remaining in communion with the Pope. While traditionalists think like reformers, hoping to change the system from within, sedevacantists think like revolutionaries. They want to bring down the whole corrupted system.

Enter a Catholic with chiselled looks named Hutton Gibson, father of Mel. In 1977, he started a newsletter called The War is Now! Think Substack in the analogue age. “This journal has but one purpose: complete recovery of our Church!” Hutton wrote in the first installment. Then, in the hallowed tradition of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, he went after his enemies: “To all who promoted the current deviation… may they roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell!”

Hutton would go on to become one of the leading lights of the sedevacantist movement, writing a series of self-published books. He would argue that Vatican II was actually “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews”, which had rigged the conclave that had elected John XXIII in 1958. In his telling, another cardinal, the arch-conservative Giuseppe Siri, had been elected. But the Jewish-backed Masons had threatened “to atom-bomb Vatican City” if they didn’t get their candidate. John XXIII, a secret Mason, became pope instead.

As Hutton’s tale suggests, sedevacantism is a wonderland of alternative facts, which is another reason why traditionalists steer well clear of it. At its core, sedevacantism isn’t a theological stance; it’s a conspiracy theory. Call it Catholic QAnon, for just like QAnon, it has become a magnet for haters, weirdos, and phonies.

Take Francis Schuckardt, the founder of the Tridentine Latin Rite Church, who in the Seventies crisscrossed America to preach the Bad News: Vatican II had destroyed the Catholic Church. The Pope was demonic, and any Catholic who followed him would be damned — that is, unless they followed Bishop Schuckardt. Hundreds of lost souls fell for it.

The Tridentine Latin Rite Church became a site of horrors. Schuckardt was a sexual predator who regularly assaulted seminarians, according to writer Michael W. Cueno’s The Smoke of Satan. Whenever the nuns were deemed to have misbehaved, they were imprisoned in freezing attics for several weeks. Congregants were mistreated too: nuns once force-fed rotten food to a young girl; after she threw up, she was made to eat her own vomit. “Lick the vomit clean,” one nun yelled while beating her.

The truth was exposed by the press in 1984. Schuckardt took off with his most loyal followers and $250,000 in cash. He tried to get another church off the ground in California, but in 1987 a SWAT team raided his compound. They found drugs, automatic weapons, and gruesome documents about body dismemberment. Schuckardt served a stint in jail and died in 2006.

Another sedevacantist thought leader was Veronica Lueken, a Catholic housewife from Queens, New York. One day in 1968, according to the academic Joseph P. Laycock’s The Seer of Bayside, Lueken started hearing voices. Then the visions began. One time, she saw a giant face in the sky: it was Jesus Christ himself. Soon after that, the Virgin Mary spoke to her from heaven. Surprise, surprise, the Blessed Mother hated Vatican II.

Like a medieval soothsayer, Lueken attracted a sizable following. People from all over the US would flock to Queens to see her in a trance. Her neighbors cursed her. Local restaurateurs thanked the Good Lord for their fortune and set up hot dog stalls for the hungry pilgrims.

In 1975, Mary finally let Lueken in on the secret behind Vatican II. “My child, I bring to you a sad truth, one that must be made known to mankind,” Lueken recalls being told. Paul VI, who promulgated Vatican II, had been replaced by a lookalike. “There is one who is ruling in his place, an impostor, created from the minds of the agents of Satan,” Mary supposedly said. How was that possible? “Plastic surgery, my child — the best of surgeons were used to create this impostor.”

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Not every sedevacantist would pay homage to Lueken. The movement is divided between a myriad of splinter groups, and each group insists on its particular definition. To complicate matters, a few reject the term sedevacantist and will go ballistic if you call them one. Some prefer the term sedeprivationism, which holds that the popes are popes “materially but not formally”. Others still insist they are simply “true” Catholics who follow the age-old teachings of the Church. But these are marginal distinctions: all ascribe to the same core doctrine. In this, they resemble Leninists, Trotskyists, and Stalinists squabbling over the correct definition of Marxism.

However, just as communists hate the moderate Left, sedevacantists are united in their contempt for traditionalist Catholics. Despite fighting similar battles, the two groups are far from brother in arms, with sedevacantists regarding traditionalists as traitors in the pocket of the Holy See.

One target of sedevacantist ire is the Society of St Pius X — SSPX for connoisseurs — a hardline traditionalist organization which has 600,000 members worldwide. It was founded in 1970 by Marcel Lefebvre, a French archbishop who had led the charge against Vatican II.

Lefebvre often spoke like a sedevacantist. Vatican II was “satanic”. It was the result of an alliance between “the highest authorities of the Church and of masonic lodges”. Therefore, Lefebvre concluded, “this conciliar Church is not Catholic. In so far as the pope, bishops, priests and the faithful adhere to this new Church, they are separating from the Catholic Church.” But Lefebvre never became a sedevacantist. He realized that the Vatican was where the power was, and he always hoped to have more influence within the Church than outside it. He entered into negotiations with Rome several times, to no avail. In the end, Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 after ordaining bishops without authorization.

In the eyes of sedevacantists, Lefebvre was a weakling. In 1983, a group of exasperated followers left SSPX, claiming Lefebvre was “far too soft”. In a feat of imagination, they called their new organization the Society of St Pius V, or SSPV. But even SSPV wasn’t hardline enough for the most committed of sedevacantists. In the Nineties, a handful of true believers broke away and joined the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, which was itself a splinter group from the Tridentine Latin Rite Church.

The sedevacantists have no intention of standing by while an imposter rules the Vatican. And so, in order to save the one true Church, the most pious of them have taken one for the team and proclaimed themselves popes. There was Pope Michael I, born David Bawden. A former SSPX member, Bawden proclaimed himself pope in the Nineties. He took over a dollar store in rural Kansas to hold a conclave. His College of Cardinals consisted of his parents, three friends, and himself. There was also Pope Pius XIII, born Lucian Pulvermacher. His conclave took place in 1998 in a log cabin in the mountains of Montana.

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The most high-profile antipope yet is Peter III, born Markus Josef Odermatt, the leader of the Palmarian Catholic Church, which is based near Seville, Spain. The Church, though not technically sedevacantist, is essentially a cult: there are around 5,000 Palmarians, who are tightly controlled, encouraged to reproduce (some families have 15 kids), and taught that Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco are saints.

Peter III’s predecessor, Gregory XVIII, quit the organization in 2016 and exposed it as a massive scam. “It’s all a set-up, particularly a financial one,” he said. “They’re just using the miracle of the Virgin Mary as a front.” The whole thing is allegedly bankrolled by donations from wealthy businessmen and may be a front for money-laundering.

It’s tempting, perhaps, to dismiss the sedevacantists as a joke — a droll footnote in the long history of the Catholic Church. But to do so would be to underestimate their influence. While sedevacantism remains a fringe movement, its rhetoric has seeped into Catholic conservative circles in recent years. There is the same sense of paranoia and betrayal, and the same belief that the Church is under threat.

The trigger has been Pope Francis himself. Although he isn’t the firebrand progressive portrayed in the media, he is a liberal. The pontiff has reformed the Vatican and tried to make the Church less judgmental and more inclusive: in 2023, for example, he allowed priests to bless same-sex couples.

The backlash has been nasty. From the moment he became pope, Church conservatives have been out to get Francis. At times, they’ve sounded a lot like sedevacantists. Cardinal Robert Sarah is a prime example. To be clear, he has never openly questioned the validity of Francis’s election. That would be grounds for excommunication. But the Cardinal has not minced words. Francis’s decision to let same-sex couples receive blessings was, he said, “a heresy that seriously undermines the Church, the Body of Christ, because it is contrary to the Catholic faith and Tradition”.

By Vatican standards, such a comment is outrageous. The Holy See, lest we forget, is an absolute monarchy. Francis is the supreme pontiff. While he’s not above criticism, insinuating that he’s betraying Catholicism crosses a red line.

But there is more. Just two months ago, Sarah said that any attempt to abolish the Latin Mass would be akin to “a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ”. This was surely a dig at Francis, who has severely restricted the use of the Latin Mass. Rumors abound that he wants to abolish it altogether. Sarah’s remark borrowed heavily from sedevacantist lore. The implications are clear: the Church might fall under the sway of the Devil. And none other than the Pope might be responsible.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has gone even further. He has not only rejected Francis’s teachings, but also cast aspersions on the Pope’s legitimacy. “Many have expressed their concerns to me. At this very critical moment, there’s a strong sense that the Church is like a ship without a rudder,” Burke said in 2014. “They are feeling a bit seasick because they feel like the Church’s ship has lost its way.” A ship without a rudder. Burke was aping the core tenet of sedevacantism: the Church (the ship) was without a pope (the rudder). The Cardinal later put out a statement making a distinction between “the person of Pope Francis” and “the divine gift of the Petrine Office”.

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There were doubts over whether Burke still recognized Francis as Pope. A Catholic website published an article headlined “Does Cardinal Burke think Francis is an antipope?” In 2019, Ross Douthat of The New York Times even questioned Burke about it: “You believe Francis is a legitimate pope?” It beggars belief — here was a leading newspaper asking a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church if he was a sedevacantist. In the end, Burke clarified that, of course, he does believe Francis is the Pope. Nonetheless, he admitted that “people are getting more and more extreme in their response to what’s going on in the Church”.

On that point, Burke is right. The Francis papacy has broken traditionalists. Many are losing faith that they can ever change the Church from within. Angry and increasingly desperate, some openly flirt with sedevacantism. Even if most traditionalists don’t come out as sedevacantists, the damage to the Church is considerable.

The Church has struck back. In 2024 the Vatican excommunicated Carlo Maria Viganò, a traditionalist archbishop, for schism. He was found guilty of “refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff… and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council”.

Viganò sure sounds like a sedevacantist. “We have a deep church that has infiltrated and occupied the Catholic Church,” Viganò said last month. “The members of this counter-church have transformed the Catholic Church into an organization in support of the woke globalist Left.” Predictably, he has won plaudits from some lay conservative Catholics. Among them is Brian Burch, Trump’s Ambassador to the Holy See and a vocal critic of the Pope. “Viganò may not have everything right,” Burch said in 2020. “But there is one thing of which I am certain; Satan is real, and he is on the prowl.”

The story of the sedevacantists is a parable for our times: it shows how extremism goes mainstream. It starts when progress is achieved — a handful of zealots lose their minds and, at the start, everyone ignores them. But, over time, their conspiratorial paranoia takes root. Next thing you know, what sounded preposterous has become legitimate discourse.

But a final question remains: is their ultimate fantasy — to overturn Vatican II — possible? Could the traditionalists inside the Church regain control of the Holy See and coax them back into the fold? Could the next pope redeem them?

The polite answer is that it would take a miracle. Francis has appointed 80% of the cardinals who will elect the next pontiff. “I’m not saying he will be a progressive,” says Frédéric Martel, a sociologist and the author of In the Closet of the Vatican, “but he probably won’t be an ultra-conservative.”

It seems that sedevacantists have lost the holy war — but at least they can take comfort in the knowledge that their usurpers will roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell.

Venner stopped in front of the altar. A large, golden cross stood above him. It gleamed in the afternoon light. Venner went down on one knee. He took out an envelope from his jacket pocket, put it on the altar. Then, discreetly, he took out a gun. There was only one bullet in it; it was all he needed.

Venner opened his mouth wide, slid the gun into it. He could feel the cold metal against his tongue. Calmly, Venner put his finger on the trigger and pressed. A blast followed. Blood splashed on the altar. The date was 21 May 2013.

This was no ordinary suicide. Venner was a French far-Right intellectual who thought of himself as a samurai. His suicide was inspired by that of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese nationalist author who committed seppuku in 1970 in the wake of a failed coup. He had always wanted to end his life in a similar way. He killed himself to send a message to his French compatriots. He had picked Notre-Dame to do it, he told friends, because it was “the most symbolic place to call out to our people”.

Hours after Venner’s death, his suicide note was made public. “In the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength,” Venner wrote. “I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences. I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilisation. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.”

More than a decade after his suicide, Venner continues to cast a long shadow over French politics. Last Sunday, the National Rally, the party of Marine Le Pen, won a resounding victory in the first round of the legislative elections. It’s now on the brink of power. This would have been impossible without Venner’s influence. He theorised the political strategy — often called dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) — that normalised the French far-Right.

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Renaud Dély, a French journalist who wrote a gripping biography of Venner, said that “Marine Le Pen is the heir of the ideological project and method of Dominique Venner”. Le Pen, in fact, paid homage to Venner after his suicide in 2013. “All our respect to Dominique Venner,” she posted on X, “whose final, eminently political act was to try to wake up the people of France.” According to Dély, Le Pen also sent an emissary to Venner’s funeral. He told attendees that his boss was there “through thought”.

To understand Venner’s legacy, we must first know his life story. Venner was born in 1935 into a well-to-do family. His father was an architect who built churches, as well as a member of the French Popular Party, a pro-Nazi party that was disbanded after the Second World War.

In 1954, aged 19, Venner volunteered to serve in the Algerian War. At the time, the country wasn’t merely a French colony — it was a French department. But Algerians wanted their independence. It was Venner’s worst nightmare. “In Algeria, we are fighting for ourselves, for our dignity, and to keep our property, a land acquired by right of conquest, blood and sweat,” he said at the time. “We fight for our race!” And Venner fought hard. In hunting down Algerian nationalists, he proved to be a ruthless, even sadistic soldier. His superiors felt his conduct went too far: Venner was too reckless and put other soldiers in jeopardy.

After a two-year stint in Algeria, Venner returned to metropolitan France seething with rage. Military authorities were too complacent. In his mind, they lacked the guts to do what was needed to keep Algeria French. Moreover, as he had learned, it was the politicians in Paris who called the shots. If Venner wanted to make a difference, it would have to be through political militancy. And so Venner entered the far-Right underground. He became a member of Young Nation, a nationalist group, and was soon taking part in violent attacks. His targets: supporters of Algerian independence, communists, socialists, bourgeois, minorities.

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At the height of the Algerian War, in 1958, Charles de Gaulle returned to power and founded the Fifth Republic. Venner saw him as the enemy. In 1940, de Gaulle had sided against Vichy. And now, Venner believed, he was about to sell out French Algeria. “General de Gaulle prefers métèques [derogatory term for non-white people] to his officers,” he wrote.

Venner went on to join the OAS, a nationalist group that opposed Algerian independence and staged terrorist attacks. In 1961, aged 26, he was arrested for his involvement in a failed military coup against de Gaulle. The sentence: 18 months behind bars.

In the silence of his prison cell, as Dély explains in his book, Venner came to a realisation that would change the course of French politics. In hindsight, it seems obvious. But, at the time, it represented a paradigm shift. The far-Right would never be the same again.

His realisation was that the far-Right would never gain power through insurrection. Instead, if it hoped to govern someday, it had to win at the ballot box. In modern democracies, violence wasn’t only inefficient — coups, as Venner knew first-hand, could easily fail — but it also turned ordinary people off. The OAS hadn’t managed to keep Algeria in French hands or even boost the cause of French Algeria. “Indiscriminate terrorism is the best way to cut yourself off from a population,” Venner wrote. “It’s a desperate act.”

The far-Right, Venner now believed, had to forsake violence if it was serious about one day implementing its violent project. Drawing on Lenin, he argued that revolution was “less about seizing power than about using it to build a new society”. To do that, the movement needed to develop a coherent ideology and create an organisation to spread that ideology in society.

But — and this is the most important part — the far-Right couldn’t be transparent about its ideology. The reason: ordinary people were brainwashed. “Through permanent one-way propaganda, to which everyone is subjected from childhood,” Venner wrote, “the regime, in its many forms, intoxicates the French people.” The far-Right had to outwit the regime. “A revolutionary struggle, a fight to the death against an all-powerful, wily, experienced adversary, must be fought with ideas and cunning rather than force.”

As such, it was necessary for the far-Right to hide its true nature. People weren’t ready for it. Instead, without abandoning its core tenets, it should adapt its appearance. In Dély’s pithy phrase, the far-Right should “know how to change its attire to better reassure and seduce”.

Venner had been mulling this strategy for a while. Back in 1959, when he had founded the Nationalist Party, a violent group which would soon be dissolved, Venner had told new recruits that they should be careful about what they said in public. “Never discuss subjects that may shock newcomers by the way you present them,” he had warned them. “For example, the métèque problem must never in a presentation or a conversation be approached with the perspectives of the crematorium or the soap dish.” In other words, never say that you ultimately want to exterminate all métèques. When you are a fascist, you can kiss but you can never tell.

Shortly after leaving jail in 1962, Venner published his pamphlet. Titled Pour une critique positive (Towards a Positive Criticism), it became a self-help manual for generations of French far-Right activists, for whom Venner is the closest thing they have to an Antonio Gramsci. With his bold, iconoclastic text, he laid the ideological groundwork for the National Rally to become the most popular party in France. And he pioneered the strategy of dédiabolisation that has been at the heart of Marine Le Pen’s political career.

For years now, commentators have marvelled at how Le Pen detoxified the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie, a convicted Holocaust denier. In 2015, she even expelled him from the party for making antisemitic comments. Since then, Le Pen has worked hard to soften her rhetoric. For instance, she doesn’t use the loaded term “Great Replacement” anymore; instead, she talks about “mass immigration”. And unlike her erstwhile rival Eric Zemmour, she doesn’t limit herself to talking about the threat of “Islamic extremism”. She has spent considerable time talking about economic issues.

Le Pen has also nurtured a new generation of far-Right leaders who don’t raise their voices or go off-script. With their tailored suits, they look like respectable politicians. Jordan Bardella, the National Rally’s 28-year-old president, is the prototype. Tipped to become prime minister if the party wins this Sunday, Bardella is the face of dédiabolisation. He smiles so much his face is frozen in a rictus. It should come as no surprise that his speechwriter, Pierre-Romain Thionnet, is a Venner devotee.

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But it would be a mistake to assume that Le Pen and Bardella are the first to put dédiabolisation into action. In fact, the strategy’s use can be traced to the presidential campaign of far-Right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965. A lawyer for the OAS, his candidacy marked a turning point for the nationalist camp: for the first time since the Second World War, they were seeking power at the ballot box. That, in and of itself, was an act of dédiabolisation. Vignancour was advised by — you guessed it — Venner. And his campaign director was none other than Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Vignancour won only 5% of the vote, but a seed had been planted. It blossomed in 1972 when the National Front — as the National Rally used to be called — was founded. The party was the brainchild of François Duprat, another far-Right activist who was influenced by Venner. Jean-Marie Le Pen was picked to lead it because he was seen as a far-Right moderate. That might be hard to believe today, but, in his day, Le Pen too contributed to dédiabolisation. A charismatic speaker, he helped popularise far-Right ideas in French society. In the space of 30 years, he united the movement and brought it to the second round of the presidential elections in 2002.

This was no accident. A National Front memo from 1985 shows that dédiabolisation is baked in the DNA of the party. It reads: “We are surrounded by hostile forces… In public, we must only evoke what our propaganda lets appear of the tip of the iceberg… We cannot impose on the masses outside the movement just any ideas. We must always start from a pre-existing mental substratum and blend it with our own key ideas.” Venner couldn’t have phrased it any better. And Marine Le Pen couldn’t have implemented it any better.

Over the past decade, Le Pen has not only ditched her father but also her most extreme positions. Gone are the calls for Frexit. Even in the last few weeks, whenever its programme came under scrutiny, the National Rally has moderated its policies or pushed back their eventual enactment. Banning the veil worn by Muslim women, for instance, would only happen in 2027 at the earliest. The end goal is obvious: to assuage fears and appeal to moderate voters.

And yet, despite the National Rally’s softening, it would be unwise to forget Venner’s influence on the movement. This was a man who was willing to sacrifice himself for his mission — a man who understood the power of the long game.

The reason behind this surprising meeting: Elmaleh had just made a film about converting to Catholicism. Stay With Us, which came out in France last November, sees Elmaleh playing himself and preparing for baptism. But it’s a heavy cross to bear. Elmaleh’s parents, also playing themselves, feel betrayed when they learn their son is changing faiths. His mother tells him: “New God, new parents! Get yourself adopted.”

The movie is clearly autobiographical. Although Elmaleh won’t reveal whether he has converted in real life, he has described his relationship to Catholicism as one of “attraction, curiosity, love” and called the Virgin Mary “my most beautiful crush”. His meeting with the Pope left him profoundly moved. “He’s an extraordinary person,” he said afterwards, “charismatic, humble, inspiring, joyous.”

Yet Elmaleh isn’t the only famous Jew to hear the siren call of the Good News. Shia LaBeouf, the star of Transformers, converted after playing the 20th-century priest Padre Pio in a drama released last year. They join a vibrant community of Jewish converts to Catholicism known as Jewish Catholics, or Hebrew Catholics. It is unknown exactly how many there are around the world, but a rough estimate would put them in the hundreds, if not in the thousands. Among them are Fr. David Neuhaus, a Jesuit who served as the Patriarchal Vicar of the Hebrew Catholic Vicariate in Jerusalem, and Fr. Antoine Lévy, a Dominican currently conducting doctoral research at the University of Tel Aviv.

Both clerics converted in their twenties, and neither repudiate their Jewish identity. On the contrary, Neuhaus tells me he’s “conscious of the fact I’m not just a Catholic like all other Catholics, but I’m from a Jewish family and part of Jewish history”. That last point is crucial: Jewish identity is bigger than just practising Judaism. Many secular Jews know little about the Torah, but still feel a strong connection to Jewish peoplehood and traditions.

Lévy, who wrote a book entitled Jewish Church, says “nobody can define Jewish identity. It’s impossible.” He adds that being born Jewish is not something you can “get rid of” — likening it to the Christian concept of sacrament. “It’s in you for life,” he explains. “Whatever you do, whatever you become… a Christian Jew is still a Jew.”

Many rabbis would, of course, disagree with that statement. To convert to another religion is often perceived in the Jewish community as a betrayal — even a denial — of one’s heritage. And yet, precisely because Judaism is more than just a religion, it isn’t that simple. As Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur tells Elmaleh in Stay With Us: “You can look for a way out of the Jewish House, but nobody has ever found it.”

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But how does one put up a crucifix in the Jewish House? What does it entail to be a Jewish Catholic? Theologically, it is not such a huge switch. As Lévy says: “The leap is short and simple. You simply need to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah of Israel.” The New Testament, under this framework, is the fulfilment of a prophecy set up in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament as Christians call it: that a Jewish man, descended directly from King David, will reveal himself as the Messiah. Christians believe Jesus, who was Jewish, was the Messiah. (Christ means Messiah in Greek.) Jews normally don’t and are still awaiting him.

Yet it is important to remember that, as Neuhaus puts it, Jews and Christians “share a language” derived from the Hebrew Bible. “Because of that shared language and those shared scriptures,” explains Neuhaus, “we can agree on many, many things. Our ethical standards, our moral vocabulary are very, very, very much shared.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy for Jews, even if they are non-religious like Neuhaus and Lévy were in their youths, to convert to Catholicism. “There’s still a huge existential and cultural barrier,” says Lévy. It results from what he calls the “historical memory of Christian antisemitism”. When I asked David Kertzer, a Pulitzer-winning anthropologist and the leading expert on the history of the Catholic Church’s relations with the Jews, to describe that history, he replied: “demonisation”. Jews “were regarded as collectively responsible for the death of Jesus and were seen as obstinate because they refused to recognise the veracity of the divinity of Jesus and of the Christian message”. This was the impetus for the Catholic persecution of Jews through millennia.

Catholics certainly weren’t the only Christians to persecute Jews, but their record stands out. It includes the forced conversions of Jews; the massacres of Jews by mobs; the mass expulsions of Jews from Catholic kingdoms and provinces during the Medieval Inquisition; the segregation of Jews in ghettos, outside of which they were forced to wear a pointy hat so as to be immediately recognisable; taking Jewish children, who had been secretly baptised by Catholics, away from their family and raising them in the Church.

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Neuhaus and Lévy both wrestled with this history when converting. Their conversions, it must be understood, were motivated by faith and their personal experience of God. As Neuhaus puts it: “I didn’t become a Christian or a Catholic because of Christianity or Catholicism. I became a Christian because of an encounter with Jesus.” That’s the case for most Jewish converts to Catholicism. The impetus is spiritual, the why ineffable by the cold standards of reason. In Stay With Us, Elmaleh recounts how he entered a cathedral as a kid and came face-to-face with a statue of the Virgin Mary. To his surprise, he felt a surge of emotion and began to cry. In that moment, he was seized by faith. Later, when trying to explain to his parents why he so badly wants to convert, Elmaleh says he didn’t look for Mary; she found him.

But the past weighed heavily on their shoulders. “When I told my mother and my wider family that I would join the Catholic Church,” remembers Lévy, “they immediately said: ‘Now you’re joining those people who have been persecuting us for 2,000 years. You’re joining the herd of wolves.’” Neuhaus’s mother asked her son: “How can you join them after what they did to us?”

So, how could they? The answer lies in the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. It was initiated by Pope John XXIII to respond to the extraordinary change of the 20th century. To thrive in the new century and beyond, the Church had to change too. It needed, the Pope felt, aggiornamento — or updating.

Among these updates, Neuhaus says, was “taking out the animosity towards the Jewish people”. John XXIII acted with determination to drive through this change. His successor, Paul VI, codified it in the 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration released shortly before the Council’s closure. It marked the moment when, Kertzer explains, the policy of “demonisation” of the Jews ended. No longer were they considered collectively guilty for Jesus’s death. In fact, as Nostra Aetate stated: “God holds the Jews most dear.”

This change was key in Neuhaus’ and Lévy’s decisions to convert to Catholicism. It meant they were able to enter the Church with a clear conscience. “I would have never joined the Church in a time of persecution,” Lévy says. Neuhaus agrees — he needed, and still needs, “to be part of a Church that’s trying to find a new way to live a relationship of respect with the Jewish people”.

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Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has made more overtures towards the Jewish community. In 1986, Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to set foot in a synagogue. In 1994, he established diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel. And in 2000, he made an official visit to the country and prayed at the Western Wall. John Paul II’s successors, Benedict XVI and Francis, have continued to foster a spirit of reconciliation.

That’s not to say there aren’t antisemites left in the Church. “I’ve encountered them again and again,” says Neuhaus. “What I think I can say with some degree of certainty is that the Church hierarchy now is against them, trying to discipline them and bring them to affirm what was affirmed at the Second Vatican Council.”

Despite those advances, there remains a major unresolved issue between Jews and Catholics. It has to do with the Vatican’s reckoning over its policies in the lead up to the Holocaust as well as its silence during the Holocaust. Kertzer has researched the subject, including in Vatican archives, for the past 20 years. In The Popes Against the Jews, he writes: “The physical elimination of the Jews of Europe came at the end of a long road… a road that the Catholic Church did a great deal to help build.” As detailed in the book, Vatican-supervised publications such as Civiltà Cattolica were purveyors of antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, vilifying Jews as hellbent on world domination. This rhetoric influenced European public opinion and fuelled antisemitic politicians. “When eventually both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists are trying to justify the persecution of Jews,” says Kertzer, “they justify them in no small part by reference to Christian sources.”

The Vatican has sought to address this, releasing a report entitled We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah in 1998. It asks whether the fact that “the Shoah took place in Europe… raises the question of the relation between the Nazi persecution and the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards Jews”. But the report goes on to assert that “the Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity.” As an explanation, it draws a distinction between Nazi antisemitism and Christian “anti-Judaism”, which it defines as “long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility”. In its telling, the former was based on racial animus, but the latter was religious.

“We Remember is certainly not a frank document,” says Kertzer, for whom the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism doesn’t hold up to historical scrutiny. “It just doesn’t recognise the reality that the demonisation of the Jews by the Church didn’t just involve so-called ‘religious criticisms’. It accused the Jews of seeking world domination.”

However, Neuhaus, who lost family during the Holocaust, adheres to the distinction outlined in We Remember. But he says that, in the late 19th century, “there was an unconsciousness about how anti-Judaism became antisemitism”. He continues: “When you read articles published in Civiltà Cattolica in the 1890s, around the time of Dreyfus, you see there is this complete confusion between anti-Judaism and antisemitism moulding into one animosity against the Jewish people.”

As for Lévy, he too acknowledges that Nazi antisemitism was “indebted” to Christian antisemitism, but cautions against making sweeping statements. He also says it’s important to “remember the number of Jews who were saved by Catholics during the Second World War”. As it happened, one of them was a Jewish teenager named Aron Lustiger. The son of Polish immigrants to France, he found refuge in Catholic boarding schools during the Nazi occupation.

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At age 13, in 1940, Lustiger visited a church and felt a powerful desire to become Catholic. He converted and took as his baptismal name Jean-Marie. After the war, he joined the Church and climbed up the hierarchy, but he was outspoken about being Jewish his entire life. “To say that I am no longer a Jew,” he explained, “is like denying my father and mother… I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”

For Lustiger, moreover, his Jewish identity and Catholic faith weren’t antithetical but complementary. He described himself as a “fulfilled Jew”, saying: “The vocation of Israel is to bring light to the goyim [gentiles]. That is my hope, and I believe Christianity is the means of achieving it.” Lustiger was the prototypical Jewish Catholic.

In 1981, John Paul II appointed him Archbishop of Paris. And in 1983, he was made a cardinal. “The Jewish Cardinal”, as some called him. Lustiger died in 2007, but his legacy can still be felt. Bishop Robert Barron, one of the Church’s most popular clerics, said in 2021 that “the recovery of the Jewishness of Christianity will be what [Lustiger] is most remembered for”. Barron, who is set to become a leading figure in the Church in the coming decades, has himself spoken of the necessity to “re-Judaise Catholicism” — that is, “to read Christ, the Bible, and the Christian faith through the lens of Israel”. In fact, the “re-Judaisation” of Catholicism has been an ongoing process since the Second Vatican Council. Perhaps, by following in Lustiger’s footsteps, Jewish converts to Catholicism are not abandoning Judaism, but spreading its message elsewhere.