June 13, 2024 - 12:45pm

Over the last few days, a map of France’s European election results has been doing the rounds on social media. It is lavishly detailed, showing the first-placed political party in each of the country’s 35,000 communes. An interactive version is available on the Le Monde website: just click on a département and then zoom in for a town-by-town, village-by-village breakdown of votes.

Yet it’s the big picture that’s attracted the attention. With the main exception of Paris, France appears as a sea of brown, indicating the dominance of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN). Why might the map’s designers have chosen that particular hue? It’s not the official party colour, which is navy blue. Irrespective of intentions, brown is suggestive of fascism. That’s especially because of the uniforms worn by the SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

The map also classifies the RN as “far right”. By contrast, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFl party is classified as “radical left” — as, for that matter, is the French Communist Party. This is not accidental, and it’s surely time to start using political terminology with greater care.

Instead of running through dry definitions, we should look to the middle reaches of the Saulx — a part of France few Britons have heard of, let alone visited — where the RN dominates, scooping up half the vote. Located on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne, its villages are strung out along a gentle river, open fields on one side and forested hills on the other. But though bucolic, it’s not quite chocolate box material. Unlike the renaissance glories of nearby Bar-le-Duc, many of the buildings are of post-war vintage.

There’s a reason for that.

In August 1944, retreating German soldiers perpetrated a massacre through the villages of Robert-Espagne, Couvonges, Beurey-sur-Saulx, Mognéville and Trémont-sur-Saulx. Scores of defenceless civilians were rounded up and murdered, their homes then burned to the ground.

Now, 80 years later, when those same communities vote in strength for Le Pen, what do the commentators of Paris and London imagine that they are voting for? Fascism and Nazism? In fact, more than most of us, the people of the Saulx Valley remember what those things are.

A catch-all label like “far-Right” brings confusion rather than clarity. Much of France — especially the vast depopulated stretch of territory known as the empty diagonal — is a deeply conservative place. It isn’t, for the most part, divided by communal tensions, but it does want to be respected — or just remembered — by the French and EU elites.

There was a time when those desires were championed by the mainstream Right. But today, the heirs of De Gaulle are a chaotic mess, in a worse state than the British Conservative Party — if that can be imagined. The leader of the centre-right Les Républicains, Eric Ciotti, was yesterday expelled from the party for publicly stating his intention to form an alliance with Le Pen, only for him to question the legitimacy of his removal.

Le Pen has stepped into the void left behind by a failing establishment, and has reformed her party to this purpose. You don’t have to be an admirer to recognise this reality, and that labels such as “far-Right” have been stripped of meaning. Anyone who wants to defeat populism, or at least curb its excesses, needs to stop fighting old wars.


Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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