The Menhir Has Left Us
Part 3

2,990 words

(Part 1 here. Part 2 here)

Following the swearing in of François Mitterand as President on 21st May 1981, he dissolved the National Assembly, calling new elections that took place in two rounds on 14th and 21st June 1981, leaving his Socialist Party with 266 of the 491 members of the new National Assembly–an absolute majority. Mitterand was further bolstered by some 23 leftists of various descriptions, moderates in the main, so that he had no need of the 44 Communist deputies to govern.

Both the FN and its frère ennemi the PFN polled very poorly indeed (43,143 votes or 0.17% for the FN, 34,744 or 0.14% for the PFN) in these elections, their participation in them being a footnote, a “mere detail”, (a phrase to which we shall return).

Somewhat ironically Pascal Gauchon[1] of the PFN obtained one of the better nationalist votes in Le Pen’s old Parisian stamping ground, the fifth electoral district, which le menhir had evidently decided not to contest again after his disappointing result in 1978.

It will come as a surprise to many British and American readers, indeed, many others in the Anglosphere, that Moscow line Communist parties had a measure of genuine popular support in post-1945 France (and even more in Italy), made all the more potent by the Communists’ formidable organisational skills. Hitherto, they had never held any of the levers of state power.

Even though the Socialists could have ruled without coalition partners (or could if so inclined have broadened their government by including the centre left, not the Communists), Mitterand’s choice of prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, invited the Communists to join the government consistently with an agreement between the Socialists and the Communists for a common programme of government dating back to 1972, and appointed four Communist ministers, so forming by far the most left-wing government to hold office in France after 1945 and arguably ever.

The course of events that followed was in no more than five years to prove damaging for the Socialists and disastrous for the Communists but would take the FN from the outermost fringe of politics into the National Assembly as a powerful bloc. How could that have happened?

As we shall see, several factors, perhaps four in number, combined to bring about this remarkable outcome. The first was the swift failure of the new government’s policies and its subsequent unpopularity, the second was the FN’s breakthrough in Dreux through the sheer hard work, dedication and perspicacity of its local leaders, the husband and wife team of Pierre and Marie-France Stirbois, the third was the decision of the European Union to change the electoral system for elections to the European parliament, which conferred instant credibility on the FN, the fourth was a series of very deliberate choices by the enigmatic Mitterand for reasons at which we can only guess.

The Mauroy government implemented a radical left legislative programme, nationalising several banks and many major industrial concerns, raising the state-mandated minimum wage by 10%, increasing welfare benefits, in many cases by 25%, shortening the working week to 39 hours, imposing rent controls and giving tenants increased security of tenure. This largesse was supposedly to be paid for by levying a wealth tax, but when the sums raised proved quite insufficient, the government simply borrowed or printed the money required.

In the result, between 1981 and 1983 the budget deficit and the foreign debt tripled, the current account deficit increased by 45% in a year, as did the level of public indebtedness overall (foreign and domestic taken together), inflation soared and the government was forced to devalue the Franc three times.

Since the government rejected proposals by leftist ministers that France should leave the European Monetary System (the “EMS”, forerunner of the Euro), pursue expansionist economic policies even at the price of relatively high inflation and impose tariff barriers to protect French industry, and instead tied itself to a policy of defending the exchange rate, especially vis-à-vis the Deutschmark, to show French commitment to the EMS and control inflation, the devaluations were not only deeply humiliating but also led to serious capital flight.

Attempts to impose exchange controls led to many simply walking across the borders to Luxembourg or Switzerland and stashing their savings in the obligingly secretive banking systems of those states at that time. Meanwhile, the high rate of inflation led to labour unrest and repeated strikes in order to obtain increased wages necessary to maintain living standards in the face of rapid inflation.

Things could not continue in this fashion. Mitterand, the ultimate pragmatist, who could be a Vichyist one day and a resistance fighter the next (indeed, both at the same time, which was certainly imaginative, but more on that anon) had his prime minister perform a remarkable volte-face in March 1983, returning to more classical economics and abandoning the leftist programme in favour of austerity and economic orthodoxy.

Unsurprisingly, the left-wing electorate was at first devastated then enraged, all the more so since the Communist minsters did not at this point resign from the government (a grave error on their part) but acquiesced in policies of austerity that hurt their own electorate but pleased the financial elite. So was the first step taken to the emergence of the FN as the new vehicle for working class discontent with elite policies. It did not take long for the first fruits to be harvested, on the contrary, it took only a year.

Before we come to the FN’s first major breakthrough at national level, it will be instructive to look at its first such breakthrough at local level. Dreux is a small, industrial town fifty miles more or less due west of Paris. By 1980 its immigrant population had already reached a staggering 30%. Living in Dreux were Jean-Pierre and Marie-France Stirbois, a married couple whom we have already encountered way back in 1965, when they were supporters of Tixier-Vignancourt and met and became friendly with Le Pen.

By 1978, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, supported only by his wife and (as she poignantly recounted on her election to the National Assembly in a famous bye-election in 1989, by when alas, she was a widow, of which more in the next instalment) a mere handful of dedicated activists, was campaigning for the FN in local elections, polling 2% of the vote on a hardline platform, including demands for the total, compulsory repatriation of all non-European immigrants from France.

Far from being discouraged, he persisted, increasing his share of the vote to a more pleasing 8.5% in 1979, 10% in 1982 and 16.7% in the first round in 1983.

Stirbois was a hardliner, but he was also a pragmatist, who sought to cultivate good relations with more mainstream conservatives at local level. This initiative now paid a handsome dividend. The local Gaullists allowed Stirbois to go forward to the second round as the only candidate of the right in his ward, in return for a clear run for their candidates in other wards. He won. It was a minor earthquake.

At this point all the credit for what had been achieved belonged to the Stirbois and their few comrades in Dreux “out leafleting on cold, dark winter nights, never knowing when you might be attacked by Communists or immigrants” as Madame Stirbois put it.

The credit for what happened next can be shared between Le Pen and, at first blush, surprisingly, President Mitterand.

Le Pen complained first to François Mitterrand’s aides then, by letter, to the President himself that his party was being denied the coverage on state-controlled radio and television that this success deserved. You might expect a disdainful rebuff. You would be wrong. President Mitterand intervened to ensure that Le Pen was invited to appear on two national television stations, where le menhir gave a good account of himself, becoming a household name overnight.

What were Mitterand’s reasons for giving Le Pen such a break? Was it sheer cynical electoral calculus, believing that dividing the right-wing vote would help his party? That is the generally accepted version. Others have suggested that Mitterand was working for our side all along, never really changing his allegiance from the nationalist right that he had so passionately supported in his youth. Was his apparent defection to the Resistance in 1943 no more than a manoeuvre to continue the struggle by other means, seeing that the war was lost? Why did Tixier-Vignancourt like him so much and encourage his electors to switch to Mitterand in the second round in 1965? Was Mitterand perhaps our best ever secret agent (thanks, Greg, for that marvellous label!), hiding in plain sight? Could that even be possible? If it were so, he earned the francisque a thousand times over! These are only questions. I don’t have the answers.

So President Mitterand gave Le Pen his first big break. To pile weirder upon the already weird, the remote bureaucrats of the European Union gave him his second.

All the members states of the European Union held elections to its parliament in June 1984. In order to address the problem of the “democratic deficit” in the EU, these elections were to take place on the basis of proportional representation, a gift from the Gods to the FN.

My readers will remember that the FN had not participated in the previous rounds of elections to this parliament in 1979, while the rival PFN had polled a mere 1.3% of the votes. Times had changed. The FN list, led by Le Pen, polled just over 10% of the national vote, a most impressive showing, and garnered ten seats in the European parliament as the reward.

Further analysis of the results is instructive. The parties of the left between them lost eleven seats, the Socialists however dropping merely two (so that their representation fell from 22 to 20), whereas the Communists lost nine (so that their representation fell from nineteen to ten: the Communist vote had halved in five years, a truly catastrophic fall). Ten of the eleven seats taken from the parties of the left went to the FN, only one to the system conservative bloc.

Clearly, Le Pen was a big winner by this outcome. In a strange way, so was that wily old fox, François Mitterand, or at any rate his Socialist party, while the Communists, whose ministers resigned from the Socialist led government a few weeks later, never recovered.

Whether out of self-serving cynicism or some other, deeper agenda, Mitterand now decided to apply the lessons of the European elections to French domestic politics.

As support for the left fell yet further in 1985, he encouraged a move to a proportional system for elections to the National Assembly in time for the new elections scheduled to be held in 1986.

Until then, elections to the National Assembly were held in each electoral district (circonscription) on a two round elimination system. At the end of the first round, if a candidate had polled at least 50% plus one of the ballots cast, he or she was elected. If no candidate had polled an absolute majority of the votes cast, those candidates who had polled more than 15% of the registered electors (not merely the votes cast) were entitled to proceed to the second round, though in practice, a system of horse-trading generally meant that only two would proceed to the run-off.

The two round elimination vote is even less favourable to nationalist parties than the British “first past the post” method, since the system parties will tend to gang up on any nationalist candidate who has done well in the first round (as happened very strikingly in 2024, when the FN dominated the first round, but did markedly less well in the second).

In the result, the FN polled a huge 2,703,442 votes (up from 43,143 five years before!), making 9.65% of the votes cast and gaining 35 seats in the National Assembly, effectively finishing off the PFN, which polled only 57,432 votes and ceased to be a serious rival to the FN. 

Within five years, so dramatically had Le Pen’s fortunes changed that, from leader of a minuscule fringe party with no elected representatives and in competition with a rival that in many ways impressed more, he was at the head of a party that could count on 10% of the national vote, a member of both the European Parliament and the National Assembly (the so-called dual mandate was permissible in those days) and in sole possession of the leadership of the nationally orientated right.

Le Pen the deputy created a favourable initial impression. Unlike Chirac, who was determined to exclude Le Pen from any position of influence, ex-President Giscard d’Estaing publicly congratulated Le Pen on his first speech in the 1986 session (not a maiden speech, since Jean-Marie had previously sat in the National Assembly as a Poujadist deputy).

Thus fortune surely favours not only the brave but also the determined and the tenacious, who persist in the face of adversity (President Trump would surely echo that thought) and a week is indeed a long time in politics, two lessons that a modern generation of nationalists would do well to learn. Things did not however continue so well.

Perhaps intoxicated by success and media attention, and an unfortunate desire to shock[2] conventional opinion, le menhir now made a false step. In September 1987, Le Pen, back on national television, famously described the gas chambers as “a point of detail of the history of the Second World War” that was “debated by historians” (the sense of the French word might better be rendered as “disputed”, which merely adds to the provocative nature of the remark).

This remark was ill-judged, as le menhir ruefully acknowledged. “I messed up” he said to a friend in the car taking home from the television studio. It made it well-nigh impossible for him to form alliances with system conservatives in future, but as we have seen, it was precisely that strategy which had led to the breakthrough at Dreux.

“Alas, that it is not expedient to say all that it would be right to say” quoth Saul of Tarsus[3], which is a third lesson that a younger and sometimes too strident generation of nationalists would do well to learn. It is no part of the function of a political party to enter into debates about matters of historical controversy. Revisionist historians have a different role to play from the practical politician and the two functions should remain carefully separated.

The outcome of the 1986 elections somewhat resembled a situation with which American but not British readers will be familiar: a Socialist President had to find a modus vivendi with a prime minister from a different political family, as when an US president comes from one party but the other controls Congress. The French equivalent is amusingly called cohabitation.

Chirac as prime minister moved quickly to abolish proportional representation, a manoeuvre clearly directed against the FN. New presidential elections were due in 1988 that would inevitably be followed by a dissolution of the National Assembly, so Le Pen can have had little doubt that his sojourn in the National Assembly would be brief. That said, it conferred legitimacy upon him and his movement (a fourth lesson that modern nationalists should learn) and once again, the fruits were not slow in coming.

At the 1988 presidential elections, Jean-Marie polled 4,375,894 votes in the first round, or 14.39%, a new high for the FN. As we have seen, in 1981, he was not even able to muster sufficient grands électeurs to be nominated to stand. Mitterand, whose popularity had by then markedly recovered, comfortably won the second-round run-off against Chirac.

New elections to the National Assembly followed, this time on the two-round system. While the FN’s vote bore up well (2,359,528 votes in the first round or 9.66% of the votes cast) only one FN candidate was elected in the second round, Yann Piat, who quickly fell out badly with Le Pen (there is a depressing pattern here, which, as we shall see, was repeated again and again) over another of his televised provocations (a pun on the name of a Jewish government minister Durafour, la four being the French words for an oven) before being expelled from the FN for criticising le chef over this tasteless witticism.

Yann Piat’s was a truly tragic life, for she was later assassinated in what appears to have been a professional hit, resulting from her courageous opposition to mafia style corruption in the départment du Var. Curiously, her mother was a girlfriend of Le Pen’s during his spell in the French army in Indo-China[4].

In truth, no-one was really happy with the outcome of the 1988 electoral cycle. Mitterand became the only French President ever to serve two full seven year[5] terms (the term of office has since been reduced to five years). No French president has ever had a happy or successful second term.

Astonishingly, up to the end of his first septennat, Mitterand, assisted by very strict French laws protecting privacy, had more or less successfully hidden not only his past as a nationalist militant in pre-war France and much of his history as a high official at Vichy but also the fact that he had not one but two families (he was very fond of his illegitimate daughter, Mazarine Pingeot), however all these matters became public knowledge in his second septennat, causing him no end of trouble with his own party, while the outcome of the 1988 elections to the National Assembly gave neither the left nor the system right a working majority.

For Le Pen and the FN, their elimination from the National Assembly was a blow. Things would soon get very much worse before they got better.

To be concluded . . .

Notes

[1] Evidently M. Gauchon made his peace with the Le Pen family in the end as by 2018 he was collaborating closely with J-M Le Pen’s favourite grandchild, Marion Maréchal at her private university, l’Institut des sciences sociales, économiques et politiques.

[2]  épater les bourgeois

[3]  (1 Corinthians 10:23)

[4]  It would however be a mistake to put two and two together and make five or a Caesar and Brutus scenario, since Yann Piat, whose father’s name is not known, was born some years before Le Pen was posted to Vietnam.

[5]  Septennat