Thomas Jefferson is apocryphally reputed to have said “every man has two countries – his own and France.” Alas, like most things that are too good to be true, our third President and author of the Declaration of Independence, did not say or write this. It is actually a line spoken by Charlemagne in a late 19th century French play by Henri Bornier, La Fille de Roland, that was first performed a half century after Jefferson’s death in 1824. Though in fairness, Jefferson did say in his memoirs that if didn’t live in the US his second choice would have been France where he had, of course, served as the US Minister Plenipotentiary after the Revolution.
More recently President Trump has invoked recent developments in France to warn Americans against voting in his opponents noting that when they see “burning steeples and raging fires in France,” they should remember that “is what the radical Democrats want to do to America.” Trump’s view was echoed by Pennsylvania Senator David McCormick who, in the before times, would have been seen as a perfectly “normie” Republican.
The protests that have wracked France for more than a month have become a kind of Rorschach test for the right-wing media ec(h)o-system which has looked on at the protests, the police response, and the occasional scenes of shocking violence (looting of stores, burning of the City Hall in Limoges, the vandalization of at least one synagogue) and concluded that this is a “red-green” alliance of ultra-leftists and Islamist activists whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.
There is a surface plausibility to this description since the protests, which began as student-teacher demonstrations protesting the pretty deplorable conditions of France’s secondary education system, have been egged on by Jean Luc-Melanchon, the former Trotskyite, later Socialist Party functionary who heads La France Insoumise (the leading left-wing political force in the country). For the moment, the polls show him as the most likely opponent for Marine Le Pen, the far-right politician currently leading the pack of would-be Presidents in the election to take place in spring 2027. Moreover, the original protesters have been joined by the so-called “black block”: a group of mask-wearing anarchist protesters clothed in dark apparel whose mission is to smash the state by instigating violence, arson, and looting (in which young protesters from largely immigrant neighborhoods have been happy to join in). Moreover, the anti-Israel, pro-Palestine signs that seem to be de rigueur at any protest these days have made their inevitable appearance.
But, well-informed observers of France see a much more complex set of phenomena at work and since France’s election may well be a harbinger for Europe’s future direction it is worth taking the time to unpack a bit of what seems to be going on.