During the campaign for last year’s presidential election, Marine Le Pen presented herself as the candidate of reason, a Joan of Arc figure who was the embodiment of “quiet strength” and the saviour of the French way of life. The Front National logo was dropped from her posters, which carried the slogan La France apaisée (France at peace). She campaigned for “total freedom” and quoted the Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu.
Positioned between the capitalists and the communists (“neither right nor left”), she set herself up as the guarantor of republican values and the rule of law, and the defender of “the forgotten”: “Our project is based on rejecting individualism and the power of money, on refusing to subject mankind to a purely consumerist logic carried out by grasping multinationals.”
There is no doubt that Le Pen is a skilful political operator: she convinced a third of the electorate to vote for her. Michel Eltchaninoff’s task is therefore an important and urgent one: to subject Le Pen’s words to rigorous analysis, exposing their true meaning. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the leopard has not changed its spots.
At first glance, it appears that Le Pen has “erased the entire history of the French far right” from her campaigning. She has distanced herself from anyone who could compromise her, even her father, who infamously described the gas chambers as “a detail” in the history of the second world war. But as Eltchaninoff’s philosophical detective work reveals, her ideas are deeply embedded in the tradition of French far-right thought. An MEP, she loathes the EU, which she says is “subservient to the financial markets” and “takes its orders from Goldman Sachs”. There may be no openly antisemitic comments in her speeches, but Eltchaninoff suggests that such language would have been readily understood in the past as code for Jewishness: she has mastered “a subliminal type of racism”. And her “artfully subtle attacks on Islam” offer her followers a new scapegoat, for the Front National is “a movement that needs enemies”.
Le Pen’s “depressing, conspiratorialist discourse”, a mix of anti-elite populism and xenophobia redolent of 1890s France, was beaten at the ballot box. But, as this illuminating study shows, her ideology still poses a threat to French democracy: “The demon has not yet breathed its last.”
• Inside the Mind of Marine Le Pen is published by Hurst. To order a copy go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
