I am puzzled to discover in the latest New Yorker article on France by James McCauley that Marcel Gauchet makes room for Marine Le Pen under the great tent of democratic France. She would exemplify a new, softer, though inexperienced right that is not in continuity with Barrès or Maurras but more like the Republican party at the beginning of the Fifth Republic (the RPR: rassemblement pour la République). I don’t think he is naïve. But it is shocking at first to see his expansive ideas on democracy be so flexible (see his Le nouveau monde, vol.\ 4 of L’avènement de la démocratie (Gallimard, 2017). So, I hope he is not about to cajole her any further and perhaps even tolerate in advance her possible victory in the 2027 presidential elections, while she finds it politic to coax the likes of Poutine or Orban.

The need to criticize the destructiveness of neo-liberalism, including its European façade, and the terrible effects of the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots, which despairs and frightens about half of the French, is, I assume, the real reason behind Gauchet’s widening or rereading of the democratic church. It would be a way to recognize the “laissés pour compte,” whom Macron gives the impression of abandoning to their fate of victims of the unstoppable global world. The Europe that Macron speaks about will go larger with the integration of Ukraine, without making its decision making about taxation or social policy any more decisive and transparent. But I don’t see how this suffering, fear, and frustration can justify a ballot for the Le Pens’ profiteering. Nothing in her program—or what transpires of it—can be construed as a challenge to neo-liberalism, in spite of her couplets on nationalism, “civilization”, and immigration. Neither does Macron’s ideas qualify as a program, granted. His persona is that of a supremely competent negotiator. In fact, they both invite an acceleration of the oligarchies or oligopolies that we see at work in Russia and in another form in the US. It can go along with proto-fascist measures, like the arrest and expulsion of immigrants in the middle of the day.

Here is what McCauley says about Gauchet::

Gauchet, a historian, co-founded the journal Le Débat, a cornerstone of French intellectual life for decades. (It ceased publication in 2020.) Gauchet has recently insisted that Marine is a “sort of authoritarian right, national, popular, which for me strongly evokes—as an ancien combattant—the beginning of the Fifth Republic.” He went further, saying that “in reality, she incarnates something very different from the extreme right of the past”—even though Marine is the direct heir, literally and ideologically, of precisely that tradition.

Macauley is not fair to Marcel Gauchet. The interview that Gauchet gave to Europe One recently makes clear that he looks at both sides of the election as not providing political platforms but rather as playing superficial roles in a moral tale. Gauchet is being realistic and simply taking seriously the weakening of a Republican front traditionally opposed to the far right. The French voter is not politically represented in the presidential election because the traditional parties that were eviscerated in 2017 and especially 2022 haven’t been replaced by real political options. If not corrected—by proportional-style elections—France might see a social explosion.