Napoleon Bonaparte is arguably the most famous Frenchman who ever lived. But this year, as the country commemorates the bicentennial of his death, a fierce controversy is raging over the emperor’s legacy. Despite his glories, detractors point to the darker side of the ledger: Napoleon destroyed the republic founded in the aftermath of the French Revolution, led hundreds of thousands of soldiers to die in a futile invasion of Russia, imposed a civil code that put women under male domination, and—most egregiously—reestablished slavery in French colonies, including the island of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1802, nine years after the revolutionary convention had abolished it—a decision that French president Emmanuel Macron recently called a “mistake, a betrayal of the spirit of Enlightenment.” In the words of Françoise Vergès, a political scientist and militant feminist, Napoleon “was a racist, sexist, despot, militarist, and colonizer, but all of that is generally swept under the rug.” Not anymore.
The debate over Napoleon’s merits and demerits goes far deeper than the assessment of a long-dead ruler. It is part of a fundamental reexamination of France’s history, culture, and society. On the one hand, there are the traditionalists who defend France’s “universal” values of republicanism, egalitarianism, secularism, and national unity; on the other, an increasingly vocal faction—derided as avatars of what they call American-style wokisme—focuses on issues steeped in identity politics, postcolonialism, anti-racism, and feminism. And beyond that debate, the country is undergoing profound political, economic, and demographic changes that portend a very different France emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the political front, France is losing faith in its traditional parties and leaders. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy was recently convicted in a corruption scheme and handed a three-year jail sentence, two years of which were suspended. He went on trial in May for alleged improper campaign financing during his unsuccessful 2012 attempt at reelection. His former prime minister François Fillon was convicted of paying his wife more than a million euros out of public funds for a fictitious job. (Both cases are under appeal.) And these are just the more prominent examples of French politicians running afoul of the law. Some analysts blame the wave of guilty verdicts on activism by left-leaning judges. But the main effect is to feed into a populist rejection of the whole political class as tous pourris—all rotten.
Though Macron and his government have so far avoided becoming ensnared in such scandals, the president’s standing has been weakened by this populist distrust—witness the massive Yellow Vest movement that began in 2018. Macron rode to power as a fresh-faced reformer denouncing politics as usual. But many of his policies—especially his proposed pension reform—have sparked resistance, while his ad hoc movement, Republic on the March, has suffered numerous defections prompted by his often brittle authoritarian style. His disapproval rating, per the French Institute of Public Opinion, stands at 62 percent (though harsh criticism of sitting presidents is something of a French custom).
Looking forward to the 2022 presidential election, none of the traditional parties has so far come up with compelling candidates, meaning Macron will likely face Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right anti-immigration National Rally party, in the runoff. In 2017, Macron easily prevailed over Le Pen in the second round. This time, though, some voters, especially on the left, may abstain rather than support Macron again.
That is sobering news for the incumbent—and for the future of France. “When the traditional right and left seem exhausted,” says Pascal Perrineau, a political science professor at Sciences Po, “people turn to the populist ‘elsewhere’ for a sense of renewal, or just a desire to flip the table over.” In the current climate, Le Pen has a plausible shot at winning. Her chances are helped by the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic, which has racked France with its biggest national crisis since World War II. From the beginning, the Macron administration sent mixed messages, then bungled the vaccine rollout amid ineffectual off-and-on lockdowns, widespread unemployment, and a severe recession—all of which will weigh on next year’s election. “When we do come out of the COVID crisis,” warns Perrineau, “the public’s cold anger can turn hot. That’s the moment when the French will take stock and call the government to account.”
Even as Le Pen benefits from Macron’s miasma, she is gaining support as a champion of republican values in the face of what many see as an overreaching social justice movement. That is quite a turnaround. Until now, the party founded by her father, the truculent ex-paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been ostracized by the mainline parties precisely because its program was considered racist, anti-Semitic, and borderline fascist. Now, as part of an extraordinary makeover aimed at “normalizing” her image, Le Pen is posing as the defender of universalism, secularism, integration, and women’s rights against what she calls “the ideologies of division, of hatred, of violent demands, which I consider profoundly anti-French.” The true French values, she tells me in a Zoom interview, are “assimilation, unity of the republic, and the fact that no right can be given or denied to someone because of their religion, skin color, origin, or sexual orientation.” In the past, it was the left that upheld those principles most fervently. Today, the left is bitterly divided between old-school traditionalists, with their focus on class struggle and economic justice, and the newer, younger currents that insist that the crucial issues are anchored in race, identity, and gender.
This intensifying culture war is part of a bleak transformation in the way the French see themselves and their place in the world. The comforting self-image of France as an important power, a fount of Western culture, and a model of Enlightenment values is giving way to a fear of national decline. “I am very worried,” says Alain Finkielkraut, a philosopher, author, and political commentator with roots in the traditional left. “I think we have entered a crisis from which I’m not sure we can recover. France is challenged by uncontrolled immigration and is undergoing a demographic change unprecedented in our history. In the face of this challenge, a large part of the French elite is reacting with a systematic and delirious self-flagellation. And when part of a people loses the desire to remain true to itself, the situation is extremely grave.”
Finkielkraut’s concerns over the impact of immigration are widely shared—and not only among Le Pen’s supporters. The germ of the controversy goes back to the 1950s and ’60s, when French industry encouraged the influx of North African “guest workers” (mostly from nations that France had colonized) as a source of cheap labor during the postwar rebuilding effort. Their presence was supposedly temporary, but many of them stayed, raised families, and brought relatives from their home countries, settling in ever-growing housing projects. They were joined by later generations, many from sub-Saharan Africa, with the result that, in 2019, immigrants made up some 10 percent of the French population. In 2017, nearly 9 percent of the country’s inhabitants were Muslim.
According to so-called universalist theory, the newcomers were supposed to assimilate, embrace French culture, and become “ordinary” French citizens. But ordinary to whom? “France never invested in integration policies,” says François Gemenne, a Belgian specialist on migration who lectures at Sciences Po. “This has caused resentment from minorities who say they are discriminated against, that there is no investment in their neighborhoods. They want to be heard and claim more visibility. That doesn’t go down well with much of the public, who don’t like the idea of minorities becoming visible. They don’t want to be a U.S.- or U.K.-style multicultural country. Multiculturalism is considered a bad word. But there is a discrepancy between principles and reality. France is in fact multicultural.”
Irrespective of immigration issues, Islamist radicalism has struck France hard. In the past year, the country has suffered four serious attacks by terrorists, including one grisly incident in which a middle-school teacher was beheaded by a man of Chechen descent for having shown caricatures of the prophet Muhammad as part of a classroom discussion on free speech. In response, Macron proposed a so-called anti-separatism law aimed at upholding secularism and combating such extremism. The measure, wending its way through parliament, targets online hate speech, bolsters government oversight of religious associations, and reinforces the requirement of religious neutrality in the public sphere. Though the text never mentions Islam specifically, some leftist critics complain that it discriminates against all Muslims, while some on the right say it doesn’t go far enough.
With an eye to a probable second-round duel against Le Pen next year, the Macronist forces are adopting an increasingly hard line on immigration, radicalism, and even dress codes. “We’re seeing a rightward shift being carried out on the back of Islam in the name of secularism and the republic,” says Michel Wieviorka, a prominent sociologist. “I think this move to the right is a French way of resisting cultural change.” Meanwhile, another incident set off alarms over new-left excesses in the universities. This March, Mélanie Luce, a 24-year-old law student and president of the left-leaning National Union of French Students, revealed that the organization sponsored “non-mixed” meetings reserved for nonwhites. That triggered critics who saw the exclusion of whites as a form of inverted racism. Comparing the practice to fascism, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer vowed to take legislative action to ban such meetings.
In her cramped office in Paris, Luce tells me that the nature of the meetings has been totally misunderstood. “They’re just twice-a-year discussion groups,” she says, “on sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia. The aim is for people who experience discrimination to be able to express what they go through in a setting that allows them to speak freely.” Luce, who is biracial herself (her mother is a Black woman from Guadeloupe; her father, a white Jewish man from Paris), contends: “What my generation wants is true equality, where a person who looks like me doesn’t have less of a chance to succeed than a white person, where we don’t have to hide when the police come. The political class has trouble understanding this aspiration.”
The evolution of French thinking on race has been transformative. Under France’s universalist doctrines, all citizens are equal and undifferentiated, to the point where the government keeps no official statistics on the ethnicity of its own population. What’s happening today, however, is that race, once considered by many to be a nonissue, has become paramount in the eyes of this new left—along with gender, LGBTQ+ rights, and the combination of discriminations that fall under the overarching heading of intersectionality. Proponents insist that the notion of race has been ignored by an establishment that has failed to come to terms with France’s history as a colonial and slave-trading power. True equality can only be achieved, they say, by examining and deconstructing that legacy. That is the meaning of the “decolonial” movement championed by researchers like Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, a sociologist at the University of Paris 8. “The question is to know how to move away from the colonial nature of power,” she recently told Le Point. “This colonial order has not disappeared with the end of colonial empires but is reconfigured and continues to act.” Postcolonial thought, she says, seeks to dismantle the “persistence of social and political hierarchies founded on the racial categorization of humans.”
Many critics see these new movements as imports from U.S. campuses, where Black studies, women’s studies, and gender studies have long had their own departments. French resistance to such categories is not just a matter of knee-jerk anti-Americanism; it reflects a deep-seated belief that U.S.-style communitarianism is fundamentally at odds with the French model of a unitary nation of equal citizens. “The Anglo-Saxon tradition has another history, and it is not ours,” Macron said last fall, bemoaning the rising influence of “certain social-science theories imported from the United States of America.” Others are more scathing. “The left is becoming Americanized,” says Finkielkraut, “and it’s an Americanization much more toxic than the Coca-Cola and blue jeans that the French traditionally denounced.”
Some say the claims of U.S. contagion are exaggerated. “You don’t have to be American to raise issues like that,” says sociologist Wieviorka. “People in France began to pose the question of identities in the wake of the May 1968 student uprising. One thing is a constant in France: When you want to disqualify an idea, a way of thinking, or a political current, you say, ‘Oh, that’s American.’ ”
Indeed, the country of Simone de Beauvoir did not need American feminists to focus attention on gender discrimination. Similarly, much of the groundbreaking work on postcolonial theory was done by French and francophone thinkers such as the political philosopher Frantz Fanon. In fact, the current debate on decolonialism has more to do with France’s own legacy as a colonial power than with sociological theories coming from across the Atlantic. Yet certain trends do bear the undeniable mark of stateside influence. The U.S.-born #MeToo movement has taken off with a vengeance in France. In recent months, the list of prominent French personalities under fire for alleged acts of rape, sexual harassment, incest, or pedophilia has continued to grow. In spring 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd set off impassioned French marches, complete with English-language posters reading “I Can’t Breathe!” and charges of police brutality in the case of Adama Traoré, a young French-Malian man who died in police custody in 2016. Like their U.S. counterparts, French social justice activists have blocked campus appearances by ideologically objectionable speakers and forced the Sorbonne to postpone a play by Aeschylus because some of the white actors wore dark masks and makeup. “France is slowly following the American road,” lamented Le Monde editor Michel Guerrin, “which leads to galloping self-censorship by artists and programmers seeking to avoid problems.”
There is nothing new, of course, in the use of the American example by different factions in France. Tocqueville, himself a liberal monarchist, studied American democracy in the 1830s “to learn what we should hope or fear from it.” In the mid-19th century, it was the French left that exalted the image of American liberty and used it as a propaganda weapon against the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III. With the founding of the Third Republic in 1870, the left’s ardor for the American model cooled and, for much of the next century, morphed into often-virulent anti-Americanism. Today, we are seeing a repeat of earlier patterns, with many French progressives adopting American social theories and modes of political activism while their opponents decry the U.S. influence.
It was easier to reject whatever came from the U.S. of A. as long as Donald Trump was in the White House. But the American image as a whole is making a spectacular comeback in France ever since Joe Biden took over and launched his bold stimulus and infrastructure plans. In a sign of what Le Monde has called “Biden-mania,” the new U.S. president drew an 82 percent approval rating in one recent French poll. That doesn’t necessarily translate into an embrace of American-style social justice movements, but it may make it a bit more difficult to demonize them.
More than two centuries ago, Napoleon carried his version of French values across most of Europe as the head of his Grande Armée. Today, two revolutions, two world wars, and four republics later, France is a very different nation. President Charles de Gaulle famously extolled “a certain idea of France”—a grand-sounding phrase most notable for its vagueness. Today, more than ever, the question remains: What idea? Which France? In a diversifying land, the answers are multiple.
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