Book review: A glimpse into far-right ideologies

Demonstrators march during a protest called by major trade unions to oppose budget cuts, in Nantes, western France, last month. Picture: Mathieu Pattier/ AP

• Fractured France: A Journey through a Divided Nation 
• Andrew Hussey 
• Gulp Fiction Books, £25.00 

Fractured France, written by a renowned historian and author, will be of interest to anyone looking for a right wing perspective on French politics and society.

The far right is a mainstream and respectable movement in French politics. It was in the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1950s — it is again now. And in its wake a host of individuals are working to promote far-right ideas.

Such ideas inform the main thesis of Fractured France, written by an old left-winger turned right in the mould of Christopher Hitchens and the columnists of Spiked magazine. 

Andrew Hussey, a longtime historian and observer of contemporary France, is sympathetic to the far-right Rassemblement National and critical of its opponents.

Hussey’s stated aim in the book is to explain France’s current political divides by visiting several of its towns and cities: Paris and Marseille, Dijon, Reims, and Manosque.

But his overarching claim can be boiled down to this: French society used to serve French people of all classes. 

Ordinarily we could expect some social unrest from “Black and Arab” teenagers “dressed in hip-hop fashion”. 

But disturbingly these days many “respectable-looking” people are involved in protests and riots. This has happened because ordinary French people no longer have power in their communities. 

Andrew Hussey, a longtime historian and observer of contemporary France, is sympathetic to the far-right Rassemblement National and critical of its opponents.

Changes are simply forced on them, including the loss of big industries and public services, and the arrival of immigrants who oppose their freedoms and way of life.

These ordinary French people, we are told, do not live in Paris, Marseille, or any big city. 

They are represented nowhere in mainstream culture, especially not by the “metropolitan literary press”, or urban hipsters “who think of themselves as liberal left but who are entitled and superior in manner”. 

The left, who are all from “the professional classes”, are snobs. They have given up on universal values, interested only in virtue-signaling and “the politics of race and religion”. 

He concludes: “the deepest division in 21st century French life” is between “those who believe in France as an ideal of civilisation, under the rubric ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, and those who have no interest in such abstractions and often violently oppose them.”

It is easy to poke holes in this picture. Hussey espouses values he claims are both at once universal and distinctly French. 

Besides which his notion of “France as an ideal of civilisation” is meaningless: everyone in French politics claims they are for ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, and their opponents are all against it. 

He purports to speak for an authentic working-class France, against metropolitan elites, despite referring several times to the Parisian apartment where he lives and appears to own.

More revealing are the omissions. Hussey claims the French left have no solutions for a working class “whose problems are low wages, job insecurity, and poor social housing”. 

Yet these were all core themes in the manifesto of the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP), which won the most seats in last year’s legislative elections.

Hussey refers just once to the NFP, misleadingly and not by name, as “a left-wing coalition led by the radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélénchon”. 

He did not lead it; but the vilification of Mélenchon and anyone willing to associate or deal with his party has been enormous, particularly since October 7.

Hussey does not say anything about the genocide in Gaza, but its effect continues to be profound.

There is depth in Hussey’s portrayals of individual cities mixing history, interview, and memoir. But this book’s main interest will be for those looking to get a right wing view of the country. 

In France it keeps getting harder, sadly, to distinguish between the right and far right.