The prejudices of French history

OPINION:

Few people on Earth are more conscious of their history than the French. Unlike Americans, who often seemed strikingly ignorant of history, the French are nurtured on their past. They never cease to invoke the grandeur of their history. From Joan of Arc to Louis XIV to Napoleon to Charles de Gaulle, France’s past informs every aspect of France’s present. They relish the aesthetics of the monuments to that history and the ideologies that underpin it.

For France, this is both good and bad.

Without a profound knowledge of the past, it is difficult to know the foundation of the present or the pathways to the future. History can also serve, however, to entrench us in ideas that may have made sense in the past but may create impediments for the future or become false gods in whom we misplace our faith.

France’s recent National Assembly elections are a case in point. The outcome strongly suggests the powerful pull of history on contemporary events. It was expected that the Rassemblement National, or the RN, the right-wing group that has evolved from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National to become a more moderate right-of-center party, would win a majority of the seats in the National Assembly. That did not happen.

Instead, although no party won a majority of the seats and the RN received the largest number of votes, the left-wing coalition, brilliantly named the Nouveau Front Populaire, or the NFP, obtained the greatest number of seats in the National Assembly.

This is a case where historical memory and the manipulation of names played a prominent and possibly deceitful role. With the RN poised to emerge victorious in the hastily called elections for the National Assembly, a group of left-wing parties quickly united as the NFP in the hope of stopping the momentum of the RN. The choice of the name Nouveau Front Populaire was particularly felicitous, just as the echoes of the Front National in the name Rassemblement National were particularly challenging.

Those who know French history know that the original Front Populaire was a socialist coalition headed by a Jewish journalist named Leon Blum. The Front Populaire headed a short-lived government in the 1930s. But that government instituted many of the social reforms that have become an integral and cherished part of French life, including paid vacations, substantial minimum wages, health care and retirement pensions. Blum himself was arrested by the collaborationist government of Vichy and barely survived incarceration in the concentration camp of Buchenwald.

As a consequence, the history of the Front Populaire and the memories of that brief period are heavily intertwined with notions of social benefits and resistance to Nazi occupation and collaboration. The opposite is true for the RN. Even though the RN has repeatedly, formally and seemingly sincerely renounced the ideology that spawned fascism and collaboration in the 1930s and 1940s, references to the RN inevitably conjure up images of some of the worst moments of recent French history.

This dissonance had a great deal to do with the outcome of the recent elections. Confronted with the possibility that the RN might become the governing power in France, the left brought out the ghosts of the past both overtly and covertly. During the very short political campaign, leaders of the NFP ceaselessly hammered on the RN’s Front National predecessor and emphasized the Front National’s reprehensible history. The press, mostly made up of left-wing journalists, happily joined in the chorus.

The irony in all of this is that the echoes of the past are not necessarily reflections of the reality of the present. Indeed, the very opposite is true.

The most prominent leader of the NFP, Jean-Luc Melenchon, is in the mold of populist dictators of the past. He is mean-spirited and disdainful of those who disagree with him. He is infused with the moral certainty that he is right and everyone else is wrong — a sure formula for tyranny.

Mr. Melenchon is unabashedly anti-Israel, deploring anything having to do with Israel and often crossing over into blatantly antisemitic territory. While many on the left have sought to distance themselves from him, he has made certain that he would remain the most prominent leader of this new coalition. At the NFP victory rally last Sunday evening, where he was the standout figure, the Palestinian flag was waved prominently throughout the assembled crowd.

Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old head of the RN, is quite different. So is Marine Le Pen, who, although the daughter of a Holocaust denier and stubborn representative of the old guard, has denounced that past (even ousting her father from her party) and has espoused a philosophy that is far more open-minded and generous of spirit, not to mention very pro-Israel.

Although the NFP resonates with the prejudice and intolerance of the past and the RN is infused with a more tolerant attitude, the dictates of history play a powerful role. Captives of the public relations of the past and unable to jettison long-established perspectives on that past, French voters seemingly could not bring themselves to make a judgment free of the prejudices of history.

As we are often reminded, a failure to know history is to potentially repeat it. We must not be blind adherents to historical events. We must learn from history, but we must also remain fully cognizant of the realities of the present. Many French voters apparently failed in this regard.

• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of  “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.