Is France Still France?

TUCSON — My planned flight to Paris in two weeks could take longer than usual. If Marine Le Pen upsets Emmanuel Macron on April 24, it could land 60 years ago, back to when fear and fascism after the Algerian war nearly undid France’s bedrock liberté, égalité and fraternité.

The first-round results on Sunday made plain that the France I’ve known since 1968 is now something entirely different. Coming at a time when a modern-day megalomanic is committing war crimes that amount to targeted genocide, that is deeply troubling.

Le Pen is unlikely to win. But a map of the primary results showing the départements (states) she carried in the first round evokes a line William Faulkner wrote in 1950: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

She swept the Mediterranean south, heavily settled after 1962 by pieds noirs, families forced to flee Algeria after a vicious war of independence. Until then, Algeria was as French as Alaska is American. Diehard soldiers tried repeatedly to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in coup attempts.

And she took the entire industrial north, dominated by workaday families who suffer badly from rising prices and stagnant wages. Most see Macron as favoring big-money interests and tearing gaps in the social safety net that has protected them for generations.

Macron skunked Le Pen in 2017, 66 percent to 33. After François Hollande’s bungled policies crippled the Socialist Party, Macron appeared from nowhere, a 44-year-old silver-tongued investment banker with grand ideas. But this time could be a cliff hanger.

That old saw is apt. The French vote with their heart in the first round and with their head in the final runoff. But like America, the country today is now deeply divided. With the essence of France in the balance, voting is visceral: gut and gonads are in the mix.

Le Pen might have benefitted from support by Eric Zemmour, a ultraright polemicist much touted in the press, had he polled more than 7.1 percent. An Algerian-born Jew, who France’s chief rabbi calls anti-Semitic, he rails against Muslims, immigrants in general and much else.

In contrast, Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far left polled just behind Le Pen, at 22 percent, and he told his voters to shun her. All eight others, totaling 20 percent, back Macron. But the turnout was low, and Le Pen is on a tear with 12 more days to fire up her growing base.

The last time, in 2017, Le Pen echoed her father’s strident rhetoric. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a bullying, blustering ex-Foreign Legion officer, is an easy man to dislike. For starters, he was accused of torture in Algeria and belittled the Holocaust as “a detail of history.”

Marine has since softened her edges into a housebroken, cat-loving flesh-presser. She expelled her father from the party, changing its name from National Front to National Rally. She shuns swastikas and skinheads, and she peppers her enthusiastic rallies with what sound like facts.

But down deep, she is all Le Pen: a France-firster who opposes Muslim and other immigrants who darken the color of France. Only recently she has played down her close ties with Vladimir Putin, who hosted her at the Kremlin in 2017. A Russian bank lent her party money in 2014.

She dropped a plan to restore francs instead of euros but wants to replace the European Union with a “Europe of nations” that gives more sovereignty to its members. And she would withdraw France — with nuclear weapons and seasoned armed forces — from the NATO command structure.

In short, Le Pen would undercut the transatlantic alliance that is now so essential as that modern-day megalomanic, with 2,000 nuclear warheads and absolute disregard for civilian lives, risks accidental Armageddon.

My first flight to France was in late 1968, a decade after De Gaulle established the Fifth Republic, replacing a series of ineffectual post-war governments. Riots in Paris pitting students against head-banging police pushed him toward retirement, and everyone had settled down.

De Gaulle freed most African colonies but kept them close by bankrolling loyal presidents’ profligacy. French military bases kept order, suppressing or instigating coups as directed by the Elysée Palace. A nuclear force de frappe and global diplomacy made France a major player.

When I took over the Associated Press bureau in 1977, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was the perfect French-style elected monarch: a “presidential” leader who was allowed personal peccadillos and dubious dealings so long as he maintained France’s glory. But he overdid it.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a murderous tyrant in the Central African Republic, decided to crown himself emperor. Giscard, who hunted big game with him, footed the enormous bill. When reporters revealed he had accepted diamonds from Bokassa, France had enough.

In 1981, crowds packed the Bastille solid, many clutching roses, the Socialists’ symbol, to cheer François Mitterrand. He was a haughty intellectual who, “socialist” notwithstanding, was an elected monarch. He stayed until 1995. Three others followed until Macron.

Whether governed from the right or left, France maintained its historical role. The Foreign Legion and other French troops held forward positions in Desert Storm; kept Serbs at bay in Bosnia; waded into the Middle East. And they kept the lid on much of Africa.

During the 1990s, conflict and climate forced Africans from ex-colonies to flee north. They gathered in les banlieues, rough urban exurbs. Speaking French and knowing the culture, many integrated into the society. That changed after America invaded Iraq in 2003.

For nearly two decades, refugees from the Middle East have swelled the banlieues to enclaves of drugs and guns where police fear to tread. Many, rather than integrate, rail against promiscuous French ways. Radical imams preach extremism. Terrorist recruiters work on disaffected youth.

America policy in Africa, essentially, has been to fight to the last Frenchman. Giant U.S. aircraft flew French commandos south and fed them satellite intelligence while they waded into combat. When ISIS terrorists fled Iraq and joined local rebels in West Africa, that was no longer enough.

Mali is at the crux. French troops took back Timbuktu and chased guerrillas deep into the rolling dunes. But faced with mounting casualties, Macron just ordered all forces home. After yet another coup, Malian leaders ally with Moscow, not Paris, for the first time since the 1970s.

There is much more to say. In short, Victor Hugo was overstating, as usual, but he had a point: “France, France, without you the world would be alone.” 

I’ll write a postmortem when the results are in. At least one thing is clear. Anne Hidalgo, the ambitious mayor who has done so much to remake Paris in her own image, won’t be doing that on a national scale. She polled 1.7 percent.