🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - Up the RPR?
04 February 2023 - Charles De Gaulle’s party resurrected, RN deputies and militants call for the rejection of the foreigner, and ️the “Les Survivants” anti-abortion website shut down
👋Hey guys, Julien here.
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This week
👼Charles De Gaulle’s party resurrected?
🛑RN deputies and militants call for the rejection of ‘the foreigner’
️👮“Les Survivants” anti-abortion website shut down
👼De Gaulle’s party resurrected?
Starting the week off with a fascinating story, there are ongoing discussions of a potential “resurrection” of a party that etched its name into French history: Charles de Gaulle’s Rassemblement pour la République.
Or rather, several resurrections. Hear me out.
One of the big issues when it comes to French politics is that no matter what political party someone comes from, whether it be the far-right, the far-left, the communists, the nationalists, the liberals, or whoever, everybody claims to be De Gaulle’s heir.
And this is now getting worse, with several deputies now trying to take on the name of his party, or the acronym, due to the power it holds.
First up, in June 2023, Franck Allisio, one of Marine Le Pen’s political advisors in the Rassemblement National and a former member of the UMP, launched his micro-party, Rassemblement Pour Reconstruire for “those who want to rebuild France and turn the page on macronism”.
“We are taking back the old family home left abandoned by our older brothers who went to the camp of the President of the Republic.”
- Franck Allisio (RN)
The thing that most people picked up on first, though, was that the acronym for this party was put at the front of all his work: the RPR, which was combined with the Cross of Lorraine on posters, a clear shout-out to former President De Gaulle.
The second example of this is taking place in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, where Renaissance’s President of the Regional Council, Renaud Muselier, has launched his own micro party: the Rassemblement Pour la Région.
As a former member of the RPR, the UMP, and Les Republicains, you can't doubt that Muselier knows what he’s doing as he uses the topic, and he makes it clear in a statement he made:
“We are entirely determined to defend the remarkable meaning of this acronym anchored in the history of our country: the RPR, a popular movement close to the realities on the ground, authentic and warm and which made no concessions to the extreme right,”
And despite having joined Renaissance recently, he has promised several RPR candidates in future local elections.
So now we have two parties currently fighting to present themselves as the heirs to De Gaulle’s party, which you can imagine would lead to a messy political fight that would lead us to all break out the popcorn.
How-ever, there’s one hitch (apparently).
Franck Allisio, the RN / nu-RPR leader, apparently legally owns both the brand and logo of the RPR through methods that nobody has entirely understood and which has left most people asking how exactly he managed to pull that off.
Especially considering the fact that his political heritage includes people who attempted to murder President de Gaulle, defended his attempted assassins, and spat on his work until it became politically useful for them.
Anywho, Speaking of the RN…
🛑RN deputies call for the rejection of the foreigner
Yes, you did indeed read that correctly.
In a (not-so-fun) story over at Le Monde, we see an event from the point of view of a far-right couple who, planning on moving to Portugal “because [they] can't stand the Arabs in France anymore” attend an RN deputy’s event because they “wanted to hear someone who finally tells the truth about things”.
And they clearly weren’t disappointed, with the following excerpt from Jocelyn Dessigny’s speech :
“We see the flowers of evil growing in the Paris region with drug trafficking, the increase in crime, the expansion of prostitution and arms trafficking … [there is a] link between these crimes and the increase in the sub-Saharan population coming to us from Ile-de-France. … Are we going to remain idly faced with this problem?”
Now, nothing here is particularly new, and if you’ve been watching French politics, you’ll notice the Rassemblement National, Reconquête, and other far-right parties will follow a set pattern when discussing “France’s problems”:
There is one (or several) severe problem(s) in Paris that are not being solved
Paris doesn’t solve it because it doesn’t like the common Frenchman and views him with contempt
The Deputy usually includes a statement that he visits Paris for his job, despite his disgust for the city, to represent the “real French people” and protect them
The problem(s) that Paris (and the rest of France faces) is the fault of immigrants, who are being used as a tool against the ordinary French people, either threatening their jobs, the provision of public services, their safety, or that of their partner’s / children
And this has a very serious impact on how many of these militants view the world. For example, in the Le Monde article noted above, you see an example of a French septuagenarian being upset that his old social housing was given to an Arab:
“He may have had French nationality. But I believe that it is first and foremost a working French person who must have social housing. A Frenchman of French origin”
This is combined with an excerpt of another individual stating that “a real Frenchman” is “five generations of pure stock”, just to drive home the ridiculous standards being applied here, which would probably disqualify a significant number of French people.
Whether the author of your favourite publication would qualify is not entirely certain, either, by the way.
However, there is a fascinating thing noted in this article: that these far-right militants are actually making distinctions between white / European migrants and the others.
For example, in the above example, the septuagenarian insists that there shouldn’t be any comparisons “between Italians and Arabs”, while deputy Bruno Bilde (RN) makes statements like: “Unlike some, French people of Polish origin are often exemplary patriots who have never contested the values of France and its identity”.
So we’re seeing that there’s an incredibly selective view of good immigrants and good French people, which is incredibly problematic.
But wait, there’s also a bizarre psychosis around how the reaction to this kind of statement is perceived as well.
While people like you and me would argue that we don’t want to vote for these parties because, well, they’re more than a little racist and discriminatory and don’t represent the views we have of our countries, European Union, or world, people see this is problematic.
There’s an example of one militant in the article who views this as some bizarre form of obstruction:
“They put obstacles in our way every time. It’s a scam: the elections are rigged … If the RN is very good six months before [the 2027 election], they will find something for them, true or not, to say that it is racist or anti-Semitic”
Maybe, we should say the quiet part louder.
️👮“Les Survivants” anti-abortion website shut down
On to a less-than-pleasant story:
Last summer, a large number of stickers began appearing on Vélib bicycles across Paris, pushing anti-abortion messages such as “What if you had let him/her live” across the vehicles.
Which is about as unpleasant and nasty as it sounds.
Regardless, this led to the Paris city council launching a large information campaign to re-state the right that all citizens have to abortion, along with information on where to find family planning centres, before then taking legal action against it.
This led to the website being shut down and further legal action to try to figure out who was running the website before then prosecuting them.
However, this is emblematic of an even more problematic issue that France and a lot of Western countries are facing: the resurfacing of trad-con (traditionalist conservative) politics, which are very frequently in direct contrast to modern society.
Even if we put aside the sheer difficulty that many people have in going through with abortions, how terrifying it can be, and how psychologically scarring it can be, the assault on modern values that this represents is enormous.
We have spent centuries as a civilisation trying to overcome those who would hold our societies back, who would trap certain people into specific areas of society purely because of their gender, religion, jobs, or ethnicity, and the way back to this is a very slippery slope paved with ill intentions.
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Speaking about de Gaulle, I did not know that he is still seen as some kind of leader figure as Churchill or Roosevelt. But is that a sign of politics of nostalgia or a real attempt to make a political change?
The communication from RN politicians is not surprising. They do not have the will nor ability to think in complex terms as regarding transnational crime. Also, right-wing populists think it is ok to discriminate and threat people badly on the basis of "culture" and passport. Basically, they do not care about universal values nor democracy.