Le Pen: Lessons soon forgotten

PAT JOHNSON REPORTER

The recent French presidential election cycle raised international concern and domestic horror when the extreme nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen came second in the initial balloting and faced a runoff with President Jacques Chirac May 5.

Though Le Pen was soundly trounced in the biggest landslide France has ever seen, the emergence (in fact, the re-emergence) of Le Pen as a contender was viewed with something akin to hysteria.

There are positive and negative messages in this sad footnote of French history. On the positive side, the vast majority of French citizenry, regardless of entrenched political allegiances, rallied behind the only democrat in the race, amid public rallies decrying the racist, scapegoating tactics of the Front National leader, Le Pen.

The negative side was what Le Pen's surprise showing said about average citizens, not just in France, but in all western democracies.

That 17 or 18 per cent of French voters would support Le Pen's policies is appalling. But just as appalling is the fact that the other 80 per cent would be so surprised by this fact.

The international community had hardly paid any attention to the French election until the stunning results of the initial balloting. Yet, the lesson that France and her democratic allies claim to have learned from this episode are the same lessons that we thought had been learned more than a century ago. The Le Pen affair really taught us nothing that we should not have already known from the Dreyfus affair, which took place in 1894.

Anti-Semitism erupts

Two old saws remain true: history repeats itself; and those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

Consider the facts of the Dreyfus affair.

In 1894, France was considered the model of European political evolution. The French Revolution 105 years earlier had provided France with the mantle of defender of individual freedoms and equality of peoples. It could be said that, like Canadians today, the French of that era were smug in the knowledge that they were an advanced people in terms of respect for human dignity. But that year, those pretenses were smashed. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French military, was accused of spying for Germany. (Though there was no war between the two countries, the historic antipathy between the neighboring states provided adequate suspicion and paranoia to launch spying charges.)

The "evidence," history has shown, was nonsensical. It consisted of a handwritten note found by a cleaning lady in a trash basket – in handwriting that apparently bore little or no relation to Dreyfus's own penmanship. Nevertheless, when culprits were sought to blame for the suspicious note, attentions turned to the only Jew in proximity: Dreyfus.

Because they were a people without a homeland, Jews were frequently subjected to questions of loyalty concerning the states in which they lived. Though Jews had been throughout history subjected to persecution based on religion, the persecution mutated during the Age of Nationalism. Since they were not pur lain (pure) French (or German or English), their loyalty to European countries were commonly doubted.

And yet, since the revolution, French Jews had lived in perhaps the most comfortable state of any Jews since the beginning of the Diaspora. Anti-Semitism, many believed, was now a phenomenon native to the backward Slavic states and other less advanced societies. Jews held senior diplomatic, academic, business and military positions. Indeed, Dreyfus's downfall could have come only in an area where he was allowed to rise to the heights of captain in the first place.

The fact that the Jewish captain was the "obvious" spy is just the beginning of the Dreyfus affair. He was publicly stripped of his weapon and medals and that might have been the end of the incident, had the general reaction of the wider French society not erupted in a stunning and apparently spontaneous manner.

Paris exploded in a cacophany of "Down with Jews" and "Death to the Jews." Ignoring for the moment that Dreyfus was later pronounced innocent, the public's obsession with Dreyfus's Jewishness was the motivation behind the hysteria and not the spying charges alone.

The repercussions of the Dreyfus affair went far beyond Dreyfus's career, the French military and even Europe itself. The realization that, even in the land of liberté, egalité, fraternité, latent anti-Semitism could ignite in such a potent way created a revolution in the way Jews perceived their place in the Diaspora.

Pogroms were still a regular occurrence in Russia, Poland and elsewhere in the east, but if France was not safe for the Jews then, some realized, no place would be safe, except a national homeland for the Jewish people.

One of the people who came to this conclusion was Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist and secular Jew who had closely followed the Dreyfus case. A successful, assimilated Jew with only tangential connections to his religious ancestry, Herzl was galvanized by the treatment of Dreyfus and the reaction of the French public.

Certainly one of history's more unlikely heroes, Herzl, with his antics in attempting to secure a Jewish homeland, verged on the delusional; his approach meglomaniacal. Yet, perhaps it took someone brave and crazy to truly imbue the Zionist dream with life.

The Dreyfus affair, among other things, could be seen as the spark that led to a widespread acceptance among Jews that they too must become a national people.

Tinderbox of hatred

In the last few years, we have seen a resurgence of anti-Semitism in some of the predictable places. The Jews of eastern Europe have never lived without the knowledge of bigotry. The increased mobility since the fall of the communist bloc has led to an enormous number of Ostjuden, the Jews of eastern Europe, to migrate to the West.

Even so, extremism in the reunified Germany has grown out of unemployment and the troubled economy, particularly in the former communist areas. Austria, Italy, even the liberal states of northern Europe have seen a resurgence of extremism that could be dubbed neo-fascism. Until his assassination last week, the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn combined a bizarre amalgam of feminism, gay rights, anti-government sentiment and anti-Muslim extremism to create a potent force in politics.

But it was France that, once again, made democrats around the world stand up in alarm. More than a century after the Dreyfus affair, the world again stood by disbelieving as this model of entrenched democratic ideals toyed with the tinderbox of hatred and xenophobia.

The lesson from the French election is not that anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred ebb and flow. The lesson is that they are ever-present, waiting for a catalyst like Le Pen to articulate them.

The lesson is as relevant for Canadians as it is for the French. If it can happen there, it can happen here. The time for vigilance is not when hatred surprises us by emerging with Le Pen-like strength, but before it is allowed to do so.

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