The Social World

Tag: France

  • Camus comes to America

    Camus comes to America

    The 20th-century French writer Albert Camus remains a living author, a permanent contemporary, in a way that the far more dogmatic and ideological Jean-Paul Sartre does not. The latter provided a caricature of “existentialism,” nihilism dressed up as absolute freedom, beholden to no limits and no enduring truths. In contrast, the author of The Stranger and The Plague rejected Sartre’s facile nihilism, as well as his repellant accommodation with murderous messianism, typically conveyed in fashionable leftist nostrums. The more hopeful side of Camus comes through in his recently re-released Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World.

    An entry from his travel notebook from his four-month long trip to New York, the east coast of the US and parts of Canada in the spring and summer of 1946, reveals just how distant Camus had grown from the “official philosophy” of Saint-Germain-des-Près. Indeed, Camus had come to reject completely the cult of ideological revolution inspired by a “messianism” that is indistinguishable from “fanaticism.” This unbeliever, however, refused to reject the sacred tout court. He found himself increasingly attracted to a Greek thinking that was not essentially historical and that affirmed values that “are preexistent.” He forthrightly declared himself “against modern existentialism,” as well as opposed to messianic, totalitarian socialism.

    By then, Camus was well on his way to the recovery of moderation grounded in an appreciation of limits and the firmest rejection of the ideological justification of murder. This recovery would find its finest expression in his 1951 book, L’homme révolté (or The Rebel in English). In the two interview-portraits appended to the volume, one from the New Yorker and the other from the New York Post, Camus expressed his displeasure at being assimilated to the camp of existentialism. He was not content with pessimism as the final word, opting instead for hope grounded in dialogue and respect for human dignity. He freely invoked Plato’s Socrates in that regard in some of his major writings from this period.

    As the noted Camus scholar Alice Kaplan writes in her lucid introduction to the volume, Camus’ “philosophizing” forms only a backdrop, even if an essential one, to these travel notebooks. This is above all “observational writing,” an artful account of choses vues (things seen). In them, we discover the man, as much or more than the thinker – at once curious, excited, witty, ironic and, often, weary. He is always coming down with, or recovering from, flu and fever, with a regularity that is alarming. Although he never acknowledges it even to himself, at least in writing, Camus was dealing with the residues of tuberculosis. This makes the spirit that shines through even more remarkable, and the illness and exhaustion more understandable.

    The second of the two travel notebooks to the Americas in this volume provides a record of Camus’ two-month trip, by ship, from Marseilles to Dakar, then on to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, in the summer of 1949. We witness Camus suffering from more serious bouts of illness, fatigue at seeing the “human face” too many times in a concentrated period of time, and from an occasionally deep melancholy whose source is never acknowledged by the author. We learn, however, from Kaplan that in 1948 Camus reignited his love affair with the Spanish actress Maria Casarès after a three-year interruption (this despite the fact that the French writer was married and the father of young twin sons). Camus remained lovestruck until his death in a car crash in 1960, causing no small amount of misery for all involved. This otherwise thoroughly decent man largely exempted affairs of the heart from supervision by his rigorous standards of moral responsibility. In South America in 1949, he “suffers from feelings of isolation and melancholy,” as Kaplan puts it, as a result of his separation from Casarès, and the considerable delays in his mail from her catching up with him.

    As the notebooks richly illustrate, Camus was a master of observation. Even on the ship from Le Havre to New York, Camus describes the varied characters and personalities he meets in a frank, enjoyable, but never biting way. Things are very tight on the SS Oregon, but Camus does not unduly complain. His descriptions of the sea – at times calm, also rough, and more often beautiful – reveal an artist’s power of description and a philosophical poet’s meditations on the natural order of things. Nature remains a powerful standard of judgment for Camus, as well as a source of solace, and a powerful reminder of constancy and change. As Kaplan points out, when the city is “crass,” when people are “indigestible,” Camus turns his contemplative gaze to the sea. He revealingly writes: “I’ve always been able to make peace with things out at sea, and for a moment the infinite solitude does me good, though I can’t help but feel all the world’s tears are rolling atop the sea now.” Torn between commitment and contemplation, the Algerian-born Camus  remained a quintessential child of the Mediterranean.

    Camus shared some of the prejudices of the French intellectual class, including, arguably, an excessive dislike for the bourgeois, the mercantile, the industrial and the utilitarian. He is at first overwhelmed by the vulgarity of New York, and the inhuman character of its skyscrapers. (He wittily observes that, thankfully, human beings do not always look up.) But the city grows on him. He admires its energy, and the gregariousness and generosity of Americans. He makes many friends in the publishing and intellectual worlds, including a crucial one with his longtime publisher, Blanche Knopf. He enjoyed going to a lively bar in the down-and-out Bowery with his friends, and taking strolls with French and American friends alike. He was fully aware of America’s “race problem” but avoided constant moralizing about it. He took to the passion and energy of black music.

    His talk at Columbia University, “The Crisis of Man,” read in French, drew an oversized crowd. It brilliantly sketched his ongoing efforts to move beyond political and philosophical pessimism and negation. Thus, while remaining eminently French-Algerian and European in character and outlook, Camus avoided anything that smacked of fashionable “anti-Americanism.” His moderate and humane libertarian socialism was largely devoid of utopian illusions, and he never gave way to inhuman abstractions. And with the one significant exception, he practiced what he preached.

    Camus was even more famous by the time he travelled to South America in 1949. The Brazil he describes is a half-Western country, racially divided, and with “a framework of modernity” barely covering its searing passions and ideological tensions. Camus meets brilliant and talented poets, strange intellectuals, beautiful and boorish society ladies, and sees the full array of semi-pagan “Black Catholicism” on display. He visits a favela in Rio de Janeiro and is struck by the good will of its inhabitants, as well as their poverty. He witnesses macumbas and hours-long dances where the participants are seemingly possessed. He is exhausted by meeting after meeting and dinner after dinner. He is charmed to find an Afro-Brazilian theater group putting on a version of his play Caligula in a samba hall, but surprised to see this satire of Hitlerite despotism turned into a “sensual, flirtatious dance,” as Alice Kaplan puts it. In the Brazil of 1949, “Hitler is a distant reference.”

    Camus’ visit to Argentina becomes an “unofficial” one to protest a ban on the performance by an Argentinian troupe of one of his plays. During his four-day visit to Chile, its alluring cities and towns crowded between the Andes and the sea, Camus witnesses public unrest over an increase in subway fares (a perennial occurrence in that country) and the outlawing of the Communist party (fully Stalinist at the time, one might add). An exhausted Camus flies back to Paris this time in what he tellingly describes as “a metal box.”

    In Latin America, Camus delivered his powerful text “The Time of Murderers,” published in French that year and a portent of what is to come in L’homme révolté. I recommend that American readers of this fine, inviting book follow up by reading “The Crisis of Man” (1946) and “Time of the Murderers” (1949) in Albert Camus, Speaking Out: Lectures and Speeches, 1937-1958 (Vintage, 2021). There one finds Camus at his wisest, most dignified, and humane, a permanent contemporary.

  • Can Bruno Retailleau defeat France’s Islamists?

    Can Bruno Retailleau defeat France’s Islamists?

    When France played Algeria at soccer in their national stadium, the Stade de France, in 2001, the French player Thierry Henry said afterwards he felt – disturbingly – as if he were playing away. The game had to be abandoned after dozens of Algerian fans, furious at being 4-1 down, invaded the pitch. 

    Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister of France since September last year and a key figure in the small boats crisis, has been known to cite Henry’s comment. Retailleau is carving out a distinct role for himself in government as the tribune of the growing number of his compatriots who share the same sense that they, too, are “playing away.” In other words, the millions who believe that they have become strangers in their own country.

    There is a trinity of issues at the heart of his agenda – porous borders, rampant crime and an increasingly self-confident Islamist movement that is on a long march through the institutions of the Fifth Republic.

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, the populist party which is currently the most powerful force on the left, thinks Retailleau is the man to watch. “For many right-wing people, Bruno Retailleau is more reassuring than [Le Pen],” he wrote in La Tribune. “Retailleau is the reactionary movement’s best chance at this time.” Retailleau’s prominence is all the more remarkable considering he leads Les Républicains, the once dominant force on the right, which long ago lost its position to Rassemblement National and has been written off by many as a dead party. Yet there’s an outside chance now that he can make it all the way to the Élysée when President Macron’s second term ends in 2027.

    So who is he? Retailleau was born in 1960 in the Vendée – a department best known in history for an unsuccessful royalist revolt against the revolutionary authorities in the 1790s. This revolt elicited Jacobin repression from Paris which was brutal enough to inspire Lenin. Retailleau’s great-great-great grandfather was part of the cross-class alliance that turned to the local aristocracy for military leadership; in his mother’s house there is a certificate of appreciation from Louis XVIII for their loyalty in an era of unprecedented upheaval.

    What happens when the rule of law starts to facilitate crime – and people can see that it’s doing so?

    But Retailleau is a conservative, not a reactionary, despite what Mélenchon may claim. His view of the French Revolution was influenced more by Edmund Burke than by 19th-century French royalists such as Joseph de Maistre. “I owe much of my understanding to Edmund Burke. There was the constitutional change of 1789, which Burke sympathized with, and the Terror of 1793, which he of course rejected. But the Terror of 1793 was not inevitable,” he says, when we meet in London during the recent state visit. “The Revolution could have been more liberal and respectful. But it gave a blueprint for totalitarianism – later communist and in our times Islamist absolutism, the ends justifying the means. And the total vision of society encompassing and politicizing every aspect of life. Meaning the attempt to perfect man from a tabula rasa.”

    The invocation of Burke is typical of the man who is one of the few top-level politicians who manages to keep up his reading while in office. Among writers directly addressing more contemporary issues, his choices are not always easy to predict: many on the French right would cite Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints or Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission, an imaginary account about an Islamist takeover of France. 

    Retailleau, however, admires the French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who is currently in prison in Algeria and is a staunch critic of the nationalist regime there and of the Islamists: Retailleau is now the most vocal member of the government calling for Sansal’s release. He is also keen on the writings on art and philosophy of Régis Debray, the tiers monde-iste friend of Che Guevara and Mitterrand adviser. Retailleau enjoys the company of Parisian intellectuals such as the cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut and the political philosopher Pierre Manent – who form a contrast with his circle of intimates from the Vendée, a difference of cultures which he relishes.  

    Retailleau’s career choices have also been unconventional. Most graduates of one of the grandes écoles would go on to become a mandarin serving an apprenticeship in the Cabinet of a minister. Retailleau, by contrast, after Sciences Po, returned to the Vendée – where his grandfather and father, a grain merchant, had both been mayor of Saint-Malo-du-Bois. His grandfather was severely wounded at the first Battle of the Marne in September 1914. His father served in the Algerian War and later ran the family farm.

    Retailleau himself has served as a reservist in the Régiment de Saumur, one of the best-known of the French cavalry regiments; and dressage is his competitive sport of choice. Today, his favorite pastime is riding alone in the Vendée (sometimes to the alarm of his security detail) and he has retained the figure of a jockey until well into his sixties. “I’ve had a few falls,” he notes, but his enthusiasm for the saddle remains undiminished. 

    His children presented him with a she-donkey for his 60th birthday. “When I have the time, I will take her on a journey to the Cévennes – in tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, another of my favorite authors.” But for now, the crisis at the French borders makes this a luxury he cannot afford: he is a workaholic, often waking at 3:30 a.m. to read his official papers.  

    Retailleau started his career at Puy du Fou – the nearby theme park on French history that was founded by the local aristocrat Philippe de Villiers, a key figure in French Euroskepticism.

    He was a keen participant in Puy du Fou’s pageants and re-enactments. Under de Villiers’s guidance, he rapidly rose to become a member of the National Assembly, president of the Vendée departmental council, president of the Pays de la Loire regional council and finally leader of Les Républicains in the Senate. But the apprentice outstripped the master and there was a parting of the ways.

    ‘Islamophobia is a bogus concept. It conflates all Muslims with Islamism, which is not true’

    The difference in approach between the two men is meaningful. There is a certain non-sectarianism in Retailleau’s approach: behind his desk in the Interior Ministry at Hôtel de Beauvau hang portraits of the two greatest Vendéens – Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a French marshal of World War Two, and Georges Clemenceau, the victor of the first world war. It’s hard to imagine a purist Catholic of de Villiers’s vintage revering an atheistic anti-clerical like Clemenceau. 

    And when it comes to Russia, Retailleau is firmly in the Giorgia Meloni camp: he parts company with those on the French right who see Vladimir Putin as a defender of family values and Christian civilization. Retailleau sees Putin not as the inheritor of Czarist tradition, but rather as a product of the KGB. 

    Retailleau believes in defending moral as well as physical borders – hence his opposition to euthanasia and his concern about the consequences of gender transitions in children. But restoring the status quo ante on capital punishment, abortion and gay marriage is hardly the mainstay of his policy vision. And he tells me that the restoration of Notre-Dame-de-Paris after the fire of 2019 will rank as one of Emmanuel Macron’s greatest achievements – less for religious reasons than as evidence of what the state can still accomplish in terms of grand projets that really matter, when it can summon the will to sweep aside bureaucratic obstacles. 

    Although the attention is now on what the French call les aspects régaliens of Retailleau’s current role – matters relating to the direct authority of the state – it was his economic agenda that mattered most to him in the Vendée. Retailleau is the antithesis of corporate man (he is proud of banning the word “management” from all departmental discourse), but he was nonetheless a big booster for business in the region. 

    Since the Revolution, the Vendée has got relatively little from the state, making it highly self-reliant. It therefore has some of the lowest claims for unemployment benefit of any department, at 6 percent compared to a 7.4 percent national average. The bulk of businesses comprise what Germans would call the Mittelstand – family-owned enterprises chafing under Parisian and Bruxellois regulations. 

    Intriguingly, Retailleau cites no one economic mentor like Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek – nor even that staunchest of French critics of Keynes, Jacques Rueff, who was also an adviser to Charles de Gaulle. Rather, he tells me, his economic inspirations are the Vendéen entrepreneurs who create real prosperity and jobs.

    His answer is shrewd, because it’s hard to be accused of being a “globalist” for extolling the virtues of local enterprises; but it says something about the French right that economic issues are now more internally divisive than cultural matters.

    If the state has interfered too much in the economy, Retailleau also believes it has been too laissez-faire in the realm of security. He poses to me a key theme of his: “What happens when the rule of law starts to facilitate crime – and people can see that it’s doing so? When the endless invocation of the rule of law becomes the enemy of honest people?”   

    Retailleau is referring to what he sees as the excessive solicitude of wide swaths of the French legal profession and judiciary for the rights of individuals accused of crimes at the expense of the collective rights of the law-abiding majority. A mere 7 percent of deportation orders for illegal migrants are implemented, and too often, in his view, that is because French judges rule that a procedural technicality has been breached.   

    This failure of the state on immigration and crime has a particular piquancy for Retailleau: his close friend, Fr Olivier Maire, was murdered in 2021, allegedly by a Rwandan asylum seeker with mental health issues. The suspect had been released on bail after being accused of setting fire to Nantes Cathedral and was being sheltered by Maire at the time. 

    Retailleau has therefore long wanted to re-empower the people by reforming article 11 of the Constitution on procedures allowing for a popular referendum on immigration – something which is not possible today. He also advocates cutting full medical aid for illegal immigrants, preferring to allow them just emergency care.

    ‘Islamists have a smooth narrative: to employ our freedoms to destroy our freedoms. It’s an all-of-society project’

    How did this shift in the ethos of the French judiciary and legal profession come about? Retailleau points the finger at the spirit of ’68 – and, in particular, the long-term effects of the Harangue de Baudot, the 1974 address delivered by the liberal Marseille magistrate Oswald Baudot urging new judges to side with “the weak against the strong,” which is now the sacred text for the left-wing Syndicat de la Magistrature, effectively the trade union for the Bench. 

    In Retailleau’s view, the price of this broad approach is also being paid by the 15,000 security personnel who were injured in France in 2023. Significantly, his first visit as interior minister was to the préfecture at La Courneuve in the Parisian banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis, where he met three hurt gendarmes: one of the perpetrators of these assaults, a juvenile, already had 33 convictions to his name. 

    Success or failure in crime or immigration policy can at least be measured in numbers. It’s much harder to mark progress in the struggle against political Islam – which Retailleau believes constitutes the greatest subversive threat to the Fifth Republic. “They are a formidable enemy, despite the relatively small numbers of their core cadres,” he says. “They have a smooth narrative: to employ our freedoms to destroy our freedoms. It’s an all-of-society project. For example, they aim to ‘Islamize’ knowledge. And their message is as follows: ‘We will colonize you and we will dominate you.’”

    One of the first steps he took on Islamism after assuming office was to declassify the Interior Ministry’s 74-page report on the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe: his purpose was to alert the public via an approach of “name and shame.” It’s little secret now that Retailleau struggled with the Elysee to maximise its revelations about individual Islamist institutions; partly because the President’s office was initially reluctant to be seen to be dancing to Retailleau’s tune. 

    Retailleau is thus the one making the political weather on this issue: the Defense Council met again recently under the chairmanship of Macron to discuss, in the light of this most comprehensive official analysis of frère-isme to date,  just how to enforce the landmark 2021 French separatism law. The old pre-war French right saw laïcité as the enemy of Catholic France; now, it sees it as a bulwark to protect the country. As ever, practical implementation is the key to Retailleau’s way of doing things.

    This included new ways of disbanding the Brotherhood’s endowments in France which promote hatred – by exposing and then freezing its assets. Also high on the priority list are the law’s demands for neutrality in the public space (no display of symbols of religion by officials at any level) and support for public servants, notably teachers, who face threats because of discharging their public duties – a particular concern after false allegations of “Islamophobia” from a pupil were weaponized against the schoolmaster Samuel Paty in 2020, leading to his decapitation by a Chechen refugee.

    Mélenchon has, unsurprisingly, accused him of cultivating an “Islamophobic climate,” but Retailleau retorts: “The concept of Islamophobia is one of the defining messages of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, but it’s a bogus concept to tie our hands intellectually and to prevent us from criticizing Islamism. And it suits the Islamo-Gauchiste project of Mélenchon to build up a communalist bloc based upon a sectarian appeal to anti-state grievances. It conflates all Muslims with Islamism, which is not true.”

    Retailleau is gratified by the favorable official responses which the Brotherhood report has enjoyed in Europe – such as in Sweden and Belgium. Over 20 years ago, French intelligence bestowed the soubriquet “Londonistan” upon the British capital – because it was seen as a “safehouse” for Islamists. Are we still Londonistan, I ask? Retailleau diplomatically sidesteps my question, but his omission of the UK as an enthusiast for this report speaks volumes. 

    Controversial as these issues are, they may (counterintuitively) form the basis of a potential future national consensus. Retailleau respects republicans from the right and the left who want to maintain traditional French laïcité against the New Left’s identity politics: reaching out across party divides, he particularly notes the rigor of the former Socialist prime minister and interior minister Manuel Valls.

    What, then, are his chances in the 2027 presidential election? The conventional wisdom of the Parisian media holds that Retailleau is too old-fashioned to win. How, when he is hovering at around 10 percent in the polls, can he hope to make it through to the second round?

    But the issues of the era – “order, order, order” is how he characterized his priorities when he took office – are cutting in his favor. He remains the most popular minister in a very unpopular government. More-over, despite its poll lead, the Rassemblement National is struggling to find a fully credible candidate, with Le Pen’s legal difficulties potentially preventing her standing and Jordan Bardella, her 29-year-old deputy, lacking frontline experience. 

    Retailleau quotes to me the well-known French political maxim of the author Maurice Druon, who served as Georges Pompidou’s culture minister: “There are two parties of the left in France, one of which is called the right!” There is an opening for a force that is genuinely right-wing, and which stays right-wing in government.

    The question now is how long Retailleau, who is very much his own strategist, remains in government. On the one hand, the Interior Ministry has been a perfect platform for his policy agenda – and the police and fire brigades, with whom he has developed a genuine rapport, would miss him. But if he stays too long, his unique brand risks cross-contamination with that of Emmanuel Macron. That is why, as leader of Les Républicains, Retailleau is increasingly distancing himself from the President on several issues (notably public subsidy for wind farms, which he wants to end). Such open free-thinking does not always endear him to the Élysée. 

    Sir Roger Scruton – one of Retailleau’s heroes – would certainly have appreciated the apparent paradox of his public life to date: the story of a ruggedly individualistic son of La France profonde vindicating the long-neglected rights of the national and cultural collective, at the heart of power.

  • Two looming crises for France

    Two looming crises for France

    Financial crises are often linked to a political crisis. On September 8, the French government will submit itself to a vote of confidence – which, by all accounts, it will lose. At issue is France’s parlous financial state, which a minority French government seeks to address. This week, French 30-year bond yields reached levels unseen since the Greek debt crisis in 2011, while the 10-year yield has surpassed present-day Greece’s. 

    France’s economy minister was quick to warn that France’s lamentable financial position could leave it facing an IMF bailout. This was intended to frighten MPs ahead of the vote rather than reflect reality. Greece was borrowing at near 30 percent prior to its debt crisis and had a budget deficit of 15 percent GDP, while France’s is 6 percent. Parallels with Greece in 2011 are exaggerated. Yet debt markets can turn at the blink of a logarithm.

    If François Bayrou’s government falls, an optimistic outcome is unlikely

    Were that to happen, the European Commission would never allow an outside body alone to take control of a Eurozone member. As with the Eurozone crisis a decade and a half ago, a new “Troika” would be appointed: IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission. Thirteen years ago I happened to be a member of that Troika called in to propose wholesale reform of the Greek public sector as the corollary for massive loans. Witnessing firsthand France’s leading role and unforgiving manner in “Task force for Greece,” it was clear how France’s attitude did not endear it to the Greeks. Like the French, they express their anger openly and carry historical grudges.

    Demonstrations and riots were not the only signs of Greek frustration and humiliation. “Task force for Greece” was nominally led by France and Germany. But the Greeks ran a very effective press campaign showing how German reparations owed to Athens from World War Two equated to Greek debt. Germany’s delegate to the task force had his German home firebombed (whenever I caught sight of him, he was always flanked by armed detectives). Germany discreetly left the “dirty work” to France.

    The French team was run by senior members of the French Finance Ministry. They set about the task with technocratic zeal. My brief was to lead on reforming the Greek university sector (having served a few years previously on a French prime ministerial commission for French university reform). The Troika austerity reforms were truly harsh. Fierce cuts to public sector wages and pensions, tax increases, privatization of state-owned enterprises and labor market deregulation resulted. My bit part was cut short by Greece’s refusal to implement any reforms not proposed and directed by itself. That became the norm. Greek passive (and not so passive) resistance to the Troika austerity reforms and the consequent political turmoil led to Greece directing the reforms itself.

    France’s prominent role in the Troika austerity measures should be a salutary lesson given its own financial predicament. With a 6 percent budget deficit and national debt to GDP ratio at 113 percent (predicted to rise to over 120 percent), France is already operating at twice the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact requirements. In November last year, the country was placed in excessive deficit procedure (EDP). As a result, under Article 126 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, France is required to provide six-monthly plans to the EU Commission on the corrective action, policies and deadlines it will apply to return to a 3 percent deficit by 2029, failing which astronomical fines could be imposed.

    There is little chance France can comply with the plan. A political crisis is likely on September 8. If François Bayrou’s government falls, an optimistic outcome is unlikely. Three fateful scenarios present themselves. President Macron could appoint France’s fifth prime minister in two years. But who would want the poisoned chalice of applying austerity measures with no possible majority in the present National Assembly? The President could call new elections as he did in 2024. But opinion polls suggest another minority government, albeit clearly dominated by the Rassemblement National. A third scenario would be for President Macron to resign. That would lead to a new RN French president, by no means committed to austerity measures.

    Each of these options will seriously frighten financial markets, not to mention the European Union. Given the way President Macron has antagonized so many European leaders over the last ten years, not to mention its role in the Greek debt crisis, France should be fearful she is not forced into the indelicate hands of the Commission. Which country’s officials would march into Paris? Heaven forfend that I be invited to take part in a Greek-led “Task force for France.”

  • Are the walls closing in on Emmanuel Macron?

    Are the walls closing in on Emmanuel Macron?

    French Prime Minister François Bayrou has recalled parliament for a confidence vote on September 9, betting he can outmaneuver a surging protest movement before it paralyzes France. The grassroots “Bloquons tout” campaign, echoing the gilets jaunes (“Yellow vests”) of 2018-19 and fueled by the hard left, plans to halt trains, buses, schools, taxis, refineries and ports. It is a general strike in all but name. Bayrou’s move aims to reassert control before chaos takes hold, but with the vote just two days before the open-ended strike begins, failure could topple his government and ignite a broader assault on President Macron’s authority. This morning, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) announced its plans to file a motion of destitution against Macron on September 23 if Bayrou falls, raising the stakes further.

    At the heart of this crisis is the economy. France’s debt has blown past 110 percent of GDP and the budget hole for 2025 stands at around $55 billion. Before the summer break, Bayrou proposed the deepest spending cuts in a generation, in a country where public spending accounts for nearly 60 percent of GDP. The unions are furious. The French are addicted to public spending and there’s a deep-seated mentality that the government owes people ever more. Mélenchon has turned the budget battle into a populist crusade against Macron’s “rich man’s government,” rallying the left and calling on supporters to shut the country down unless the cuts are scrapped. Gilets jaunes veterans have been readying to go back on the streets.

    Within minutes of the end of the press conference in Paris at which Bayrou announced the confidence vote, Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI and others declared they would not support the government. It also appeared yesterday evening that the Socialists were leaning against Bayrou, an immediate slap in the face for him and indirectly for Macron. This morning, Mélenchon escalated the pressure, vowing to push for Macron’s impeachment on September 23 if the vote fails, blaming the president for the crisis rather than Bayrou.

    Bayrou’s move was designed to seize the initiative before the country slides into chaos, but the arithmetic is now completely against him. To survive, he needs 289 votes. His Macron-centrist alliance can deliver barely 165. The consensus yesterday evening among journalists and leading Paris-based analysts is that the government has almost no chance of surviving. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was the only possible lifeline, and immediately after the announcement they made clear that they would not help Bayrou. A curt statement from the RN said it was “not inclined to support” the government. Bayrou and Macron’s gamble has almost certainly failed. It looks as though Macron and Bayrou completely miscalculated their move.

    Bayrou’s bold move was meant to buy Macron time. But it now threatens to blow up his presidency

    Le Pen no doubt very rapidly concluded that there is no need to save Macron’s prime minister to satisfy her own ambitions. Polls suggest she would emerge from early parliamentary elections as the largest force in the Assembly, even if personally she cannot run. Her party would still, however, fall short of a majority, making her refusal to back Bayrou cost-free and politically advantageous. If the government falls, Macron’s authority erodes further, and the RN’s narrative of “ordinary France versus Parisian elites” hardens. Mélenchon, meanwhile, is actively pushing for Bayrou’s downfall. LFI has seized control of the anti-austerity message and united Socialists, Greens and hard-left radicals behind him. For Mélenchon, an early election offers the chance to turn street anger into parliamentary power.

    Bayrou’s bold move was meant to buy Macron time. But it now threatens to blow up his presidency. If indeed Bayrou loses the confidence vote, Macron will face an impeachment process. He could try to appoint another sacrificial prime minister to preside over austerity and strikes, but no one credible will want the job. He could also call an early election, risking handing power to Mélenchon or leaving the country even more paralyzed. Or he could simply sit tight and let the blockades and market jitters spiral while he waits out the end of his term. If Bayrou falls, Macron may limp on in the Élysée, but the Fifth Republic itself risks a reckoning.

    As Bayrou battles parliament, the markets are signaling that France’s fiscal credibility hangs by a thread. Bond yields are creeping up. Somehow the ratings agencies haven’t yet let things slide. France has held on to its top-tier status long past the point of credibility. Perhaps this is only thanks to the assumption that the country, Europe’s second biggest economy, is too big to fail. But that indulgence has its limits. Come mid-September, when the numbers are on the table and the budget battle begins, a downgrade from the rating agencies seems inevitable. This will damage France and will certainly damage Europe. A downgrade would spike borrowing costs, potentially triggering a broader sell-off in European markets.

    For eight years, Macron’s political brand has rested on him outmaneuvering his opponents and keeping France just stable enough to get by. If the government loses this confidence vote, Macron’s authority breaks. He may cling on in the Élysée, but his presidency will be weakened beyond repair. France risks months of paralysis, street unrest and financial turmoil.

  • The folly of labeling air conditioning ‘far right’

    The folly of labeling air conditioning ‘far right’

    If you want to understand what lies behind the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party and its consistent – indeed, deepening – lead in the UK polls, I have a suggestion: French air conditioning.  

    To be more specific, if you want to understand the difficulty Reform’s opponents have in tackling it and why the party’s rise seems inexorable, the row going on at the moment in France over air conditioning offers a guide.

    When you insist that wanting cool air is ‘far right’, you are in the same sphere as those who say that protecting borders is pandering to the far right

    The New York Times reports how Marine Le Pen has said, with her typically incisive populist touch in the middle of a heat wave, that if she became president she would introduce a “major air-conditioning equipment plan” around France. She was backed by an opinion piece in Le Figaro, arguing that “making our fellow citizens sweat limits learning, reduces working hours and clogs up hospitals.”

    With its equally typical tone-deaf response, the French left is using the heat wave to campaign against air conditioning. Libération, the left’s house newspaper, called air con “an environmental aberration that must be overcome” because it uses up too much energy. 

    We’ve all heard the arguments many times. But more than that, Brits live in a country where air con is viewed by the authorities as something close to evil. In Florida, aircon is standard in 95 percent of new homes, as in Australia where 75 percent of homes have it. In Europe, long considered an aircon backwater by Americans, it is present in 30 percent of Italian homes and 40 percent of Spanish houses. And it is entirely normal in hospitals and care homes almost everywhere. Except, of course, in the UK – despite the appalling consequences of this. Last year 496 people died in care homes from heat, with a further 473 dying in hospitals. 

    But there is one argument against aircon I confess to not having come across before, until I read the New York Times report. A French talk show host introduced its debate on Le Pen’s proposals by asking, “Is air-conditioning a far-right thing?”

    If you want to take advantage of technology to be cool in your own home, you may, it seems, be far right.  Forget the fact that modern air-to-air pumps remove much of the green issues around cooling, for some supposed progressives, the very concept of cool air is seen by some as “far right.”

    Which brings us to Reform, and also to the protests currently taking place in Britain outside asylum hostels and hotels. Because if you insist that wanting cool air is “far right,” you are in the same sphere as those who say that protecting borders is pandering to the far right, and that worrying that your neighborhood is housing sex offenders and dangerous young men also shows you are far right. You are removing any real meaning from the term by using it to describe mainstream ideas held by tens of millions.

    And so the more you insist that such ideas are far right, the more you turn your defeat into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Screaming “far right” at people who want air conditioning won’t lead to anyone deciding they would rather sweat in the heat, just as labeling as far right anyone concerned over the influx of asylum seekers in their neighborhood won’t cause them to suddenly take stock and welcome them into the village. 

    Quite the opposite, in fact. Because the more you label politicians who support ideas which are widely popular as “far right,” and the more you attack those who agree with those politicians, the more likely you make it that those you attack will draw the logical conclusion: that those politicians are the ones on their side. And the more their support will grow.

    But more than that, the more likely you also make it that those who really are far right are able to present themselves as being smeared, because the term has become devoid of real meaning.

    How is it that such a basic lesson still needs to be learned?

  • Candace Owens: on the Macron lawsuit, anti-Semitism and Trump

    Candace Owens: on the Macron lawsuit, anti-Semitism and Trump

    Candace Owens joined Freddy Gray on the Americano show last Friday to discuss her recent lawsuit with the Macrons, Trump’s intervention, the Epstein Files and accusations of anti-Semitism.

    Here are some highlights from their conversation.

    Why did Macron and his wife sue Candace Owens?

    Freddy Gray: Candace is being sued or threatened with legal action by the Macrons, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, the President and First Lady of France. Because, Candace, you believe that Brigitte Macron is a man. Why do you think the Macrons are choosing to sue you?

    Candace Owens: Because they were trying to stop the story. I think it was an effective PR strategy. They had been suing and harassing the journalists that had initially brought this story forth to the French public for years, and then they lost their defamation suit against the two journalists, Amandine Roy, Natasha Roy. And that was pretty explosive news. So I think that they then filed suit against me and knowing that it would drive potentially the most media traffic to kind of say, “Oh no, but it still isn’t true at all. I know we lost this defamation case in our home turf, but we’re now going to try it in America,” just to kind of signal to the press that they’re not lying.

    FG: If you wanted the story to go away, this is not a very sensible strategy.

    CO: Yeah, actually if you look at the history of them as a couple, they haven’t been very good at PR… I do think it was poor advice. I think their advisors made the wrong decision, and we saw this even recently, the disaster of their PR when Brigitte was caught assaulting Macron on the plane. I mean, they lied, they forcefully lied, and then they essentially disappeared. The story the very next day from the French press. So they’re used to having that kind of power.

    FG: It’s that clip that makes me think you’re wrong, because I’m pretty sure she punches like a girl. I mean, men don’t hit like that.

    How did the theory start?

    CO: The Daily Mail ran a headline, and Emmanuel Macron was on camera saying it’s not true, and freaking out about these rumors and saying how hurtful they were. And I thought that was odd. I said, “What could possibly be going on in France that the President is having to lower himself to respond to such a ridiculous rumor?” And when I was reading this article, I was sort of interested in the dog that wasn’t barking, which is that the Daily Mail didn’t do a good job of instantly debunking it. Obviously, tons of photos could debunk this… It wasn’t a deep internet web conspiracy. It was actually French journalists that were on the left who loved Brigitte Macron and wanted to celebrate her by doing their due diligence and telling the story of Brigitte Macron. These were feminists… They felt that they were being threatened by the Élysée Palace. They were asking basic questions, asking for pictures and feeling like they had done something wrong. And they were essentially being told that the only person that could get them what they were looking for was a woman named Mimi Marchand, who at that moment was running communications for the Macron couple. Mimi Marchand has since been charged with forging documents… So it was very organic how this story took off in France. People just trying to figure out like, hey, can we get some photos of you? There’s 30 years of your life that seem to be missing?

    FG: It is definitely strange that nobody seems to be able to find a lot of evidence about Brigitte Macron’s upbringing. But what occurs to me – I’ve watched the series – I know the journalist you speak to, Xavier Poussard. He uses a facial recognition app to say that these images of Brigitte Macron’s brother must be her. There’s a sort of 80 percent likelihood. That strikes me as not necessarily reliable, and also the fact that, you know, siblings can look very, very alike. So the fact that Brigitte Macron’s brother looks a lot like her is not quite that surprising, is it?

    CO: No, it’s not surprising at all. And you’re correct. This is not a 100 percent technology… What’s more compelling is that this brother of hers is missing. At this point you would have to have a terrible relationship with your brother if you wouldn’t just come out before you had to sue anyone and say, “Hi, it’s me, I’m Jean Trogneux. I love my sister very much. I’m a private person, but this is getting ridiculous.” Or even her children, right? Her children could release photos of them being raised by her growing up. But I don’t care how angry you are at your parents, at a certain level, you’d go, “Guys, this is getting ridiculous. Here’s me and my mom.” We’re just like, hey, 30 years of your life is missing. It’s getting a little uncomfortable with how many people in your orbit have been arrested for pedophilia. You’ve lied – objective lies – you told the press at the beginning of your relationship. Don’t forget, when he first ran for president, the public told the media he was 17. Now we’ve got them down to 15. And the truth is that he was actually 14 when he was in that play where she says she saw him perform. But it’s not helping the media story that they lie. From the very beginning they presented it as if Brigitte was this really irresistible, sexy teacher, when when they actually got evidence of what she looked like when she was teaching Macron. She looks homely. It’s definitely not a very attractive teacher that was wearing skirts. It looks like a male that’s in the middle of a transition, to be honest with you.

    FG: I’ve listened to what Xavier and you said about that. And it does sound a bit like Xavier was sort of just angry at the media for the way that they manicured her image. But that’s what happens with powerful and important people. Their images are always being manicured, and often they manicure themselves.

    CO: Which is totally fine. It’s every piece of the Brigitte Macron story that has required so many lies. And yeah, they they did that, perhaps because they didn’t want people to realize that something really strange happened at that school. And it doesn’t help that when Emmanuel Macron entered office, they got to work trying to lower the age of consent to 13. It doesn’t help that Emmanuel Macron’s mother worked in her career assisting transgendered people in getting identities. The person that’s dressing Brigitte Macron that works with LVMH and Louis Vuitton specializes in androgynous dressing, trans people and of getting models that are trans. There’s so many other elements that are just peculiar. I want people to also know that before we published the first episode, we were in touch with Brigitte’s team. We said, “Look, we’re not interested in spreading conspiracies. Answer these basic questions. Could you produce some photos of your living for 30 years? Did you live as Jean-Michel? Have you ever lived as a person named Veronique?” And they forcefully declined to answer any of those questions.

    French pedophilia?

    FG: I think you’re sort of insinuating that the real scandal behind this is a kind of pedophilic elite in France.

    CO: I believe that’s been a problem that’s happened in Paris for a very long time.

    Owens mentioned Sigmund Freud, Richard Duhamel, Richard Trumbull, Eric Moretti and André Gide as examples of French pedophilia.

    FG: Well, like me, you’re a Catholic. You’re a recent convert to Catholicism. And I know from my French Catholic family that there is this obsessive hatred in France of the French government and the secular French government and the French left, and this assumption that they are satanic somehow or Satanic driven. Is that something you think you’ve latched on to?

    CO: Well, no, I was not aware of French politics. I got into this quite organically. I don’t follow French politics. I don’t speak French… The idea that there are is an orbit of people who could commit crimes and then have the audacity to sue people for writing books or sue people that are talking about it. It offends me. It offends my senses as a Christian and as a mother. And I felt that it was very important for the world to kind of look and go, what’s going on in France? … It definitely wasn’t driven by some idea of a satanic panic happening in France.

    Trump tells Candace to stop saying Brigitte is a man

    FG: The Donald Trump story. He leant on you himself to stop talking about the Brigitte Macron story.

    CO: Yeah. Back in February, Macron was in the White House ostensibly to discuss Russia and Ukraine. I was contacted by the White House and told that he took Trump to the side and wanted me to stop talking about Brigitte. And the person who relayed this to me before Trump called me the next day, said that it was a contingency on the Ukraine-Russia conversation, which is ridiculous. When Trump called me the next day. He basically said he was very surprised. But Macron took him aside and asked if he could get me to stop talking about Brigitte. I said to him that I would not speak about Brigitte for a few months while he was looking for a signature on some document pertaining to the EU. But then certainly, of course, I would speak about it months later, which is exactly what I did.

    The Candace-Trump fallout

    FG: You were a keen supporter. He was a fan of you. And then it seems you’ve completely fallen out and largely over Gaza. Am I correct in saying that?

    CO: You are correct in saying that. What’s happening in Gaza, to me is just a moment of are you a human? Are you not a human? And also the Epstein fumble as well – the gaslighting of the Epstein case. To effectively gaslight your supporters and say, why? Why are we still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? What do you mean, why aren’t we still talking about Jeffrey Epstein if there’s been a blackmail ring, and politicians are supporting things because they have been blackmailed. I’ve been very disappointed in him.

    FG: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that he’s in the files that he sent this card, this bawdy card, to Jeffrey at birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein.

    CO: I don’t buy the birthday card because Trump immediately came out and said, this is not true and sued. In May when Pam Bondi sat down for a meeting and said, you’re actually in these files, he never debunked that. Do I believe that Donald Trump was on Epstein Island? No. Do we know that he parted with Epstein in his youth? Yes, we know that… The bigger point is that he he could have come to his supporters and said, “look, I’m very surprised to hear this. I have nothing to do with anything that happened on that island.” He could have gotten ahead of it. When you choose to gaslight the public, you have become exactly what you knew that we hated when we sent you into DC.

    Do you ever think you’re a conspiracy theorist, Candace?

    FG: Do you ever feel that you’ve maybe taken crazy pills and you’ve become a conspiracy theorist?

    CO: Absolutely not. The Macron story is one of the most fascinating stories ever. And in a sane world, I would be given a Pulitzer.

    Owens responds to accusations of being anti-Semitic

    FG: There’s a lot of suspicion of you that you have gone from that criticism of Israel into full-on Jew-hatred. How do you respond to that allegation of anti-Semitism?

    CO: It’s nonsense to say that I have hatred for Jews. I worked for Prager University. It is a literal Zionist enterprise that is run by an IDF intelligence. I then worked for the Daily Wire, which is run by Ben Shapiro. Prior to that, I worked in private equity for two Jews in New York for four years. And I almost married a Jew, actually, while I was in New York… I’m the same girl who stood up to Black Lives Matter. I don’t care about your identity. I know when people are calling people racist because they are trying to stop the conversation. They said, “You’re a self-hating black.” I know exactly what’s happening when you start using your identity as a shield, and it just doesn’t work with me. What’s happening in Gaza is atrocious.

    FG: Well, you married a self-hating Brit instead. Not self-hating, sorry. I meant to say you married a Brit. Let me say that again. I don’t know whether your husband’s self-hating. I’m self-hating.

  • The French are turning against the EU

    The French are turning against the EU

    When Donald Trump won a second term in the White House last November the response in Europe was one of barely disguised horror. “The European Union must stand close together and act in a united manner,” declared Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

    Emmanuel Macron posted a message on X: “The question we, as Europeans, must ask ourselves is, are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?” The president of France got his answer on Sunday evening. No. The trade deal agreed between Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, and Donald Trump has not gone down well in much of Europe.

    Scholz’s successor, Friedrich Merz forecast that Germany’s economy would suffer “significant” damage because of the deal. EU exports will have a tariff of 15 percent, which is superior to the customs duties before Trump’s re-election, but much lower than his threatened 30 percent tariff. Additionally, von der Leyen has promised the bloc will purchase energy worth $750 billion from the United States and make $600 billion in additional investments. According to Hungary’s Viktor Orban: “This is not an agreement… Donald Trump ate von der Leyen for breakfast.”

    The most strident criticism of the deal came from France, where in a rare display of unity the terms of the agreement were savaged across the political spectrum.

    Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said that “it is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to assert their values and defend their interests, resigns itself to submission.”

    Trade minister Laurent Saint-Martin described the deal as unbalanced and said the government should not accept “what happened yesterday because that would be accepting that Europe is not an economic power.”

    It was telling that Saint-Martin said “Europe” and not “France.” For centrists like Saint-Martin – he was one of the first to join Macron’s fledging En Marcheparty in 2016 – France and the EU are indistinguishable.

    Macron’s predecessor (and mentor), Francois Hollande once accused him of “believing in nothing and having no conviction.” That is not true. Macron has one unshakeable conviction, and that is the EU.

    It is why he won’t let Brexit go, taking every opportunity to savage Britain’s decision to leave the bloc. Twice during his recent state visit he went on the attack. Britons were “sold a lie” over Brexit he said at one point, adding on another occasion that the country “was stronger when part of the EU.”

    As yet there has been no response the Elysee to von der Leyen’s trade deal. Perhaps Macron is still working out how best to spin the fact that Britain’s tariff rate with the USA is 10 percent.

    Marine Le Pen lost little time in pointing this out, posting on X that the EU “has obtained worse conditions than the United Kingdom.” The leader of the National Rally described the deal as “a political, economic and moral fiasco” and said that that “this form of globalization, which denies and destroys sovereignty, has been outdated for many years.”

    The majority of the French agree with her. In an interview with the BBC in 2018, Macron admitted that if given the choice his people would probably follow Britain out of the EU. This is one reason why he has been so determined to make life difficult for post-Brexit Britain: pour encourager les autres.

    Macron’s strategy has been partially successful. A poll last year revealed that 62 percent of the French are opposed to Frexit. The bad news for the president is that 69 percent of them have a bad opinion of the EU.

    The poll was conducted a month before the European elections, which resulted in a resounding victory for Le Pen’s Eurosceptic party and a humiliating defeat for Macron’s Europhile movement.

    When Le Pen reached the second round of the 2017 presidential election it was with a promise to quit the EU. Two years later she abandoned that position and vowed to reform the bloc from within. Her party won’t return to Frexit, but it will increase its Euroskepticism between now and the 2027 election. The same goes for the hard-left’s Jean-Luc Melenchon, who loathes Brussels as much as Le Pen. Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the center-right Republicans, is also a long-standing critic of the EU’s ambition and voted against the EU Constitution in France’s 2005 referendum. That result, he said in a 2020 interview, along with Brexit, “have shown one and the same thing: Europeans do not want a federal Europe.”

    Across France, enmity towards the EU has strengthened in the last year. The Mercosur trade deal agreed with South America in December is widely unpopular and France’s failure to control its borders is blamed on Brussels.

    The French are demoralized and angrier than ever with their ruling elite. A citizens’ collective called “Bloquons tout!” (Block everything) is using social media to mobilize people for a day of protest on September 10. “Boycott, disobedience, and solidarity” is their rallying cry and they are urging people to take to the streets across France.

    Will it achieve anything? Probably not. After all, what’s the point of protesting in Paris when all the big decisions about France’s future are made in Brussels.