Five books to understand France in the face of decisive elections | Babelia

For the first time in the history of France, the extreme right starts as a favorite in a legislative election and has options to democratically reach the Government. Marine Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, leads the polls for the first round this Sunday. After the second round, on July 7, the first group could form in the National Assembly, according to the projections of the demographic institutes. It is the result of a fundamental change in the country that writers such as Florence Aubenas, Nicolas Mathieu and Michel Houellebecq have been describing for years in their chronicles and novels. Authors such as the economist Thomas Piketty or, more than 70 years ago, the Spanish Manuel Chaves Nogales have also shed light.

It is not Michel Houellebecq’s best novel and it cannot be said, like others, that it is prophetic. But Annihilation It is the best chronicle of Macronist technocracy from the inside. Has it all. Daily life, and the intimate one, in the corridors of the Ministry of Education and Finance, with a minister, Bruno Juge (judge, in French), inspired by the royal minister, Bruno Le Maire (mayor, in French). A protagonist, advisor to Minister Juge, who “had voted for the president’s party, or for the president himself, in all the elections, seemed to him ‘the only reasonable option’, according to the time-honored expression.” His relatives in the countryside “who voted for Marine [Le Pen]obviously”. A National Rally on the doorstep of the Elysée, because “the gap between the ruling classes and the population had reached an unprecedented level in small provincial towns, the social movements that had taken place in recent years were, in his opinion, only a timid beginning; racial hatred, on the other hand, was reaching levels unprecedented in Europe”. The novel speculates that Emmanuel Macron, on the verge of leaving office, is plotting to facilitate the arrival of the RN to power, because “it would cause catastrophes, the economic and social collapse would be immediate, and the people would soon demand its return”. The RN in power, the antidote to the RN in power? The idea is circulating now too: any resemblance to reality is fortuitous.

No sociological study or reportage has so realistically portrayed postindustrial France and the white working class as Nicolas Mathieu in Their children after them, awarded in 2018 with the Goncourt prize. The setting is a steel valley near the German border; the time, the nineties; the protagonists, three young people: a worker, a provincial bourgeoisie and a small Arab trafficker. This was, after the Second World War, the industrial engine of France and Europe; A united Europe was built on the steel industry and mines of these regions on both sides of the border; Today, although geographically it is still in the center, it is a peripheral area where many have the feeling of being abandoned by the hand of God (or the State). It is the France of the ruined factories and the impoverished working class; the one that voted communist and socialist, and today sees Le Pen’s RN as the party that defends the people against those at the top. The party, in any case, that has managed to connect with the fatigue of those who see how “life was woven almost in spite of them, day after day, in this lost hole that everyone had wanted to abandon, an existence similar to that of their parents, a slow curse.”

It is the world of precarious jobs, that of hypermarkets, that of the France of roundabouts and industrial zones, that of the daily humiliations of those below, a world that Annie Ernaux has also accurately portrayed in her books. To prepare this report, published under the title Ouistreham PierFlorence Aubenas worked as a cleaning lady on the Normandy coast. She gives an inside look at the France of the working poor, in a book that illuminates the dark areas of French malaise and the poetry of ugly France. A visit to the supermarket is a journey to a lost paradise: “We look at everything. We touch everything. We comment on everything. From time to time, there are customers who greet each other, with smiles and questions about the family, as if in the town square on a fair day,” she writes. “Behind each aisle, Philippe has his childhood memories. When he was little, the comics aisle was in the place of cleaning products. Here he bought his first backpack, his first LP, his first book, and so on. after shave… ”Yes, there is poetry in hypermarkets, and there is a great novel of contemporary France in the whole of Aubenas’ work, from his reports on the pandemic or his chronicles of events in the tradition of grand reportage French (Albert London, Joseph Kessel), and at the level of the best literature written today.

You have to read the economist Thomas Piketty to understand the origins of income and wealth inequalities in our capitalist world. You have to read him because he is one of the few French intellectuals of our time who has truly managed to influence public debate: he put inequality on the table after the 2008 crisis. But you also have to read him because reading him means understanding something fundamental of France, one of the most redistributive developed countries. And in this country, egalitarianism dominates the social and political debate in France, and statism—whether it is called socialism, Colbertism or Gaullism—is adhered to by all parties, from the extreme right to the extreme left, even the so-called liberal center. . In Capital and ideology, the most political among his books translated into Spanish, develops the idea of ​​a “Brahmin left”, named after the Hindu priestly caste, which has abandoned the working classes and left them at the mercy of populist and anti-government discourses. immigration like Le Pen’s. The economist’s thesis: the high abstention among the popular classes denies that they feel seduced by the extreme right; rather, he demonstrates that “these voters are not satisfied with the options proposed to them.” A committed intellectual, Piketty is one of the promoters in these elections of the leftist alliance baptized as the New Popular Front: the most recent “option” to win back lost voters.

No, France is not on the brink of civil war, and no, France is not on the brink of fascism. It is also not true that our twenties are 1940 (nor 1938, nor 1936). And yet, for years, there has been a reference that returns again and again to each of the recent crises in France, be it the covid or, now, the dissolution of the National Assembly and the possible coming to power of a party nationalist and populist. The book is The strange defeat, by historian Marc Bloch, an implacable x-ray of the collapse of France in 1940 before the invasion of Germany and, above all, the bankruptcy of its elites and their responsibility in the debacle. Every debacle in France is a 1940 revisited. And it is possible that, if the work of journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales became known in France, The agony of France It would become another bedside book to understand this key year in the national conscience. Chaves Nogales witnessed the collapse of 1940. He saw the two Frances, that of the Enlightenment and human rights, and the other, and how the latter prevailed. “By furiously devoting themselves to the demolition of the myth of democracy,” he writes, “the French nationalists have achieved nothing but the demolition of France, its capitulation.” And he concludes: “The fall of France is not, however, the regrettable drama of a cowardly people who did not want to fight. No. France, during the months of war, which have been its agony, fights, not against the external enemy, but with itself. ”There is no war today, no capitulation, there is no need to dramatize more than necessary; There is, for now, only a functioning democracy and a system under tension, but an echo resonates from the pages of Chaves Nogales: a country in conflict with itself. France against France, also in 2024.

You can follow Babelia in Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.