The Western media is up in arms over the results of the recent French presidential run-off elections. Extremist Jean-Marie LePen defeated socialist candidate and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the Presidential primary, earning the “right” to face incumbent President Jacques Chirac in elections on May 5th.

While it is a foregone conclusion that Chirac will triumph, especially now that his former political opponent Jospin is throwing his support behind him, LePen has seized the moment to foment his own revolutionary views. LePen has targeted immigrants. The media also factors in LePen’s “anti-semitic” views — the former paratrooper has called gas chambers “a detail of WW II.”

There are significant issues at play with that last statement. First, let’s consider LePen’s campaign slogan: “French first”. From this swells the anti-immigrant rhetoric, LePen’s program, for instance of increasing welfare for white French citizens and of sending refugees that are in “transit” to Britain.

Sounds like nationalism, granted ultra-nationalism. Yet nothing that has not been seen elsewhere. The bogeyman of Nazism is everywhere in Europe. In Austria — birthplace of Hitler — an extreme right-winger was elected to lead the country. In the Czech republic — home to some of the most intense pogroms of history, the first country to fall to Hitler, a publisher is in court arguing for the right to publish Mein Kampf. Ukraine, a country torn between its slavic heritage and a foothold in in the old Austro-Hungarian empire, by extension, a part of western Eutrope, is experiencing an explosion of vandalism directed against synagogues and growth in public anti-Jewish sentiment. Even placid and proper Sweden has seen reaction against immigrants of a different dermal pigmentation. In short, this is not a French phenomenon.

Small wonder. For what is at stake is a European issue. LePen is against the European Union — as are many Europeans. The democratic system of majority decision in referenda, many of them close, means that there still are tens of millions perhaps even well over a hundred million Europeans against the EU. That is a formidable number, an aquifer for people like LePen to tap into.

The other issue is, however, almost uniquely French. Leaving earlier French history aside, (although there is much there to support the following points), just by looking at the WW II legacy. Because of British (and American) dithering, France fell with ridiculous ease to Hitler’s troops, the vaunted Maginot line proved about as useful in keeping the Huns out as the Pyrenees are posing an obstacle to today’s invaders, African immigrants. France was occupied for a full four years, and that period saw great polarization. The Vichy régime versus the Resistance. Collaborators versus freedom fighters. Last week we mentioned in this space how DeGaulle used the resistance card to great political gain. Yet the abhorred Marshall Pétain sincerely believed that his Vichy régime, effectively contolled by Berlin, would provide the French with a chance to regroup and wrest back freedom.

The collaboration issue is especially painful in France, and is milked by the left as much as possible. The circus in the mid 80’s around the arrest and trial of the Butcher of Lyons, Klaus Barbie focussed on precisely those painful wounds. Barbie was a war criminal, no doubt, but the left and Jewish groups snatched the chance to trot out the duplicity of many Frenchmen during the war.

Historian Julian Jackson, in a book published last year titled France: The Dark Years 1940–1944, provides perhaps the definitive history of the period by combining views of occupation, collaboration, and resistance. Jackson emphatically makes the point that one must ignore the traditional dichotomy between “collaboration” and “resistance”. One must accept, in view of all historical evidence, that the ideological frontiers between Vichy and the Resistance were often blurred. A social history, the book should be read by apologists for either side. Presciently, Jackson notes that LePen’s Front national has provided a home to former Pétainists and collaborationists. It is no secret that LePen loathes DeGaulle, indulges Pétain, and most obviously, openly expresses his dislike for Jews. Thus leaving him wide open to the broadsides of the western media, that is ever so careful not to alienate the people that they ignored during WW II. Yet negationism is alive and well in the France of today, a legacy if you will, of the internecine battles that generations have waged on French soil.

The results of the French presidential run-off election were thus not so much shocking, for those aware of history, but telling. Mainstream leaders are picking up the signals expressed by millions. The parallells with Hitler’s ascendancy to power are there, but fortunately, in the case of LePen, highly unlikely.

Critical to an understanding of the issues at play throughout Europe is the awareness that there is an inherent conflict between nationalism and the push for a borderless Europe — the European Union. This leaves the ground fertile for extremists like Jean-Marie LePen, and should serve as a clarion wake-up call for vacillating politicians elsewhere.

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