Is Macron pushing France toward a ‘strange defeat’?

Before the European parliamentary election and turmoil that followed, French President Emmanuel Macron used the figure of the historian and resister Marc Bloch to deliver an urgent warning about dangers to European unity.

Bloch, born in 1886, was a medieval historian who fought for France in the First World War at the battles of the Marne and the Somme. His family, of Jewish heritage, had left Alsace when it was annexed by Germany in 1871. As a historian in the 1930s, he was the co-founder of the celebrated Annales school, which championed social history. He was fiercely committed to the values of the French republic, and when the Second World War came, Bloch fought for France both in uniform then in resistance.

Amid war, the growing influence of far-right parties, and a weary popular engagement with liberal politics, President Macron has warned that the same shortsightedness and complacency which Bloch described in his chronicle of the fall of France, Strange Defeat, could bring an end to the Europe we know today. Eighty years after Bloch’s tragic death at the hands of Nazi occupiers, Macron’s invocation of his memory is striking.

While dangers to Europe loom, however, the immediate danger is of Macron’s making: this strange dissolution.

Macron has turned to Bloch in his speeches several times during his presidency. In May 2023, visiting the prison in which both Bloch and resistance leader Jean Moulin were held before their deaths, Macron issued a reminder of how Bloch had described the Republic – up to his last breath – as necessary, vital and just.

There he also emphasised Bloch’s reading of French history, as he had previously in 2020, in 2017, and in 2016. That story connected the Coronation of Reims with the Fête de la Fédération – the triumphs of both France’s monarchical past and its republican future – in a story of French values that could overcome ideological division.

Yet, that section of Bloch’s Strange Defeat, is perhaps worth rereading. In the very next line, Bloch lauds “the real Popular Front of the masses” as the embodiment of this national story. As the language of history has suffused the rapidly accelerating political campaign, Macron has struggled to maintain this vision of republican values over political factionalism.

New Popular Front

On the left, posters featuring the face of former Prime Minister Léon Blum announced the creation of the New Popular Front, retooling the language of the united left which faced down fascism in the 1930s. “History demands unity” became the rallying cry for a swiftly agreed alliance, but as Blum’s Popular Front demonstrated, the road to that unity meant overcoming both ideological and, inevitably, political division in service of a greater cause.

In a public press conference, Macron dismissed this movement, claiming that Léon Blum would be “turning in his grave.” Certainly, the divisive head of France Unbowed (La France Insoumise), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, feels like a ghost at the feast (and in a historic reversal, it is the far-left accused of antisemitism). Yet, Macron’s vilification of the left would seem to echo what Bloch wrote in Strange Defeat:

“It would be difficult to exaggerate the sense of shock felt by the comfortable classes, and even by men who had a reputation for liberal mindedness, at the coming of the Popular Front in 1936.”

On the campaign trail in 2024, Macron appears to be tacking to the right, trying to divide conservative voters by adopting the far right’s language on immigration, while attacking the left.

For Bloch, there was in the original Popular Front a “striving of the masses to make a more just world, a touching eagerness and sincerity which ought not to have been without effect on any man animated by ordinary human feelings.” Shifting the language of this legislative campaign from fear and anger toward hope and understanding would help learn the lessons from Bloch’s warning about elite complacency, and return to the values Macron celebrates in Bloch’s text.

Strange defeat of the Republican Front?

Macron’s call for a “Republican front” in these upcoming legislative elections looks to have been terminally weakened by his own hand, and continues to be so during this snap election campaign.

Two decades ago, far-right rabble-rouser Jean-Marie Le Pen made the presidential runoff. Tainted by accusations of Holocaust denial and dogged by a history of torture in the Algerian War, Le Pen was a political monster on whom history hung heavy and against which the Republic could mobilise.

Now it’s his daughter who is leading the far right’s bid for power, having expelled her father and sought to detoxify the party’s image, if not its values. Once known as the National Front, she rebranded it the National Rally, trying to wave away its associations with wartime collaboration under the Vichy government and the political inheritance of post-Fascism.

That history matters as much as reading Bloch’s account of 1940, and the far-right remains on the wrong side of it. While the National Rally’s candidate for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, may be more at home on TikTok than the field of history, and despite trying to launder their pro-Kremlin image, the associations remain stark while war rages in Europe.

Re-reading Strange Defeat might remind the president of those French elites in the Third Republic who preferred the order of German militarism to the messy popular democracy of Léon Blum’s short-lived government. As Bloch warned of military tensions in 1930s Europe:

“If the terrible storm broke again, there was grave danger that the whole of European civilisation might well suffer irremediable shipwreck.”

One persistent theory has been that Macron seeks to use the dissolution to expose the far right to power and tarnish them with failure before the 2027 Presidential elections. This, too, seems lifted directly from the pages of Strange Defeat:

“They were ready to find consolation in the thought that beneath the ruins of France a shameful regime might be crushed to death, and that if they yielded it was to a punishment meted out by Destiny to a guilty nation.”

The French president has often reached for his favourite historical quotes in his speeches in an effort to demonstrate his education and his statesmanship. Yet when Macron cited Bloch to warn of the complacency of European elites, he would have been well to look closer to home. When he spoke of Bloch’s reading of French history, of a national greatness which transcended political division, he would do well to read its context. The danger now is that Macron’s strange dissolution becomes a historic defeat for France.

This first article appeared in 'The Conversation' on 26 June 2024