Lhe crisis that France is experiencing today reveals something unprecedented in its history: the disconnection between social debate, social tensions and political life. The societal debate, which for several years has been on the front pages of magazines and television programs, which fuels Twitter accounts and opinion polls, which nourishes literature and pits intellectuals, researchers and artists against each other, concerns issues of identity: race, gender, religion and culture.
The violence of the public debate on immigration, Islam and wokism is all the stronger because we are talking, in fact, of the same thing: everyone sees themselves as an oppressed and threatened minority, of the male white to racialized. Right-wing literature often depicts this fantasized civil war as the inevitable horizon of the tensions that have shaken society, from Camp of the Saintsby Jean Raspail (Robert Laffont, 1973), until Submission, of Houellebecq (Flammarion, 2015). The suburban riots of 2005 and the terrorist attacks are then presented as the syndromes of this civil war with the appearance of an apocalypse.
One would expect the political field, like the social field, to reflect these new identity divisions. However, it is nothing, or almost. Since the beginning of this century, no identity demonstration, either against immigration, Islam or wokism, or in defense of migrants, Islam or cancel culture, has brought together more than a few thousand, or even only a few hundred demonstrators, except La Manif pour tous in its infancy, when it was not yet an identity movement. Social revolt neither overlaps nor takes up identity protest. On the other hand, since 1995, millions of people have regularly taken to the streets to protest against the social crisis.
An obvious corollary
In the political field, the theme of identity, launched by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1980s, had ended up being taken up little by little on a political arc that goes from the far right to the center left. But, unlike in the United States, the debate over identity and values has never defined two clear-cut political camps, and religion only plays a role in it by default. In fact, there is a relative consensus on values: the defense of secularism is now common to all the parties, which are distinguished on this only by their dose of criticism of Islam (but have ceased to mention a Christian France).
You have 60.87% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.