“The astonishing presence of the RN at the demonstration against anti-Semitism is the sign of a profound restructuring of the political game”

2023-11-12 07:00:23

Grégoire Kauffmann, specialist in the 19th and 20th centuries and the radical rights, teaches at Sciences Po Paris. The historian notably published Edward Drumont (Perrin, 2008) and The New FN. The old clothes of populism (Threshold, 2016). He has just devoted a book to the 1980s and the hostage affair in Lebanon – one of the hostages being his father, the journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann – which combines his teenage memories with the portrait of the time (Pick up, Flammarion, 400 pages, €22.90).

How do you, as a historian, analyze the resurgence of anti-Semitism observed in France since the Hamas attack?

This sudden outbreak is not a surprise as Middle Eastern crises always have repercussions in France. We saw it during the Six-Day War, in 1967, or during the second Intifada, at the beginning of the 2000s: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hysterized the political debate – and fueled intellectual controversies. After the Six-Day War and Charles de Gaulle’s declaration that the Jewish people were “confident and dominant”, the philosopher Raymond Aron wrote a book, De Gaulle, Israel and the Jewss [Plon, 1968 ; Les Belles Lettres, 2020], in which he considered that these remarks “solemnly authorized a new anti-Semitism”. In 2002, after the second Intifada, the historian of ideas Pierre-André Taguieff coined a neologism, the “new Judeophobia”, to characterize the anti-Semitism of the Arab-Muslim world.

Read our decryption: Article reserved for our subscribers Among French Jews, fear and the feeling of great isolation: “There are not many people to support us”

Has the conflict between Israel and Hamas disrupted the political landscape?

The incredible novelty is of course the fact that the National Rally [RN] was invited to join, on Sunday, November 12, the great Republican family to march against anti-Semitism at the call of the presidents of the National Assembly and the Senate [Le 7 novembre, Yaël Braun-Pivet et Gérard Larcher ont appelé à une marche civique contre l’antisémitisme, « unissant tous ceux qui se reconnaissent dans les valeurs de la République ». Marine Le Pen a invité dès le lendemain, sur RTL, tous les adhérents et les électeurs du RN à se joindre à cette marche]. The journey accomplished since the desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras in 1990 is simply dizzying: the huge demonstration which followed the desecration was a parade against the National Front [FN] and claimed to be such – it was also the first time, since 1945, that a current President of the Republic, François Mitterrand, joined a procession.

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