by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2022 Paul Ben-Itzak
“Aller vous balader a St. Denis, aller vous balader a Trappes, aller vous balader a Roubaix, et vous voir bien qu’on n’est pas en Amélie Poulain.”
— Jordan Bardella, president, “Rassemblement Nationale,” Wednesday, February 16, France Inter public radio
If there was any doubt that despite a name change which promises the inverse, the political DNA of the National Front party of French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is still oriented by a fundamental, distorted, racialist optic based on the mythical idea that being really French means being white, and which seems to see anyone who isn’t white as a threat to “replace” the population that is (a false construct which has its echoes in the United States; I am not trying to throw stones here), it was dispelled this morning when National Front — er, excuses-moi, “Rassemblement Nationale” — president Jordan Bardella, pressed to say if he subscribed to the ‘grand replacement’ theory advanced by Right-Wing rival Eric Zemmour and even mainstream Republican candidate Valerie Pecresse told his interlocutors on middle-brow Radio France chain France Inter: “Go take a stroll in St.-Denis, go take a stroll in Trappes, go take a stroll in Roubaix, and it’s obvious that you’re not in the land of Amelie Poulain.”
Oh, que si!
The above was not the rebuke of morning hosts Nicholas Demorand and Leah Salame, who once again let stand, without challenge, the false war-of-civilization, flood-of-immigrants premises of an extreme right-wing party, failing to meet the minimum standards of responsible journalism. Of course I know it’s too much to expect of these radio personalities to offer a refutation which demands a bit of statistical research and authority (or simply sitting in at or downloading College de France professor Francois Heran’s free February 28, 2020 course on the subject), e.g. the false idea that France is being submerged by a tidal wave of immigrants. But in the case of Bardella’s cinematic-allusionary attempt at white-washing, anyone who’s seen “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain” — and everyone in France has seen Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film at least twice (mezigue, four) — would recognize that the analogy does not hold up. Right off the top, without even re-viewing the movie (known in the U.S. as simply “Amélie”) I can think of at least two principal and two supporting characters who, by the evidence (because the director doesn’t separate the characters out by their race; to him they are all eminently Parisian), are of Maghrebian or otherwise non-white origins: The Montmartre grocery store owner, his slow but earnest assistant (Jamel Debbouze), the middle-aged man moved to tears and reconciliation with his son after the heroine discovers his childhood treasure box behind a wall in her Montmartre apartment, and Ticky Holdago’s photo-booth character whose photograph comes to life in quadruple at Amélie’s bedside as she debates her own resistance to breaking out of her protective shell and not simply rescuing others from their malheurs. All of these characters — and I’m probably forgetting some — are integral to the story, to the heroine’s trajectory and ultimate victory over her own fears.
And if we add another part of the construct that’s often included by the “Grand Replacement” conspiracy theorists (because, to be fair, Bardella did not make this precision) — that the implicitly threatened population isn’t just whites but the European Christian heritage, voire civilization — we’d have to include Audrey Tatou’s Jewish co-star Mathieu Kassovitz. (Whose 1995 “La Haine,” centered around three Black, Maghrebian, and probably Jewish young male protagonists in a St.-Denis-like Parisian suburb — all eminently French — is an apt response to the kind of Xenophobia represented by Zemmour and the National Front.)
As with Zemmour, my problem isn’t so much with the politician himself — who, whether I like it or not, represents a significant train of thought in French (as American) society, and the views of a population it would be unfair to globally condemn as ‘racist’ or even ‘xenophobic’ — as with the presumed journalists, who by once again not challenging the premises of these racialist constructs meant to win votes by catering to the lowest fears of a population suffering legitimate pains by scape-goating the Other lends them (even invests them with) a veneer of social respectability, allowing and enabling their enunciators not only to pass racialist ideologies, but to erect the false construct of society (and threats to society) which makes it possible for those voters to believe them — and socially respectable to vote for them.
And of course, beyond questioning his erroneous allusion to the film’s racial make-up the racialist premise underlying Bardella’s observation should also have been challenged, as follows (for example):
“You mean because the populations of those cities isn’t white?”
Followed by:
“What’s wrong with that?”
And:
“So, do you have a problem with French Blacks and Arabs?”
Journalists are here for this, to cut through the dissimulations — to probe for the roots behind vague insinuations.
To confront powerful people with what they’re actually saying, and make them define the meaning of their words — and the intentions behind them.
The consequences of their failure to do so are not anodyne.
If Salame and Demorand had forced the president of a national party which polls predict will get 46 percent of the vote in the April election — an election which will help determine the future for 67 million French citizens if its candidate faces president Emmanuel Macron in a final run-off — to reveal the racialist base and false ‘civilizational’ equations underlying that party’s professed sentiments (or if you prefer, arguments) on immigration, a healthy percentage of good,* honest*, and hardworking people who are poised to vote for this party *not because they are racists* but because they are hurting or feel threatened in their identity (or are simply, and justly, proud of traditional French values and the country’s history and national identity) would have been forced to face the fact that they would be voting for, and in a way endorsing, a certain form of racism, of white supremacy.
There’s a lot of bandying about of citations from Camus these days; he’s just about replaced the fables of Lafontaine (or the proverbs on which Amélie’s co-worker tests Kassovitz before giving him Amélie’s address), dictum- and pearls of wisdom-wise. M. Demorand and Mme Salame would have done well to recall the late playwright, novelist, philosopher, and journalist‘s one about the danger of not naming things.
PS, February 17: Apparently, France Inter’s ‘confreres’ on its pseudo-highbrow sister chain, France Culture, don’t listen to the former that much. On Thursday’s FC morning program — according to the host of which Israel can do no wrong and its abuse and killings of innocent Palestinians is invisible, en passant — political analyst Stephane Robert postulated the myth of a Front National ‘adouci,’ i.e. ‘softened,’ the idea presumably being that the racist discourse is gone. But tell me, Mr. Robert, how do you tell the difference between the ‘kebab-eaters’ that Eric Zemmour would have one believe dominate the HLM moderate housing units of France, and the St.-Denis, Trappes, and Roubaix cities which, according to the FN’s Jordan Bardella, “are not the France of Amelie Poulain”?
The Paris Tribune 