The Collaborators

Shulamite by Anselm Kiefer, 1983, via SFMOMA, San Francisco

On 14 February this year, a street fight broke out in Lyon between fascist and anti-fascist militants (Lyon has long been a bastion of various fascist and far right groupuscules and there are frequent clashes between them and antifascists, most notably those associated with the organisation La Jeune Garde). During the fight, 23-year-old Quentin Deranque, a fascist activist, was badly beaten and later died of head injuries. What followed was outpouring of denigration across almost the entirety of the political and media class of all antifascists and, especially, La France Insoumise, due to its links to La Jeune Garde, whose founder, Raphaël Arnault, is an LFI deputy in the National Assembly. The far-right RN has called for a “cordon sanitaire” against LFI and its exclusion from all positions of power, and it has been followed enthusiastically by centrist and right-wing political forces, with the centre left trailing behind dutifully. The media has also been particularly aggressive, with some outlets painting antifascists and LFI as the “real fascists”. In this piece originally published in French here), Frédéric Lordon takes on these enablers of the fascisation of the French political scene.

They are educated. They went to top schools — well, to Sciences Po, or to journalism school. So, they took classes. They learned. They learned history. They regurgitated it — in their coursework, in their articles, and in their small talk. They watched documentaries on Arte. Films, about The Rise of... About what happened, about processes that were set in motion, and about when things started happening faster. About what the processes led to. They were invited to ‘contemplate all this’ and invited others to do the same. How could it have happened? Amidst such blindness, such passivity, such political, intellectual and moral failures. After all this, they solemnly swore: ‘Never Again!’. So — it’s only logical — they know.

But, now, everything is happening again — but as if on a loop. There is no need to make any effort to generalise or conceptualise. Everything is before their eyes once more: a process leading somewhere. An identical one, or almost. All they have to do is look, and call it its proper name. But instead… nothing. No, no, nothing is happening — at least nothing remarkable. Not here, anyway. Somewhere else, well, sure, things are different, there. In the United States, for example. It’s very different in the United States. According to the most tried-and-tested rule of national journalism, when it’s happening ‘far away’, you can see it — but, be careful: don’t use this same rule for Israel. When speaking about the United States, for example, one can even indulge oneself with the frisson of saying ‘fascism’. What about France? The rise of… a process leading… somewhere? Frankly, no, we don’t see it. Nothing. What about the Rassemblement National? Well, yes, we read the polls. But it’s all perfectly republican. Fascism — hardly. 

Turned on their heads

All things considered, in the situation we find ourselves in, it would be greatly preferable if they did see ‘nothing’. Because there isn’t ‘nothing’: rather, things are being turned on their heads. For it’s said that the political problem in France is not the inexorable rise of fascism, but the anti-fascist left-wing bloc. Which, at the very least, they suggest mezza voce, could well be the ‘real fascism’. It is, then, not accurate to say that ‘everything is repeating itself’ identically as before. For the second historical fascism has the peculiarity of absolutely denying that it is fascism, while reserving this same shameful name for its opponents. This point is well illustrated by a now old skit. It’s a parody, but a deadly serious one. An SS officer in SS uniform is accosted by a passer-by who calls him a Nazi. He reacts indignantly and sarcastically comments: “Why not call me far-right while you’re at it? That’s what happens when you run out of arguments, you play the “Nazi” card on me; and our Führer, well, I suppose he’s a Nazi too?!” etc. This is exactly the real state of the debate today. A France Info report concludes by talking about the ‘flowers for Quentin’.

Yet it would only take three minutes of video to reveal the nature of the groups to which this unfortunate chap belonged. Instead, we get the ‘chorister and philosopher’ or the ‘maths student’. It varies. But, in any case, a figure of wisdom, moderation and Christian empathy. But what he was really affiliated with were the black hordes, the torchlight parades, the Celtic-cross banners, the arms stretched in salute, the neo-Nazi parade in Paris he took part in last 10 May, for example — in other words, all the expressions of authentic fascism kindly authorised by recent Interior Ministers Darmanin-Retailleau-Nuñez— well, the media won’t show that. Nor will they show the videos, though they are widely available, of fascist militias at work, pickaxe handles in hand, in the streets of Angers, Rennes, Lyons, and elsewhere. They will not say what happens to nightlife, in bars, clubs or bookshops, when a raid can take place at any moment. They will not show the photo of Retailleau,former Interior Minister, now Republican party leader, in the pleasant company of ‘Le Jarl’, a notorious militia leader, yet a perfect illustration of what a ‘fascist arc’ is. They will not reel off the list of all the people killed by the far right — though, it’s true, they all have names that sound far too un-Christian, and anyway no one talked about them even then. They will not mention Macron’s differential compassion, who is almost in mourning for a fascist militant but says nothing about the murders committed by fascist militants — even though there have been many such occasions.

In short, they will not say that if there is anti-fascism, it is perhaps because first and foremost there is fascism — because, logically, one cannot precede the thing one defines itself against. And that, when society is left prey to militias — which are tolerated by the entire state apparatus, from the depths of the police to the highest levels of the administration and government, prefects and ministers, and ignored by the media, which has the power to generate national-level social condemnation — then, yes, when nothing deters these militias, it is not surprising that some people no longer want to be subjected to this, form a plan to defend themselves, and, as it happens, to defend others, and give themselves the means to do so. Nor is it surprising that what is only predictable happens, when the desertion of society by a complicit state leaves only the possibility of violent confrontation. It would, generally, be up to the police to deal with this. But everyone now knows which side the police are on. Everyone, that is, except the media.

With the rise of fascism stripped out of the landscape, all that remains is an incomprehensible ‘anti-fascism’, an absurd aberration, pure and causeless violence. Then, taking a ten-step leap into the lie, they can put the headline ‘La France Insoumise, the New Enemy’, like France-Info, the far-right public radio station (I’ve removed the ‘?’ from the headline, since there’s no obligation to rubber-stamp every degree of hypocrisy). Or, as Sandrine Cassini’s piece in Le Monde headlined, ‘La France Insoumise Under Challenge by the Right and the Far Right’, when it is quite obvious that the real headline should be ‘France Insoumise Under Challenge by Le Monde’. We will have to remember this weekend in February 2026, because it will, without the slightest doubt, remain a moment etched in history. It’s not that what happened was completely unprecedented. We’d already seen the denials of the rush towards fascism under Macron, and the heaping of condemnation upon the only real opposition party (since the Rassemblement National only proposes intensifications of what is being done already, whereas the rest propose a perfect status quo). It’s not that everything is unprecedented, but that everything has been taken to such an extraordinary degree that quantitative variations make qualitative differences. The shift to what we call, for convenience’s sake, Trumpisation — i.e. an extraordinary way of lying, distorting and fabricating — has taken hold of the entire political and media landscape. And this shift is total.

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Falsifying

It is no mere coincidence that this event follows just a few days after Interior Minister Nuñez’s statement that ‘racial profiling does not exist’, even though that very practice has been documented by the Cassation Court, the European Court of Human Rights and France’s Council of State. What’s more, the Foreign Minister made a baffling statement demanding Francesca Albanese’s resignation on the basis of comments she simply did not make. The media didn’t pick up on either statement as being particularly grave. They settled (at best) for reporting on these interventions as a matter of routine. A normally ‘healthy’ media system would be an authoritative means for putting things straight, and even for denouncing the sheer indecency of such falsehoods. However, the contemporary media system has itself become an agent of the intellectual corruption it is supposed to fight. It now busies itself with not speaking the truth, when it is not outright working to say the opposite. Thus, the ‘fact-checking’ press, which claims to be on a crusade against post-truth, has itself turned — in a reversal that will forever remain incomprehensible to it — into a formidable post-truth machine. For this media, there is no fascism, and anti-fascism is fascism; La France Insoumise is violence itself in political form, and truly murderous militias do not exist; La France Insoumise’s words kill, but not those that speak of the Great Replacement; and cries of ‘down with the veil’ did not cause a ripple of scandal for Retailleau. Meanwhile, we read, La France Insoumise is antisemitism reincarnate, despite the lack of any way of demonstrating it, whereas the thick mud that covers everything in the Rassemblement National — its ordinary candidates, its groupchats, its connections with fascist militias — is all to be considered null and void, since the Rassemblement National supports Israel.

Israel, and its genocide. This is perhaps the primary — and symptomatic — location of the political and media shift. The genocide in Gaza is denied in the same way as the rise of fascism within France, giving rise to an alliance that defies understanding, logic and history: Zionism in its genocidal variant (not only) and the agglomerated bloc defending the bourgeois order, from the Parti Socialiste to the most antisemitic far right. Hatred of La France Insoumise is the only cement for this alliance. It is true that, as La France Insoumise was alone in the institutional arena in denouncing the genocide and also alone on the Left, it marked itself out as a target for all comers. Will any media outlet ever question this parallel world that has become ours, in which, for example, the son of a Nazi hunter calls for ‘large-scale roundups’ [a reference to Arno Klarsfeld’s call for ‘round-ups’ – “rafles”, a term redolent of Nazi practices during the Occupation - of undocumented foreigners]? Is it any wonder that, in this reversal of magnetic poles, extreme lies reign supreme?

And this even in the most well-brought-up circles, such as C politique, the Sunday equivalent, on Channel France 5, of the daily sedation machine that is C ce soir. On it Jean-Yves Camus, supposedly an academic, raves — and there is no other word for it — that La France Insoumise member of the EU Parliament Rima Hassan has described all Jews as ‘genocidal’. This is immediately followed by another falsification, claiming that ‘From the Jordan to the Sea’ means the expulsion of Jews — Hassan has consistently said the opposite. And not a word of response from host Thomas Snegaroff, not a sharp and clear interruption in the face of pure fabrication. It was preferable to move on to something else — for example (at random) to finish with La France Insoumise. The host noted, for form’s sake, that La France Insoumise was not a priori involved in the drama in Lyons. But he nevertheless devoted a good quarter of an hour to it, which provided ample opportunity to insinuate that it was involved after all.

Unsurprisingly, we could count on Macron to put all the pieces together: La France Insoumise/far left/(outside the) republican arc/antisemitic. He did so at the kind invitation of Frédéric Haziza, the peddler on Radio J for whom journalism is as alien as sexual harassment is familiar. In any case, we expected nothing less from the president who has been an active agent in this process, and whose media system has worked so tirelessly to deny his leading role therein. We mean here the Macron of Philippe Pétain (he considers him a great soldier), Charles Maurras (a reference point), Éric Zemmour (to be consoled by phone), Valeurs Actuelles (whom he gave an interview), but also: the rampant police violence, guaranteed impunity, appalling legislative measures (the ban on filming the police, the presumption of self-defence), authorised racism in ministerial statements, ideological policing at universities, surveillance of social media under the guise of protecting young people, repression or banning of demonstrations in support of Palestine — a general collapse of fundamental freedoms and rights, France’s downgrading to the rank of ‘failed democracy’ (Civicus), or ‘flawed democracy’ (The Economist). And, finally, and most importantly: the well-documented obsession with handing power to the Rassemblement National, even if it means ignoring the election results, as in 2024. Because the French press is already preparing to delight in worrying about what Trump might do in the midterms, without ever mentioning that trampling on elections is already happening here. In total silence.

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Collaborating

The genocide in Gaza was the first place where Trumpisation took hold, but everything else followed suit, notably the ‘violence’ — which, of course, must have come from La France Insoumise alone. Just as there is no anti-fascism without fascism preceding it, there is no violence rising from society without violence first being done to society. There has been no shortage of violence for three decades, but particularly in the last decade, in France’s decade of Macronism. Thank the heavens that a major political formation like La France Insoumise has emerged to constrain the violence in response, to give it expression and form but also to build something structured — to transmute anger into regulated conflict. What would have happened otherwise? What other outlets would this reaction have found? One could almost end up dreaming of a full-blown insurrection, like the Yellow Vests redux, but on steroids. Something that would come and get the powers-that-be of the bourgeoisie in their very homes, to teach them first-hand what the difference is between real violence and political conflict. But the bourgeoisie no longer tolerates even simple conflict, and the only left-wing opposition that it can contemplate is a right-wing one: neoliberal-centrist Parti Socialiste figures like Hollande, Glucksmann, and Cazeneuve — whoever, but right-wing ones. In truth, it is no longer in a position to understand anything. It is driven solely by the desire to preserve its order: and it can at least see that the Rassemblement National would not threaten that order. This fanatical desire has taken hold of all the bourgeoisie’s political and media chiefs. This is why, as Pierre Bourdieu put it, to conceive of this orchestration there is no need to hypothesise the existence of a conductor. For that is what it is. Or, in truth, this is even a campaign.

We can, and should, use the name campaign, to characterise such a generalised, consistent and violent undertaking to eliminate a political formation, i.e. the only left-wing one in the institutional electoral landscape. Broadcaster Benjamin Duhamel, facing La France Insoumise’s Manuel Bompard, can wave his little arms and stamp his feet, saying ‘we talked about it’ — about the connections between the Rassemblement National and the neofascist student organisation Groupe Union Défense, for example, which was responsible for the murder of Federico Aramburu. The truth is that no, they haven’t talked about it — not in the same way that they talk, with glee, about what happened in Lyons, not in the same way that they summon La France Insoumise, and La France Insoumise alone, to appear before them. Because the Rassemblement National has not been summoned before them for a long time. Defectors from the far-right media have become public service columnists, even on France 5, and especially on France Info, which has become the radio station of collaboration par excellence. Every day, they link together the two forms of denial — the denial of the crime against humanity over there, and the denial of the rise of fascism over here, which are now deeply intertwined. This connection is never expressed more clearly than in the inept but ubiquitous topos of the ‘republican arc’, and of who is said to be joining it or else exiting this ‘arc’. It will no doubt remain the fetish of this imbecilic class, which does not even have the particular grandeur of cynicism: it believes in it, as steadfast as can be. In reality, this ‘arc’ will enter history as the canonical feat of the collaborators.

I had been about to write, with regard to Quentin Deranque, that we are surely on the brink of him getting a national tribute or a silent march. But then came the news of a minute’s silence in the National Assembly. A militant of the most violent far right, honoured in the National Assembly. It took a political cartoonist of the genius of Fred Sochard to immediately produce the antidote. ‘What about the victims of racist crimes?’ asks one character. ‘Aren’t years of silence enough?’ replies president of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet.

But still. An entire class, a noxious minority radicalised in the fanatical defence of its privileges, and now ready to do anything, is literally installing the far right in power. That’s when it does not actively will the far right to power. It denies, of course, that it has any such intention. But it is doing everything needed to make that happen. From this approach, well, the far right is no big deal. After all, we have already cleared the way and prepared the ground. We are already racist, freed from the rule of law and elections, activists for all manner of police authorisations, unconcerned about the militias — and aren’t we paying tribute to one of their fallen sons? No, the real danger are ‘the others’, with their taxes, their passion for Arabs, here and in Gaza, their objections to capitalism, their tiresome harping on about the oppressed, their lack of sympathy for the powerful — for ‘us’, that is. But we will do whatever it takes. We have learned, but it appears we have forgotten everything. Forgetting this history is a weight off our shoulders.  So we will distort, we will fabricate, we will falsify, we will turn things on their heads — in short, we don’t see many limits, a bit like Epstein (that was a joke). We won’t even feel like we’re lying because, by intoxicating the public, we have intoxicated ourselves, and now we believe everything we say. We collaborate with clear heads and a free spirit. So no, we have learned nothing from history. This is our way of entering History.

Translated by David Broder

Filed under: article-author-frederic-lordon