On Saturday, I went where no self-respecting left-leaning academic would dare, or deign, to go:

I accompanied a conservative friend to the launching of Philippe de Villiers’s presidential campaign.

Why not, I thought.  At least it will be something to blog about! I was not disappointed: plenty of material. Nor was I all that shocked by what I heard there. Mostly just deeply unsettled.

Outside the Mutualité, where the event was held, we were handed fliers that ranged from the far right to the
center-right, from the political to the bizarrely non-political,
calling for us to join a manifestation against the EU, to join
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s "Patriotic Union," accusing Villiers of getting too
close to the UMP (the party of Chirac, Sarkozy, and Villepin), an
anti-abortion pamphlet, and a magazine advocating zero consumption of
alcohol during pregnancy.   

Once we got inside,
we found ourselves in a giant "Go France!" pep rally: kids dancing
around onstage to a techno Fur Elise in red, white, and blue t-shirts
reading Je Heart P2V and just plain P2V, people waving flags like they
were on the barricades at the Les Mis finale. 

To give you an idea of where to situate "P2V," take this pithy little comment I overheard waiting on line to get inside the Mutualité:

"Ségo has been bought, Sarkozy is garbage, and Le Pen," the speaker’s eyes glimmering with gleeful transgression, "is a bit too far to the left."

Characterising Villiers as to the right of Le Pen seems a bit extreme to me; from what I know of the two, Villiers seems more like Le Pen without the blatant racism and anti-Semitism, without the sinister smirk and cigar.  On the contrary, Villiers has the air of a rather intelligent French lumberjack.  Imposingly tall and with the rough face of a peasant, Villiers is an entertaining speaker, funny, passionate and, even, compassionate.  He professes to care not only about the elite, but the workers, and wants to do for France what he’s done for the Vendée, as several of his supporters, who spoke, emphasized: make sure that everyone who wants a job has one,  and can increase his pouvoir d’achat  [is that "buying power" in English?].

But this humor and avuncular compassion, sadly, does not allow for the least
difference of origin or sexual preference.  It’s too bad.  I don’t want
to dislike him. Everything about Villiers calls out to be liked and
respected.  Except, and this is an enormous except, for the signs
decorating the room laying out his political opinions.

At first glance they seem to hold water in a libertarian sort of way that seemed potentially valid to me:  "Vous préférez l’artisanat à l’assistanat? Moi aussi.  Villiers: le bon sens" [You prefer the artisan class to the welfare class? Me too. Villiers: common sense"] or "Ras-le-bol des charges, des taxes, des impots? Moi aussi. [Sick of charges and taxes? Me too]" Then you get a little further on and you see something like "Vous etes pour l’immigration zéro? Moi aussi,"  which begins to give me pause, being something of an immigrant myself, although my companion assures me that writers and college professors from rich countries are not the immigrants Villiers wants to keep out of France.  It’s true that the present policy of mass immigration and regularisation doesn’t seem to be working for France, but that’s just as much the fault of the French model that demands complete assimilation.  "Je ne crois pas que l’immigration soit une chance ni pour les Français, ni pour les immigrés! [Immigration is not a good thing, neither for France nor for the immigrants] " Villiers proclaimed. Well, I couldn’t help thinking, perhaps a first step might be to relax the strict distinction between who is French, and who is an immigrant…

But my stomach really turned when I saw the signs reading "Vous etes contre le mariage homo? Moi aussi. [You're against gay marriage? Me too]" That’s when I really started to feel like I was at a gathering of the descendants of Maurras and Barrès, and all the anti-Dreyfusards who would not have  welcomed me into their midst at the turn of the last century.  To me, the signs against gay marriage seemed excessive and out of place, amongst the complaints at the Socialist overtaxing of the worker and support of the unemployed.

They did, however, make sense once I stepped back and considered that Villiers’s slogan is "La France à 100%," leaving no room in the ratio for anything foreign or "deviant"–as in, not only do you have to be white to be French, you also have to be straight, and you have to view all alternatives to the traditional French family structure as un-French. 

In my experience, a nation is comprised of its citizens, and the character of such a nation ought to reflect any evolution of its citizens and their mores.  The laws have to keep up with the times,  not hearken back nostalgically to some idealised, Edenistic era when France was white and Catholic and , ahem, buggery happened in private and never led to marriage.  Society is just not that homogeneous anymore– and would you really want it to be? Looking around at all the white faces, I felt as if the room had been ethnically cleansed. And with all due respect to M. de Villiers, his supporters, and my conservative friend, frankly, it creeped me out.

Although I doubt the Villiers campaign will lead to the Elysée Palace, I do like some of the values he is trying to bring to the fore, like, for example, the idea of restoring pride in being French to the French.  I stood amongst the waving flags and felt national pride for my adoptive country, wondering why it is that when I hear the Star Spangled Banner played, it feels irrelevant, American wars, American foundational myths, but when I hear the Marseillaise I fall for it hook, line, and sinker; it’s not the Revolution that does it for me (more honor in being imprisoned in the Bastille than storming it, in my view), but more the idea of being a part of the country that produced Hugo and Cézanne, the fact that Georges Seurat was born around the corner from where I sleep half the time, that George Sand stalked these streets dressed as a man, that Emile Zola looked at Paris and wrote the Rougon-Macquart series, that Stein turned language upside-down from her apartment in the rue de Fleurus.

He is right to try to encourage the French to emerge from their constant self-flagellation, their "juin 40 mentale." It’s just that I find disturbing his willingness to exclude those who would like to share in that pride.  My warm and fuzzy feelings for France as my adoptive country are
almost certainly those that any
immigrant by choice feels for their adoptive country, and spending a few hours amongst people for whom "proud to be French" also means excluding others from that pride based on their racial and sexual identity seriously undermined my patriotic buzz.

What do you all think? I know it’s not "cool" to be patriotic, but the sentiment can’t be entirely negative, as long as it’s not being used as an excuse to blow someone else up or keep them from moving into one’s country. 

Maitresse at the rally, looking around at the crowd, somewhere between shocked, appalled, speechless, and bemused