Le Vrai Visage de Manuel Valls (The True Face of Manuel Valls)

by Emmanuel Ratier

Paris: Éditions Facta, 2014.

There is a rather surreal quality to most Western governments today. There is little pretense of actually defending the interests of their citizens, but much blithe conforming to a smug and self-destructive egalitarian ideology (see: Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau . . .).

In this regard, France is no different. But senior French politicians are unusual in their eagerness to make ever-more Judeocentric statements, a truly bizarre phenomenon. Nicolas Sarkozy, who seeks to be reelected as President of the Republic, has said “Israel’s right to security [. . .] is the struggle of my life” and that humanity has “contracted towards the Jewish people a debt which cannot be extinguished.”[1]

You would think such declarations of fealty to foreign interests would disqualify someone from seriously participating in French politics. In fact, such statements are increasingly common. The center right Sarkozy has real competition in this regard with the Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Here are some of Valls’ statements in recent years:

“I am by my wife eternally bound to the Jewish community and to Israel. Come on!” — Responding to Jewish critics on Radio Judaïca Strasbourg on June 17, 2011.

“The Shoah, the extermination of the Jews, the genocide, must be sacralized, sacred.” — On French television in February 2014 explaining why the government was more sensitive to anti-Semitism than to anti-Islamic or anti-Catholic actions.

“Anti-Zionism is the open door to anti-Semitism [. . .]. The Jews of France are more than ever the Frenchmen at the vanguard of the Republic and of our values.” — Speech at an event organized by the CRIF (the official Jewish lobby)[2] held on March 19, 2014. Valls was flanked by CRIF President Roger Cuckierman and Bernard-Henri Lévy. The event was attended by the Jewish Defense League (an organization banned for terrorism in the United States of America and Israel.)

and Bernard-Henri Lévy. The event was attended by the Jewish Defense League (an organization banned for terrorism in the United States of America and Israel.) “So madame [Marion Maréchal-Le Pen], until the end, I will campaign to stigmatize you and to tell you that you are neither the Republic nor France.” — Response in the National Assembly to the young Le Pen, on March 10, 2015.

“Why this particular bond [between France and] Israel? This bond is unique. Because we are two sister nations.” — In a speech of January 25, 2016, at an event dedicated to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

These are not exceptional statements. The French prime minister constantly broaches these themes, always with the same message: Jewish ethno-nationalism is supremely good and must be supported, French (ethno-)nationalism is supremely evil and must be opposed. Again and again in innumerable speeches and television or radio appearances. Such comments are also representative of an official policy of enthusiastic support for the Jewish ethnostate of Israel despite its crimes and of organizing the replacement of the indigenous French population with African and Islamic settlers. Valls has also taken the lead in excluding nationalist parties like the Front National from participating in democratic politics and persecuting critics of Jewish ethnocentrism like Alain Soral and Dieudonné M’Bala M’bala. He has justified all this by publicly affirming on numerous occasions, perhaps more explicitly than any other French politician, the “sacred” status of the Shoah as the de facto state religion of France (the Jewish journalist Éric Zemmour has called the Shoah “the official religion of the French Republic”).

All this is surreal and the begs the question: Who is Manuel Valls? Why is he the prime minister of France?

In this, the independent French journalist Emmanuel Ratier — who passed away in August of last year — has provided a useful little book titled Le Vrai Visage de Manuel Valls (The True Face of Manuel Valls). Ratier specializes in documenting and archiving the statements and acts of elite French circles, notably of the political class, big business, and Freemasonry.

The basic theme of the book, largely citing official and mainstream sources, is that Valls’ meteoric rise to power has been largely due to cultivating elite power networks, typically with heavily Jewish leadership. Valls enjoyed a secure place on the margins of the Socialist Party, promoting a “modern” neoliberal-left ideology from a safe seat representing the heavily Afro-Islamic city of Évry, playing the tough guy on television as a kind of Socialist Sarkozy. He acquired a reputation as a tough operator prone to hysterical rages against uncooperative journalists and colleagues. Though long advertising pro-Palestinian views to pander to the citizens of Évry, Valls in 2009 performed an astonishing pro-Zionist turn and married a Jewish second wife. He then enjoyed a meteoric rise as interior minister under President François Hollande in 2012 and then as prime minister since 2014. The Socialist government, being grotesquely unpopular in failing to deliver its economic promises, appealed to Valls to present a stern image and pass right-wing economic reforms. In his speeches and actions, he has become known for his strident attacks against nationalists.

This review will summarize Ratier’s book and Valls’ life story, while seeking to elucidate what deeper historical forces Valls represents.

The Young Valls: Deracinated and Deracinating

Valls was born in Barcelona to wealthy Catalonian parents in 1962 and was raised in Paris. He told a Catalonian radio station in September 2013: “We always spoke Catalan at home” (13). He would only undertake the formalities to become a French citizen at the age of 20. His parents never asked for citizenship themselves. Mysteriously, the family enjoyed cheap “social housing” in a luxurious apartment in central Paris, overlooking the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Ratier speculates that Valls may be of crypto-Jewish descent, as his family name is common among the Marannos of the Spanish island of Majorca (whose nominally Catholic crypto-Jews are known as Chuetas). His uncle, also named Manuel Valls, was a composer who published a collection of Sephardic Songs (Manuel Valls, Canciones Sefarditas: Para Soprano, Flauta y Guitarra, Unión Musical Ediciones) and composed the anthem for the F. C. Barcelona soccer club.

Valls is completely hostile to any notion of a nation having historical or ethnic roots, prophesying a twenty-first century of rootless cosmopolitanism. His maternal grandfather got rich as a settler in Sierra Leone, where he had a half-caste son with a native woman. Valls writes in his political book[3] of his uncle:

I have often told myself that my uncle was the perfect embodiment of human culture. The fruit of my Ticino [of the Swiss canton] maternal grandfather’s double life, he was Sierra-Leonian by his mother. [. . .] Enriched by his Helevetico-African heritage, he lived in London his entire life, which recently ended. That is, for me, the man of the twenty-first century, multicultural man. (14)

Deracinated, atomized, global, miscegenated: That is Manuel Valls’ vision of a postnational mankind.

Judaism does not seem to have been a major factor in Valls’ early life. He was baptized a Catholic but his godfather, Carlo Coccioli, was an Italian convert to Judaism who had written a homosexual manifesto in the fifties entitled Fabrizio Lupo. Valls had a Catholic education, went to mass every week, and it was even thought he might enter the seminary.

Ratier claims that Valls has embellished his past to suit the political aims of the moment, including playing up Jewish influence in his upbringing. He quotes Valls in his authorized biography[4] claiming that “the only high-brow [bobo] store” his father frequented was called “Izraël” [sic] and that “a monument to the Jewish Martyrdom” in front of his primary school “counted a great deal for me” (45). There are numerous statements of this type in the book.

Valls’ Networks: Freemasons and Jews

Mainstream media sources emphasize that the success of Valls’ career in the Socialist Party can be ascribed to political networks he joined decades ago, when he was still in university. In particular, Valls early on sealed alliances with two men who would prove to be influential: Alain Bauer, the Freemason and “crime expert,” and the spin doctor Stéphane Fouks, both “secular Jews.”

Le Monde reported on how the three friends divided up their future roles:

Politics for one, police and Masonic networks for the second, lobbying and marketing for the last: It’s at Tolbiac University, in 1980, that Manuel, Alain, and Stéphane agreed on their roles and laid the foundations for the future program of the left of the 2000s, between [neo]liberalism and securitarianism [i.e. fighting crime].”[5] (24)

In this same article, Julien Dray, a Jewish Socialist and the founder of SOS Racisme (an “anti-racist” organization opposed to the Front National), gives a romanticized account of how the three men met at the University of Tolbiac in 1980:

I arrived one day in the Tolbiac cafeteria. I had the triumvirate before me [. . .]. Bauer confided: “Me, I dream of becoming Grand Master of the Freemasons.” Fouks took the floor in turn: “Me, I do not necessarily want to make politics my profession. I like communication.” Valls spoke last: “Me, I love France, I would like to become President of the Republic. But for that, I need to be French.” (25)

Alain Bauer rose in 2000 to be the youngest Grand Master of the Great Orient of France, a major Masonic group. Bauer has claimed that Masonic influence was critical in getting the European Union to adopt a non-Christian, deracinated identity and in supporting Muslim Turkey’s bid to join the bloc:

If in the texts on Europe [i.e. the EU Treaties], there is no question of introducing a notion of ‘Christian cultural heritage,’ it is not by chance. The Freemasons are doing their job. [. . .] We are in favor of the accession of Turkey, which for us has always been a part of Europe. [. . .] [Former French president Jacques] Chirac is rather philo-Masonic [. . .]. Concerning us, on the essential values, Chirac has never failed.[6] (99)

Bauer works as an “expert” on crime, lecturing, consulting, promoting video surveillance, and so on. He hasvalso worked as a senior official in the American defense firm Science Application International. Bauer’s wealth and power are thus embedded in powerful contemporary structures: Freemasonry, the U.S. military-industrial complex fed by the “War on Terrorism,” and the growing demand for “security” as crime-prone minorities spread across the Western world. Bauer is a member (like many French top figures) of the honorary committee of the League Against Anti-Semitism and Racism (LICRA). The nominally “anti-racist” LICRA is in fact a Jewish-dominated hate group specializing in the persecution and defamation of both French nationalists and more generally all critics of Jewish ethnocentrism.[7]

Stéphane Fouks is the son of one Moïse (Moses) Fouks, a Ukranian Communist Jew who later in France gravitated to Social Democracy. The Figaro newspaper says Stéphane was raised in “an ecumenical and secular Judaism, more cultural than religious” (104). Fouks is a strongly-identified Jew, having been a member of the Zionist Committee of Tolbiac at university and currently being a senior member of the CRIF, the main Jewish activist organization in France. In the 1980s, he organized concerts for SOS Racisme. He founded his communications firm with fellow Jews Patrick Salomon and Tony Dreyfus, highlighting the importance of ethnic networking to professional success. Fouks then works in political and corporate advertising, and his wealth reflects the power of ethnic networking and image-making (illusion) in the era of mass democracy.

Fouks has been keen to use his influence to push the political culture of France and other European nations to be in line with Jewish imperatives. Marianne magazine reported in 1999:

In 1995, Fouks, child of an Eastern European Jewish lineage, pushed for the Socialist [Aleksander] Kwaśniewski [whom he advised until 2005] to the Polish presidency against a Lech Wałęsa surrounded by reactionary Catholics who were ambiguous on the question of anti-Semitism. ‘This was very important for my story,’ [he said].[8] (107)

Kwaśniewski was a former communist, whereas Wałęsa had achieved global fame as a heroic resister to communism.

Fouks was known as Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s “invisible man” between 1997 and 2002, serving as an ever-present if discrete adviser. In the 2000s, Fouks had also been working as the spin doctor of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Jewish Socialist and head of the International Monetary Fund, until the latter was embroiled in the notorious sex scandal involving a Guinean immigrant in a New York hotel room. Strauss-Kahn had until then been perhaps the most likely candidate to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as president.

Even mainstream publications have been troubled by the influence of political consultants like Fouks in French political life. The center-left magazine Les Inrockuptibles in 2011 flirted with anti-Semitism when discussing the topic:

The general public does not know their faces: We never see them on television, we do not hear them on the radio, we do not read them in the press. Yet they weigh heavily in all the media. Their obscurity serves their glory, their underexposure in the media illustrates their strategic overexposure. [. . .] They do not claim the titles of “guru,” nor of “magician,” nor of “kingmaker”: the titles of “adviser” or “codecider” suit them better, but remain too euphemistic given the excess of their operational power. We do not vote for them but it is they who decide! [. . .] [Stéphane Fouks] [t]his Ashkenazi multimillionaire [sic], is one of the three gurus who ‘has an immense power of influence over French political and economic life [. . . ] a real decider established in the shadows of our democratic system.’[9] (108)

Today, the almuni of Fouks’ company, Havas Worldwide, formerly known as Euro RSCG, are pervasive in the cabinets and staff of the Socialist government. They are often Jewish.

Valls’ power networks have naturally grown as his career his progressed. In 1989, he joined the Freemasons at the invitation of Jean-Pierre Antebi, a Jew and the LICRA’s treasurer at the time. Valls apparently left the Masons in 2002. In 2001 he joined the elite “bipartisan” social club Le Siècle. In June 2008, he joined the Bilderberg Group, having thus successfully graduated from the rather provincial French secret societies to a global and globalist[10] networkers’ club.

The business magazine Challenges summed up Valls’ networks in December of 2012, a few months into his new job as interior minister: “He has handed in his Freemason’s apron, but his friend Bauer is among the brothers and beyond. He no longer eats at the Siècle, but his friend Fouks can open his thick address book of bosses and other deciders. What is he lacking? The ability to smile . . .” (6).[11]

Go to Part 2

[1]Guillaume Durocher, “Paul-Éric Blanrue and the Jews: From Celebration to Censorship,” The Occidental Observer, September 24, 2015. In a similar vein, German Social Democrat and President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz has claimed that “For me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”

[2]Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France or Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France. On the CRIF see Guillaume Durocher, “The Culture of Critique in France: Anne Kling’s Books on Jewish Influence,” The Occidental Observer, May 24, 2015.

[3]Manuel Valls, Pouvoir (Stock, 2010).

[4]Jacuqes Hennen and Gilles Verdes, Manuel Valls: Les secrets d’un destin (Du Moment, 2013).

[5]Ariane Chemin, “Valls, Bauer, Fouks : le pacte de Tolbiac,” Le Monde, November 27, 2012.

[6]Nouvel Observateur, December 2002.

[7]On the LICRA, see Guillaume Durocher, “The Culture of Critique in France: Anne Kling’s Books on Jewish Influence,” The Occidental Observer, May 24, 2015.

[8]Marianne, September 23, 1999.

[9]“Les gourous de la comm’, ces décideurs de l’ombre,” Les Inrockuptibles, March 23, 2011. The “ashkenazi multimillionaire” reference apparently removed from the online version of the article.

[10]The banker David Rockefeller, one of the senior members of the Bilderberg Group, has made no secret of his globalist hopes in his 2002 memoirs: “Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

[11]Gaëlle Macke, “Portrait — Manuel Valls, ministre de l’Intérieur : Carré,” Challenges, December 20, 2012.