JB

There is a lot of assumption that far-right anti-immigrant sentiment is driven by this increasing prevalence of Muslim immigrants. There has been politicization of immigration and in particular attacks on Muslims, like the ban on headscarves in public schools — an absurd and racist measure passed in 2004.

At the same time, mass immigration from the Arab and Muslim world, and from the French colonies, has been a permanent feature of post–World War II life. The numbers kept increasing in the decades following that war, from the Maghreb, during the 1960s and 1970s. There was a lot of racism during that time.

During France’s brutal colonial war in Algeria, there was an infamous incident in 1961 when a police captain ordered the massacre of several hundred Algerian pro-independence demonstrators; the police then dumped their bodies into the Seine River.

Throughout all of this, the far right never managed to make sustained headway. Certainly not like they have in recent decades. In fact, at the beginning of the 1970s, the French far right was in complete and utter disarray and had no traction. So it can’t simply be the presence of foreigners, or even the presence of racism, that explains the increasing traction the far right has enjoyed since the 1980s.

Instead, you have to look at the neoliberal reforms and direction of French capitalism during this time. The traditional stability that came with the “thirty glorious years” after World War II — full employment, expanding welfare state, improving living standards, have disappeared. Over the last couple of decades, France has increasingly had a two-tier economy where people in more stable, full-time jobs are able to rely on a whole range of social protections that come with those jobs.

Access to the French welfare state, which represents more than a quarter of the overall economy, is largely based on workers’ employment history. Those who have long records of stable employment, particularly in industries that come with unionization, have been hammered by the changes of the past three decades, but there’s also a big gap that’s opened up between that group and the growing numbers stuck on the edge of the labor market.

People relegated to the margins of the labor market, who suffer from high rates of un- and underemployment, and who get far more benefits than in the United States but don’t get the same protections as the upper-tier workers, are easily stigmatized in France.

In this situation, given this increasingly precarious and segmented welfare state and labor market structure, those people are really easy to stigmatize, and the Right is able to pit people against one another. It’s easier for the far right to get a hearing when they claim that “it’s those scroungers living off basic assistance who are stealing the bread from your mouth and are the reason why your benefits are under threat.”

The direction of neoliberalism in France has encouraged these kinds of divisions among workers.