On the left as well as the right, a thick residue of antisemitism in France

Robert Zaretsky
March 26, 2025

Antisemitism is the socialism of fools — the famous phrase falsely ascribed to the 19th century German socialist Auguste Bebel — has had all too many reasons to be cited over the subsequent two centuries. It is not just all-too-apropos in the case of current events in France, but it is also all-too-tragic given the great stakes involved.

Last year, President Emmanuel Macron, in a fit of peevishness following the striking defeat of his party Renaissance in elections to the European Parliament, called snap legislative elections at home. Faced by the surging the far-right movement led by Marine Le Pen, the several parties on the left — the Socialists, Greens, Communists, and Defiant France — closed ranks to form a “republican wall” against this threat.

Dubbing themselves the New Popular Front — a nod to the coalition of leftwing parties, led by the Socialist Léon Blum, that assumed power in 1936 — the alliance was a mixed success. It won enough votes to prevent Le Pen’s party from forming a government, but not enough votes to form a government of its own. The result was parliamentary paralysis with a National Assembly evenly divided between the rightwing, centrist, and leftwing blocs, each unable to form a government , each unwilling to compromise with the others.

Yet this paralysis also revealed the structural incoherence of the New Popular Front — a structure partly built with the lumber of a party, Defiant France, that carries the stain of antisemitism.

There is little that is surprising, though much that is disappointing, about this fact. It happens that antisemitism on the French left is old as the observation associated with Bebel. Many of the leading figures who rallied to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus in the 1890s —Jean Jaurès, Émile Zola, Georges Clemenceau, even Bernard Lazare (the child of a French Jewish family who named him Lazare Bernard) — were hardly immune to anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudice. More important, socialist theorists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who declared that he “hated the Jews on reflection and irrevocably,” and Alphonse Toussenel, author of The Jews: Kings of our Era, were fanatically antisemitic.

The present era in France, thanks to laws against hate speech, is mostly free of such fanatical claims on the left and right. Over the past few years, however, Le Pen’s National Rally, desperate to overcome its neo-Nazi origins, has nevertheless been rocked when one or another “black sheep” — the quaint term it uses — blurts an antisemitic or racist remark. The offending sheep is then quickly culled from the herd. (Except, that is, when it involves the party’s leader, Jordan Bardella. Last year, he opined that Jean-Marie Le Pen — the party’s founder who insisted that the Shoah was a “detail of history” — was not antisemitic.)

Unhappily this has also been the case with Defiant France. Unlike the National Rally, however, there is never a culling largely because its shepherd, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has been one of the principal offenders. In the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, his party refused to describe Hamas as a “terrorist” organization, while one of the movement’s deputies, Danièle Obono portrayed it as an “act of resistance. Another deputy, Rima Hassan, insisted in an interview shortly after the massacre that Hamas’ attack was “legitimate.” It was only last month that Hassan allowed that it was a “war crime,” yet still insisted on the “legitimacy” of the movement responsible for the crime.

As for Mélenchon, there are the sins of omission — he refuses to slap the terrorist label on Hamas — and the sins of commission. For example, while French Jews were reeling from a cascade of antisemitic acts last year, Mélenchon serenely observed that antisemitism was merely “residual” and that expressions of it were “totally absent from public gatherings” of the movement’s followers.

Yet this residue seems to be putting up pretty stiff resistance within the party itself. Last week, by way of publicizing a march against antisemitism and racism organized by the nation’s unions, the LFI tweeted a poster. It featured Cyril Hanouna, a talking head on the extreme right who is one part Tucker Carlson, one part Alex Jones. Hanouna is not just a thuggish provocateur, he is also a Jewish one, the child of Tunisian Jews who settled in France.

This provides the context to the poster. Looming above large letters urging the public to protest the ideas and individuals of the far-right is Hanouna’s face. Or, rather, a caricature of his face, with a menacing glower and rictus, that bears a startling resemblance to the horrifying caricatures in Joseph Goebbels’ film Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”) and Veit Harlan’s classic Der Jude Süss (“The Jew Süss”). While both films made the rounds in Nazi-occupied France, the posters were since archived and were mostly forgotten except by French historians.

Until now, that is. The reaction on social media was so rapid and lacerating that the image was quickly deleted. But that did little to stem the outrage. Yet Mélenchon could not help but be Mélenchon. In an interview with the radio station France 3, he attributed it to the “right-wing networks” seeking to tarnish his party. When the interviewer insisted on asking Mélenchon to assume responsibility for this poster, he exploded, “Are you accusing me? Just shut up! You are carrying on this extreme-rightwing campaign against us.”

All of this would be comic if it were not so tragic. The National Rally continues to have this dismal wind in its sails while the leader of France’s largest progressive party is busy setting his ship’s sails aflame. The other parties on the left, most importantly the Socialists, have cut their ties to Mélenchon’s party. Yet without the votes of the National Rally, there is for the moment no prospect of a promising political horizon come the presidential and legislative elections in 2027. There remains time, but it risks to soon become, well, residual.

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