From the 2019 Orsay Museum and Museum of Modern Art exhibition Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), Les temps nouveaux, de Seurat à Matisse: Paul Signac (1863-1935), “In harmonious times: The Golden Age is not in the past, it’s in the future (retort),” 1896. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm. Kasser Mochary Foundation, Montclair, NJ. Kasser Art Foundation. © Nikolai Dobrowolskij. Signac was the anarchist art collector, critic, and editor Fénéon ‘s principal artistic fellow traveler following the death of Georges Seurat, his co-inventor of the Neo-Impressionist (also known as Pointilist or Divisionist) movement.
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak
“It is never wrong to listen to the people’s voice.”
— French president Emmanuel Macron, upon dissolving the French National Assembly and calling snap elections for June 30 and July 7.
“[Emmanuel Macron] has plunged France into chaos. He is playing with fire.”
— European MP Raphael Glucksmann, whose Socialist Party has joined the Communist, Ecologist, and Unsubmissives parties to stave off Marine Le Pen’s Far Right National Rally (formerly National Front) party from being elected to power in the snap legislative elections called by French president Emmanuel Macron, June 12, France Inter public radio.
“Il ne faut jamais essayer la fascism.” (We must never give fascism a try.)
— Young woman demonstrating against the Far Right in Paris, June 15, interviewed by French public radio.
“We can transform our country. We can re-illuminer our country, as the great Jaures said.”
— Manon Aubry, European MP, whose Insoumis (Unsubmissive) party has joined the Socialists, Ecologists, and Communists to form the New Popular Front and field a unified candidate for each of France’s 576 congressional districts in the upcoming elections, France Inter, June 18.
Disclosure: In addition to his genuine concern for France’s future, the author has a vested interest in his adoptive country’s choice.
On June 30 and July 7, a nation that rightly takes pride in being the birthplace of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and whose reigning motto is Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty faces an existential choice: Will it become grander or will it shrink?
Will the country of Voltaire, a cradle of the Age of Enlightenment, continue to be a phare (beacon) for humanity and for the life of the mind, or will it help lead the way back to the caves of Obscurantism?
Will French voters be conned by an intense, slanderous, irresponsible, nauseabonde (sickening) propaganda campaign actively abetted by State-controlled public radio, bolstered by pro-Israel lobbyists such as the American Jewish Committee (whose express mission, never explained on public radio, is to get Jews to emigrate to Israel, thus it has a vested interest in scaring French Jews into incorrectly thinking France will not be safe for them if a coalition which has critiqued Israel’s actions, falsely depicted as anti-Semitic by Israel’s supporters, is elected****) and the self-appointed, pro-Netanyahu representative organization of Jews in France, to scare French Jews and others into not voting for the leading anti-Racist and social justice political force in this country by falsely branding the Nouvelle Front Populaire (New Popular Front or NFP) coalition of Leftist parties as anti-Semitic *purely because it has dared to criticize Israel for the war crimes and crimes against humanity, including a possible genocide as identified by the leading international court, this putatively Jewish state has been perpetrating for the last eight months against another Semitic people in which it has killed nearly 40,000 people in defiance of all international laws and moral norms, the majority civilians including 16,000 children, through deliberate, targeted attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, refugee camps, churches, ambulances, universities, food-distribution points, and mosques and by illegally using starvation and water deprivation as a weapon of war,* a propaganda campaign whose perverse effect could be the rise to power of a genuinely racist, fear-mongering extreme right-wing party whose founder once described the gas chambers as “a minor historical detail” and in which the only difference from the classic Jew-baiter is that “Jew” has been replaced by “Immigrant” or “Islamist” as the scapegoat for people’s real economic woes (sound familiar?) — a party which thus every Jew should be revolting against with every fiber of his being?
Will the country which abolished the slave trade in 1848 choose to be governed by a devoutedly anti-racist coalition, the New Popular Front — named after another coalition of the Left forged 90 years ago to fend off fascism (itself inspired by the Spanish Frente Popular forged to fight off Franco) — or by a party whose president, Jordan Bardella, has observed that “anyone who walks around (the cosmopolitan, racially mixed Paris suburb of) St.-Denis knows this isn’t Amelie Poulain‘s France,” a statement left unchallenged by Bardella’s interviewer on French public radio, which has also (in my view) shamelessly collaborated with Marine Le Pen’s effort to de-demonize the National Front party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen by re-Christening it the Rassemblement National (RN or National Rally) party and pretending to care about the poor (among other ways by simply providing a platform for this party long decried by political leaders both on the Right and the Left* for its anti-Republic values), at the same time actively demonizing Jean-Luc Mélonchon and his anti-racist Insoumis (Unsubmissive) party — the leading party on the French Left which has joined with the Socialist, Ecologist, and Communist parties to form the NFP and field unified candidates in each of the 576 circumscriptions for the June 7 legislative elections — with patently false charges of anti-Semitism because the party has been out front in criticizing Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza and never challenging the National Front’s factually false claim that France is being “submerged by immigration,”** the great fear-stoking lie upon which it hopes to be elected to power?
(If you believe French public radio reports — a big if — even the famed Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld now says that if he has to choose in the July 7 run-off between the party whose founder once called the gas chambers “a minor historical detail* and the New Popular Front, whose platform denounces anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of racism as well as transphobia, he’d choose the former because of the latter’s alleged anti-Semitism, an unfounded accusation unfortunately nurtured by French president Emmanuel Macron, also a sincere anti-Racist, who claims, inaccurately, that the Insoumis party has not denounced anti-Semitism — and who has suggested that original Front Populaire president Leon Blum would be “spinning in his grave” over the other Left-wing parties’ alliance with the Unsubmissives — and who, after using the vote on the Left to help defeat Marine Le Pen in the last two presidential elections has since not only attempted to put what he calls the “Extreme Left” (Mélonchon is France’s answer to Bernie Sanders) and the Extreme Right on the same level, another campaign abetted by the mainstream media, but has risked legitimizing the RN’s scape-goating of immigrants by describing the New Popular Front or its platform as including a gesture that is “totally immigrationist,” according to French public radio. This from the same French president who commendably designated for the Pantheon Josephine Baker, and this on June 18, the 84th anniversary of the famous call to resistance of General de Gaulle that “France has lost a battle but not the war,” a call to resistance to which Josephine Baker responded heroically, putting her life on the line, Josephine Baker an immigrant, Josephine Baker whose Blackness would make her suspect in Jordan Bardella’s France.)
Will France — this great country on whose literary, intellectual, civil liberties (France abolished the death penalty in 1981, while my own country continues this barbarism), political, and artistic culture and heritage, a heritage of political liberation and mental emancipation and expansion, I like so many Americans was weaned and in which I still believe and champion — continue to stand on the shoulders of and promulgate the Humanist heritage and values of Voltaire, Moliere, the Chevalier de la Barre, Eugene Sue, Hugo, Zola, Anatole France, Clemenceau, Jean Jaures, Leon Blum, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Josephine Baker, Marie Curie, Georges Sand, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, the Impressionists, Boris Vian, Charles de Gaulle, Romain Gary, Michel Ragon, Charles Trenet, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir, Chris Marker, Charles de Foucauld, Jacques Prevert, Claude Cahun, Maximilien Luce, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Eluard, Paul Signac, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or will it return to the age of Edouard Drumont and the anti-Dreyfusards (“La France Juivre” replaced by an imaginary and menacing “La France Musulman”), of the Xenophobia of Vichy, with immigrants replacing Jews as the “boucle emissaires” or convenient scape-goats?
Will this rich bouillabaisse of a multi-cultural nation whose cultural virtues I have been proud to share, praise, promote, and trumpet for 25 years continue to take pride in having provided a haven and cultural/artistic/literary petri dish for ‘etrangers’ (‘Strangers’ or ‘Foreigners’) like Picasso, Montand, Apollinaire, Irene Nemirovsky, Romain Gary, Chantal Akerman, Georges Simenon, Camille Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Nicolas de Stael, Marie Taglioni, Rudolf Nureyev, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and others who gave back by enriching and internationalizing its culture on a global stage, or will it vote for and bring to power a party which has cultivated a fabricated fear, based on lies (rarely challenged by journalists on State-controlled media) that France is being ‘submerged’ by immigrants and who threaten its very identity with a ‘great replacement’ of a people with Christian roots by non-Europeans? (I am not saying there is not a problem with those who would seek to impose their sectarian practices on others in a country which strives for lay values; witnesses I trust who report personally being intimidated by fundamentalist Muslims have recently informed me otherwise. And the decapitation of a brilliant and dedicated middle-school teacher, Samuel Pati, who loved and was devoted to his students, by an Islamist extremist in 2021 for simply teaching those values and the stabbing death of another teacher by another extremist were shamefully under-reported outside of France. What I am saying is that these real atrocities are being shamelessly exploited to sow irrational fear of the ethnic Other — in a manner and for motives which should make every Jew revolt — by a political party which does not care about Jews and which, if elected to power, will not keep its economic promises and which, based on past practices in other countries risks to do everything possible to hang on to that power once it has it.)
Will my adoptive country — a country I adopted because it fostered and inspired my own creative, intellectual, and literary flowering just as its soul seemed to reflect my own and whose culture I have been blessed to be a part of and proud to promote to an Anglophone audience for a quarter of a century — continue to grow and blossom in hope, to grandir, or will a portion of a people in whose fundamental goodness, intelligence, maturity, and decency I have always believed devolve into xenophobic resentment, hoodwinked by Far right populists and a complicit mainstream media, and misdirected by a sincerely and proven anti-racist president who has so lost his way that he is apparently no longer able to distinguish between (as I interpret his putting them on the same plane) an earnestly anti-racist coalition and a jingoistic, racist, and potentially fascist party into believing that the Other is responsible for its real economic pain?
Will it pursue the path set out by Leon Blum, an intellectual and librarian and the pupil and collaborator of Jean Jaures (the founder of Modern French Socialism), the president of the Popular Front Leftist coalition elected in 1936 to stave off fascism and which accorded French workers paid vacations and the 40-hour work week, a legacy which has inspired a new coalition of Socialists, Communists, Ecologists, and Unsubmissives to form the New Popular Front not just to head off a new Far Right-wing threat to liberty, fraternity, and equality to which Emmanuel Macron opened the door when he dissolved the legislature on June 9 and called snap elections (in his defense, Mr. Macron, who did so after the National Rally party lead voting for the French delegation to the European Parliament in the June 9 E.P. elections, argued that it is never wrong to give the people a voice in their destiny) but to offer a new program of hope, or that set out by Jean-Marie Le Pen when he founded the National Front, which despite in its current made-over incarnation as the National Rally catering to real popular concern about soaring inflation, still has that racist gene in its DNA as it exploits people’s real economic pain and suffering to nurture resentment and fear against and of the Other so that it can be elected to a power which, history teaches us, the Far Right once elected is loathe to relinquish?
Will French voters buy Emmanuel Macron’s continued efforts to put the New Popular Front, specifically the Unsubmissive party, on the same level and thus suggest that they are just as dangerous as Le Pen’s party (a “both extremes” moral equivalence and nomenclature French public radio has for the most part uncritically adopted) with the disproven charge that it has refused to denounce anti-Semitism and is too radical, a suggestion countered by former president François Hollande’s joining the New Popular Front’s electoral list as well as by the NFP’s platform, which unequivocally condemns all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, as well as Hamas’s terrorist massacre of October 7, at the same time demanding the release of all Israeli hostages as well as Palestinian political prisoners, critiques what it considers the French government’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “supremacist government,” and calls for France joining 145 other countries in recognizing the State of Palestine?
Will they vote for hope, or will they let their fear and economic suffering be cultivated and harvested by the hate-mongerers of the FN/RN selling false promises, because (as a friend and neighbor explained to me),”Why not? We might as well try something different.” You do not just give potential fascism a try because once it is in power, it does not yield.
Like too many Germans in 1933 and too many Americans in 2016, too many French people in 2024 are economically suffering, the victims of a rampant neo-Liberalism which has seen hospital emergency rooms shutting down intermittently for want of doctors, energy and grocery prices soaring, retirement allocations lagging behind inflation, rent prices going up, and medicine co-payments increasing. Like the National Socialist Party in 1933, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally party is attempting to exploit a people’s real economic pain to be elected to power, and yes, like the National Socialist Party it has found its ‘boucle emissaire,” yesterday the Jews, today Immigrants and “Islamists.”
I want to be crystal clear on two things:
1) Real Islamist extremists — or religious extremists, a term I prefer because the problem is not the religion, it’s a violent, ultimately nihilistic extremism which is religion-blind — have killed and massacred innocents in Israel, Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, New York City, Boston, Spain, India, Pakistan, Brussels, London, Norway, New Zealand, Oklahoma City, Pennsylvania, and — most pertinent here — France and most resonant for me, Paris. I was in Paris on November 13, 2015, when they massacred 130 innocents. I still remember the smile of one of them, Naomi Gonzalez, peering out from a print-out taped on the bullet-ridden window of a café in my neighborhood, and reading that her parents had taken her from Mexico to the United States, where she was a 20-year-old student at UCLA studying that semester in Paris, and thinking: Her parents took her out of Mexico for this? To be gunned down while having a beer with friends on a terrace in Paris — in my neighborhood? And another print-out on a nearby tree for a 27-year-old music student from Algeria, gunned down by these cowardly monsters firing Kalashnikovs on unarmed defenseless civilians because he happened to walk by with his dog. And all the insouciant smiles on the print-outs taped on a fence around the park opposite Baticlan, where they mercilessly gunned down 80 people for the ‘crime’ of listening and dancing to live (American) music, as well as a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” the clarion call for an earlier generation of Naomi Gonzalezes who came to Paris because Paris is where you go to live and experience life and its emotions to the maximum. You don’t go there expecting to be killed, not in a war but for living and enjoying life to the maximum. For talking and exchanging and dancing with others. (“They hate our spirit of ‘Vivre Ensemble'” is how Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo adroitly framed it at the time.) And under the photos of one of the insouciant smiling young men, the words, “Morte pour la France,” “He died for France.” This last stirred controversy among some, who muttered, “It’s not like he died fighting in a war.” Maybe not, but he, but they, did die for France because France’s identity — the identity which beckons like a siren to the world, particularly the artistic, literary, and cultural worlds and particularly the young — is not just about the Liberation, and the Resistance, it is about a quality of life, enveloping and exuding values and exchanges including exchanges between people of different backgrounds and it is that quality of life which is now threatened, not by the parties on the Left but by the extreme Right-wing National Front / National Rally and everything it represents.
2) If the National Front / National Rally led French polling for the June 9 European Parliamentary elections with 31 percent of the vote (the spur for Macron to dissolve the legislature and call snap elections — after insisting before the elections he would not do so — because, he said “it is never wrong to let the people speak”), with Macron’s Centrist Renaissance party garnering 15 percent of the vote followed by Raphael Glucksmann’s Socialist list with 14 percent, it is not because millions of French people suddenly became racists. Many (if not most) of them voted for the FN/RN because they are hurting, struggling to make ends meet. By “they” I mean good, generous, loving and decent people (I’m not being sarcastic) like a retired friend in my village who worked 40 years on a clothing factory assembly line (before the factories in the village shut down and many of the manufacturing jobs moved abroad) and is now living on a retirement pension of 1,000 Euros per month, like her husband, and who drives 30 kilometers out of town every week to buy groceries because the chain store here has a monopoly which shows in its astronomical price increases over the past two years, including on basic commodities like eggs, pasta, chocolate (we are in France), cheese (ditto), sugar, and cooking oil. Her financial lot was already difficult under the previous government (whose finance minister was a certain Emmanuel Macron) and has only gotten worse since under the hyper-drive neo-liberal “reforms” Mr. Macron has instituted since he was elected in 2017. (Among other things abolishing a tax on the super-rich enacted by Hollande, and which the New Popular Front promises to re-instate, also promising to block prices on fundamental necessities and energy, a hike in the minimum wage to 1600 Euros net monthly, class size reductions, free lunches for school-children, 1 Euro meals for college students, and investment in French hospitals. It has also promised to annul Mr. Macron’s increase of the retirement age from 62 to 64 with a view to lowering it to 60, and to abrogate his rigorous immigration law passed with the cooperation of Le Pen’s party.)
I can beg my friend not to vote for the National Front / National Rally party because they will hurt me, other migrants, and the poor, because they will continue to stigmatize Muslims and people of color in general, because they are simply lying when they say France is being ‘submerged by immigrants,’ because they are a racist and possibly a fascist party, because of the real risk, born out by history in other countries like Hungary, that once they are elected to power (the party or coalition of parties which wins the most seats in the June 30 legislative election and July 7 run-off, if it garners an absolute majority, picks the next prime minister, who designates the next government) they may be loathe to relinquish it and because of what an Extreme Right victory will do to French society and culture and thus its image and reputation abroad, but I cannot argue with her. I do not have that right. I did not spend 40 years working on an assembly line, my Social Security if I choose to retire in two years will be $1500 per month, and I have paid no or little rent over the past ten years thanks to the grace of a generous family. (If you are wondering why my friend, rather than believing the empty promises of the National Front / National Rally, does not turn to the New Popular Front, which offers a real program of economic equilibrium, it is partly because Jean-Luc Mélonchon’s Unsubmissive party, the leading party on the Left, has been slack in establishing a presence outside urban areas, and partly because of the right-wing propaganda my friends are fed every night by C-News, the French answer to Fox “News,” owned by the French version of Rupert Murdoch, which night after night hammers them with the fake news that delinquency in France has increased when it has actually decreased over the past 30 years, as the College de France and Rutgers sociologist Didier Fassin has pointed out, and regularly maligns with false charges the Left, particularly the Insoumis (Unsubmissives), who won the most votes in the 2022 legislative elections after the National Rally. And also because of the mainstream media’s enabling of the de-demonization of the National Front (who my friend insists are not the Extreme Right, but the Right) and active complicity in the demonization of the Unsubmissives and, now, daily efforts to de-credibilize the genuinely anti-Racist New Popular Front with false and unfounded charges of anti-Semitism while rarely talking about the NFP’s program of economic justice and liberation.
So let’s finish with that, the program that the NFP promises to enact within the first 100 days of its election, as reported by Le Monde.
“We want to change people’s lives with concrete measures,” Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the Ecologist (formerly Green) party told a Paris press conference last week.
Those measures include:
** Price blocks on grocery products of premiere necessity as well as energy.
** Creation of a “menstruel leave” in all enterprises and administrations.
** Reduction of the work week from 35 to 32 hours for “difficult metiers” and night work.
** A moratorium on major highway infrastructure projects as well as dams.
** A plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
** Filling staff gaps in public hospitals, schools, the Justice department and other state agencies by ‘revaluing’ salaries.
** Opening 500,000 new places in public nursery schools.
** Reduction of class sizes so that they improve on the European average of 19 children per class.
** Taking the first steps towards being able to offer free lunches (which I and my brothers benefited from going to public schools in San Francisco; “Soylent green is people!”), material, transportation (ditto), and after-school activities in public schools.
** Organizing a conference to “save public hospitals,” including by revaluing salaries for working nights and weekends.
** Banning all PFAS’s (the non-stick surfaces you find in some pots and pans), notably in kitchen tools.
** Implementing a zero tolerance policy when it comes to racist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic “acts and words,” the propagation of all of which the platform notes has seen a “disturbing explosion” in French society.
** An inter-ministerial plan to analyze, prevent, and combat anti-Semitism and another to fight Islamophobia, the NFP platform noting that “Anti-Semitism has a tragic history in our country and must never return. All those who propagate hate against Jews must be fought.” (This past weekend, two middle-school boys are alleged to have raped a 12-year-old Jewish girl while crying “Dirty Jew!”)
** Reviving the “Tax on the Rich” installed by Mr. Hollande and later abrogated by Mr. Macron, with the addition of a climate aspect.
** Setting aside a third of positions on corporate boards for employees.
** Supporting the annulment of the free trade agreement between the European Union and Canada.
** Re-establishing higher pesticide standards dropped by Mr. Macron’s government (which adopted the more problematic European standards) under pressure from farmers and farming industry groups.
** Constructing 200,000 new public housing units per year over the next five years and pushing for a “right to housing” law which would include imposing mandatory rent control in zones with a high housing demand or a “universal right to rent.”
** Limiting media monopolies.
** Abrogating “asylum and immigration” laws approved under Emmanuel Macron with the support of the NF/RN as well as “regularizing” undocumented workers, students, and schoolchildren and giving preference to “cartes de sejour” or residence permits valid for 10 years.
** Creating a new refugee status of “climate displaced.”
** Creating a “legal and secure” route to immigration and putting in place a “sea and land rescue agency,” as well as “guaranteeing access to free State medical aid” for foreigners. 27,000 would-be migrants have lost their lives at sea over the past ten years while trying to cross from Africa or North Africa to Europe to seek a better life.
** Re-establishing specialized local police or community units.
** Banning use by law enforcement of what the platform describes as “defense launchers” and a certain class of “grenades.”
** Replacing the government’s police review board with a new independent organism operating under the aegis of the office of the Defender of Civil Rights. (It should be noted that France’s government police review board has much more strict and neutral standards than many of its American counterparts, with police sometimes placed in ‘garde a vu’ simply for using their arms when a death results, pending an investigation of whether the use was justified under French law.)
** Revising standards over when police have the right to use their arms.
Footnotes
*In the 2002 presidential run-off, Jacques Chirac refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Invited with other party leaders to meet with president Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s successor, Hollande, refused to participate alongside the National Front.
** For the actual facts, or statistics, on immigration, see François Heran’s lectures at the College de France.
*** In “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” Romain Gary, writing under the pseudonym of Emil Ajar, describes an older Muslim resident of the Paris quartier of Belleville who every day sits on a bench with “a copy of the Koran in my right hand, a copy of Monsieur Hugo in my left.”
**** This morning, public radio chain France Inter, on the heels of an incident in which two junior high school boys are alleged to have raped a 12-year-old girl in calling her a “dirty Jew,” cited a poll — co-commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, whose mission is to get Diaspora Jews to make aliya to Israel, which mission French public radio newscasters never mention — presumably including French Jews (they never explain how they’re able able to find them, given that keeping such statistics is forbidden in France) — which allegedly found that a majority of French Jews say they would leave France if Les France Insoumis (the Unsubmissives) party, part of a Left coalition including the Socialists, Communists, and Ecologists running in the June 7 legislative elections, comes to power. (This is what is known in the trade as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not for the reason cited by the AJC: If enough voters fall for the lie that criticizing Israel for what it is doing to Palestinians makes one, or a party, anti-Semitic that they don’t vote for the Left coalition, the most likely result is the election of a party, the Front / Rassemblement National, with a real history of anti-Semitism.) The station then interviewed the president of the “Representative Counsel of Jewish Institutions in France” (it only claims to represent Jewish institutions, but public radio typically presents the organization, which has a long history of supporting Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, as representing the opinions of all Jews, and never interviews representatives of organizations like the Jewish Union for Peace, which have clearly condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank), who effective blamed LFI’s criticism of Israel and defense of Palestinians for what he described as the increase of anti-Semitic incidents in France.
The Dance Insider & Paris Arts Voyager 