The book involves a lot of reporting and interviews in small towns and villages across France with ordinary people, as well as with the usual crowd of politicians, ministers and business leaders in Paris and other big cities. I try to explain why so many voters are abandoning the traditional parties of left and right that have governed France since the start of the Fifth Republic in 1958, and why they are turning to the RN and the far right. I hope the reader will start to understand the feelings of the French outside Paris who feel “left behind” by the central government and its representatives, people they regard as arrogant and out of touch. Members of the establishment, the left-liberal Parisian elite if you like, have tended to caricature RN supporters as fachos, as neo-fascist and racist thugs and skinheads, but this is not what I found. Those who now support Le Pen, Bardella and the RN include butchers, bakers, civil servants, firemen, farmers and accountants. They also include many French Jews, who would never have voted for Marine Le Pen’s antisemitic father Jean-Marie but now say that the antisemitism they perceive in France these days is coming not from the far right but from the far left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). It is difficult to overstate how much France has changed politically since I first came here as trainee at Reuters in the early 1980s: there was a broad consensus then that the Front National, as the party was then called, was beyond the pale and had to be excluded from power at all costs. FN representatives on the campaign trail were routinely confronted with demonstrations by Communists and trade unionists.
Today, many of those same Communists and Socialists, or their children, are voting RN.