Burchard makes the insightful observation that Charles Le Brun’s designs function as frontispieces to the places and monuments that celebrate Louis XIV’s reign. This idea is supported by the artist’s reuse of an allegorical composition for a lost painted portrait of the king in an engraved frontispiece to a philosophical treatise
Charles Le Brun—the subject of Wolf Burchard’s beautifully presented book—had the rare combination of skill and social grace required to succeed in the faction-ridden, bureaucratic climate of Louis XIV’s court. He worked for the king nearly half his life, entering Louis XIV’s service in 1661 at the age of 42 and working for him until he died at 71 in 1690. His preeminent position among the Sun King’s artists is evident from the many offices that he held: he was the king’s premier peintre; chancellor, rector and later director of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; and director of the Gobelins manufactory where paintings, tapestries and furniture were made for the royal palaces. With three decades of service to the crown, Le Brun’s indelible mark on the history of art is most evident at Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, where his grand, ebullient style is found everywhere in paintings that he made and the many objects and images produced after his designs by others.
Those of us who study the art of ancien régime France, especially that produced for aristocrats before the 1789 revolution, face the burden of reconciling a fascinating, beautiful world with its terrible politics. For some, this task proved to be impossible. The British art historian, Anthony Blunt, equated Charles Le Brun’s leading role in the design and production of Louis XIV’s palaces, gardens, monuments and all that they contained with the top-down tyrannical structure of absolutist government, branding him “a dictator of the arts in France”. Blunt’s statement provides the opening gambit for the introduction to Burchard’s book, The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV, about one of France’s most celebrated, if maligned, artists, whose contemporary influence and posthumous legacy he seeks to redefine through the concept of sovereignty.
The author presents Le Brun as a benevolent (albeit ferociously ambitious) sovereign of the arts. In Early Modern Europe sovereign power was thought, at best, to be a form of non-arbitrary authority, whereby a ruler governed as a father to the people by a strict moral code, for the greater good. Le Brun, Burchard argues, was not a tyrannical dictator, but __more a patriarch among the community of artists who served the Sun King; his control was not arbitrary, but based on mutual respect between him and the artists and artisans he supervised.
Revealing how Le Brun’s authority conforms to the contemporary political structures of Louis XIV’s France, this study is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature re-evaluating the artist’s oeuvre. (The catalogue for the impressive Le Brun exhibition staged at Louvre-Lens in 2016 being foremost among these.) Indeed, Burchard’s book comes at an exciting time for the study of 17th- and 18th-century French art, with scholars today providing nuanced and sympathetic accounts of the period, moving past the political and theoretical burdens of previous generations.
Le Brun is, perhaps, best remembered for two things: his ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles that narrates events from the life of Louis XIV, and his lectures on physiognomy and the expression of the passions, neither of which feature prominently in this book. The latter was the subject of Jennifer Montagu’s work, The Expression of the Passions (1994), the only serious monographic study on the artist to be published in English until now. And while it would have been interesting for Burchard to bring his considerable insight into Le Brun’s oeuvre to an analysis of his cycle for the Hall of Mirrors, it would be impossible to cover all that the artist designed, and advised on, throughout his career in one book. This study concentrates on the lesser-known aspects of his oeuvre, particularly his designs for decorative arts and architecture, while synthesising the __more comprehensive French and German literature for an anglophone audience.
Six chapters guide the reader through Le Brun’s sphere of influence, from the works executed by his own hand, to a multitude of objects made under his supervision that can be attributed through the repetition of motifs that he designed when other evidence is lacking. The most fascinating works discussed in this study no longer exist, or were never fully realised: a celebrated equestrian portrait of Louis XIV; an obelisk fountain for the precinct of the Louvre’s east facade; an unfinished commission for 93 Savonnerie carpets for the Louvre; and the celebrated Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles. The last chapter devoted to the staircase draws together Burchard’s insightful analyses of the diverse painted, built and woven monuments to Louis XIV’s reign to reassemble the fragments of Le Brun’s designs and influence into more complete account of his practice.
Burchard’s most fascinating insight, however, is his analogy between Le Brun’s designs and frontispieces for Early Modern books. The analogy is structural as much as symbolic: the lost equestrian portrait of Louis XIV reappears in a frontispiece for a philosophical treatise; Le Brun’s designs for the facade and fountain for the Louvre function as a frontispiece to the palace; the Savonnerie carpet for the Salon Carré serves as a frontispiece for the grande galerie of the Louvre; the Ambassadors’ Staircase at Versailles “was a three-dimensional frontispiece advertising the grandeur of the spaces that lay behind”. The frontispiece to a book refers to both its subject and its author in images and inscriptions, just as Le Brun’s designs both celebrate his patron and simultaneously reveal his authorship. This insightful analogy forms a thread that not only connects the chapters of this book, but provides a coherent characterisation of the artist’s approach to representing Louis XIV across media.
• Robert Wellington is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University in Canberra. His research focuses on the material and intellectual culture of Louis XIV’s court. His book Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV was published by Ashgate (2015)
The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV Wolf Burchard Paul Holberton Publishing, 288pp, £40 (hb)
The US artist and architect Vito Acconci, known for his radical conceptual works such as Seedbed (1972), has died age 77. The Bronx-born artist turned poet and architect, who is considered a Body Art trailblazer, arguably paved the way for a later generation of artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy.
Acconci received his BA with a major in literature from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1962. After publishing a magazine called 0 to 9 from 1967 to 1969, he turned to photography, documenting passers-by that he followed on the street for the work Following Piece (1969). The work explores “his body’s occupancy of public space through the execution of preconceived actions or activities”, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which owns photographs from the series. For Seedbed, he spent hours masturbating beneath a ramp at the Sonnabend gallery in New York while whispering aloud his fantasies about visitors.
Vito Acconci, Step Piece (1970). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
From the late 1970s, he began making experimental sculptures, furniture and public art pieces, including Birth of the Car/Birth of the Boat (1988) located in Pittsburgh, Name Calling Chair (1990) and Flying Floors at Philadelphia International Airport which was unveiled in 1988. The same year, he established his own architecture practice, Acconci Studio, which is based in Brooklyn.
Last year, MoMA PS1 in New York presented a survey of Acconci’s works of the 1960s and 1970s, exploring the artist’s early poetry, sound and video pieces. The show—Vito Acconci: Where we are now (Who are we anyway?) 1976—included the Super 8 film Shadow Play (1970) in which Acconci shadowboxed in front of a blinding light, and the film Openings (1970) which showed the artist pulling out his body hair. Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, told The New York Times last year: “He’s challenging our limits about what we want to be private and what we want to be public, and those questions have only become __more important.”
Installation view of Vito Acconci's show at MoMA PS1. PS1, 2016. Image courtesy of Acconci Studio and MoMA PS1. Photo by Pete Deevakul.
Acconci talked to The Art Newspaper in 2002 when he reflected on his early career. The artist said: “After college, I went to a writing school at the University of Iowa. After that, I came back to New York in 1964 and that was the first time I realised art galleries existed. That was when I saw a Jasper Johns painting for the first time… Jasper Johns was the big influence, the notion of how to make abstraction possible using convention first, use a flag, use a number 5, as long as you have that you can make any impression you like, as long as you have the given. It so shaped the way I thought, it made me recognise conventions, that there’s no such thing as ‘creation’ just organisation and re-organisation, dis-organisation.”
Asked whether he thought he should subsequently make art, he said: “I thought I had no desire to make art. But I realised when I was writing I was using the page as something to travel over and that if I was so interested in moving across this space I should move over a floor, over a street, a ground. But also by 1967, phrases like ‘conceptual art’ were first being used. If conceptual art hadn’t been around there wouldn’t have been any place for me. Entrance is only possible at certain times and in certain contexts. I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t build but once someone said conceptual art I thought maybe I can do that, I have ideas, there’s a place for me.”
The Art Fund’s Museum of the Year shortlist has been announced with the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham; the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, Newmarket; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London; Tate Modern, London; and the Hepworth Wakefield nominated for the £100,000 prize. For the first time, the other shortlisted museums will also receive £10,000 each.
The winning museum will be announced 5 July at the British Museum in London. The judging panel includes high-profile names from the culture sector such as Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum; Munira Mirza, former deputy mayor of London for education and culture; and the artist Richard Deacon. Jo Whiley, the BBC Radio 2 DJ and presenter, is also on the panel.
Tate Modern opened its Herzog & de Meuron-designed Switch House extension last June, drawing 143,000 visitors in its first three days. Meanwhile, Hepworth Wakefield launched an ambitious programme last year to mark its fifth anniversary, with shows dedicated to Martin Parr and Stanley Spencer, as well as hosting the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Last autumn, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London completed a seven-year, £7m project to reinstate its founder’s original design.
The least well known nominees include the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing & Sporting Art, described by The Art Fund as a “cultural hub in the heart of Newmarket which combines the history, science, art and culture of horseracing with the finest examples of British sporting art, together with an opportunity for visitors to meet former racehorses in the restored stables and newly-built arena.”
The Lapworth Museum of Geology, part of the University of Birmingham, is another underdog. It reopened last June after a £2.7m redevelopment and is commended for bringing to life __more than 250,000 objects, ranging from fossils to volcanic rocks.
The Art Fund director Stephen Deuchar, says: “Whether unveiling new buildings, galleries, displays or public programmes, all the finalists have shown a real commitment to innovation and experimentation, offering fresh perspectives and news ways of seeing and understanding their collections.” Last year's winner was the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The musician and actress Janelle Monáe—who had a supporting role in this year’s Best Picture Academy Awards winner, Moonlight (and starred in category contender, Hidden Figures)—will help the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago) celebrate its 50th birthday this June. Monáe is due to perform at the museum’s MCA ArtEdge: 50 gala on Saturday, 3 June, which gives a sneak peek of the exhibition Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg (6 June-24 September), featuring sculptures, monumental paintings and illustrations from across the Japanese artist’s career. Pharrell Williams, the musician turned contemporary art collaborator, who has worked with Murakami, handpicked Monáe for the evening’s musical lineup. (And yes—octopus will be on the dinner menu.)
Dramatic images of St Petersburg’s ransacked Winter Palace after the Bolshevik Revolution are going on show in London for one weekend only. Calvert 22 Foundation, which supports contemporary art from Russia and Eastern Europe, is exhibiting around 20 photographs (enlarged reproductions of the original prints) from the archives of the State Hermitage Museum, which has occupied the Baroque former residence of the Russian tsars since October 1917. The partnership underpins a year-long season of events marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
The display traces the rapid evolution of the palace from the centre of celebrations for the ruling Romanov dynasty’s 300th anniversary in 1913 to a symbol of the destruction of the old regime. The still-new medium of photography captured the meeting of Russia’s moderate interim government in the library of Tsar Nicholas II after the February Revolution, the preparation of works of art for evacuation and the all-female battalion that defended the palace against Lenin’s Bolsheviks. A number of the prints only entered the Hermitage archives in the 1990s as a gift from the widow of the author P.F. Gubchevsky, who wrote the museum’s historic guidebook.
The Museum After the Revolution opens today (until Sunday 30 April) as a visual counterpoint to a conference of the same name co-organised by the foundation and the Hermitage (28-29 April). With a keynote address by the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, and panel discussions on topics such as the legacy of the imperial jeweller Carl Fabergé, Soviet museum policy in the 1920s and the collective silence around the Prague Spring in 1968, the event explores the impact of the Russian Revolution on museum collections across the former Soviet bloc.
The dealer and collector Virginia Dwan's 57th Street gallery in New York had already delivered several shocks—including my first encounter with Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, although Paula Cooper had shown them earlier—when I was sent there in 1971 to review a show of Carl Andre's sculpture as a novice contributor to Artforum.
That assignment made possible a critical and formative confrontation with a key question: what could make this—something so barren of expressive, communicative form or intent—art?
Andre's metal plate sculptures did not sit comfortably on the Dwan Gallery's carpeted floor, but that aesthetic dissonance heightened their rebarbative strangeness. By that encounter and a few others (such as with Richard Serra's debut at Leo Castelli's upper Manhattan warehouse space in 1968), I was imprinted in the manner that Harold Rosenberg had warned young critics about: thereafter, I would weigh all the new art I saw in relation to the formal rigour and philosophical ambition of Minimalism and Post-minimalism.
Dwan's gift in 2013 to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, of 250 works of Modern and contemporary art has now occasioned the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959-71, which is on now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma). But the survey show—which first opened at the National Gallery last September and is organised by James Meyer—seems timely for other reasons also.
It comes at a moment when American and European art dealers wonder openly whether the old business model of retail exhibition space still makes sense in a global market transfigured by mushrooming art fairs and internet commerce.
On the one hand, Dwan is a precursor of the multi-venue gallery system that exists today with Gagosian, Pace, Marian Goodman and others. Dwan was one of the first to operate galleries concurrently in Los Angeles and New York. On the other hand, for visitors with memories of her exhibitions, she personifies the cultural leadership toward which, in the pre-internet age, a curious art public looked for direction on the most challenging and consequential new art of the day.
To Lacma visitors without memories of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Dwan Gallery survey will serve as a synopsis of the transitions from early installation and Pop art to Minimalism, Conceptual art and Earthworks.
Dwan bravely sponsored the work of the Los Angeles assemblagist and art impresario Edward Kienholz, whose grungy and humorous work Back Seat, Dodge '38 (1964)—a found and fabricated object tableau of backseat sex—will strike many who know its history as a marker of the puritan spirit of an earlier age. When it was first shown at Dwan's gallery, it sparked public and legal allegations of obscenity. Terms permitting its public display were finally negotiated after an onslaught of negative publicity.
Virginia Dwan at home in New York in 1969. (Photo: Roger Prigen, Courtesy Virginia Dwan Archive)
Walter De Maria's 35-Pole Lightning Field (1974). (Photograph by Helen Winkler-Fosdick)
The courage of Dwan's proprietorship shines no less brightly in her early championing of European artists __more than a world away from Los Angeles, such as Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Arman, each represented here by works of exemplary quality and spirit.
Early sculptures by Robert Smithson, such as the lapidary Glass Stratum (1967), have their own fascination here, as they did when Dwan first showed them in New York. But they faintly foreshadow the ambition of his Spiral Jetty (1970), the Earthwork he built on the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake thanks to Dwan's patronage.
The seldom-shown film that Smithson made to document—and, in his eccentric manner, account for—the Spiral Jetty plays continually in the exhibition. Those lucky enough to have known him will find his voice on the soundtrack and the helicopter views of his lank figure stumbling along the Jetty almost painfully moving.
Through scrim-covered windows in the Smithson gallery, visitors can glimpse Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass (2012), Lacma's permanent installation of a 340-ton boulder beneath which visitors can walk for a taste of stone in the sky. In 1969, Dwan sponsored Heizer's Double Negative, another defining project of Land Art. Into the facing walls of a canyon in the remote Nevada desert, the artist cut a slot and removed nearly a quarter million tons of earth to make the work.
Double Negative continues to ignite younger artists' imaginations, even though comparatively few people have visited the deliberately forbidding site. Just a week ago, I happened to see a 2014 looped video by the Oakland artist Marshall Elliott titled Improbable Irrigation (Double Negative). It shows an impulse sprinkler atop the ridge at one end of Heizer's piece absurdly and impudently watering the vast cavity below.
A group of large photographs speak to another of Dwan's greatest acts of patronage: the 35-pole "test field" in Arizona that Walter De Maria built as a precursor to his 400-part installation The Lightning Field (1977), one of the greatest works of art of the late-20th century.
Documentation of this summit of Land Art reminds me of Dwan's most powerful New York show: her 1969 presentation of De Maria's Beds of Spikes—pieces so potentially injurious to clumsy viewers that one had to sign a liability release before entering the room.
Perhaps Lacma organisers found the presentation of Beds of Spikes impractical, or loan restrictions may have been prohibitive. But no work in the exhibition, and none other absent from it, better evokes the fire of Virginia Dwan's commitment to sharing the most powerful new art she could find.
The museum's presentation of the Dwan Gallery's history serves an obvious educational purpose. It is invaluable to students of the art and art history programmes in the Los Angeles region. It also serves notice to nostalgics and utopians alike that art's social and institutional history cannot be repeated. The moment betokened by Los Angeles to New York will never come again, but it may prove fundamental to a cultural future we almost dare not dream of.
Kenneth Baker retired in 2015 after 30 years as resident art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is an Art Newspaper correspondent based in San Francisco
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959-71, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, until 10 September
A furore has erupted at Tate after a notice was posted in the museum's staff rooms asking for voluntary contributions towards a leaving present for the director, Nicholas Serota, who steps down in June after 28 years in post. “We have thought long and hard about what to get, and decided to put money towards a sailing boat. Nick loves sailing, and this would be a lasting and very special reminder of the high regard which I know so many of us have for Nick and his contribution to Tate,” the appeal stated. Social media posts claimed staff were being asked to chip in for a “yacht” (prompting The Guardian to go overboard—pardon the pun—which reported that junior staff were incensed at the lavish parting prezzie). A Tate spokeswoman tells us that the idea for Serota’s gift came from the staff themselves who wanted to mark his years of service to Tate. “Contributions towards the purchase of a small dinghy, which the staff thought would be an original gift, are entirely voluntary,” she adds. Research undertaken on the dinghy market shows that prices vary wildly, ranging from £12.90 for an inflatable Sea River Pool rowing raft boat to a Honwave T35-AE2 model which goes for a whopping £819.99 (no danger then of a Serota super yacht upsetting local sailors off St Ives).
1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, until 7 May 1-54.com Just down the road from the fair, Red Hooks Labs (133-135 Imlay Street) is presenting an exhibition of works by the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. The show, The Eye of Modern Mali, is organised with 1:54 and the Parisian gallery MAGNIN-A and looks at the artist’s depictions of the people of Mali in the period just after independence in 1960. “Sidibé paved the way for a looser, __more candid style of photography decades before any kind of street photography,” says Touria El Glaoui, 1:54’s founding director. An earlier iteration of the show was presented at 1:54 in London last October.
Art New York and Context Pier 94, 55th Street and 12th Avenue, until 7 May artnyfair.com and contextnyfair.com To mark the 30th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s death, the Alfstad & Contemporary gallery is presenting photographs taken by Christophe von Hohenberg of the artist’s memorial service in New York in 1987. Among the guests that day were Tom Wolfe, Keith Haring and Yoko Ono. “It marked the end of era,” says the gallery’s founder, Sam Alfstad. Meanwhile, Pablo Helguera (a contributor to The Art Newspaper) is presenting a project from which all profits will go to various charitable organisations. “The artwork is nothing but a certificate of what that cause [that the funds go to] is”, he says. The work is titled All Proceeds.
Collective Design Fair 550 Washington Street, until 7 May collectivedesignfair.com The landscape architect Brook Klausing has designed an indoor garden as a respite from the fair. The space, built in part of timber salvaged from the Rockaway boardwalk after Hurricane Sandy, includes planters with flowering perennials and trellising ivy. “The overall feeling is stolen from the storyboard of the set designer that created Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,” Klausing says, noting that he aims for simplicity that nevertheless commands attention.
Fridge 603 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, until 6 May fridgeartfair.com The scrappy Fridge art fair returns this year in a new venue—the Branded Saloon, a bar in the Prospect Heights area of Brooklyn. This year’s theme is Love and Torture, which the fair organisers landed on after trying to come up with an idea that captured the moment. Initially, love alone was to be the focus, but “we managed to start torturing ourselves over politics again and, half-kidding, I said, ‘OK, it’s got to be Love and Torture’”, says Linda DiGusta, Fridge’s curator. A pop-up section of the fair will take place at the nearby Nu Hotel on Smith Street.
Salon Zürcher Africa 33 Bleecker Street, until 7 May galeriezurcher.com The 19th edition of this mini-fair is also the second edition of Salon Zürcher Africa. Five galleries from New York, Paris, Nairobi and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia will present works by artists including Malick Sidibé, Nelson Makamo and Onyis Martin. Portraiture is a key theme, says the dealer Sitor Senghor, whose eponymous Parisian gallery will be included in the fair. Although each exhibitor will have his or her own presentation, Senghor says each will focus on work that focuses on “personhood” and “the importance of being real and alive”.
Spring/Break Bklyn Immersive 300 Flatbush Avenue Extension, 7-14 May springbreakartshow.com Large-scale work is the focus of the first edition of Spring Break Brooklyn, an offshoot of the Spring Break fair founded in 2009 by Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly. “We’re deliberately shifting from our typical model of the ‘art fair’ with [a] focus on immersive environments created with site-specific installations,” Gori says. Around a dozen artists, including Jason Peters, Grace Villamil and Melissa Godoy-Nieto will be included in a ground-floor space in downtown Brooklyn. “The goal remains the same,” Gori says: “activating non-traditional art spaces and providing a free exhibition platform to curators and artists.”
Superfine! New York 459 West 14th Street, until 7 May superfine.world Twenty-three galleries plus 27 artists representing themselves will show work at the Superfine fair, which focuses on art priced at $1,000-$10,000. Affordability is a point of pride for the organisers and each exhibitor will show at least one work priced at less than $1,000. This allows an opening for artists representing themselves. “There’s also obviously a bigger risk as they have to cover rent, fair exhibition fees, and all other costs of owning a business, but the benefit is that, if they market their work and the gallery correctly, they’ll keep all of the take from work that is sold,” the fair’s founder and director, Alex Mitow.
Portal Art Fair 435 Broome Street, 3-8 May 4heads.org/portal-2016 Thirty artists are included in the second edition of the Portal art fair, which this year takes place in a 2,000 sq. ft space in SoHo. Artists range in style, from representational painters to photographers and sculptors. What brings the fair together, says one of the its co-founders, Antony Zito, is an emphasis on "how location, architecture, and context changes the experience of art and changes the way artists approach" their work. Among those included in the show are the Iranian-American painter Zahra Nazari and the New York-based German photographer Martina Kaendler.
Anish Kapoor: Descension Public Art Fund, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1 Until 10 September To celebrate the non-profit public art organisation’s 40th anniversary, the Indian-born British artist has brought a work from his 2015 solo show at the Palace of Versailles to New York: a 26-ft- diameter pool of spiralling dark liquid that will be installed next to the East River. The “continuously swirling mass converges in a central vortex, as if being sucked endlessly into the earth’s depths, generating physical, cultural and even political resonances”, says Nicholas Baume, the director of the Public Art Fund. “The work grows out of Kapoor’s longstanding interest in the potential of water as a sculptural medium.”
IA still from Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015-16). Courtesy MoMA PS1
Ian Cheng: Emissaries MoMA PS1 Until 25 September In his first solo museum presentation in the US, the American artist shows the entire series of his Emissary Trilogy (2015-17)—complex live computer simulations that he describes as “a video game that plays itself”, which the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently bought. The works are shown via 10 ft-tall projections that form an immersive environment in the gallery space, allowing viewers to follow and intervene with the narrative of characters and wildlife, navigating situations such as natural disasters and elections. Throughout the exhibition, the installations will be streamed live online via Twitch, a social media platform for gamers.
Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi, Life is Cheap Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Until 5 July As part of the biennial art prize—in addition to the $100,000—Yi is showing an installation that includes olfactory art, a long-held interest. In this case, the central scent, named Immigrant Caucus, is based on chemical compounds drawn from Asian American women and carpenter ants. “Hopefully the installation inspires a wide and unpredictable range of responses, but one thing I think visitors might turn over in their minds after seeing the show is the way sensory perception is powerfully influenced by cultural forces and assumptions, rather than being purely biological in nature,” says the show’s curator, Katherine Brinson.
Lygia Pape: a Multitude of Forms The Met Breuer Until 23 July Originally making pristine, if relatively rigid, geometric abstractions, the late artist—now one of the most important figures in Brazilian Modern art—reached artistic maturity under Brazil’s military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985. About halfway through the show, Pape’s first career survey in the US, viewers encounter a projected video of a vast white cloth cut with holes from which dozens of smiling faces poke through. Titled Divisor (Divider), this participatory work, first staged in 1968 in Rio de Janeiro, is an encapsulation of some of Brazilian Neo-Concretism’s main claims and ambitions: to make the activation of space a political metaphor.
Local police find fruit with spells (2017) by the artists GCC, at the Whitney Museum. Courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; and Project Native Informant, London; photo Bill Orcutt, courtesy Whitney Museum
2017 Whitney Biennial Whitney Museum of American Art Until 11 June Tension, upheaval, uncertainty, disorientation: do these themes sound familiar? They are the persistent refrain of many recent biennials because they are the persistent problems of our time. The 2017 Whitney Biennial is the largest ever edition in terms of square footage, occupying around two-thirds of the museum’s exhibition space and featuring 63 artists based in the US, irrespective of original nationality. It maintains the general insistence on disorder but the tone is milder, both conceptually and formally. A wall text at the museum says the biennial “arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarising politics,” which is true, but the sense of alarm seems sometimes like an afterthought.
Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: the Art of the In-Between Metropolitan Museum of Art Until 4 September The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition celebrates the Japanese avant-garde designer of the fashion house Comme des Garçons, only the second living designer to have a monographic exhibition at the museum since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983. Comprising around 150 womenswear designs dating from the house’s debut in the early 1980s to the most recent collection, the show explores previously undisclosed elements of the designer’s career (Kawakubo rarely gives interviews or discusses the concept of her collections). “Although she still rejects the label of artist for herself, preferring the epithet ‘clothes maker’, she’s begun to consider fashion as art,” says the curator Andrew Bolton, who collaborated with the designer in organising the show.
Louise Lawler: Why Pictures Now Museum of Modern Art Until 30 July Lawler presents 40 years’ worth of her work, including the project Birdcalls (1972-81), in which she chirps the names of male artists. Also on show are “adjusted to fit” pictures, edited examples of earlier works altered for specific locations. “In 2017, at a moment when the subject of truth and fake news came to the forefront of national discourse, the artist tweaked her ‘adjusted to fit’ images by adding a twisting or twirling dimension to certain works, further distorting them as a reaction to the concept of ‘alternative facts’,” says the show’s curator Roxana Marcoci.
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 Brooklyn Museum Until 17 September The exhibition features works by __more than 40 black female artists concerned with socio-political issues. One highlight of the show is a poster for the 1972 exhibition Cookin’ & Smokin’ at the Nyumba Ya Sanaa Gallery in Harlem. The space was run by the Weusi art collective, which was conceived as a ‘brotherhood’ of mostly black men. The collaboration “was indicative of the women’s close relationship with their male counterparts in the Black Arts Movement, in contrast to the distant relationship with their white female counterparts in the mainstream feminist movement”, says Rujeko Hockley, who co-organised the show.
A citizens' rally, Culture against the Front National, is taking place this evening, 2 May, at the Philharmonie de Paris in protest against Marine Le Pen's presidential bid.
Orlan, one of the artists attending the rally, has made an anti-Le Pen declaration calling on people to vote for the centrist Emmanuel Macron. “Let's barricade Le Pen who makes references to tradition, although there are nice and festive traditions,” Orlan says.
Accusing Le Pen of being against freedom of expression, she says: “Freedom is needed by all of us and for artists working on the representation of the body and with the body, we absolutely need freedom of expression, without which we cannot make any work. Le Pen would like to prevent us from showing the body, sex and our sexuality even though we are all made alike.”
Orlan refers to her own work, La Liberté en Ecorchée (Flayed Liberty, 2013), to highlight the need of ethnic tolerance. “La Liberté en Ecorchée is a self-portrait in 3D video but above all a manifesto artwork, this character is skinless. One can't see if the skin is white, black, yellow or read; racism cannot be inscribed.”
Although Le Pen has temporarily stepped down from presiding over the party in order to widen her appeal, her nationalistic programme remains harshly criticised by art professionals. According to the latest poll, Le Pen is expected to gain 41% of the votes, with Macron winning by 59%.
Some 60 organisations and associations—including the CFDT-Culture (the Ministry of Culture's union), AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and CIPAC (Federation of Contemporary Art Professionals)—are calling on people to vote against Le Pen on 7 May. The rally, aimed at highlighting cultural diversity and open-mindedness, will include artists' reactions and performances. “We cannot accept the banalisation of the Front National and its anti-democratic ideas of rejecting the other and an inward-looking attitude [...] that runs contrary to republican values,” reads a statement from the organisers.
“Voting against the Front National means voting for Macron because a blank vote would benefit the Front National,” says Raphael Cuir, the president of AICA France. “In the FN's 144 engagements, culture is reduced to heritage, to the 'promotion of the national novel', which translates as 'national propaganda',” adds Cuir, who fears that, “The FN in power would be the end of the freedom of expression and the Ministry of Culture's vital support in all forms of cultural and contemporary, artistic expression.”
A parallel event this evening at La Colonie, the arts space opened by the artist Kader Attia in Paris, is a programming of 100 anti-racism poems. “I believe that Marine Le Pen and culture is like radical Islamists and culture: hatred of freedom and difference,” says the French-Algerian artist.
George Osborne, the former chancellor, has said he is stepping down as an MP “for now” following his decision to take a job as editor of the Evening Standard and other lucrative roles outside the House of Commons.
After 24 hours of speculation about his future, he told the Standard he was quitting the Commons but hinted he would want to return to frontline politics in future.
“I am stepping down from the House of Commons – for now. But I will remain active in the debate about our country’s future and on the issues I care about, like the success of the northern powerhouse,” he said.
“I want a Britain that is free, open, diverse and works with other nations to defend our democratic values in the world. I will go on fighting for that Britain I love from the editor’s chair of a great newspaper. It’s still too early to be writing my memoirs.”
In perhaps the first sign that a man with no previous experience of journalism has much to learn in his new gig running the London daily, he gave his new team the scoop just a little too late for it to be published in anything other than a specially produced slip edition.
The veteran political editor Joe Murphy launched the exclusive with a tweet before lunch, but after the day’s paper had been printed.
Joe Murphy (@JoeMurphyLondon)
George Osborne reveals he will step down as MP at the election. Story on @EveningStandard online now
April 19, 2017
The outgoing editor, Sarah Sands, an old newspaper hand about to turn radio boss, quickly ordered an extra slip edition, seen by relatively few commuters on Wednesday.
Osborne’s decision to quit will be a relief for Theresa May, who sacked him as chancellor when she took over last July. Osborne had indicated he was prepared to fight from the backbenches against a hard Brexit taking the UK out of the single market.
He has been under pressure from some Conservative colleagues and the opposition to go since he was revealed as the surprise choice to edit the Standard. Labour raised concerns about the potential conflict of interest arising out of holding both the media role and his job as a Tory MP.
Some of his constituents also opposed the idea of having an MP who was also editing a London newspaper and performing four other roles, which collectively made him the highest-earning member of the Commons.
After becoming a backbencher, Osborne declared new employment paying £650,000 a year for one day’s work a week for the fund manager BlackRock. He has earned £800,000 for 15 speaking engagements in the last year, collects a £120,000 a year stipend from a US thinktank and has a book deal on top of the £75,000 MP’s salary. He will take up his editorship in mid-May.
Almost 200,000 people had signed a petition started by one of his constituents urging him to “pick a job”.
He had previously defended the decision to take on all the jobs, saying parliament would be “enhanced” by his experience of outside work.
Explaining his decision to stand down, Osborne told the Standard: “At the age of 45, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life just being an ex-chancellor. I want new challenges. I’m very excited about the opportunity to edit the Evening Standard. I’ve met the team there, and their energy and commitment to this great newspaper are positively infectious.”
He promised his editorship would give the public “straight facts and informed opinion to help them to make the big decisions Britain now faces about the kind of country we want to be. That starts with the coverage of this general election.”
Hatred of dissent, it seems, is the new normal in British politics. “Crush the saboteurs,” screamed the Daily Mail, announcing Theresa May’s calling of a snap election. “Crush pro-EU saboteurs, PM,” advised the Sun for good measure. But what exactly are saboteurs and how should we crush them?
Surprisingly, the language of hard-Brexit Tory supporters is now that of the Russian Revolution. In 1918, the Bolsheviks dissolved Russia’s democractically elected constituent assembly on the grounds that it was a front for the bourgeois counter-revolution. “All power to the Soviets!” Lenin declared. “We shall crush the saboteurs.” For a while, it had seemed as though neo-Soviet rhetoric was the preserve of squabbling factions within the Labour party, with both Corbyn and his opponents accused of organising “purges”. But since three judges defending the rights of the British people were denounced in the rightwing press last autumn as “enemies of the people”, it appears to have become the de facto mode of political argument on left and right. Supporters of the two main parties are complicit in creating an ambient political atmosphere of paranoid permanent revolution. (Rather sweetly, the Mail devoted pages two and three on 19 April to a Soviet-style heroic-agriculture tribute to a British farmer who insists on ploughing his field with horses, which is just as well, since he probably won’t be able to afford a tractor, post-Brexit.)
The political saboteurs Lenin complained of were alleged conspirators, working behind the scenes to ruin his virtuous plans, but the word actually originates in the language of industrial disputes. “Saboteur” and “sabotage” are of French origin, and a popular etymology relates them to “sabots”, the wooden clogs that Luddite workers supposedly threw into machines to break them. Whether or not that is true, the verb “saboter”, meaning to deliberately mess something up, came to be used in the late 19th century by anarchist thinkers, and “sabotage” appeared in English in 1910 to describe the destructive actions of French railway strikers.
The word’s origins in the struggle between workers and capital, then, makes it an appropriate term for enemies of the modern Conservative party in particular. (Home counties Tories, of course, are especially likely to disdain people thus characterised, given their historic battles with “hunt saboteurs”.) And it is no doubt thrilling for well-lunched tabloid editors to dream of “crushing” people they wouldn’t dare pick a physical fight with in person. But Theresa May did not call anyone a saboteur, so perhaps this is all just an unfortunate case of macho projection.
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Yet May’s speech announcing the election was, paradoxically, profoundly anti-democratic. “At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead there is division,” she complained. “The country is coming together, but Westminster is not.” This rather charmingly combined a totally made-up fact (the country is coming together) with a bizarre whine that parliamentary democracy is functioning as it should. Any persistent total unity in an elected assembly, after all, would signal that it had been hijacked by a fascist. If there were no “division” in Westminster, we would find ourselves in a de facto one-party state, in which the wisdom of the dear leader is all – a vision of “strong leadership” at which Vladimir Putin would nod sagely.
May’s contempt for the democratic functioning of government neatly mirrors Lenin’s own nearly a century ago, when he asserted that the workers’ councils were better than any democratically elected body: “The Soviets, being revolutionary organisations of all the people, of course became immeasurably superior to all the parliaments in the world.”
In Theresa May’s implicit view, too, superior to all the parliaments in the world would be a British establishment that offered zero obstacles to her “getting on with the job” of delivering what she considers best for the British people (whatever that turns out to be, since apparently no one needs to know right now). In May’s habitual way of phrasing things, the normal workings of parliament – in which MPs and members of the Lords may disagree with a government’s plans – are nothing but “playing politics” or “political game-playing” which must not be allowed to continue lest it cause “damaging uncertainty and instability”. To cast disagreement as game-playing is to characterise dissent as fundamentally unserious, and to bring the very idea of politics into disrepute.
And so, despite her disavowal of the term, the tabloid characterisation of May’s plan as one of crushing the “saboteurs” does not seem inaccurate. Indeed, the recent finale of the TV drama Homeland, which saw the newly elected president Elizabeth Keane holed up in the Oval Office ordering arrests of senators and congressmen, now looks as relevant to British as to American politics. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are a paranoid aspiring autocrat, everyone is a potential saboteur.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith invents the heroic historical figure Comrade Ogilvy, who had “no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally”. Theresa May’s world, too, seems to have shrunk to one in which the greatest enemies are the enemies within and democracy must be democratically eliminated for the good of the people.
As a season ticket-holding Evertonian, born and bred in Liverpool, I read with particular interest the article about the Sun’s latest outrage (Kelvin MacKenzie suspended by Sun over racism row, 15 April). It is shocking to me that ignorance of Ross Barkley’s racial heritage is presented as some sort of extenuation. Are we to assume that likening a supremely gifted working-class man to a gorilla would be acceptable in the absence of a Nigerian grandfather? I deplore racism, but I equally deplore the pillorying of the working class which Evertonians endure at so many matches, where we are invited by opposing supporters to “eat rats in [our] council flats” among other class-based insults, reflecting the ugly anti-working-class rhetoric of the likes of MacKenzie. Maggie Patel Warley, West Midlands
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The sun is out, as forecast, and the workmen I booked, here to inspect and mend the water pipes, are working well. Everything this morning is happening as expected so things, really, ought to be fine.
But the papers, as usual, have plenty of gloom. The Daily Mirror deplores the fact that “rape boys [are] in the same class as victims”; there’s a picture of the bombed subway in St Petersburg where 13 people were killed; and one of a Muslim woman who felt forced to take off her hijab in order to get a job. In the Times there’s a less than cheerful tale of a murdered family who had kindly given shelter to a homeless man. Depressingly, we are told, too, that “ministers have abandoned a plan to help struggling families”.
Are we meant to read all this and feel like giving up? Or get cross with newspaper editors for presenting such a picture of doom? Of course, the papers don’t have only gloomy tales, but it is arguable that such items can actually make our own lives seem good by contrast.
Perhaps it’s only when we realise there are awful things going on in the rest of the world that we think of ourselves as pretty lucky after all – and can stop worrying about the petty things that otherwise bog us down. Does it really matter that I can’t find my keys for the umpteenth time today when children in Syria are dying because of a suspected chemical attack?
When we read about some of the terrible things some people do to others, it can help us to realise that the people we deal with day by day in our own lives are not, after all, any worse than others, indeed they may even be a whole lot better. Whatever we have to cope with, we can rest assured it is not the worst thing that anyone had to face.
Elections are won and lost in the newsbreaks between songs on the radio. BBC Radio 2 alone attracts a greater number of weekly listeners than the number of those who voted Conservative at the last general election.
But what appears in newsbreaks is driven by what news producers read at morning conference, which is driven by the day’s papers, which in Britain overwhelmingly tilt to the right. Theresa May can rely on her allies in the rightwing press – the Telegraph, Express, Sun and Mail, with whose readers she has an instinctive and deep sympathy – to largely repeat what she says, which then finds its way from news pages to TV and radio.
Downing Street plans a campaign designed to produce good clips for the six o’clock news and soundbites for radio, as well as plenty of pictures and the odd interview, mostly chosen with the expectation that they will give the prime minister an easy ride.
That dynamic is already at work, even though the campaign is only days old. May claims that the election is being held because the opposition parties could block the Brexit deal.
The truth, though, is that May’s problem isn’t Brexit: it’s everything else. Her flagship education reform – the introduction of grammar schools – cannot get past the Cameroon tendency in the Commons and is dead on arrival in the Lords, as she has no manifesto pledge to protect it. The row over the budget shows that even a tax rise that is popular in the country cannot overcome the objections of the Tory right. On almost every issue of substance, there is a disgruntled Conservative faction that is larger than May’s Commons majority. On Brexit, however, she can count not only on her own party, but on the Northern Irish Unionists.
Labour, led by a Eurosceptic who has voted against every important European treaty to come before the Commons, who is opposed internally by backbenchers who fear that frustrating the referendum result will cost them their seats, has neither the ability or the inclination to stop Brexit. The Liberal Democrats may have the inclination, but with only nine MPs they do not have the ability. If anyone threatens Brexit, it is May, with an early election that could herald a Remain fightback.
But that won’t be what you read in the rightwing press, who all reliably parroted the May line. On this occasion, the Mail went too far even for May, for a change, describing the contest as an opportuntity to “crush the saboteurs”.
Labour hopes to circumnavigate the print press through the use of social media, where the party can tailor its message to fit the desires of each voter group, thanks to Facebook and the vast stores of data the company has on all its users. Broadcast laws compel both sides to be given equal airtime, so at least Corbyn will have his moment in the sun. However, the commitment to balance also helps the right. As far as the bulk of economists are concerned, the merits of the Conservative approach to deficit reduction are not a matter of debate – they simply don’t work. But on the airwaves, Philip Hammond and John McDonnell’s plans will be discussed as if they were of equal worth and weight.
That false equivalence, however, is a better ride than Corbynism will get in most of the papers, which also won’t hesitate to magnify and disseminate whatever skeletons the Conservative attack team have found in Corbyn’s cupboard. But there is one arena in which they will not be as gentle as May would like: her objective to use the election to slough off the commitments that David Cameron made in haste to see off Ed Miliband.
Downing Street’s desire to free itself of George Osborne’s commitment not to increase income tax, national insurance or valued added tax is good economic sense, but it offends the interests of conservative media bosses. The continuation of the triple lock on pensions is an expensive bribe that is no longer needed thanks to the party’s mammoth lead among retired people. Just as with elections, with regard to Britain’s ageing population, the rightwing media relies on the custom of elderly people to stay afloat, and will be forced to campaign, at least a little, in its readers’ interests.
And the interests of newspaper readers and owners will combine to mean that even May’s loudest allies will find cause to dissent from time to time. The business of newspapers is news, after all. Even as the rightwing press amplify May’s message, they will be keen to present Labour as a party capable of winning and wielding power. In that sense, if no other, they will be a greater ally for Labour and the Lib Dems than many suppose.
Like most serious political reporters, Olivier Faye, of Le Monde, professes little desire to please the people he writes about, and even less expectation that he will. This equanimity has been of particular use in his current assignment covering the Front National, the clannish party of the French far-right, which has been warring with the news media for four decades. Faye and the other reporters assigned to the FN make light of the hostility aimed their way by the party and its supporters, and have adopted some of the cleverest insults as their own. They call one another journalopes, for instance – a mashup of journaliste and salope (whore) – or members of the merdia.
The Front National has fashioned itself as the “patriotic” victim of a bankrupt political establishment and the corps of bourgeois journalists allegedly beholden to it. Marine Le Pen, the FN’s vituperative leader, often refers to her opponents as “the media-political system” or, __more succinctly, la caste. This tactic of populist martyrdom is a sort of trap, one that lures the media into the stance of an adversary, called to defend both themselves and a frequently indefensible political class. For years the French press plunged into it with what, in hindsight, appears a heedless and self-righteous sense of mission. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there were media boycotts of various sorts against the party; yet it only rose in the polls, citing the media’s hostility as evidence of both the conspiracy against it and the potency of the truth it was preaching.
Faye, 29, with ruddy cheeks and modish round glasses, conducts himself with a friendly but slightly fervent air that is common among French political reporters, who constitute an informal elite within French journalism. He fits a longstanding type, but neither he nor his colleagues endorse the old condemnatory approach to the FN. “There’s no attitude that’s __more counterproductive, I don’t think,” he said. “Today people don’t want to be held by the hand, to have someone tell them, ‘Watch out, these are bad guys! I, I the great knower, I’m going to tell you what you should do.’” At Le Monde, the conviction is now that “you have to treat this party like any other,” Faye said, “even though it’s not a party like any other.”
It is fair to say this maxim represents a victory for Le Pen. Upon succeeding her father, Jean-Marie, as the FN’s leader, in 2011, she began a strategy of dédiabolisation, or de-demonisation, a broad effort to soften the party’s image and normalise its portrayal in the press. The following year, she won 17.9% of the popular vote in the first round of the presidential election, the FN’s best-ever result. This year, she is expected to take more than 20% and thus qualify for the final runoff. The words Front National appear nowhere in her campaign propaganda.
Dédiabolisation is almost entirely a matter of appearances – the party platform has undergone hardly any revision – and Le Pen and her lieutenants thus scrutinise their press coverage with particular intensity. She is known to call editors to complain, though with Le Monde she tends to call Faye directly. She once left him a voice message admonishing him that she had not “dressed down” a party official, as he had contended in an article, but had quite simply expressed her disagreement. “I see the games haven’t changed, it’s a shame,” she said, affecting a tone of weary exasperation. “Call me back if you think” – she paused, as if summoning her acid – “you’ve behaved in good faith. Au revoir!”
In early September, Faye and four of his editors invited Le Pen to an off-the-record lunch to discuss the upcoming campaign. Such lunches have long been common for French journalists and politicians, though only more recently for the FN. They met at an upscale Danish restaurant on the Champs-Élysées. Faye and his editors were seated at the far end of an enclosed terrace. Le Pen, an imposing woman with platinum blond hair and an ashen scowl, arrived with her bodyguards, who waited at the door, and her longtime media advisor, a bemused and friendly man named Alain Vizier. Le Pen sat facing Faye; Vizier sat at his side.
Le Monde, an afternoon paper widely held to be the country’s publication of record, is the object of particular resentment for many at the Front National; they scorn it as an emblem of the “system”, but seem to crave its approbation nonetheless. After a brief round of pleasantries, and before the journalists had had the chance to begin on their questions, Vizier placed a stack of printouts on the table. Le Pen looked at Faye. “I’ve printed out the last 20 articles you wrote,” she said, as Faye recalled it. “There’s one that talks about real issues, and 19 that have nothing to do with politics.”
She had underlined, in red ink, various words of which she did not approve. “You have a nice little tone of disdain, of condescension,” Le Pen said, her voice rising to the low, imperious bark that is her standard register for interactions with the media. “A little ironic tone that I don’t like.” Surrounding conversations grew hushed; diners seemed to cease chewing, and stare. Le Pen took particular exception to an article about the Front National’s highly publicised recruitment of elite civil servants, after years of attacking them as the embodiment of a blinkered governing class. The article began: “Most political parties cart about their share of contradictions, and the Front National is no exception. Marine Le Pen, who presents herself as the megaphone of the ‘people’ and a paragon of ‘common sense’, ceaselessly denounces ‘the consanguinity and collusion of the elites’, who ‘no longer defend the common good’.”
Le Pen did not like the use of the word “paragon.” She leaned back on the banquette and drew on an electronic cigarette, and left Faye to defend himself. (“Sometimes I use irony,” Faye acknowledged later. “It’s a way of marking a bit of distance, it’s true.” After the lunch, he learned that the stack of articles and the “19 out of 20” accusation form a set piece that Le Pen has used more than once.)
Le Pen went on for about 30 minutes. “She gave us a whole speech about how we were her enemies, because she knew we were going to call for people to vote against her,” recalled Caroline Monnot, Le Monde’s top political editor. “And I told her, ‘Yes, we’re undoubtedly going to call for people to vote against you, probably, but that’s not a big discovery for you.’”
Le Pen’s purpose, it became clear, was to convince Le Monde to publish an op-ed she had written, and she threatened to restrict the paper’s ability to cover her campaign if it did not agree. “That’s where things are screwed up with them,” Monnot said. “That’s just not how it works. It’s not, ‘Up until now I was a pariah, now I’m going to be able to set my own conditions.’ We don’t let anyone set their own conditions.”
Though it sets out to cover the the Front National like any other party, Le Monde does maintain a rule that is particular to the FN. It remains the paper’s policy – like that of various other publications – to refuse to publish op-eds written by FN officials. “The problem we have, honestly, is that if we open the door to taking her op-eds, then we’re helping her put the finishing touches to her banalisation,” Monnot said, “and we don’t want to be in that position.” To refuse on principle is also an imperfect solution, however, accrediting as it does the party’s claim to ostracism and victimhood at the hands of an unaccountable elite – themes that remain the central feature of the party’s politics.
“There’s a pretty perverse and complicated game you have to play with them,” Monnot said. “They’re constantly trying to drag us into this system versus anti-system confrontation. Which we have to constantly avoid getting trapped in.” She offered a metaphor for Le Pen. “There’s a theatre play, and she absolutely wants us to act in this play with her,” she said. “And how do you go about not acting in it?” Once the media have been pulled on stage, whatever they do is part of the show, whether they like it or not.
Marine Le Pen addresses journalists at a horse fair in Villepinte, north of Paris, December 2016. Photograph: Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images
All politics is storytelling, and all responsible political journalism attempts to account for this, or at least make it plain. Le Pen and her party have long sought to tell a story about the media themselves. This places the journalist in the difficult position of being at once subject and object: they can no longer perform their duties from behind the comfortable myth of neutrality; they are called to speak about themselves, account for their work. And if they are honest, they will be obliged to acknowledge the possibility of contradictions and flaws. Le Pen has intuited this weakness, and understands how to exploit it. If she cannot have what she wants from the media, then, she knows she can at least have her way with it.
She did not dwell upon the rejected op-ed, but rather turned to the slab of raw salmon that had been placed before her, and began to answer questions, pleasantly now. “She’s a politician,” Faye said. Later in the afternoon, Vizier, Le Pen’s media advisor, sent him a playful text message: “Thank you Olivier for that ‘most lively’ lunch!”
Marine Le Pen was four years old in 1972, the year her father, Jean-Marie, a truculent blond bruiser with a penchant for sinister witticisms, was made president of the newly created Front National pour l’Unité Française. The Front National – anti-communist, anti-Gaullist, anti-finance, anti-tax, anti-immigrant, anti-Europe – was peopled by radical Catholics, monarchists, Vichy apologists, colonial nostalgics, neo-fascists and other marginal reactionaries. For the first decade of its existence, it distinguished itself mostly by its insignificance. Jean-Marie won 0.74% of the vote in the presidential election of 1974.
He understood that if the Front National was to grow, it would require exposure in the press, positive or not. In 1982, though the party had won no elections of any note and counted only a few thousand registered members, he wrote to president François Mitterrand to complain that the media was denying him attention. Calculating that any rise in Le Pen’s fortunes would mean a corresponding fall in those of the parties of the traditional right, Mitterrand, a Socialist, directed the country’s three state television channels to give the FN more airtime.
Le Pen made his first major television appearance in 1984, and immediately established himself as a showman of national stature. He had been invited to appear on l’Heure de Vérité (The Hour of Truth), a political programme that, in that era of relative trust in politics and limited television entertainment, drew millions upon millions of viewers. The invitation had been highly controversial; demonstrators and riot police massed outside the studio.
The show began with the host lecturing Le Pen briefly. Though he was “a marginal of the political realm”, the host said, Le Pen was nonetheless “part of the reality of French society”. “This is a fact, and it’s why I’ve invited you this evening,” he said. “This invitation, as you know, is not to everyone’s liking.” Le Pen grinned, before seeming to remember the camera and nodding solemnly. Marine Le Pen, then 15, dressed in capri pants and heels, watched from the front row of the audience.
One of the show’s interviewers, a particularly svelte and haughty man in a grey suit and tie, had come armed with several quotations of dubious taste, attributed to Le Pen or his associates over the years, and asked Le Pen to comment upon them, one by one, in the manner of a prosecutor questioning a witness. One comment, attributed to Le Pen: “When I see the Arabs, with their rumpled look, I wonder if there’s not some biological determinism at work.” In the formal diction he has long employed, and which lends even his most violent or outrageous statements a patina of harmless scholarship, Le Pen claimed that he had never said such a thing.
“This really does seem to me a surprising method,” he exclaimed at one point, “and one that strongly resembles political terrorism.” He smiled broadly and laughed, realising that a clever and damaging line had formed in his mind, and with both hands made a gesture of friendly admiration toward his questioner. “Elegant terrorism, I acknowledge! And plush. But terrorism just the same!”
Le Pen’s poll numbers doubled within a day. Later in the year, the Front National won nearly 11% of French votes for the European parliament, where Le Pen himself became a representative. (He remains one today.) “I think they believed they would be devouring me whole, to the audience’s great delight,” Le Pen, now 88, recalled to me recently, with delectation. “Unfortunately for my opponents, it was the tiger that ate the tamer!” He laughed wheezily.
Within the “caste” Marine Le Pen so disdains, it is habitual to remark that she is “her father’s daughter”. This is meant to indicate that she is not the gruff but compassionate patriot she proclaims herself to be, but rather the leader of an unreformed proto-fascist party, a despot in democrat’s clothing. The literal, rather than political, implications of her filiation tend to receive little analysis. But the central fact of her life is that she is indeed the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen. For the better part of her 48 years, her father was very probably the most hated man in France, and if ever she forgot this the press could be counted upon to remind her.
He was an inattentive parent and, by reputation, an unrestrained narcissist, and his political activity was at the centre of family life. He revelled in his infamy, and did little to shield his daughters from its consequences. “You’re Le Pen girls for life,” he told them. “It’s not going to be easy, so you might as well knuckle down now.”
In 1976, a massive early-morning detonation destroyed the two apartments the Le Pens occupied in a building in Paris. Marine has described the attack as a moment of political awakening. “I’m eight years old and realise, brutally, that my father is someone well-known and that people are angry at him,” she wrote in a 2006 autobiography. And yet, she continued, there was not “the slightest sign of solidarity or compassion” from the authorities, not so much as “the shadow of a telegram” from the president or any other government official. “And it is then and there,” she wrote, “at the age of dolls and dollhouses, that I become aware of this thing that is terrible and incomprehensible for me: my father isn’t treated like the others, we are not treated like the others.” She suddenly intuits that she is a victim, both of her father’s choices and of an elite that, finding those choices repugnant, denies him and his family their rightful membership.
Marine Le Pen’s autobiography, titled À contre flots (Against the Torrents), is a standard political memoir insofar as it aims to explain its author’s political views as the inevitable consequence of an exceptional life; it departs from the norms of the genre in its embrace of extravagant victimhood. It is a litany of grievances: the media are prominent villains, accused of ginning up “delirious lies”, launching “great campaigns” against the Front National, and caricaturing her father as “a racist, an antisemite, a fascist”. And this alleged misrepresentation, this diabolisation, is doubtless the root of the many other injuries of her life: if only her father and his party had been presented for what they truly were, she would not have been made to suffer.
Philippe Olivier, a member of the party since 1979, knew Marine in her younger years and married her elder sister. “When you’re a kid, and you read vile things about your parent, about the people around him, about what they do, where the quotes are doctored, where the words are doctored – it’s hard,” said Olivier, a personable man with a lisp that renders his conspiratorial worldview less menacing, who is now Marine’s close advisor. “And so she constructed a personality with the press as a life companion, but one that wasn’t always so pleasant.”
When Jean-Marie Le Pen won nearly 17% of the first-round presidential vote in 2002, the press was stupified. So was he
By the mid-1980s, a generation of highly politicised journalists, children of May 1968, had risen to positions of influence within the French media, and they seemed to believe it their responsibility to halt or at the very least punish Le Pen and his party. “The whole story of the 80s and 90s was the story of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s electoral rise, and of the media who wondered, ‘What do we do? What can we do?’” said Daniel Schneidermann, who worked as a reporter for Le Monde in those years, before becoming a respected media critic. “And yet they realise that nothing is working. If they scream about fascism, it doesn’t work, it has no effect on voters. Not if they attack him personally, either. If they put out big editorials on the theme, ‘This is bad!’ nobody cares.”
“There was this idea,” said Schneidermann, “that since he wasn’t a politician like the others, everything goes.” They took liberties they would not have allowed themselves with other politicians, whose private lives they handled with marked deference. Le Pen and his wife, Pierrette, began a long and angry divorce in 1984. Pierrette had run off with her husband’s biographer, a magazine journalist who had been living, at Le Pen’s invitation, at the family home. (She left without a word even to her daughters; Marine did not speak with her for 15 years.) The press covered the split with some glee, particularly when, in 1987, Pierrette took revenge upon her ex-husband by posing nude for the French edition of Playboy. Marine was humiliated.
Her father’s so-called dérapages, or “slips of the tongue,” were covered with particular zeal. The most famous of these was what has come to be known in France simply as “the detail”. In a broadcast interview, Le Pen was asked for his opinion of the theories of two prominent Holocaust-revisionists. He replied: “I ask myself a certain number of questions. I’m not saying the gas chambers did not exist; I haven’t been able to see any for myself. I haven’t studied the question in particular. But I think that it’s a mere detail in the history of the second world war.” The country was incensed. “There are details that are monstrous,” Le Monde wrote in an editorial.
Jean-Marie Le Pen campaigning in the presidential elections of 2002. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Le Pen denounced a “pack of political and media hounds” on a “witch-hunt”, and specified that in the context of a war that killed tens and tens of millions, the chosen technique for the slaughter of just a fraction of these was surely not of terrible consequence. It was the sort of specious, diversionary but superficially logical argument that has always confounded Le Pen’s critics in the media, and they largely preferred to ignore it. He protested, as ever and more loudly, that he was a persecuted speaker of truth.
The following year, 1988, he won more than 14% of the presidential vote, his best finish yet. The media worked themselves into an historic lather; his numbers remained there for a decade.
When Le Pen won nearly 17% of the first-round presidential vote in 2002, qualifying for the first time for the final round, the press was stupified. So was Le Pen. He ran his party as a sort of fiefdom, for his own amusement; there is a widely held view among researchers, reporters and current members of the Front National that he adored the attention he commanded as an agitator and flouter of bourgeois pieties, but that he had no great desire for power and its responsibilities. Serge Moati, a filmmaker who maintained friendly relations with Le Pen, was with him on the evening of his first-round victory, at Le Pen’s manor overlooking Paris. The brawler was suddenly withdrawn, Moati said, seized with melancholy. Le Pen fretted that he had no one to name as his chief of staff, nor as prime minister. “He just wanted to have fun, to play around,” Moati said. His daughter, by contrast, seeks to rule.
Like her father, Marine Le Pen has proven herself an exceptional broadcast personality, born with a blood instinct for the minor hypocrisies of her on-air opponents, and a quick-thinking talent for transforming them into grand theatrical indictments. She has inherited her father’s unconscious smirk, which often serves as notice that she has just concocted some particularly clever bit of verbal violence. Like him, she also tends to jut her jaw and bare her lower teeth when speaking, which can lend her the slight air of a bulldog. The French say she has gouaille, which might be translated as “cheekiness”, but is a term applied almost exclusively to women, evocative of late evenings at a Paris bistro counter, cigarettes, red wine and a certain bawdy self-assurance. Le Pen in action is good, if discomfiting, television.
Her father never seems to have encouraged her promotion within the party. The camera noticed her first, and she built her rise largely upon the strength of her media appearances. The first of these to attract attention was on the evening of the second round of the 2002 presidential election. Le Pen lost heavily to Jacques Chirac, with just 18% to Chirac’s 82%, but Marine’s performance inspired a certain fascination. Journalists, she later wrote, began requesting interviews, wishing to behold “the monster’s daughter”.
In the coming years, no other FN official was granted so much exposure, in print or on air, with the exception of her father, and she was far more pleasant for journalists to deal with. It is true that Le Pen seems to enjoy nothing so much as a good row, and she is known to fume in silence during commercial breaks when she feels she is being disrespected, but she is also viewed as quite personable and inspires far less overt disgust than her father ever did. “We’re all much less on edge,” one top television presenter once told the magazine Télérama. “Before, we had to organise a whole ballet so that our other invitees wouldn’t bump into Jean-Marie Le Pen. We had to do their makeup separately, and install two entrances, so the other politicians wouldn’t have to say hello to him.”
While there were those within the party who believed that the FN’s disrepute brought in more voters than it scared off, Marine Le Pen calculated that the party would have to soften its image if it wished to accomplish anything more than shocking the bourgeoisie. This would require courting the media.
After succeeding her father in 2011, she began to speak more openly of her experiences as a woman and mother, banned skinheads from the FN’s public rallies, and let it be known that “what happened in the camps” during the war was, to her mind, “the height of barbarism”. In 2015, she had her father expelled from the party; he had given interviews reiterating his views about the “detail” and asserting that Philippe Pétain, the leader of France’s collaborationist Vichy regime, was not a “traitor”.
Marine Le Pen campaigning in Perpignan, October 2015. Photograph: Schreiber/EPA/Rex/Shutterstock
Unsurprisingly, this narrative of fantastic family betrayal, emancipation and political rebirth played well in the press. Most of the coverage was sceptical, of course, and editorials were sure to note that, whatever image Le Pen sought to project, she remained her father’s daughter (though it is widely believed that his expulsion was not a stunt). But coverage of any sort has a legitimising effect, and coverage of a contested claim – here, that the Front National has truly changed – at the very least implies the possibility that the claim is true.
In the country’s last round of national elections, in December 2015, the FN tripled the number of seats it held on regional councils and won more votes – nearly 7 million – than it had in any other election, ever. In its editorial the following day, Le Monde called upon the country to “take action before the catastrophe”. (The party’s successes cannot be explained solely as a phenomenon of the media; but the media has nonetheless been crucial to its rise.)
In 2002, Chirac had refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen. This year, for the first time, his daughter appeared in a presidential debate. In the view of party officials, the FN’s dédiabolisation has now been accomplished. In her dealings with the press, Le Pen alternates between the postures of the politician and the insurgent, answering policy questions when it suits her and inveighing against her questioners when it does not. “First of all, Marine set out to ensure that she was being respected by the media,” said Philippe Olivier. “Because, there would be the little journalist who came from who knows where, who’d show up and who would ask a really disagreeable question. Well. We’re in politics, we’re not whores, you know? And even whores have to be treated with respect!” He laughed. “She’s not going to go talk to journalists who behave badly.” (The party, long wary of the “filter” imposed by journalists, was the first in France to have its own website.)
In February, shortly after the official launch of her campaign, Le Pen was interviewed during the nightly newscast on TF1, the country’s most-watched channel. An economist from a thinktank called the Institut Montaigne had been invited for the occasion, to ask Le Pen about her plans to withdraw France from the euro, a decision most mainstream economic thinkers believe would be calamitous. The Institut Montaigne, the economist said, estimated the total cost of leaving the euro to be equivalent to 2.3% of the country’s GDP. “I’d like to remind you, Gilles,” he said, addressing the host, “this represents €50bn.”
“What is a shame, Monsieur l’Expert,” Le Pen began, “is that you haven’t told us just what the Institut Montaigne really is.” The Institut Montaigne, she explained, had been chaired until just a month earlier – “Ah, look, what a surprise!” – by a man who was now campaigning for her opponent, François Fillon, whose economic platform had in fact been penned by that very same man.
Sensing catastrophe, the host interjected, but Le Pen steamed on, smiling. She noted that, furthermore, the longtime director of the Institut Montaigne was a close friend of still another opponent, Emmanuel Macron, and a backer of his movement, En Marche!. “I believe En Marche! was in fact domiciled at the home of the Institut Montaigne’s director!” This was true.
Le Pen collected herself and, with icy didacticism, broadened her charge. “I would like to tell the French: you’re going to be experiencing this same thing for the next two months.” Until the end of the campaign season, she said, “all those who have something to lose in this election” – the media, the “great powers of finance,” her political opponents – would be conspiring to block her candidacy. “You’re going to hear things as utterly insane as what we’ve just seen here.”
The expert nodded, and looked at his shoes, and had not a word to say for the remainder of the segment. “He thought that with his three little graphs and his suit and tie, he’d be able to pass,” laughed Olivier. “She left him standing there in his underwear!”
French political journalism has long rejected the notion that the reporter should maintain great critical distance from the politicians he or she covers. It is the account of the exercise of power that has traditionally been valued in France, not the account of its consequences; and to observe the exercise of power, one must be close. (The media historian Alexis Lévrier has argued convincingly that the explanations for this attitude toward power are largely to be found in the ancien regime.)
When president François Hollande took office in 2012, four of his ministers were involved in relationships with journalists. Hollande himself was living with a journalist named Valérie Trierweiler, with whom he had begun an affair when he was the head of the Socialist party and she was a reporter covering it. This was hardly uncommon – Hollande’s three immediate presidential predecessors were known to have had intimate relationships with journalists as well, and the same is true of countless other government ministers.
François Hollande with his former partner, journalist Valérie Trierweiler, December 2011. Photograph: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images
None of this is hypocritical or fundamentally wrong, of course, but such proximity does give the appearance of collusion, or at least suggest it as a distinct possibility. For many voters – not only supporters of Le Pen – journalists and politicians seem to be all-but-indistinguishable representatives of a self-satisfied and entirely oblivious Parisian ruling class, and it must be said they have done little to discourage this impression.
Accusations of partisanship and collusion are only bolstered by the long traditions of both in French journalism
Nearly all of the French private media sector is controlled by investors and corporate entities with highly diversified business interests and no historical attachment to the principles of journalistic independence. BFMTV, the country’s most-watched television news station, is owned by Altice, a multinational telecommunications group founded and run by the Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi. In October, an Altice media executive left the company to join the campaign of Emmanuel Macron. Before running for the presidency, Macron had served as a senior aide to the president and then as economy minister, and had shepherded Altice’s acquisition of a major French telecommunications operator. The Front National has taken note of all this, and has cited it repeatedly as evidence of BFMTV’s alleged collusion with the Macron campaign.
The television station has taken to publishing statistics to show that Macron is accorded no more airtime than Le Pen. The FN’s accusations are “pulled out of thin air”, Hervé Béroud, BFMTV’s managing editor, told me. “When an individual person leaves a company to join a political campaign, does that commit the entire company?”
Béroud’s reasoning is perfectly sound, and there exists no material evidence to suggest that BFMTV has been anything but fair in its coverage. But given the disfavour with which financiers, politicians and journalists are presently regarded, it is hard to believe the FN’s charges do not resonate with voters. (Antisemitic elements within the party may pay particular mind to the fact that Drahi is Jewish.) The Front National has made similar accusations about Le Monde, whose co-owner, the philanthropist Pierre Bergé, has been a vocal supporter of Macron’s candidacy.
These accusations of partisanship and collusion are only bolstered by the long traditions of both in French journalism. As the country’s daily paper of the right, Le Figaro might be expected to show sympathy for Le Pen’s positions on immigration, say, or French identity. But the newspaper is owned by an industrialist who also happens to be a senator from the traditional right, to which the FN is a threat, and Le Figaro’s editors have been discouraged from covering Le Pen “so as not to harm the republican right”, according to Philippe Goulliaud, who served as the paper’s politics editor for a decade. The paper’s opinion pages remain all but closed to Le Pen. Libération, on the left, refuses to publish either op-eds or interviews with Front National officials. (The paper is also owned by Altice.)
France’s various public television and radio stations, and Agence France-Presse, are controlled by political appointees, and the privately held print media, with few exceptions, depends upon state subsidies for its survival. Which is to say, conflicts of interest, or at the very least the appearance of such conflicts, are rife. The Front National knows this well, and uses it.
On the evening of Le Pen’s combative interview on TF1, her personal assistant was formally charged with embezzlement, the result of an inquest into the Front National’s suspected misuse of funds from the European parliament. Le Pen herself had received a police summons, which she disregarded, citing the immunity granted her as an MEP.
On air, she deflected questions about the charges, and suggested the contours of a plot against her. “This investigation was opened two years ago,” she said. “It’s really pretty surprising that, all of a sudden, two months before the presidential election, there should be this flurry of judicial activity.” She denied any wrongdoing.
Marine Le Pen visiting a pig farm in Brittany, March 2017. Photograph: Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images
Three days later, the banner headline on the front page of Le Monde described the FN’s finances as “a system of organised opacity”. Inside, a series of articles detailed the allegations of campaign finance fraud that have trailed the FN in every election it has contested since 2012. Olivier Faye, the reporter, said his editors felt the Front National had been a bit neglected in the paper’s recent coverage, which had focused most intently on Le Pen’s opponent François Fillon, himself accused of a no-show jobs scheme involving his wife. (The embezzlement accusations against Le Pen hardly make her an outlier among French politicians.)
Le Pen held a rally the following day, in a concert hall on the grey outskirts of the western city of Nantes. Faye was there, and before Le Pen took the stage he wandered the concert hall interviewing her supporters. He sat down a bit abruptly next to a man named Joseph Elie, a retired farmer with blue eyes and black wispy owl eyebrows who worried that French agriculture was being strangled by European regulations. “We’re assailed with rules,” he said, “rules we sometimes can’t even understand.”
“A question that’s totally unrelated,” Faye said. “The scandals that are trailing Marine Le Pen, the financial scandals – does all this bother you?”
“No it doesn’t bother me!” Elie replied. “And I’ll tell you why: because, unfortunately, they all do it. You see Fillon – all of them!” And Le Pen wasn’t accused of personal enrichment, he noted.
“But some of her friends, on the other hand, did enrich themselves personally,” Faye said.
“Her friends?” Elie asked.
“Yes, some of her close associates. You know, in the affair about the campaigns in 2012?”
“Oh,” Elie said, sounding confounded. But then: “Has it been proven?”
“Well, the justice system hasn’t given a verdict yet,” Faye said.
“The justice system hasn’t given a verdict yet!” Elie repeated, vindicated.
A man seated nearby, spilling breadcrumbs from a sandwich on to his stained green sweater, asked which newspaper Faye was with. “If you will, France, to me, is a pyramid,” the man said. “At the top of this pyramid, there are a half-dozen very important men, billionaires, and the rest of us are their employees, their parrots. Oh yes! You’re a billionaire’s employee.”
“I’m not technically his employee,” Faye objected.
“Fine,” the man said, “but you can’t write whatever you want!”
“I know this will surprise you,” Faye said calmly, “but really, I really do write what I want.”
“At Le Monde?” asked another man, incredulous. “For 30 years they’ve been telling us there are no immigrants in France. While at the same time you can see we’re drowning in immigrants!” His wife, seated next to him, said the Front National was treated as “evil incarnate” by the “immigrationist” media. The man said, “You can tell these papers are really just puppets.”
When Le Pen took the stage, she began with an indictment of the country’s traditional political class, “dream-wreckers”, whose “inadequacy” and “disdain” have condemned the French, at each election, to nothing more than “turning the other cheek”. “I want to transform your oh-so-legitimate anger,” she urged, “into an act of love, for that vital and unique community that is, just like your family, your nation.”
She turned to her prime opponent, Macron, whom she derided as the choice of “the ruling caste”. She smiled a tart smile. “Look, by the way, at the zeal with which the moneyed powers are now openly backing Mr Macron! The moneyed powers, and their representatives in the media. Like Mr Bergé, the owner of Le Monde” – now there were boos, and whistles – “who has put his newspaper entirely in the service of Mr Macron and is using it as a weapon of war against the people’s candidacy that I embody!”
Faye sat hunched at his computer in the darkened hall and dutifully typed out the words, raising his eyebrows in slight disbelief. Such direct attacks on the media have few precedents in French politics. His jaw worked away a bit more quickly at his chewing gum. “Or like Mr Drahi” – more boos – “he too in the service of Mr Macron, who controls numerous channels and numerous papers, all of them entirely devoted to his candidacy!” Le Pen went on. “I want to tell the French to be extremely careful not to let this election be stolen from them – to know how to recognise, in the avalanche of propaganda they’re being served from morning till night, the hand of the system.”
When Le Pen had finished speaking and the lights came up, I spoke with a delicate-looking woman in hoop earrings and a black skirt, who carried a small French flag and whose name was Soizic Robin. “They’re the only ones I believe in any more,” she said of the Front National, though she told me she had voted for the party only since Marine has been at its helm. Jean-Marie, Robin said, was a “disgraceful man”. She said the media coverage of the party had grown fairer in recent years, though she complained the party was still unfairly associated with its former leader, and presented only in a negative light. Two buses transporting FN supporters to the rally that day had been stopped on the road and attacked by masked protesters, for instance. “And I’m sure that won’t be in the news,” she said, but she spoke without bitterness.
Faye called Monnot, his editor. “Really one of the most intense speeches I’ve heard in the past two years,” he said. In the report he filed for the next day’s paper, inflected with a hint of the irony he likes to deploy, he wrote that Le Pen, in order to “counter the accumulation of scandals implicating her,” had attempted “to pass herself off as a victim of some effort to silence her”. Much of the article consisted of quotations from Le Pen’s speech. A small sidebar ran alongside it: “Buses of FN supporters attacked.”
In a broadcast interview this month, Le Pen was asked for her view of a particularly infamous chapter of French wartime history, one that has come to stand for the inhumanity and collaborationist zeal of official France during the Nazi occupation. In July 1942, more than 13,000 Jewish men, women and children were detained in Paris, and deported to their deaths. These mass arrests, now referred to collectively as the Vel d’Hiv (for the cycling arena in which many of the captured were held) were planned and executed not by the Germans, but by the French. In an historic address, Jacques Chirac once proclaimed that “France, that day, committed the irreparable.” Le Pen was asked if Chirac had been wrong to state this.
“I think France is not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv, voilà,” Le Pen replied crisply, glaring at her questioner – the same man, as it happened, who 30 years prior had asked her father about the gas chambers. “I think that in a general way, and more generally, if there are people who are responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time.” She jabbed a pen in the air. “It’s not France. It’s not France. France has been mistreated, in the minds of people, for years. In reality our children have been taught that they have every reason to criticise it. To see only, perhaps, its darkest historical aspects. So, I want them to once again be proud to be French.”
Le Pen had spoken little of French history during the campaign season; the Front National has not always been well-served by its public exegeses of past events. And indeed, Le Pen’s opponents and detractors asserted immediately and with righteous anger that she had outed herself as a despicable revisionist. Le Monde charged that she had crossed a “red line”, that of “the national consensus” on the country’s historical guilt. Macron said: “Some had forgotten that Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen.”
One wonders what other dark episodes Le Pen would see scrubbed from the country’s account of itself, what other unwelcome truths she would banish. But there was – and Le Pen was quick, as ever, to note it – a slight excess in the outcry, a note of hypocrisy. Revisionism of this sort has been a frequent feature of the politics of contemporary France, and it remains largely tolerated when it emanates from quarters other than the far-right. De Gaulle had insisted Vichy was the regime of only of a traitorous few, while “France” and “the Republic” had survived the war in exile in London, unsullied by the ignominies of collaboration. Every French president until Chirac had maintained the same, and a small number of contemporary politicians still do. François Fillon, her opponent, has in the past rejected the idea that “France” might bear guilt for Vichy. But he did not refrain from adding his voice to the chorus of opprobrium.
“I find this controversy to be artificial and shameful,” Le Pen complained. “Shameful! Because I expressed the position that was General de Gaulle’s, and François Mitterrand’s, and that of all the presidents one after another until Jacques Chirac.”
If only as a technical matter, this was true. And in the eyes of some, perhaps many, Le Pen had once again been made the victim for being right – “mistreated” like the nation itself, compelled toward false repentance by a caste of moralising hypocrites. Indeed, she would be nowhere without them.
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