The student protests of May 1968 are often viewed as the foundational event of contemporary French society, not least by May 1968′s ageing student protagonists. The French journalist Nabila Ramdani sites a different event, exactly a decade earlier, as the determining factor in a country where Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party this month almost breached the gates of power.
Ramdani names the military coup mounted in Algiers on May 13th, 1958, as the font of so many of the ills that beset France today. The putsch, led by a group of pieds-noirs resisting the Algerian independence movement, prompted the return to politics of Gen Charles de Gaulle and the establishment later that year of the Fifth Republic and its monarchical presidency.
Though France pulled out of Algeria in 1964 and de Gaulle survived multiple assassination attempts at the hands of the pied-noir OAS, the war continues to cast a baleful shadow over French society, as Ramdani, the child of Algerian immigrants, knows only too well. The return of white European settlers to France from Algeria created an electoral bloc ripe for exploitation by the National Rally’s predecessor the Front National, founded by Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, a veteran of the Algerian war. The war has also spawned a society that is far more militarised than any other in western Europe, while the Fifth Republic has created a top-heavy political system that has fostered a polarised polity.
Ramdani’s remedies to “fix France” include the abolition of the Fifth Republic and the reinstatement of a parliamentary democracy of the sort that previously existed, a staple of programmes of the French left for some time. Another of her proposals – lowering payroll taxes and social charges to facilitate job-creation – is, however, one the left would most certainly baulk at.
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Ramdani’s book is a vigorous jeremiad that makes many sound arguments about the often sclerotic nature of French society and the marginalisation many people of immigrant descent, like her, experience. And though she is not always right – her account of French urbanism is rather simplistic in the way it pins the blame on Le Corbusier’s cité radieuse – the overall portrait of social malaise is persuasive, not least because the scars of the Algerian war, left to fester, continue to haunt the country.
