Guerre des histoires, guerre des mémoires

The history of France is consubstantial to the political project of the French far right: the past is understood as the origin of a nation’s identity, as a value in and of itself from which to draw moral principles and understand the present, as a ritual of political socialization for activists, as a mobilizing story and finally as the political horizon of a desired return to France’s mythical grandeur. In this ideological vision, the past (birth, blood) determines the identity of peoples and individuals. The weaponization of history for the purposes of glorification and national cohesion goes hand in hand with the obliteration of entire sections of French and world history, veering into negationism, and the paradoxical erasure of the origins of the National Front itself.