A Big Change Looms in Paris

I met my friend and mentor Yves three years after arriving in France. I was a waiter in a neighborhood restaurant on the Left Bank in Paris. It was, with a stint at McDonald’s, one of my many student jobs. Yves arrived as we were getting ready to close. The kitchen was already closed. He said that he was very hungry and wondered if we had any leftovers in the kitchen. Unfortunately, we had nothing. I recommended a kebab place that was not far. It was at this moment that he asked me how long I had been working there, because he had never seen me, even though he was a regular customer. I also learned that Yves and his family lived a five-minute walk away. He seemed interested in my background.

 “I would like to continue this conversation on my next visit,” Yves said.

A few weeks later, Yves was back at the restaurant with two young ladies, whom he introduced as his daughters. Later, I learned that one of Yves’ friends was my teacher. This was the beginning of a great friendship between Yves and me. He became the mentor to whom I turned for advice regarding my student, professional and private life. His whole family welcomed me. I found a second family. Yves was Jewish. His parents had been in concentration camps. He didn’t talk about it much. One almost had to really press him to get him to talk about it. I later realized that it was more out of modesty and the fear of opening serious and deep wounds. I was often frustrated, because I felt that he should talk about his story which is part of a dark chapter in the history of France. Yves, who is now over 70, told me each time that I had the enthusiasm of youth and that I would understand later. This response frustrated me even more. I was often also struck by the fact that my friend did not observe the Jewish holidays. I brought it up to him.

 “Why don’t you celebrate Hanukkah or Rosh Hashanah?” I asked him one day. “It’s like you’re ashamed of being a Jew.”

Yves remained calm, but from his expression I understood that it was not the first time someone had made the same observation.

 “I am not religious. I don’t believe in any God whatsoever. I am a scientist,” he replied.

Yves was indeed an eminence in the energy and IT sector. He was very respected but that did not justify him turning his back on something that I considered fundamental.

 “But, mon ami,” I retorted, “you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. You can’t act like being Jewish isn’t part of your identity. Your family, like other Jews, were hunted down and exterminated in camps just because they were Jewish. Not practicing your religion means letting the Nazis and the antisemites win,” I told him.
 “I hear you and you know that I fight against all racism of any kind and I will never stop. I will fight to the end for humanist values, but I am simply not religious,” he said.

We had a thousand and one discussions on this very important subject. Often, my friend agreed to answer questions about his family during Nazism and their deportation to Nazi camps. But it was painful. One of our points of contention was Yves’ political affiliation. He voted for the progressive left in the French political spectrum. I have always been a centrist. I did not understand his political affiliation, because I felt that certain leaders of the French progressive left were antisemitic, but my friend said that he recognized himself in the humanism of the left. He worked on projects to light up the world. I learned to respect his modesty. For years, I took advantage of current events to talk about antisemitism, Nazism and the Holocaust. He has learned to deal with my intrusions into his sacred and painful past.

Since the beginning of our friendship, which now dates back more than 20 years, Yves has never been the one to initiate a conversation about antisemitism. Yet, God only knows how many times we had talked about racism, intolerance, moral and material poverty, history, the future. It was always I who brought up antisemitism. Even after Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack, it was I who opened the discussion.

As a result, huge was my surprise when my friend brought up antisemitism a few days ago, while we were discussing French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to dissolve the parliament and organize snap elections, after the crushing defeat of his party in the European parliamentary elections on June 9. I thought we were going to analyze Macron’s political poker move and what it says about the young president’s place in French history.

 “I’m afraid for my daughters,” my friend took me by surprise. “Tara, I’m really scared. I’m very scared. Macron made a big mistake. I’m afraid my daughters will pay the price.”

I was speechless. On the other end of the phone, I had the impression that it was a total stranger speaking. I had never heard this trembling voice, filled with contradictory emotions. There was fear, even fright. There was worry, resignation but at the same time a touch of hope coming through but dressed in anger.

Yves and I called each other “Tara,” which means wise or elder in one of my father’s dialects. He asked me to come up with a name from home at the start of our friendship. I chose “Tara” because Yves was my wise man, my mentor, the father I had lost when I was very young. He was my friend, my brother. I was Catholic. He was Jewish. I was black. He was white. But we never looked at each other in these aspects. His family welcomed me as one of their own. I knew almost all of them, down to his cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts. When my mother came to France for the first time, a niece of Yves, who is a doctor, personally examined her to make sure everything was okay. She had given her the medical attention that my mother had never had. My mother swears by Dr. Marion Adler. It’s one of her best French memories. “She saved my life,” my mother told her sisters and relatives in Africa about Dr. Adler.

This June 12, Yves’ fears were due to the fact that the polls significantly favor the National Rally, which is the new face of the National Front, an extreme right-wing party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had declared that the Shoah, a Hebrew word for the Holocaust, was a “detail” of history. It is the daughter, Marine Le Pen, of this notorious antisemite, who is the leader of the National Rally. Over the years, she has embarked on a “normalization” campaign of the far right by giving a light face from the outside to a political party whose ideology has not changed one iota. The ideology is just dressed up in flashier clothes. It is like dressing vulgarity with Chanel. It will remain vulgarity despite its appearance.

Le Pen was paradoxically helped in her de-demonization enterprise by Jean-Luc Melenchon, her big enemy and rival from the far left, whose recurring antisemitic statements make her appear as a moderate, close to the Jews or even their defender and protector. Le Pen did not hesitate to support Israel after October 7.

Unsurprisingly, the transformation of the National Rally and the assumed antisemitism of the leader of the far left have plunged many in the French Jewish community into an impossible situation, particularly when an anti-Jewish act is committed on average every day in the country. While certain Jews, including the famous Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, have said that they would vote without hesitation for the National Rally’s candidates in the event of a standoff between the far right and the Popular Front, a last-minute political party created a few days ago by the various left-wing parties to oppose the far right, my friend does not have a dilemma.

 “I will never vote for the National Front,” Yves told me, using the original name of the National Rally.

His comment revealed his deep thoughts: Yves does not believe in the supposed normalization of the far right. Watching it so close to power had brought to the surface what he had buried deep inside for decades. I actually understood that my friend had been reluctant to talk about the deportation of his parents to the concentration camps — who did not know each other at the time — because he was afraid that history would repeat itself. He was convinced of the duality (good and evil) which coexist within us humans. History is full of periods when hatred took over from tolerance. Yves fears a new Holocaust during his lifetime. He believes his fears are about to become reality. He fears that a victory of the National Rally on July 7 will bring back the Collaboration period, the period between July 1940 and August 1944 when France, led by Vichy France whose leader was Marshal Philippe Petain, was an accomplice to German crimes. Yves fears that a new far right government will unleash its xenophobic ideology like it did 84 years ago.

 “In your opinion, who will be the first targets?” he asked me rhetorically. “Of course, it will be us Jews, then Muslims or Arabs.”
 “I think that Arabs or Muslims are first on the list, then non-Muslim blacks, because immigration is the cause of all of France’s ills they say,” I replied. “Then it will be the Jews’ turn.”

Yves and I did not completely agree on the order of target list for a far right government. On the other hand, we agreed that he and I were going to pay a high price. He, because he is Jewish, and I, because I am black.

 “They will send you back to Africa. As for me, I don’t know where they will throw me,” said mon ami.

There was a sort of silence. We both imagined where Yves would end up and the prospect was frightening. Yves seems determined to prevent what his parents and others had experienced from happening again. He considers various scenarios to protect his people from possible barbarity but, at the same time, he recognizes that living a persecuted life is not ideal.

If the National Rally wins on July 7 in France, a new era would begin in France and in Paris. It would be a new France, a new Paris, whose central characteristic would be the French first, and more specifically, the native French, the fundamental question being what it means to be French or what French identity is.

For the far right, being French means being white, speaking French and being Christian. French identity is thus linked to religion. Anything that is contrary to Christian values thus threatens the French identity. By deduction, immigration, particularly of North Africans because they are Muslims, is a big threat to the French identity. It doesn’t matter that the grandparents of these North Africans, or Arabs as they’re referred to locally, fought for France during the two world wars. Nor does it matter that a 1905 law separated the Church from the State by proclaiming secularism as a fundamental principle of the republic, that is to say, a free exercise of religion. In 2022, Marine Le Pen declared that if she were elected president “Algerians who already live in France and behave in accordance with French law, respect our habits and customs and love France, have no reason not to stay. The others, certainly in the minority, will have to leave.”

Algeria, a North African country located on the other side of the Mediterranean sea facing Marseille, was once a French colony. In 1962, it gained its independence, causing the departure of nearly a million white French people who had settled there. They had settled mainly in the south of France. They are known as “Pieds Noirs”, Black Feet, a reference to the fact that they lived in Africa before the Evian Accords which sealed Algeria’s independence. These “Pieds Noirs” have nourished a lot of resentment towards Algeria, Arabs and Muslims. They want their revenge. It is this resentment that has fueled the French far right for decades.

The new Paris will be an anti-immigrant Paris. Le Pen and her cronies do not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants. The foreigners threaten the national existence. They are an external threat. It is the confrontation between the inside and the outside. This fight against external threats is necessary because it is a defense of the French identity, says the National Rally.

A white American Christian would tell me that they don’t see why they would be targeted if they decided to move or visit the new France. The response is simple: for the National Rally, America is the face of liberalism, neoliberalism and globalization, all of which are seen as changes which have undermined and continue to threaten the French identity. They must be fought to preserve the core. In France, immigrants are those who embrace American power with open arms, while the far right sees America as the devil, a hated outsider. It considers that the current French elites are under the thumb of the globalists of America which is the dominant in the narrative of the dominant vs. the dominated, as is told by the National Rally. Le Pen wants to “protect” the dominated or native French and restore French national, social and cultural identity against the dominant or the foreigners, whoever they may be.

If you are white, Catholic and speak French you will be welcome. For the rest, you will be an enemy from within. The National Rally has endorsed candidates who are nostalgic for the Vichy government and openly antisemitic. One of them, Françoise Billaud, paid tribute on her Facebook page to Marshal Pétain and the collaborationist priest Jean-Marie Perrot. Frédéric Boccaletti, another possible future lawmaker of the National Rally, founded a bookstore in 1997 which features books which deny the Holocaust.

 “Tara, I’m scared,” Yves repeated at the end of our conversation. “I have never been so scared in my life. I don’t see any escape.”
 “Don’t lose hope, mon ami,” I said to him. But deep down, I was just as afraid as Yves.

In a few days, a new day will dawn in France. Will it be a day of fear?