Clément Méric was nineteen years old, a student. He’d moved to Paris from Brittany—where his parents had, until recently, taught law—to attend Sciences Po, a prestigious public university. He was, according to his former teacher Amaury Chauou, exceptional and strong-willed, qualities that helped when he suffered from leukemia some years ago. And he was an activist. At Sciences Po, Méric had joined a progressive student union that worked to combat the rise of the far-right in France. In April, during a swell of demonstrations, he’d marched in support of gay marriage, which the country legalized in May. Wearing a red bandana over his face, his mousy-brown hair cropped close, he held up a banner that read “L’Homophobie tue” (“Homophobia Kills.”) But, Chauou said later, he was not a militant or an extremist. After Méric was dead, Chauou called him “a young intellectual and a citizen of the world.”
Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, June 5th, Méric stopped into an exclusive clothing sale in Paris’s haute Ninth Arrondissement with some friends. Around 6 P.M. that evening, another group, made up of a few young men and one young woman, arrived; their swastika tattoos and sweatshirts with white-power logos gave them away as skinheads. Insults and invective flew, and spiralled into a brawl on the street below. Reports vary as to how many people were involved in the fight, and what exactly happened to Méric. Initial accounts said that he had not yet started to swing when he was knocked down by multiple blows (some witnesses say he was hit with brass knuckles, known in French as coup-de poing américain). But this week, the French radio station RTL reported that surveillance videos showed Méric approaching one of the skinheads from behind, as if to strike, before the man turned and felled him with a single punch to the face. Either way, Méric was rushed to the hospital unconscious and put on life support; the next day, he was pronounced dead.
Eight suspects were arrested in connection with Méric’s death; three were released almost immediately, and five, between the ages of nineteen and thirty-two, were charged with various crimes. The main suspect, a twenty-year-old security guard named Esteban Morillo, stands accused of manslaughter. Another suspect, a woman named Katia, has admitted to membership in the far-right Revolutionary Nationalist Youth (J.N.R.), part of the ultranationalist “Troisième Voie” or “Third Way” movement. France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, linked all five to the country’s resurgent neo-Nazi movement. “An extreme right is at the heart of this,” Valls said of the incident. “There is a discourse of hate, and a climate that favors this discourse.”
France, home of the Enlightenment, with larger Muslim and Jewish populations than any other European nation, is having something of a crisis of tolerance. The World Values Survey Association recently found that almost one in four French people—a wealthy, educated, Western population—wouldn’t want a neighbor of another race. (Residents of former Soviet states were considerably more open-minded.) There is clear discomfort that Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a French-Congolese tennis player, bested Roger Federer at the French Open, and that the recent winner at Cannes, Abdellatif Kechiche, is a French-Tunisian who dedicated the coveted Palme d’Or prize to the young people of the “Tunisian revolution.” Xenophobic feeling, often targeted against Muslim immigrants, or, closer to home, French citizens descended from Arab states that were once French colonies, is increasingly commonplace.
French authorities are seeking to crack down on this rightward motion. Following Méric’s death, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced his decision to break up all groups of “fascist and neo-Nazi inspiration,” and ordered Valls to immediately “proclaim the dissolution of the Revolutionary Nationalist Youth.” Earlier this month, a European parliamentary committee unanimously revoked the immunity from prosecution that Marine Le Pen, a far-right politician, held as a member of the European Parliament. In late 2010, this immunity shielded her when she likened Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation of France. She may now face criminal charges for the incitement of racism.
Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, in 1972, founded the far-right Front National party. The elder Le Pen, who has been convicted of racism and inciting racial hatred through Holocaust revisionism, as well as of multiple counts of assault, passed the party leadership to Marine in 2011. She has since worked to “de-demonize” the party—she condemned Méric’s’s violent death as “unacceptable”—but is perceived by many on the left as legitimizing or “banalizing” the extreme right. Indeed, she has benefitted from the rise in extreme-right fervor. Last April, Le Pen won eighteen per cent of the vote in the first round of France’s presidential election, the highest percentage the F.N. has ever received. In parts of Picardy, in northern France—where skinhead graffiti calls for death to blacks and Jews, and heils Hitler, and where Esteban Morillo is from—she won nearly thirty per cent. Earlier this month, the F.N. humiliated the Socialist party in a parliamentary by-election, an embarrassing repudiation of President François Hollande.
Muslim immigrants are by no means all that is fuelling intolerance in France. When such turmoil strikes, the root tends to be an economy in crisis. France today is officially back in recession. Hollande has announced that he expects zero economic growth in 2013. The unemployment rate is at 10.4 per cent, a fifteen-year high; young men like Morillo and Méric face a youth unemployment rate of 26.5 per cent. As a result, young men and women have started, in the grand tradition of French history, to turn toward political extremes. As the far-right has gained ground, so has the far left. Nicolas Sarkozy—“President Bling-Bling,” of the center-right—ushered in the recession and cracked down on minorities and immigrants, and so gave way to Hollande, who is even less beloved; he has become the least popular President in the history of the Fifth Republic. The country’s embittered left is turning toward the new Front de Gauche (Left Front) party, founded in 2008 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former teacher and Trotskyist, to bring together the members of the country’s various anti-capitalist factions—of whom there are more and more. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the hero of the 1968 student protests, has said, Mélenchon has “succeeded in restoring national nostalgia for old-time class conflict and statist tradition.” In so doing, he has made the Front de Gauche a powerful force in French politics, if not quite as powerful as the Le Pens’ Front National.
Mélenchon’s popularity owes as much to the growth of the far-right as it does to the impotence of the center left. He has called the extreme right “professional racists,” and referred to Marine Le Pen as “half-demented.” Since Méric’s death, more and more young people—students, syndicalists, and worker, queer, and immigrants-rights groups—describe themselves as antifascists or “antifa,“ an identity formed in opposition that can only lead to greater confrontation.
Le Pen and Mélenchon have little in common, but both they and their supporters see Hollande as useless and ineffectual: that he mustered the power to legalize gay marriage infuriated and baffled a fair portion of the populace. In the spring, graffiti all over Paris read: “We want jobs, not gay marriage” (in French it rhymes). Roaring marches against marriage equality featured some participants waving the flag of the monarchy. Protests against Parliament turned violent, and anti-gay demonstrators disrupted the French Open. (They plan to do the same at the Tour de France, which begins later this week.) Extremists in neo-Nazi masks filmed themselves vandalizing an L.G.B.T. center in Paris. In Paris, Bordeaux, Nice, and Lille, gay men were brutally attacked. Last week, a twenty-three-year-old Parisian student named Nicolas Bernard-Buss was sentenced to four months in prison (two were suspended) for rebelling against the police and giving a false identity at a large anti-gay rally; thousands demonstrated in Lyon and a few hundred in central Paris on his behalf.
The frustration and despair is felt at every level. Dominique Venner, a seventy-eight-year-old historian, committed suicide in May in the eight-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, as a show of protest against the direction he thought France was taking. He abhorred the legalization of gay marriage and, even more, the declining white birthrate in France, which he called a “catastrophic peril for the future.”
Venner was a military man, and his reactionary gusto came to mind when, two weeks after his death, a journalist named Jean-Dominique Merchet published a much-discussed piece in which he accused the extreme right of having “fantasies about a military coup d’État.” Another French Revolution seems a way off, but there is a through-line connecting Venner with Méric and Morillo. France’s economic circumstances, and those of a greater Europe, make it easy for its residents to feel suffocated, and to turn, in a desperate search for a solution, toward a politics of the extreme. There are leaders there waiting to welcome them.
On Twitter, after Venner’s suicide, Marine Le Pen praised him. “All respect to Dominique Venner whose final, eminently political act was to try to wake up the people of France,” she wrote in one tweet. In another, she said, “It is in life and hope that France will renew and save itself.”
Above: A demonstration in Paris against same-sex marriage, in March. Photograph by Philippe Wojazer/Reuters.
