Deciphering the Quenelle
By SYLVAIN CYPEL
JAN. 23, 2014
PARIS — Seventeen years ago, the leader of the far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, deemed the Holocaust a “mere detail in the history of the Second World War.” Today, a popular comic known as Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala (his stage name is simply Dieudonné) claims “not to know, between the Jews and Germans,” who’s telling the truth — “but I have my own little ideas on the subject.” We know what those ideas are: Dieudonné invited onstage at one of his shows Robert Faurisson, a “theorist” of Holocaust denial, who argues that the extermination of the European Jews is a Jewish invention.
Dieudonné, who revels in stoking controversy while hiding behind ambiguity, recently came up with a rallying gesture for his supporters. He calls it the “quenelle” (literally, a dumpling, a French version of gefilte fish). The move consists of the right arm pointed straight down, which the left hand keeps from lifting — very like the repressed Nazi salute of Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove.” Mr. M’Bala M’Bala claims this is not anti-Semitic but “antisystem,” a defiance of authority, but his true disciples have caught on, pulling quenelles in front of synagogues.
On grounds that “inciting racial hatred” is illegal in France, the interior minister, Manuel Valls, decided to ban the comic’s shows, creating a furor. Canceling Mr. M’Bala M’Bala’s tour not only gave him free publicity, but it has also risked making him a victim of censorship.
At first glance, the Dieudonné affair seems a new form of anti-Jewish expression. Of course, it is. But it would be wrong to say that’s all that it is.
French society has suffered from an economic and social crisis for three decades. Whichever party has been in power, the unemployment rate has hardly dipped below 8 percent since the 1980s; more than one in four young people are out of work.
I recently returned to France, after six years working in the United States, to discover some unpleasant surprises. In “la France profonde,” a diffuse populism is stirring. Reminiscent of America’s Tea Party, this movement combines a nostalgic mind-set that everything “was better before” with a radical aversion to taxes and a hostility toward the detested European bureaucracy.
According to a recent study, only 8 percent of French people espouse racial inequality, yet there is a palpable conviction that everything bad comes from outside: Brussels, globalization, immigration. Whatever the law says, the “freedom” to express racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant views has reached new levels. Mr. Le Pen used to claim to “say out loud what the people think in private.” Lately, many have begun thinking out loud.
The Dieudonné affair is symptomatic of an insidious slide toward intolerance, but anti-Semitism is the least of it; racism and xenophobia manifest themselves more often as anti-Arab, anti-Muslim or anti-black. Last year, in Carpentras, a town notorious in 1990 for the desecration of Jewish graves there, swastikas were spray-painted on the headstones of French Muslim soldiers. Late in 2013, the minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, a black woman originally from French Guiana, was called a “monkey” by a National Front candidate in municipal elections; the same slur was repeated by a representative of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement, the mainstream opposition party.
Urban neighborhoods where poor African, Asian or Caribbean populations live have become increasingly ghettoized. In French political parlance, this is called a “failure to integrate,” or a “rise in communitarianism.” France has become a hotbed of tensions that has seen a steep rise in “ethnicist” views of society. It is not just Mr. M’Bala M’Bala who has flourished in this atmosphere; other comedians trot out the most hackneyed racial clichés.
The phenomenon cuts across social class. Take Alain Finkielkraut, a professor of philosophy at the elite École Polytechnique: He recently published “L’identité malheureuse,” a book bemoaning the dilution of an eternal France about to be defiled by swarthy barbarians threatening to plunge “European civilization” into a multicultural bouillabaisse. Among the objects of his disgust: “Halal butcher shops and fast food.”
Mr. Finkielkraut’s sentiments echo those of Renaud Camus, a writer (not related to Albert Camus) who has denounced the “great replacement” of populations, which imposes on “the true rooted French” those who are not. Mr. Camus makes no secret of his admiration for Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie and current leader of the National Front. Such ideas have even found resonance in the media, thanks to commentators like the political journalist Éric Zemmour, who laments the fate of the “white proletariat,” helpless before the “ostentatious virility of their black and Arab competitors seducing numerous young white women.”
The worst came last fall with a campaign against France’s Roma people. The previous president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had already singled out this vulnerable population of 20,000 as a dangerous nuisance — despite the fact that the Roma constitute just 0.03 percent of the population. The interior minister, Mr. Valls, has now called for their expulsion. Well might we wonder about the integrity of a politician who defends Jews from Dieudonné’s quenelle while deporting Gypsies.
The son of a white mother and a black father, Mr. M’Bala M’Bala will continue to surf a wave created by the “competition of victims” in a country that is historically “guilty” twice over: toward the Jews, for its participation in the collaborationist Vichy regime, and toward its black and Arab citizens, for its colonial past. By calling Jews “slave traders,” Mr. M’Bala M’Bala plays a game of provoking the authorities’ squeamishness about anti-Semitism, even as other expressions of racism get a pass. When Dieudonné described Ms. Taubira as a “cheetah,” there was scarcely a stir.
Unless things change, this deplorable clown has a bright future.
Sylvain Cypel, a former correspondent for Le Monde, is the author of “Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse.” This essay was translated by Edward Gauvin from the French.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 24, 2014, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: A French Clown’s Hateful Gesture.
