a lesson from the national front

by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

IN 2003, PRESIDENT BUSH’S ARMY had just invaded Iraq, and I was a junior in high school, studying abroad in France for the first time. Some intercultural enlightenment I expected, like learning to appreciate aïoli, chocolat chaud, bouillabaisse, and so on, but I was unprepared for other kinds of exchange, like the time an older student backed me into the corner of the school’s courtyard to yell at me, in rapid-fire French, for representing the warmongering United States. With my limited language skills, I couldn’t decipher all the insults he lobbed at me. Fortunately, some French classmates rescued me when they recognized that I was incapable of defending myself, let alone my country.

In Marseille, where I was studying, local activists organized anti-war protests, and the school I attended kept its courtyard closed at lunch to prevent any of us—the handful of American students in particular—from participating. But we could still hear the protest chants rising above the courtyard walls. “Arrête les USA! Stop America!” One after another accusing my home country of lies, crimes, and fabricated justifications for the war.

One afternoon, another American student and I came down the street just in time to see a parade of demonstrators march by. Most of the people holding the signs looked no different from the people I encountered elsewhere in Marseille, but some of them looked like revolutionaries, clothes scruffy, as if they couldn’t be bothered to care about how they looked when their principles were at stake. On their placards I read: “Pour la paix, Contre la guerre,” “Stop Bush,” and “Bush, blood-letter of the world.”

What would happen if I joined a protest? What did it mean to protest the actions of your government, to believe in something so deeply that you would take to the streets? How could I explain to my classmates the American perspective—and was it my perspective as well? And who was right—the French teenager who cornered me in our school yard to berate me for a president I was too young to vote for, the anti-war demonstrators who marched in the streets, or the American President, whose speeches I heard dubbed into French on the evening news? I wondered what my parents were saying about it and if my sisters knew what was going on with the war in Iraq.

When I returned to France in college in 2007, the cohort for my exchange program in Toulouse was all American students, and I was, to my astonishment, the most accomplished French speaker among us. Even so, I wasn’t satisfied with my half-fluency. When I spotted a language partner request on a local message board, I arranged to meet regularly with Aurélien, a Toulousan about my age, to further hone my speaking skills.

One day in La Place du Capitole, we nursed our white bistro mugs and watched people scurry across the cobblestone square, snatches of their conversation breaking into our own. Everywhere people were talking about the upcoming presidential elections, especially the lead candidates, Ségolène Royal and Nicholas Sarkozy, whose faces were plastered on wheat-paste posters all over Toulouse, all over France.

He asked me what I thought about the upcoming elections.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

Now, I wonder how I was ever uncertain about what to believe. And maybe, it wasn’t that I didn’t know but rather I couldn’t believe that some people and some political parties fostered division as a means to get elected. I couldn’t conceive of a world where that kind of politics would be rewarded with wins. I still thought the need for resistance was in the past, in the dark days of enemy occupation and world war. These days, I see more clearly that protest takes many forms and that it takes all kinds of people—activists, elected officials, nonprofit organizations, working wherever they can—to make the world better and more sustainable for generations to come.

That night, Aurélien picked me up in his little stick shift Peugeot and drove us out to a rally at an arena in the suburbs. By the time we arrived, it was dark and the parking lot was crammed with other little cars like his.

We wound our way together through the maze of cars and into the crowd, which seemed to be made up mostly of other young people. Around us, I felt and saw black and brown and white people converging and could hear the rising tide of their voices as speaker after speaker took to the stage.

A frisson of hope crackled through the throng when we cheered for the early speakers and clapped at all the big promises for big changes to make France more welcoming, more fair. Then there she was, the candidate herself, Ségolène Royal. Rows and rows of people rose to their feet between me and the stage. Huge screens illuminated the crowded arena with projections of her face on both sides of the podium. She seemed so close. She spoke about what was at stake in the upcoming election, and the crowd responded, thousands of people chanting and clapping. I’d never been to anything like this in the United States, and I never wanted to leave this shared sense of the future.

Not long after that, I read an article about Ségolène Royal, who mentioned the French Resistance as one inspiration for her campaign, and I also read an article about Jean-Marie LePen, the leader of the ultra-right National Party, who mentioned the French Resistance as one inspiration for his campaign. Interesting, no? Did this add up? Since I was in France that semester to learn more about French social and political culture, I decided to do some homework on the matter, and that’s as innocent an explanation I can make for how I found myself at the local offices of the National Front.

The day of my appointment, a blond young man greeted me in the office lobby. He had all the friendly, floppy qualities of a rather tall puppy. He introduced himself as Guillaume, brought me coffee, and, because I was early, he chattered with me while we waited for his boss, the party's regional director, to arrive. He complimented my French and then the phone rang. He attended to the caller in the same friendly, solicitous way, although now he seemed like a concierge in a très chic hotel, intent on catering to the needs of whoever called upon him. In the lobby hung a bold poster that proclaimed in French, “Immigrants are going to vote, and you’re abstaining!” I wondered if Guillaume appreciated my French skills because it helped me pass as someone he didn’t have to hate.

Monsieur Bernard, the regional director, walked in and greeted me warmly with a firm handshake. He was a robust man in late middle age, and he seemed eager to begin with the interview even before we were seated at the desk in his office. In rapid, formal French that I was proud to keep up with, he suggested that I should meet their colleague, an American woman who’d immigrated to France and been elected to the regional council. Guillaume’s eyes lit up at the suggestion, and he set to work at his computer composing an email to connect me with the regional representative. But the prospect baffled me—an immigrant who was now an elected official for a party that denounced immigration?

M. Bernard spoke at length about the work of the National Front and its opposition to immigration, which was especially important in this department, Haute-Garonne, which abuts the Spanish border. I asked whether he agreed with his party leader’s assessment of their efforts in the present being the legacy of the French Resistance. He didn’t disagree, but he didn’t dwell on the past. M. Bernard wanted to talk about the future, one where France was focused on its own needs and its security.

I returned to the National Front office for another interview with the director, but either I was early or M. Bernard was late. I wandered through the labyrinthine hallways of the granite regional administration building and eventually discovered Guillaume, the blond officer manager, alone at his desk, which was strewn with papers, folders, the miscellaneous debris of any office job.

He apologized that he was the only one there at the moment.

“But I was just about to run down the hall,” he said. “There was an event this morning, a seminar hosted by one of the enviro groups upstairs, and they’re giving away the centerpieces. Wanna come?”

We followed a series of speckled tile hallways to a big conference room, where a bunch of potted tomato plants were crowded together on a table, free for the taking. He handed me one and took one for himself, and we headed back to his office, plants in hand.

We returned to the main office just in time to meet M. Bernard at the door. During this interview, the regional director explained to me how the National Front worked with partners—collaborated, I couldn’t help but think, like the Vichy officials who helped implement Nazi policies in France during the occupation.

After the interview I trudged home, plant in hand, through the streets of Toulouse. I passed shops that had grown familiar to me, and I felt both at ease on this route and uneasy with the way the interview had gone: getting the tomato plants with Guillaume; carrying on a conversation with M. Bernard; trying to better understand their narrow perspective on a world I found so expansive. I had the distinct, disgusted sense that I’d been downright friendly with fascists that afternoon.

The third time I went to the National Front’s office, the elected representative—the American woman—was waiting for me. I guessed her age as somewhere around forty-five; she had tightly curled black hair, a smart suit, and an enormous handbag that made me wonder what she had to carry around. Guillaume was deferential when he introduced her as Madame Elena Fournier, and she was cordial with him, not unkind. As we settled across from one another in M. Bernard’s office, we exchanged pleasantries in French. Then she switched languages with a small laugh of recognition. “I suppose we can do this in English,” she said.

I nodded, feeling a wave of relief and regret. I got out my notebook, turned on my handheld audio recorder, and asked my opening question: “Tell me a little bit about yourself.”

Mme. Fournier seemed to grow progressively more comfortable as she told me about growing up in Arizona, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, then studying at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She fingered the buttons on her suit jacket while she talk about each of her siblings, all of whom still lived in the United States, and she chuckled at her youthful affair with her French professor, who had married her and brought her to France. She presented the story as romantic, with a happy ending, but I felt dissatisfied. I wondered about her parents’ experience as immigrants to the United States, but I didn’t ask about it.

Instead, I asked, “Why did you join the National Front?” I truly did not understand how someone like her—someone who had benefited from an open immigration system—could square her story.

Her expression clouded with defensiveness. Regardless of what she said, her meaning would have been perfectly clear: I would never understand.

“I mean, how could you represent a party that opposes immigration?” I asked. “You’re an immigrant.”

Mme. Fournier raised a hand to wave away my assumptions. “I’m different from other immigrants,” she said. “I’m well educated, and I’m married to a Frenchman.”

I let my audio device keep recording the conversation and pretended to jot down notes in my research notebook to kill a little time while I replayed her words in my head and tried to figure out how to pivot to my next question.

Mme. Fournier seemed to see the world in black and white—people were all either one way, or they were different—and when I heard her say “different,” I understood her to mean that she was better than others—better educated, better connected. In the years since my conversations at the National Front in Toulouse, I have spent time recognizing my own privileges—the ones that allowed me to go to France in the first place and to be admitted into the halls of a regional government building in order to satisfy some intellectual and intercultural curiosity. I’m curious about the gray areas, the ways that conversations can lead to coalitions, the places where people disagree on some things but agree to work together in order to accomplish common goals. The ways that differences can lead to something better, something beautiful. To see the world in black and white is to imagine that the impact of policies and politics can be distilled into numbers, data that can be manipulated into easy sound bites. I’m learning, and always re-learning, that one of the most powerful ways to make change is to tell an elected official a story about the impacts of a policy on a real person. Stories help lawmakers appreciate the rich complexities of the communities they serve, and bring those communities to life. 

Today, I rarely speak French, and I work in a role I couldn’t have foreseen for myself back when I was a young foreign exchange student in Marseille or even Toulouse. I work for an organization that works to elect pro-democracy champions in Pennsylvania, the most critical swing state in the country, at a time when the American political landscape is particularly polarized and some issues are particularly polarizing. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve found myself here: a circuit of ancient streets, village roads, and speckled tile hallways have led to a career providing administrative support in some ways not unlike Guillaume, the young man who served the regional director of the National Front. It’s not resistance work, but I get to help ensure that everyday people, no matter where they’re from, can take action to make their voices and their votes heard. And I first learned that power in France, from the protestors, from the crowds, and from the political party with whom I disagreed.

About the author:

Hillary Moses Mohaupt is a listmaker: she’s a writer, non-profit professional, baker, flâneuse, and francophile. Her work has been published in Brevity’s blog, The Writer’s Chronicle, Hippocampus Magazine, Distillations Magazine, Split Lip, and elsewhere. She wants you to ask three people to vote on Election Day.