Franco-American

One of the strangest intertwinings in contemporary life is that of extreme right-wing French thought and literature with the new transatlantic white-nationalist mind-set. This is best exemplified by Steve Bannon’s notorious embrace of the themes of Jean Raspail’s bizarre 1973 novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” a nightmare vision of the invasion of France by alien hordes (though, curiously, not from Africa or the Middle East but from India). But even within France there has been, as a good piece in the Wall Street Journal made plain the other day, an intellectual rehabilitation not just of far-right politics but of extreme-right intellect. For years, one of the prophylactics against the rise of the Le Pens, father Jean-Marie and daughter Marine, was their apparent inability to get anyone in the French functionary class—a far more significant opinion-making and directing body in France than here, as illustrated by the great difference between a French “haute fonctionnaire” and a mere American or British civil servant—to embrace them. That has changed, or has seemed to change, recently, with Marine taking on a group of surreptitious haute-fonctionnaire “Horaces”—the name is a reference to the great if obsequious Roman poet who hymned the emperor Augustus.