Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen have never been friends. As far back as 2012, the radical firebrand compared his Right-wing opponent to a “shape-shifting rat” — and things haven’t really improved since. Now, though, French politics is changing, and Mélenchon with it. With Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement, and barred from running for the presidency in the 2027 elections, the Republic is in the midst of a political earthquake. Yet if the electoral decapitation of Rassemblement National has sparked predictable rage on the Right, the far-Left is baring its teeth too.
Immediately after Le Pen’s sentence, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party said it would never use the courts to defeat its opponents. As Mélenchon himself stated on X: “The decision to remove a politician from office should be decided by the people.” It’s a telling statement, and one that goes a long way towards explaining his backing of a woman he once dismissed as “semi-demented”. For if he is a populist like his Right-wing rival, Mélenchon is also a fundamentalist when it comes to that most cherished of French political ideas: that le peuple, the people, represent the country’s collective will, over and above judges or the state.
It’s a theme Mélenchon returns to in his latest book. Published in English today, Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century is a paean to people power, carrying its readers from the earliest human societies to the fractured, anxious France of the 21st century. Not, of course, that the people are simply there to admire. On the contrary, Mélenchon believes that the Le Pen farrago is a “historic moment for France” and that her treatment could be “the spark” that ignites the peaceful revolution he thinks the country needs. He may be right about the revolution — but risks being disappointed by the path his beloved people finally take.
The modern political usage of le peuple dates back to the Revolution. Three years after the storming of the Bastille, in 1792, the First Republic was proclaimed, introducing a new constitution and handing sovereign power to the citizens of France. Since then, each iteration of the Republic has always deferred to “the people” as the nation’s true rulers, clear everywhere from Delacroix’s painting to the rousing chorus of the “Marseillaise”.
Mélenchon clearly sees himself in this tradition. Quite aside from his recent pronouncements, he always describes himself as a “Republican” and not a mere “Leftist”, frequently comparing himself to Jean Jaurès, the legendary founder of the contemporary French socialist movement. Yet if invocations of popular sovereignty are common across French politics — even haughty centrists like Emmanuel Macron adopt the idea — Mélenchon argues that the French Revolution did not go far enough. True freedom, he suggests, can only be found in permanent revolution, the constant updating and upending of political realities driven by ever-shifting material conditions.
As you might expect from a self-styled French political philosopher, Now, the People! is a long, rambling, complicated work. Ranging from economics and globalisation to climate change and artificial intelligence, the author hopes to influence nothing less than the future of humanity. The book begins with a call to arms, an appeal for a veritable citizens’ revolution — by which Mélenchon means political change led by a peuple who finally understand how oppressed they truly are.
It’s a familiar if slightly outdated dream, as if John Lennon’s “Imagine” had reappeared as political praxis. Certainly, it sits comfortably alongside Mélenchon’s established style as a media figure, to say nothing of his owlish features, his penchant for Nehru jackets, and his political awakening in the Trotskyist and Maoist ferment of Sixties France.
Yet Mélenchon is also a tough old bird and no lazy nostalgic. He references an eclectic variety of past thinkers, not only Marxists and other enemies of capitalism but the Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Along the way, he calls for a new Republic, the Sixth, with a new constitution fit for purpose in the 21st century. In practice, that means replacing the one-size-fits-all universalism of the 1789 Revolution with a more inclusive and dispersed form of freedom than that found in the rubric “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” — now dismissed by many modern Leftists as an outmoded form of European “totalitarian democracy” and unsuited to the postcolonial age.
To justify these claims, Mélenchon quotes three recent examples of civil disturbances over recent years. These are the revolts of the Gilets Jaunes; the agitation over pension reforms; and the riots of the summer 2023 provoked by the police shooting of Nahel Merzouk, a 17 year old of mixed Moroccan-Algerian heritage. Merzouk was targeted, Mélenchon claims, precisely because he was part of a minority that the Republic does not recognise. For Mélenchon, then, the Merzouk affair was not merely an instance of unbridled police violence, but rather a demonstration of the limits of Republican universality.
Yet if his theoretical ambition is impressive, Mélenchon’s understanding of contemporary France is distinctly lacking. The fact is that his case studies cannot easily be subsumed into any single strand of discontent. The uprising of the Gilets Jaunes was an angry cry from what is often termed “peripheral France” — the abandoned and ignored towns and villages far from well-heeled metropolitan centres. The mini-riots over pension reforms were a simple show of frustration at Macron’s economic policies, and his high-handed autocratic manner. For their part, the unrest of 2023 were a mixture of youth nihilism leavened by fierce anti-Republicanism. These teens in the banlieues don’t want a new Republic, they just want to destroy the status quo, clear enough when they targeted post offices, schools, libraries, and any other building carrying the imprimatur of the French state.
Apart from anything else, it’s hard not to notice the bizarre contradiction that self-proclaimed Leftists like Mélenchon should argue in favour of rioters, many of whom actively despise the Left-wing Republican model. If, moreover, Mélenchon’s diagnosis is dubious, his cure is too. Towards the end of the book, and echoing the theories of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, he espouses what he calls “creolisation” — as a way of linking the universalist aspirations of the First Republic to the kaleidoscopic multicultural reality of contemporary France.
To be clear, “creolisation” isn’t multiculturalism, anathema to many French Leftists. Nor is it assimilation or integration in the American model. Rather, it envisages the creation of a new hybrid society, one where the culture of the “oppressed” creates a new national culture blending French and non-French traditions. Out, then, are the hardy perennials of state secularism and centralisation, replaced by “the concrete universalism” of difference. That inevitably involves a total reshaping of every institution in the Republic, from schools and universities to the armed forces. This, Mélenchon argues, is the only solution to the divisions and conflicts that currently plague the country, from suburban riots to the rise of the far-Right. As Mélenchon breathlessly concludes, this new France will be “the future of a humanity which is soaring to new heights”.
How to explain these ideas, so radical in their opposition to the 1789 framework? In a sense, they’re the logical endpoint of a political culture obsessed with le peuple — especially as those universalist principles push up against the reality of the modern Republic.
“France’s universalist principles push up against the reality of the modern Republic.”
France, after all, is a place where old class divisions no longer apply, and where roughly a tenth of people are immigrants. Given these demographic inescapables, Mélenchon would probably argue he’s just bringing the Leftist view of society up to date. But as he does so, with all the high-end intellectual pirouettes demanded by “creolisation”, the author risks losing touch with the very peuple he so cherishes. What’s in no doubt is that activists across the political spectrum are appalled by his ideas. He has unsurprisingly been attacked from the Right, which sees him as pandering to an Islamist agenda, but also by elements on the Left, who consider his vision of people power as not only “anti-French” but an actual betrayal of the secular Enlightenment values upon which France is founded.
The ordinary French public, and not necessarily just white people, has mostly reacted with horror at Mélenchon’s theories too, seeing them as the extinction of French identity in the name of an untried political experiment. Some have even compared Mélenchon’s “creolisation” to Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission, in which the novelist imagines France gradually turning into an Islamic state, while rumours appear online that the politician hopes to make Arabic an official language of the country.
That last one is unsubstantiated — but it’s also true that Mélenchon was born and raised in Tangier, and still jokes that the first political slogans he ever learned were cries in Arabic for Moroccan independence. It is hard to think of a boast more likely to antagonise the minority that still mourns the loss of France’s colonial empire, let alone the countless millions who fear the rise of political Islam in the Hexagon itself.
Indeed, it’s hard not to see this combative swagger as Mélenchon’s fatal flaw. The fact is that, far from wanting to smash the Fifth Republic in the name of a fantasy revolution, most French people are exhausted by the disorder of recent years — and ache, instead, for stability. More than this, they are desperate for their voices to be heard. This is the real fallout of the Le Pen affair, with many voters seeing it as a deliberate block by the state on a legitimate political party, denying the votes of all those who voted for Rassemblement National at the last election. It goes without saying that this is a far more likely trigger for revolt than Mélenchon’s dream of creolisation.
