Far-right ideas are gaining a renewed respectability in France

“NATIONALISM IS THE safeguarding of all those treasures that are at threat without a foreign army crossing the border, without the physical invasion of territory. It is the defence of the nation against the stranger from within.” Thus wrote Charles Maurras, a reactionary and anti-Semitic French author, in “My Political Ideas” in 1937. After the disgrace and trauma of Vichy France, which officially branded Jews the stranger within, such thinking was for most of the post-war period banished to the fringes of French intellectual life. For decades it was intellos from the political left who dominated the salons and newspaper columns of Paris.