Student-led research at POLIS:  The Far Right and Its Uses of the Past:

Last summer, CTIS member Anna Grimaldi won some internal seed funding from the Leeds Social Science Institute (LSSI) to carry out an international project on the Far Right in collaboration with the University of Buenos Aries (UBA). To expand the project’s pedagogical impact, she also worked with a Laidlaw Scholar from the University of Leeds, as well as a Masters Research Fellow from King’s College London (KCL). Through a student-centred approach, Anna’s supervisions supported students to engage with the main project’s team, but also to develop their own parallel projects, mobilising their personal interests, career development preferences, research design and project management skills.

Lucile de Lucile de Laforcade, a final year student in International Relations, approached the project by collecting her own data and applying the project’s methodology to produce a fantastic piece of work. To showcase the value of this student-centred approach to learning, we share below Lucile’s main output.

 The Far Right and Its Uses of the Past: a Pilot Study of Twitter and the Rassemblement National

Lucile de Laforcade

Introduction

Over the last few years, the French far-right party Le Rassemblement National (RN) has grown into the one of the most important opposition parties to the presidential majority. It today appears as a powerful and influential European force, yet at the same time, an eminently more radical and reactionary structure. Surfing on a global turn to nationalism and populism, from which it borrows its core mechanisms, rhetoric and structure, the fifty-year old Rassemblement National finds its distinctiveness in the way it has maintained a distinctive character, and a pervasive discourse mobilising France’s collective memory, identity, shared history and trauma. Today more than ever, its presence on and skilled use of social media platforms – Twitter being the party’s main artery – has proven a successful way to reach a wider and ever younger audience, bringing forth a seemingly new, less radical political agenda without breaking from its traditional fold. Supported by the Gino Germani Research Institute (IIGG) and the University of Leeds’ Social Sciences Institute (LSSI), this collaborative research seeks to understand how Twitter is mobilised to support the wider social and political movement of Rassemblement National in France.

Through the systematic analysis of the RN’s tweets since 2013, we highlight and examine the repertoire of words and actions used by the party on the platform to create an identity, shape political reactions and processes, and imagine conditional futures. In doing so, we identify Twitter both as a rite de passage for the Rassemblement National, as well as a machine (see Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine, 2019) used to call upon memory and affect, foster and motivate reactions, gather support and legitimacy around a cause, a leader, the party, and prefigure political imaginaries. In this process, we focus on references to the past – be these events, symbols, figures or particular states of affairs – as the primary lexicon of the RN on Twitter to achieve its political goals.

To address these themes, The Rassemblement National, Twitter and its Uses of the Past draws on the conceptual and methodological framework of its pilot project, The (Re)Turn of the Far Right and Its Uses of the Past, developed collaboratively through a series of workshops between Dr. Anna Grimaldi (University of Leeds), Dr. Francisco García Chicote (University of Buenos Aires), Dr. Christos Vrakapoulis (University of Edinburgh), Dr. Micaela Cuesta (University of Buenos Aires), Poppy Lown (University of Leeds) and Lucas Reydó (University of Buenos Aires). Building on this pilot project, Dr Anna Grimaldi (University of Leeds – UoL) and Lucile de Laforcade (King’s College London - KCL) collaborated and reflected collectively to elaborate a profile of the contextual, theoretical and analytical structure of Rassemblement National and its use of Twitter. We interpret this phenomenon by drawing on our combined backgrounds in history, political science, memory studies, visual semiotics, embodied performance and strategic communications. This preliminary presentation of our research provides a brief summary of our methods and introduces key components of our findings.

Selecting a Case Study: The Rassemblement National

As we began thinking about the study of far-right politics in France, two case study options quickly emerged: the Rassemblement National – National Rally – (RN), and Reconquête – Recovery. The latter, created in 2021 under the impetus of and to support the presidential bid of French polemicist and author Eric Zemmour, quickly gained nation-wide momentum, reaching an honourable fourth place at the elections. Embodying a radical turn to nationalism and hard-line far-right ideology, Reconquête would have constituted a perfect candidate for a pilot study like ours. Yet, with no parliamentary presence, and such little influence on policymaking at the national level, we settled on the Rassemblement National instead. A well established far-right party in France, the RN – formerly known as the Front National (FN) – was created in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, which he led until his own daughter, politician Marine Le Pen (MLP), took over in 2011. After a long policy of ‘de-demonization’ and the rebranding of the party from a national ‘Front’ to a ‘Rally,’ MLP stepped down, handing the party’s leadership to the young Eurodeputy Jordan Bardella. With over 80,000 members and supporters, the RN is today a major force within the French social and political landscape, leading the opposition to the presidential majority, with no less than 88 deputies for a total of 577 seats. As France approaches the 2027 presidential elections, Rassemblement National has never been bigger, stronger or closer to a victory, making it an opportune moment to establish an interdisciplinary reading of their communication techniques.

Data Collection: Manifesto and Twitter Account.

Focusing on such a long-standing, organisationally rich and complex, politically omnipresent and deeply reactionary party posed manifold challenges. To best serve the purpose of our study, we needed to narrow down its focus, which we did through the formulation of a set of key ideas, themes and concepts. These were based on a preliminary exercise of content-mapping the RN’s main website page and Marine Le Pen’s April 2022 Presidential Manifesto, from which we extracted the Rassemblement National’s core rhetoric lexicon. This, in turn, defined how we selected and framed the data we would filter, analyse and evaluate.

At the same time, we followed and charted the RN’s online presence and activities in order to identify not only the party’s principle channels of communication, but also their favoured platforms for interacting with members and the wider French electorate. Compared to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, Twitter appeared – perhaps unsurprisingly – as Rassemblement National’s greatest asset. Not only does the party’s medium feature an average of 10 Tweets a day and an impressive 335,100 followers (as of September 25, 2023), the RN is also the most popular French political party on Twitter, and cumulates a conquering 912,300 followers all social media platforms combined (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube)Twitter therefore not only appeared as a device but a core component of RN’s identity, ideology and project-building strategy, which they could use to strengthen their message, legitimacy and reach.

The final step in our data collection was conducted by our data scraper, Lucas Reydó (UBA), using the Twitter Academic API along with the “AcademicTwitteR” package available in the CRAN repository for the programming language R. While we limited our retrieval to RN party tweets, we made sure these included retweets from its most prominent and vocal leaders including, but not limited to, Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen and Sébastien Chenu. These tweets were then filtered using the previously identified keywords, and a total of 7,000 were systematically, and chronologically analysed by Dr. Anna Grimaldi (UoL) and Lucile de Laforcade (KCL). Together, we drew on our collective disciplinary and methodological strengths, our respective experiences and insights and interpretations through regular reflections, making this the fruit of knowledge co-creation. The following sections present our initial findings, divided into three sections to highlight the dynamic relationship between Twitter and the RN, one that transcends past, present and future in an attempt to bring about political change.

‘Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the Frenchest of them all?’

Twitter is, for the RN, not just a social media platform. It acts as a powerful mirror showing the far-right party what it was, is, and could be. It is, above all, a test of French-ness, which the RN seeks to embody, emulate and project as it attempts to build a political, social and national identity through the social medium. The quest for a French (political) identity seeks historical legitimacy, and manifests in RN’s Tweets through references to a national past and the mobilising of a French heritage. We found numerous references to a glorified ‘culture’, built on ‘genius’, ‘tradition’ and ‘Christianism’, as well as references to illustrious figures like Joan of Arc, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, or Charles de Gaulle, from which the RN assumes a direct kinship. Not only do these images speak to the many, engaging French collective memory, but they serves as a stark reminder of the values of the true Frenchman, which the RN is vigorously fighting to protect against destruction. Mobilising the national past in their Tweets is one of the first steps towards defining who precisely belongs to the the true French community, and who does not.

Summoning the past takes place through two interconnected ways, both enabled and shaped by Twitter. The very nature of the social media platform and its heavy reliance on words to convey messages in short form inevitably draws on specific, ‘insider’ language, references and shortcuts to which only RN followers and sympathisers on Twitter can relate, further building a sphere of belonging. Where “national priority,” “carceral Europe” or “islamo-socialism” are mentioned, they mobilise a specific understanding of French domestic and external politics, exclusive to the RN. The power of those terms, furthermore, is their purposeful fuzziness, allowing anyone interested in embracing their rhetoric to do so easily, thus joining the RN discourse in their own way, as opposed to the rest of society.

As a result, this same society undergoes a scission, divided between the RN and its members, the “us”, and the rest, a “them”, both constructed and further stigmatised through this radically antagonistic discourse. The strength of such discourse lies precisely in its vagueness, which offers flexibility. Enemies range from ‘big businesses’ to ‘woke extremists,’ from ‘Islamism’ to the ‘migratory submersion,’ and from ‘Macron’ to ‘Erdogan.’ The threats identified by the RN are both near and far, external and from within, putting the French nation at the heart of a dangerous environment of ‘conspiracy,’ ‘lies’ and ‘powerlessness.’ The ‘rightful’ Frenchman, thus presented as a victim of both globalisation and Europeanisation, migration and elitism, de-industrialisation and inflation, is called upon to act following their ‘common sense.’

Popular Mobilisation and Political Action

Resorting to French people’s ‘common sense’ appears as the most common tool used by the RN to justify their claims and shape their political strategy. The power of logic is taken to transcend all other demonstrations of knowledge, even that of experts, which the RN openly opposes. It is indeed science that trumps experience, undermines the lived reality of the French nation in the face of migration in particular. More than once, we found the following exclamations on the party’s Twitter:

If we keep on going with the complete opening of borders, we will keep on going with deindustrialisation and unemployment (2017/08/23 – 42:24)

Unemployment is rising, immigration is increasing, insecurity is increasing […] (2018/11/28 – 17:52)

Laying out the direct causal relationship between immigration and unemployment in France, the RN makes the ‘factual’ core to its claims about truth and knowledge. This omniscience is further amplified by the sheer number of figures and statistics flooding the party’s tweets, often reinforcing the conclusions drawn by the RN itself, with little to no indication as to where these precisely come from:

An aggression every 44 seconds (2023/06/20 – 07:15)

Since 2017, more than 650 000 first asylum applications have been recorded in France: it is an absolute record (2023/06/05 – 09:21)

74% of French people believe there is too much immigration in France! (2023/06/05 – 51:56)

Against such glaring political incompetence and powerlessness, the RN also uses Twitter as an echo chamber for mobilisation and political action. Beyond the feeling of distrust and revolt that RN seeks to instil among its readership, the party’s tweets clearly set out how its followers might transform their anger and frustration into concrete outcomes, but only if they embrace MLP’s political line. RN tweets feature a strong injunctive language (‘support,’ ‘demand,’ ‘join,’ let’s act,’ ‘refuse,’ ‘sign our petition,’ ‘MOBILISE,’ ‘RESIST’), often presenting the people’s duty in existential terms. In doing so, RN’s Twitter becomes the paradigmatic space of a battle for the very survival of French civilisation. It is particularly interesting to note how readers and supporters alike are brought into a virtual albeit sensory experience, intended to exacerbate a willingness to fight. RN’s followers find themselves in the midst of a ‘social war’ (2023/01/11 – 39:04), a ‘bloody and grieving’ nation (2018/06/25 – 45:48), of which they are the only ‘true defenders’ (2019/03/03 – 40:55). The RN’s self-fulfilling and reinforcing logic is particularly compelling, as this Tweet by RN European deputy Thierry Mariani encapsulates:

The true defenders of Europe are here, with us, with Jordan and Marine! If, on May 26, we do not achieve a majority in Brussels, we will have lost the fight. This is why you should mobilise and vote! (2019/03/03 – 40:55)

This example also indicates another important trope in the semiotics of RN’s tweets: an almost Biblical rhetoric, drawing from martyrdom and destiny, and actualising French foundational myths such as that of Joan of Arc.

“Liberty Leading the People”, or the RN’s divine mission.

Past, present and future are interrelated in the RN’s Twitter space, stressing the party’s unique ability to catalyse a sense of national heritage in order to shape a new horizon for the French nation. Their call for radical change positions the party in the direct fold of the French Revolution, claiming the very ideas, namely, notions of freedom and democracy, that motivated Robespierre et al.,. It is precisely their (re)definitions that flood the party’s tweets, as demonstrated by the following quotes:

STOP to all of those who see in the people and its expression a threat, when in reality they are the pillars of LIBERTY, the pillars of Europe […]#Bobigny #WeAreComing  (2019/05/08 – 18:08)

Democracy is the power of the PEOPLE! Macron has decided to govern AGAINST the French and for the elites! (2023/03/23 – 51:00)

By equating “the people” to the core values of Republican France, the RN claims that current politicians are slowly degrading the national body. Simultaneously, “the people” are elevated as a supreme entity from which, according to the party, derive the very tenants of France, serving a self-reinforcing mechanism of designation. Here, the confident use of “the people” as a unique, bounded entity, further emphasising the party’s role as supreme guide and sole legitimate spokesperson. Through its tweets, the party intends to inspire readers as it celebrates the past, breaks with the present, and provokes the future. This proactive position, assumed and embraced by the RN leaders indeed precipitates conditional outcomes, making their realisation a necessity:

If we do not say ‘stop,’ we will be submerged (2018/04/04 – 10:43)

We must act now, we can change Europe to save the nations […] #Caudry #WeAreComing (2019/02/21 – 59:39)

It is also particularly important to note the regular appearance of the hashtag #Onarrive (#WeAreComing), which is included at the end of a majority of Tweets, suggesting both the dynamic character of the party and its ever-active role, as well as its continuous projection into the future as something to be reached or achieved.

This future, however, and perhaps most importantly, is not fully unknown. Rather, it echoes a past reality, France’s “Golden Days,” days that are today thought to be lost and which the party strives to bring back. The positive, almost uplifting approach chosen by the party makes such a reconquest appear more attainable, by and for all. Idealisation plays a fundamental role in this. Throughout its Tweets, the RN indeed shares its love and admiration for past successes and situations, which in the party’s eyes are the pillars of French prestige. These include, but are not restricted to, strong borders, rural communities and agriculture, an affirmed anti-decolonialism and national priority. This is indeed assumed on Twitter by the party, according to which the movement of the world, is a return of borders, the legitimate return of identities, it is the return of protections and fair trade #WeAreComing #Caudry (2019/02/24 – 01:00).

While the RN world therefore appears to be cyclical, the movement and its vision cannot be realised without the party fighting to lead France towards its renewal, one Tweet at a time.