Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French leftist leader who I was hoping would beat Macron in the last election, really sullies himself with this comment about French collaboration with the Holocaust. Responding to Macron’s speech in which Macron said France needed to take responsibility for its role in the roundup and extermination of the Jews (for decades, a touchy subject in France), Mélenchon resorts to the worst nationalist tropes to defend the honor of the French nation. Never, at any moment, did the French choose murder and anti-Semitic criminality. Those who were not Jewish were not all, and as French people, guilty of the crime that was carried out at the time! On the contrary, through its resistance, its fight against the [German] invader and through the […]

Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 1936: Léon Blum’s Popular Front government establishes extensive labor law protections, including the right to collective bargaining, two weeks’ paid holidays, and 40-hour work week. Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 2017: Macron’s government uses summer holidays to ram through extensive labor law retrenchments, including provisions that ensure collective bargaining agreements protect workers who aren’t in unions and that prevent workers from having to answer work-related email and phone calls after hours. Also, this: … he’ll [Macron] ask Parliament for legislation that would let the government enact labor reforms by decree, avoiding momentum-sapping debate… That’s how we fight fascism today: by an enabling act that allows the government to bypass political debate and rule by decree.