The antisemitic messages attributed by Mediapart to the young Jordan Bardella bear the mark of Alain Soral. In what way is he both new and old?
Pierre SavySoral is indeed both new and old, as the book is, in fact. He is new in the arrangement of the themes, which is necessarily singular: antisemitism gathers a set of themes, beliefs, and prejudices that can be arranged in a thousand ways, a kind of combinatorics. He is new also in his manner of communication. He is not alone, but he uses social networks, he has an unlimited platform and a sizeable audience, despite all the condemnations he has faced.
On the other hand, he is old because he did not invention of any particularly strong theme. He has borrowed many themes, not all of them, from antisemitism forged since the nineteenth century. The anti-Judaic dimension, Christian, is not massively present in him. But the denunciation of Jewish misanthropy, Zionism as a world conspiracy, the love of money, the excessive power: all of this is not new, and all of it can be found in Soral. It is new with old.
There is a sense that antisemitism rests on sedimentation: the major themes, including the medieval ones you mention in your book, are present. Perhaps the racial question, which would be in decline?
I agree, this notion of sedimentation is a good image. When one writes a book that traces the long history of beliefs and prejudices, there is a bias that invites speaking of all the sedimented layers. In the long run, there is indeed sedimentation; that is history. Today, many themes, if not all, can still be found when one researches on the Internet or reads the antisemitic press: almost everything is there. But when we observe what is said and written today, certain themes have receded, even disappeared; others have been reformulated; others are thriving.
I also agree with the idea that we must distinguish, it is a bit scholastic, between racism and racialism. Racism is unfortunately thriving, including against Jews. The purely racial dimension, backed by a pseudo-theory developed between the late eighteenth century and especially the nineteenth and into the mid-twentieth, which culminates with Nazism, is in retreat: we know it is somewhat ridiculous to believe in it. That does not mean that no one believes it anymore. But racism today tends to be cultural in nature, which does not prevent it from being real racism, without relying on a false gene theory. That has receded, and other themes have receded as well.
What are these other themes?
For two fairly large reasons, the antisemitism of Christian matrix has lost a great deal of its force. On the one hand, religion in general holds a smaller place in our society and in public discourse, what contemporaries call the de-Christianization. On the other hand, and this is very commendable, the Church undertook a profound shift after the Shoah: Vatican II in the 1960s and the promulgation of Nostra Aetate. One can still find these ideas in reactionary thinkers, in the strongest sense of the term. But the notion that Jews are too ritualistic, that they do not understand their Scriptures, and above all that they killed Christ, is less present in the argument.
Otherwise, in a metaphorical form. Deicide, that is, the idea that all Jews are guilty of killing Jesus, and not only the Jews of his time, which is already false, is such a strong and pervasive theme in Western art and culture that it still reappears. A Palestinian mother carrying her dead son becomes a Pietà; the Israelis would kill the Palestinian people, presented as the Christ. But it is still less present.
The other set of themes that has receded a lot are beliefs about the body, linked to the racism we discussed: horns, the odour of pestilence, the tail at the base of the spine. These are chimera-like beliefs, difficult to sustain today, because the level of information and collective cognitive abilities make this impossible, except in a few particularly backward minds.
What do you find of these antisemitic themes in the remarks attributed to Jordan Bardella?
One clearly finds all the themes of classic antisemitism, that of its golden age, if I may say so, the nineteenth century. A French antisemitism which, as we have just said, is not violently racialist: even if he may have said these things, he is not in a position to subscribe to Nazi positions. There is still a gap, even if these remarks are appalling.
He may not have mentioned Rothschild, but there is this idea of the Jewish banking power, of world domination by Jews, or at least the project of domination. You can find three of the main themes that are the subject of specific chapters in our book. First, the conspiracy of domination, with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the background: the idea that since the nineteenth century Jews have worked toward world domination. Then a theme that goes back to antiquity, that of misanthropy, of hatred of the goy. We coddle this term, which simply means “non-Jew,” to dress Jews with a hatred of humanity and other peoples; it is very explicit in his messages, with this will to dominate other peoples. Finally, of course, money, the most present theme: a taste for money, talent in earning it, the desire to possess all the money through banks. The second theme is very old; the two others were in full vigor in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth.
Why money? Where does that come from?
It is a complicated question. In two words: a bad bend is taken very early, in the Gospels, with a certain Judas, who sells the Christ. The Gospels were written by Jews, and it is important to say so, because it is easy to label them as antisemitic, which is somewhat caricatured. But Judas has the misfortune to be named Judas. In the early centuries of the first millennium, some Fathers of the Church, some theologians, transform Judas into a Jew. One does not need to be a linguist to hear in Judas Yehuda, a name that allows us to turn him, by antonomasia, into the embodiment of Jews. So we work on Judas to critique the love of money among Jews.
That continues and becomes irrevocably locked in the central Middle Ages, between the 11th and 14th centuries. Jews are kept away from property ownership and directed toward the moneylending trades, which they practice: lending, commerce. They are not the only ones, most lenders are not Jewish. But for several centuries, this activity in the money trades locks in the cliché, the stereotype. It is a band-aid that has never left the Jewish people. Then, with this know-how in numbers and writing, with movable property but no land, this gives in the modern era and in the nineteenth century large Jewish banks, or Protestant banks, by the way. There is a real presence in banking and commerce, but it is not inexplicable and certainly not exclusive.
What did the State of Israel change, while the far right is very duplicitous toward it?
One might have expected that things would go smoothly. The problem is that since 1948, and especially in recent decades, there has been an incredibly violent conflict, which mobilizes much beyond Israel and Palestine. The far right thus faces a double bind: does it hate Jews more or Arabs more?
Some think that Israel is the bulwark of the “Judeo-Christian” civilization, with obviously added quotation marks, against the Arab and Islamist peril, and that one must therefore support this country. This is all the easier as it is currently led by the far right: converging with a Western country, fairly modern for now, highly militarized, is not complicated. Or, conversely, Jewish hatred prevails, and one must support the Arabs, to whom all sorts of virtues can be attributed. Father Le Pen and a good part of the far right, even today, lean that way. Between two hatreds, their hearts waver.
Soral, for his part, has made his choice. These are also people who manage to rally through anti-Semitism individuals who would otherwise have reasons to hate each other. In Soral, there is now a wide open door for Arab-Muslim patriots, willing to fight the only enemy, Zionism. He speaks poorly of women or homosexuals, but in truth, what obsesses him is the Jew.
The masculinist dimension of Soral, I am not saying it is present in Bardella, I obviously don’t know. But one can imagine that, for a young activist of the National Rally at the time, it wasn’t something monstrous?
No. Again, I don’t know him personally and I won’t comment on his personality. But the image he projects is of a tall, handsome, very athletic man who lifts weights, so they say. And more broadly, these young people who are now in their thirties and who, it would seem, were somewhat raised on Soral as they became politically aware as teenagers, are sensitive to this discourse. They sometimes post things that are extremely problematic about women, and there are no women among them. Those who study the far right feel that the discourse passes more easily between Soral and these young men than with Marine Le Pen, for example.
There is therefore something quite probable in this arrangement. Masculinism, masculinist rhetoric are very present in Soral, who can insult women very freely. He also insults men, but for women, it is always of a sexual nature: “whores,” “sluts,” “suckers,” and so on. It is a very present dimension that could have appealed to a young man. But, again, I do not know him personally.
More broadly, what do the accusations by Mediapart about a Soralian antisemitism in the young Jordan Bardella inspire in you?
Baptiste Roger-LacanIt’s a two-level story. First, there is little reason not to trust what Mediapart says, which rarely errs in this type of investigation. And the context provides many reasons to believe it, given the discourses, themes, and antisemitic imaginary that could have circulated in the FN’s offices and federations in the early 2010s. It was a moment when Soral had a very large audience within the far right. He was among the first to know how to capture and channel the possibilities offered by video and digital media to disengage his speech from traditional media: bypass newspapers and reach a direct audience receptive to this antisemitic discourse. The dates provided by Mediapart correspond precisely to this high point of soralian speech within far-right, especially digital, milieus.
The second interesting point is that, from that moment on, Jordan Bardella seems to have adopted the logic of double-speak typical of nearly all far-right organizations in Europe since 1945. There exists a strategic, tactical, and internalized distinction between what one says to each other, when the section is gathered or by message, and what one says outwardly. Among themselves, they socialize, they mark their affiliation through this discourse, and they openly express the most racist, the most antisemitic, the most homophobic statements. Toward the outside, they are politely mannered. In this sense, Fabrice Arfi is right to speak of concealment rather than demonization of the RN for the past fifteen years.
But, contrary to what one might think, this logic did not emerge with Marine Le Pen: it has existed almost since the party’s birth. The only difference is that under Jean-Marie Le Pen, party leaders regularly violated this rule by making antisemitic, homophobic statements publicly. With Marine Le Pen’s arrival, these statements, when public, were often sanctioned by exclusion, except when proximity to the party leadership protected the author.
The first case, not long after Marine Le Pen became the head of the party, is that of Alexandre Gabriac, a young rising star of the party, also a member of the Oeuvre française, at a moment when that group sought to infiltrate the Front national. He is photographed giving a Nazi salute and is immediately excluded. This triggers debates within the FN’s National Council, because Jean-Marie Le Pen opposed that exclusion. One sees then two lines, and what is interesting is that they do not diverge on the substance, but on what to do with people who do not respect the rule. Or the messages in question were presumably circulated within the framework of the section or federation to which Bardella belonged. They were intended to participate in this militant sociability that, within the Front national, passes through racist and antisemitic outbursts. Finally, this story fits into the long history of antisemitism on the far right.
But then, in the hypothetical case where he would have said these things, why not acknowledge it? Why not say: “I did that at seventeen; you were all young once”?
These are hypotheses. I think that during his ascent to the head of the RN, Bardella wanted to embody this new supposedly depoliticized face, with the very particular idea that the party would have been demonized by others than himself. He wanted to embody a party allegedly freed from the culture and ideology antisemitism that had characterized it since its founding in the 1970s. Briefly a possible presidential candidate, number two whose role apparently seems destined to last, he embodied the possibility of normalizing the party.
For all these reasons, admitting to having held these remarks, even as a youthful error, would be a risky strategy. In this case, it would completely undermine his strategy and Marine Le Pen’s, at a moment when the National Rally has seized the question of the place of French Jews in society, and more broadly the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, to reinforce its image as the sole shield against the “Muslim threat” in France.
For now, I think the line will be fairly Trumpian: deny, deny, deny, probably rise into conspiracy theory in statements, likely escalate in violence toward those who will treat the affair. The journalists first, who will have to wear Kevlar vests; the judges if the case goes to court; and certainly the researchers. The RN will revert to a classically populist line, pitting the people, whose legitimate and majority choice to bring the RN to power would be threatened, against a small educated elite attached to its privileges. We will have to see what Mediapart puts back on the table, but I think they will not admit anything for as long as possible. That does not mean Bardella will not be gradually, imperceptibly pushed away from the RN leadership. But I do not think the party will admit that he could have said such things.
You say it was Soral’s peak around thirteen years ago. How would you assess his role in the history of the far right and antisemitism? And why do you think he declined? He is less present in France, for obvious reasons, but can we be sure his star has dimmed?
In the history of the far right, and especially in the history of antisemitism, he provided a media surface, and especially a digital surface, to a discourse that hybrids classic antisemitism. The latter presents Jews as a cosmopolitan and manipulative minority, acting in their own interests by seeking to oppress national majorities: this is the classic dynamic of antisemitism born from exclusive and defensive nationalism of the late nineteenth century, the same moment when the modern far right emerged and structured it. Soral re-energizes this discourse with an obsessive reading of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and of Israel as a visible and manifest embodiment of the Jewish people’s domineering plan.
What is interesting is that Soral, gradually marginalized by the media from the 1990s through the 2000s, found himself increasingly refused access to television channels, radio, and nearly all of the French press. He then turned to the Internet, creating a site and producing videos distributed especially on YouTube, to transform this antisemitic discourse into a business. He created a publishing house and attached to all this an array of content to sell. It is a classic pattern: the business of antisemitism is as old as Édouard Drumont; there is money to be made in antisemitism. Through this channel, he reached new audiences, notably on the far right, young people who form the first generations to seek explanations for the world on the Internet rather than in traditional media.
He therefore played a very important role at that moment. He benefited from real traction at the end of the 2000s and the early 2010s: his videos were widely distributed and highly watched. Moreover, he was for a time a companion of the Front national, which saw him as a conduit to attract younger voters.
Today, the market of hatred has become increasingly competitive, both in the French space and globally, and his influence has declined. He remains nonetheless a reference for a whole segment of radical far-right. I have no proof, other researchers know this better than I do, but I am sure that there are still militants who listen to him behind closed doors today.
Today he has an international career. He is in Russia, but is he pursuing a career as an intellectual there?
I know poorly the ultra-contemporary. I became interested in him precisely at the moment when he was within the RN networks. Today, I could not even tell you where he gets his income from. Does he receive a little money from Russia, or even play a role as a destabilizing agent? I do not know.
How would you define him? I often describe him as a Drumont who met the Internet, but I do not know if that is relevant.
On that point, there are many parallels. He is an intellectual, a figure of Parisian intellectual life, who increasingly obsessed antisemitism as a form of social, media, and financial life, and who doubles down on antisemitic excess. To the point that he is hardly controllable by the traditional party structures of the far right. He is a kind of antisemitic entrepreneur, creative of the contemporary far right.
What distinguishes him from Drumont, for obvious reasons, is perhaps his masculinist dimension that may have appealed to Bardella? In Mediapart’s article, one of his former comrades explains that he was not interested in Soral, but in masculinism.
We see there the ability of the far right to mark against its own camp when it is in trouble. Masculinism fits into the multiplication of hierarchies that the far right defends: its worldview is always extremely hierarchical. It defends cultural, social, racial hierarchies, and hierarchies of gender. There is always this idea of a difference between men and women, and of masculine qualities that are threatened. It is a classic far-right discourse.
Soral seized on it because, in this digital marketplace of radicalism that emerged at the end of the 2000s and really took shape in the early 2010s on the French Internet, it allows him to differentiate himself and attract, literally, viewers. And it is not completely delusional on the part of such a rabid antisemitite, since there is also a tradition, present among the Nazis, that the Jew is feminine. The Jew is not on the side of strength, but on the side of cunning; there would be in him a sort of androgyny, even femininity, opposed to a masculine, hierarchical, armed culture that would be threatened. Put simply, Jews would seek to emasculate Western societies to better subjugate them.
In Bardella’s remarks there is the issue of Zionism. The term has spread widely, becoming even more polysemic than before, to the point of being synonymous with “Jew” for a number of people who seek to crypt the message, in both the far right and the far left. What does this inspire in you?
This parallel exists for a long time, as shown notably by Valérie Igounet’s work on negationism. But for a long time, it remained on the margins. On the far right, there were debates about the question of Israel. The case of Xavier Vallat is very well documented: the former General Commissioner for Jewish questions becomes a Zionist after World War II and defends the existence of the State of Israel, on the grounds that if Jews have a land, they will not come to threaten the French race. It is a kind of ethno-nationalism that would apply consistently to Jews. In the same way, a very small minority of radical left posited the idea of an equivalence.
I think that October 7 and Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza transformed the nature of the debate about Israel in France. This debate has always existed, but it gained an unprecedented centrality in the media and political spheres, with new strategies. At the time of Bardella’s statements we were discussing, that degree of fusion between antisemitism and anti-Zionism remained quite marginal, and was carried in this manner by only a few figures, including Soral.
Do you see elements that the reactions to Mediapart’s revelations have left out?
Perhaps two things. First: there has been a lot of talk about Soral in the past week, but one must not underestimate the implicit importance of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the antisemitic statements attributed to Bardella.
Bardella never hid that he entered the FN out of admiration for Jean-Marie Le Pen. His initial fascination for the party came more from his fascination with Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is undoubtedly the most famous antisemitist in France in the second half of the twentieth century. This dimension inevitably plays into his statements. More generally, in the same way that watching Soral’s videos, commenting on them, and discussing these themes was part of the FN’s partisan and militant culture in the early 2010s, the fascination with Jean-Marie Le Pen and with his most transgressive statements in 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s — notably his antisemitic and negationist statements — contributed to this almost clandestine militant culture, at least theoretically kept away from outside ears. It reinforced the ties among RN militants. Therefore, we must not underestimate the shadow cast by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s antisemitism.
The second point is that this sequence fits into the history of the far right in France. The modern French far right is built not only in parallel with the emergence of modern antisemitism, but almost inseparably from it. There existed a counter-revolutionary anti-Judaism, producing texts mixing distrust of economic liberalism and rejection of Jews, following modalities that borrow from the themes and tropes of Jewish rejection by Christians, notably Catholics. But antisemitism emerges in the late 1870s in Germany. A few years later, Édouard Drumont and La France juive reconfigure antisemitism by fusing elements from Catholic anti-Judaism, antisemitic eschatology, millenarian and counter-revolutionary, and from left anti-Judaism anti-capitalist, with the term antisemitism not yet existing. He makes it into a perfectly coherent discourse, explaining, in his view, the decline of France in the context of the 1880s European economic crisis.
It is at this moment, in the 1880s-1890s, that a reconfigured far right around the national question emerges. Since then, these two phenomena, nationalist far right and antisemitism, have become inextricable: there is almost no far right without antisemitism, and vice versa. The Front national inherited this. Even if they say they are right-wing, they have raised the banner of the far right, and thus that of antisemitism. And what is interesting is that they accompany the mutations of antisemitism across the decades. It is almost striking that this party, this political movement, cannot seem to disengage from it, as if it were actually impossible.
That matters, because it helps remind us that all antisemitic, homophobic, xenophobic outbursts identified among party candidates are not accidents. The term “slip” or “provocation” are highly situational words that, in a way, absolve the RN as a party. What is happening today shows how systematic and constitutive this discourse is to the party’s identity, even if that identity is not publicly acknowledged. This discourse is deeply identitary within the RN’s militant culture.
Could Jordan Bardella have detached himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen?
There were several moments when the question arose, and they never wanted to detach themselves from Jean-Marie Le Pen, even at his death. In fact, at Le Pen’s death, we saw more of a return to militant memory and a celebration of the nationalist fighter that he would have been. He ended up being expelled in 2015, after a series of statements between 2010 and 2015 forced Marine Le Pen to distance herself to uphold her so-called dedemonization line. But in reality, this nationalist antisemitic and racist sentiment was never abandoned and remains part of the party’s deep militant culture. Many, in one way or another, were fed by it.
We can speak of Caroline Parmentier, of the whole Marine Le Pen entourage. If one looks at the connections between the radical far right, the RN, and the small violent movements that exist on the far right and do not play by electoral rules, they are deep. The party still bathes in this fusion, and not this union, of the right and the far right that has constituted it since the early 1970s.