Marion!

Via Rod Dreher:



AmConMag: Marion Maréchal’s Populism is the Future of the French Right By Scott McConnell
An important convention highlights the changing character of French conservatism—and France itself.

And there is a part of France—Catholic, highly educated, patriotic, with historic loyalties to the France that predated the Revolution—that may be growing in influence in reaction to the progressive onslaught.

A recent work on the new French Right, “Le vieux monde est de retour,” describes a youthful Catholic intellectual resurgence, a reaction against the slogans of May 1968—everything is possible, free love, marriage for everyone, mass immigration—that have more or less governed their lives. This is the kind of conservatism of Marion Maréchal’s circle, and it includes many who supported the openly Catholic, avowedly conservative, proudly bourgeois François Fillon in the last election. He was the center-right candidate and likely victor until his campaign imploded amidst reports of a no-show parliamentary job held by his wife and other charges of personal corruption. Implicitly Maréchal’s argument is that however meaningful the divide between the respectable Right of Gaullist or bourgeois parties and the extreme Right of Jean-Marie Le Pen might have been, its rationale has evaporated. Her aunt has made the extreme Right more or less respectable; mass immigration has rendered it necessary.