Could France’s far left and far right come together again?

As the European elections approach, Europe’s oldest liberal democracies – Britain and France – are in turmoil. Taking the long view, Britain’s problems are circumstantial and exceptional. France’s, by contrast, are renewing with more extreme political traditions that have risen and fallen, but never disappeared, over the last two centuries.

Gavin Mortimer’s blog on Coffee House describes the seemingly paradoxical synthesis of far-left and far-right voters contemplating casting their ballot for the same party – the former National Front, now Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Yet as with so much in French politics this is far from novel.

Karl Marx used nineteenth century France and its political history as a laboratory for his writings on class struggle. When he wrote famously that ‘history repeats itself; the first time as tragedy the second time as farce’, he was referring to the 1848 revolution tumbling into reaction with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état – just as the Great French Revolution of 1789 had spawned Napoleon Bonaparte, the former’s uncle.