On Le Pen & Exceptionalism

In class last Thursday, I was pretty overwhelmed by the similarities between the statements of current French populist candidate, Marine Le Pen, and the immediate “get out of jail free card” that American Exceptionalism brings to discussions of crimes against humanity. Why is it okay in the United States to slaughter a group of people and still claim that it’s the “home of the free”? In France, one politician is claiming a similar thing.

Le Pen is famous for being xenophobic and racist, and she comes from the Front National, the far-right extremist party. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, once said that the Holocaust was only a “small detail of history,” and despite efforts to clean up the FN’s public image, Le Pen showed her true colors. A couple of weeks ago, Le Pen said to the French press that the Vichy government’s role in the Holocaust was not actually France, despite heaps of evidence in the contrary. In a horrific display of Nazi collaboration, the Vichy government used French city buses to round up and imprison 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children in a stadium called the Velodrome. After three days of heat and torture, they were shipped out of the country to be exterminated in the concentration camps. For Le Pen to deny French responsibility for le Velodrome d’Hiver parallels the United States’ ability to simply pretend that it is not responsible for the genocide of 15,000,000 African Americans during slavery – and now.

Basically, my point is that there is a continuing tradition of nationalist exceptionalism that allows people in government to say that crimes against humanity are not the responsibility of the nation because they are a blip in history. That part of history doesn’t reflect who we are, they say. We read in “We Charge Genocide” that to contend with the injustice of genocide and tragedy is a nationalist act that resides in the fabric of what it means to be American. The Civil Rights Congress pointed fingers at every part of the American government in petitioning the UN for relief because the crimes against African Americans in the United States equaled the magnitude of the Holocaust. 15,000,000 people died.

The hypocrisy behind the mentality of American Exceptionalism, and I guess you could call it French Exceptionalism, fuels the fires of hateful groups like the Front National. Moreover, it allows for the presence of a messed-up dichotomy of freedom being defined by un-freedom on the home front. Just in case you’re curious, Le Pen’s polls took a hit, but here we are waiting for her to face off against Macron for the second round of French presidential elections on May 7^th.