French election like ‘Lord of the Rings’
The weight on Macron’s shoulders, should he win as expected, will be as great as that on Frodo
he board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last, the great battle of our time.”
As Lord of the Rings fans should know, Ian McKellen’s Gandalf says these lines to Billy Boyd’s Pippin as, standing on a terrace at Gondor, they gaze in horror at the storm clouds massing over Mordor. With the fate of Middle-earth hanging in the balance, the forces of light and darkness prepare for their epic clash.
Standing on a terrace in Paris, French voters might well be muttering the same words — in French, of course — as they prepared for today’s presidential election between the moderate Emmanuel Macron and the ethno-nationalist Marine Le Pen. In fact it seems to me that J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece serves as a guide to current events in France.
Tolkien’s epic, inspired by the Second World War, traces the journey of the hobbit Frodo Baggins to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mordor. As he stumbles towards his goal, and Middle-earth’s salvation, coalitions form, or fail to form, in his wake. There is, for example, the decision by the wizard Saruman, once dedicated to preserving the order of the world, to collaborate with Sauron the Abhorred, master of Mordor.
A similar betrayal stunned France on April 28. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of Arise France — a hard-right party that won nearly 5 per cent in the first round of voting — appeared with Le Pen to announce that they were uniting their forces. Should she win, Le Pen vowed, Dupont-Aignan would become her prime minister.
Though Dupont-Aignan doesn’t campaign in a flowing beard and gown, he has long flaunted something equally dramatic: The political and moral standard of Gaullism. Dupont-Aignan has always described himself as a Gaullist — namely, someone committed to re-establishing France’s role as a powerful and sovereign nation. This, in turn, has made him sceptical of transatlantic or European alliances and hostile to the European Union’s monetary union — just like Le Pen. And yet he scorned her party, the National Front. Just a few months ago, he declared that “a republican Gaullist has nothing in common with the National Front. Period”.
That was then. At a recent news conference, Dupont-Aignan declared that he was sacrificing personal interests for the superior interest of the nation. Sceptical observers were as unimpressed by this claim as, say, the Ents were by Saruman’s landscaping ideas for Fangorn Forest. Not only did Le Pen promise Dupont-Aignan the keys to the Matignon — the prime minister’s official residence — but also a cheque to cover the debts he had run up during his presidential campaign. Thus, for the first time in France’s history, a mainstream political party has struck an alliance with Le Pen the Abhorred.
Weakness for older bonds
Once an ‘Axis of Evil’ forms, everyone else must choose sides — or be condemned by history for failing to do so. Take Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who refuses to commit himself even as Sauron’s forces breach the city walls. Or Jean-Luc Melenchon, the Steward of Revolutionary Purity, aka the leader of the hard-left party Defiant France. Having failed to reach the election’s second round, he has not called on his followers to join, well, the Rohirrim — the republican front forming against Le Pen — by voting for Macron.
Macron is the French Frodo. Just as the future of Middle-earth was thrust into the hands of an untested and provincial youth with a weakness for older blonds, this now is also the case for France. There are, of course, important differences. Frodo goes about barefoot, while Macron, one imagines, wears shoes to bed. More important, Frodo never sought his task, while Macron has run towards it with the swiftness of one of Legolas’ arrows.
Granted, many of Le Pen’s followers have strictly nothing in common with Sauron’s chthonic creatures. They are, instead, the assembly line and skilled workers whose lives have been overturned by the forces of globalisation. Yet, a President Le Pen will forget them as quickly as President Donald Trump has forgotten his own base. Moreover, the National Front continues to harbour subterranean and sordid elements, including neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionists in senior positions.
At the end of the trilogy, Frodo succeeds in his task and Mordor is destroyed. Here lies both the greatest difference and greatest similarity. The forces that have lifted the National Front to the threshold of power will not, like Mordor, disappear after today’s election; if anything, they will strengthen and remobilise for the next election in 2022. But. given the expectations of the French people, the weight on Macron’s shoulders, should he win as expected, will be as great as that on Frodo
Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and is finishing a book on Catherine the Great and the French Enlightenment.