Jonathan Bouchet-Petersen’s post
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By asking for a tribute from the Assembly for a socialist and feminist activist or by pleading for the political rehabilitation of Napoleon III, the party of Marine Le Pen, capable of claiming to be Gaullist or heir to Jaurès, is blurring the tracks to make people forget that he is far right.
On the part of the National Rally, the initiative is surprising. On Tuesday, as part of International Women’s Rights Day, the deputy of Vaucluse, Bénédicte Auzanot, tabled a motion for a resolution supported by the entire RN group in the Assembly and which aims, unexpectedly, to pay tribute to socialist and feminist activist Jeanne Deroin. Socialist and feminist, two words that remain, today as yesterday, at odds with the DNA of Marine Le Pen’s party.
Jeanne Deroin, this name is not known to the general public. She is the first woman to have been a candidate in an election in France. It was in the legislative elections of 1849, a year after the adoption of what was then presented as “universal suffrage” but which in fact only concerned men since women only obtained the right to vote in 1944. If it turned out to be legally impossible, his candidacy was a strong symbolic act that marked the spirits and inspired the following generations.
Blur the lines by all means
If the RN group wants to pay homage to a figure who has nothing to do with its history, it is of course because the far-right party – which refutes this denomination and which several complacent or at least lazy media now qualify of “national right” – seeks by all means to blur the lines to establish his supposed respectability. And for this purpose, the Lepenist formation does not lack nerve in trying to roughly monopolize a par