Marine Le Pen and the French political party she leads, the National Front, are the topics of a book being written by Stanford Associate Professor Cécile Alduy. Photo Credit: Jacques Brinon/AP

In an unexpected turn of events in May, France's far-right National Front political party won the largest share of votes (25 percent) in the European Parliament election and 24 of France's 74seats.

While the National Front victory was one of numerous wins for right-wing groups across Europe, the National Front has ascended in popularity quite rapidly – thanks in part to a strategic rebranding initiative led by party president Marine Le Pen, the daughter of longtime National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. She has guided the party away from the anti-Semitic, radical rhetoric that characterizedher father's tenure from 1972 to 2011.

Stanford Associate Professor Cécile Alduy, a scholar in French literature, is currently working on a book about the evolution of the National Front's discourse under Marine Le Pen's leadership. Her research interests span Renaissance poetics, the cultural history of gender, and the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance.

In an interview, Alduy shared her study of modern French politics and how Renaissance ideologies are playing out there today.

How does your academic background inform your ideas about contemporary French politics?

I think that it makes me particularly attentive to two things: first, the long history in which recent evolutions in the definition of French national identity take place and, second, the rhetoric of political discourse. That is, the fact that politics is a lot – and maybe first and foremost – speech, communication and symbols. Political leaders act – and are judged – as much by what they say as by what they actually do. 

How do you apply French history to current affairs?

My first book examined the rise of a proto-national sentiment in French Renaissance literature – how poets and rhetoricians elaborated certain myths, figures and narratives to give shape to a nascent national consciousness. This led me to be on the lookout for reminiscences or reincarnations of such representations of collective identity in contemporary literature and public discourse.

During the Renaissance, it took a lot of rhetorical guts to describe France as a unified kingdom when most of its people did not speak the same language and its borders were still in flux. Poets and lawmakers worked hand in hand to establish French as the official language throughout and to rein in regional and religious differences. One of the images that helped was that of the king of France as the incarnation of the people. I see reminiscences of this powerful image in the attempt made by several political leaders in the past 10 years to appear as providential men (or women), particularly in the far-right self-portrayal as the voice of the people.

Your forthcoming publication, Marine Le Pen: Words, Myths, Media (to be published by Seuil in 2015), investigates Le Pen's use of language. What about her political discourse do you find most striking?

What is most striking is how she has managed to smooth out her father's rhetorical asperities – such as his anti-Semitic gaffes, for instance, including the latest one on rounding up a bunch of artists for the next fournée, or batch for the furnace – to offer instead a sleek, almost mainstream rhetoric to the public. In contrast to the often clearly racist slurs of her father, she has launched a two-pronged attack on immigration on cultural and economic grounds.  Immigration from non-European countries is in her words unsustainable because of cultural rather than racial differences, and even more importantly because it is unaffordable in the current economic crisis.

Could you provide an example of Le Pen's "semantic takeover" and explain her media strategy?

Marine Le Pen has decided to portray her party as the true champion of laïcité (France's strict notion of the separation of church and state, which forbids any display of religious affiliations in public offices and schools). But she has stretched the concept so much, and in a unique unilateral direction, that in her mouth, laïcité is a politically correct, and readily acceptable, word for an attack on any display of the Muslim faith in public – not just in public schools but in the streets.

She is collapsing two different meanings of "public" into one: public-funded entities (schools, companies or government) and everything that we say is "in the public eye" or that happens "in public." This is a devious play on words but it works: people, including politicians and journalists, have started to confuse the two notions. The meaning of laicité is dangerously slipping from that of a legal framework that guarantees the neutrality of public education and services to a restrictive normative system of values that excludes from the national community certain behaviors and religions.

How has the French mindset about immigration evolved from the Renaissance era to today?

Immigration was not seen as a problem in the Renaissance – rather the opposite. For one thing, foreigners could be taxed more and on more things. They also brought new art forms, technologies and money.

France's notion of national identity was constructed during the Renaissance as something cultural rather than what we would now call "ethnic." French poets and authors of the Renaissance put forward an image of France as the "Mother of the Arts and Letters" (a phrase, incidentally, reused by Marine Le Pen in her speeches). France was to be unique in the world because of its contribution to the arts, to philosophy, literature and sciences. The French kings were adamant to invite foreigners who could help them achieve these goals (Leonardo da Vinci is only the most famous example).

This is a very different take from now, when anti-immigration movements point out what they think is the unbearable economic and "civilizational" cost of immigration for the country. (Economists have concluded that the balance sheet of immigration in France is actually positive but the representation of immigration as costly continues to prevail.)

This summer you will be working on "Extreme Rhetoric: 40 Years of National Front Speeches (1972-2013)," a digital humanities project and database of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen's public speeches since 1972. What will you and your fellow researchers be looking for?

We are looking for what has changed and what has not changed in the party over the last 40 years. We want to uncover the structural components that form the backbone of its ideological makeup and point out the evolution in diction, word choice and topics.

For instance, the representation of history in their discourse has not changed over the last 40 years. Father and daughter have been telling the same narrative of France's decadence: both wax lyrical in their nostalgia for a Golden Age, lament the fall of France from its former grandeur, resort to conspiracy theories to account for its fall, and call for a renewal thanks to the union of the people to a charismatic leader (themselves). But the enemies have changed. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism was the threat. Now it's Europe, globalization and even unregulated capitalism.

Both leaders differ also in the kinds of rhetorical authorities they are trying to embody. In a smaller-scale study of Marine Le Pen's lexical universe last year, I showed how she beefed up the economic side of her discourse, quoting liberal French economist Thomas Piketty and American economist Paul Krugman, for instance, to present herself as a pragmatist and an expert. Her father, by contrast, situated his discourse almost exclusively in the realms of moral principles ("the good," "justice," "moral obligations," etc.) and rarely condescended to explain how his economic agenda would work in the real world. But their platform has not changed. In other words, the content remains the same, but the rhetorical surface has been reworked.

A new chapter in the Scottish independence movement could reshape the future of that country and the rest of the United Kingdom, Stanford faculty say.

Scotland will hold an election on Sept. 18 to decide whether it should break away from the United Kingdom. With the official kickoff of the Scottish independence referendum on May 30, the 4.1 million Scots who make up the country's electorate are mulling over how independence would affect a range of issues including agriculture, education, defense, health care and more.

Now, momentum seems to be on the side of the independence vote, said Christophe Crombez, a consulting professor in Stanford's Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"If you had asked me a year ago whether Scotland would vote for independence, I would have said no. Now I am not so sure. The current UK government has not handled this issue well. Threats, such as warnings that Scotland could not keep the pound, have backfired," said Crombez.

Economics and the EU

Scotland, which has significant – though somewhat dwindling – oil operations in the North Sea, would likely remain part of the European Union if it leaves the UK, Crombez said. Scotland highly favors membership, whereas Britain's view is more mixed about the 28-member bloc.

"The economic consequences of leaving the UK will be minimal for Scotland. Scotland would remain part of the EU single market. It could possibly keep more of its oil revenues," he said.

The political ramifications for a redrawn Great Britain are significant. "Great Britain would lose more of its prominent status in world politics. England would have to deal with an identity crisis, having lost its empire after World War II and now witnessing the unraveling of the UK," he said.

Extracting Scotland from the Great Britain political equation would likely give more power to conservative British voters, as Scotland tends to vote on the left side, Crombez said.

"Also, the British government wants to put the issue behind them. So when the vote goes down, they can finally move on one way or another from the Scottish independence issue," he said.

If Scottish voters elect to remain part of the United Kingdom, the British government has said Scotland will not get another chance at independence.

Historical origins

The current move toward independence stems from the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was Britain's prime minister.

"Thatcher's policies were intensely disliked in Scotland," Crombez said. "While she kept on winning elections in England, her party's support in Scotland dwindled. Scotland felt that England was imposing policies on it that it did not want. Devolution and independence were seen as ways to get out of that situation."

As a result, since the early 1990s the conservatives have not played a significant role in Scottish politics, he said. And in 1997, voters in Scotland approved "devolution," which granted them legislative powers in the form of the Scottish Parliament.

"In my opinion, calls for independence would have been even stronger if Scotland had not been granted the autonomy it got in the 1990s," he said.

The roots of Scotland's drive for independence stretch deep into Great Britain's past, said Priya Satia, associate professor of modern British history and Europe Center faculty affiliate.

According to Satia, "Some might say as far back as the Jacobite rebellion against the union of Scotland with England and Wales in 1707. Others might point to a much later originary moment – regional nationalisms like Scotland's emerged in the latter half of the 20th century as part of the British reaction to the loss of empire."

From 1603, Scotland and England shared the same monarch when James VI of Scotland was declared King of England and Ireland as well. The two kingdoms united in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. Prior to this, Scotland had been a sovereign state for more than 800 years.

Scotland, Wales, England and Ireland lost that sense of "common identity" to a shared British brotherhood once the "colonial 'other'" no longer existed in the post-WWII period, said Satia.

Historian Peter Stansky says it would not be wise for Scotland to exit the UK.

"I think it would probably be a mistake for Scotland to vote for independence. At the moment I think it has a good situation," said Stansky, the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus.

Stansky noted, "It can act independently in some areas, participate in some British decisions and has English backup. Independence would be a nice sentimental gesture, but a bad move."