The Breitbart of France

The rise of the far right in France is a real and enduring phenomenon. And perhaps the most underrated mechanism in its rise is the blog aggregator Fdesouche.

Without a doubt the biggest news website on the "identitarian" or far-right/alt-right in France, the site speaks directly to white identity politics. Its very name is a play on the expression Français de souche (roughly, native Frenchman), which used to be a politically correct way to say "white Frenchman," until France's alt-right took it upon itself as a badge of honor, whereupon it became politically incorrect again.

If you were to analogize Fdesouche to a U.S. website, its politics would make it Breitbart, but its style would make it more like the Drudge Report. Fdesouche is that very 1.0 thing: A pure aggregator, it only puts up links, with a headline, a small excerpt, and a link.

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As Drudge has shown, this minimalism can be very powerful. Fdesouche doesn't have to say or argue anything; it can let the facts speak for themselves. (Or so the site can implicitly claim.) Its fodder is local news reports about crime, petty and non, preferably when the perpetrators are dark-skinned and the victims fair-skinned. The constant drumbeat of news stories about black-on-white or Arab-on-white crime is the best depiction of a France on the edge of ethnic warfare, one that packs a much stronger punch than any speech, op-ed, or report.

The Periscope app, which allows anyone to livestream video of anything, has been a boon to the site. Street fights and prison riots have gone up on Fdesouche. Any citizen video of inter-ethnic violence seems to be fair game.

But that's not the only thing it posts: It also features regular political news, videos of debates between intellectuals (hey, this is still France), and even humor.

The site often breaks news and increasingly drives the national conversation. As a Paris-based journalist , I can attest to the fact that, just like Drudge in the U.S., almost every journalist checks it semi-obsessively, even as they disdain its politics.

Fdesouche was one of the first sites to expose the stories of the New Year wave of sexual assault that shook Europe. More recently, it started beating the drum about the fact that a popular rapper, Black M, had been contracted to perform at a concert for the 100-year anniversary of the Battle of Verdun. It then revealed that Black M once rapped that France was "a land of kuffar" (infidels). The controversy became a national issue; some felt that inviting a popular rapper whose favorite themes are partying and drinking to the commemoration of the most gruesome battle of World War I was a disgrace, while others believed that the only possible objections one may have to a rapper would be racist. In the end, Black M was uninvited.

Fdesouche occasionally plays with its traditionalist image. After helping expose the Cologne sexual assaults, the site briefly changed its tagline to "Fdesouche — Feminism that works."

The site's founder, so-called Pierre Sautarel, a self-proclaimed psychoanalyst, is one of the smartest tweeters I know. Here's someone who knows exactly where the line is and walks right up to it but doesn't cross it. You'll never catch him using a racial slur. Most of his interactions involve, like a good shrink, turning his trolls' questions against them. He will retweet his fans' most aggressive commentary without endorsing it.

Beyond the media success story, with the rise of Fdesouche come important questions that the French are wary to confront. What does it mean to be French? Is it exclusively about values? Or is it also an inherited identity — something that is passed on from father to son?

There are few scientific racists in France, perhaps even fewer than in the U.S. But there are a fair number of so-called "identitarians." Perhaps France pushed furthest the Enlightenment myth that every man can create his own self and is not constrained by any inheritance — that existence precedes essence, that someone who, say, was brought up in a fundamentalist version of Islam and with no marketable skills can be a productive member of a post-Christian society with an advanced economy. To this, identitarians would respond that identity — who you are, by virtue of your birth — matters. Which is something that, depending on who says it and in what context, seems either tautologous or scandalous.

This is the question that France is struggling with, through Fdesouche and other efforts. And the answer may end up deciding the fate of the West.