How France's Antisemitic History Molded Today's Rejection of the Far-Right

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Policy Preferences and Attitudes toward Democracy & European Politics and Society
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: European Politics and Society

Abstract

In this article, we examine the long-lasting impacts of past anti-Semitic acts and their persistent role in shaping contemporary social and political attitudes.

We find that French communes with a history of persecutions against Jewish minorities between the 13th and 17th centuries continued to exhibit anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviors centuries later. Specifically, during the late 19th-century Dreyfus Affair, these localities were more prone to riots, showed stronger support for an anti-Dreyfus officer, and, during the Second World War, experienced higher levels of Jewish deportations. While this suggests a lasting legacy of prejudice, a closer examination of voting patterns in more recent periods indicates a shift in these localities. Municipalities with a significant history of anti-Semitism – as measured by various indicators from different periods – have consistently shown, between 1986 and 2022, a reduced inclination to vote for the French extreme right compared to localities with a less pronounced anti-Semitic past.

This result, diverging from the attitudinal patterns observed until the Second World War, contrasts with studies on the long-term impacts of interethnic violence and coercive institutions, which have typically found that subsequent historical legacies often correlate with more conservative behaviors and heightened racial resentment. A further analysis incorporating memorial sites dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations who saved jews during the Holocaust indicates that in communes with a history of anti-Semitism, a greater presence of these memorials is associated with a lower support for the extreme right. In contrast, in localities without a similar history, these memorial sites do not appear to reduce extreme right voting trends. Such evidence suggests that post-war memory initiatives, particularly those highlighting resistance to anti-Semitism, may have contributed to counteracting pre-existing trends by reshaping contemporary political attitudes against nationalistic parties. The overall pattern observed in this study illustrates the persistence of deep-rooted historical biases but also their malleability when harnessed and repurposed to diminish the appeal of current radical ideologies.

Author

• Nadim Farhat, University of Luxembourg