Dramatis Personae

Plotting, leaking, throat-slitting, backstabbing, purging, and more. Your guide to the wildest week in the history of postwar France. Part II

The Le Pen family haunted house in St Cloud, near Paris.

⚠️ Important advice from your editor:

1. Read Part I, first. This won’t make sense otherwise.

2. This is a multimedia experience. Don’t skip the videos.

3. Please recall our typo policy.

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The Cast

Note: Thinking about it yesterday, I decided to write a short guide to some of the key historical figures with whom you should also be familiar if you’re to fully understand what’s going on over here. I asked myself if this was overkill and if everyone already knows who these people were, but I decided the answers were “no” and “no.” Some of you know this history a lot better than I do. But I don’t think everyone does. (If they did, man, would our news coverage be better.)

Also, the phrase “far-right” is rapidly being emptied of meaning. Younger Americans, especially, have only the vaguest idea what happened in Europe the last time the far-right came to power. Most people don’t know what “far-right” means in a French context, in particular.

Americans who think the French far-right sounds based may not be my usual readers, but at a moment like this, it can’t hurt to try to reach the people who most need it. This has more than a bit of relevance to American politics, after all.

So I decided to write this. This part isn’t quite as amusing. Some periods in history just aren’t good for chuckles. But I do think that for many readers, knowing this, or reviewing this, will help.

If you know all of this already, skip down to the next section, where the fun starts again.

Also, I bet you’ve never a video of a Pierre Poujade rally.

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Historical Figures

⚜︎⚜︎⚜︎ Alfred Dreyfus: