Why can't France quit Russia?

No matter Moscow's malevolence, the French can’t stop romanticizing Russia.

Photo by the Kremlin.

France’s two-stage presidential election begins today, and it is more than passing strange that no matter the outcome, Vladimir Putin will win. As expected, incumbent President Emmanuel Macron is leading the polls, at slightly more than 26 percent. It seems all but inevitable that he will find himself competing in the second round against Marine Le Pen, who is polling just above 22 percent. He drubbed her in the 2017 election and will probably do it twice.

But accidents do happen.

Consider the candidates nipping at their ankles. Support for the far-left showboat Jean-Luc Mélenchon has risen to 17.5 percent, but flash-in-the-pan Eric Zemmour—the candidate so far to the right he makes Le Pen look pink—has sunk to 9 percent. Pulling up the rear, with 8.5 percent, is the forgettable Valérie Pécresse, the first woman to lead France’s traditional center-right party, Les Républicains, and with numbers like those, probably the last. At least she is polling ahead of Anne Hidalgo, the candidate of the traditional center-left Parti Socialiste. To judge from Hidalgo’s numbers, her mother might vote for her. Realistically, then, only five candidates have a shot—albeit a long one. And all five would suit Moscow just fine.

The case of Macron is particularly curious. His five-year term has been marked by ever-more audacious Russian aggression. Indeed, his introduction to leadership on the international stage was Russia’s attack on the 2017 French election campaign, when directly before the second and final round, Russian hackers leaked two gigabytes of data stolen, allegedly, from Macron’s campaign and purportedly replete with evidence of the candidate’s improprieties, sexual and financial. This was the culmination of a months-long disinformation campaign in favor of Le Pen and against Macron. The leaks failed to serve their purpose because Macron’s campaign, having seen what happened to Hillary Clinton, was well prepared; they seeded patently ludicrous documents among the leaked ones to muddy the waters. (The hackers, too,were culturally unfamiliar with France; they labored, for example, under the impression that French voters would be dissuaded, not encouraged, by revelations of Macron’s peculiar sexual tastes, and the Macron Leaks proved in the end more persuasive to the American far right than the French electorate.)

An introduction like this to Russia’s malevolence might subdue a president’s enthusiasm for Moscow, especially given Moscow’s contemporaneous attacks on other Western democracies, its incessant cyberattacks, poisonings and assassinations on Western soil, and, of course, its war crimes in Ukraine and Syria. But Macron brushed it off. He has spent the past five years trying to draw Russia into his embrace, evidence be damned. Apart from Germany, the rest of Europe—the Baltic states and Ukraine, in particular—have viewed Macron as a preening, Putin-loving nincompoop, at best; an outright menace to European security and NATO’s integrity at worst.

But this isn’t the strangest part. Macron, at least, comes by his views honestly. Le Pen and Zemmour, both far-right candidates, are literally, paid stooges of Moscow, and lest the libel editor send this back to me with the words, “We can’t say this!”—oh yes, we can. Both have been caught in the act. It is neither libelous nor even controversial to say that they are Putin’s paid proxies. Both have given Putin his money’s worth, too, by hewing faithfully and even proudly to the Kremlin line.

Mélenchon is a stranger case. We have no evidence that he has dipped his beak, so we are forced to conclude that he echoes Moscow’s line out of enthusiasm. (To paraphrase Humbert Wolfe: You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! —that useful idiot. But seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.)

In a normal election, Macron’s opponents would seize upon this opportunity to portray Macron as soft and naïve on Russia. But since they have all proposed to be even softer and more naïve, none have brought up the subject. Even the blond and bland Valérie Pécresse has avoided attacking Macron for his Russophile agenda, and no wonder; as a teenager, she attended communist youth camps in the USSR—“I took propaganda classes, I sang The International in Russian,” she explained proudly to Le Figaro in 2016, emphasizing her passion for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and lamenting that (oddly) her hosts were not as well-versed in Pasternak as she had hoped. Asked recently what she would say to Russia if elected, she replied—on prime time—in fluent Russian. But she didn’t take the occasion to say she would see Putin in the Hague or Hell, whichever came first. She offered instead a banality to the effect that she wished for peace in Europe. Since that occasion, she has clearly calculated that the less she speaks of Russia (and certainly, the less she speaks in Russian) the better: She has barely mentioned the issue in the campaign.

It is worth remarking that Pécresse’s parents, Gaullist intellectuals, were close to former French President Jacques Chirac, also a fluent Russian speaker; Chirac translated a chapter from Eugene Onegin into French; he was awarded the Russian Order for Merit to the Fatherland in the first degree for his contribution to enhancing French relations with Russia, as well as an honorary doctorate from the Kremlin-aligned Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Pécresse aligned herself closely for years, too, with François Fillon, who preceded her in leading Les Républicains in their quest for the presidency, in 2017, before his campaign capsized ignominiously when it emerged that he had given his family phony jobs, on a state-funded payroll, for which a court sentenced him in June 2020 to five years in prison, three suspended. Fillon then accepted positions on the board of directors of not one but two Russian-state owned oil groups, Sibur and Zarubezhneft. Photos have made the rounds of Fillon in a state of happy bonhomie with the Russian vice-president Alexander Novak; this allowed Green Candidate Yannick Jadot (perhaps the only French politician untainted by ties to Russia) to denounce Fillon as a tool of a foreign power and Pécresse as a tool by proxy. Secretary of State for European Affairs Clément Beaune likewise denounced the party’s “complicity” with the Russians. When asked about this by a dogged journalist on BFMTV, Pécresse had nothing better to offer than, “François Fillon has left politics, he has the right to be be left alone.” So the obvious avenue of attack on Macron, to wit, that he is Russia’s useful idiot, is simply too risky for her. She’s better off changing the subject.

But Pécresse, at least, is a normal candidate. It is not normal that another two candidates are literally on Moscow’s payroll and the third so indistinguishable from them in his views that one assumes he’s either blackmailed or a fool. There’s no third option. But there you have it: 47.5 percent of the French electorate supports at least one of the Kremlin’s three stooges; if you then add voters who have declared for Macron or Pécresse, a stunning 75 percent of the French electorate would, it seems, vote for a candidate who makes a habit of humiliating France before Moscow.

This is all the stranger because the horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have dominated the French airwaves since February 24, as they have everywhere else. It’s impossible to imagine anyone in France, however unpolitical or uninterested in current affairs, could be unaware of Moscow’s war crimes—or in favor of them.

How should we understand this?

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MACRON’S VISION

On April 4, 2017, a Russian Sukhoi-22 dropped a bomb full of Sarin on the village of Khan Sheikhoun. As a declassified French intelligence assessment noted pointedly one week later, the Russian military provided the Assad regime with “unquestionable” air superiority, giving it “total military freedom of action” for “indiscriminate offensives.”

Macron took office on May 14, 2017, having just experienced the reality of Russian information warfare directed not only at him, but—rather cruelly—at his wife. He certainly read this report, presumably in its classified form, and even in its unclassified version it was unsparing in its description of the effects of chemical weapons on civilian populations. Yet not two weeks after taking office—in what France24 described “a very magnanimous gesture on Macron’s part after the vitriol on the French campaign trail”—Macron invited Putin to the palace of Versailles for a summit. “I will be demanding in my exchanges with Russia,” he assured the media, but what this meant was hard to discern. With the red carpet unrolled over the marble courtyard and the Republican Guard standing watch, Macron shook Putin’s hand at great length and met his eyes in a way that suggested nothing so demanding as shy but smoldering passion.

Whatever they discussed in private, in public, the two leaders jointly inaugurated an exhibition in the Grand Trianon dedicated to the visit of Peter the Great to France, three hundred years before. This seized the attention of the French media, who noted that although Peter’s trip had political (and economic) objectives, such as forging an alliance with France against Sweden and signing a trade agreement, Peter was a reformist, a modernist, a Westernizer who sought to discover “all that was most remarkable about France” and adapt it to the Russian empire. The Czar’s time in Paris, they stressed—and particularly his conversations with French intellectuals—were greatly to influence his thinking and works.

Macron presumably figured that if it worked once, it would work twice. The French media—which was not at all insensate to the horrors unfolding in Syria, but oddly unwilling to connect them to Russia, or particularly to Putin—spent the week of Putin’s visit recalling that in 1717, Peter the Great had taken Louis XV, then age seven, in his arms. This was a formative event in the reign of the young king, they said, and a harbinger of the long and deep Franco-Russian friendship that followed. At a joint press conference with Putin, Macron relieved himself of a speech about Peter the First. “What’s important to recall about this story,” he said, Putin standing impassively by his side,

which today has lasted three centuries, is this dialogue between France and Russia, which has never ceased. Dialogue between our intellectuals, our cultural figures, who admired each other, and which have endured to this day, nourished by our greatest artists …

At some point, he mentioned the Minsk accords—he said he would ask Putin to respect them—and called for a return to the Normandy format dialogue on Ukraine. Both allusions seemed an afterthought. Putin did not take the young Macron in his arms, but the duo were espied together in a golf cart, enjoying the gardens.

Whether his exchanges with Putin were in fact “demanding” is impossible to know; the archives are not yet open. But within a year, his intelligence services had gathered 44 more allegations of chemical weapons usage in Syria and claimed to have substantiated eleven of these claims with dispositive evidence. The report attributed the “considerable rise” in the tempo of chemical attacks to Russia’s refusal to reauthorize the UN’s investigation mechanism.

Russian operatives, that year, traveled to the UK to poison Sergei Skirpal and his daughter with Novichok (also killing the unfortunate passerby Dawn Sturgess, who came into contact with the carelessly disposed nerve agent.) Assad attacked the city of Douma with chemical weapons; and Moscow, for the twelfth time, used its veto to prevent the Security Council from taking action to protect Syrian civilians.

Macron nonetheless felt the Versailles tête-a-tête such a resounding success that in May 2018 he accepted Putin’s invitation to St. Petersburg. If anything useful emerged from those talks, they remain a secret. He also accepted Putin’s invitation to watch the World Cup in Moscow, ignoring the human rights organizations who begged Western leaders to boycott the event in protest of Russian war crimes in Syria. (In fairness, France won the World Cup.)

Then, late in June, Macron’s ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, issued a clearly authorized statement to the Atlantic Council: Macron wished to work with Putin to seek “mutually acceptable” solutions to the crises that had of late soured relations between Russia and the West. Unlike the Soviet Union, said Araud, Russia was not “an existential threat” to Europe. “Russia has done things that we don’t accept, but at the same time Russia has its own legitimate interests, so let’s talk with the Russians to see whether we reach compromise deals which are mutually acceptable.” Le voilà, the Macron Doctrine: en même temps.

But cut Macron some slack. At this point, he’d had no experience of leading anything. We may assume that he was learning on the job. It’s what followed that’s inexplicable.

Several months after these cheery head-of-state visits, France exploded. The Gilets Jaunes, initially vexed by the rising price of gas, took to the streets, at first peacefully and then with a ferociously violent nihilism that stunned even the most experienced observers of France. Russia quickly spotted the potential. The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard listed “#giletsjaunes” as a key term used by accounts “linked to Russian influence operations.”

Russian state media is popular across a broad spectrum of the French political landscape—or it was, until the French finally kicked them out—but particularly among the far left and far right. Accounts linked to Russia amplified the Gilets Jaunes’ messages, spreading tens of thousands of tweets and retweets. As the movement gained steam and became insanely violent, Russia played the French left and the right with equal aplomb: For the left, Moscow dusted off the Cominform’s greatest hits (the French people were “speaking out ... at the injustice of capitalism.”) For the right, they invented new themes, enlisting the skills of the American alt-right both as generators of memes and enthusiastic amplifiers. The French media reported, with puzzlement, a strange phenomenon among the Gilets Jaunes: their certainty that France would be better governed by Vladimir Putin. One protester, identified as Céline, told FranceInfo that Putin “shows us how a country should be run. Putin protects Russia. He doesn’t let anyone boss it around. We want protection, too.”

As the puzzled Amnesty International activist Oleg Kozlovsky noted, “It would be impossible to see a movement like the Yellow Vests in Russia. People would end up in prison.” No need for speculation, as it happened; that summer, thousands of protesters mobilized in Russian cities to protest both quotidian grievances like those of the Gilets Jaunes and their inability to choose their own government in free and fair elections. Not only did the protesters end up in prison, their children and their parents did, too. Pour encourager les autres.

Macron survived the uprising, but the exercise cost France nearly three billion dollars in economic damage. The Gilets Jaunes were an existential threat to Macron’s political career.¹ All the same, his brush with political death—an uprising that anyone with eyes to see had been cultivated and nourished by Moscow—did nothing to temper his obsession with the idea that he and he alone could entice Russia to play the role he envisioned for it—as an esteemed member of a family of European nations led by France.

And so, no sooner had the uprising died down, Macron welcomed Putin to the Fort of Brégançon, the official holiday resort of the President of the French Republic. Notably, this took place five days before the G7 summit in Biarritz, from which Putin had been expelled following his invasion of Crimea. The point of the expulsion was to indicate that the G7 would no longer dignify Putin with invitations to luxuriant summits at such places as the French President’s vacation residence. But Macron and his wife Brigitte—the poor woman an object of pure contempt in the Russian media, mocked as Macron’s superannuated beard—again received Putin warmly, and again the French media went into raptures; this treatment in Le Monde was typical:

[Putin] even thought about flowers. Vladimir Putin hands a bouquet to Brigitte Macron, who waits patiently with her husband at the top of the steps of Fort Brégançon. A warm ambiance emanates from the small courtyard, bathed in sunshine. “It’s a beautiful place!” admires the Russian president, who congratulates the Macron couple on their tans: “You have a superb complexion.” Smiles emerge on both sides. One could almost say intimacy, but for the presence of about forty French and Russian journalists.

By inviting Putin to the shores of the Mediterranean, Le Monde’s reporter exclaimed, Macron showed all the warmth due to “this great power that is Russia.” Every press organ in France offered a ritual invocation of Turgenev and Stravinsky. Macron again laid it on thick. “Russia is European, very deeply so,” he said to the assembled press corps. “We believe in a Europe that goes from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” (Hold that phrase in mind—it didn’t emerge from nowhere.) This, he explained, was why France “defended Russia’s reintegration into the Council of Europe.”

Answering a question no one had asked, he said “Russia is a great power of the Enlightenment”—he did not say in what conceivable way—and “has its place in the Europe of values in which we believe.” As he spoke, the Spetznaz was enlightening Idlib, and the Russian air force was sharing its passion for Turgenev and Stravinsky with Hama and the Humaymat hilltops over the course of more than 200 bombing sorties. The campaign was so enlightening that dozens of Syrian villages and towns were levelled to dust and ashes and more than 300,000 civilians forced to flee. (The Rite of Spring can have that effect.)

At this point, Macron graduated from political naivete to outright obsession. In August 2019, Macron addressed his conference of Ambassadors, an annual French exercise in defining its foreign policy priorities. Much of what he said was bland. But what he said about Russia was not bland; indeed it was shocking, particularly to anyone in Eastern Europe. “I am in no way naïve,” he said, words that typically preface a comment breathtaking in its naivety and this instance was no exception. “I know that many of you made your careers working on dossiers whose every aspect fostered a mistrust of Russia.” By this, he meant the Atlanticists in the French foreign policy apparatus, who have long existed in tension with the Gaullo-Mitterandists, of whom more later. Yet the time had come, he declared, to “reassess in depth—in great depth—our relationship with Russia.”

Yes, he allowed, there were reasons for mistrust—“cyber-attacks, the destabilization of democracies, and a Russian project that is deeply conservative and opposed to the EU project.”

There were more reasons, too, but he didn’t mention Putin’s propensity to murder his political opponents, the destruction of Russian democracy and civil society, the invasion of Georgia, the war in Abkhazia, the expulsion of the ethnic Ingush; the wars in Chechnya, Dagestan and South Ossetia; the seizure of Crimea, the war in eastern Ukraine; the massive and unspeakable war crimes in Syria; Russian violations of the INF treaty; its modernization of an array of non-strategic nuclear weapons, the “escalate to de-escalate” nuclear doctrine or—and this is a particularly strange omission—Russia’s campaign to undermine French efforts to stabilize the Sahel and the Central African Republic.

The mistrust, Macron argued, was owed to a “series of misunderstandings,” all devolving from Europe’s failure to “enact its own strategy” at the end of the Cold War, allowing Russia to build “a fantasy around the destruction of the West and the weakening of the EU.”

We have heard this before from Russia’s pet pundits; the argument wouldn’t have been out of place on Tucker Carlson Tonight or Glenn Greenwald’s Substack. It is the standard Tankie narrative: We should never have taken the concerns of countries on Russia’s border so seriously as to force Russia to conclude that destroying the West and breaking apart the EU—as opposed to ceasing to threaten its neighbors—would solve its problems.

Thus it was time, Macron said, to “rethink the fundamentals.” What the fundamentals were, he did not specify. But his goal was to “build a new architecture” with Russia, “based on trust and security in Europe.”

Trust? But why?

Because “the European continent will never be stable, will never be secure, if we do not ease and clarify our relations with Russia.”

Well, that is so, one supposes, but what if Russia would rather not?

He understood, he continued, that France’s allies would be unhappy about this new French dispensation. “Some of them will urge us to impose more sanctions on Russia because it is in their interest.” (True, in a sense, but trivially; economically, sanctions are in no one’s interest; they were imposed on Russia because it had, again, invaded a European country. The interest they served was punishing Russia and dissuading it from doing it again.) “But they are most certainly not in ours,” he added. Perhaps. It depends whether you think France has an interest in living in a world where Russia refrains from invading its neighbors. It looks different, perhaps, if you are Russia’s neighbor.

To build this new world of trust and security, he said, France must create “a new relationship with Russia.” He warned that “actors on both sides, including the Russian side,” would try to undermine this project. There would be “attacks and provocations” to distract France from its goal. But France must stay firm and work “tirelessly” to rebuild this “agenda of trust.” It would require “constant dialogue with President Putin.” He noted again that his audience might be dubious (no doubt some were on the verge of stroking out) but, he reminded them, he was the president, and they were not.

Russia, he said, “that great country,” had admittedly played an “unprecedented” role in every conflict of the past five years. At last, he mentioned Syria, Libya, and Africa. But surely, he asked rhetorically, Russia couldn’t truly want to play this role? “If I were in the Russians’ shoes,” he said, “I would pause for thought,” for Russia, “that great power,” spends a lot of money on its military despite having “the gross domestic product of Spain, a declining demographic, an ageing population, and growing political tension.”

To Macron, this made no sense. Having put himself in Russia’s shoes, he concluded that Russia must be in his shoes: Russia must secretly be French—a country with twice the gross domestic product of Spain, a declining demographic, an aging population, and growing political tension. Thus it must want, deep down, to spend less money on war crimes and more time in diplomatic pourparlers. Macron somehow concluded that behind Russia’s clawed-and-fanged exterior was a herbivore struggling to get out. He alone could liberate it, through “stringent dialogue” in which he would offer Russia “strategic options.” It was “up to us to prepare it and make progress on this point.”

Missing from Macron’s discourse was any assessment of how Russia sees itself—in Russia’s own shoes. Russia does not see itself as France. It sees itself as gloomy, violent, imperialist, and expansionist power with a proud tradition of masochistic suffering. Nor did he note that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced nothing like Nazi Germany’s process of lustration and atonement.

Upon hearing this, France’s allies in Eastern European went berserk. Not only did they see Macron as naïve, which he was, they saw his words as a profound betrayal, which they also were. Then, two months later, days before a NATO summit in London, Macron pronounced NATO “brain dead” in an interview with the The Economist. All hell broke loose, though to people who had been paying attention, it came as no surprise.

To be fair, he was right. The heart—and the might, and the money—of NATO is the United States. The commander in chief of the United States was at the time Donald Trump, and in alluding to him as “brain dead,” Macron was merely offering a clinical description. What’s more, Trump had days before Macron’s interview announced he would withdraw US troops from Syria, forsaking America’s very temporary PKK allies. What many Americans failed to appreciate was that the PKK was guarding ISIS prisoners, of whom quite some number were French nationals. Nothing but those Kurds stood between ISIS and Europe. France, more than any country in Europe, had been the victim of ISIS’s depravity, and saw’s Trump’s decision as a guarantee of an ISIS resurgence. Macron saw Trump’s decision as a betrayal—as it was—and a security nightmare for France. Which it was.

On the other hand, even as Russia was driving France out of Mali and CAR, it was, by happy accident, on France’s side in Libya, where both countries backed the warlord Khalifa Haftar. Haftar, in turn, was fighting Turkey’s favored Libyan warlords, and France was feuding with Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean. So perhaps Macron was in no position to complain about Trump’s decision (though this didn’t stop him). But clearly, he was right to say that if any overarching logic was governing the action of NATO’s members, it was at that moment hard to discern.

The critical part of the interview followed. “Who is our common enemy?” Macron asked rhetorically. “This question deserves to be clarified. Is our enemy today, as I hear sometimes, Russia? Is it China? Is it the Atlantic alliance’s purpose to designate them as enemies? I don’t think so. Our common enemy at the alliance is, it seems, terrorism, which has hit all of our countries.”

No. Our common enemy is Russia, closely followed by China. Terrorism is a common problem, one exacerbated, not alleviated, by Russia. But this—all of this—is what Macron (and the cohort of presidential hopefuls trailing in his wake) was thinking.

Thus no other leader has spent as much time talking to Putin as Macron. Last February, Macron flew to Moscow for a seven-hour parlay. As Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, Macron sat at the opposite end of Putin’s long, queer table. No one knows the point of that table, but the message it sends is clear, and probably that message is the point. According to the Elysée’s readout, Macron tried to persuade Putin to refrain from invading Ukraine. In response, Russia invaded Ukraine. Between then and mid-March, Putin and Macron spoke at least a dozen times, on one occasion twice in a day. Macron has not publicly remonstrated with Putin for his butchery in Ukraine, but he has publicly remonstrated with US President Joe Biden for calling Putin a butcher.

None of it has worked.

At last—alas—it is no longer difficult to persuade NATO members that Russia has no interest in becoming a normal European country, even if in failing to become one, its future as an immiserated satrapy of China is overdetermined. Russia seeks to invade and violently subjugate its former empire because Russians believe it is right and good and above all Russian to possess a violently subjugated empire. Putin could not be clearer on this point. He has said explicitly that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a tragic setback; since then, he has behaved explicitly as a man who proposes to rectify this setback. It is strange that France, of all countries, has so insistently failed to intuit this: France, too, knows the pain of losing an empire.

Days ago, on March 31, we learned that General Eric Vidaud, who since last summer has headed up France’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, or DRM, had been sacked owing to his department’s failure correctly to analyze Russia or predict its invasion of Ukraine. In an interview with Le Monde, Army Chief of Staff Thierry Burkhard allowed that the US intelligence services had got it right, whereas French services “thought that the conquest of Ukraine would have a monstrous cost and the Russians had other options.”

A sacking is welcome. Someone should lose his job for this debacle. But to place the blame on Vidaud is probably unfair. According to Le Monde’s sources, the DRM had been sidelined by France’s powerful spy agency, the DGSE. The DGSE, the DRM, the Quai d’Orsay, and other organs of French foreign policy surely felt under enormous pressure to tell Macron what he wanted to hear. If Macron was surprised to find the Russians couldn’t be trusted, it’s not Vidaud who should lose his job. It’s Macron.

Yet we are all praying he keeps it—because the alternatives are so much worse.

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THE ALTERNATIVES

Something, clearly, is odd about France’s relationship with Russia, which resembles that of a lovelorn mistress who is absolutely certain that one day her beloved will leave his wife and marry her, even though said wife is pregnant. (Again!) The syndrome involves three distinct threads.

The first is the French far right, whose views have in recent years growingly infiltrated France’s traditional and respectable right. Le Pen, Zemmour, and scoundrels of their ilk are the intellectual heirs of Charles Maurras, the ideologist of Action Française, a political movement founded in 1899 to defend the “true France”—blood-and-soil France; ultranationalist, reactionary, and royalist France; anti-parliament, counter-revolutionary, anti-Semitic, and paranoid France. To some extent, fear of Muslims has replaced fear of Jews in Maurrassian political thought. For this sector of the electorate, no threat to France surpasses what it views as its civilizational clash with Islam—except, perhaps, the threat of gay parades. Thanks to Russia’s extensive propaganda efforts in France, the far right has come to see Russia as their ally in the battle against Islam and gay parades alike.

They’re right to envision Russia as their ally in the struggle against gay parades. But they’re profoundly wrong to imagine Russia is their ally against Islamism. Russia no more fought ISIS in Syria than it is now fighting Nazis in Ukraine. Russian forces in Syria avoided hitting ISIS targets: They targeted every Syrian who was neither an Assadist nor ISIS, in the end allowing Assad to survive and almost truthfully to say that only his regime stood between ISIS and the world. The audacity and cynicism of this strategy was breathtaking, but it had nothing on the West’s eagerness to believe these lies.

Le Pen and Zemmour admire Putin’s authoritarianism and nationalism and believe that in these qualities, he is their natural ally. Both have been forced, since the invasion of Ukraine, to walk back their encomiums to Putin’s strength, but there are things you can’t unsay. Le Pen persuaded herself that “whether we like it or not, Ukraine belongs to the Russian sphere of influence.” Badgered by the media about whether taking nearly ten million euros from Russian banks might influence her decisions, she insisted that to the contrary, she alone among French politicians was independent: It was everyone else who was in hock to the United States. No, it wasn’t that her opponents were taking cash from the Americans, precisely, but they were “extremely dependent on the American vision.” Whatever that meant.

At the end of January 2022, in Madrid for a rally with allied nationalist parties, Marine Le Pen refused to approve a jointly-written statement about Ukraine. The text said, “Russia’s military actions on Europe’s eastern border have led us to the brink of war.” It called for “solidarity” in the face of “such threats.” However anodyne the statement, she wouldn’t put her signature on it. In the beginning of February, she declared she didn’t believe “at all” that there would be a Russian offensive in Ukraine.

Zemmour went further, declaring Putin’s demands “completely legitimate,” because “Ukraine has throughout history always been a region of empire, whether it be Russian or Austrian.” (He was referring, one assumes, to the parts of Western Ukraine that were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. By this logic, it would also be normal for Austria and Hungary to suit up and invade France, especially since the rivalité franco-habsbourgeoise is a considerably older phenomenon than Russian imperialism.)  “If I were president,” he said, “I would say: ‘There are no more sanctions against Russia.’” And of course, as his rivals have recently reminded him, he said, “How I long for a French Putin, but there is none.”

Zemmour likewise predicted Russia would never invade Ukraine. But if it did, he said, it would scarcely matter, because “Ukraine does not exist.” He likened Ukraine’s relationship to Russia to that of Africa to France: better than an old colony, a stomping ground you keep around for several centuries. Modern Ukraine, he said, was “a country full of junk.”

Proud of the political support he’s received from the descendants of King Louis XIV—they admire his propensity to speak longingly of France before the Republic—Zemmour has made a point of envying Putin for his ability to “wear the Czar’s clothes again.” He praised Putin as “the last to resist the politically correct hurricane from America that destroys all traditional structures, family, religion, homeland.”

Until very recently, Zemmour openly fantasized of a Franco-Russian alliance. “I think she’s the ally who would be the most reliable,” he said in September on CNews. As recently as February, he remained of the same mind: “Vladimir Putin is a Russian patriot,” he said.” It is legitimate for him to defend Russia's interests.” The problem, he said, was the Americans, who had done so much to provoke Putin. As for the Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders, he declared, on prime time, that “Ukraine’s problem is not that Russia threatens an invasion. I don’t believe it. Russia—I take the bet—will not invade Ukraine.” As for the warnings it would? Just American “propaganda.”

If you imagined such views would be confined to the far right, you’d be wrong. Jean-Luc Mélenchon swallowed them whole as well. In February 2016, interviewed by France 2, Mélenchon congratulated Putin for his war crimes in Syria. Asked by the journalist Lea Salamé whether he supported Putin’s actions, he replied, “Yes.” Firmly. Seeing Salamé’s shocked face, he elaborated: “Yes. I think he will solve the problem. … I am in favor of Daesh being defeated, crushed.” His interlocutors correctly informed him that the Russian military had shown no interest in hitting ISIS positions. Mélenchon denounced this argument as lies and nonsense. Yann Moix pointed out that Putin was killing civilians. “What you say does not correspond to the facts,”Mélenchon insisted, and called for an “international military coalition,” with Russia, “to beat Daesh.”

When he said this, in 2016, it had long been obvious to anyone in possession of a map that Russian airstrikes were concentrated on regions held by the Syrian opposition, not ISIS; if they killed ISIS fighters, it was only by accident, and the civilian toll of their airstrikes was not only monstrous, but deliberate, with hospitals in particular bearing the brunt.

What’s more, there was already an international military coalition to beat Daesh. But since it was led by the United States and NATO—and because only Americans can be imperialists—Mélenchon wanted no part of it. His horror of US imperialism has repeatedly, firmly, put him on the side of Russian imperialism. In 2018, he called for an anti-American Paris-Moscow alliance, then flew to Moscow for talks with the only people who were interested in talking to him: The Stalinist United Communist Party. “I am absolutely against the American alliance, I want to leave NATO,” he said there, and  “I came here to undertake a militant act: to say ‘The Russians are our friends.’”

“NATO,” Mélenchon has said, “is a machine for creating trouble, an instrument of the declining American empire.” Fine. Whatever. If you’re an aging Trotskyite, that’s axiomatic. But he has taken this view so far as to come out on the other end: It is “in France’s interests to ensure that Russia is its partner. Russia is not an adversary, but a partner for France.” He’s not only “against confrontation with Russia,” he’s “against sanctions on Russia, as well.” Mélenchon actually supported the invasion and annexation of Crimea: “The ports of Crimea are vital for Russia’s security,” he declared, and Russia was merely “taking protective measures against an adventurous putschist power, in which the neo-Nazis have an utterly detestable influence.”

The “adventurous, putschist power” he’s speaking of is Ukraine. As for Russia’s massing of troops on Ukrainian borders, he said, “Who wouldn’t do the same with a neighbor like that, a country associated with a power that is continually threatening to them?”

Who indeed? No one had the presence of mind to point out that none of Ukraine’s other neighbors felt this necessary. An “anti-Russian policy is not in [France’s] interests,” he repeated. “It is dangerous and absurd.” Were he elected, he would seek Russia as “a partner.” He deplored the way “we betrayed the word given to the Russian leaders.” In a magical momentary mind-meld with Noam Chomsky and Margarita Simonyan, he added, “We brought ten countries into NATO to the east, which was felt as a threat by Russia. We have a duty to ensure that Ukraine does not enter NATO because otherwise, it is normal for the Russians to say ‘we feel threatened,’ especially when anti-missile missile-batteries are installed in Poland.”

All three of them—Le Pen, Zemmour, and Mélenchon—have been somewhat chastened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Why seeing similar videos from Syria did not chasten them is not precisely a good question, because the answer is obvious, but it is worth noting that they were unchastened.) All three have been forced, of late, if only by the prospect of electoral annihilation, to say the right things. You can’t really campaign on a platform of dead bodies, raped women, brutalized children, and flattened cities. Still, clearly, their hearts aren’t in it. “I am on the side of Zelensky against Putin,” said Mélenchon grudgingly. Le Pen allowed that the war had “partly changed” her view of the Russian president. “Yes, it’s an authoritarian regime, historically and in culture. Even if we are judging (it) by our western norms, which are not Russian norms.” Zemmour made a grave video to express his disapprobation of the invasion. Perhaps this is all electoral cynicism; perhaps they don’t mean it; but something tells me these pampered poodles don’t really have the stomach for wet work, so they probably do mean it. It’s just a day late and a billion rubles short.

That the far-left and far-right have converged in their views of Russia is not a surprise. This is the well-known phenomenon of the political horseshoe at work. The surprise is how skillfully Russia has played both sides. Soviet propaganda was confined by its formal commitment to Marxist-Leninism; it was obliged to focus its efforts on parties that were, at least nominally, on the left. Its slick new propaganda organs are unconstrained by imperatives of ideological consistency. Its media outlets and bots in France have hammered away at the menace of Muslims and the horrors of gay marriage even as the old comrade networks rehearse the left’s greatest hits from the Soviet glory days.

The old comrade networks were never dismantled, by the way. If you recall what they sounded like in 1968, you know what they sound like now; it’s the same phrasing, the same arguments, sometimes even the same newspapers. Throughout the Cold War, Soviet active measures targeted French public opinion; it is impossible to say exactly how effective these were, but common sense says they worked well enough. We know, for example, from the Mitrokhin archive and from other sources that Le Monde was thoroughly penetrated by the KGB. So was Agence France-Presse, among whom the Mitrokhin archive identified six agents and two “confidential contacts.” La Tribune des Nations was run directly by the KGB. No sensible person doubts that Moscow now keeps on its payroll any number of French journalists of the left and the right; that it does this simultaneously—and enjoys an advanced command of social media—makes the Russian Federation’s propaganda more effective than Soviet propaganda ever managed to be.

Roughly speaking, the far-right in France today descends from the monarchists. Like them, they see nothing especially distasteful about Russia’s authoritarian and antisemitic inclinations (and indeed something rather appealing). As for the far-left, it is willing to overlook Putin’s authoritarian peccadillos on the grounds that anyone who gets the capitalist Anglo-Saxons this spun up must be doing God’s work.

Then there is another thread, and perhaps the most important. Gaullism unites the far-left, the far-right, and the so-called Gaullo-Mitterandists in suspicion of the Atlantic alliance and a hopeless romanticization of a Russia that no longer exists.

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LES RUSSOPHILES

To understand this, we must go back further still. The French love affair with Russia may be traced at least to the 18th century, when Gallomania was de rigueur among educated Russians. French was not only the language of diplomacy and trade, but cultural status. French-language books in Russia outsold Russian editions. Between the era of Catherine the Great and Alexander the First, French was the second and then the native language of the Russian nobility.

The Russian and French elites forged intimate links. Voltaire corresponded with Catherine the Great, then wrote a history of the Russian Empire in the reign of Peter the Great. In 1746, Voltaire was inducted into the Academy of Science in Saint Peterburg. The French nobility wrote of their real and imaginary journeys to Russia. In the 1780s, the French ambassador to St Petersburg, Count Ségur, acquired a taste for Russian noblewomen. Charged with improving Franco-Russian relations, he edited Catherine the Great’s various plans for new educational institutions. The Comtesse de Ségur, who wrote classic morality tales for French children, probably did more to shape French minds than any number of Russian agents. Following a visit to Russia in the winter of 1774, the celebrated writer and philosopher Denis Diderot reported that no nation in Europe took to French culture, language, and mores so quickly. What’s more, he wrote, Russia’s fashionable dress and splendid feasts were the equal of London or Paris.

Russians were fascinated with French glitz. The French were fascinated with Russia’s fascination, confirming, as it did, Russia’s suitability for France’s mission civilisatrice. Nor was France indifferent to Russia’s sheer size. As Europe’s only republic, France was ostracized and little loved. Monarchies preferred to stick to their own kind. An alliance with Russia would solve the problem of French isolation.

The idea of such an alliance originated in the 1870s in Paris’s salon scene. Russian autocrats charmed prominent French republicans through cultural and political exchanges, and even through the mass media, promoting the merits of autocracy to French citizens in a language they might find persuasive. The French were thus told of the “organic bonds” between the Czar and his people, which were apparently sufficiently like the idea of “popular sovereignty” as to be an outgrowth of the same deep urge. This bizarre ideological synthesis left an indelible mark on French political life, the effects of which are felt to this day.

France had been diplomatically isolated since its defeat in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War. By the late nineteenth century, what began as a cultural enamorment acquired diplomatic urgency. Rising German power and deep traditional distrust of Britain led French diplomats to see a Franco-Russian alliance as their highest aspiration: Such a union would endow France with the friendship of a great land empire, a counterweight against Germany; it would moreover serve as proof of France’s great power status. It’s notable that well before the rise of the United States as a global power, France was overcome by the worry that it was losing its status. Certainty that its best days are behind it is an enduring aspect of the French character. France needed Russia’s friendship to balance its overweening rivals— Germany, of course, but also Britain: Franco-British imperial competition in Africa was the source of growing strain, culminating in the humiliating Fashoda Incident of 1898.

The political rapprochement resulted in a secret alliance, inaugurated in 1891 and made public in 1897, which endured until its tragic dénouement in 1917. The alliance was not without detractors. French political life was profoundly polarized between monarchists and republicans. Republicans were skeptical of Russia’s values and thus the alliance, and understandably so; the marriage between Europe’s first republic and its most severe autocracy was unnatural, no matter what its advocates imagined. Little illustrated this more clearly than the Dreyfus affair, which rallied French republicans in Dreyfus’s support. Monarchists—Charles Maurras, in particular—came to the defense of the French state. In this regard, Russia, a notorious center of anti-Semitic outrages, made perfect sense to the monarchists. Cultural exchanges between France and Russia were hardly confined to elevated letters between Flaubert and Turgenev. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most widely distributed anti-Semitic publication in history, was plagiarized from a satire by Maurice Joly. It was probably written in Paris.

The rapprochement contributed to the massive influx of French capital into Russia. From 1888, France provided Russia with cheap loans, floated on the Paris bourse, essential for rebuilding the backward Russian military; these also financed the railways that Russian strategic planners fondly and foolishly imagined would bring troops to the German front. The Russian state borrowed nearly nine billion gold francs through the Parisian finance scene between 1888 to and 1909, equivalent in today’s dollars to some US$161 billion—a staggering sum, especially since the economy of France and its population were so much smaller than they are today. In 1891, the French fleet visited the Russian naval base at Kronstadt. Czar Alexander III welcomed them warmly. Throughout France, republican politicians organized lavish feasts in Russia’s honor; hundreds of thousands turned out to see visiting Russian officials; consumers eagerly acquired Russian books and posters to commemorate the alliance; Frenchmen wrote songs and poems celebrating Franco-Russian amity.

By then, the French were head-over-heels in love with what they believed to be a Westernizing Russia. In 1863, Gustave Flaubert met Ivan Turgenev in a Left Bank restaurant in Paris. French students still study their 17-year correspondence—central to the literary history of the age—for their baccalauréat exams. Their exposure to Russia, at an impressionable age, comes in the form of such descriptions as these:

Your “Scenes From Russian Life” make me want to be shaken along in a telega through snow-covered fields, to the sound of wolves howling. Your work has a bittersweet flavor, a sadness that is delightful and penetrates to the very depths of my soul. …

If the peoples of the countries were friendly, their elites entered a unique communion. The Russian elite spoke French more often than Russian, as readers of War and Peace will have noticed. Russophilia thrived. To this day, Russia remains profoundly romanticized by the French elites: Pushkin! Tchaikovskysky! The Bolshoi ballet! 

We know, of course, where this alliance, so ardently sought, so tragically led. Jean Jaurès, the legendary antimilitarist and luminary of the French left, was along with Émile Zola one of Dreyfus’s most passionate defenders. Jaurès saw clearly the imminent catastrophe of the Great War and tried desperately to avert it. Jaurès, representing the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, was elected for the Tarn in 1906. Six years later, Raymond Poincaré became Prime Minister. Russia, we now know, covertly subsidized Poincaré’s election campaign. Seeking to obstruct Imperial Germany’s determination to become a world power, Poincaré embarked upon a program to strengthen Franco-Russian ties, which had been somewhat undermined during the 1908-9 Bosnian crisis.

In July of 1914, Poincaré led a secret mission to St. Petersburg to reinforce the Triple Entente. Jaurès, outraged by Russia’s influence over French foreign policy, condemned the visit as dangerously provocative. Addressing the Chamber of Deputies, he accused Poincaré of being “more Russian than Russia.” He asked, “Are we going to start a world war?”²

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THE SOURCES OF CHARLES DE GAULLE’S CONDUCT

To understand the context in which Charles de Gaulle’s views emerged, it is important to remember the context in which they did not emerge. Unlike Germany or Eastern Europe, France had not been occupied by the Russian empire or the Soviet Union.³ French historical memory has no parallel in the traumas experienced by Poland and the Baltic states. France did not fall behind the Iron Curtain. The French did not experience the deportations or the gulags. The French elites’ proximity to their Russian counterparts probably taught them, too, some disdain for the Russian and Eastern European masses, whose experiences they tended to discount as exaggeration—a tendency we see to this day.

France most certainly had experienced German occupation. It had experienced, too, war after war with Britain, competition with Britain in the colonial world, and the humiliating loss of its empire as a triumphant Anglo-American alliance replaced its position on the global stage.

De Gaulle did not truly distinguish between the United States and the United Kingdom. Just as he always referred to “Russia,” not the the USSR, he referred to “the Anglo-Saxons” as a single entity in his dealings with the British and Americans. Some historians have speculated that his childhood memories of the Fashoda incident left him permanently suspicious of Britain. De Gaulle believed—correctly—that the United States and Britain viewed France as a lesser partner. He found this intolerable. He never recovered from the insult of France’s exclusion from the Yalta conference.

Soon after de Gaulle returned to power, the Cold War entered a period of high tension, particularly with Nikita Khrushchev’s threats to Berlin. Under such conditions, France had no choice but to rely on the Atlantic alliance for its security. But in de Gaulle’s eyes, this came at too high a price, for while the United States functioned as the guarantor of France’s territorial integrity, it was also as a threat to French independence. Americans were indifferent, at best, to French aspirations for status: De Gaulle had acquitted himself honorably, in the minds of most Americans, but France had not.

De Gaulle envisioned what he called a Europe des États, a Europe of states, a superpower in its own right, one in which the decisive role would be assigned to France and Germany. He urged Western European countries to cooperate to protect their independence against the two elephantine superpowers under the Franco-German aegis. France thus became, in 1960, the fourth country to test an independent nuclear weapon. De Gaulle wrote to President Lyndon Johnson, in 1966, to announce that France would withdraw from NATO’s integrated command. (It remained a member of NATO.) No longer in need of the American nuclear umbrella, de Gaulle was at liberty to criticize the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War and its role in Latin America, which he did. He urged Europe to strive for diplomatic self-determination. He criticized the role of the dollar as a global reserve currency.

It is hardly surprising, given France’s wartime experience, that de Gaulle was haunted by memories of 1940 and wished for France to be master of its own house and central to decisions made in respect of its fate. It is unsurprising, too, that de Gaulle viewed the maintenance of French independence as the supreme object of French policy, even if this risked dividing the West. It was in this spirit that after withdrawing from NATO’s command, de Gaulle went to the Soviet Union to call for a Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals”—meaning with the Soviet Union and without the US. Now, perhaps, you hear the resonance of Macron’s comment—“a Europe that goes from Lisbon to Vladivostok”—an allusion lost on everyone else, but missed by no one in France.

Yet there is a difference between de Gaulle and Macron. De Gaulle was smarter. Again, de Gaulle referred insistently to “Russia.” For de Gaulle, regimes came and went. Nations—and geography—endured. But regimes mattered, and the Soviet regime, to de Gaulle, was repulsive. Macron has been unable to recognize that Putin’s regime is no improvement.

De Gaulle was not a communist sympathizer. He saw the USSR as an aberration, a view reinforced by the White Russians who flocked to Paris after revolution. But contacts with Moscow were, in his view, an enhancement of French diplomatic prowess. He hosted a summit in Paris between Khrushchev and NATO leaders in this spirit, although the U-2 incident ensured its failure. In de Gaulle’s mind, French contacts with Moscow allowed France to punch above France’s diplomatic weight. These views were popular at home and popular abroad, in the developing world especially.

When he came to power in 1981, François Mitterrand, a leftist who had in all other ways been de Gaulle’s opponent, hewed to the same line, resisting Reagan’s efforts to lead NATO’s European members, and even sending weapons to Nicaragua. “NATO,” Mitterrand argued, must not acquire the status of a “holy alliance.” Like de Gaulle, he sought to preserve French diplomatic autonomy and room for maneuver. Thus emerged the concept of “Gaullo-Mitterandisme.” All French presidents since then have practiced the art of “en même temps.”

With the close of the Cold War, the idea that France was not, and should not be, an “aligned power” became even more seductive, particularly with the US-led invasion of Iraq. Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq War expressed the overwhelming sentiment of the French public. Prior to his reelection, in 2002, Chirac had been critical of Russia. But having rejected the invasion and incurred American wrath, he needed support. Guided by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, Chirac made his first official foreign visit to Russia, holding a summit with President Putin at Sochi on the Black Sea, where France and Russia coordinated their resolutions on Iraq in the UN Security Council. Russia rewarded him by putting in a major order with Airbus.

Chirac, recall, spoke fluent Russian. (He was also later convicted of embezzlement, becoming the first French leader to be convicted since Marshal Philippe Pétain.) His refusal to join the United States in invading Iraq was widely hailed by French intellectuals (yet again!) as a sign of the birth of a Franco-Russian axis. Typical of the mood was an influential 2002 book by Henri de Grossouvre: “Paris Berlin Moscow: The Voice of Independence and Peace,” which sold out immediately. Grossouvre argued for the establishment of “a strategic partnership between the European Union and Russia” around a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. If this sounds familiar, it should; it was clearly echoed in Macron’s reverie about a new European security architecture into whose bosom Moscow would be drawn, complete with the notion that really, the only powers that matter in Europe are France and Germany.

Such a partnership, Grossouvre proposed, “would allow Europe to solve the major challenges of the 21st century: energy, security, space, and mastery of high technologies.” He envisioned Europe as one of “the centers of a world that has once again become multipolar, a source of balance and peace that would curb the spiral of wars waged at the initiative of Washington.” If again this sounds familiar, it should. It’s how Russian strategists, foremost among them Vladimir Putin, have been selling their vision, although “a source of balance and peace” is a very hard sell now that the world has seen up close what Russian peacekeeping in, say, Bucha resembles. 

Grossouvre was heartened by what he took to be signs of Putin’s enthusiasm for this plan, including “the arrest of pro-US oil oligarch Khodorkovsky in Russia, the resignation of the ‘liberal’ Kremlin Chief of Staff Alexander Volochin, the establishment of a Russian military base in Kyrgyzstan and the nomination of his envoy to the EU, Mikhail Fradkov as Prime Minister in March 2004.” (Certainly, these were signs of something, but a sign of Putin’s eagerness for “growing economic and strategic cooperation within Europe” they were not. Grossouvre was, among other things, a fool.)

What got Grossouvre’s goat, especially, was the revelation of the existence of ECHELON, a network of electronic listening stations monitored by the Five Eyes—the US the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This too is significant. In this century and the last, French Russophilia has had its origins in its fear of insatiable American rapaciousness. In 1995, President François Mitterrand told the journalist Georges Marc Benamou that “France does not know it, but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent, vital, economic war, a war without dead, apparently ... Americans play very rough; they are greedy, they want undivided power over the world.”

Psychologically, the roots of this fear are not hard to discern. America, especially in cooperation with its Anglophone allies, is powerful, it does want undivided power over the world—except when it wants to withdraw from it in a fit of absent-mindedness—and Anglophone countries don’t trust France, or treat France, the way they do one another. The Five Eyes is an Anglophone club (Canadians are only Francophone under duress). If France is excluded from this club, it is only natural: People tend to trust people who speak their language. But if France resents this, that is also only natural: People don’t trust those who exclude them from their clubs.

Still, it goes deeper than this. Franco-British rivalry may be all but forgotten now to Americans, but it certainly isn’t forgotten in France or in Britain. Centuries of warfare and imperial competition leave scars, even if their origins become dim and unconscious. The fall of France in the Second World War was a betrayal from which the Anglophone world may have recovered, but it was a shame from which France has not. The historical line from Dunkirk through the Five Eyes club to AUKUS is redolent of mild contempt. When the US, the UK, and Australia signed a defense pact and cut a lucrative nuclear submarine deal at France’s expense—without so much as doing France the courtesy of letting them know before it hit the headlines—they tore the scar off a sucking French chest wound.

France was once a mighty empire. It is no longer a mighty empire. The empire is a phantom limb, as it is for every post-imperial power. The United States remains a mighty empire, so powerful that it can wake up in the morning and reduce its rivals to penury before lunch, so imperious that it has no idea it is an empire. The empire is just the water in which Americans swim, like goldfish in a tank. Most Americans couldn’t tell you what “SLOC” stands for, no less list the ones they control.

This is why France has rarely had a president inclined to view Russia in the harsh light of reality. Sarkozy, it is true, was an Atlanticist who undertook France’s return to the integrated military command of NATO. But he didn’t push back against the invasion of Georgia—to the contrary, he forced upon Tblisi a ceasefire that favored Moscow—and he signed France’s first major arms deal with Moscow since the Second World War, over the howling objections of Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics, and of course Georgia. 

The suffering France has endured at the hands of Islamist terrorists has left the country particularly easy for Russia to manipulate. Hollande actively sought Putin’s military cooperation in the fight against ISIS. The French media highlighted the “common enemy” and portrayed this as an alliance, even though Russia did more to create jihadis than it did to kill them.

The candidate of Les Républicains in the last presidential contest, François Fillon, might well have won the presidency had he not become embroiled in a corruption scandal. He too was a Russophile. He called for a rapprochement with Russia without demanding any concession in turn, and he campaigned feverishly against the economic sanctions placed on Russia following its seizure of Crimea, saying they were counterproductive and “strategically devastating for our farmers.” He envisioned what he hoped would be  a good relationship between Putin and Trump. He said he admiredPutin’s “cold and effective pragmatism” in the Middle East. (Cold and effective, for sure.) Le Point reported that Fillon and Putin used “tu” with each other, the equivalent of calling each other “my dude.”

This points to one (among many) of the problems that have sunk Valérie Pécresse. Fillon was a Pécresse ally, until she betrayed him. He was also on the board of Russia’s largest petrochemical producer Sibur; one of its major stakeholders is the businessman Gennady Timchenko, a close ally of Putin. Fillon was also on the board of Zarubezhneft, a Russian oil and gas exploration company. Fillon’s chumminess with Russian power has led some government officials, including Clément Beaune, the EU affairs minister, to ask Pécresse to “clarify her position” toward Fillon, who “dishonors himself by offering his services to Russian financial interests.”

But what can she say? How can she attack her rivals for their stance on Russia when hers is hardly any stronger—and when you just know that sitting in the FSB archives there is a photo of the young Mademoiselle Pécresse, dressed in her Komsomol Young Pioneer uniform, and perhaps even a video of her doing what teenage girls do when they travel abroad on their own for the first time?

This Gaullist reflex animates Macron (and the cohort of flunkies trailing his wake), even if only unconsciously and instinctively. Macron’s insistence that NATO was “brain dead” and needed a new security architecture that included Russia was very much part of this tradition. Trump’s presidency made all of this sound even more plausible than usual to the French. The Atlanticists (who are also a powerful force in French foreign policy) were implicitly rebuked every time Trump opened his mouth.

So here we are: On the eve of the French election, Russia is committing war crimes in Europe so abominable as to recall Hitler and Stalin, yet all of the candidates have in one way or another converged on the idea that within Russia there is a secret European country still longing for the seductive touch of France’s mission civilisatrice.

The French have of course been horrified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They are paying attention. The invasion, Macron said, was an “electroshock” to NATO, one that presumably pulled it from the brink of brain death. The French fleet air arm is flying a daily patrol of two Rafale fighter jets and a Hawkeye spy plane over Romania and Bulgaria, part of a NATO mission. France has redeployed the Charles de Gaulle carrier to fly air police and reconnaissance flights over Romania, where it has also sent has also sent troops and armored vehicles, including Leclerc heavy tanks. France has begun air patrols over Bosnia and Herzegovina and sent Mirage 2000-5Fs to Estonia. It has expelled 35 Russian diplomats, and it is sending arms to Ukraine: It has made a policy of being discreet about what they are (causing some to wonder if there are any at all), but yes, there most certainly are. The French defense industry is proud as a new parent about the performance of the Milan 2 anti-tank missile.

France has boosted its defense spending and deployed three of the four submarines that are capable of launching nuclear weapons, something it has not done since the 1980s. The French foreign minister also reminded Putin, in response to his nuclear threats, “Vladimir Putin must also understand that the Atlantic alliance is a nuclear alliance. That is all I will say about this.” The French military successfully tested an upgraded nuclear cruise missile and was not hesitant to announce this. Among civilians in the Ministry of the Armed Forces and at the Quai d’Orsay, a generation of devoted Atlanticists—to whom Macron’s warning was addressed in August 2019—are loudly saying, ‘We told you so.”⁴

But many large French companies remain committed to Russia. France is one of the major European investors, and the biggest international employer, in Russia. Companies such as Auchan and Leroy-Merlin refusing to leave. Others are engaged in projects with Russian participation—such as the utility company Engie, in the construction of now-shelved Nord Stream 2—and are still actively lobbying for the lifting of sanctions.

The idea that Macron will charm Putin into becoming a good European is dead. For good. But Macron is an agile politician who will translate his plan into something more palatable: He will probably play the good cop to the US bad cop, or the designated Putin interlocutor. This is not ideal, but it is not awful.  Zelensky has already realized he can use Macron for this purpose, and regularly delivers messages to Putin via Macron for both strategic and diplomatic reasons. Since Putin is surrounded by yes-men, Macron may be able to tell him truths that his generals won’t disclose.

But Macron is unquestionably the least Russophile candidate in the race. If, God forbid, through the kind of accident that can happen in democracies—high abstention rates, a moment of populist petulance, a Russian-engineered last-minute surprise—one of his rivals wins the presidency, the Atlantic alliance is in deep trouble. None of his rivals can be trusted. Their enthusiasm for Putin is not a bluff and it is not a pose.

Several days ago, the Kyiv Post’s exasperated defense editor Illia Ponomarenko, astonished that Macron had yet again dignified Putin with a pointless phone call, asked on Twitter: “Are you guys impressed with his outstanding peace-enforcing effort and his leadership against the biggest aggression in Europe since World War II? Ready to vote for him again?”

Within minutes, thousands of real and amateur experts on French politics replied. I was one of them. We all said the same thing. Trust me. You don’t want to see the alternative.

1. It should be stressed that Russia does not have the ability to conjure up a movement like this ex nihilo. What they have the power to do, and what they do without a doubt (I’ve watched it in real time), was scan the horizon for conflicts and divisions in open societies, then exacerbate them. It worked, nearly costing Macron his presidency.

2. If Germany remilizarizes, as it proposes to do, it is not beyond imagination that this whole scenario could again come to pass again. I hope that someone, somewhere, has thought about this. Recent US presidential administrations have hurled endless imprecations at Germany: You must stop freeloading. You must remilitarize. I’ve always found this a fathomless objective: Who cares if they’re freeloading? That’s Germany, for God’s sake! We’ve managed to demilitarize it—permanently! Rejoice!

I appreciate that times change, and Germany has changed. I appreciate that this remilitarization will now happen and must happen—no thanks to our imprecations, all thanks to the miserable ogre in Moscow. But if anything goes wrong in Germany, it does put France back in the same position. Geography doesn’t change. I hope it will work out for the best.

3. With one exception. Napoléon’s deadly march on Moscow, in 1812, cost 300,000 Russians their lives and reduced thousands of villages, along with the capital, to ashes. Alexander I concluded that Napoleon had to be finished, once and for all, and in 1814 joined a coalition of Prussian, British, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Sardinian, Austrian, Bavarian, and Wurtembergian troops in invading France from the south, east, and north. On reaching Paris, they drove Napoléon into exile on Elba. After 25 years of war, France was exhausted; to Alexander’s astonishment, the people seemed almost relieved. He declared himself to be bringing peace, not destruction, and offered France generous terms. Talleyrand replied by giving him the keys to city. There were no hard feelings. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, centuries of brutal Russian conquests define the bleak landscape of collective memory. This was nothing like that.

4. No doubt some have accompanied the words with the rest of Conquest’s famous rejoinder.