Rap-sody of France.

Written by Emily Lewis, Tillmann Osici & Isla Galloni

According to Emmanuel Macron, French society is “colour-blind”. However, 41,5% of France voted for the right-wing party Rassemblement National under Marine Le Pen, a woman who believes that an apparent “Islamisation” of France is endangering civilisation and who compared Muslim immigrants to the German soldiers who occupied France during World War II. One rightly asks the question of how a President of France should react against such reckless hate and proto-fascist rhetoric. The morally correct answer would be to call out the lies and expose Rassemblement National. Instead, Macron joined the ranks of many distinguished French politicians who haphazardly made this rhetoric their own. In 2020, Macron called for an “Islamic Enlightenment”, and, whilst acknowledging the existence of the “good Muslims”, pointed out the “Islamic separatism” that tries to destroy the Republic. Such talk is indistinguishable from the hatred flaunted by Rassemblement National. This is not a new phenomenon, and all the Presidents since Jacques Chirac have used this kind of language in one way or another. Where politics fail, civil society has to intervene. Just as it did in the 90s, the current French Rap Music scene is the most vital voice in calling out Rassemblement National on their racism and other politicians’ complicity.

Suprême NTM – (Never) Again?

In 1995, France was at a breaking point. Front National under Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, experienced a boost in popularity as the economic depression of the mid-1990s polarised the country. Conservative candidate Jacques Chirac ran on a platform that tried to heal the “social rift” in France. However, Chirac, who disliked Front National, never properly contested their arguments. Instead, he used the same language to get votes for himself. Chirac spoke of an “overdose” of immigrants, adding that with “the noise and smell, the French worker goes mad.” In that political climate, the rap group Suprême NTM published their song Plus jamais ça (“Never again”), to speak out against the latent racism on all sides of the political spectrum in that election year. 

The song draws a direct connection to France’s Vichy-past. There, it had already experienced the horrors of far-right extremism. Suprême NTM calls out to politics to stop drifting towards the right again. Chirac, by acknowledging, to any degree, that “Muslims and Blacks” are the problem, legitimised Front National. The song warns that concepts such as “Honour, the motherland, conquest and colonies” lead to destructive outcomes. Although Chirac won the election, Front National’s 15% vote share in the first round indicated that the problem was far from resolved. Le Pen’s infamous comeback in 2002, where he secured 17.79% of the votes, confirmed this. The song’s conclusion that “We’ll be dealing with this same climate” for the future still holds true. Chirac’s efforts to “heal the rift” only exacerbated the division in French society, which was about to worsen.

Bigflo & Oli – “Je Suis” (a disjointed) France.

The 2017 presidential elections displayed strong polarisation between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen: 63%-36%, respectively. BigFlo et Oli’s Je Suis (2015) depicts France as beautiful yet fundamentally fractured by issues like the loss of people-state dialogue, lack of community and a rupture in varied sectors.

People-State Communication is lost, those unheard risk resorting to radical voices promising to bring change. People are so dissatisfied with the system that they resort to scapegoating. This phenomenon is apparent in the verse about sécurité sociale: “People will say I only widen the pit of the Sécurité Sociale’”. Public opinion blames the sick instead of focusing on the state’s failure to mend the sécurité sociale itself. Such lyrics mirror real events of the 2010s: the Yellow Vest protest, demanding the Referendum d’Initiative Citoyenne, was a cry for people’s voices to be heard by the government. A divide is also visible in the second and third verses, which alternate voices of rich and homeless citizens. The placement of these two different perspectives reflects France’s disparity. A difference in income, and loss of solidarity: “Between this man and my dog, I wonder to whom I’m the closest” and “They all want to taste the fruit from the tree I planted”. 

Verses about migration sequenced successively give voice to a refugee, who, relieved to have safely arrived, writes to his family, then Le Pen’s “Français de Souche” (“native French”), expressing concern over the diversifying population around them. One is hopeful, his arrival is a “miracle”, the other is worried about the loss of “roots”. The latter verse’s narrator is at a crossroad: his worry might be swayed by rhetoric like that of “Grand Replacement”. These ingredients lead people towards Nationalist ideas: the fear of replacement and loss of community, as expressed through the metaphor of new trees outgrowing old roots and people no longer “looking” like the narrator or speaking their language. A final verse shows the effects of nationalism on those seen as “foreign”. Its narrator states he built France, and yet: “They say this country isn’t mine”. This rejection is mirrored in the verse spoken by a Muslim man who denounces the double standard he is subjected to. His beard resembles Jean Jaurrès’s, a notable French figure. These lyrics echo current debates surrounding the abaya, evidenced by statements like those of presenter Charlotte d’Ornellas criticising a student stating the abaya is not always religious: “Dolly, you’re not in the Middle East”. Such rejection is not limited to the fringes of French extreme-right politics, with President Macron explaining that “School should remain neutral” and “we do not want to know where our children come from”, a direct attempt to homogenise the educational environment and erase differences, specifically Muslim difference which he excludes from French identity. 

Je Suis presents a beautiful but troubled France. Its last verse entangles weddings with issues like racism, excellently showing France’s facets. The final “Je suis la France” at the song’s end invites the listener to take pride in France. 

Orelsan – “L’Odeur” of Civilisational Downfall.

Orelsan’s L’Odeur de L’Essence (2021) paints a more fatalistic portrait of French polarisation, a prelude to the 50/50 divide between Macron and Le Pen in the 2022 presidential elections. In this apocalyptic France, Orelsan denounces the manipulations of colonial history by Rassemblement National (formerly Front National), and foreshadows the end of the very concept nationalists aim to protect – civilisation. 

The 2022 Rassemblement National Manifesto warns of the escalating “threat of Islamization” upon French society. Le Pen presents Macron’s government as “stagnant” against “the Islamist menace” to French democracy – a statement she placed after calling for immigration restrictions. She characterises immigration as a vessel for terrorist “moral decay” infecting French civil culture, a rhetoric she builds by evoking a once-glorious French civilisation. In a 2017 interview, she applauded French prosperity during Trente Glorieuses (1945-1973), stating that colonisation brought infrastructure and education to Algerians. Ignoring the colonial atrocities committed through land-usurpation, enforced famines, and coercive French “disciplining”, Le Pen asserts French cultural superiority in spreading “enlightenment” to its colonies, casting Arabic identities as its Barbarian Other.   

Orelsan denounces Le Pen’s use of a seductive yet illusory Trente Glorieuses past. L’Odeur de L’Essence opens with a chorus of voices repeating, “They are waiting for a country”, clashing against Orelsan’s line: “Nostalgia, luring them with the greatness of a past France that is but a fantasy”. Through Le Pen’s speeches, nostalgia in times of financial struggle is turned into pressing needs to return to a glory wholly fantasised. “Everything is hierarchical”, including history. Its romantic presentation by Le Pen precisely reflects this, as she omits the violence of the Algerian War (1954-1962) for comfortable mirages of past prosperity unblemished by immigration – “a time when people were already nostalgic”. 

Laforcade highlights French malaise with decolonisation, as “selective amnesia” allows Le Pen to ignore French responsibility in colonial trauma and instead fuel fears of counter-colonisation from the barbaric Other. Orelsan notes: “Fear, persuading them that foreigners are coming into their living rooms to replace them”, developing into “paranoia”. This references Renaud Camus’s “Grand Remplacement” theory, stating that “European, white and Christian populations” are “threatened with extinction by Muslim immigration” invading “pure” French civilisation. Orelsan notes, “It’s every man for his team”: there is no space for French “multiculturalism”; it is your culture or mine. This is ethnic survivalism. 

Orelsan’s use of rap defies fears of incompatible cultures. Prévos notes that nationalists will never recognise French rap as “pure French culture”, as they associate it with banlieues, Arabic identity, and barbarian “charabia”. Yet Orelsan challenges nationalists’ cultural identification with the “language of the civilised”: “We will fall […] like the Romans”. Through rap, he articulates a warning against pyromaniac nationalists, inverting the rhetoric of their ethnic fears: the Rassemblement National fuels extremisms, and will precipitate the end of French civilisation as a whole.

Ethnic anxieties polarising French society are ongoing, inflamed by feelings of cultural superiority, political misrepresentation, and economic instability revising Macron’s assertion of a “colour-blind” France. From Suprême NTM’s Plus Jamais Ça (1995) denouncing nationalist manipulations of Vichy history, to BigFlo & Oli’s Je Suis (2015) revealing the mosaic of French identities, and Orelsan’s L’Odeur de l’Essence (2021) deconstructing malaise of decolonisation, French rap calls out the lies of nationalist parties. It warns us that unless we remain critical of nationalist rhetoric, we will stay in a battle “to sit at the front of a plane heading straight towards its crash”.

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