A certain idea of France’s past: Marine Le Pen’s history wars

ABSTRACT Contrary to what common sense suggests, the meaning of historical figures and events is not fixed once and for ever. Instead, the battle over history plays an important role at an identity-building and political competition level, thus becoming what post-structuralist literature refers to as ‘a site of struggle’. This article intends to study such aspects of history through the analysis of Rassemblement National and its leader, Marine Le Pen. It shows how French history is not only of interest to historians and educated citizens but also of political parties. Moreover, the article aims to be a study of the relationship between the contemporary far-right and the past.


Introduction
Even though Rassemblement National (RN, previously known as Front National) has been a major player in the French political landscape since the 1980s it has gained particular salience in the last decade, coinciding with the presidency of Marine Le Pen, the daughter of one of the founders of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen managed to amplify her father's electoral success, roughly from around 10 per cent to 20 per cent, by expanding the vote share among the traditional voters of the French far-right and making gains among young people and women (Stockemer & Amengay, 2015). She was able to go through the second round in 2017 and is expected to do the same in 2022, when she will likely confront once again centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron.
Part of this success has to do with the breakthrough Marine Le Pen represented for the party. Such a breakthrough has received several labels, such as 'républicanisation' (or 'Republican turn'), 'detoxification', 'de-demonization' or simply 'normalization' (Eltchaninoff, 2018). Indeed, Marine Le Pen conducted a total renovation of RN's discourse and strategy that highly contrasts with her father's, even though differences at an ideological level are not so evident (Calignong, 2017). Indeed, up until 2012, the Front National was a classic European post-war far-right party, not too different from Haider's FPÖ (Austria) or Umberto Bossi's Lega Nord (Italy). Its main strengths lay in its ability to polarize around subjects such as immigration, European politics or taxation and on the capacities of a confrontational and charismatic leader to present himself as a maverick. Although Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to revamp and rearticulate the dispersed archipelago of groupuscules that the French far-right was in the 1970s and get remarkable electoral results both in 1995 and 2002, his strategy was doomed to failure, especially in a tworound electoral system that eventually requires attracting a broad range of voters coming from different parties.
Marine Le Pen understood the limitations of her father's strategy and chose a more pragmatic path by avoiding histrionic stances on polemic issues while embracing a more transversal approach, even though her party undoubtedly remains part of the Western European far-right (Mudde, 2017). In the last decade Rassemblement National has emphasised its popular character and how it represents demands of all kinds, thereby aspiring to abandon its ideological ghetto and represent the entire French nation. One of the topics in which the party's discourse has shifted is history. Jean-Marie Le Pen is famous for his many faux pas concerning the Holocaust and the Second World War. He has been fined on several occasions for referring to gas chambers as 'a mere detail in history' (Chrisafis, 2016), yet another example of the antisemitic stances that made his daughter suspend him from the party in 2015 (Rubin & Breeden, 2015). He has repeatedly refused to condemn the excesses of the French colonial army in both Vietnam and Algeria, wars in which he participated and in which he is accused to have engaged in acts of torture and brutalisation, events that he only denies half-heartedly (Malye, 2018). More recently he has praised Philippe Pétain (who ruled over Vichy France in collaboration with the Nazis from 1940 to 1944) while attacking Charles De Gaulle, a common target of the French radical right since the 1960s (Peytermann, 2018). His daughter, in contrast, has a different style, one that consists in applying her pragmatism and transversalism while conserving a view of France's history consistent with far-right values, thereby articulating a series of stances that allow the party to distance itself both from its former leader and from the rest of the French right, paving the ground for a provocatively contradictory discourse.
This article intends to explore this approach, thereby contributing to the analysis of the use of historical memory by far-right parties in contexts of political competition by focusing on the example of RN. In order to do so, it will employ a theoretical framework based on a combination of the approach articulated by the Essex School of Discourse Analysis (ESDA) and the idea that history can be a site of struggle. It will then be divided into two sections. The first explores how Marine Le Pen, following the example of the majority of far-right forces, follows an approach ('resurgentism') based on the idea that France was once a magnificent nation but then entered a period of decay, which can be reversed by defeating a series of ideas and adversaries. The second explores how she has embarked on a process of disputing aspects of France's past that were once indifferent to the French far-right, following her intention to 'normalize' her party. Both sections will show how history is reinterpreted in a way that suits ideological and political goals (without this implying that such reinterpretation is carried in a dishonest or calculated way), always in competition with other political actors and in connection with a particular context. Whereas the first focuses on history as an identity-building tool, the second centres on its role in political competition.

Theoretical framework and methodology
Historical facts and figures can certainly be 'objectivised', that is, they can become institutionalised under certain interpretation, achieving some degree of consensus in the education system and the media and among the key political actors. Such is in fact the normal state of history, which we associate to essays, textbooks and scholarly debates rather than to political praxis. But history can also become a 'site of struggle', a notion defined in poststructuralist literature as 'a discursive domain in which dominant discourses compete for ideological hegemony in an endless quest to fix meaning' (Chandler & Murray, 2015, p. 392). 1 How is this possible? Indeed, it is perfectly understandable that political actors compete for the interpretation of contemporary issues, such as mass migration, climate change or women rights, but it is not so clear how they could also fight over the significance of events and figures from the past whose meaning should remain inert. This article follows the theoretical framework formulated by Ernesto Laclau and other members of the ESDA and therefore rejects, from a post-structuralist perspective, that such meaning could be fixed once and forever. Indeed, historical facts are here considered to enjoy what Walter Benjamin called 'Nachleben' (literally 'afterlife'), which implies that even after their 'consummation' they remain semantically active within a particular cultural or political space, capable of changing as long as there are actors able to make them change. 2 Their meaning can surely be anchored within specific discourses, but the option for political entrepreneurs to emerge and contest it will always be open.
It is in this way that history can become story, a qualitative shift only possible when one operates in the political arena and similar to that between money and capital in the sense that apparently neutral elements become part of a potential 'investment', 3 but only thanks to the possibilities offered by a certain system of rules (here, the political system in its rhetorical aspect) tacitly respected by all of the participants. Consequently, there needs to be a certain consensus on the plasticity of history in the political in order for the statements regarding this discursive practice to seem legitimate and be operative, a consensus that involves every actor, even those who are harshly confronted to each other. It is in this sense that one can say that every antagonism presumes some degree of complicity, inasmuch as for any antagonism to exist there needs to be a shared 'battleground' in which it takes place, including both 'the rules of the game' and the incentives at stake. 4 It is here that we have to introduce the concept of 'the historico-political': the discursive domain in which the understanding of a variety of historical events and figures is disputed for political purposes, not necessarily at an electoral level but mainly as a way of providing imaginaries for a certain political group and changing the meaning of historical representations. 5 This idea is of course far from being new: the distinction between history as a rigorous emplotment of past events and 'story' as the structuration of history from an ideological point of view can be found in many authors: Joao de Barros' distinction between verum and fabula, Leopold Ranke's distinction between history and hagiography, Ha-Joon Chang distinction between history and 'official history' or Julián Casanova's distinction between past and memory are only a few examples of it. The notion of historico-political practices seeks to focus on the competitive aspect of these uses of history, not in order to defend the distinction between history as a rigorous discipline and the ideological use some actors make of it (a distinction that can of course be problematised) but so as to explore the mechanisms whereby they take place.
How to examine historico-political competition in a particular context (here, contemporary France)? Discourse Theory, the discourse analysis variant originally formulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and empirically developed by other authors can provide a theoretical model for such a task. Partly as a reaction against orthodox Marxism and following a neo-Gramscian approach filtered by post-structuralist categories, Laclau (2005) posits a view of the political whereby competition between political actors around the articulation and promotion of collective identities takes place first and foremost at a discursive level, where 'discourse' is understood not as a mere linguistic device but rather as a dimension in which 'reality' and language are intertwined. Thus, formulating discourses is not only a way to engage in public debates, but rather an activity by which the meaning of facts and the content of identities are shaped. Political actors conduct these practices as a way of building hegemony, a concept employed by Gramsci and other Marxists that here refers to a practice whereby a political subject articulates different demands and signifiers in a particular discourse, always in opposition to others.
If meanings can be transformed and disputed it is because they are to some extent malleable. As Laclau noted, 'today we tend to accept the infinitude of the social, that is, the fact that any structural system finds limits, that it is always surrounded by an "excess of meaning"' (Laclau, 1990, p. 90). This idea is mostly an importation of Jacques Derrida's views to the political sphere, which can introduce ideas of diachroneity and dynamism that were arguably absent among orthodox structuralist thinkers. Such views inevitably led to the notion that structures (linguistic or not) could not have any centre (an ordering principle), but were rather in a continuous 'play', that is, in a sort of decentred anarchy in which the components of the system are always potentially adrift. This is where Discourse Theory meets the historico-political, since the first is based on axioms that can explain how the latter operates. The ESDA provides a series of categories that can help us in understanding the way political actors compete for the meaning of historical facts. The first of these is the distinction between 'elements' and 'moments' outlined in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). According to Laclau and Mouffe, when a social entity (such as a demand, an identity or a historical event) is not integrated in any political discourse and remains independent from political actors it is called 'element', whereas when it is articulated within a certain discourse it is called 'moment'. Elements therefore take a particular meaning when they are integrated in a 'discursive formation', a post-structuralist revision of Gramsci's idea of historical bloc, a cluster of social groups and identities who are part of the same collective will and are here considered to be articulated in a discursive way. One can think of historical events and figures as elements that can be incorporated within different discursive formations, thereby becoming moments.
The other category that can be helpful is that of 'floating signifier'. The concept was borrowed from Jacques Lacan and within the ESDA framework it refers to a type of signifier 6 whose meaning cannot be partially fixed because it is employed by two or more political forces (but not necessarily by every actor of the political landscape) 7 due to its value. 'Democracy', 'justice', 'freedom of speech', 'equality', 'people', 'freedom', the name of the country, the national identity or the national flag are typical examples of floating signifiers in contemporary liberal democracies. But we should include also negative floating signifiers, even if Laclau does not consider them: 'totalitarian', 'communist', 'nationalist', 'anti-patriot', 'illiberal', 'enemy of the people' are also contested, although they are used to characterize the adversary rather than oneself. It is important to note that only valuable signifiers can 'float', so those that are not politically significant at a certain time and place could not become floating signifiers. In contemporary France, Charles de Gaulle, the French Revolution, the secular tradition or republicanism are examples of floating historical signifiers. These signifiers stand in a liminal semantic space, sometimes reaching one particular discursive formation, but generally wandering 'in a nebulous no-man's-land which can be crossed in many directions' (Laclau, 2005, p. 87).
The question remains of how to apply this theoretical framework at an empirical level. Which evidence should be of our concern at a level of data collection? How could it be employed systematically rather than illustratively? As it is clear by now the ESDA focuses mainly on the enunciative aspect of political discourses, thus studying texts in a way that allows to draw inferences about shared and disputed meanings. This means that it examines the way in which political actors construct (and contest) representations of social reality through language, focusing mostly on written texts as a source of evidence. This article will therefore focus on those texts that are representative of Marine Le Pen's stances on French history and, following the ESDA theoretical toolkit, identify elements, moments and floating signifiers. In order to narrow down the corpus of qualitative data that this article centres on, we will focus on party literature (particularly on speeches and statements that can be found in RN's official website) and declarations covered by French media. Needless to say, it will cover texts that were produced during the last decade, coinciding with Le Pen's mandate as leader of her party.
Before starting the empirical analysis of Le Pen's historico-political discourse some aspects need to be clarified. The first thing to note is that historico-political struggles are very limited due to the fact that few historical elements are actually disputed at a given time (this in fact applies to political signifiers in general). It is actually fairly easy to identify the elements from the past that exist as valued elements or as floating signifiers in a certain discursive context. Indeed, the vast majority of historical events and figures of a nation remain indifferent for both political parties and voters: no one in the contemporary French political arena seems to care about Louis the Pious, the Capetian dynasty, the Norman conquest, the Seven Years' War, the Bourbon Restoration, the colonization of Polynesia or the Battle of Dakar, just to name some examples. 8 Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that historico-political reinterpretation has limits. Even though some of the disciples of Jacques Derrida and his concept of 'reactivation' might conclude that history, just like other 'texts', is open to a large, potentially infinite spectrum of meanings that can never be foreseen, the truth is that there are at least some constraints to this. The first limit is of course factual. The history of a nation, even though articulated in particular and selective narratives, consists of a series of events that actually took place (generally within the national territory) and are far from being 'constructs'. This means that those who engage in historico-political disputes are hampered by certain realities and thus are not free to resignify events and figures at their discretion (it would be difficult for a Somalian thinker to claim successfully that Queer Theory originated in her country). 9 The second has to do with the way particular historical discourses can become sedimented, as abovementioned. Indeed, when facing the past political actors do not find a tabula rasa open to new reconfigurations, but rather a semantically charged space that defies their reappropriations. The hammer and the sickle or the swastika are two examples of 'charged' (in a negative way, which makes them unvalued) historical symbols that do not seem to be available for reappropriations.

The decline of the French
Marine Le Pen's views of the history of her country are first and foremost marked by a notion shared with the majority of far-right political forces that have emerged in the last couple of centuries: 'resurgentism'. To put it schematically the idea is the following: the nation (here broadly understood as natio, that is, as a community that shares a common origin and history) used to be glorious and strong, mostly because it followed a series of essential values, but then at a certain point its essence began to be corrupted by a concatenation of ideas and actors, and thus the task now is to resuscitate it by combatting these 'anti-national' or 'anti-patriotic' forces. The nation has therefore to 'become itself', following a providential conception of identity whereby one needs to turn into what it is destined to be. This ideal can be found in many, if not all, far-right ideologies, although in different shapes and 'degrees', from right-wing populist notions of making a country 'great again' (which are today mostly nativist and deglobalizing) to fascist palingenetic beliefs (imbued by mystic and Romantic apocalyptic fantasies).
Therefore, for the leader of RN the history of France is mostly one of decay, but such decay can be reversed, if only a political force rises to power and can conduct a series of political and cultural changes in the country, one based on a good understanding of French history. The problem is that some French politicians and intellectuals seem to want to rewrite France's past and manipulate the truth. 10 In 2012, for example, Julien Rochedy (head of the Front National de Jeunesse) denounced that the history programs for high school proposed by socialist François Hollande were downplaying the role of figures such as 'Clovis, Charles Martel, Hugues Capet, Saint Louis, François Ier, Louis XIII, Louis XIV and Napoléon' thereby 'depriving French youth from their roots' (Rochedy, 2012). It should be noted that other figures, such as Jean Jaurès, Olympe de Gouges or Simon Babeuf, are not vindicated, as they are not seen as potential 'moments' for RN's identity-building project. Marine Le Pen agreed with Rochedy and claimed that education programs should focus 'on the glorious aspects of France's history' instead of reproducing 'a certain masochist spirit' (Le Pen, 2013b). 11 But which are those 'glorious aspects'? And when did things start to go wrong in France's history? According to Le Pen France is first and foremost a Catholic nation that has forgotten its roots. 'Monsieur le président should admit' she stated in 2018 after Macron met a group of French bishops, 'as I have done on many occasions, that it is quite evident that France has Christian roots' (Le Pen, 2018). Yet the French government not only seems to ignore such 'historical fact', but it also neglects the situation of the Church. As Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (Marine's niece and a potential ultraconservative competitor) claimed after the feminist group Femen held a topless protest at Notre Dame in 2013, 'it seems that everything goes when it comes to insult Catholicism, profane its places of worship, degrade national heritage (…) every religion seems to be protected except the historical religion of the French' (Maréchal-Le Pen, 2014) (it is interesting to note how the national and the religious are intertwined in the declaration). This is how RN sees Catholicism, as part of the French historical essence, contrasting with the more secular views of its competitors, even though as it will be explained later on RN has integrated the defence of laïcité to its discourse in the past years, giving way to a somewhat ambiguous stance. 12 It is therefore not surprising that Joan of Arc is vindicated as 'a Republican national hero, for [she] was both a Catholic saint and a national heroine' (Le Pen, 2011).
The other source of historical pride is France's grandeur. Since the French revolution, when modern nationalism started to become the main source of political allegiance (displacing dynastic and religious loyalties), France was seen as the paradigm of power and autonomy, resisting against foreign enemies and spreading its ideas and values abroad (Winock, 1994). According to Le Pen France has lost such strength, which could be recovered 'by drawing upon the same historical matrix, that which inspired both Jeanne d'Arc and Henri IV, both Richelieu and [Charles] de Gaulle' (Le Pen, 2012b, p. 110). The decay has concrete perpetrators: for RN both the European Union and American hegemony have undermined France's power in the last decades. But things can be reversed, since 'as Paul Valéry used to say, France stumbles and falls, but it always gets back on its feet (…) this is another reason why the elites try to deprive us of our history' (Le Pen, 2012a, p. 128). 'We need to recover our muscle. France will be strong in the future. I will do my best to ensure it' she promised before the 2017 presidential election (Le Pen, 2016). According to her, a France worthy of admiration will be a France that is once again conquering [conquérante] and proud of itself, inventive and capable of offering its best image to the world, the one that enlightened so many peoples at some of the key moments of its history. (Le Pen, 2012a, p. 18) Catholicism has thus historically provided a social bond for the French, giving spiritual and cultural content to a nation that was once strong but is now weak and divided. When did the process of decay started? For French far-right intellectuals from the past the traditional culprits were mainly either the Jews or the Left, or a combination of both (since some forms of leftism were seen as part of Jewish conspiracies) (Millington, 2020). For Le Pen, who is part of a post-Cold War and transversal far-right and seeks to 'detoxify' her party, there are two sources which are also disengaged from anti-Semitism and anti-Communism: liberalism and Muslim immigration.
It is important to note that for RN 'liberalism' does not refer to the main connotation of the word (generally associated with individual freedom, pluralism and autonomy) but has a different meaning. Such meaning is summarised by Alain de Benoist, a key thinker of the French radical right, who in Contre le libéralisme (2019) defined it as a veritable cultural matrix including 'the culture of narcissism, economic deregulation, the religion [sic] of 'human rights', the fall of communities, gender theories, the apology of hybridity, contemporary art, reality tv, utilitarianism, the power of the ephemeral and the hegemony of 'free choice'' (De Benoist, 2019, p. 11). 'Liberalism' includes therefore both economic laissezfaire, progressivism, alienation and atomization, all seen through negative lens. This connotation is far from being original, as it can be traced back to early twentieth-century critiques of the European liberal order (Chappel, 2018). Where did this uprooting and destructive force come from in terms of France's recent history? For Marine Le Pen and her party the answer is clear: May 68.
A quick examination of the documents available in the party webpage show that May 68 (and, by extension, the sixties as a period of political mobilization) is seen as the beginning of a certain societal decline. The struggles of the soixante-huitards are seen as the cause of 'the brutal dechristianization of France and a rejection of De Gaulle's patriotism' (Ardinat, 2018), 'the expansion of educational permissiveness' (Racine, 2013) or the end of the authority of law (Lafay, 2012). 13 These views find echoes in some popular writers such as Michel Houellebecq (especially in Les particules élémentaires and Extension du domaine de la lutte) and Michel Le Dantec, who are critical of the legacies of the New Left and present a late twentieth century in which hedonistic capitalism has ravaged the fabric of society (Wolin, 2010). According to Le Pen this movement also meant the death of the Left, which used to fight against inequality and irrationality (it is not clear when, since both the FN and the French radical right have always harshly opposed any form of leftism) but then chose to oppose the traditional family, the army, the nation, the school and the Church, thereby 'taking down the elements that could create barriers against the [liberal] system' (Le Pen, 2012a, p. 154).
The other reason that can explain France's decadence is mass immigration (which is always connected to globalization and multiculturalism), which tends to be associated with the interests of almighty, uprooted elites. 14 As Michel Eltchaninoff explains, 'according to Marine Le Pen it is the elites of the 'global hyper-class' who have created a new form of inegalitarianism and broken the republican pact by favouring immigrants to the detriment of national citizens' (Eltchaninoff, 2018, p. 84). The idea is that the République (which in Le Pen's discourse refers to an ethnic nation rather than to political or civic elements) is under attack and that the mainstream political actors are either involved in the process or too naïve to respond to it. For Le Pen France once was a more or less homogeneous and peaceful country, but global forces, in alliance with immigrants, have destabilised it. The terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo in 2015 was shown as proof of this attack against the nation (in Le Pen's rallies one could spot people wearing 'Je suis Charlie Martel' t-shirts), contrasting with other parties which focus on the defence of free speech and pluralism.

Exit from the ghetto: disputing the French historico-political mainstream
The previous section has focused on what Laclau and Mouffe called 'moments' ('elements', here historical ones, which are integrated in particular discourses, thereby gaining a new and particular meaning) and has shown how Marine Le Pen and her party selectively integrate a part of her country's history into her discourse. This section will centre on the socalled 'floating signifiers', polysemic elements whose meaning is difficult to fix because they are disputed by two or more political actors because of their value.
A good example of a floating signifier in the French historico-political arena is Charles de Gaulle (1890Gaulle ( -1970. Recently Emmanuel Macron praised his 'unshakable faith on France's destiny' and defined him as 'an incarnation of the French nation' (Coutasse, 2020). A few days later Christian Jacob, the president of the conservative Les Républicains, accused Macron of trying to appropriate the historical figure and pointed to the fact that the former president is 'part of the DNA of our political family' (Mourgue, 2020). De Gaulle was the president of France from 1958 to 1969, but before that he had a key role as the head of the Résistance against the Nazis. He has historically been despised by the French far-right, who saw him as a traitor who had renounced the French dominion over Algeria during the 1960s. In fact, in his memoirs Jean-Marie Le Pen referred to him as 'a horrible source of suffering for France' (Robine, 2018). But his daughter, as it is clear by now, has a more practical approach. 15 One of her former key right-hand men, Florian Philippot, surprised the French public when he declared that he had a portrait of le général in his office (Ficek, 2012). For her part, Marine Le Pen accused the French conservatives of having betrayed his memory (Faye, 2013) and more recently claimed that there is 'a continuity between De Gaulle and us' (AFP, 2020). According to Michel Eltchaninoff, 'Le Pen sees in De Gaulle her predecessor as someone capable of lifting a country back onto its feet' (Eltchaninoff, 2018, p. 51).
The vindication of De Gaulle is in fact part of a broader attempt to eschew any association with the mid-twentieth century French far-right and embrace the historico-political mainstream while modifying it to make it fit into the party's discourse. 'Collaboration', a concept that refers to the fraternisation between French far-righters and their German occupiers during the 1940s, is used to point to how the French elites 'collaborate with Muslim radicalism', facilitating 'the occupation of streets' (a reference to Parisian Muslim Street prayers), 'even if it is not an occupation that takes place with soldiers and weapons' (Le Figaro, 2012) (an obvious reference to the Nazi occupation of the city). In 2012 she also claimed that Nicholas Sarkozy 'doesn't like France, and every day he collaborates a little more with his masters: the markets and the banks' (Eltchaninoff, 2018, p. 21). Her fight is presented as 'a struggle against both savage globalization and any form of totalitarianism, especially against globalism and Islamism' (Franceinfo, 2013), while radical Muslims are qualified as 'Islamofascists' in some party milieux (Wild, 2012). In 2016 Le Pen surprised some journalists when she defined herself as 'the candidate of la France libre' (Werly, 2013) (the label that the French résistants gave to themselves during the 1940s). Here the reference to totalitarianism resonates not only with its right-wing variants but also with real socialism.
The way Le Pen rejects twentieth century stigmatising historical signifiers is also obvious with her treatment of Philippe Pétain and the régime de Vichy, which she defined in 2011 as 'a collaborator and illegal regime', clarifying that for her 'the République and France were in London during the Occupation and Vichy was not France' (Rouden, 2017). This example is particularly interesting, as the relationship between French political leaders and Pétain's regime (constantly resignified depending on the circumstances) is a clear example of the intertwinement between history and discourse (Rousso, 1990). The leader of RN simply places herself in the républicain mainstream, despite the historical ties of her party and the regime (Shields, 2007). Another way of avoiding the issue is to problematise the pertinence of focusing on it. For her, the way both French media and parties are allegedly obsessed with these events is part of 'the blaming of the French people' and it is absurd to 'reduce the Second World War to Vichy, neglecting the heroic Résistance' (Le Pen, 2012a, p. 113). That being said, Le Pen does engage in some controversies surrounding the 1940s in France (to a lesser degree than her father, in any case), for example questioning the responsibilities of the Vichy government in collaborating with the extermination of the Jews (Faye, 2017). Despite her discourse being different from that of the old FN, it is clear that it is in the memory around Vichy that Le Pen finds a higher degree of tensions between the ideology of the party and its discursive strategy, a fact that her adversaries do not hesitate to exploit, especially during electoral campaigns (Mcdonnell, 2017).
In this way Marine Le Pen tries to turn things upside down through historico-political means: whereas totalitarianism, Nazism and collaboration tend to be associated with the far-right by the other parties (and by intellectuals and historians) she proposes that it is now her party that fights for freedom and equality. The task is double: not only avoiding any association with those events that are defamed but also trying to turn the situation around by linking them to her political adversaries. Her efforts face, of course, huge obstacles: those historical events have already been mapped by the majority of political forces in a certain way, and transforming their meaning is difficult for a political party (especially for one that tends to be stigmatised).
But be that as it may Charles de Gaulle and the struggle against the Germans are not 'the jackpot' of the French historico-political, even if those are a source of highly valued signifiers. If a political actor wants to dispute the nation's historical mainstream it should rather focus on the two elements that make the most part of the country's prestige: the Enlightenment and the French revolution. It would seem unlikely that a far-right party, coming from a Counter-Enlightenment and reactionary tradition (closer to Antoine de Rivarol or Joseph de Maistre than to Rousseau or Voltaire), would try to associate itself with those events, but Marine Le Pen has astutely chosen to do so. She has cited Montesquieu on more than one occasion (Eltchaninoff, 2018) and has defined her party as 'republican [in the particular sense that 'républicain' has in France], profoundly and sincerely attached to the pillars of our collective past, to the fundamental values that France has chosen' (Le Pen, 2013b). Once again, this 'republicanism' is often weaponised against Islam: 'we believe in equality regardless of one's origins or beliefs' she declared in 2013, 'which is why we cannot accept that some people in our territory [immigrants] are considered 'more equal' than others' (Joignot, 2015). In the same way, Le Pen has become a great advocate of secularism (laïcité), but mostly as a way to condemn the activities of French Muslims and often in contradiction with her sympathies towards the Catholic Church and Christian symbols (Tresca, 2017).
Marine Le Pen therefore presents herself as the spokesperson of the French revolutionary spirit, fighting against new forms of absolutism. Indeed, as Michel Eltchaninoff notes Marine Le Pen's discourse 'suggests that today's France has reverted to the Ancien régime, whereby the people are ignored and the general interest overlooked, defeated by the feudalisms of finance, politics, [non-Christian] religion or the [foreign] mafia' (Eltchaninoff, 2018, p. 28). This contrasts with how the other parties see the revolutionary heritage of the country. For Macron, the French revolution has to do with universal values (mainly, individual autonomy and formal equality) that should be reaffirmed in France but also spread abroad (Bouniol, 2020), while for Mélénchon (located at the left of the spectrum), who provocatively vindicates Robespierre, it is rather related to popular sovereignty and arose against despotisms such as 'the [actual] presidential monarchy' (Gracia, 2018).
Many in the French media were certainly surprised when Jeunes avec Marine (the party's youth) shared a photomontage representing Eugène de la Croix's La liberté guidant le people (1830) with Le Pen's face and the slogan 'La Résistance c'est nous' (FNJ, 2012). The key idea that justifies these kinds of stance is that the Enlightenment (and, by extension, liberalism) is actually an offshoot of Christianity. According to Le Pen, 'France has Christian roots that have been secularised by the Lumières' and Islam could be compatible with the République if it accepts the basis of the Enlightenment (AFP, 2016). She also declared that Christianity 'has inspired our [French] worldview, our views of Man, our idea of free will which makes us reject forced marriages that exist in other traditions' (Lagoutte, 2017).
Marine Le Pen has even made some advances on the association between her party and women's rights, something that was arguably absent from her father's discourse. In fact, the party has eradicated the so-called 'radical right gender gap' in the last years, especially after the 2017 presidential election (Marchand-Lagier, 2018). The type of feminism advocated by Le Pen is what Richard Posner (1990) called 'conservative feminism', mostly related to individual empowerment, legal equality and to a celebration of autonomous strong women. The historical figure chosen to fulfil such an ideological role is, of course, Joan of Arc (1412-1431) the French female Catholic warrior who fought against the Kingdom of England during the Hundred Years' War. Jean-Marie Le Pen gave a privileged place to this historical figure by honouring her legacy every 1st of May (coinciding with the International Worker's Day, commemorated by the Left), but his daughter turned her into an icon not only as a national heroine but also as a woman (Sini, 2016). The defence of her compatriots is here again frequently used against Islam, a religion capable of causing 'huge setbacks against the freedom of women' (Le Pen, 2019) in a stance that some critics have called 'Femonationalism' (Farris, 2017).

Concluding remarks
This article has examined the way in which Marine Le Pen has engaged in a series of 'history wars' during the last decade in order to restructure her party's discourse. The theoretical framework provided by Ernesto Laclau and the ESDA has proved to be heuristically valuable for the analysis of what has been called 'the historico-political', that is, the way in which history can become a site of struggle between political actors. Examining a series of texts (mainly Le Pen's declarations and speeches) and employing the concepts of 'moments', 'elements' and 'floating signifiers', the article illustrates which parts of French history are resignified by RN's leader and how such resignification leads to tensions with other actors. As the article shows, there is a certain continuity with Jean-Marie Le Pen's discourse, but also remarkable differences.
The article has also intended to contribute to the idea that historical discourses should never be analysed in the abstract, separated from political competition and ideological interests. Indeed, the idea that history should be confined to rational, 'scientific' research is a naïve stance that ignores the importance of the past in political competition. In fact, it has been discarded by many historians, even though the topic remains a contested one (Hodgkin & Radstone, 2006). This article shows that, even if such rigorous research exists and can be distinguished from the historico-political, history is also a playing field for contemporary political parties. Moreover, the example of Marine Le Pen reveals the capacity of the far-right to resignify historical events and figures that were previously associated to liberal or left-wing parties. 3. Here 'investment' has the double meaning that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ascribes to it while referring to taste and other social practices: it is both an investment in the (economic) sense that it consists of investing something in the expectation of gaining some profit and in the (psychoanalytic) sense that there is a genuine 'involvement' or affection. In other words, reinterpreting history has to do with a political strategy (and is inseparable from concrete discourses and ideologies), but that does not imply that such activity is carried in a cynical or calculated way. See Bourdieu (1979, p. 94). 4. As Laclau (2005) noted, 'the forces which have constructed their antagonism on a certain terrain show their secret solidarity when it is that very terrain which is put into question. It is like the reaction of two chess players to somebody who kicks the board' (p. 140). 5. This practice seems to be as ancient as historical record itself. Daniel Woolf (2019) notes that it was already common among the Hittites, whose elites used history as a way of legitimating themselves. Its benefits are not as tangible as some authors who view politics as a powermaximizing activity might suspect, but as mentioned they are probably more related to long-term Kulturkampf dynamics. It would be interesting to explore whether this model can be applied to international relations, since national governments do engage in these 'history wars' too (let us consider Poland's struggles around the country's participation in the Holocaust or the seemingly eternal disputes around the Japanese Empire in East Asia). 6. It is important to note that 'signifier' takes a broad meaning in Laclau's works, inasmuch as he also applies this idea to social identities and struggles, so according to him feminism, environmentalism or LGBT rights cannot be fixed within any discourse (they are and will always be disputable), a view that makes the fact that European right-wing populist parties are engaging with those themes less shocking. See Laclau and Mouffe (1985, pp. 140-142) and Laclau (2005, pp. 129-137). 7. Indeed, floating signifiers are rarely 'universal', but they are rather disputed by political forces that stand close to each other within a particular space (for example, left-wing parties or populist parties, either right or left, will try to seize the same signifiers, which could be unappealing to other actors). 8. The question of why some historical figures and events are considered valued signifiers at a certain time and place remains one of the most important ones. In the light of the analysis of the example of contemporary France it could be hypothesised that these have two key characteristics: (1) they tend to be near to the present in terms of historical time and (2) they can be connected to concrete contemporary struggles in an analogical way (for example, an actor that feels that his nation is under attack might naturally find an equivalence in other eras). 9. This means that the process of historical meaning-building should not be understood as some kind of artistic creation (in which the producers are free to manipulate ideas, facts, historical figures and history overall however they desire to) but rather as an artisanal production with limited raw materials and templates. 10. Indeed, historico-political struggles are often presented as a search for the truth, for as Terry Eagleton noted, 'nobody would claim that their own thinking was ideological, just as nobody would habitually refer to themselves as Fatso (…) ideology, like halitosis, is in this sense what the other person has' (Eagleton, 2003, p. 2). 11. The idea that criticizing some aspects of a country's national history is a form of 'masochism'

Notes
can be found on any contemporary far-right party. Of course, the idea is not that the national past should not be condemned or reviewed (far-right forces do attack and reassess many aspects of their country's history) but that the episodes that they consider 'glorious' should be vindicated (often in opposition to progressive or liberal historiography). Some right-wing radicals use the term to condemn critiques against one's ethnie or race too, referring to it as 'ethno-masochism'. 12. That being said, the relationship between the French Catholic Church and Le Pen's party is far from being free of disturbance. Not only Marine Le Pen (a divorced woman) has often been pointed to as a non-practicing Catholic (Trippenbach, 2018) but Catholic voters are divided in their sympathies towards RN (Vercelletto, 2017). Overall the party struggles to balance its 'secularist' identity with its efforts to appeal to the Christian roots of the country. 13. It is worth mentioning that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the key protagonists of May 1968, was accused of being a pedophile by Jean-Marie Le Pen at the European Parliament in the context of a heated debate, while his daughter Marine stood next to him (Florin, 2011). Far from being just a harsh attack against him, it represents the views that both Jean-Marie and Marine have on the movement and its leaders, as the accusation is related to a series of comments made by Cohn-Bendit in 1975 in an ambience of moral relaxation and hedonistic heterodoxy (Sénécat, 2019). 14. The idea that there is an alliance between ethnic minorities and powerful elites is a classic trope in far-right discourses since the 19th century. The most famous example is the concept of 'Judeo-Bolshevism', whereby there was supposed to be a coalition between Jews and both political and economic elites to undermine national traditions and communities. To put it simply the reasoning is basically the following: a series of powerful agents need to destroy a national community to achieve their shady goals, and in order to do that they 'use' ethnic or racial minorities to divide society and make it more malleable. This idea is more or less popular within RN, but it is generally more linked to conspiracy theorists such as Renaud Camus. 15. That being said, both her and her party have sometimes expressed views on the French Empire (and particularly on Algeria) that are not far from the ones shared by Jean-Marie Le Pen (Meddi, 2017).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).