The Traveling Scholar | AC Sieffert, PhD

Okay, let’s get this guy out of the way before we get into some of the major disasters of disastrous campaigns and minor candidates. I mean, at this point thes has become fairly arbitrary-but bow we are coming to the uninspiring lot, or flyers for people I have a hard time taking seriously, when they don’t have any parliamentary representation or come out of the woods once every five years, or are polling so far behind no one knows why they are still in there.

This guy is not entirely badly represented here, I just have nothing more to say on him than I did on Nathalie Arthaud, and at least she looked serious.

I actually happen to like the guy who founded the NPA, Olivier Besancenot. He has a BA in history, and regardless of whether you agree with his positions, the guy is smart and has said plenty of intelligent things. Besancenot, for example, once remarked that while he defined himself as a Trotskyist and a revolutionary, revolution was to be reinvented, because no revolution had ever been successful without blood, and no revolutionary experiment had fully succeeded. He also was a great public speaker, and a charismatic figure.

Besancenot was a postman, and earned the nickname the Red Postman, from his opponents.

Let me take a detour here to explain one quick thing that has bearings on this (I know, the detours are long here).

French people know fairly openly that their own secret services have done bad bad things. The thing that’s very European though is that instead of finding this very shameful, the French have always been proud of their secret services’ dealings. Pragmatically, they have actually helped prevent a lot of bombings between the 1970s and the 2000s, but the dealings of these secret services are entirely intermingled with very very very bad things. The CIA is often presented as the ultimate evil machine of the West, making and unmaking regimes (and potentially trying to commit a coup against the De Gaulle government to prevent Algeria from becoming independent with the backing of the USSR, but that’s neither here nor there). But the French secret services, les barbouzes as we call them, have a deeply unsavory history. First of all–the word barbouze itself comes from the way the counterinsurgents working against the Secret Army in Algeria called themselves. The Secret Army (OAS) was the armed anti-independence resistance that tried to murder De Gaulle at the Petit-Clamart attack in the early 1960s. In response to the OAS, and to protect De Gaulle and his entourage and government, a number of veterans who knew him organized (more or less with his blessings, but the more or less is very murky) into various groups that became the formal core of the Secret Services under De Gaulle.

I spoke in the post on Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the SAC, the Civic Action Service, which was a Gaullist militia De Gaulle used in the 1950s and 1960s, and which was more or less openly comprised of former crime operatives, nationalist militiamen, and other unsavory characters. It’s more or less an open secret that these men almost all knew deep secrets of the Republic and found work into the government after the Algerian independence, whether they worked with the GRE (tasked with finding and destroying freedom fighter cells in Algeria), the SAC, or the SDCE (the actual secret services founded in 1943 by Free France generals), in the 1980s Mitterrand reorganized them into the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure). In the late 1980s, early 1990s, as the USSR was falling apart and the danger of the KGB slightly diminishing, a former director of the CIA said in an interview that in his opinion the DGSE was the scariest threat to US industrial secrets. Lo and behold, in 1990, the French were caught red-handed spying IBM. The Ariane rocket program and AIRBUS greatly benefitted (benefit?) from the work the DGSE does. On the other side of the espionage services in France is the RG, the general internal espionage organ of the French police, founded in 1907, and which in 2008 merged with the DST (Direction of the Surveillance of the Territory) under the umbrella term of DGSI. Almost all of these agencies had at some point or another either a bird of prey, a lion, or a sword and shield on their logo (the sword and shield one looked like the Mirror Universe for Star Trek, not going to lie).

Officially the entire budget of the DGSE and the DGSI are known. Unofficially, it’s pretty well established that their combined budget is well over a billion euros, and well over the official numbers. The DGSI is well-known for having political “papers”: if you’ve ever been in a student union, like me, you were likely to be in those surveillance papers in one way or another. For plausible deniability purposes, both agencies operate on a need-to-know basis, which means that when they get caught, political responsibilities are minimal, like when DGSE sunk the Rainbow Warrior in the 1980s, in New Zealand, using two French navy mines; or when the PRISM network’s ancestor (known under various codenames throughout its history) was revealed to the public; or when, in 1973, DGSI agents were caught installing microphones in the building of French left-wing paper Le Canard Enchaîné. Today, behind the NSA, the DGSE and DGSI have the second biggest intercepting capability for telecommunications–and this history started in 1888 when the NSA was not even in the thoughts of US politicians and general.

In 2007, during the presidential campaign, Besancenot denounced the generalized used of the TASER in France. Shortly thereafter the magazine L’Express realized Besancenot had been followed by a private detective, working for the French distributor of TASER, and who had collaborated with current or former officers of the French police (and likely secret services). The irritated CEO wanted to know if Besancenot drove a Porsche, but despite pulling the candidate’s financial records and pretty much everything he’d ever had his name on–very illegally of course–the detective did not find a single bad thing on the candidate (that’s rare in France), but the PE also got caught in the process.

Which, I mean, makes it really funny that Macron would complain about the Pegasus software and the Mossad spying on him, or Hollande complaining about the NSA spying on his conversations with Merkel, because, you know, pot, kettle etc.

Shortly after, in 2010, Besancenot stepped down. Officially, he wanted to avoid the kind of personality cult that Mélenchon, Chirac or Mitterrand had developed, but unofficially, it was pretty clear he was burned out by what had happed in 2007-2008 with the TASER France CEO.

Philippe Poutou was chosen to replace him, and we get here to our first actual, bona fide, blue-collar candidate of the election. Poutou is the only one who’s actually never held a white-collar job before 2019. The son of a postman and a housewife, Poutou was born near Paris, although he lives now near Bordeaux. Until he was fired in 2019 because of offshoring, Poutou was working in the FORD factory in Blanquefort, near Bordeaux.

The poster is the guy you get in a meeting. He’s almost always smiling, very approachable, very nice. It’s almost hard to take him seriously because he always looks like he is on in some joke no one knows (and perhaps he is–that we live in an absurd society that sells off everything, and the planet is on fire, but neither here nor there).

Like Nathalie Arthaud, this is a poster in situ of a demonstration (probably the same one actually), but instead of the realism of the picture, we get a reddish background that evokes the revolution. Blog, fire? But in any case, it makes Poutou pop off, so that works out great. The combination of the open shirt and the cap? I have mixed feelings about this one–on the one hand no one should have to be a penguin to be taken seriously in politics, on the other one, the fact that Arthaud gets flack for dressing down and he does not in this analysis. Nothing annoys me more that gender discrimination in representation, particularly in politics.

The black cap is a great touch–for the reasons highlighted in the analysis above, because blue-collar workers=cap, boss=hat, but also it’s a black cap, and black and red are the colors of the NPA, as well as the anarchist movement (and Poutou is also an anarchist, although that is not the label he is running under for the elections).

The open shirt is a common thing lately–Mélenchon had the same in 2012, with a rising black jacket that made it almost look like he was wearing a Mao collar. Not unlike Arthaud’s poster, the demonstration behind him as the dual goal of showing him as a man of the people, but it also works as a way to make the poster more dynamic–he’s walking with us. The color that sets him off from the rest contributes to this impression of just a very dramatic break. The smile works to give hope, and the slogan–their profits are not more important than our lives–is very in line with the whole poster. Not too harsh, not too dark, but rather hopeful and warming. Besancenot wanted a bloodless revolution, and I don’t know if Poutou believes in that, but he’s trying his darnedest.