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France Now Considers America’s Woke Leftism, Cancel Culture A Global Threat

February 16, 2021
Frank Salvato
Emmanuel Marcon, France, Eiffel Tower

French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters that the chief threat to national cohesiveness around the world is the extreme woke Leftism on American college campuses and its resulting cancel culture.

Mr. Macron tables the threat as, “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States.’’ Many political and social leaders in France are extremely concerned with the runaway woke culture on American college campuses. They warn that the totalitarian and unyielding Progressive ideology – especially on the issues of race, gender, and post-colonialism – are undermining French society.

“There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Jean-Michel Blanquer, Mr. Macron’s education minister.

This sentiment is common among prominent French intellectuals. Their concern is at a level that they have established common ground in fighting against what they see as societal contamination by the “out-of-control woke leftism” pervasive on campuses across the US,  and its associated “cancel culture.”

A book critical of race studies published in France this month by Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, two highly regarded French social scientists, noted that race had become a “bulldozer,” usurping and cancelling the importance of other subjects.

Noiriel alluded to the fact that because race is not recognized as a dividing tactic by the majority of French, all of the evidence in pro-critical race texts was based on “subjective data.’’

Some center-right lawmakers see the encroachment of American identity politics and critical race theories into the French culture and global lexicon so clearly they pressed for a parliamentary investigation into “ideological excesses’’ at the nation’s universities and singled out “guilty” scholars on Twitter.

Mr. Macron, last June, directly blamed universities for encouraging the “ethnicization of the social question,” that was resulting in “breaking the republic in two.’’

Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist who co-founded an organization against “decolonialism and identity politics, said he was pleasantly surprised with Marcon’s statement. His organization is comprised of established potentates and it has issued public statements warnings of American-inspired “social theories” in major publications like Le Point and Le Figaro.

Domestic activism, influenced by American out-of-control woke Leftism – or “wokism” – fueled disputes over French cultural appropriation and blackface at French universities.

At the Sorbonne, activists protested a play by Aeschylus because it incorporated the wearing of masks and dark makeup by white actors. At other higher educational institutions, well-known speakers were disinvited because of their views following student pressure.

“It was a series of incidents that was extremely traumatic to our community and that all fell under what is called ‘cancel culture,’” Ms. Heinich said.

At a recent speech on preserving the cohesiveness of the French Republic, Macron said:

“Every day people want to put forward good reasons for dividing us. We aren’t a society of individuals. We’re a nation of citizens. That changes everything. We learn to be citizens; we become them. These are rights and duties. But I won’t yield an inch to those who want to divide us one way or another, because I believe our greatest treasure is this grouping we form. It is one and many, let’s never forget. That is the strength of our republic.”

“‘Many’ doesn’t mean we’re an agglomerate of communities,” Macron continued. “It means we’re a national community. But this national community has 66 million stories, and [is] something which is always greater than every individual, which means an individual becomes a citizen. His or her adherence to the Republic’s universal principles is what we have to defend.”