Is this the man who can defeat France's Islamists?

Spectator

4 days ago

When France played Algeria in their national stadium, the Stade de France, in 2001, the French player Thierry Henry said afterwards he felt – disturbingly – as if he were playing away. The game had to be abandoned after dozens of Algerian fans, furious at being 4-1 down, invaded the pitch.
Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister of France since September last year and a key figure in the small boats crisis, has been known to cite Henry's comment. Retailleau is carving out a distinct role for himself in government as the tribune of the growing number of his compatriots who share the same sense that they, too, are 'playing away'. In other words, the millions who believe that they have become strangers in their own country.
There is a trinity of issues at the heart of his agenda – porous borders, rampant crime and an increasingly self-confident Islamist movement that is on a long march through the institutions of the Fifth Republic. But Retailleau's approach to these problems is more conservative than the populist kind associated with Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, the Corbyn-style populist party which is currently the most powerful force on the left, thinks Retailleau is the man to watch. 'For many right-wing people, Bruno Retailleau is more reassuring than [Le Pen],' he wrote in La Tribune. 'Retailleau is the reactionary movement's best chance at this time.' Retailleau's prominence is all the more remarkable considering he leads Les Républicains, the once dominant force on the right, which long ago lost its position to Rassemblement National and has been written off by many as a dead party. Yet there's an outside chance now that he can make it all the way to the Élysée when President Macron's second term ends in 2027.
So who is he? Retailleau was born in 1960 in the Vendée – a department best known in history for an unsuccessful royalist revolt against the revolutionary authorities in the 1790s. This revolt elicited Jacobin repression from Paris which was brutal enough to inspire Lenin. Retailleau's great-great-great grandfather was part of the cross-class alliance that turned to the local aristocracy for military leadership; in his mother's house there is a certificate of appreciation from Louis XVIII for their loyalty in an era of unprecedented upheaval.
But Retailleau is a conservative, not a reactionary, despite what Mélenchon may claim. His view of the French Revolution was influenced more by Edmund Burke than by 19th-century French royalists such as Joseph de Maistre. 'I owe much of my understanding to Edmund Burke. There was the constitutional change of 1789, which Burke sympathised with, and the Terror of 1793, which he of course rejected. But the Terror of 1793 was not inevitable,' he says, when we meet in London during the recent state visit. 'The Revolution could have been more liberal and respectful. But it gave a blueprint for totalitarianism – later communist and in our times Islamist absolutism, the ends justifying the means. And the total vision of society encompassing and politicising every aspect of life. Meaning the attempt to perfect man from a tabula rasa.'
The invocation of Burke is typical of the man who is one of the few top-level politicians who manages to keep up his reading while in office. But among writers directly addressing more contemporary issues, his choices are not always easy to predict: many on the French right would cite Jean Raspail's anti-immigration novel Camp of the Saints or Michel Houellebecq's Soumission, an imaginary account about an Islamist takeover of France.
He admires the French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal who is currently in prison in Algeria, a staunch critic of the nationalist regime there and of the Islamists: Retailleau is now the most vocal member of the government calling for Sansal's release. He is also keen on the writings on art and philosophy of Régis Debray, the tiers monde-iste friend of Che Guevara and Mitterrand adviser. Retailleau enjoys the company of Parisian intellectuals such as the cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut and the political philosopher Pierre Manent – who form a contrast with his circle of intimates from the Vendée, a difference of cultures which he relishes.
Retailleau's career choices have also been unconventional. Most graduates of one of the grandes écoles would go on to become a mandarin serving an apprenticeship in the Cabinet of a minister. Retailleau, by contrast, after Sciences Po, returned to the Vendée – where his grandfather and father, a grain merchant, had both been mayor of Saint-Malo-du-Bois. His grandfather was severely wounded at the first Battle of the Marne in September 1914. His father served in the Algerian War and later ran the family farm.
Retailleau himself has served as a reservist in the Régiment de Saumur, one of the best-known of the French cavalry regiments; and dressage is his competitive sport of choice. Today, his favourite pastime is riding alone in the Vendée (sometimes to the alarm of his security detail) and he has retained the figure of a jockey until well into his sixties. 'I've had a few falls,' he notes, but his enthusiasm for the saddle remains undiminished.
His children presented him with a she-donkey for his 60th birthday. 'When I have the time, I will take her on a journey to the Cévennes – in tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, another of my favourite authors.' But for now, the crisis at the French borders makes this a luxury he cannot afford: he is a workaholic, often waking at 3:30 a.m. to read his official papers.
Retailleau started his career at Puy du Fou – the nearby theme park on French history that was founded by the local aristocrat Philippe de Villiers, a key figure in French Euroscepticism.
He was a keen participant in Puy du Fou's pageants and re-enactments. Under de Villiers's guidance, he rapidly rose to become a member of the National Assembly, president of the Vendée departmental council, president of the Pays de la Loire regional council and finally leader of Les Républicains in the Senate. But the apprentice outstripped the master and there was a parting of the ways.
The difference in approach between the two men is meaningful. There is a certain non-sectarianism in Retailleau's approach: behind his desk in the Interior Ministry at Hôtel de Beauvau hang portraits of the two greatest Vendéens – Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a French marshal of the second world war, and Georges Clemenceau, the victor of the first world war. It's hard to imagine a purist Catholic of de Villiers's vintage revering an atheistic anti-clerical like Clemenceau.
And when it comes to Russia, Retailleau is firmly in the Giorgia Meloni camp: he parts company with those on the French right who see Vladimir Putin as a defender of family values and Christian civilisation. Retailleau instead sees Putin not as the inheritor of Tsarist tradition, but rather as a product of the KGB.
Retailleau believes in defending moral as well as physical borders – hence his opposition to euthanasia and his concern about the consequences of gender transitions in children. But restoring the status quo ante on capital punishment, abortion and gay marriage is hardly the mainstay of his policy vision. And he tells me that the restoration of Notre-Dame-de-Paris after the fire of 2019 will rank as one of Emmanuel Macron's greatest achievements – less for religious reasons than as evidence of what the state can still accomplish in terms of grand projets that really matter, when it can summon the will to sweep aside bureaucratic obstacles.
Although the attention is now on what the French call les aspects régaliens of Retailleau's current role – matters relating to the direct authority of the state – it was his economic agenda that mattered most to him in the Vendée. Retailleau is the antithesis of corporate man (he is proud of banning the word 'management' from all departmental discourse), but he was nonetheless a big booster for business in the region.
Since the Revolution, the Vendée has got relatively little from the state, making it highly self-reliant. It therefore has some of the lowest claims for unemployment benefit of any department, at 6 per cent compared to a 7.4 per cent national average. The bulk of businesses comprise what Germans would call the Mittelstand – family-owned enterprises chafing under Parisian and Bruxellois regulations.
Intriguingly, Retailleau cites no one economic mentor like Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek – nor even that staunchest of French critics of Keynes, Jacques Rueff, who was also an adviser to Charles de Gaulle. Rather, he tells me, his economic inspirations are the Vendéen entrepreneurs who create real prosperity and jobs.
His economic inspirations are the Vendéen entrepreneurs who create wealth. His answer is shrewd, because it's hard to be accused of being a 'globalist' for extolling the virtues of local enterprises; but it says something about the French right that economic issues are now more internally divisive than cultural matters.
If the state has interfered too much in the economy, Retailleau also believes it has been too laissez-faire in the realm of security. He poses to me a key theme of his: 'What happens when the rule of law starts to facilitate crime – and people can see that it's doing so? When the endless invocation of the rule of law becomes the enemy of honest people?'
Retailleau is referring to what he sees as the excessive solicitude of wide swaths of the French legal profession and judiciary for the rights of individuals accused of crimes at the expense of the collective rights of the law-abiding majority. A mere 7 per cent of deportation orders for illegal migrants are implemented, and too often, in his view, that is because French judges rule that a procedural technicality has been breached.
This failure of the state on immigration and crime has a particular piquancy for Retailleau: his close friend, Fr Olivier Maire, was murdered in 2021, allegedly by a Rwandan asylum seeker with mental health issues. The suspect had been released on bail after being accused of setting fire to Nantes Cathedral and was being sheltered by Maire at the time.
Retailleau has therefore long wanted to re-empower the people by reforming article 11 of the Constitution on procedures allowing for a popular referendum on immigration – something which is not possible today. He also advocates cutting full medical aid for illegal immigrants, preferring to allow them just emergency care.
How did this shift in the ethos of the French judiciary and legal profession come about? Retailleau points the finger at the spirit of '68 – and, in particular, the long-term effects of the Harangue de Baudot, the 1974 address delivered by the liberal Marseille magistrate Oswald Baudot urging new judges to side with 'the weak against the strong', which is now the sacred text for the left-wing Syndicat de la Magistrature, effectively the trade union for the Bench.
In Retailleau's view, the price of this broad approach is also being paid by the 15,000 security personnel who were injured in France in 2023. Significantly, his first visit as interior minister was to the préfecture at La Courneuve in the Parisian banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis, where he met three hurt gendarmes: one of the perpetrators of these assaults, a juvenile, already had 33 convictions to his name.
Success or failure in crime or immigration policy can at least be measured in numbers. It's much harder to mark progress in the struggle against political Islam – which Retailleau believes constitutes the greatest subversive threat to the Fifth Republic. 'They are a formidable enemy, despite the relatively small numbers of their core cadres,' he says. 'They have a smooth narrative: to employ our freedoms to destroy our freedoms. It's an all-of-society project. For example, they aim to 'Islamise' knowledge. And their message is as follows: 'We will colonise you and we will dominate you.''
One of the first steps he took on Islamism after assuming office was to declassify the Interior Ministry's 74-page report on the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe: his purpose was to alert the public via an approach of 'name and shame'. It's little secret now that Retailleau struggled with the Elysee to maximise its revelations about individual Islamist institutions; partly because the President's office was initially reluctant to be seen to be dancing to Retailleau's tune.
Retailleau is thus the one making the political weather on this issue: the Defence Council met again recently under the chairmanship of Macron to discuss, in the light of this most comprehensive official analysis of frère-isme to date, just how to enforce the landmark 2021 French separatism law. The old pre-war French right saw laïcité as the enemy of Catholic France; now, it sees it as a bulwark to protect the country. As ever, practical implementation is the key to Retailleau's way of doing things.
This included new ways of disbanding the Brotherhood's endowments in France which promote hatred – by exposing and then freezing its assets. Also high on the priority list are the law's demands for neutrality in the public space (no display of symbols of religion by officials at any level) and support for public servants, notably teachers, who face threats because of discharging their public duties – a particular concern after false allegations of 'Islamophobia' from a pupil were weaponised against the schoolmaster Samuel Paty in 2020, leading to his decapitation by a Chechen refugee.
Mélenchon has, unsurprisingly, accused him of cultivating an 'Islamophobic climate', but Retailleau retorts: 'The concept of Islamophobia is one of the defining messages of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, but it's a bogus concept to tie our hands intellectually and to prevent us from criticising Islamism. And it suits the Islamo-Gauchiste project of Mélenchon to build up a communalist bloc based upon a sectarian appeal to anti-state grievances. It conflates all Muslims with Islamism, which is not true.'
Retailleau is gratified by the favourable official responses which the Brotherhood report has enjoyed in Europe – such as in Sweden and Belgium. Over 20 years ago, French intelligence bestowed the soubriquet 'Londonistan' upon our capital – because it was seen as a 'safehouse' for Islamists. Are we still Londonistan, I ask? Retailleau diplomatically sidesteps my question, but his omission of the UK as an enthusiast for this report speaks volumes.
Controversial as these issues are, they may (counterintuitively) form the basis of a potential future national consensus. Retailleau respects republicans from the right and the left who want to maintain traditional French laïcité against the New Left's identity politics: reaching out across party divides, he particularly notes the rigour of the former Socialist prime minister and interior minister Manuel Valls.
What, then, are his chances in the 2027 presidential election? The conventional wisdom of the Parisian media holds that Retailleau is too old-fashioned to win. How, when he is hovering at around 10 per cent in the polls, can he hope to make it through to the second round?
But the issues of the era – 'order, order, order' is how he characterised his priorities when he took office – are cutting in his favour. He remains the most popular minister in a very unpopular government. More-over, despite its poll lead, the Rassemblement National is struggling to find a fully credible candidate, with Le Pen's legal difficulties potentially preventing her standing and Jordan Bardella, her 29-year-old deputy, lacking frontline experience.
Retailleau quotes to me the well-known French political maxim of the author Maurice Druon, who served as Georges Pompidou's culture minister: ''There are two parties of the left in France, one of which is called the right!'' There is an opening for a force that is genuinely right-wing, and which stays right-wing in government.
The question now is how long Retailleau, who is very much his own strategist, remains in government. On the one hand, the Interior Ministry has been a perfect platform for his policy agenda – and the police and fire brigades, with whom he has developed a genuine rapport, would miss him. But if he stays too long, his unique brand risks cross-contamination with that of Emmanuel Macron. That is why, as leader of Les Républicains, Retailleau is increasingly distancing himself from the President on several issues (notably public subsidy for wind farms, which he wants to end). Such open free-thinking does not always endear him to the Élysée.
Sir Roger Scruton – one of Retailleau's heroes – would certainly have appreciated the apparent paradox of his public life to date: the story of a ruggedly individualistic son of La France profonde vindicating the long-neglected rights of the national and cultural collective, at the heart of power.