Language / legitimacy
Who Gets to Define “Extreme” in French Politics?
Before a political argument can be won, someone has already named its participants. Watch what that naming makes easier to see, and easier to ignore.
Existing essay carried forward into the revised collection. Further editorial revision is planned.
An ideological classification
A contested rearrangement
A security vocabulary
A political tradition and a policing label
Ce n’est pas la même chose.
“You are extrême droite. I am droite extrême. Ce n’est pas la même chose.” This is a satirical exchange, not an attributed quotation. Its joke is the serious question: can rearranging an adjective change the political threshold at which a position becomes acceptable?
Naming is not merely describing. A label can allocate permission to speak, identify a legitimate negotiating partner or make an adversary appear outside politics altogether. But not every disputed label is meaningless: an analysis of authoritarianism, exclusion or political violence still needs categories, definitions and evidence.
An older word, a new occasion
Ultragauche did not originate with the 2026 school protests. Its older history includes currents of left communism; its use in security discourse has another history. The same word can therefore identify a political tradition in one archive and a suspected security threat in another. Those uses should not be silently merged. Historical study of the French ultra-left (Presses universitaires de Rennes)Gérald Darmanin
At a Senate hearing on 5 April 2023 about Sainte-Soline, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said: “le problème n’a rien à voir avec le maintien de l’ordre, mais […] concerne l’ultragauche.” The analytical move is precise: the object of explanation shifts from the conduct of policing to the identity of an adversary. This does not prove that every protester was peaceful, nor settle whether particular police actions were lawful. It shows how the question itself is reframed. Historical study of the French ultra-left (Presses universitaires de Rennes)Gérald Darmanin
From the ministry to the dinner table
Imagine the route: ministerial statement, headline, studio discussion, social feed, Christmas dinner. This is an explanatory model, not a measured transmission chain. Repetition can make a disputed classification feel like ordinary vocabulary without everyone along the route sharing an intention. Gérald Darmanin
To demonstrate when “ultra” became normal would require a dated corpus, stable outlet selection, frequency denominators and comparison with earlier protests. A few memorable broadcasts cannot establish a sudden linguistic invention. The 2023 hearing already prevents us from treating the 2026 mobilizations as the word’s beginning. Gérald Darmanin
Orwell is a warning. Foucault is a method.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Syme asks: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” That fictional ambition helps formulate a question about political vocabulary; it is not evidence that contemporary France is Orwell’s fictional state. George OrwellMichel Foucault
Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, The Order of Things (1966), asks about the ground on which a classification acquires validity. The useful move is to inspect the table of distinctions itself: who is placed together, who is separated, and which institutional voice makes the arrangement look natural? Power over language is not always a centrally written dictionary. It can be the power to make your categories the starting point of everyone else’s argument. George OrwellMichel Foucault
The vocabulary relay
An analytical model, not a measured transmission chain.