RUTHFULLY YOURS

Welcome to an only-in-France controversy.

Marine Le Pen is, without a doubt, the most interesting figure on the French political stage today. Amid France’s persistent economic and cultural malaise and the unpopularity of Socialist president François Hollande, the rise of her National Front seems unstoppable.

This rise is based in part on Ms. Le Pen’s charisma and political skill, but also on a strategic realignment of the National Front. In part, this involves an embrace of populist economic policies to go with her populist social stances. And in part, this involves a repudiation of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and leader of the National Front, who built a ceiling of support for his movement thanks to a history of racist and anti-Semitic outbursts, a repudiation that has gone as far as her ousting her father from the party he founded.

While still calling for shutting down the borders, Ms. Le Pen has officially repudiated racism and has expelled, in addition to her father, any party official or activist caught making racist, or racist-sounding, remarks, whether in the media or on their Facebook pages. Her hostility to many forms of Muslim immigration, she insists, is driven by France’s secular value of laïcité, officially embraced by all French elites, rather than by any belief in any clash of civilizations.

All of which makes the trial scheduled to open on October 20 a challenge for Ms. Le Pen. She is set to stand trial on charges of “inciting racial hatred” — yes, that is a thing in France — for a speech in which she compared Muslim street prayers to the Nazi occupation.

The context is that in some Muslim-majority, or near-majority, neighborhoods, Muslim congregations, lacking mosques, instead hold their public prayers on the streets. They sometimes shut down traffic for this. This has been criticized, and not only by the National Front, as a breach of France’s doctrine of laïcité, or hardline secularism that does not tolerate religious expression in the public square. Of course, many groups claim that such criticism has little to do with laïcité and more to do with prejudice against Muslims, or against immigrants, or against people of different races, or all three. In one speech, Marine Le Pen criticized those prayers as a breach of laïcité and called them “an occupation” — which is, after all, literally true, in the sense that the people in question are “occupying” the streets, but then, perhaps straying from prepared remarks, analogized this occupation to the Occupation.

In France, of course, immigration, religion, and secularism and fears of Islam are flash points. As is the tremendous weight of the history of World War II and the Vichy regime and an obsession with not repeating the mistakes of the past. While certainly honorable in itself, this creates a tendency among French elites to view anything – such as criticism of unrestrained immigration – other than an unreserved embrace of the Other in whatever form  as tantamount to Nazism.

(And yes, we should all pause here for a second to note the absurdity that a country that claims the legacy of the Enlightenment and of Voltaire could have on its books a law making it an offense to “incite racial hatred” through speech. France, as ever, lacks an equivalent of the U.S.’s First Amendment, in practice if not in theory – France’s Declaration of Human Rights, which is part of the Constitution, does include an article protecting free speech, but it was never used to strike down speech-regulating laws, of which there are many. It’s even technically illegal to publicly insult someone, something that the history of France shows is one of life’s greatest pleasures as well as one of its greatest arts.)

The political import of the trial is clear: The elder Le Pen’s fatal flaw was an obsession with the events of 1939–45 and a seemingly irrepressible tendency to run off his mouth about them in unpleasant or downright odious ways. Ms. Le Pen’s pitch is that she doesn’t have that fatal flaw of her father. A reference to the Nazi occupation, still an extremely touchy topic, would indicate otherwise. The trial keeps the soundbite in the headlines in the run-up to important regional elections in which the National Front is expected to do very well.

And predictably, Ms. Le Pen’s defenders argue that the trial, which was brought on by pro-immigrant groups, is politically motivated, designed to damage the National Front over a stray comment. And, after all, though recent years have been better than the previous decades, France’s justice system does not exactly have a record of immunity from political pressure.

Will this be enough to stop Ms. Le Pen’s meteoric rise? The short answer is no. Will it slow it down? Possibly not. While it’s clear that if Ms. Le Pen were as gaffe-prone as her father, her party’s support would fall back to Earth like a bad soufflé, it’s also clear that she is not at all as gaffe-prone as her father. The French public, while not liking her remark, might well see the trial as yet another instance of France’s elite applying a double standard to Ms. Le Pen and her populist movement, and reward her for it.

More profoundly, of course, Ms. Le Pen’s movement will keep up its strength as long as France’s political elites do nothing about the country’s persistent problems with mass unemployment, crime, and cultural and identity malaise. But that is a lot harder than passing laws against crying wolf.

— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a writer based in Paris, is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a columnist at TheWeek.com.