‘Patriots of Diversity’: A Leftist Trap?

The Left is not French! As Maurras said, they are the Pays Legal (the "legal country", but the true France is the Pays Réel (the "real country).

From The European Conservative

By Hélène de Lauzun, PhD

Despite all proclamations of intent, being French cannot be invented or decreed.

At a time when France is searching for its identity and future, a march was organised a few days ago in Paris under the banner of ‘Patriots of Diversity’ (Patriotes de la diversité). Is this a welcome return to patriotic pride, or yet another incarnation of multiculturalism? The debate is raging within the French Right as to whether the country’s crisis can really be resolved through popular mobilisations of this kind.

The movement was launched in June. A symbolic demonstration was held on Saturday, October 12th, in Place de la République, in eastern Paris—traditionally a focal point for far-left demonstrations, which have taken to defacing the imposing allegorical statue erected during the Third Republic with their community emblems, Palestinian flags, rainbows, and other tags glorifying Hamas.

The organisers of the demonstration said they wanted to show their attachment to the French flag, which has been so mistreated by the Left that it has become a symbol of shame, carrying echoes of fascism and colonialism. For them, the French flag should above all be a sign of pride. 

They claim to belong to the French nation on the grounds that they love France. But it is not certain that this is sufficient.

The initiative may have seemed of the better kind at first glance, but some voices on the French Right have questioned its relevance. Can one legitimately claim to be “at the same time”—en même temps, to use Emmanuel Macron’s favourite phrase—patriotic and diverse? Is the homeland, as the land of one’s forefathers, compatible with diversity?

This debate raises the thorny question of how to define a nation. Are we members of a nation through declared allegiance or through blood? The French Revolution established the national principle as one of voluntary consent, historically expressed in certain territories through referenda requesting annexation to France—against the Papal States or the Empire. In the 19th century, the republican historian Ernest Renan clarified the French concept of ‘nation’—which was then opposed to the German definition of ‘Volk,’ above all a people united by blood and language, which allowed, for example, the Wilhelmine Reich to claim Alsace, a land of Germanic language but French heart.

This debate, which originated during the French Revolution, will resonate with any nation that is proud of itself and its identity. Love and attachment to a country are not enough to make you part of a people. A taste for freedom and Guinness will never make me Irish, even if I live in Dublin for twenty years. What makes Ireland Irish? What makes Japan Japanese? A nation is not merely a random gathering in a given place of a group of people who have shared some common interests for an indeterminate period of time.

The debate remains unresolved and continues to stir strong opinions today. In 2025 France, where historical perspective is often ideologically rejected for linking the contemporary nation to times deemed too dark to celebrate, the commitment to the nation based on will and principles has become overly abstract. Can one claim to be French based solely on a declaration of principle, founded on a love for a handful of noble values and ideas—liberty, equality, fraternity? From this conception of the nation to cosmopolitanism, there is only a small step.

In a lecture given in 1882, entitled What is a Nation?, Renan clarified the matter as follows:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which, in truth, are one and the same, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the shared possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the present consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to assert the heritage that has been received undivided.

Today, the Left tends to favour the second term of the equation—“the present consent, the desire to live together”—to the detriment of the first, “the heritage that has been received undivided.” The Patriots of Diversity are no exception to this rule, and tend to be a little too quick to dismiss terms that are all important—“heritage” and “received undivided.”

A debate organised by our friends at Radio Courtoisie brought together Henda Ayari, one of the founders of the ‘diversity’ movement, of Tunisian origin, Jean-Eudes Gannat, an identitarian, and Bruno Attal, a police officer and trade unionist well-known in French nationalist circles, in a heated discussion. In this controversial conversation, Ayari faced strong opposition to her commitment from Gannat, who sees her movement as a new avatar of multiculturalism, which a few years ago praised France’s “black, white and Arab” (black, blanc, beur) unity in football. Today, the promotion of “patriotic, secular, and meritocratic diversity” makes it possible to avoid words with too many connotations of “history,” “roots” and “civilisation.”

“They’re doing the same thing again as with SOS Racisme. A total sham, financed and publicised to divert patriotism from its essence. These people want to replace the historical French people with an aggregate of individuals without a past,” Gannat denounced on the set of Ligne Droite, Radio Courtoisie’s flagship programme. On the radio set, the tone eventually rose, with Attal even turning against Gannat and calling him a racist. 

The debate is far from over.

Essayist Marguerite Stern, writing on X, also expressed her scepticism about this 2025-style patriotism, espoused by a section of the Right that has internalised the supreme virtue of diversity as a certificate of anti-fascism and media respectability and also likes to highlight its ‘quotas’ of minorities. She draws a provocative yet thought-provoking parallel between immigrants posing as patriots and trans people posing as women—both, under the guise of good intentions, appropriating a cause that is not supposed to be theirs.

She asks:

Will we soon see non-European individuals at the head of patriotic marches, just as we see men in skirts at the head of feminist marches? Will the aesthetics of cross-dressing also contaminate the right? A country is a culture, but it is first and foremost a people.

The introduction of an ethnic criterion is a delicate matter, but it cannot be ignored. Without resorting to a dubious classification of who is or isn’t French by measuring drops of blood and skin tones, it is enough to return to common sense and the origins of a people. According to remarks attributed to General de Gaulle—statements that a head of state could not make today without provoking widespread condemnation—France is “above all a European people of white race, Greek and Latin culture, and of Christian religion.”

Beyond this set of criteria, what truly defines France is a deep, visceral  connection to the land, experienced for thousands of years by a peasant people. It is no coincidence that today, as France is experiencing a wave of mass immigration, one economic sector is resisting, against all odds, this replacement by labour presented to us as a universal panacea: agriculture. Foreigners hire themselves out as agricultural workers, but it is the French who, alone and increasingly desperate, still plough and turn the soil to make it sprout.

Since then, the controversy has grown stronger, to the point that ‘Ben the Patriot,’ one of the leaders and an online influencer for Patriots for Diversity, after defending Ayari on social media, ended up throwing in the towel, and announced his departure from the movement. He denounces the “hatred” and “jealousy” of “nationalists.”

This dramatic move is highly significant. This is not simply a difference of opinion. It touches on the heart of the problem because it is ultimately a profound cultural confrontation. Pierre Sautarel, editor-in-chief of the Fdesouche platform, and a leading voice from the French national right, publicly replied to Ben the Patriot on X, criticising the influencer’s good conscience: “Ben arrives…in boss mode. We calmly explain our disagreement with his line, backing up our arguments and pointing out that some people find his comments contradictory. He reacted aggressively, with a threatening ‘wesh’-style attitude.” [Ed. note: A ‘wesh’-style attitude borrows a word from North African Arabic slang which connotes a confrontational, streetwise demeanor associated with urban immigrant youth culture.]  

Despite all proclamations of intent, being French cannot be invented or decreed.

The Left has done a lot of damage by imposing its mental frameworks even on the minds of those who, nevertheless, appear to want to break free from them.