French booksellers and distribution networks have colluded to limit the visibility Jordan Bardella, president of the Rassemblement National, can get for his newly published book which recounts his political career and shares his thoughts on France. It is a very common exercise for French politicians seeking to establish themselves as statesmen to publish an essay halfway between autobiography and political programme. Bardella, the 29-year-old President of the Rassemblement National, is no exception to the rule. On November 9th, Fayard, one of France’s biggest publishing houses, published his first book, Ce que je cherche (What I’m looking for). “This book is neither an essay nor a programme: it’s a reflection of my life,” says Bardella, who intends to give a personal account of the unusual journey that took him from the department of Seine-Saint-Denis to the presidency of the Rassemblement National.
The book is almost 320 pages long, with a planned print run of 150,000 copies. An intense promotional campaign is therefore planned by Fayard, which belongs to the group headed by Vincent Bolloré, a right-wing media personality, owner of the conservative CNews channel and nightmare of the Left.
Jordan Bardella is planning a nationwide tour to present his book, with rallies and book signings designed to boost his popularity and profile as a future head of government.
His book caused quite a stir even before it was published. A France Inter journalist even lost his job for having—it was thought—‘collaborated’ with the RN MP on writing the book.
The president of France’s leading party has also come up against hostility from the distribution networks, which have no intention of giving his book the slightest publicity. Some booksellers refuse to display the book in their shops. Mediatransports, the subsidiary of the French national railway company (SNCF) and the Paris transport company (RATP) responsible for advertising in these public spaces, has announced that it is refusing to display advertisements for the book in stations, depriving it of a significant amount of visibility.
Bardella decries this decision and believes it contravenes the duty of neutrality. So many books by other political figures have been published without encountering the same hostility. However, Bardella believes that censorship can also serve him well and give him positive publicity. “When they say ‘the book by the president of the RN must be banned,’, I find myself at the top of the sales list on Amazon,” he explained, even calling on trade union organisations to “continue” in this way. “It’s great publicity for me,” he quipped, before “thanking” Médiatransports for its unwitting help.
In response to this ban, the Fayard publishing house has decided to take Médiatransports to court “in order to assert their rights and compel the company to fulfil its distribution contract.” The Left is denouncing Bardella’s ‘victimisation’ as totally overrated and is offended by what they see as further proof of Vincent Bolloré’s omnipresence and omnipotence in the French media.
Despite the cries of outrage from the Left, the final content remains rather classic and polished.
Bardella devotes a great deal of symbolic space to his youth in Seine-Saint-Denis, the department with the highest percentage of immigrant population. Himself the grandson of Italian immigrants, he claims that in the 1960s, the northern suburbs of Paris were “a paradise,” characterised by “mutual aid and solidarity,” echoing a motif often evoked by political figures who happily grew up in the suburbs, starting with Éric Zemmour. In the 2010s, he became involved in associations helping migrants (“Pakistanis, Afghans, West Africans”) and realised that it was impossible to integrate them: if it had worked in the past, it was because immigration was “European.”
He tells how he joined the Front National in 2016—unaware, he says, of the past of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and of his personality. At the FN, as the party was still called at the time, Jordan Bardella was part of a new generation of activists for whom the FN was above all embodied by Marine Le Pen. An entire chapter, the last one, is devoted to the woman to whom he owes his political career and meteoric rise. He sets out both their intimate conviction that she will one day end up in the Elysée Palace—even if the scenario of the last elections cruelly belied their shared hopes.
Throughout the book, Bardella makes a firm commitment to uniting the French Right. Strangely enough, his political model is Nicolas Sarkozy, who in the 2007 presidential election succeeded in bringing together a vast right-wing electorate, from the conservative bourgeoisie to the working classes—only to betray them afterward, in a policy of ouverture (opening up) to the Left that left a very bitter taste in the mouths of genuinely conservative French voters. He wants to achieve the same electoral synthesis, and in this, he differs from Marine Le Pen, who stubbornly refuses to admit that she belongs to the Right. Like Marion Maréchal, he wants to be more libéral (in the French sense of the word), less statist. Editorialists like to track down the signs of a coming war against him and Marine Le Pen, and Marion Maréchal—or both.
Few politicians dared to comment on the book’s content. Interviewed by RTL, Zemmour was less than enthusiastic. It is true that Bardella was not kind to him, describing him as “too caricatural, too excessive to be understood by everyone.” In return, Zemmour felt that Bardella was “just repeating what Marine Le Pen told him to say,” and confessed that he didn’t bother to listen to the young man: “When I want to know what the RN thinks, I only listen to one person, Marine Le Pen. That’s it.”
At the turn of a page, Bardella congratulates Marine Le Pen on her ability to “bring out a successor.” Himself, of course. This is no mere stylistic flourish from his pen. The current trial of the parliamentary assistants could well sound the death knell for Marine Le Pen’s candidacy in the 2027 presidential elections: she risks a ten-year ban on eligibility, which may not be suspended even if the judgement is appealed. In the context of the U.S. elections, the very left-leaning French judiciary will be keen to block the RN in the courts in response—so they think—to the success of the Trump wave that the U.S. courts have not been able to stem. Bardella is standing by. You never know.
