The proponents of “national preference” like to dress up the political principle in a false air of common sense. Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party has attempted to normalize the doctrine of discriminating against foreign nationals through social rights at the national level. “I like my daughters better than my nieces, my nieces better than my cousins, my cousins better than my neighbors,” Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen once proclaimed. In 2022, Marine Le Pen, said it was necessary to put “our own before others.” Today, her lieutenant Jordan Bardella says “national priority” is a simple “common sense principle.”

Although this policy consists of excluding foreigners from the welfare system to which they contribute financially, and of establishing privileges prohibited by major international treaties, the RN presents it as an elementary rule of common sense. Its leaders assert that all French people with a shred of common sense know very well that “charity begins at home.” By placing “national preference” under the banner of popular wisdom, they are setting to music a political line defined over 40 years ago by one of the far-right party’s theorists, François Duprat.

In the 1970s, this intellectual – formerly part of the Occident and Ordre Nouveau far-right militant movements – advised the Front National (FN), as the RN was formerly called, to base its anti-immigration rhetoric not on hate speech, but on “rational, social and political arguments.” In a France that had just adopted anti-racist laws (1972), Duprat, who defined himself as “neo-fascist,” was hoping to avoid “blocking” processes and to broaden the FN’s electoral base. “You have to know what you want,” he wrote in an internal memo in 1978. “To please the snarling activist in one branch or a vague sympathizer, or alternatively, to win thousands of voters and adherents to our ideas.”

A mere decade later, in 1985, the expression “national preference” appeared in capital letters on the cover of a collective book published by Albin Michel. Its main author, Jean-Yves Le Gallou, was a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration school for top civil servants and affiliated with the center-right UDF party. In 1974, Le Gallou founded the Club de l’Horloge, a circle of young technocrats who, according to historian Nicolas Lebourg, dreamed of “a state that was minimalist in its economics and maximalist in terms of racial hygiene.” Intended to provide “elements of doctrine for the right,” this work was applauded by the FN – to such an extent that Le Gallou joined the far-right party.

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