The trouble with French rap

Last Monday, a group of 20 French rappers released a video entitled ‘No Pasarán’. Evoking the Republican resistance against Franco in the Spanish civil war and before that, the resistance of the French against the Germans during the Great War, the phrase called for people to resist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If last night’s second round election results in France were anything to go by – with the Rassemblement National finishing third – the rap did the trick.

The message is anything but subtle, set against a video montage of refugee camps, clips of fascist rallies, and Le Pen’s mansion in the affluent Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, to a refrain of a boxing match annotated with the words ‘Jordan t’es mort’ in block capitals. But if Jordan Bardella, the young turk from the French council estate who has risen to be Marine Le Pen’s number two, is depicted as wiped out in the ring, this begins to look fairly anodyne compared to the language used to describe Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion. ‘Un coup de bâton pour ces chiennes en rut’ – roughly translated as an insult relating to canine menstruation – and even Marine’s big narines or nostrils come under attack. Their message? Vote for the far-left Nouveau Front Populaire not the right-wing porcs.

When the clip went viral on social media with millions views, Marine Tondelier, leader of the French Green party and dubbed the ‘left-wing Marine’, equivocated on the violence of its message notably towards women. ‘Les codes du rap sont comme ça,’ she shrugged before going on to defend the video as art and therefore nothing to do with politics, or her. Hearing this, the journalist interviewing Tondelier decided to read out a text message from culture minister Rachida Dati: ‘In another era, feminists of the left sued the rapper Orelsan for being too right-wing,’ it read. Orelsan, a French rapper, faced legal action from feminists for a song which contained violent fantasies about a woman. Tondelier, surely aware of the double-standard in which artistic violence is condoned as long as it comes from the left, looked troubled.

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France has had a rap problem for decades. While rap is hugely popular, French politicians have often tried to downplay its status. At the Victoires, the equivalent of the Brit awards, France’s black or Arab rappers are frequently overlooked despite the genre being widely admired by the French youth. When Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister in the 2000s, he tried to go to war with rap, declaring the genre to be an incitement to racial unrest. He cited the 2005 Paris riots as proof, a move which secured the support of over 200 parliamentarians. For nearly a decade, Sarkozy pursued libel action against two rappers, La Rumeur and Sniper, and made it an imprisonable offence to ‘offend the dignity of the Republic’. It must have been rather embarrassing for Sarkozy to find out, in 2008, that his son Louis was in fact a hip-hop producer, going under the alias Mosey.

For Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National, this isn’t her first round in the rap ring. In 2021, the politician managed to get the French Football Association to drop Youssoupha’s ‘Écris mon nom en bleu’ as the official anthem to the Euros on the grounds of the French-Congolese rapper’s libellous lyrics about her in the past. Outrage followed from the French left who saw the move against Youssoupha as part of a wider censorship of French diversity, citing the French FA’s 2016 attempt to introduce a quota system on players of African and Arab origin. Asked about the ‘No Pasarán’ video on French television last week, Marine Le Pen explained that she would of course be suing the rappers involved, adjusting her blonde bob and barely concealing a smirk when she referred to the video as ‘art’.

So where does this leave French rap, once considered a genre born of the habitation à loyer modéré (council estate) and on the margins of acceptable taste? By aligning itself with the dominant left, French rap destroys its outsider status – what could be more establishment than opposing Le Pen? – and it may very well lose its rhetorical and artistic power. In some ways, that has already happened. For the young, rap is as French as red wine, mauvaise conscience and striking.