AFTER nearly two decades on the defensive, France’s left-wing thinking classes have embarked on a vigorous counter-attack, denouncing writers and celebrity intellectuals as undercover bigots who serve the intolerant Right.

Since there is nothing that Paris loves more than a quarrel among les intellos, newspapers and magazines are devoting front pages to the Left Bank war between the “reactionaries” and the “new ayatollahs” of the Left.

More than September 11, the key date in the Left Bank world view is April 21 this year, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader, stunned the thinking classes by eliminating Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Prime Minister, in the first round of the presidential elections. The polemics were ignited by Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (The Call to order: Inquiry into the new reactionaries), a slim treatise published in the autumn. In this, Daniel Lindenberg, a university “historian of ideas”, exposes what he sees as a return to 1930s-style far-right thinking among hip intellectuals and authors.

The most famous villain is Michel Houllebecq, whose last two novels, Atomised and Platform, are rants against the spirit of the 1960s, Islam, popular culture and sexual liberation. Also in the firing line is Alain Finkielkraut, one of the 1980s’ “new philosophers”, condemned for his aggressive support of Israel.

The favourite game at chattering class dinners this season is “name le nouveau reac”, in which you “out” covert conservatives — for example, José Bové, the anti-McDonald’s campaigner. Though a hero of the Left, he hails from the anti-globalisation campaign that Lindenberg argues is a cover for authoritarian nationalism. An easy target is Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the former Socialist minister, who ran as a “national sovereignty” presidential candidate this year. Lindenberg blames much of the French “new wave” on Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the US “neo-cons”. The symptoms of French neo-reaction are, according to Lindenberg: hostility to Islam; left-wing admiration for the anti-crime crackdown and back-to-basics policy of President Chirac’s conservative Government; and blaming the student revolt of 1968 and its slogan — “It is forbidden to forbid” — for all the ills of modern France. One of the signs of the rightward lurch is the fashion talking of the “droit-de-l’hommisme” — civil-rights-ism — an expression coined by M Le Pen, now widely used, to denote the anti-racism movement.

Lindenberg says that les nouveaux reacs are “writers, journalists, advertising people, university teachers . . . who advocate the return to old values and defend the idea of returning to a golden age. Most place this before 1968 and the more daring before 1789. For them, society worked well in this period, while today there is a free-for-all which promotes pornography, racial mixing, excessive liberation of women and morality.”

Lindenberg is backed by guardians of left-wing orthodoxy, such as Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur. His targets call his cause the last gasp of antique Marxism.

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