The Le Pens and their Nazi records: the culture trade as a school of consent

The facts first, as Libération reports them. Taking over from her father, Marie-Caroline Le Pen ran Serp, a music publishing company, which reissued CDs of songs of the Nazi army and speeches by figures of the collaboration. Still according to Libération, Marine Le Pen was, at that time, one of the shareholders. The article, of which we have here only the summary, speaks of records that were "antisemitic and pro-Nazi". We do not, at this stage, have the detail of the catalogue, the dates or the sales volumes: we are not inventing them.

What follows is our reading, and it concerns not the scandal of the day but the mechanism. We readily picture propaganda as a leaflet or a rally. Yet a record is more discreet: it is played at home, lent, collected, and it fits into a sociability. A music publishing house is, on its small scale, a means of cultural production. It manufactures memory, that is to say common sense.

This is where Gramsci's notion of hegemony becomes useful. It describes power exercised through consent as much as through force: a worldview that ends up looking normal. This battle is fought in what Gramsci called the trenches of civil society, namely the media, the school, the churches, but also, let us add, the "history" shelf and the catalogue of reissues. Rehabilitating a repertoire begins by making it available, then ordinary, then "debatable". The merchandise does the work that the argument does not dare to do.

The media coverage, for its part, also deserves scrutiny. When the affair resurfaces, we are served the usual grammar: "resurgence of the past", "family heritage", "grey areas". The vocabulary is polite, almost archaeological, as if one were unearthing an old cellar. Yet a commercial company is not a memory: it is an activity, with managers, shareholders and a customer base. The word "past" here acts as a cushion. Who is cast as the reasonable adult in this story? The one who, with a shrug, sends the affair back to the years when "things were different".

The concepts of the Marxist tradition remind us that ideology is not simply a lie, but a partial image of the world presented as universal. Let us therefore ask who benefits from the common sense being installed. Normalising the imagery of collaboration means preparing the ground for policies that will, when the time comes, appear simply "common sense".

There remain factual questions that only an inquiry will settle: what share of Serp's activity these records represented, what exact role the shareholders played in it, and what answers those concerned give. We await them, and we will read the replies with the same vigilance as the accusations. For the essential, in the end, rests on a simple idea: consent is manufactured, and it is sometimes sold by the piece.