| dc.description.abstract | This Master’s thesis is the result of five and a half month fieldwork among members of the French radical right party, Front National (FN), in Gard in the south of France. It aims to illuminate populist worldviews by balancing macronarratives of the FN and French society with microhistories of informants in Gard, with a particular emphasis on individual agency and intragroup tensions. I ask how being abjected from nationalist tropes confirms the martyr narrative pursued by the FN, and approach this question from a set of different angles. Firstly, I argue that the FN has been constructed as a ‘repugnant cultural other’ in French society, reinforced by continuous academic moral disdain and FN’s anti-establishment attitudes, which impedes ethnographic inquiry. I outline the methodic obstacles this implied for my fieldwork and how I circumvented these. Secondly, I turn to my informants’ experiences of stigmatization in everyday life, and how their narratives fit into the FN’s history and a particular reading of French societal trajectory. I suggest they embody an archetypal martyr narrative, synthesizing René Girard’s work on the ‘scapegoat’ and Alain Badiou’s on ‘Saint Paul’. Thirdly, applying the martyr narrative through the lens of Bruce Kapferer’ idea of nationalism’s ‘constitutive power’, I analyze local political practices in three communes in Gard: Beaucaire, Nîmes and Saint-Gilles, including provincial events attended by informants. I suggest FN’s counter-discursive practices can be viewed as ‘thick resistance’, applying Sherry Ortner’s term. Fourthly, I elaborate on the idea of ‘thick resistance’ and make an ‘extended case’ out of FN’s use of the secular Republican principle laïcité. By way of Louis Dumont’s ‘value-hierarchies’, I argue for laïcité’s role as a ‘mobilizing metaphor’ and a social least common denominator in France. Fifth, I analyze a terrorist attack that occurred during my fieldwork. Using Marshall Sahlins’ ‘structural amplification’, I trace the national and local reactions, online and offline, and suggest that the incident and its responses epitomized the tropes extant in my field. | eng |