Names as Battlegrounds: The French Far Right and the Gallicization of Forenames

Résumé

This study examines how French far-right political actors strategically instrumentalized forename debates to construct exclusionary narratives of national identity between 2012 and 2022. Through Critical Discourse Analysis of speeches by Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Éric Zemmour, this research investigates how far-right rhetoric transforms naming practices into battlegrounds for defining Frenchness. The analysis reveals a strategic duality: while Le Pen and Bardella employ implicit racialization through appeals to Republican equality and laïcité, Zemmour’s discourse exemplifies explicit hierarchy and advocates for “native French” supremacy. Both approaches operationalize “elite racism” and naturalize exclusion through three key mechanisms: reconstructing national identity boundaries by framing non-French names as Republican threats, legitimizing racial hierarchies through assimilation discourse, and linking naming practices to existential threats such as “Islamization” and demographic “replacement”. Situated within France’s historical trajectory of Republican assimilationism, this study reveals how contemporary far-right discourse weaponizes everyday cultural practices to perpetuate systemic marginalization while undermining France’s egalitarian pretensions.