By Sylvain Cypel, New York Times guest op-ed, Jan. 23/24, 2014

[....] I recently returned to France, after six years working in the United States, to discover some unpleasant surprises. In “la France profonde,” a diffuse populism is stirring. Reminiscent of America’s Tea Party, this movement combines a nostalgic mind-set that everything “was better before” with a radical aversion to taxes and a hostility toward the detested European bureaucracy.

According to a recent study, only 8 percent of French people espouse racial inequality, yet there is a palpable conviction that everything bad comes from outside: Brussels, globalization, immigration. Whatever the law says, the “freedom” to express racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant views has reached new levels. Mr. Le Pen used to claim to “say out loud what the people think in private.” Lately, many have begun thinking out loud.

The Dieudonné affair is symptomatic of an insidious slide toward intolerance, but anti-Semitism is the least of it; racism and xenophobia manifest themselves more often as anti-Arab, anti-Muslim or anti-black [....]