Jordan Bardella

Jordan Bardella's two books – "Ce que je cherche" (2024) and "Ce que veulent les Français" (2025) – form a strategic double figure of self-myth and self-legitimization. The first work stylizes Bardella's rise from a child of the banlieues to a "republican success story" in the Rassemblement National, linking this to a pathos of national greatness reminiscent of Bonaparte and De Gaulle. The search for "grandeur" becomes the self-justifying narrative of a savior of the "forgotten French." The second book transforms this claim to salvation into a gallery of seemingly authentic civic portraits, which, however, only represent the voices of a homogeneous, work-ethically moralized "people" that he himself embodies. Bardella thus merges narrative journalism, political mythology, and campaign rhetoric into an aesthetic form of populist pathos in which "empathy" becomes a stage for ideological simplification. The nation appears as a sacred community opposed to elites, migration, and Europe; difference is morally devalued. – This article reads these works as twin acts of political self-promotion: literature as candidacy. It shows how both volumes support the Bolloré media complex and its right-wing populist agenda: the first as a biography of a “designated replacement candidate” for Marine Le Pen, the second as an emotionalized election campaign under the guise of populist authenticity. The analysis interprets Bardella’s pathos of the “true France” as projective self-deification and reveals that his ideal France aims not at plurality but at symbolic power: the beauty and grandeur of a candidate – aesthetically precise, politically dangerous.