The 1998 World Cup took place in another era. Pre-9/11, pre-Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, pre-October 7, the 1990s now seem to me like a distant, almost innocent time when global security and states adhering to international law were things we took for granted.
I watched France win that World Cup in Arles, the Provencal town best known for its Roman ruins and the paintings Van Gogh made there, such as Starry Night in 1888. The town rang with cries of "Black-Blanc-Beur" (“Black-White-Arab”) – French slang for players such as Zinedine Zidane, Lilian Thuram and Marcel Desailly who carried France to a 3-0 victory over Brazil at the Stade de France.
The three men symbolised the diversity that makes France what it is. Zidane was born in Marseille to immigrant Algerian parents. Thuram was born in Guadeloupe. Desailly was born in Ghana and adopted as a small child by a French diplomatic family – but all three were French to the core.
It was a beautiful moment. Politically, France was in a period of "cohabitation" – President Jacques Chirac embraced the World Cup win as a moment of national unity. The team was received at the Elysee Palace, and Mr Chirac himself appeared on the pitch after the final whistle.
Decades later, France and the world are different places. Didier Deschamps, who captained that winning 1998 team, now manages a 26-man squad in what he has said will be his final World Cup as coach. Captained by Kylian Mbappe, among the panel are 16 players who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Mbappe was born in 1998 – the same year as the "Black-Blanc-Beur" triumph – in Bondy, a working-class Paris suburb, to a Cameroonian father and an Algerian mother.
Nearly three decades later, Mbappe carries that same multicultural identity as captain. France recently beat Morocco 2-0 to set up today’s semifinal against Spain. Away from the pitch, however, the country is going through a different kind of moment.
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has announced that she will run in next year's presidential race, a declaration that follows an appeals court ruling on her embezzlement conviction. Ms Le Pen was found guilty last year of overseeing a scheme in which her National Rally party misused European Parliament funds, paying party staff with money meant for EU parliamentary assistants. This amounted to about €2.8 million ($3.2 million) embezzled over more than a decade.
The original sentence barred Ms Le Pen from public office for five years, a ruling that threatened to end her presidential ambitions. This month, however, an appeals court cut that ban to 45 months, with two thirds suspended. Having already served 15 months, Le Pen is now effectively cleared to run next year.
The court did order Ms Le Pen to wear an electronic monitor rather than serve time behind bars – a humiliating and limiting condition she says would make campaigning impossible. She plans to challenge it before France's highest court, an appeal that would suspend the monitoring requirement for another year.
That she has avoided prison and now faces only an ankle bracelet says less about the leniency of French courts than about her own political durability. Ms Le Pen’s story is being cited as one of redemption and resilience – one like her hero, Joan of Arc, that shows invincibility.
The Le Pen name still sends a shiver through liberal France. Marine succeeded her father, Jean-Marie, as leader of the National Front, a party he founded in 1972 and defined for decades by xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric. He was convicted several times for hate speech and once dismissed the Holocaust as a "detail" of history.
The Le Pens, in short, were long seen as a genuine threat to France's liberty, equality and fraternity. Marine has spent years trying to change that: she expelled her father from the party and renamed it the National Rally in 2018. After the October 7, 2023 attacks, she positioned the party as a defender of Israel and an ally of French Jews, backing Israel's right to defend itself, criticising the International Criminal Court's pursuit of Israeli officials, and opposing French restrictions on Israeli defence firms.
The reception has been mixed. The French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld has praised the shift but the Jewish umbrella group CRIF still refuses to welcome her. Former prime minister Elisabeth Borne put it simply: "Changing a name does not change the roots."
In the meantime, to be safe, Ms Le Pen has installed a younger face at the head of the party. Jordan Bardella, a polished 30-year-old member of the European Parliament, was elected National Rally president in 2022 and groomed as her heir. It was long assumed that Mr Bardella would be the fallback candidate had the courts barred Ms Le Pen outright. Like roughly one in four people in France, he is the son of an immigrant – in his case, an Italian mother born in a working-class suburb of Turin.
However, Mr Bardella is not happy to have been pushed aside and is said to be sulking. That he is still waiting in the wings, rather than leading the ticket, is itself a measure of how far Ms Le Pen has manoeuvred around the legal obstacles meant to stop her.
Two Frances are visible this summer. One is on the pitch in the US, embodied by a team even more diverse than the one that sang "Black-Blanc-Beur" in 1998 — proof, if any were still needed, of what French identity actually looks like.
The other France is on the campaign trail, where a politician whose party was built on excluding people like Zidane, Thuram and Desailly's families now stands closer to power than at any point in her career. It is a tense moment.
Whether France's multicultural triumph on the field will once again paper over its anxieties off it – as it briefly did in 1998 – or whether Ms Le Pen will finally break through, is a question that will define the country long after this World Cup is over. We are now in an era post-October 7th, where Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant emotions have taken on loud, and frankly terrifying forms. Both outcomes matter to see where France, and Europe, will go in the future.
