Marion Maréchal in Warsaw: “The cultural and educational battle is for the long term”

The higher education institution founded in France by Marine Le Pen’s niece is building links with the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary and the Collegium Intermarium in Poland.

Marion Maréchal: Yes, we can say that, and the declared objective of our two schools is to be a response and an alternative to a phenomenon that is unfortunately becoming more and more prevalent in the university world, whether in Poland or in France. This manifests itself firstly in an intellectual homogeneity, an intellectual conformism to be precise, and secondly in a sectarianism that sometimes borders on intellectual terrorism. It is indeed rare that a week goes by in France without a controversy about teachers being threatened, marginalised, or ostracised, or conferences being disrupted or even cancelled, or student unions putting pressure on universities to push an often very radical militant agenda. We see many institutions – not all, fortunately – zealously relaying a certain number of ideologies. I am thinking in particular of LGBT ideology, neo-feminism, cancel culture, wokeness, and, in France, immigrationism. Sometimes, as at Sciences Po and the Sorbonne University, they even create programmes dedicated to these ideologies, especially gender studies.

Students are taken hostage in the process, and, most of the time, they do not even dare to express a different opinion for fear of becoming the target of criticism at best, and threats at worst. For example, at the University Lumières Lyon 2, a student in political studies who had denounced on social networks the political correctness and the total absence of contradiction and differences of opinion in his courses was insulted and physically threatened, without the university’s management ever taking a stand or taking his side.

In the face of this, and in the face of the decline in standards – because the two unfortunately go hand in hand – I believe that Collegium Intermarium and ISSEP both wanted to create a small island of resistance, a sanctuary in which the historical role of the university, which is first and foremost the search for truth and the transmission of knowledge, is revived.

Olivier Bault: In Poland, Collegium Intermarium has obtained private funding for its launch, it has behind it the Institute for Legal Culture Ordo Iuris, which is an association of lawyers with conservative sensibilities that is very well known and very active in that country, it has the government’s moral, if not financial, support, and there will even be several secretaries of state at the inaugural conference today, one of whom is attached to the Ministry of Education. In France, however, ISSEP seems rather to be ostracised by the public authorities and the world of higher education...

Marion Maréchal: The first notable difference between our two countries is that conservatives are not in power in France. I imagine that the Polish government looks favourably on such initiatives. This would be all the more logical since the current Polish Minister of Education was originally supposed to be involved in this project before he was called to join the Morawiecki government. So I guess there is some synergy there, and this is what I wish them.

In our case, to put it simply, it is the liberal-progressives who are in power. Our school is obviously not looked upon favourably by the left and by the current government. We have no public subsidies, but after four years of existence our teaching staff includes about fifty people, a significant number of whom teach at public universities and are not afraid to acknowledge and proclaim that they are also at ISSEP. This shows that things are changing a little bit. Our teachers teach only one subject, hence their number, and as we run courses in both political science and management, they also include business leaders, journalists, senior civil servants, officers, lawyers, not to mention contributors to the Centre for Analysis and Forecasting, which is our research centre and the source of our publications.

Our students are progressing and we are gradually achieving academic credibility. It was certainly more complicated for us at the beginning, but I notice today that our students all manage to find internships, sometimes even at large French companies, and all of them have been integrated professionally without significant difficulties. Around ISSEP there is a whole ecosystem of associations, companies, and communities, which also provide support and are first-line recipients. With this network logic, we have largely compensated for the difficulties we could have had by not being supported by the government, and we now have about a hundred students each year, including about thirty in the master’s programme and about seventy in continuing education.

Olivier Bault: You have established a school in Spain. Can you tell us a few words about your Spanish undertaking? Why did you choose Spain?

Marion Maréchal: Indeed, last year we opened a Spanish subsidiary which is working very well, with programmes adapted to Spain, in Spanish, with Spanish teachers and a Spanish staff. We have a desire to spread ISSEP internationally. Initially, my dream was to prosper in the “Latin alliance” and to start by setting up in Italy, Spain, maybe even Portugal. It so happened that a Spanish team came to see us, a rather young team, between 30 and 40 years old, some of them having worked in the world of politics but without being elected, others being entrepreneurs – a bit like us at ISSEP, and they explained to us that they would like to reproduce the ISSEP model in Spain. Today, this Spanish school operates autonomously, but we have a common brand identity and a common educational charter as well as administrative links.

Olivier Bault: I believe that universities suffer from the same kind of problems in Spain and France...

Marion Maréchal: Yes, but the Madrid ISSEP managed to get some big names on board right away, including former ministers who joined the project, and even, funnily enough, the head of the football federation, who got involved in the scheme. You could say that they were a big success right away because they brought in some big names. This is indicative of the fact that even though Spain is on the left, there is a great deal of dynamism in conservative circles, which are sticking together. This is less true in France.

Olivier Bault: Did you think, before you heard about Collegium Intermarium, that Poland too needed an island of intellectual resistance in higher education? Does this surprise you?

Marion Maréchal: No, this does not surprise me so much because I realise that, even in countries where conservatives are in power, education in general and higher education in particular remain the preserve of the left. The cultural battle has long been lost. In my country, it used to be the Trotskyites who ruled in the education sector, today there is everywhere a form of neo-Marxism, since the class struggle has been replaced with the race struggle or the gender struggle. The nature of the dominant and the dominated has changed, but the dialectic, the reasoning and, in some respects, the methods remain the same: we don’t debate, we guillotine.

Faced with this neo-Marxist left, the young generation of conservatives – the Collegium Intermarium team is also young, they are people in their 30s and 40s, as is the case at ISSEP – is willing to work together, going beyond our possible differences in order to be part of a logic of connections, of networking, of pooling strengths and experiences. It is very interesting because it is new and it is growing. When I went to CPAC, the big meeting of American conservatives, I was struck by the network logic of those circles across the Atlantic, in all their diversity. They have this logic of solidarity and this desire to hunt in packs, as the left very often does. In France, we do not have that culture at all, but it seems to me that this is less true elsewhere in Europe.

Olivier Bault: After this first visit, do you plan to develop exchanges with Collegium Intermarium?

Marion Maréchal: Of course, this is the goal and I hope it will happen, as I hope it will with the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a large school that offers training in Hungary, with a lot of international exchanges. I saw them last week when I was in Budapest for the 4th Demographic Summit. They also know them well at Collegium Intermarium. The idea is to have symposiums and study courses in common, with publications in several languages, and also to exchange teachers and, in the long run, to succeed in arranging student exchanges during certain periods.