In less than a year, more than 50 million French citizens will have the chance to vote for a successor to President Emmanuel Macron, and recent polls show Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, leaders of the far-right National Rally (RN) party, ahead of potential candidates of the left, center and moderate right. Although surveys indicate a much tighter race in the definitive second round of France’s electoral system, young men may well give the far right a decisive edge.

In France, as in the United States (and elsewhere), 20- and 30-somethings are increasingly divided over issues of gender and feminism, which is potentially translating into divisions in the voting booth. While the far right did make notable inroads among young women in the 2024 legislative elections, the stance of young men was more striking: 38 percent of 25-to-35-year-old men voted for the RN and its allies in the first round, compared to 24 percent of their female counterparts. 

Not surprisingly, then, recent studies have found an “ideological cleavage” between the sexes on a range of hot-button political topics. Young men are more conservative on issues of immigration and gender equality, and prioritize security and individual freedom, while their female counterparts’ top concerns are social justice and environmental issues.

To be sure, only a minority of young men supported the National Rally in the last election. While the urban and educated — think those with university degrees — still primarily support the left, those in rural areas and regions ravaged by deindustrialization have been gravitating to the far-right parties. With higher unemployment and lower wages among the less educated, and women outnumbering men in higher education by about 25 percent, the links between socioeconomic status, gender and political orientation are growing ever more defined.

The economic anxieties of many working-class and some middle-class white men explain the drift to the right at least in part. As in other Western countries where the path to prosperity has become elusive and economic inequality has increased, French populists and their followers have primarily scapegoated Muslim and other nonwhite immigrants — not to mention women, Jews and the ill-defined ruling elite.

Much like American anti-woke warriors, Julien Rochedy, a former leader of the RN Youth, has decried “anti-white racism” and the triumph of “ideological feminism” in universities, media, and politics, while calling to “rebuild bonds of brotherhood and power among men.” Rochedy has teamed up with Papacito, one of France’s most notorious influencers, who spews a steady stream of misogynistic, homophobic and racist commentary on social media. Papacito, who calls himself “king of the Visigoths,” appears on his Burger Ring podcast with machine guns in hand. He joined fellow masculinist Raptor Dissident to call for nationalists to fight the “decline of the West” and simulated the murder of a leftwing member of the National Assembly on YouTube (which subsequently closed his account).

Called a “facho” — slang for fascist — by his critics, Papacito is a prominent figure in the French “masculinist” subculture. Better known as the “manosphere” in the United States and Britain, masculinism is a diffuse ideology that alleges that men are oppressed in a “feminized” society and need to reassert their “virility” and “natural” superiority.

Seen as a reaction to feminism and women’s social and legal gains of the past 50 years, masculinism posits a “crisis of masculinity” in which men and boys have fallen behind women and girls in education and the job market, and have been sexually emasculated.

Its adherents run the gamut from relatively moderate “men’s rights activists” motivated by alleged bias in child-custody cases, and bodybuilding coaches like Tibo InShape, to “pick-up artists” who instruct men to be sexually aggressive and “incels” (involuntary celibates) who have instigated murderous attacks on women because they feel romantically rejected. Indeed, last year a foiled attack by an 18-year-old incel was referred to French anti-terrorist authorities.

Although the vast majority of French citizens support the struggle against sexism (according to the French government’s High Council for the Equality of Women and Men), 23 percent of French men, mostly on the far right, adhere to what it calls “hostile sexism.” Another 27 percent support traditional gender roles, which it deems “paternalistic sexism.” And the trend is ominous: according to a recent poll, 64 percent of teenage boys identify with the right in stark contrast to the 53 percent of girls who identify with the left. International surveys suggest that Gen Z men (ages 14-29) are at least twice as likely as baby boomers to believe that wives should obey husbands or that women should never initiate sex.

Masculinist influencers keep the drums beating. Social media types including Stéphane Édouard, Alex Hitchens and BryanForReal have built followings as “seduction coaches.” Édouard, with 338,000 YouTube followers, has spoken of “training women like a horse,” while Hitchens, with 660,000 TikTok subscribers, has counseled men to punish wives and girlfriends for “stupid” behavior.

Édouard has collaborated with the leading female face of French masculinism, Thaïs d’Escufon, a 26-year-old “tradwife” advocate who laments the purported global decline in testosterone and the “devirilization of France and Europe.” A former spokesperson for Génération Identitaire, a rightwing group banned by the government in 2021, she has raged against the “deadly peril of migration” and called for the “reconquest” of France.

The language of “reconquest” is echoed by far-right politician Éric Zemour. Zemour, whose 2006 manifesto The First Sex was a patriarchal rejoinder to Simone de Beauvoir’s influential 1949 feminist book The Second Sex, has been equally at home in the commentariat and politics. A frequent guest on right-wing channel CNews, he has spoken of “a war of extermination against heterosexual white males,” peddled the “great replacement” theory that nonwhite Muslims are replacing white Europeans, and argued that French women’s duty is to produce white babies. In 2021, he founded the Reconquête party — to the right of the RN — winning 1 in 11 male votes in the first round of the 2022 presidential elections.

Like Rochedy and Zemour, Alain Soral has cast himself as an intellectual leader of French masculinism and far-right politics. In his book, Toward Feminization: Analysis of an Anti-Democratic Plot, he attacked the “totalitarianism of feminism” and has argued that because of biological differences men are superior. Soral has been convicted of inciting antisemitic and homophobic hatred, first fleeing to Switzerland in 2019 and then to Russia this March.

Masculinism in its many permutations has both influenced the French far right and drawn a significant number of young men and other voters to the National Rally and Reconquête. However, Marine Le Pen, with an eye to expending her reach among more traditional conservatives, has worked hard to “de-demonize” the more overtly racist and sexist party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The RN has abandoned its calls for France to leave the EU and repudiated her father’s antisemitism, couching her support for Israel and for women in anti-Islamist rhetoric. 

Bardella, the 31-year-old immigrant’s son with 2.3 million TikTok followers who will stand in as head of the RN if Marine Le Pen’s embezzlement conviction is not overturned on appeal, has said he will “unswervingly guarantee every girl and woman in France her rights and freedoms.” Yet the party has opposed both tougher penalties for sexual harassment and violence, and efforts to reduce job and pay discrimination against women.  

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For young men struggling in a harsh job market and inclined to see women as competitors, masculinists who identify feminism as a reason for their problems and politicians who advocate traditional gender roles have made the right seem like their natural home. As Stéphanie Lamy, a French feminist and author of the 2024 book, The Masculinist Terror, said: “It costs less for a candidate to promise middle- and working-class men that they will regain control over ‘their women,’ than to actually improve their material conditions.”