Emmanuel Macron spent Monday morning in the presence of the French rugby team and for once he spoke without ambiguity. ‘You are the best prepared team in the world,’ he told them at their training camp south of Paris. ‘You’ll be brothers in arms, fighting from the first minute to the last. The team is bigger than you, just as the nation is bigger than any one of us. Make us proud, make us happy.’

France are indeed the bookmakers’ favourites for the Rugby World Cup, the tournament they are hosting for the first time since 2007. On that occasion, they were similarly confident going into the competition, only to be beaten in the semi-final by Jonny Wilkinson’s England.

The French left, or at least LFI, will defend republican principles when it suits them

Unfortunately France’s preparations for the tournament, which kicks off on Friday evening when they take on New Zealand in Paris, have been overshadowed by a racism row. At the centre of the controversy is the lock forward Bastien Chalureau. In 2020 he was handed a six-month suspended sentence by a court in Toulouse after being convicted of assaulting two rugby players outside a nightclub, and of using racist language.

Chalureau has always denied the second charge. ‘It was a late-night brawl, nothing more,’ he said after his conviction. ‘So I’m extremely outraged that I’m being falsely accused of racism, and I don’t accept being branded a racist.’ He appealed that charge and his case will be heard in November.

Not long after his conviction, Chalureau was released by the Toulouse club he played for and he joined Montpellier in a bid to put his past behind him. Last year he won the French championship with his new club and he then earned his first cap for France against South Africa in November. Chalureau appeared in this year’s Six Nations’ match against Wales and in June he was named in France’s preliminary World Cup squad, playing in three of their summer warm-up matches, including twice against Scotland.

Chalureau failed to make the final 33-man squad for the tournament, but when France’s South African-born lock Paul Willemse was forced to withdraw with an injury last week, Chalureau was drafted in as his replacement. And that was when all hell broke loose.

Chalureau’s initial selection for France last year had drawn no comment, but the prospect of his presence in the World Cup provoked an angry response from La France Insoumise (LFI). Some MPs in the left-wing party have demanded his expulsion from the squad, among them François Piquemal, whose constituency is in Toulouse. He said he would raise the subject with Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the Minister of Sport. She, in turn, reminded LFI that the racism charge was under appeal and therefore ‘everyone must let justice do its job, respecting the presumption of innocence’.

Chalureau’s hand was among those shaken by Macron when he met the squad on Monday, and he was also filmed discussing the player with the France coach, Fabien Galthie. When asked what he thought about Chalureau’s inclusion, the president said:

It’s important – and I know Bastien is going to do this – that he expresses himself from the heart and tells the truth. Under no circumstances should that interfere with the preparation or the running of the show. It’s a team and we have to keep it together. I want them to think about one thing and one thing only: rugby, the game and winning.

Chalureau duly appeared before the media on Monday evening and he admitted to ‘mistakes’ in the past. ‘I’ve been in front of the judge, I’ve been sentenced for violence and I’ve paid for it,’ he said, tearfully. ‘I deny the racist remarks. I am not a racist.’

It’s not the first time in recent weeks that a high profile figure in France has denied he’s a bigot. Last month the rapper Médine insisted he was not anti-Semitic after posting a derogatory message on social media about the writer Rachel Khan, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors.

The accusations against Médine were brushed aside by LFI and the Green party, both of whom invited the rapper to their summer conferences. Mathilde Panot, the parliamentary leader of the LFI, said she was ‘honoured’ at the presence of Médine. Yes, she conceded, he had once made a controversial hand gesture known as a ‘quenelle’, said to be a derivative of the Nazi salute, but it was ‘at a time when he was unaware of the anti-Semitic nature of this gesture’. Khan, a former Socialist party activist, said it hurt her to ‘see the left no longer defending the republican principles that are theirs’.

This isn’t strictly true. The left, or at least LFI, will defend republican principles when it suits them. But they have become so consumed by identity politics, what the philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa describes as the ‘cultural Americanisation of the French Left’, that they are oblivious to their own hypocrisy.