France’s new minister of culture has promised to put an end to the creeping cancel culture that is threatening the country. ‘Today wokeism has become a policy of censorship,’ said Rachida Dati, who was appointed to her post last month. ‘I am in favour of the freedom of art, the freedom of creation, and I am not in favour of censorship’.

She explained that she will launch her campaign next week, summoning the great and the good of the cultural world to ‘ensure that we support creative freedom and do not support these new censors.’

Dati might have had in mind the 1,200 poets, editors, publishers, booksellers and actors, who recently signed a petition demanding the head of Sylvain Tesson, a celebrated travel writer. They were upset that he had been appointed the patron of a poetry event, judging him a far-right reactionary and every other leftist trope that has come to characterise the censorious age. The same signatories accused Emmanuel Macron of running an administration, ‘closer than ever to the far right.’

Dati – who served as Minister of Justice in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government a decade and a half ago – made her remarks in an interview on CNews. That in itself will unhinge the hysterical element of the French left, who regard CNews as – you’ve guessed it – far-right. They are in a minority. The broadcaster is booming and is set to become the most popular news channel in France this year.

The left-wing newspaper Liberation – which published the letter from the 1,200 censors – is particularly aghast at the popularity of CNews, and its sister radio station, Europe 1. It recently described their viewers figures as ‘worryingly high’, wailing that it was ‘a sign that their far-right line is finding an audience’.

Dati’s interview on CNews was conducted by Sonia Mabrouk, one of the broadcaster’s most prominent journalists. She is of Tunisian heritage, and Dati was born to an Algerian mother and a Moroccan father. Both are Muslims.

They are a multicultural success story, but not in the eyes of many on the left.

They despise the pair for their diversity, ideological not ethnic. Both women refuse to be confined within the narrow parameters imposed on people of their background by the French left. They don’t regard themselves as ‘victims’ or ‘oppressed’; they are French Muslims, proud of the Republic and their religion.

In another recent interview – with the newspaper Le Journal Du Dimanche – Dati reaffirmed her belief that public service broadcasting has a responsibility to give all ‘opinions that make up France’s diversity their rightful place’.

The editor of this newspaper is Geoffroy Lejeune, a regular commentator on CNews and a hate figure for the left. When he was appointed editor last year, most of the paper’s editorial staff went on strike because they regarded him as ‘far-right’. They were supported by more than 600 left-wing ‘personalities’ who signed a petition published in Le Monde, among them Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and Fabien Roussel, the leader of the Communist Party. Another petition was signed by scores of left-wing and centrist journalists.

The protest fell on deaf ears and in the six months since he has been editorLejeune has not turned the paper into a ‘far-right’ newspaper; it is more conservative in its content, and more diverse in its views.

It is this that drives so many on the French left wild. Since the 1968 generation came to cultural power in the early 1980s, their grip has been iron, particularly in public service broadcasting, known for its left-wing bent. But this generation is now fading from the cultural scene and a new generation is coming through.

They don’t see life through the same narrow lens; they see a France that intellectually has become cowardly and conformist – and worst of all, censorious.

The same is true politically. For the European elections in June the three right-wing parties in France – the National Rally, Reconquest and the Republicans – will be led by Millennials: Jordan Bardella, Marion Marechal and Francois-Xavier Bellamy. The left have no such figures to galvanise their young. The Socialist party is dominated by the middle-aged, and while 33-year-old Adrien Quatennens was once regarded as the successor to Jean-Luc Mélenchon in La France Insoumise, his reputation will forever be tarnished by his conviction in 2022 for domestic abuse.

The left in France are on the backfoot politically and culturally. Yet rather than embark on a profound examination of why this is, they are doubling down on the errors that have brought them to this point: intolerance, immaturity and insularity.

These traits are embodied in the increasingly common phrase within left-wing intellectual circles: the ‘extrême droitisation’ of France (literally the extreme right-isation), applied to anyone who is ideologically impure.

It was first heard a decade ago but has become more popular in the last couple of years as the left has become more illiberal and less influential. No one is safe: Macron, stand-up comics, protesting farmers, all have been denounced in recent months.

Examining this phenomenon last year, the distinguished philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff wrote in an essay that the left today is ‘characterised by ideological intransigence and an endless blindness to socio-political reality’. This he said was because while the right thought of their opponents as simply mistaken in their beliefs, the left ‘tends to see them as the incarnation of evil…to accuse them of being a representative or agent of the forces of evil is to exclude them from any debate’.

Taguieff, a left-wing activist himself decades ago, said that the left’s belief in its virtue is so entrenched that freedom of expression will only be secured by a ‘genuine intellectual counter-offensive in France’.

Positioning herself to lead this offensive is Rachida Dati, a Muslim woman of working-class origin. But this is one example of diversity the French left won’t be celebrating.