France: A Republic in Ruins

By Bruce Bawer

It was five years ago this November that I wrote here about Éric Zemmour, whose potential candidacy for president of France (he officially kicked off his campaign on November 30) was sending shivers of terror throughout the Gallic political establishment. Well-known as an author, columnist, and TV talking head, Zemmour hated France’s reckless immigration policy, hated the French media (because it hated France), hated the EU, and hated feminism. Critics compared him to Trump: his intense patriotism was unseemly, his pronouncements too blunt, his disregard for the political establishment just plain scandaleux. And they savaged his 2014 bestseller Le Suicide français, which is now, finally, available in English.

What to say about The Suicide of France? Tolstoy famously wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Similarly, every Western country is making its journey to Islamization by a somewhat different route. Each, after all, has had its own distinctive traditions to violate, its own turning points at which the wrong choices were made, its own elections at which a brave soul who might have turned things around lost to a hack. So it is with France. Zemmour’s book is quite specifically not about Europe’s self-slaughter, but France’s.

In his foreword, the translator, Nathan Pinkoski, describes The Suicide of France as “the book that broke the spell of French progressivism.” The official story of modern France, disseminated in schools, movies, and the news media, is that the events of May 1968, when privileged, bubbleheaded youth took to the barricades, began a long march “in the right direction: towards liberty, equality, and fraternity; towards racial and sexual diversity, tolerance, and unity; towards a republic more sensitive to ever-expanding human rights; towards a more prosperous, safer nation that was part of a peaceful Europe.”

Not in Zemmour’s view. In truth, he warned, post-1968 France was engaged in an act of gradual self-annihilation. When order was restored after the disruptions of the soixante-huitards, he observes, “The State was saved, but not Society. No one noticed….The France that emerged from May ’68 would herald the revenge of the oligarchs over the people, of internationalism over nations, of the new feudal lords over the State, of the Girondins over the Jacobins, of judges over the law, of femininity over virility.”

At first Zemmour was almost universally derided for making this argument. But more and more, he’s been embraced as a truth-teller. For him, the key to the tragedy of modern France was the rejection of the legacy of Charles de Gaulle, after his death in 1970, by “the rising countercultural elite,” who preferred multiculturalism to the “traditional structures” of France, to its “charm and genius,” to “all the things that had made France great.”

Yes, France’s neighbors are undergoing a similar decline. But France, contends Zemmour, is going to hell faster: “France is the sick man of Europe….France is frightening; France is frightening herself. France is becoming less and less lovable; France no longer loves herself.” Yes, it still looks pretty from a distance. But “the soul of the place has vanished.”

Many of the specifics that Zemmour adduces here will be unfamiliar to most English-speaking readers. For instance, long before Obama- and Biden-appointed judges in the United States began according special treatment to felons from minority groups, a certain subset of French magistrates – whom Zemmour calls “Red Judges” – “had forged a theory and practice of revolutionary justice” that transformed the court system into “the instrument of class struggle and revolution,” protecting “the weak, the poor, the young, the foreign, because they are victims of society, even when they are guilty,” and punishing the well-off even when innocent. This new concept of justice was first exhibited prominently in the so-called Bruay-en-Artois case, in which the 1972 murder of a miner’s teenage daughter made national headlines.

Then there’s homosexuality. It’s not that Zemmour is anti-gay. He’s anti-openly gay. He praises gays who, after the arrival of gay rights, “kept to the old ways of discretion” (i.e., those who stayed in the closet, living in fear) and singles out for condemnation the lyrics of a 1972 Charles Aznavour song, “Comme ils disent,” which, he maintains, has for forty years served as an anthem of liberation, a tribute to the breaking of taboos, a “panegyric for difference and tolerance, for boys who have nothing to apologize for, because nature alone is responsible if I’m a homo, as they say.”

While reviling gay openness, however, Zemmour praises what he calls “the great tradition of French homosexuality”: men who, following the noble example of ancient Greece and Rome, married in order to produce children while indulging on the side their “taste for boys.” (Note that he says “boys,” not “men.”) “The 1970s,” he gripes, “had turned everything upside down. Once, sex was a game, a pleasure; now, it became an identity. Marriage was no longer an institution but a love affair. Lovers told each other everything, hid nothing from each other; they couldn’t live a lie. Hypocrisy was described as bourgeois (as if the people acted any differently), the better to discredit it.” Who but a Frenchman could come up with such stuff?

Also on the list of Zemmour’s bêtes noires are “the Anglo-Saxons,” whom Frenchmen on both the left and right have long made a habit of blaming for France’s problems. In one chapter, Zemmour notes approvingly that Georges Pompidou (prime minister, 1962-8; president, 1969-74) “wanted to make modern art the spearhead of the cultural battle that France dared to wage against the American steamroller” in order to prevent “French youth [from] enthusiastically imbibing the cultural codes of the Hollywood machine,” and that Pompidou also barred the Rolling Stones – “these young drug-addled English” – from La Belle Republique “so as not to expose French youth to the bad example set by the Anglo-Saxons.”

He actually devotes a whole chapter to Dallas, the 1980s soap opera. “There was something of Balzac in Dallas,” he claims, “with its dark characters, cynicism, Machiavellianism, and violence, with greed and money as a means of dominating men and possessing women.” The series, he laments, “proved to be a formidable weapon for colonizing minds….In France, parents called their children Sue Ellen, Pamela, or even JR.”

And Dallas is only the tip of the iceberg: Zemmour hardly misses anything American to complain about, from Halloween to McDonalds (“Much to the surprise of the American bosses themselves, France became the biggest consumer of McDonald’s after America”). He even digs back into history to gripe about the earlier introduction into France of such toxic American products as “chewing gum, Coca-Cola, rock and roll, and Hollywood [films].” It’s almost surprising that he doesn’t blame the U.S. for liberating France from the Nazis.

I opened The Suicide of France expecting to read about Islamization, but there’s less about that here than there is about Americanization, which he seems to consider the greatest of evils. He speaks harshly about “the fascination of our elites with America.” At times he appears to be even more critical of the U.S. than of the USSR. (In its war with Afghanistan, he insists, the Soviet Union “was not in the vanguard of communist totalitarianism, fighting the West; it was in the vanguard of the West, fighting the new Islamic totalitarianism. America wouldn’t understand this until September 11, 2001.” He quotes with admiration a speech in which Pompidou complained that “Anglo-Saxon society” is “about money, it’s oligarchic, it’s contemptuous of the lowly, and at least as conservative as our own….It has enormous, inhuman, and unacceptable flaws. It is in full decay.”

Of course Zemmour’s problem with America – and this is the case with almost all French intellectuals – is that it’s a superpower and France isn’t, and that few people outside of France recognize just what an injustice this is. Indeed, a reverence for France and for all things distinctively French is at the heart of this book. Zemmour, savaged for being a conservative, even describes Sartre, that vile Communist, as a “great man.” “With him,” laments Zemmour, “the great figure of the French intellectual, born two centuries earlier with Voltaire and Rousseau, passed away.” Good riddance.

Each chapter of this book introduces a new topic about which Zemmour has a punchy, unambiguous take on some aspect of modern France’s dive. Abortion rights. Airbus. Educational “reform.” The launch of the TV channel Canal+, which, inspired by America’s HBO, was originally supposed to provide high culture to a sophisticated minority but ended up delivering dreck to lowbrows. The founding of the organization SOS Racisme. In a chapter entitled “Au revoir, les enfants” (the title is borrowed, needless to say, from that of Louis Malle’s 1987 film), he criticizes the reduction of the history of World War II to the Holocaust and in turn to “the murder of Jewish children.” Perhaps Zemmour has a legitimate point to make here, but his trademark stridency makes it sound nothing less than chilling.

Along the way, Zemmour tosses off a litany of names that the typical American reader will not recognize, alludes to details of various French elections that cannot possibly be familiar to any general reader outside of France, and rattles off the acronyms of political parties: RPR, UMP, UDF, PCF. (Pinkoski should have added a glossary for us ignorant, deplorable Anglo-Saxons.) And he proffers bon mots that only a Frenchman could have come up with: “Debates are like women: the best ones are the ones you don’t have.”

And then, finally, he gets around to Muslims – for whom, in France as elsewhere, the urban elites rolled out the red carpet to demonstrate their virtue, even as the rapidly changing demography made the provincial natives feel increasingly like aliens in their own country. “In less than a decade,” Zemmour writes, “French soccer became the soccer of the French banlieues. The fierce young players no longer respect their coaches or trainers. They only accept authority abroad, in English, Italian, or German clubs, as if it were not authority itself that was the problem, but France. Islam began to appear in the locker rooms; players started to shower in shorts out of modesty and demand halal food. This greatly surprised the foreign players from South America, for example, who were the only ones who dared to rebel against the proselytism of the most zealous Muslims.”

There’s more on Islam, but not as much as one might expect. Zemmour’s eyes are almost always not on the banlieues but on France itself – la belle France, la grande Republique. He loves de Gaulle. He loves Napoleon. Why? La gloire de la France, dummy. Some people will tell you that the French Revolution was a holy nightmare and that French history since then has been ridiculous – two monarchies, two empires, five republics, and a partridge in a pear tree. Not Zemmour. He reveres the revolution of 1789 (and, I guess, the other two as well), takes seriously the uniquely French obsession with that tired concept, the glory of the motherland, cherishes the French concept of the sacredness of the State.

In America, as he points out, suspicion of government is encouraged, inbred: to trust one’s rulers blindly is regarded as the very height of folly and a threat to freedom. In France, by contrast, the State is loved and respected. The State, indeed, is us, devoted by definition to our welfare and determined to do whatever is in our best interests. What outrages Zemmour is that this is all a thing of the past: in the aftermath of de Gaulle, the State has ceased to do its job – in fact, it “has turned against the French, with the taxman robbing them and the justice system looking on with the loving eyes of Chimène at the predators from across the Mediterranean who rob them, pillage them, rape their daughters, and kill their sons.”

Chimène, by the way, is the heroine of Corneille’s 17th-century play Le Cid. Yes, this book is very French, full of such flourishes. I’ve noted the widespread view of Zemmour as France’s version of Trump, but the idea of a French Trump, when you really think about it, just doesn’t even begin to compute. Zemmour may be perceived as a radical in his country, but like so many mainstream French authors and politicians, he has a profoundly romantic idea of France, fiercely embracing the illusion that it ever was in living memory an important country and that it is, or deserves to be, a more highly regarded and influential world power than it is.

Still, this is a terrifically engaging book, fun and formidable and full of fight, by turns preposterous and perceptive, maddening and thought-provoking. It’s frequently reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s 1957 book Mythologies, a collection of fifty-three essays the most memorable of which – with titles like “Wine and Milk” and “Steak and Chips” – seek deeper meaning in sundry aspects of French culture.

Above all, The Suicide of France serves as a reminder that France is very much a world unto itself, a country that has given us wonderful things (from Proust, Renoir, and Ravel to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Chanel No. 5, and boeuf bourguignon) but that, in its people’s proclivity toward monstrous vanity and egotism and delusions of grandeur, will always leave us scratching our heads and sensing, in our heart of hearts, that the whole place is, in the final analysis, kind of silly. None of which makes it pleasant to know that the parade of fools who have succeeded de Gaulle have arranged to hand the place over to barbarians.

First  published in Front Page Magazine