Adieu

The France you know and love is gone... forever.

Of all the injustices and crises in the world today, there are none that distress me more than the terminal decline of the European continent. What was once a super-continental amalgamation of proud civilizations such as the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Gallic that dictated the destinies of every corner of the globe has now regressed into essentially a peninsula of mass tourism, decaying cities, and geopolitical irrelevance. Exponentially surpassed by rapid technological innovation from China and the United States, economically squeezed by aggressive blackmail from rogue states Russia and Iran whose weaponization of global energy threatens to sink European industry, and flooded with foreigners hostile to the very concept of Western civilization, Europe today is little more than one crisis and tragedy after another. I also have several friends in Europe who by and large share my disgust with their once-proud civilization’s collapse.

It is exactly because, even as a proud American, I love so much about Europe I have been appalled by the shocking and senseless violence of the past several weeks in France—violence that has spread across Europe, even all the way to tiny Albania. What started as a movement of high school students angry about underfunded schools and teacher shortages quickly regressed into the most destructive rerun since 1968 of the famed French tradition of never allowing one’s complaints to be expressed peacefully. Rather than delve into the details of the scale of the violence, which would honestly depress both you and me, and potentially make you stop reading, I find it more useful to get to the bottom of what exactly has gone so badly wrong.

I, for one, try not to succumb to the most extreme conspiracy theories, most of which usually devolve into the antisemitic trope of some kind of Jewish conspiracy of mass migration—never mind that a major portion of these new, shall we say, arrivals carry antisemitic opinions themselves. And while there undoubtedly remain concerns about France’s un-westernized minority population, I believe the bigger immediate crisis lies in the country’s equally toxic domestic politics.

On the one hand, you have lame-duck president Emmanuel Macron, a man who once promised a national revival but whose incompetence has instead accelerated France’s decline. Before a televised address on Sunday, Macron had spent the past several weeks jet-setting to international conferences, attending car shows with exhibitions of a far lower gear than their American Chinese counterparts, and most woefully of all, enjoying a Celine Dion concert. Apparently, while Macron may prefer to fiddle in the naïve expectation that his heart (and his country) will go on, Paris is burning and France is sinking faster than the Titanic. And somehow, despite everything, Emmanuel Macron still finds time and money, money France doesn’t have, for… Ukraine. If the French President devoted even one-tenth of the time, money, and effort for France as he has devoted for Ukraine, perhaps he wouldn’t be suffering from public favorability barely higher than Diddy Combs.

While Emmanuel Macron may be a passive observer, there are other, darker factions of French politics whose role in the violence is far more corrosive and sinister than that of the president.

French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu (yes, France has both a president and a prime minister, with the president more powerful) blamed “an insurrectionary plan led by far-left and ultra-left fringe groups.” And the public agrees. According to one survey, 55% of respondents claimed that the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party was responsible for orchestrating student unrest. To get a good picture of LFI, a political party led by serial political arsonist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, their core platform to fix France’s chronic economic problems is to simply… cancel the nation’s debt. And while Mélenchon, a closeted antisemite, may be more a communist than an Islamist, the support is an ideal vehicle for the poisonous Red-Green Alliance, a deeply subversive tactical arrangement between secular leftists and ultra-conservative Islamists with the shared goal of dismantling Western society from within.

So odds are that yes, the ongoing riots are not merely another round of Gallic cantankerousness but a systemic endeavor by dangerous extremists, both with European and non-European backgrounds to erase any legacy of Western civilization.

As an adherent of the Realist School of International Relations, I firmly believe France, and Europe as a whole, are entirely irrelevant in the great game of geopolitics. I also believe that there is no hope left for France as a nation. Whatever romantic or idyllic image you once held of France, or especially Paris, best be erased from your memory. I know this message will hurt for any Francophiles (and I know who you are) reading my newsletter, the France you know and love is just gone and will never return. Because this is what Paris looks like today. Over the next 50 years, there may no longer be any France, even as a legal entity, left at all. Even as someone with no distinct attachment or longing for French culture, this collapse truly breaks my heart, and it should yours as well. From now on, I see little point in writing about that country at all, because there soon won’t be anything left.