The decision to charge Houellebecq has been criticized as a freedom of speech issue; and so, to an extent, it is. French law in that respect differs somewhat from English, but doubtless his lawyers will have hours of lucrative fun arguing over the difference between inciting people to do something unspeakable and simply warning that society is moving in a direction where something unspeakable is likely to happen. Nearly 60 years ago Enoch Powell was in the same position over dire prophecies he made in his so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech.

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But this prosecution of Houellebecq provokes concerns that go far beyond freedom of expression. In just over 30 years as a novelist writing mainly about the misery of bourgeois French life, he has lifted up a number of stones and allowed some pretty unsavory things to crawl out from under them. In no particular order these include sex tourism, paedophilia, mental illness, rampant narcissism, family breakdown, betrayal, social alienation, self-hatred, nihilism, prostitution and, inevitably, racism. But then anyone who understands what French society is really like will find none of this surprising. It is not the mark of a happy country when the two people most likely to end up competing in the final round of next year’s presidential elections are Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Years of decadence and failure under the Fifth Republic — conditions about which Houellebecq has written extensively in all his novels — have led to an embrace of one form of extremism or another as a means to counter or, at least, manage them. That, if you like, is the end product of the society about which Houellebecq has spent all these decades writing.

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If he is not allowed to be himself, to express what he feels, his natural powers of observation will be suppressed. No-one sensible can defend incitement, but was the novelist really inciting anyone in that 2022 interview? Was he not merely simply presenting another aspect of a deteriorating society, in which the people have failed themselves through their willful decadence and whose traditional political class has not even dared to try to treat the underlying problems? Houellebecq’s lawyers have on his behalf issued a statement in which it is claimed he feels manipulated and exploited by those to whom he gave the interview. Maybe he does, but he should have seen it coming. Again, this is not simply about free speech: it is about a creative artist having the permission to express the depths of his creativity in order accurately to reflect his society or, in this case, his fears for his society. If others have chosen to exploit that then it may be, as the statement also said, out of greed — Houellebecq is probably France’s greatest and most famous living novelist and therefore big box office — but it might just as plausibly be that they shared his fears, and saw no reason not to share them with a wider public. In the present unhappy state of France this is inevitable.

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But then French writers have often courted trouble for displaying radicalism or for perceived insult. Molière scandalized polite society with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Flaubert was rude about Norman peasants (and the middle class) in Bouvard et Pécuchet and quite shocking in Madame Bovary; Zola was prosecuted for criminal libel over J’Accuse; Céline was fascist but still one of the most glittering writers in the French canon. Houellebecq has long been in a distinguished Gallic tradition of saying the unsayable, but saying it beautifully; all that is shocking is that a feeble and gutless French state is once more trying to punish him for it.

I recall being in my office on a January morning in 2015, reading an article about Houellebecq in Le Figaro about his new novel, Soumission, published that day. The novel’s action was set seven years later at the 2022 presidential election. As usual, the two highest-scoring candidates in the first round contest the prize in the second: and Houellebecq imagines these to be Marine Le Pen and a fictional creation, Mohammed Ben Abbes, leader of the Muslim Fraternity. The leaders of the main parties, frozen out of the contest by their poor performances in the first round, meet to decide where to advise their voters to go. They agree that Mme Le Pen cannot possibly be allowed to win, and tell their followers to vote for Ben Abbes. He wins; France is Islamified. The anti-hero of the novel, a lecturer at the Sorbonne who, in true Houellebecqois style seems most attracted to his vocation because of the opportunity it gives him to sleep with his young female students, flees Paris for a time and wanders aimlessly around a country in ferment. Returning to his faculty — now part of the renamed Islamic University of Paris — he is welcomed back to his job by his (ethnically French, formerly Catholic) superior, who has himself converted to Islam and is very much going with the flow. He tells him Islam isn’t too bad, not least because he now had four wives, and the youngest is only fifteen.

Reading the Figaro interview, I looked up from my newspaper and saw something shocking happening on the television in the corner of my office. A news channel was relaying, live from Paris, the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The coincidence of this horrific event and the publication of Soumission was not lost on the French media in the succeeding days. Once more, Houellebecq had shown he was not only a great novelist but a great prophet. However, the controversy over that magnificent book continues to this day.

It is a book that takes us to the heart of Houellebecq, and reminds us why for the sake of France and for those who, like General de Gaulle, have a certain idea of France, he must be preserved and allowed free rein. He said at the time that he was not attacking Islam: he was attacking the so-called custodians of France’s glorious culture for being willing to abandon it, which he was convinced they were. He was attacking, in that regard, not merely the cynics and self-servers of the political class, but many French people themselves, who took their way of life and their freedoms for granted. It appears that, still, no lessons have been learned. With luck Houellebecq’s lawyers will see him safe: but what this climate of suppression will mean for the mood of France in the imminent presidential election one dreads to imagine.

The interior of Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, finished in the Twenties, literally resembled a cathedral with its soaring levels of concrete pillars and ribs. Even in the era of globalization, a powerful car industry centered in Germany and exporting to the world has been an enduring source of European prestige. So it is not entirely an exaggeration to say that the twilight of this car industry heralds a spiritual crisis for the continent. 

The reversal of fortunes has been swift and brutal, manifest in a wave of Chinese electric vehicles and hybrids now crashing over European trade barriers. As recently as 2021, just 1% of new cars sold in Europe came from Chinese brands; last month, one in every seven new cars did, despite EU tariffs of around 30% on Chinese EVs. The challenge could not have come at a worse time. Europe’s car makers have been crippled by the loss of Russian energy supplies, Trump’s tariffs, and the EU’s bungled efforts to phase out petrol engines. They are suffering an even worse mauling in the lucrative Chinese market. 

China has been the focal point of the car industry for decades; but until recently it was European marques selling their vehicles to the expanding Chinese middle class and bringing the profits back home. Volkswagen arrived there in the late Seventies as an auto-making god, teaching Chinese engineers the manufacturing standards that underpinned their own nascent industry. It would later hold the title of China’s top-selling brand for 25 years. Today, as VW undertakes a restructuring that threatens 100,000 jobs globally, it is partnering with Chinese brands to learn how to make the automobiles of the future. Some of those Chinese models may even be produced in its emptying German factories. Imagine if French wines were shouldered out of their own market by foreign upstarts; this gives some sense of the humiliation that will be entailed by VW making Chinese-designed cars in Saxony.

Embarrassed Europeans have typically blamed China’s export success on a sinister plot to deindustrialize Western countries by undercutting their manufacturers with heavily subsidized goods. As Rishi Sunak warned last month, Xi Jinping wants to “make the world dependent on China while China depends on no-one”. There is certainly some truth in this account, but it rests on a misleading image of China as a purveyor of cheap knock-offs. Sadly, the snobbery implied by the phrase “Temu Range Rover” — as the popular Jaecoo 7 has been nicknamed in Britain — has not been earned. Even if China cannot match the German mastery of the internal combustion engine, its car industry has bested the European one in innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial strategy.

The best illustration of this is BYD – an abbreviation of the pinyin name Biyadi – the Shenzhen-based firm which displaced VW as China’s largest brand in 2023, and which has since become the global leader in EVs and hybrids. Fifteen years ago, when BYD was seeking a toehold in the United States, a baby-faced Elon Musk dismissed the challenge to Tesla with a scoff: “have you seen their cars?” It has indeed been a long road for a company founded by the son of rice farmers in rural Anhui province, which started out in the Nineties making batteries for laptops and mobile phones. Yet Musk’s Silicon Valley approach to cars, focusing on a tiny range of products to serve everyone, has proved inferior to BYD’s strategy of challenging incumbents across a wide spectrum of vehicles, from city runabouts to monster pick-ups. 

As of this year, BYD has two models tailored to the European market. According to the company’s adviser for the region, these will answer peculiar conditions such as German Autobahns, Italian mountain roads, and British potholes. They look just like European cars, and deliberately so: BYD is offering something familiar for a lower price, along with an assortment of clever tech to dispel any residual uncertainty about buying a Chinese product. Who has not wished for a tiny vent to douse your smartphone with cool air while it charges wirelessly?

Like the Chinese auto industry at large, BYD rose through a combination of imitation, innovation, and shrewdly adapting itself to government programs at both national and city levels. Its earliest vehicles, not yet electric, were closely modeled on Japanese brands such as Toyota. It released the world’s first mass-market plug-in hybrid in 2008. Around the same time, the Chinese leadership began to throw its weight behind EVs in earnest, offering a range of subsidies for both producers and consumers. It had long shown an interest in developing homegrown “new energy” vehicles, which promised to provide China with a niche in the global market and to alleviate its dependence on imported oil. 

But academics Fengming Lu and Xiao Ma argue that China’s cities were the most important drivers of the industry. BYD entered partnerships with numerous municipal governments, beginning with Shenzhen and Changsha. These deals often proved hugely profitable for both parties. The company received favorable access to land, infrastructure, electricity and labor, in exchange for which it invested in local car-making plants and provided the cities with electric buses and taxis. BYD even opened a railway division to make the most of municipal transport programs. 

Private capital also played an important role. Stock markets allowed local governments to cash in on the shares they had acquired in EV makers and begin the investment cycle again. Venture capital funds, both Chinese and foreign, were crucial to the boom in EV start-ups that took place after 2015, with hundreds of entrepreneurs from the tech sector flooding into the industry. China thus ended up with an absurdly large number of carmakers. This intense competition did not just force companies to innovate, but encouraged brands like BYD to become export giants, exploiting less competitive EV markets overseas.  

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So BYD is not so much a creature of state subsidies as the product of a state-engineered process of Darwinian struggle. The central government used tools such as credit availability, tax incentives and influence over local government priorities to stimulate an explosion of private and municipal ventures, before tightening business conditions so that only the fittest could survive. Since the early part of this decade, China’s EV industry has been in this second phase of cutthroat consolidation. 

One reason that BYD has emerged as a victor is its high degree of vertical integration: rather than outsourcing the production of every last nut and bolt as most Western carmakers have done, it controls most of its supply chain. It has partnered with mining companies around the world to ensure access to crucial minerals such as lithium, which it processes in its own refineries. It develops and produces its own batteries, powertrains, semiconductors and software systems. Consequently, the company is protected against supply shocks, can respond swiftly to market demand, and is able to innovate across numerous domains. 

This all amounts to a humbling lesson for Europe, a continent which long viewed the clean energy transition as an opportunity to show that it can still shape history and determine its own destiny. Instead, the EU is scrabbling to build defenses against the tide of Chinese EVs. Decarbonization targets may be relaxed, and a “Made in Europe” drive is underway to limit state support to European suppliers. 

The situation in Britain is somewhat better or even worse, depending on your perspective. Its government has done little to protect a long-suffering domestic car industry, and its drivers have little sentimental attachment to national car marques, most of which are foreign-owned servants of the luxury market. Britain last year produced its lowest car output since 1952. The country is less threatened by China’s dominance because it has no pretense of even being in the race. Indeed, Chinese EV imports are integral to the Government’s goals of reaching Net Zero and bringing down inflation, since they are cheap and don’t produce CO2 emissions — at least, not after they leave the factory. And the policy is working: though BYD only began selling its cars here in 2023, it was Britain’s second-most-popular brand in September. Hence the irony of a Labour Party that longs to reverse Brexit insisting that the freedom to set its own EV tariffs is a “red line” in negotiations with Europe. 

Why was Europe’s mighty car industry blindsided by the challenge from China? According to historian and commentator Adam Tooze, one reason may simply be corporate greed. Tooze argues that European brands used the post-Covid supply shortages of the early 2020s as cover for a profit-maximizing strategy, making fewer cars and aiming them at the higher end of the market. The deeper causes, however, take us to the fundamentals of political economy. The Chinese state has been ruthless at building up the supply chains, energy security and industrial base needed to succeed in high-tech manufacturing, but it has been equally ruthless in using market competition to foster innovation. Europe, by contrast, has long neglected industrial strategy through a naive faith in global free trade, yet it still allowed its powerful legacy industries to squat over the political system in such a way that new players and technologies have been denied space to breathe. 

However, such bloodless explanations feel insufficient for a matter of deep significance to Europe’s history and identity. They do not pass the cathedral test. One can tell that Europe’s cars are long past their creative peak simply by looking at them: a mass of SUVs with different names but near identical appearances and dimensions, fat blobs in shades of white, silver and black. Gone is the chic elegance of the Citroën that inspired Barthes; gone is the cold, Teutonic glamour of the old Mercedes, the charisma of the red Alfa Romeo driven by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. The decline can be measured in the reaction of passers-by when a vintage car rolls along the street, with its elegant profile, purring engine and rich color palette: they stop, point, let out a spontaneous groan of appreciation. True, cars now accelerate faster than they once did, but the thrill is dampened by an optimization for comfort that gives the impression of being wrapped in cling film.

My neighbor, a professional mechanic, explains the problem concisely: “Old cars have character. Today they’re all made of plastic, and they all look the same.” Some of this is due to government regulation, and the sharing of designs in a heavily consolidated industry; but it also reflects artistic failure in the form of a herd-like pursuit of the average consumer. As a result, we are forced to seek distinction in utilitarian matters such as battery range, trunk space, and, of course, price. The erotics of form has been replaced by the fetish for technological trimmings that dominates YouTube’s vast catalog of car reviews: the voice assistants, the 540-degree parking cameras, the entertainment systems and cruise control settings. If cost, efficiency and gadgetry are what matter now, then it’s not obvious why European consumers should ignore the fruits of China’s booming auto industry, which does these things rather well.

Perhaps cars offer us a barometer of civilizational vitality. Even if automated production lines do not employ the millions they once did, the fact that cars have around 30,000 components and require extensive research and engineering skills makes them fundamental to any serious industrial nation. Developing countries are acutely aware of this, hence why so many of them long to have their own brands. The rise of the AfD amid the bitterness of Germany’s disintegrating automotive sector certainly carries a whiff of Untergang. As for China, the unique prestige of automobiles is undoubtedly a reason that its leaders put so much emphasis on beating the world at EVs. Its industry may be conquering the globe on the basis of efficiency and clever software, but it is still young. It may yet develop a poetry of its own.

The triggers may differ — schools in France and Belgium, housing in Spain and Portugal, the cost of living in Italy, corruption and a mixture of the above in Serbia — but the root is the same. These are the protests of a generation that believes it has been robbed of its future. It’s a conclusion that’s hard to argue with. The social contract its parents knew — work hard and you will, at the very least, secure a home, be able to support a family and be better off than those that came before you — has collapsed. For many young Europeans without inherited wealth, adulthood means drifting from one precarious job to the next, earning barely enough to cover the cost of rent and groceries, let alone start a family. That is, if they find work at all. Meanwhile, they have watched the institutions that were supposed to give them a start in life and cushion its blows — schools, universities, health and youth services — wither under austerity and privatization. 

There is no doubt that young people have overwhelmingly borne the brunt of the neoliberal policies pursued over the past decades. That neoliberalism has driven inequality to new heights is widely acknowledged; what is less often noticed is that this inequality is increasingly drawn along generational lines. The geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand recently shared some pretty extraordinary statistics on X regarding France: the over-60s — roughly a quarter of the population — hold around 60% of the nation’s wealth. They also receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government, in the form of pensions that, under the current system, are paid for by younger generations. This continuous bottom-up generational transfer of wealth is even more extraordinary when one considers that the average French retiree now has an income higher than the average worker.

Yet though the protesters often explicitly frame themselves in generational terms — most obviously Germany’s “Gen Z regelt” (which roughly translates as “Gen Z’s got this”) — their demands aren’t phrased as claims against the old. This is surely the right approach. Blaming the boomers would be a mistake. They simply had the good fortune to grow up in an era of full employment, affordable housing and decent pensions, and there is nothing scandalous about aging societies spending more on the old. Moreover, much of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority of boomers; not all older people live a luxurious life, of course. Ultimately, the problem is not that pensions are too high; it is that the young are being denied what their parents took for granted. The generational divide is simply how a decades-long class war from above is experienced by those who came of age after workers had already lost it, and who inherited a political-economic regime built to transfer wealth upwards. In Europe, that regime has been written into the institutional architecture itself — the euro, the Maastricht treaty, the fiscal rules — which systematically favors asset holders over wage earners, and established workers over new entrants. 

The mechanisms are well understood. A decade of quantitative easing inflated the property and financial assets held by the old while wages stagnated, locking the young out of home ownership. Labor market reforms — from Italy’s Treu package and Jobs Act to Germany’s Hartz laws and France’s El Khomri law — preserved the security of those already inside while consigning newcomers to a revolving door of temporary and increasingly precarious contracts in the name of “flexibility”. After 2010, austerity fell disproportionately on education, youth services and public investment. Existing pensions were largely shielded, while future ones were quietly cut. As a result, across Europe, government spending on older people has risen, while public investment has been gutted. Then came the pandemic, which cost Gen Z years of schooling, work and social life, followed by a surge in inflation, made worse by an energy shock that Europe’s leaders largely inflicted on themselves. 

As if that weren’t enough, the young are now being told to accept further cuts and deteriorating living conditions to make room for rearmament and an open-ended war — for which, it seems, there is always money. Just a few weeks ago, as French police were firing tear gas at teenagers, EU leaders tasked the Commission with finding another €70 billion for Ukraine in 2027, on top of the €45 billion already earmarked. The fiscal rules that were never relaxed for schools or hospitals are being bent for defense, through national escape clauses and joint borrowing for weapons procurement. And the young have noticed. They are told there is no money for their classrooms, while new billions are found for a war with no end in sight — a war that, as conscription returns to the European agenda, they may even be asked to fight. In many countries, young people are starting to explicitly link the cost-of-living crisis with the rearmament drive. 

The real question, then, is not why the young are revolting, but why it took them so long. The economic roots of these protests are undeniable. But are they the whole story? Most conservative commentators have focused instead on the presence of second-generation youths of Arab and African background, and on their leading role in the violence and looting, above all in France but also in Italy. For much of the Right, the riots simply confirm what it has been saying for years: that mass immigration has been an unmitigated disaster, filling European cities with a largely Muslim underclass that has no interest in integrating, and that, in the crudest version of this narrative, is cast as bent on destroying the very fabric of Western civilization, in some cases with the help of the “far-Left”. The demands of the overwhelmingly peaceful protests, meanwhile, go largely unheard. 

There is an irony here. The populist Right never tires of complaining that a “globalist establishment” has impoverished and deindustrialized Europe. Yet when young people take to the streets, sometimes violently, against that very establishment and the consequences of its policies, it cannot bring itself to believe that they might have genuine grievances. Instead, it instinctively assumes that someone must be pulling the strings: Islamists, Antifa, Mélenchon. 

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It is, of course, right to distinguish between the peaceful protests demanding economic reform and the rioting and looting that accompanied them. But are they really two entirely separate stories? There is no question that much of the looting, in France as in Italy, had a strong second-generation component drawn from the banlieues and the marginalized peripheries of Italian cities, with little discernible ideology behind it. Nor is there any point denying the costs of mass immigration, from public safety to the pressure on public services. Many of those involved in the violence were clearly acting out of opportunism. And the growth of separate communities of different social and religious backgrounds, often living in conditions of extreme exclusion, is clearly a social time bomb, one that has already done serious damage to social cohesion — and those on the Left who deny this reality are as blinkered as those on the Right who fixate on it at the exclusion of everything else. 

One might go further and argue that mass immigration has itself been part of the neoliberal social engineering of recent decades, not least by creating a reservoir of cheap labor. One might also argue that rioters running amok at peaceful demonstrations damage the protesters’ own cause, drowning out their demands and handing the security forces a pretext for a crackdown. There have even been claims that the French police deliberately allowed the destruction to happen in order to justify mass repression. 

These are all valid arguments. But they raise an obvious question: why do the protesters raging against the status quo not turn their anger on these immigrants and instead often march alongside them? Are they simply blinded by naïve Left-wing ideology? Or is something deeper at work? It is more likely that they experience their struggle primarily through a generational lens, one that cuts across ethnic, and to a certain degree class, lines. That seems far more convincing than the “islamo-gauchiste” theory, which holds that this cross-ethnic alliance is not spontaneous solidarity at all, but something engineered by Left-wing parties such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. That may hold to some degree in France, but it doesn’t hold in Italy, where there is no Italian LFI, no comparable alliance between the Left and Muslim voters, and yet the same mixed crowds appeared in the streets, as elsewhere.

Yet reducing the violence solely to its second-generation component is also misleading, and far too comforting. Young people of European background have taken part in it too. The crowds that recently rioted in Milan included kids with Italian-born parents alongside those from immigrant families. So we have to ask to what extent this violence is also a reaction to a system that offers no avenue for political change. This is not to justify it. Violence, in and of itself, leads nowhere emancipatory. But we cannot escape an uncomfortable fact: an increasingly authoritarian system that is actively committed to blocking any democratic systemic change, with no social intermediaries between power and the masses, and no forces capable of giving the revolt a direction and a political content, of placing it under the guiding idea of social emancipation, is bound to breed violence. And then there is the merciless generational arithmetic: the young are a minority in every European society. They cannot win elections on a generational platform.

But the violence — and especially the wanton looting — also expresses a deeper malaise, one that goes beyond economics. It reflects the nihilistic void into which Western societies have sunk: when individualism, purposelessness, anxiety and despair become the norm, we shouldn’t be surprised if the result is collective depression, or rage. At a time of moral decay at all levels of Western societies, particularly among its political and corporate elites, who systematically display little respect for either human life or (other people’s) property, is not a little delusional to expect the youngest and most disadvantaged to hold themselves to a higher moral standard than their rulers?

Writing about the riots in England in 2011, the German social psychologist Götz Eisenberg described the young as the “surplus generation” — no longer needed by society, its labor expendable, deprived of the chance to build an independent life through its own efforts, yet constantly dazzled by the promise of self-realization through consumption, a state that is increasingly beyond its reach. Fifteen years on, his diagnosis is more relevant than ever — and indeed Britain remains a social powder keg that could once again explode at any moment. Violence is no solution to social problems, but neither does it arise in a vacuum. Where political and economic power has become anonymous, anger turns on the nearest symbols, such as a Louis Vuitton boutique. A shop window can be smashed; financial markets and austerity can’t.

That said, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming the protestors represent an entire generation. The same generation that fills the streets also votes, in growing numbers, for the anti-immigration Right. In France’s 2024 election, a third of under-25s backed the Rassemblement National; in Germany last year, more than a quarter of young men voted AfD. The anger at the establishment is the same but it is channeled in the opposite political direction. The question is whether European politicians, whether incumbents or its “populist” challengers, have any real answers.

Addressing the protesters’ grievances would require systemic change: greater public investment in education and housing, higher wages, more secure jobs, economic redistribution (focused on the real wealth hoarders, not pensioners in general), and a rational energy policy, which would itself demand a radical shift in geopolitical paradigm. However, it’s hard to see how any of this could be achieved within the current EU-Nato architecture, which no major party seems prepared to challenge. Meanwhile, the idea that the problem of alienated second-generation youth can be solved through even more heavy-handed repression — or perhaps even “remigration” — is little more than a fantasy.

The question, then, is whether the young people of Europe can replicate what happened in Serbia. That is a country that faces much the same demographics — an aging and shrinking population — yet its student movement managed to build a platform that drew support across generations, partly by shunning traditional ideology and unifying under a simple, non-partisan message for change. It’s ironic that today this seems harder to achieve in the “liberal-democratic” West than in a country routinely described as authoritarian.

France is in the grip of social breakdown, with financial chaos looming. The urgent question now is: could it spread? A leading expert on Europe and its discontents, Wolfgang Münchau explores how the next debt crisis might start — and how it could both destroy the eurozone and scar Britain’s economy. 

***

“The Irish say they are not Greece. The Portuguese say they are not Irish. The Spanish finance minister said last week that Spain is not Portugal.” I wrote these words in the Financial Times over 15 years ago, as the eurozone sovereign-debt crisis raged. Fast forward to today, and the big news is that Belgians are not French. Expect, soon enough, to hear that Italians are not Belgian. With all eyes currently on France, on the violence, the protests, and the rising possibility of a genuine financial crisis, the key question now is how such a crisis might spread.

The first eurozone country in the firing line today is Belgium. Like the French, the Belgians allowed their budget deficit to rise, and the national debt to soar. To be fair, the country’s leaders are aware of the risks. To quote Bart De Wever, Belgium’s prime minister and one of Europe’s smarter leaders: “We absolutely must distance ourselves from the French situation to prevent it from spreading to us.” He might as well be telling us that “Belgians are not French”.

In the event, I worry De Wever will have less control over the situation than he thinks. That’s partly because Belgium’s debt-to-GDP ratio — at 108% — is so high. But also because the other two countries in the danger zone are France and Italy: respectively the EU’s second and third-largest economies, and two of the most indebted countries in the bloc.

At the moment, French costs on 10-year bonds is over 5%, with the Italian rates a little lower. To be clear, neither of these rates are in crisis territory just yet — but they are getting closer. Once interest rates exceed a certain threshold, a doom loop sets in. Higher interest rates raise debt servicing costs, which drives up the budget deficit, which drives up borrowing, and which again drives up interest rates.

No one can tell when, exactly, a crisis might arrive: it depends on the country and its politics. Yet once investors conclude that a country cannot conceivably afford to pay the debt, interest rates will surely start to jump, the mechanism through which practically every financial crisis plays out. We are in the phase where everybody still pretends that the situation is under control, and that all that needs to happen is for governments to save a bit of money here and there. In practice, though, ministers of all stripes find this hard.

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Just recall that France is in its current mess because of Emmanuel Macron. Who could have predicted that his decade-long presidency would end with his country in flames, and with a financial crisis looming? Yet the policies Macron pursued earlier in his tenure nonetheless led him here. The austerity imposed by his government bred more violence, while cuts in public investment deterred private investors.

Looking at the presidential candidates in France today ahead of the election next April, I struggle to see how the country will end up with a government that succeeds in doing all of the following: bringing the budget deficit under control; avoiding social unrest; complying with European rules; and staying in the eurozone. Something has to give here.

Nobody, not even leading French candidate Marine Le Pen, wants to quit the eurozone. Nor, for that matter, does Jean-Luc Mélenchon. If you thought Brexit was disruptive, a euro exit would be on a different order of magnitude. Yet what many Europeans, including politicians, don’t understand is the relationship between debt and membership of the eurozone. Put simply: you can’t default on your debt and expect to keep the euro. Debt serves as collateral for the money the banking system gets from the ECB. If a country defaults on its debt, the banking system inevitably freezes up.

Given these fundamentals, how might a eurozone crisis actually play out? Le Pen, even more likely to win the presidency now that Paris is burning, is probably crucial here. One option is that, notwithstanding her rhetorical largesse on the campaign trail, she decides to impose austerity once in the Élysée. Her popularity ratings would soon slump, and would likely not recover. You might think this is totally irrational, but we saw this pattern repeat itself over and over again during the eurozone crisis.

Alternatively, Le Pen might conclude that France cannot service its debt if interest rates stay high. She could therefore ask the European Central Bank for a bailout. If the ECB refused — helping France would drive inflation up for everyone — a President Le Pen might instruct her finance minister to default on a payment to bondholders.

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In the short-term, at least, there are advantages to such an approach. First, it would free Le Pen up to default on more foreign debtors. That, in turn, could allow her to impose less austerity than she might otherwise have had to. France also would benefit from lower debt-servicing costs, and a more competitive exchange rate, making French companies more competitive against the rest of the world. And perhaps most importantly, France will have its own central bank, one able to set interest rates suited to the country’s economy, and which could be relied upon to act as a backstop in a crisis.

All the same, France defaulting on its debt would likely lead to a French exit from the euro. Should we ever get to this point, the ensuing financial crisis would dwarf everything we have ever experienced. Financial institutions would fail all over the world. For its part, the eurozone might not survive, as other countries default on their debts and crash out in turn. Ironically, one of the European countries most affected in this scenario would be the UK. Despite not being a member of the EU, let alone the eurozone, Britain’s capital market would be deeply vulnerable to chaos across the Channel.

You might well wonder why anyone in their right mind would choose this scenario. The problem is that we’d only get to the implosion of the European financial system after several other things happened first. No one would choose it from a menu.

I’m not saying that there’s no way out. But none of the alternatives are obvious or easy. Leaving the eurozone might well end up being the easiest option, especially if you don’t care about the consequences for the rest of the world.

Having spent a good part of my career writing about the eurozone’s financial crisis, and its ongoing economic decline, I concluded that the one big mistake the EU committed was to choose a monetary union without installing the necessary political infrastructure first: a fiscal union, a single capital market, and a single sovereign debt instrument. The introduction of the euro was the crowning achievement of Europe’s political integration in the Eighties and Nineties. Then it stopped.

This is not an argument about the pros and cons of European integration as such. If you oppose political integration, you should not join the euro. The UK’s opposition to the euro was internally coherent. Poland is an example of a country that would not dream of leaving the EU, but it, too, chose not to join the euro. But what we’ve learned in the last 15 years is that if you join a single currency, you don’t want to stop there; you must go all the way. This is where the bloc went wrong. A half-way house of an unfinished monetary union is unsustainable. By unsustainable, I don’t mean bad. Just that either it’ll be made sustainable — or it’ll end.

Some people argue that political integration may yet happen. I fear this is wishful thinking. The politics of the EU has been moving away from political integration for quite some time; the euro crisis was probably the last moment when a fiscal union could have been realistically agreed. Back then, the far-Right was not yet a political force in most countries, while Germany’s economy was strong enough to theoretically accept a closer union. The fact that, even then, Angela Merkel said nein is telling — certainly, in its newly weakened state, none of Germany’s bickering political parties even mention EU integration today.

Superficially, the euro crisis ended when the ECB supported national bond markets through quantitative easing. But the underlying problem of economic divergence between member states was never really resolved, even as the solutions were only designed for small economies. So, if you tell me that France is not Greece, I’d happily agree — except to add that it’s worse.

Vance, in short, is rediscovering political gravity. And yet he remains the Right’s most viable and promising leader, and will likely retain that status regardless of what happens in November 2026 — or even 2028. Post-Trump, he is the only figure who can hold together a Republican Party that could otherwise easily splinter into four or five mutually suspicious factions. He has maintained bridges to each of these factions, and has learned to address himself acutely to the one anxiety all share, a fear that recently found a name — France.

France functions for America’s various conservative factions as a kind of crystal ball. In the looting, arson, and rioting that tore through major French cities over the past fortnight, America’s conservative groupings see their own future: that is, unless mass migration is halted and, at least to some extent, reversed. In France, they see the tipping point already past. So many culturally incompatible newcomers have piled on, in their telling, that society, properly speaking, is no more. What remains is an agglomeration of strangers, arrayed now in hostility, now in cold peace.

Several years’ worth of public and private conversations with Vance have convinced me that this is his central animating cause, the source of both his fears and his ambitions. The various factions on the Right, he feels, might have their disagreements — among themselves and with the Left — over issues ranging from tech policy to social welfare to war and peace. But all those other discussions must take second place to the complex of issues around immigration, assimilation, demography, and social cohesion.

For Vance, those other disagreements determine the shape of the polity — whereas the migration issue determines whether Americans have a polity at all. As he has repeatedly told me, it’s impossible to build up social solidarity “if society is always in flux”.

Turmoil in France has served as a foil for American statesmen going back to the two nations’ launch as twin revolutionary republics founded on Enlightenment ideals. Among the founding generation, Thomas Jefferson went furthest in championing the French revolutionary cause. As he saw it, the Jacobins had unleashed in the Old World the same spirit that had inspired American colonists: the spirit of a freedom that could no longer accept the yoke of kings and priests.

Yes, Jefferson wrote in a 1793 letter, the French Revolution had had its excesses: most notably, the killing of “guilty persons” without trial (how had they been judged guilty without trial? Jefferson didn’t say). But these excesses were par for the course in a “struggle which was necessary”. So necessary, in fact, that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated”, with only “an Adam and Eve left in every country”.

Others of Jefferson’s generation disagreed. Alexander Hamilton, speaking for the conservative Federalists, followed news of the Reign of Terror with great distress. Directly contradicting Jefferson, he argued in 1793 that the difference between the American and French revolutions is “no less great than that between liberty and licentiousness” — between orderly self-government and mob rule.

The French Revolution’s assault on religion didn’t seem to bother Jefferson one bit. But to early American conservatives, it was not only blasphemous, but self-defeating. While far from orthodox in their personal religious belief and practice, the more conservative-leaning Founding Fathers saw virtue as a necessary precondition of self-government, and they held up religion, in turn, as an indispensable support to virtue.

Thus, John Adams observed of revolutionary France: “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” On National Fast Day on 9 May 1798, instituted by President Adams amid deteriorating relations with the French republic, the head of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, took to the pulpit to warn that “to destroy us, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath” — as they already had in Paris.

As has often been the case since, America’s geopolitical interests dissolved these ideological boundaries. When it became undeniable that the French Revolution had empowered a new emperor with an appetite for world domination, Jefferson shrank from his earlier Francophilia. In 1802, and now President, he described Napoleonic France as “our natural and habitual enemy”. France’s encroachments on New Orleans, and along the Mississippi on what was then the western frontier, should prompt the Americans to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”.

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Through the 19th century, France’s image in America more or less solidified into what it is today: as a place that riots a lot, and whose politics seesaw between the extremes of revolt and reaction. There was an undeniable element of hypocrisy in this reception. Americans had their own volatile divisions, which escalated into civil war in the middle of the century, claiming some 600,000 lives. Class struggle in Gilded Age America and in the early 20th century didn’t look so different from the Paris Commune.

Then again, which quarrelsome couple doesn’t feel better about itself while listening to the family shouting match in the apartment next door? American conservatives have long framed their society’s internal contradictions and domestic rancor as foreign. An entire genre of US conservative thought is devoted to uncovering the European — specifically German and French — roots of progressivism, to the neglect of its origins in Anglo-American liberalism.

Which brings us to today’s French anxieties on the American Right: to US fears of immigrant “no-go zones” and seething multitudes apt to riot when their “paper” country — France — defeats their real homes — Algeria, Morocco — in a football match. Fear of ill-assimilated banlieues encircling major cities like Paris and Marseilles. Fear of Islamo-gauchisme, with the white Leftists mouthing the lofty slogans and the Arab or African toughs doing the nihilistic looting, all while making it clear that their political attachment to France is all but nonexistent.

It’s easy to caricature these fears as overblown, ignorant — or, at any rate, irrelevant. American immigration and assimilation dynamics are different from those in France (and Western Europe more generally). Unlike with the French or the British, Americans haven’t struggled to define a place for the descendants of former colonial subjects — they haven’t had to deal with the transition from empire to nation-state. And it’s a cliché but nevertheless true that US culture is easier to assimilate into precisely because it’s relatively “thin”: the culture of a commercial empire with a voracious appetite for labor and dynamism.

All the same, it’s a mistake to dismiss wholesale the American Right’s current French anxieties. For starters, there is more than a kernel of truth to the American conservative diagnosis. There are sensitive areas in France where the police must tread carefully. There are mosques and imams whose preaching casts into severe doubt the very possibility of expecting political loyalty of certain communities. Take a walk through Parc Georges-Valbon and Saint-Denis into central Paris — I did so at Christmas last year — and you can’t help but feel that the rate of demographic churn is so high that, in certain areas, majority-minority distinctions completely break down, leaving only different minorities mustering different levels of street-level and institutional “strength”. France, such as it is, is something vestigial in these areas, marked only in streets named after long-forgotten saints, kings, novelists.

Riots aside, this generates what I’ve described in these pages as diversity stress: a kind of constant, low-grade anxiety associated with having to negotiate normative and linguistic differences, public-resource competition, and simple unfamiliarity. It challenges people’s expectation of order and familiarity, which is just as much a part of being human as is the taste for novelty.

While the nature and source of the migration differs between Europe and the United States, moreover, the underlying dynamic is the same: the mass movement of people from the Global South to the Global North that began in the postwar decades and was turbo-charged beginning in the mid-2010s (coinciding, for an obvious reason, with the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic)

Why so many in the past decade — more than a million to Europe under Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das regime, and some eight million in the Biden wave? Partly to shore up aging demographics and the pension systems that depend on fresh labor; partly because migration is another form of wage arbitrage for employers; and partly (above all, perhaps) because migrants can more easily reach the West, thanks to prosperity in the Global South that allows a growing subset of people to cross vast distances relatively cheaply and quickly.

The upshot of all this is that the migration anxieties that twice catapulted Trump to the White House will long outlast his messy reign. A majority of Americans might disapprove of his handling of immigration, recoiling from the performative cruelty of ICE. But those same majorities still tell pollsters that they prefer the same or lower levels of migration as today (when Trump has already sealed the southern border and drastically cut legal migration and naturalization).

The result is that immigration restrictionism will remain the American Right’s top concern for the foreseeable future. It is the one cause upon which an otherwise notoriously fractious movement can converge even after Trump leaves the historical stage. Today, the movement is divided between five main factions. We might call them the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists. All demand less migration, albeit for different reasons and in a different tone.

Start with the Restorationists, those who hope to restore the GOP’s old ideological fusion of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and moral traditionalism. Historically, this group was the most amenable to mass migration, not least because it’s what the pro-business donor class insisted upon. But things have changed. For one thing, this faction has been chastened by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, and its most classically liberal elements have more or less defected to the Democratic Party (where they will have to contend with an ascendant democratic socialism).

More important, supporters have come to view mass migration as one of the main drivers of anti-Israel sentiment — and they’re not entirely wrong. Politicians with names like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani are products of post-1965 immigration, when the United States threw open the gates to newcomers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The children and grandchildren of those migrants attended US universities where various grievance-studies courses were commonplace, where questioning American exceptionalism was de rigueur, and where campus activism meant backing Students for Justice in Palestine if you, as a member of, say, the Asian and Pacific Islander group, hoped to win support for your own pet causes. This is also why Vance, in a leaked address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, argued that anti-Israel sentiment could be mitigated by cutting migration. He was pushing on an open door: the remnants of the old-school GOP today are far less hospitable to migration than were their predecessors in the Reagan or Bush era.

Which brings us to the Tech Accelerationists — those who believe fervently that America’s salvation lies in staying ahead of China when it comes to artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies. This group, too, could historically be expected to support certain kinds of immigration to fill positions in research, data science, and the like with STEM workers from the developing world who’d work for much less than their American-born peers — and who didn’t dare demand higher wages or organize into unions, since their right to stay was often tied to a single employer.

But this, too, is changing. Like the Restorationists, the Accelerationists have been chastened by the populist tide. Insofar as they wish to remain part of the Right, they have to bargain and compromise with populism, just like every other faction. In December 2024, one of their chief spokesmen, Vivek Ramaswamy — a vocal champion of guest-worker programs — was attacked online after he blamed American cultural mediocrity for tech firms’ reliance on foreign labor (the subtext being that America still needs visa schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Asian, and specifically Indian, tech workers).

Then, too, the rise of AI and automation is rendering many lower-level tech jobs redundant, and an automated economy doesn’t need endless low-wage migrants. Here, too, Vance can bridge the gap between populists and Big Tech: as he told me in a 2024 interview for the New Statesman, immigration restrictionism is the “tech-forward” position, since the easy availability of cheap labor in certain sectors discourages firms from investing in efficiency boosting technologies.

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Of the Populists, not much need be said, since they are the most likely to oppose all immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, for reasons that range from economic and cultural to nativism and outright racism. The Christian Nationalists form an adjacent and overlapping faction. They once served as the evangelical backbone of the old GOP but have now gone their own way, having concluded that the bargain with pro-business libertarians and foreign-policy hawks wasn’t worth the candle (the libertarians got their tax cuts, the hawks got their wars, but the Christians who marshaled the votes got… much less).

Largely because Protestantism is Christianity nationalized, this group has never been as comfortable with pro-migration moral universalism as Catholics. In places like Texas, this group’s economic anxieties about migration have blended with cultural concerns over the rapid build-out of mosques and Hindu temples associated with recent migrant flows. When Vance addresses the civilizational discomfiture brought on by mass migration in Europe, he hits this group’s sweet spot.

That leaves the Catholic solidarists (or the Common-Gooders, if you will). This group — in which, cards on the table, I count myself — isn’t exclusively made up of Roman Catholic intellectuals. But they tend to prevail and set the tone. Their objections to mass migration aren’t racial or identitarian — apart from anything else, Catholic doctrine bars that — but practical: mass migration undercuts the wages and bargaining power of American-born workers, squeezes welfare systems, and makes it harder to foster class-based solidarity. Union density in the United States is inversely proportional to migrant flows; for good reason, Whole Foods uses “heat maps” to track the risk of unionization at its stores, with those in diverse, high-migration areas seen as lowest risk, while those in relatively homogenous areas register as high-risk.

Here, again, Vance appears as a bridge figure. His Catholic conversion memoir, Communion, published this year, is in many ways a critique of the old religious Right that preached personal virtue and uplift while neglecting the material and political-economic foundations needed to shape virtuous souls. At one point in the book, he even favorably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar who sympathetically engaged with Marxism and who once wrote, “The class struggle is not something we are in a position to refrain from. It is just there; we are either on one side or the other.”

Vance’s answer to those who criticize the second Trump administration for neglecting its pro-labor promise is, more or less: stop immigration first. That might be self-serving. But it isn’t illogical, for the same reason that most of the Right’s Solidarists emphasize restrictionism. At any rate, it’s what Vance believes the half of the country that elected him wants.

The danger in this tying of everything to immigration should be obvious. It can look like — and, perhaps for some, it is — an attempt to evade the domestic, homegrown sources of American malaise. But after decades in which discontent with high migration flows was pooh-poohed or written off as bigoted, there remains a lot of political space for addressing what nearly all of the Right’s factions view as a generational crisis. The negative example thrown up by France this month has been too urgent and searing to ignore.

Since May, Tirana’s central boulevard had been the scene of the peaceful, and joyful “Flamingo Revolution” protests, named after the animals supposedly threatened by the Kushner-led coastal development project in the southern village of Zvërnec. But if the “Flamingo Boulevard” of the summer was a protest movement that styled itself as a revolution, what is happening now is an attempted revolution that styles itself as a student movement. The demonstrators are attempting to overthrow Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, elected for a fourth consecutive term only last year, with the aim of installing a caretaker technocratic government before new elections. On Saturday, it looked for a dramatic few hours like they might succeed. Thousands of protesters had filled Tirana’s main boulevard, pressing right up to the Prime Minister’s Office, Albania’s seat of government. Masked and black-clad youths kept pushing forward with howls of joy and rage against the water cannon and shield walls of riot police, cheers going up as petrol bombs exploded in flames against the armored trucks, forcing them to retreat. If the underlying causes — an end to political corruption, greater social spending, an entirely new political system — are the same as before, the mood among the protesters has become newly fierce. Gone is the summer’s disaffection with Edi Rama, replaced by a burning, visceral hatred.

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Whenever the rioters wavered, chants of “Down with the dictator, Down with the communists” rang out, motivating them to push forward once again into the thick clouds of tear gas, hurling back the CS canisters, and aiming fireworks at the police ranks. Hijacking a parked car, the protesters rolled it towards the police lines and set it aflame, forcing the police to retreat. Young women in gym wear and Covid masks, and young men in black tracksuits and ski masks ran as close to the police as they could to hurl their missiles, jeering and cursing at them, the men often thrusting their groins at their opponents to indicate, in a manner it does not take a fluent command of Albanian to understand, what they wished to do to the officers. Dozens of times that Saturday night, I had to escape from the choking tear gas; every time, within seconds, a volunteer ran up to squirt distilled water in my eyes, an indication of the impressive and seemingly organic level of student organization behind the protests. Tea, a 21 year old math student, asked me where I was from as she squirted water into my eyes. England, I spluttered. “Then you don’t know us Albanians, we are crazy as fuck,” she laughed. “He is going, and we are going to make him go, as quickly we can.”

At a pavement cafe near the protests, I met Genc Pollo, a prominent conservative intellectual and politician, and a strong critic of Rama’s government. An urbane figure, it was a surprise to see him with swimming goggles perched on top of his head, an attempt to keep out the tear gas from the protests he now observes nightly. If the Flamingo protests had been listened to by the government, he told me, all this violence could have been avoided. “But the answer from the government was mostly derision, mockery, calling them foreign spies, calling them algorithmic manipulators, and the usual stuff.” Instead of concessions, “immediately, with the police, replying with tear gas and batons, and now rubber bullets, it turned into a violent confrontation. That is “a very logical evolution of the situation. Should the frustration, and the discontent, and the legitimate grievances have been really dealt with, not with decoys, not with propaganda, and on the top of that, derision for the protesters, it could have been channeled into peaceful ways, peaceful solutions, and arrangements.” Was there a solution that ends with Rama still in power? “I don’t think that’s possible,” Pollo told me. “Since it has become tense and also violent, I don’t think it will last as long as the Flamingos. By the nature of it, I mean if it’s either way, it will be decided in a shorter time frame.”

Back on the boulevard, beneath the din of the tear-gas grenades, I asked Jurgen, a  20-year-old law student, why he was here. “Because of the corrupt government and everything that has been happening in the past 13 years,” he told me “The PM will resign, hopefully this weekend, because of the mass protests, he should reflect on that. We gave him 140 days of just asking nicely, he didn’t listen, so now things took a turn. This is the result of not listening to the people of Albania. I cannot name a single thing he’s done that has benefited me as a student or as an Albanian.” Behind him, a group of older women, one in a hijab, were busy tearing up the cobbled pavement and filling a wheeled shopping trolley with rocks to be trundled towards the young men at the front. Indeed, for a Gen-Z protest, there were a surprising number of men with gray hair at the forefront of the clashes, hurling rocks and metal poles at the police lines.

While the violence is led by students and schoolchildren, the polite middle-class protestors of the summer have been joined by older toughs, with indications that ultras from Tirana’s football firms have set aside their rivalries to unseat their embattled Prime Minister. To the chants of “Rama resign” and “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail” from the peaceful summer protests have been added a new one: the slogan of the Balli Kombëtar, the Right-wing Second World War resistance movement: “Albania for Albanians, Death to Traitors.”

For many protesters, however, it is contemporary geopolitics that most concerns them. “Rama will go,” one man in his 30s told me, “but he will only go when other nations, America and Europe force him to go, because he has a bad personality, he is difficult, and also because he is implicated with criminal gangs, and with Israel.” If the Kushner-led Zvërnec project was the spark for the summer Flamingo protests, a broader sense that the Rama government is too close to Israel has led to widespread conspiracy theories that Tel Aviv has sent reinforcements and crowd control equipment to the Albanian police, and that Rama has sold the country out to Israeli interests. Among the many demands for revolution scrawled along the walls of the boulevard was the terse spray-painted message: “Fuck the Jew Rama.” In a country that is fiercely nationalistic even by Balkan standards, multiple shades of political opinion, both Left and Right, have now converged on a joint struggle to overthrow the government. I asked Eldison, a 20-year-old software engineering student, if the Flamingo protests had become a revolution. “It was always a revolution, because we are fighting for our future, our rights, our country,” he said. “Rama won’t resign, but he will kill himself.” Why, I asked. “It’s kind of Jewish stuff,” he shrugged.

The Albanian government did not grant a request for an interview, instead offering to respond to a set of written questions. When I sent a detailed list, it didn’t answer them, instead forwarding me a transcript of Edi Rama’s television address in which he blamed antifa, “neo-Communists”, “neo-Ballists”, the political opposition and Iran for the disturbances. At a café in a shopping mall, I met a prominent Socialist Party insider who granted me an interview on the condition of anonymity. “What is new now is that there was this very sudden explosion in terms of attacking public institutions, destroying public offices,” the insider told me. “But I guess there’s also the element of the police doctrine linked to it, in the sense that there was an effort in the very early days, at least, to sort of let them let steam off.” The explosive rhetoric, meanwhile, which the insider blamed on “bots,” was also apparently new. “What do the bots say? You have sold this country to Israel. You are all thieves, that’s the second element. And we are gonna kill you and burn you. So these are the three overarching themes.”

The rhetoric was becoming increasingly dark, my interviewee told me. “The last time Albanians have called other Albanians traitors, it was in 1943, 1945, 1944. And it’s so out of context now, but again, this is a generation that does not understand the specificity of that word in Albanian history. And for me, it’s very dangerous.” Indeed, “there are three things I fear in terms of keeping me up at night,” the insider told me. The first was rising inflation of essential goods, carried over from Albania’s main trading partners Italy and Greece. The second was that the heightened rhetoric might cause a death, after which things could spiral out of control. The third, they said, was an unwillingness to explore constitutional means of resolving the impasse, in favor of absolute victory. “That’s why I’m a bit bemused by them saying, like, ‘We need a political answer to this crisis’, I mean, if you go to the government and say, ‘Look, before we talk, you should step down’, it’s a diktat. It’s not a political solution, right? It can be a political outcome, but it’s not a political beginning of the sentence.” Will Rama step down? “No, but there are discussions in terms of what’s the method forward.” The interview over, our smalltalk was abruptly ended by their driver coming up to warn them that protestors had reached the area, and that they should leave. This protest, like almost all the protestors’ gatherings now, was quickly dispersed by the police’s liberal deployment of tear gas and water cannon.

At the headquarters of Albania’s conservative opposition Democratic Party, I met Belind Këlliçi, the party’s young and American-educated vice-chairman. In his office, with signed photographs of Donald Trump and JD Vance framed on the wall behind him, a jumble of gas masks and plastic body armor sat on the floor. The night before, police had fired volleys of tear gas into the compound, in what Këlliçi told me was part of a plot to have agents provocateurs burn it down and blame it on rioters. I asked Këlliçi what he meant by his tweet the day earlier, which said that: “This monster who demands blood at any cost deserves the fate of every dictator who has been dragged away by his own people.” “[Rama] is a dictator, and he’s the head of the first narco-state in Europe,” he answered. “I say that the Socialist Party is not my enemy. It’s my political opponent, but for what Edi Rama has done to the Socialist Party, and if you can check the records in the last decade, you have dozens of ministers, mayors, members of parliament, and high-ranking officials that are in jail for either corruption, drug dealing, stealing money, money laundering, and other affairs.”

I asked Këlliçi what will happen next for Rama’s government. “I cannot tell you within this month or within this calendar year, but I’m very positive that within a very short period of time, in the next few weeks or months, it will be forced to leave,” he said. “There is no way that people can go on with this. There is no way that we will go in parliament and pretend it’s business as usual. We will not do it. We will stand by the students. We will stand by the protesters. We will do everything in our capabilities to support and protect them.” In terms of the coming days, Këlliçi claimed, “We have received a tip from his closest team within the Prime Minister’s office that he’s trying to have a fatality in the protest. It doesn’t matter if it’s from the students or from the police forces. He’s trying to use it as a justification to stop immediately the protest and to find a way to come to an agreement with the students and to say that this is enough, you cannot take it anymore, one fatality is enough, and we have to find a political solution.” But, Këlliçi added, “I don’t see the students stopping. I don’t see the civilians, the people of Tirana and other cities stopping.”

Certainly, the street violence, which now comes in waves of lulls and escalations, has not ended, and neither have the mass rallies, which have now been joined by striking university lecturers and teachers. On Friday, I’d joined the protesters outside the Ministry of Education on Durrës Street, which has become the hub for morning protests, before a far larger crowd gathers later in the day along the government boulevard. The police assumed a defensive posture, huddled around a water cannon whose nozzle twitched and dripped in anticipation of the violence to come. A line of schoolgirls linked arms and pushed to the forefront, daring the police to blast them away, which, after male protesters ran from behind them and began to throw stones, they did, first with blasts from the water cannon, and then with volleys of tear gas. I asked one of the girls for an interview. “My parents would not be happy,” she said, lowering her Covid mask. It would be anonymous, I said. “Oh, OK,” she replied, “We are here to bring down the dictator Edi Rama,” smiling happily before running away at the next round of gas.

Women were as prominent at the forefront of the fighting as men, one woman in her 30s wearing pink angel wings running right up to the police to hurl a rock into their faces, another young hijabi in modest clothes smashing a cobblestone against the curb then throwing it at the police, skittering away laughing. Later that evening, as the crowd of protesters outside government buildings on the boulevard morphed into a riot, I watched as a few hundred protesters began ripping up the cobbled pavements and hurling the stones at police. Some climbed onto the parliament building and smashed the windows with steel bicycle racks, trying to batter down its thick wooden doors before being dispersed with volley after volley of tear gas in fighting that went on through the night. In the first days of the riots, the government tried to project an air of normality, sending in overnight teams to clear away the wreckage and paint over the slogans on the walls, no doubt hoping that the protests would fizzle out naturally. Yet at the very least, large crowds smashing the windows and doors of parliament and the Prime Minister’s palace to burn them down is surely a distraction from normal parliamentary procedure. For over a week, Parliament was suspended as the riots overtook the capital’s daily life.

Each side, government and protesters, blames each other for the violence. On Friday and Saturday, it appeared from the scene that the police used force only defensively, after coming under sustained assault, or in an attempt to prevent the storming or destruction of government buildings. But in an attempt to prevent an Albanian Maidan in the capital’s seat of power, the police have evolved new tactics of dispersing attempted concentrations of protesters with water cannon and baton charges, rubber buckshot fired from shotguns, and constant volleys of tear gas, which hangs around the city center like a thick Dickensian fog. Potential rioters are pre-emptively arrested by police snatch squads, sometimes seemingly at random. At night, operators from the elite police special forces unit RENEA surround the Prime Minister’s office, where they make their disinclination to be photographed assertively clear. But if the police’s new tactics have eased the threat to government buildings, the result, so far, has been to push the violence into surrounding streets, as knots of rioters fight evening running battles in the main shopping boulevards and narrow alleyways in between, smashing up banks and CCTV cameras and erecting impromptu barricades of burning bins and street furniture to slow down the police vans chasing them, and throwing firecrackers and pyrotechnics into government buildings along the way in an attempt to burn them down.

The protests, and riots, have swiftly evolved from a shock event into part of the fabric of Tirana’s daily life, a new normality for Albanians to navigate, with all its inconveniences and strange advantages. The kiosk where I was accustomed to buying my preferred local cigarettes has been burned down, like many others in the city center. On the other hand, crossing the road, a hazardous enterprise in ordinary times, has been made easier by the destruction of all the center’s traffic lights, forcing drivers to begrudgingly stop for pedestrians. The television news channels are now devoted to rolling coverage of street battles, filmed by gas-mask wearing cameramen perched atop vans. Pavement diners in restaurants and cafés watch the disorder like football fans, restaurant owners hand out bottles of water to passing rioters to shouts of “bravo”, and confused tourists choke at the tear gas as they leave their hotels, trying to make their way between the clashing lines of demonstrators and police.

Along Mine Peza Street, one of Tirana’s main thoroughfares, almost all the shops are shut, with A4 signs proclaiming “We are with you! Please don’t destroy our business!” taped to the metal shutters. At the landmark Taiwan cafe, in a park beside the main boulevard, I watched burly security guards order away riot policemen attempting to enter to arrest protesters. When the police gave up and trooped away, the park erupted in cheers and clapping. With both sides digging in for the long haul, the battle to come is for the patience and goodwill of Tirana’s wider population. In one busy shopping street, I saw passersby remonstrating with rioters attempting to burn down a bank, gesturing angrily at the occupied apartments above. “I’m disgusted at this,” a café owner told me, “Burn down all the ministries, sure, good, but leave private property and small businesses alone. Rama will never leave. I’m 40 years old, and I know Albania will never change.”

Outside the Ministry of Education, I met the 25-year old MP Marjana Koçeku, elected to parliament for Rama’s Socialist Party only last year, and who resigned when the Flamingo protests began. As we spoke, over the loud explosions of tear gas grenades, our conversation was twice interrupted by older women coming up to kiss her, thanking her for her support. “Being part of this group [the Socialist Party] I understood that just by being part and having my vote on their support, I am contributing to the destruction of my country,” she told me. “I think it’s very important to have a deep reformation of the system of the political elite that we have right now, because they are strongly rooted in a mentality of corruption, in a systematic violence of making politics and [its approach] to the citizens. So if this is a safe and healthy solution for our country, I fully support it.” Indeed, she added, “I believe that this protest will not end soon,” she told me. “I expect it to last for some time, and I definitely believe in good and positive results of this protest, and of this movement. The only and the most necessary reflection into political actions that should be coming now from the government part, is the resigning of the Prime Minister, from his government, and from politics at all, because he had enough time to witness what our nation is really looking for, and enough time to understand that he cannot be the right image of leading Albania toward the European Union, especially with all the scandals that have popped up.” I asked Koçeku if the Flamingo Protests had now become a revolution. “Revolutions are beautiful,” she smiled, “I’m looking forward to seeing one in my country.”

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In the clashes on Durrës Street, I bumped into the Canadian-Albanian revolutionary activist Bora Mitrovica, who I had interviewed in the summer. You were right, I said to her, that the Flamingo protests would soon turn violent. “I know my people,” she replied, “I’m just surprised it took so long.” But whether the protests will really force Rama to resign seems doubtful. Seemingly wavering last weekend, the state’s use of coercive power has since become stronger and more confident, hampering the ability of the protesters to gather or hold their ground. The protesters’ appeals to claimed European norms on humane crowd control also suffer from comparison to the riots, and robust policing methods, now seen in France and Italy. With Rama directly linking the violence in Tirana with the riots in Western Europe, it is perhaps unfortunate timing for anti-government Albanian activists that their uprising has been overshadowed by events in the EU’s heartlands.

Whether or not the protesters evolve new and more effective tactics, as the government has, remains to be seen. The country’s religious leaders — Sunni Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic, —have made joint appeals for calm and dialog, hinting at a political transition. But even if the government wished to negotiate with the protesters, it is unclear who they could negotiate with. Over lunch, an exasperated Western diplomat, who had attempted to reach out to the demonstrators, told me that they still don’t know who is leading the movement, or indeed if anyone actually is. The government’s hope, then, must now be that the attempted revolution turns back into a protest movement, with which it can choose to negotiate or else continue to ignore. Winter rains will soon be coming, perhaps diminishing the will of protesters to gather in large numbers, but also limiting the effectiveness of tear gas, upon which Rama’s authority increasingly rests. Another possibility is that the protests will evolve into an electoral movement beyond the control of either main party, as in Serbia, where the two-year student-protest movement looks this weekend to be on the cusp of power. The one thing that could tip the balance, almost everyone I spoke to told me, would be a death resulting from the riots, at which point, I was told over and over again, “anything could happen.”

But for now, two immovable objects, Edi Rama and the protesters, are locked in a battle of wills with no plausible means of de-escalation other than the total defeat of their foe. On Monday, on the boulevard, eerily quiet after the police’s overwhelming use of force the day earlier, I bumped into Bora again. “I don’t like it,” she said, gesturing at the small knot of placard-holders outside the Prime Minister’s office. “If this protest turns back to peaceful, we’ve lost.” She need not have worried: the clashes have since resumed. Overshadowed by turmoil elsewhere in Europe, Albania’s most serious political crisis in years still has a long way yet to go. Perhaps, rather than appealing to EU institutions for mediation, the greater impact will be a disenchantment with a European core not so very different in its essence to Albania after all.

Observing this, my thought was: but this isn’t the future for America! This is recent American history. Does no one remember the summer of 2020? Six months into Covid, George Floyd’s death triggered riots across the USA. Cities burned, youths rampaged and looted, and at one point an anarchist group took over central Seattle, declaring it the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”. The total cost in insurance claims would, according to reports, total more than a billion dollars.

There are parallels between the Floyd riots and the disorder now sweeping France. But there is one significant difference. The Floyd riots didn’t stop at the borders of physical America: they permeated digital America, and spilled back out into other physical places, triggering copycat protests wherever social media holds sway.

Back then, the mimetic riptide was swift and widespread. The Guardian reported BLM protests in locations without any black people. In Manchester, Bristol, and Westminster, crowds chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” at British police officers who — unlike their counterparts in the US, where the chant originated — almost never carry guns. There have been mimetic echoes of the French violence in other European countries; but no one in Minneapolis has come out on the streets in solidarity with the banlieues of Paris or Marseilles. Why not? Well, while we have grown used to thinking of the digital realm as sort-of neutral, a de-materialized “public square” in which every voice carries something like equal weight, the reality is that it’s not neutral. It’s American.

That means the mimetic currents mostly flow the other way. Arguably recreational protest looting is itself mimetic and (as Time put it) “as American as apple pie”. For those of us who live substantially inside the Anglophone internet, but outside geographic America, it’s easy to forget this. Like the protesters chanting at unarmed British bobbies, this can sometimes have absurd or comical effects. In 2023, for example, the British Left-wing commentator Ian Dunt decried the damage the Tories’ then-proposed “Rwanda bill” would do to “separation of powers” in Britain. Except that “separation of powers” is a political concept native to the USA, but nonexistent on this side of the pond.

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But perhaps this is understandable, given that the online realm is as much a projection of US soft power in the 21st century as Hollywood was in the 20th. Joseph Stalin is reported to have once said: “If I could control the medium of the American motion picture, I would need nothing else to convert the entire world to Communism”. And, back in his day, the US State Department was sharply aware of Hollywood’s role as a vector for soft power, working closely with film industry bodies to entrench US movie-making dominance overseas.

In our own time, digital tech plays an analogous role. Just recently, for example, the US ambassador to the EU threatened “devastating” retaliation to EU proposals to reserve some satellite bandwidth for local operators, a proposal that would weaken US competitors such as Starlink in the European market. Ongoing tussles between the US and EU over “freedom of speech”, and proposed US legislation against overseas speech restrictions, can also be understood in this light.

The result is not just a tight American rein on economic and legislative leadership of digital media, but also an ideological and discursive landscape in which everyone is incentivized to filter their own country’s news through an American register. Last week, in explaining to Americans her decision to move back to Britain, the writer Freya Sanders felt compelled to describe her homeland as “a silly little country”, and there are many more such cases.

Ever since the Great Depression, it’s been said that “when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold”. So I say this mostly without rancor: empires gonna empire. We in Britain had our turn being Top Nation. But the important thing is not to get confused. And it’s easy to get confused: as the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald has noted, the sheer volume of money, and the loudness of transatlantic Anglophone discourse, can have a distorting effect on domestic politics outside the US.

The absurdities of the Summer of Floyd vividly illustrate this. As Tomiwa Owolade has pointed out, so too does the propagation of American progressive race politics in cultures without America’s history of slavery and segregation. More recently, the Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna added his Left-wing contribution to the general noise of American projection onto European affairs. This time these events were pegged not as the tragic consequence of open borders, as Trump suggested, but what happens “when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few”.

This kind of projection and confusion abounds on the Right, of course, and is not confined to commentary on France. It’s most pernicious when it works to refocus contentious issues away from domestic coalition-building, toward whatever sells in the international clickbait economy. For instance, Elon Musk’s contribution to amplifying domestic British debate on the so-called “grooming gangs” certainly did much to draw attention to the issue. But it was also an egregious case of this precise dynamic in play: the cost of this amplification was a hyper-focus on internationally legible, highly emotive aspects of the crimes, particularly race and sexual torture. These aspects are real. But the net effect has been further siloing the topic as a Right-wing talking point, foreclosing otherwise fruitful lines of coalition-building. And, in the process, a crucial point has been drowned out, namely that the industrial-scale horrors suffered by British girls at the hands of these gangs is the tip of horrifically large iceberg: entrenched, networked, predominantly Pakistani-heritage organized crime, active across a plethora of criminal activities beyond child sexual exploitation, and most likely embedded in British local authorities.

Tackling this represents a policing challenge roughly analogous to the measures required to curb the Sicilian mafia, which plagued American cities in the last century. A problem of this kind, and on this scale, ought to be a clear bipartisan issue. No one, Left or Right, wants to live in a mafia state. Unfortunately, a large and eager market exists, well beyond Britain’s borders, for prurient ragebait about sexual torture. That market is likewise eager for proxies through which to debate “mass immigration”, “Islamification” and the like. And when all the incentives pull toward rage-bait, anyone trying to get a hearing for a concrete program to tackle organized crime can forget it.

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Let me be clear. None of this is to say that everything in Europe is hunky-dory. Ethnic mafias is no one’s definition of “hunky-dory” here in Britain. The riots currently raging in France, meanwhile, are the most violent and widespread since the gilets jaunes protests of 2018. There is footage reportedly of private homes being invaded, and unconfirmed reports of some rioters being found with guns. If true (and not hysterical clickbait) the situation may be escalating. France has deep underlying demographic and fiscal problems. These structural issues are real, and a version of the same pattern now plagues most developed nations to varying degrees: a shrinking tax base relative to welfare liabilities, and social solidarity weakened by the demographic pluralism embraced by political leaders, the latter done in an attempt to mitigate the former.

But also? The Floyd riots did a billion dollars of damage, but America did not “fall” in 2020. France has not “fallen” this week either. The point is this: while the structural patterns producing this week’s riots may be echoed across many Western polities, the political choices best placed to respond will vary in each case. France’s political process will grind on, toward a leader able to grip the country’s domestic difficulties. This is a matter, in any case, for the French to resolve. An overwhelmingly loud, one-size-fits-all internet discourse has little to contribute to that process, except Schadenfreude and its own projections.

And this is perhaps most urgently a lesson for those polities that share a language with the USA, but diverge in political culture. The French remain at least somewhat insulated by the barrier of language. By comparison, divided as we are by a common language, we in Britain are all but defenseless. As for becoming better-defended, inasmuch as it’s possible at all, this likely entails some strategic blocking and muting. It might also entail knowing our own political history and constitution better than Ian Dunt, and by that I don’t mean the castrated postwar account approved for “Western Civilization” enjoyers.

If the AI boosters are right, American hegemony is going nowhere. Though also, if they’re right, social media will soon be so overrun with bots and slop that everyone abandons it. That might be a mercy all round. But whether Britain would emerge on the other side with a distinct political culture once more is anybody’s guess. Perhaps instead by then we’ll all just sound like AI.

Meanwhile there’s still that standing invitation, from the internet, to offer up our home for likes and reposts. As a spectacle, a “silly little country”, a cautionary tale, an object of scorn or synthetic pity: a succulent morsel for the clickbait economy. Don’t take it.

***

A previous version of this piece incorrectly attributed the “silly little country” comment to Freya India. This has now been corrected. 

Unrest had been brewing for a month, starting with firm but polite protests by schoolteachers at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris over grievances shared by teachers and families across the country. Three-quarters of French lycées are over 50 years old, and many are in a dire state of disrepair. Staff are thinly stretched, poorly remunerated, and often paid late.

Within two weeks — lightning-fast for the cumbersome, centralized Ministry of Education — some of the Saint-Exupéry demands were met. But a torch had been lit, and across the nation, further protests stirred.

The French secondary school system was long one of the best in Europe. Forty years ago, unless you were a devout Catholic, you would only send your child to a private school if they had flunked the state lycée. Yet standards have now slipped so catastrophically that, at baccalauréat level, when students are typically 18, many pupils make egregious spelling and grammatical mistakes, have not attained a high level of numeracy, and cannot understand novels or plays written half a century ago, let alone at the time of Molière. The teenagers who were soon to be marching in towns across the country knew they would struggle to find jobs, let alone homes of their own.

This generation has many more reasons to worry: not only today’s cost of living, but threats to France’s generous and unsustainable pay-as-you-go pension system, as well as the expensive ground war at the edge of a declining continent, the politics of resentment fostered by populists of the Right and the Left, and the ballooning national debt. Viewed by creditors as an increasing default risk, France is now borrowing at higher rates than even Italy. All these problems have whipped up a nation that was already fractured.

It was fracturing when, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron became president. He had appeared practically out of nowhere, brought into the cabinet of Socialist president François Hollande, despite not being an MP, to serve as economy minister. Macron then betrayed Hollande, running for the presidency as a charismatic wunderkind, but also a mandarin — as a graduate of the École nationale d’administration, he was perceived as someone who could fix things the French technocratic way. But, as it turned out, he couldn’t.

During the presidential campaign, Macron faced Marine Le Pen in a televised debate. She waded through binders of notes, lost in the hail of figures he was mercilessly lobbing at her. Macron destroyed her and won the election, thus overcoming, if only temporarily, the French public’s dislike of elites. Having created his own party, he found himself with a houseful of novice MPs who gloried in being “amateurs”, leaving him a free hand.

Macron has since been described by the commentator Daniel Foubert as “a man who thinks he’s Jupiter but governs like a McKinsey intern who accidentally became emperor”. In a crucial decade, this was exactly what the nation did not need. He spent time lecturing Europe from the grandest lecture hall at the Sorbonne, promising to turn France into La Start-Up Nation and birth a new generation of French tech “unicorns”.

It took barely 18 months for the first mass protests to erupt. They were led by the Gilets Jaunes, who objected to fuel taxes and new speed limits on the roads they used for work commutes and school runs. By the autumn of 2018, Macron’s effigy was hanging from roundabouts across the bleak industrial areas of a country he didn’t seem ever to have visited.

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His response was more long speeches. He delivered them to the nation on television, and to halls of “representative citizens” (assemblies weeded to exclude known troublemakers). He had also told an unemployed youngster that he, Macron, could “cross the street and find [him] a job immediately”; a remark as infamous as the occasion when, as economy minister in 2014, he told a group of textile workers from a factory in receivership that they were illiterate and therefore unemployable.

Increasingly violent marches threatened both provincial préfectures and the Elysée Palace in Paris. But in 2020, Covid froze the entire situation for long enough that people’s grievances were refocused on the new rules introduced to stop them spreading the virus. Eventually, the pandemic passed. Facing Marine Le Pen a second time, Macron won re-election in 2022.

But this background noise never disappeared, and that is what explains Saturday’s terrifying breakdown. Macron thought he had sailed through one storm after another: in fact they added up to a reckoning. The more he considered himself TINA — There Is No Alternative (to moi) — and cooked up the concept of the Front Républicain designed to prevent Le Pen (l’horrible fasciste) from ever coming to power through alliances between his party and just enough of the soft Left, the more he believed himself invincible.

Like every politico heady with the sound of his own voice, and bored with thankless domestic affairs, he recast himself as a foreign policy maven. But all his posturing on the world stage only broadcast to French voters that they had never really interested him. And it also signaled to France’s disenfranchised minorities that there was no man of iron will in the Elysée palace, only one of passing fancies.

The violence that erupted on Saturday was predictable; what was shocking was its concentrated intensity. Ever since a 22-year-old student of Algerian origin called Malik Oussekine died after a police beating during student protests in Paris in 1986 — triggering peaceful marches across France as well as violent demonstrations —  every interior minister, Left or Right, has restrained police action for fear that a fatality might trigger race riots.

It didn’t always prevent them. In 2005, when Nicolas Sarkozy was President Chirac’s interior minister, he had to contend with three weeks of riots after two adolescents from the banlieus, trying to escape the police, hid in an electricity substation and were electrocuted. In 2023, an adolescent driving without a license tried to evade a police check and was shot. The same banlieues erupted once more.

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French judges and civil servants, Left-leaning by habit and inclination, have learned little. They often refuse to sentence offenders, arguing the grotesquely overcrowded French prison system doesn’t “rehabilitate” anyone. They, like Macron, have read Michel Foucault, and can blame him for their skewed view of incarceration. The rioters and looters, who have not read Foucault, have been much cannier. They have learned that, by and large, they will be spared real punishment if they can pass themselves off as victims. The many shopkeepers and workers whose livelihoods were destroyed or stolen on Saturday are conveniently forgotten, wreathed in a cloud of compensation promises that can take years, and lawsuits, to materialize as actual payments.

Last night, both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron spoke to the nation once more. She stole a march by going first, at 6pm. Gone were her binders of notes and her fluster: she sat behind a desk, a French flag behind her, president-like, and spoke with authority. She didn’t offer solutions, but she didn’t have to. While looting was still taking place on city streets, she talked of a “profound crisis of trust and authority posing a threat to democracy”, which was both true and deeply ironic (Macron had kept her out of power by portraying her as the threat to democracy). Then, two hours later, Macron began his personal struggle session, managing to sound utterly unrepentant, while promising to create an online “platform” where students and teachers could express their grievances — which rather suggested that he hadn’t really been listening to them at all.

While Le Pen called out Jean-Luc Mélenchon — he and his France Unbowed party had repeatedly told crowds of supporters in the very banlieues where they had been cultivating the ethnic vote that violence “could be legitimate” — Macron would speak only vaguely of “unrestrained violence”. Le Pen was the one sounding decisive and presidential, while he could only deploy that peculiar hollow diction of his, better suited to the Comédie-Française. After a decade of long and empty speeches, how appropriate that he should take his bow with another one. With only six months of this dilettante’s presidency left, he leaves France in flames, her streets echoing with the sound of shattering glass and the hooting of the mob. Emerging from the ruins, others are preparing to claim the future.

It began in mid-September in Créteil, in the suburbs of Paris, with lycée students marching in solidarity with their striking teachers. Three weeks later, hundreds of schools are closed, the Place de la Bastille has filled again, and the protests have spread to Belgium, Italy and now Greece. The demands are embarrassingly modest: enough teachers; classrooms that are not overcrowded; buildings that are not falling apart. The state’s response has not been modest at all. Almost 7,000 arrests, 86% of them minors. A 15-year-old lost his left hand to a stun grenade. A 16-year-old was partly blinded by a rubber bullet. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister lectures them against “violence” and lambasts politicians who “use this anger to conduct their electoral battles”.

I keep watching the videos. Many of the students could put our parliamentarians to shame with their free-flowing speeches. Others cannot string two sentences together. And, to be fair, some indulge in ugly violence. As I watch them, my mind races back to my own student days in England. To our rage at Margaret Thatcher’s determination to slash and burn our universities’ budgets. And to my friend Fiona — whom I wrote about in my last book as well as in my last piece. As student activists, Fiona and I shared one political defeat after the other, from the Miners’ Strike to the Wapping Dispute. One day, exhausted, I asked Fiona if it was time to surrender, to give up. Her answer has stayed with me for 40 years: when you join a good struggle, she said, you learn to live in near proximity to giving up without ever actually doing so.

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That’s the political passion that can beat in young chests. It is not always articulate, it is rarely disciplined and, as I learned in Thatcher’s England, it is usually on the losing side. Fiona’s one regret was that we were fighting splendidly to defend communities that deserved defending, but for causes that screamed anachronism. “Why can’t we bring the country to its knees to demand clean energy and a free press?”, she asked, as we fought in solidarity with coal miners and printers whose labor resulted in abominable rags like The News of the World and The Sun.

The French lycéens have no such problem. Their cause is anything but anachronistic. They are demanding the one thing that every social economy needs, and which ours have refused to fund since at least 2008, well before that in Britain and my native Greece: investment in the future, beginning with the people who will live in it.

Here is the cruel irony. For 15 years, centrist politicians have been telling French families that there is no money: for teachers, for classrooms, for anything that does not yield a quick rent. Yet after 2008, that same center found unlimited sums for the bankers and, today, finds gargantuan sums for armaments. Even Renault is at it, pivoting from quirky cars to killer drones. For almost two decades, austerity for the masses and “socialism” for bankers and corporations choked investment.

There is no puzzle here. Why would big business invest the rivers of money the central bank was providing them for free: when the masses were too impecunious to purchase high-end goods? Naturally, big business took the funds and bought back their own shares. As these shares skyrocketed in price, so did the managers’ bonuses, house prices in Paris’ leafier neighborhoods, and the price of everything — from crypto to art — that the rich buy when they have money to burn. And here’s the rub. In the midst of all this money-making, productive investment collapsed. Why invest productively when you can make more by buying houses, paintings and Bitcoin?

This is why German industry is withering, why France’s schools are crumbling, and why so many young people wonder what life will look like in a decade, especially now that AI is pulverizing entry-level jobs hitherto reserved for the “good” kids who did their homework and followed the proscribed bourgeois path. It is bizarre for the grown-ups to dismiss the students blocking their lycées as rebels without a cause. They are the first generation to receive the sky-high bill for the combination of austerity for the many and socialism for the very few that their parents bequeathed them.

As I watch them, a darker thought creeps in. The incredible youth uprising of May 1968, when students urged us to demand the impossible, ended up reinforcing conservatism. Will today’s uprising end up feeding the extreme Right that loathes them, the very forces that thrive on their despair? Six months before the presidential election, Marine Le Pen leads in the polls. We have already seen how her side will play this.

The demonstrators from the banlieues of Créteil and Seine-Saint-Denis are being painted as black and Arab hooligans, foreign bodies burning the Republic. As for the furious white bourgeois kids of central Paris, they are portrayed as spoilt brats, too clever by half, privileged products of elite lycées who understand nothing of what it means to work to put food on the table, to be real victims of mind-numbing inequality. The far Right’s strategy is tried and tested: divide the youth along the lines of race and class; set the frightened middle classes against both; then walk into the Élysée promising order. It seems the young cannot win. Or can they?

Seeking hope, I turned to an article by novelist Arundhati Roy, describing another youth uprising half a world away. In India, the Chief Justice contemptuously dismissed unemployed young Indians as “cockroaches”. A student, Abhijeet Dipke, replied on Instagram with a single question: “What if all cockroaches come together?” Millions answered. The Cockroach Janta Party was born, first demanding the resignation of an education minister whose ministry had allowed exam papers to leak, devastating the lives of millions. On 20 July, tens of thousands of young “cockroaches” descended on Delhi and marched towards parliament, through tear gas, batons and the barrels of assault rifles. Months on, they are still out on the streets.

The parallels with France are striking. In Delhi, as in Paris, it began with education: with the state’s contempt for the young people it was meant to prepare for the future. In Delhi, as in Paris, the demand that sparked the fire quickly became, in Roy’s words, “small change”. The real target was the rot across the entire system of governance. And in Delhi, the police reportedly prepared trucks of stones and pre-damaged vehicles so that the young would look violent and the state would look as if it were acting in self-defense. Remember that the next time a French minister speaks about “violence”.

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But the most important lesson from the cockroaches is what they got right. Instead of lecturing, Roy writes, they showed Indians what their country could look like: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, people of every caste and class protecting each other as they faced down the police. Dipke, a Dalit, dared say out loud what cautious opposition politicians would not: that if his name had been Khalid, he would already be in jail. In short, the cockroaches refused to be split along the fault lines that the Modi government has spent a decade deepening. They did what my friend Fiona always demanded of us: they stopped explaining oppression and started practicing solidarity.

By looking to India, I feel I now have an answer about France. The Republic’s youth can win if the kid from Créteil and the kid from the Lycée Henri-IV refuse the roles that the far Right and the extreme center have written for them. If they see that the crumbling classrooms of the banlieue and the overcrowded ones in central Paris have the same author. If they understand that their dignity is indivisible, that, as Solomon Burke once sang, “none of us are free if one of us is chained”.

But Roy also issues a warning, one that we, the adults, must heed. Spontaneous rage dissipates, she writes, unless accompanied by real political work. “States have the power to wait. People don’t.” The French government is already waiting, promising a “plan” by the end of October and hoping the students will be back in class, exhausted, by Christmas. Here I find myself closer to my mother, a second-generation feminist, than my friend Fiona. Whereas Fiona distrusted every organization, as a finishing school for future bureaucrats, my mother, who for years faced down organized misogyny alone, knew that without organization, life is dreary and struggles are short.

The young have lit the fire. It is now the duty of trades unions, teachers, parents and, yes, the parties of the Left to stop jockeying for position and to turn this moment into a program: money for schools; an end to the austerity that starves them; and a public-investment drive in the sectors of the future, funded by the means some of us have been proposing for years.

If the Left fails them, the far Right will harvest their anger, just as it harvested the anger of the gilets jaunes. Yet get it right, and France’s young cockroaches will achieve more than what their predecessors did in 1789, 1871 and 1968: not merely warning Europe, like a thermostat, that a boiling point has come, but helping us turn away from fascism, racism and mindless conflict. The canary is singing again. This time, let us not wait until it falls silent.

More than his story, though, it’s Fo’s title that feels most relevant to contemporary France. For it’s quite possible that the country will, at some point, stop paying its debts. If debtors can’t pay, they won’t. But a debtor who can theoretically pay might still choose not to. As one of the richest countries on Earth, France has no excuse on that score. But when politics intrudes, all bets are off, with ominous consequences far beyond bank balance sheets.

The economics here aren’t hard to grasp. Surpass a certain threshold of debt, and France risks ending up in a debt trap. Borrow too much — and public debt is already at €3.6 trillion, accounting for 119% of GDP — and creditors will get so nervous that they start selling. With more sellers than buyers, interest rates go up. This, in turn, raises the cost of servicing future debt. Countries tend not to notice this process at first — but then, from Sri Lanka to Argentina, it just happens.

When nations fall into a debt trap, there are four potential escape routes. Perhaps the starkest option is simply defaulting on their debt. Then there are two forms of belt-tightening: either enforcing austerity via higher taxes and lower spending, or selling state-owned land or companies. Finally, central banks can bankroll their governments and print more money, which in practice means buying government debt. That last strategy helps push interest rates down, much like what has been happening lately in Japan.

Politics determines which combination of those four options are chosen. The French electorate has for quite some time not voted for candidates who prioritize balancing the budget, something considered distinctly uncool within the country’s political culture. Indeed, the two candidates which polls now predict most likely to enter the second round of the next presidential elections also happen to be the least fiscally responsible: Marine Le Pen, leader of the Right-wing National Rally, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of La France Insoumise, which translates as “France Unbowed”.

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In the case of Mélenchon’s party, we might well ask: unbowed to what exactly? The bond markets? Mélenchon favors the cancellation of French debt held by the European Central Bank. To achieve this, he suggests an old financial wheeze: keeping all the money France has borrowed, never paying it back, and never paying interest on it either.

Mélenchon’s “perpetual zero-coupon” trick — as this scheme is officially known — is a technical way of saying that he wants to default on his country’s debt. The idea is that this would give him scope to raise more debt to fund his electoral spending promises. Yet there is no way Mélenchon could get the rest of the EU, especially Germany, to agree to this. If he were to be elected, and really did proceed with his plan, France would likely crash out of the eurozone and even the EU itself.

To be fair, the polling numbers will probably change between now and the first round of the presidential election next April — but it’s not clear how. An air of insurrection has descended on the hexagon, and that may well play into Mélenchon’s hands. After all, a protest by high-school students, sick of their overcrowded and dilapidated classrooms, has now spread from Paris to the rest of France. Last week saw 250,000 students take to the streets, forcing the closure of some 500 schools.

The protests also saw eruptions of spontaneous violence, with demonstrators throwing projectiles at police, and setting cars and buildings on fire. By the end of the week, officers had arrested almost 7,000 mostly young people, of whom a third will face prosecution. Not that this is merely an insurrection of the poor: even students from elite schools, like the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, have joined their fellow teenagers, frustrated by crumbling schools and rising state violence. Mélenchon taps into this febrile atmosphere like no other politician.

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Marine Le Pen represents the other end of the political spectrum: the France of the angry rural middle classes. She has been leading in the polls for a long time, and her conviction in a trial about the abuse of EU funds has had no impact whatsoever on her popularity. Just as lawfare did not work against Donald Trump, it didn’t work in France either, even as there have been rumors that the gilet jaunes, who paralyzed the country back in 2018, could yet turn out to join the students.

Unlike Mélenchon, to be fair, Le Pen doesn’t want to default on French debt. But if she follows through with the tax and spending program she outlined last week, she might end up in a similar place. One of the biggest sources of new income would come from a unilateral two-thirds cut to French contributions to the EU budget, a policy with history. Before it was called the National Rally, Le Pen’s party was called the National Front — and under its leader, Marine’s father Jean-Marie, leaving the EU was a core policy.

Marine, too, supported France’s withdrawal from the EU until 2019. She no longer talks about “Frexit” in explicit terms, but her policies are as inconsistent with EU membership as Mélenchon’s. The EU would cease to function if France were to default on its membership contributions — just as it would collapse by defaulting on French debt, with Germany and the Netherlands left as the only countries bankrolling the operation.

Of course, six months to go until the first round of voting, and it’s still possible that a centrist politician might emerge as a viable candidate. But to win, such a person would still have to default in one form or another. Perhaps bondholders would still get what they were promised — but pensioners or students or farmers would need to be sacrificed to maintain France’s fiscal position.

What I struggle to see, though, is any scenario where a radical centrist like Macron could emerge as a surprise winner and return the country towards a path of liberal centrist reforms. Macron, after all, was elected back in 2017: and his political experiment has failed both politically and economically. As France is approaching the end of his decade in power, French cities are burning, and financial markets are wondering whether France will default on its debt. This was not the way Macron’s centrist revolution was supposed to end.

France falls into the category of countries that are too big to fail — and too big to save. If it refuses austerity for political reasons, it will also refuse the sale of assets. They are not going to auction off the Mona Lisa or the Bayeux Tapestry. This leaves us with exactly two ways out of the crisis: some combination of a default, and a bailout by the central bank.

Certainly, the European Central Bank (ECB) could simply buy French debt. This would lead to lower interest rates on French bonds, but wouldn’t resolve the country’s underlying debt problem. Indeed, the ECB could take its support to such extreme levels that the eurozone itself ends up with higher debt and inflation, with other countries lining up to demand support. Italy’s public finances are much better managed than France’s, for instance, but Italy also has higher levels of debt relative to the size of the economy.

The ECB could therefore find itself in a position where it’s damned if it helps France — and damned if it doesn’t. This is the fundamental problem with the eurozone: once the big countries diverge in their politics and economics, the end is nigh. The only thing that can help you then is a political union that enforces convergence. The eurozone crisis was the last moment when such a union could have been established. But instead of solving the bloc’s underlying financial problems, EU leaders did the bare minimum needed to prevent the emergency from spinning out of control, for instance by granting cheap loans to already over-indebted countries.

We used to say back then that Brussels was kicking the can down the road. Well, we are now at the end of the road, with a skip full of cans piling up around us. Certainly, with far-Right parties in the ascendance everywhere in Europe, union is too late today, even as high inflation means the ECB has far less room for maneuver than it did a decade ago. No one can predict how things will play out from here: but some form of financial crisis is probable.

This returns us to Fo’s play: and the basic difference between Italy then and France today. Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! was about a dispute within the Italian Communist Party, which at the time had abandoned its radicalism, accepted austerity, and moved closer to the political center. Fo himself was a hardliner. As he once said about capitalists: “the only way to get that mob thinking straight is to stuff them down the bog and pull the chain!” That’s Mélenchon’s language too — except that unlike Fo, his dramatics aren’t limited to the theatre.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard about the location: first, because national school protest waves always seem to start off in the Parisian suburbs, and second, because in the Nineties, I spent a year as a language assistant at a lycée nearby. Marcelin Berthelot in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés was, and still is, a feeder institution for the top universities, known collectively as the “grands écoles”. The high-achieving students there were extremely diligent, reserved, and polite, except during a countrywide protest in the Spring term, when they suddenly started running up and down the corridors breaking classroom windows. Footage from earlier this month shows armed police trying to deal with teens amassing in front of my old workplace. Plus ça change and all that.

Further back in 1990, as a teen myself on a gap year, I was supposed to be attending a Strasbourg lyćee during another massive national round of demonstrations; though the fact I can’t remember it is probably due to the fact I spent most of my time bunking off, wandering around the city center, smoking and shivering and attempting to look like Betty Blue. (For some reason I also can’t recall, I didn’t have a coat.) By then, sometimes violent protests of lycéens had been a feature of the French landscape for at least 20 years, and university demonstrations for longer than that. The latter feature in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, set in 1848, where the hero Frederic asks a stranger why groups of students are facing off with policemen: “I haven’t the least idea,” replied the other, “nor have they, for that matter! ‘Tis their fashion just now! What a good joke!”

So despite Trump’s latest in-depth analysis, there is a lot more happening here than another simple tale of mass migration gone wrong. A quarter of public schools are now involved, and — though French law strictly forbids data collection on race or ethnicity — press footage of the crowds show white faces very much to the fore. In truth, a familiar script is being rehearsed, albeit with a somewhat more diverse and volatile cast than in former productions. And certain narrative elements remain indispensable.

First, you need an impeccably conscientious pretext, as if some swotty committee were running protest HQ — which in some sense they are, since French lycées are unionized. This year, the justification for direct action is a lack of teachers and crumbling facilities; in 1990, it was a lack of adequate security and resources; in 1998, it was overcrowded classrooms; and in 2005, it was proposed reforms to the baccalauréat exam. One tries to imagine British school kids self-organizing over such worthy matters, as opposed to joining riots initiated by others. One fails.

Next, you need resistance to spread, something that happens a lot faster now with the help of the smartphone. You also need a classically over-the-top police response early on, preferably involving riot shields, tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon, so that the kids can more easily imagine themselves as heroes and keep going. Turmoil must ripple outwards through already tense banlieues and Northern cities, where immigration and deprivation are high and police skirmishes common. The ensuing aggression by opportunistic casseurs will introduce a note of extremity and chaos, nicely furnishing Right-wing headlines, which will in turn be recycled as galvanizing proof you are on the spiritually correct track.

As media attention arrives, some rich white boys from fancy lycées will become confident spokesmen for the movement, hoovering up attention while talking grandly of equality and fraternity with minorities. And, as with the avuncular presence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leader of socialist party France Unbowed — there must be old socialists and communists hovering around for the photo ops, praying that working-class revolt will soon be sparked. During the fabled student protests of May 1968, still glorified by ancient hippies today, what started as university sit-ins culminated in 10 million workers walking out on strike, and an attempt to set the Paris Stock Exchange on fire.

Naturally, along with these hackneyed elements, there is also some youthful sincerity and idealism. French student movements often begin with a genuine grievance, for the state is massive, sclerotic, and haughtily self-satisfied, often resulting in frustrating indifference to young people’s interests. In 1968, universities were overcrowded, impersonal, dilapidated places, and the original uprising at Nanterre made reasonable demands. In 2026, the young people also have a point: demoralized teachers are leaving the public school system in droves; classes are overcrowded; 56% of schools were built before 1970, and many are now unfit for purpose. A senate report from before the crisis estimated that renovating them adequately would require 1.5 billion euros every year til 2050. Of course, thanks to recent arson and vandalism, the bill will now be a lot bigger, but adolescent minds lost in anarchic ecstasy are unlikely to join the dots.

Conscious reasoning aside, there are deeper currents too. As an interested Francophone, over the years I have mused about what makes les Français so prone to radical acts. Along with a lot of others, I’ve concluded that the national tendency to sentimentality has something to do with it. As Edmund Burke told France, the nation has been “long misled” by “high and romantic sentiments”; and many others have pointed out the connection between revolutionary carnage and the romantic rejection of austere Enlightenment ideals. In the run up to the blood-soaked 1790s, Diderot was calling for a tear-soaked theater, with plays that would liberate tender feelings after years of repressed neoclassical fare. Greuze was painting queasy pictures of little girls mourning dead birds. Rousseau was emoting all over the page and urging others to do likewise. Love was supposed to undo oppressive social hierarchies; self-love, romantic love, love for one’s fellow man. Shortly afterwards, the impossible imperative to lovingly embrace millions of unknown fellow citizens would produce quite a lot of hatred in practice. Who knew?

But even after all that, the appeal of transforming sentiment into something immensely lofty lingered. It is still there in all of those twinkly eyed French films featuring unlikely romantic couplings from across the tracks; or the ones that present emotionally unhinged women as romantic leads (like that frankly bonkers arsonist Betty Blue, in fact). It’s also evident in the camp delivery of French television presenters, always chasing “des petit moments d’émotion” for their audiences, and sometimes even crying uncontrollably on screen. And it is also present in the inherited mythology of school protests, as generation after generation pretend to themselves that sowing some civic chaos is an expression of solidarity and love.

The kids presumably have read their history; even May 1968 was mostly over by June. They know they are unlikely to gain much power collectively, though a few will become media personalities. There is no long-term plan of engagement here, nor genuinely revolutionary intent. They are mostly doing an enjoyable reenactment of the country’s greatest hits, but with the safety catch firmly on. Though there have been some horrible incidents — a hand blown off and a jaw fractured by police — with the sheer numbers of people involved, personal chances of self-destruction are slim.

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Thankfully, although there are plenty of protests in the UK, they are not a crucial part of our national mythology. Equally, despite its uptight reputation, British culture still lacks the precise formality and impersonality of the French version, to which all that sentimental excitability seems to be a reaction. Even now, there are lots of unspoken rules: you must say “Bonjour” or “Bonsoir” when you enter a place; you must not use “tu” for the wrong people; you must not eat on public transport; you should not hug strangers but only kiss them (a norm which to awkward English people seems completely the wrong way round). As a clueless 20-something in Saint-Maur, I once phoned up the local council about an administrative matter, and made the mistake of asking for a particular person without prefixing her name with Madame. Three decades later, I can still hear the stinging rebuke.

So I suspect that in France, protest stands to mannered formality as adultery stands to marriage: both are time-honored ways of letting off some steam. Had the country rarely seen mass direct action from the young like this, it would be a lot more shocking; but actually, it is almost touching in its conservative recreation of the past.

Sooner or later, politicians will promise a tiny bit more money for school improvement; the disorder will peter out, and kids will troop back to class. The taxpayer will foot the bill for cleaning up, and immigrants will do most of the work. Rich boys from nice parts of Paris will move on to grands écoles like their parents before them; and, like their parents before them, they will now have a war story to tell. Deprived suburbs will revert to being places where violence against authorities doesn’t get a particularly noble framing. As Thierry Garnier might have said with a Gallic shrug: bof.

At first sight, there is not much new here: after a decade or so of street violence, from the demonstrations of the Gilet Jaunes to the recent protests against pension reform, taking in the 2023 riots against the police killing of young North African in a Paris suburb along the way, the French public is now accustomed to scenes that in any other country would look like freeze-frame snapshots from a war zone.

It is, however, the vicious quality of the violence from young people which has been genuinely shocking. Notably, in Paris, a lone young trainee female police officer was pursued, tripped and then battered on the ground by a gang of youths. In Belfort, a city in northeastern France, a plain-clothes officer was almost killed by a “lynch mob” — so-called by the press — of hooded teenagers who pinned him to the ground and repeatedly kicked his head. And in Marseille, a young woman at a bus stop was sprayed in the face by an improvised flamethrower wielded by a laughing kid.

Equally terrifying is the eerie, almost incomprehensible way that the violence, which has erupted outside schools all over France, from Lille to Marseille, came apparently out of nowhere. So far, over 1,000 secondary schools have “mobilized”, which means student strikes, barricades and fires in school buildings. The damage will cost millions of euros to repair. Over 3,000 arrests have been made, mainly of young people.

The unrest began at the end of September, taking the form of a series of reasonable protests in the Paris region by school pupils. They decried the degraded state of the French educational system, making legitimate complaints about poor timetabling, lack of teachers, and rotten buildings in a state of Soviet-style shabbiness: freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer heatwaves. It is not only the students but also the teachers who have been complaining about these conditions. My friend Laurence has taught science in a variety of Parisian schools over the past 10 years and testifies that she has never seen conditions so bad or students so angry. “It is as if the government actively despises us,” she said.

Student anger has also focused on the “Parcoursup”, an online system that, in 2018, replaced the old university application system. Parcoursup offers students the ability to apply to many more universities than previously, and allows universities to rank applications via perceived merit rather than allocating them by lottery, as its predecessor did. But the basis of the rankings is opaque, with the Left arguing that it privileges better-off students, that France is not a true meritocracy, and that this is an assault on the core concept of “égalité”.

This has been one of the rallying cries of the radical Left party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The party is the closest challenger to the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls for the presidential elections next year. The LFI has been courting school-age students and teachers for years, with their strategies for further investment and a reshaping of university policies, controversially opening up elite colleges to educationally disadvantaged students. But this is the first time that the Macron government has explicitly pointed to the LFI’s role in deliberately stirring up subversion. This at least was the view of the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who, while calling a crisis Cabinet meeting last Friday, pointed the finger directly at Mélenchon, stating that “the LFI and its ultra-Left proxies are at the origins of this movement”.

His accusation has been given substance by the sight of the LFI Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, jubilant and dancing in front of the burning shell of the Lycée Paul Eluard. There have also been calls by the LFI activist Ritchy Thibault “to march on the Elysée Palace and burn it down”. Intelligence agencies for the police have also spent much time tracking preparations for the disorder on social media since early September, noting among the calls for “armed action”, the language of the far-Left — notably “the end of neo-Liberal democracy”, “disrupting the social order”, “challenging state violence”.

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, leveling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a “Sixth Republic” — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and “a New France”. Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants. The aim is not assimilation into an old order, but destroying it altogether.

All of this has the potential to backfire on Mélenchon. Two years ago, the Minister for Justice, Gérald Darmanin, identified the overall LFI strategy as “bordelisation” — a word that is hard to translate but roughly means in slang terms “deliberately creating chaos”. More recently, Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and a presidential candidate for 2027, described the LFI as “an absolutely seditious party with a fascination for violence” and called for a debate on banning the LFI. Mélenchon’s slyly sarcastic response to Retailleau was that this was “absurd” and that not a single LFI document could be traced to recent disturbances, unless he had incited them “by telepathy”.

Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the “Old France” — which still makes up the majority of French people. With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s. A recent poll in the newspaper Le Figaro found that 78% of French people thought that the LFI was “aggressive”, and 70% thought they were actively “dangerous”.

The precedent for all this violence and rebellion is of course the near-revolution of 1968, still a nostalgic meme for Old Leftists. Students and school kids who were in revolt angered the older generations so much that they effectively delivered Right-wing governments until 1982.

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But the 21st century is a totally different political landscape in France, shaped by tensions over race, religion and ethnic identity as much or more than the neo-Marxist dreams of revolution cherished by the LFI. This is why Le Pen also has a substantial youth vote to match or even overtake the LFI, a youth which craves order and discipline over anarchy. I have been to enough RN rallies over the years to see how Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young and handsome protegé and president of the RN, is greeted with pop-star style adulation when he speaks to an often hip and well-informed young audience. We are a long way from the fascist brutes of the old days of the Front National, the predecessor of today’s RN.

Le Pen has now come out on national television, accusing Mélenchon of stirring up trouble in the schools. Her prescription, sidestepping the issue of immigrants, is for new, stricter laws to punish so-called “casseurs” — the most destructive of the rioters.

None of this stops Mélenchon from invoking the specter of “fascism” when he talks about his opponents, and especially Le Pen and the RN. The more he does this, however, the more even centrists and those on the Right, normally opposed to Le Pen, see the sense in her analysis of the situation. Put simply, the harder Mélenchon drives the strategy of chaos, the more deeply retrenched even the milder conservatives become, scared of the forces yet to be unleashed and what their country might look like if Mélenchon ever comes to power.

It would be a savage irony if the LFI, the party of insurrectionary challenges to the “bourgeois order”, also turned out to be the party that opened the way for an RN presidency.

Both treasures have played their part in the “soft power” of cultural diplomacy. The Mona Lisa was loaned to the United States in 1963, following a state visit to France by President Kennedy. The story goes that his wife Jackie so charmed de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, André Malraux, that he agreed to the loan as a goodwill gesture. De Gaulle’s view is not known, but he probably saw this as a harmless sop to the Americans at a time when relations between the two countries were strained.

As for the Bayeux Tapestry, the idea of a loan was first mooted at a summit in 2018 between President Macron and Theresa May, two years after Brexit. Macron, too, was looking for a symbolic gesture of goodwill in troubled times. Knowing that the Bayeux Museum was scheduled to close for renovation, one of his officials, who recounted the story to me, came up with the idea in the small hours of the morning.

In both cases, there were protests from curators and the public about the risks of moving these precious-but-fragile works. A petition was duly launched against the loan of the Tapestry in July 2025. Macron, like Malraux before him, overruled the objections in the cause of diplomacy. Given the vicissitudes the Tapestry has suffered over the many centuries, it seems likely to survive this one too — and will continue to inform Anglo-French conversations about national identity.

Amazingly little is known about the first four centuries of the Tapestry’s history. It was originally assumed to have been commissioned, and even stitched, by William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda. In France, indeed, it was often referred to as “La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde”. That theory is long discredited. It is now believed to have been commissioned by William’s brother-in-law Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who was also, as Duke of Kent, his main administrator in England. Even so, we still do not know when it ended up in Bayeux. The first record appears in a cathedral inventory in 1476. When the building was ransacked by Protestants in 1562, it survived, perhaps because it was hidden in a chest.

Yet it would be in the 18th century that the Tapestry began to excite wider historical interest, sparking arguments about its “identity” that would rumble on into modern times. In the 1740s, the scholar-monk Bernard de Monfaucon commissioned a draftsman to do a copy, publishing the results in a volume entitled Monuments of the French Monarchy, making the Tapestry known to a wider public. On the far side of the Channel, meanwhile, antiquarian William Stuckley, best known for his work on Stonehenge, claimed the Tapestry was stylistically a British not a French artifact.

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Despite all this, the Tapestry remained obscure. It survived two close shaves during the Revolution. The first was in 1792, when fears of an English invasion prompted local patriots to form the Calvados Battalion of volunteers. Searching to cover the weapons and provisions in their wagons, someone suggested the old hanging in the cathedral. Luckily, a local administrator stepped in to prevent this. Two years later, some zealous local citizens had the bright idea of cutting it up to decorate a float for a Republican parade. They were stopped by a member of the Revolution’s newly created Commission for Arts.

It would, however, be Napoleon who fully embraced the Tapestry as a political symbol for the first time. In 1803, huge numbers of troops assembled at Boulogne for an invasion of the British Isles. To bolster propaganda for the scheme, Napoleon had the Tapestry displayed for two months at the Louvre. An official newspaper reported the next day that, during his visit to see the Tapestry, Napoleon asked a question about the scene with the comet: supposedly predicting King Harold’s doom. In a footnote, the paper also carried the story that a comet had been sighted recently near Dover. Unfortunately for Napoleon, this portended nothing. The invasion was abandoned. The Tapestry returned to Bayeux.

Yet the artwork’s potency would hardly diminish. Over the next decades, after all, the Tapestry moved from being a local relic to a French national treasure. Across the Channel, meanwhile, a member of the British Society of Antiquaries, Charles Stothard, was dispatched to France to make a detailed drawing of the entire work. Years later, after his death, two fragments cut off from the Tapestry were found in his belongings, and his unfortunate widow was accused of the crime. On the upside, his drawings provide the only record of the Tapestry before some 19th-century restorations.

Still, that did not stop Stothard’s drawings from being engraved and published, providing the Tapestry’s first ever full color reproduction in the 1820s. Especially after railways made Normandy more accessible, it became a major tourist attraction. It was now moved for display from the cathedral to the Hôtel de Ville. The poet Robert Southey complained he had had to queue to see it. Views differed: Constable thought it was “almost as bad a Mexican painting”; Ruskin was hugely admiring; Dickens thought it the work of “feeble amateurs”; Tennyson was inspired by it to write his verse drama Harold in 1876.

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All the while, it attracted scholars, who used the Tapestry to debate the impact of the Normans. One example is J.H Round, an Oxford historian who used the work to argue that the Conquest had replaced England’s Anglo-Saxon social structures with feudalism. Tellingly, Tennyson’s Harold is a brave freedom fighter, embracing High Victorianism to rail against the Norman yoke.

Interpretations of the Tapestry took a new turn from the 1870s when, thanks to the display of the hand-colored photographic reproduction of the Tapestry at the South Kensington Museum — now the V&A — it was reimagined as a proto-feminist work. In her book The Queens of England, popular writer Agnes Strickland celebrated the women who had created the Tapestry. Others retorted that women might have made it, but lacked the imagination to have designed it. As one male academic snootily commented: “I suppose I am not expected to take any serious notice of some amusing remarks made by Miss Agnes Strickland”.

Comments like these did not deter Elizabeth Wardle. A friend of William Morris and a talented embroiderer herself, she conceived the idea of producing a copy of the Tapestry. Setting up an Embroidery School at Leek in Staffordshire, she gathered a team of 37 embroiderers to produce a copy, working from the South Kensington photographs. The replica was unveiled in Leek in 1886 and became celebrated enough to travel the country, as well as to Europe and America. It was even taken to Windsor for a day, though Queen Victoria was not impressed. Finally, the replica was finally bought by Reading Museum. It has been there ever since — despite occasional attempts by Leek to get it back, according to one local, on the grounds that it was the town’s “Elgin Marbles”.

The contested history of the Tapestry took a final and unexpected turn in the Second World War. The more fanatical Nazis were obsessed with the idea of racial purity and the search for the origins of the true Aryan race. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, saw his men as new Teutonic Knights, and in 1935 set up Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Research”) to investigate the origins of the master race. It became interested in the Bayeux Tapestry because, since the Normans were originally descended from Vikings, they could be interpreted as “Nordic”. After Hitler’s conquest of France in 1940, when an invasion of England was planned, the Tapestry was viewed as an example of warlike Aryans defeating effete Saxons (who, of course, could themselves be seen as Nordic).

What saved the Tapestry from Himmler’s designs was that the Nazis were as bureaucratic as they were demented. Occupied France was technically controlled by the Wehrmacht, putting the Tapestry under the authority of the Kunstschutz (“Art Protection Squad”): a body which respected the Hague Convention and protected national works of art. As for Himmler’s pseudo-researchers, they had no rights to the Tapestry unless they could first re-define it as non-French, which would remove it from army protection.

Aware of the dangers posed by the Ahnenerbe, the aristocratic head of the Kunstschutz prepared to move the Tapestry to safekeeping. But a mole in the unit revealed his plan, and a team of SS “experts” arrived in June 1941 to photograph the Tapestry for research, just another example of the intriguing relationship between physical studies of the masterpiece and the ideological exploitation of it. For the rest of the war, Ahnenerbe “experts” pored over their photographs, preparing a huge volume to prove the Tapestry’s Aryan identity. The work as a celebration of Nordic supremacism was even the subject of a broadcast by Lord Haw Haw.

In the end, it wouldn’t matter. After the D-Day landings, Himmler ordered the Tapestry transported back to Germany, but Resistance fighters got there first, capturing the Louvre, where the work had since been transferred from Normandy, a few days before Paris was liberated. In December 1944, for the first time since Napoleon, the Tapestry was displayed at the Louvre. Then it returned to Bayeux, where it has been ever since.

Having survived Huguenot iconoclasts, revolutionary enthusiasts and crazed Nazis, the Tapestry will surely survive this new journey, watched over by its curators. There is no chance that a latter-day Charles Stothard will be able to snip off a few threads. On the other hand, whether the Tapestry will fulfill its role in soft-power diplomacy is another matter. Mona Lisa’s smile was not enough to prevent such a dramatic collapse of Franco-American relations that de Gaulle broke with Nato in 1966. Let us hope the Bayeux Tapestry proves more successful in its mission.

It just turns out that digital capitalism is a cruel game of gatekeepers and first-past-the-post market power. France, like the European Union as a whole, remains as embedded as ever in a digital economy lorded over by Silicon Valley. Today, it’s a reality best represented in the €264 billion deficit in digital services whisked out of the EU common market by US corporations. The legacy German software company SAP, Europe’s largest tech sector “champion”, is middling compared to its American peers. Artificial Intelligence hopefuls like France’s Mistral AI do make headlines. But they remain blips on the chart next to the leading California and even Chinese firms.

Still, it was no doubt with an eye to his legacy that Macron early this summer sought some sort of victory, albeit in the far less glamorous business of data centers. In June, Japanese lender SoftBank duly announced a €75 billion spending spree on French data-center capacity, spelling a roughly five-gigawatts surge in computing power. And, for Macron, this is proof that France is at last making inroads in scaling up the infrastructure that defines Europe’s tech sector, especially given his country’s relative strengths elsewhere. In OVH Cloud, for instance, the country already boasts one of Europe’s largest homegrown cloud and compute providers, and this on a continent where Amazon, Google and other US “hyperscalers” control some 70% of the market. But France’s real trump card is energy. In 2022, Macron announced a significant expansion of the country’s arsenal of nuclear power plants — even if that now seems set to be gobbled up by the gargantuan demand-shock for electricity from data centers.

Digital infrastructure can, of course, be sized up by processing power — in terms of the raw quantities of data being handled. These are the sweatshops of the big data age, tasked with storing, processing, and sifting the masses of information on which AI foundation models run. But they are also measured by what they consume, whether that’s the sophisticated chips in their servers or the tons of rare metals required to manufacture them. As for energy, those newly announced data centers are predicted to consume the equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors.

Sooner or later, then, France’s data-center euphoria will be forced to contend with a tight knot of contradictions. Many of these are inherent to the technology itself, already clear in the way limited water resources and strained electricity markets are driving local pushback to data centers in the US. With French planners giddily talking of reindustrialization by data center, these tensions can be expected to repeat themselves.

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For now, however, with local opposition still sporadic, planners and operators see few reasons not to accelerate. Public utilities like electricity producer EDF, which was re-nationalized in 2023, or the transmission operator RTE, are promising “fast-track” hooks up for operators. Recent state decrees, alongside an omnibus deregulatory package adopted by parliament this spring, are aimed at speeding up groundbreaking, removing permitting powers from municipalities and even curtailing the possibility of public reviews.

Warnings of an AI bubble be damned: in France, data centers now bear the stamp of a national cause. Macron, for his part, would no doubt like the investment push to be seen as one of the so-called “grands projets” periodically undertaken by French presidents since de Gaulle. Just as France’s independent nuclear deterrent ensured dignity in the Cold War, and civilian nuclear power protected the country from energy shocks in the Seventies, data centers are being touted as a way of resisting Europe’s digital colonization by the so-called “GAFAM”: the French acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. On paper, at least, it’s a seductive story, even if the French public has yet to take much measure of the commitments being made in its name.

Yet cutting dependence on Silicon Valley is far harder in practice. It’s no coincidence that Macron and his allies have long pushed for a more assertive tech policy from the EU, one component of the French President’s broader calls for “strategic autonomy” vis-à-vis Washington. In recent years, though, this position has been in the minority. A first wave of EU tech legislation — from 2016’s GDPR rules, to the Digital Markets or Services Acts of 2022, and the AI Act of 2023 — put some limits on the worst abuses of the tech majors: while also punting on the comprehensive industrial policy needed to make up for Europe’s technological lag. One reason for this continued caution? Donald Trump’s eagerness to come to the defense of US tech giants in their regulatory skirmishes with Brussels.

So are the winds shifting in Paris’ favor? On the heels of the investment surge in France, Brussels announced a new “tech sovereignty” package that supposedly has the bloc reclaiming “its place in the global race for geoeconomic power”. European institutions are also preparing a “Cloud and AI Development Act”, with the goal of tripling data-center capacity by the early 2030s and scaling up of European-based companies across the tech economy. A new Chips Act purports to reinforce EU production and supply chains for advanced microprocessors.

For boosters, this is a sign that Brussels is finally taking the geopolitics of technology seriously. And this summer, Macron’s government also announced it would phase out its contract with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, replacing the American military-tech company’s software — used by French intelligence services since 2016 — with a model created by French startup ChapsVision.

All the same, pressure remains not antagonize Washington. Weeks after introducing its tech sovereignty package, for instance, the European Commission in late June signed up to the Trump administration’s so-called “Pax Silica” alliance on the critical minerals and chip supply chains needed for AI. “There is a case to be made for more compute capacity that is sovereign and located in Europe,” says Giorgos Verdi, a policy lead with the Europe branch of Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank and advocacy group. “At the same time, it’s very important to define, before rushing into the craze of data-center build outs, what this sort of capacity is used for.”

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When it comes to Europe’s tech ambitions, separating fact from myth is not always easy. That goes for the much vaunted, and just about always inflated, jobs figures supposedly stemming from the opportunity at “reindustrialization” represented by new sites. It also goes for the use of the new compute capacity itself, which on its own will do little to dent the structural advances of Silicon Valley.

With or without that new processing power, meanwhile, the fundamental problem remains US control over the commanding heights of the digital economy. Lou Welgryn, president of the Paris-based Data for Good, tells UnHerd that a mad rush for data infrastructure could “reinforce dependence on actors that dominate the technological core”. Without European alternatives further up the value chain, expanded compute capacity will merely service the same corporations that already control the digital economy today.

Just follow where the capital flowing into European processing power is coming from, with US tech majors present, either directly or through local partners, in many of the largest data-center projects. As Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s CEO, has pointed out, his bank’s data-center spree simply involved aggregating various capital sources — and working closely with an unnamed “hyperscaler”. According to a French senate report published last month, a mere 1.4 gigawatts of 15 gigawatts of projected data-center investments is of European origin.

There are other ironies here too. What Welgryn calls “digital sobriety” seems to be heading for the dustbin of history. But amid an ecological crisis, and a cost-of-living crunch that shows few signs of receding as the leading preoccupation for French citizens, what of the so-called “energy sobriety” that was, until quite recently, held up as a societal totem?

A big-data blitz will only add to simmering tensions over stretched water resources; rage over rural water reservoirs, built in the interests of agro-industry, has already sparked battles between protestors and riot police. This summer’s historic heatwave has rivers like the Loire almost running dry, even as wildfires rip through swathes of French countryside. One recent report classifies as “high risk” the environmental exposure of at least a quarter of French data-center projects. From climate “resilience” to data sovereignty, a lot seems to be riding on the panacea of limitless nuclear energy.

Macron’s closing gesture towards strategic planning ought to have been the chance to strike a balance between these mounting constraints and conflicting priorities. Tech sovereignty today surely needs a material infrastructure, but it cannot just be about opening the electrical spigot to Silicon Valley. Who knows, it could even be about placing some hard limits on big data itself. Until then, France and Europe risk being pigeonholed into a developmental path that just means taking on more of the dirty grunt work of the digital economy. If, or rather when, a data-center backlash comes, Macron’s successor can expect to have their hands full.

Nos remplaçants s’il y en a, et s’il leur arrive de penser à nous dans quelques siècles, n’éprouveront ni indignation ni colère ; ils ne seront plus concernés. Ils ressentiront probablement un vague dégoût, et surtout une immense perplexité. Les plus lettrés tenteront de la réduire par l’écriture d’énormes ouvrages, dont « Histoire de la décadence et de la chute de l’empire romain » reste un exemple classique. Un résumé simplifié des thèses de Gibbon expliquant la chute de l’Empire romain par le développement du christianisme, outre qu’il est convaincant et clair, présente l’avantage de pouvoir être prolongé sans difficulté par les thèses d’Auguste Comte sur le passage de l’état théologique à l’état métaphysique, dont l’unique fonction aura été de détruire. Le déclin de l’Occident trouve ainsi son explication naturelle dans la chute du christianisme initiée par le protestantisme, accomplie par le siècle des lumières. Nietzsche dit à peu près la même chose, en y rajoutant d’amusants effets spéciaux mettant en scène des saltimbanques et des aigles. Ce qui ne colle par contre plus très bien, c’est que les choses ne vont pas mieux en Asie ; le déclin démographique, dans les pays technologiquement les plus avancés — Japon, Corée, plus récemment la Chine — y est même encore plus rapide, au point que leurs populations risquent, à un terme pas si éloigné, de disparaître. C’est bel et bien la modernité toute entière qui s’autodétruit sous nos yeux incompréhensifs.

« Les choses tombent en morceaux ; le centre ne peut plus tenir / La pure anarchie est lâchée sur le monde » écrit Yeats en 1919, pressentant que, pour l’Europe, la guerre qui vient de s’achever n’aura été que l’annonciation d’autres désastres plus considérables. La guerre a donné naissance à la guerre, le nazisme a ouvert une porte sombre qui ne s’est jamais totalement refermée, les deux guerres mondiales n’ont fait qu’accélérer la décomposition des pays qui ont commis la folie de s’y engager. Un siècle après le poème de Yeats, le centre n’a pas tenu — et cela apparaît avec une évidence particulière dans le cas du centre politique européen, Bruxelles. En Belgique l’euthanasie, ouverte aux « personnes en souffrance psychique » depuis 2002, l’est aux mineurs depuis 2014. Quelques marges tiennent encore, mais l’une après l’autre les digues cèdent, et nous sommes submergés par cette « mer noircie de sang » dont parle Yeats dans le vers suivant.

English Translation

The moral confusion of MeToo

By Michel Houellebecq

France should be the next barrier swept away by this sea; it remains possible to avoid it, but hope is dwindling. For some time now, several years already, that I have been striving to fight against euthanasia, while the conviction grows in me that I am fighting a losing battle, I feel like I have played all my cards, and even started to cheat. One last time, I do not think it useless to recommend to those whose vote will have the force of law to reflect on the few philosophers who, over the centuries, have approved of suicide — it is even quite astonishing: “progressivism” sweeps away with contempt, with a wave of the hand, not only all existing religious traditions, but almost everything previous philosophers have thought; such arrogance, I think, has never before manifested in human history. But philosophies, unlike religions, speak mainly to the intelligence of the human being, and hardly reach what is essential in him. The Catholic religion, despite apparently some recent stirrings, has long been lagging behind in Europe, and I am not at the point of preferring an Islamic society, on the grounds that secular society deviates from moral law. But I am not sure I want to belong to a society that legalizes euthanasia; defending the West is fine, provided it deserves to be defended. It is enough to examine the arguments of the supporters of euthanasia to be overwhelmed by disgust, and that by force of disgust a moral insurrection is triggered; these arguments are actually summed up in a single one, which is dignity, but this word has been used so often, and in such a perverse way, that it has become difficult to grasp its meaning. Seen by supporters of euthanasia, the desire for dignity expressed by the dying person, as testified by loved ones, is generally expressed by phrases like: “He would not have endured becoming a vegetable.” The assertion would be more convincing if they could complete it like this: “He would not have endured becoming a vegetable, he would have preferred to become a corpse.” Let us add that the vegetable metaphor reflects a painfully pragmatic view of the human being. Ideally, a human being should move, perform acts, in short, lead an active life. And if that is definitely impossible, at least he should communicate, show himself capable of interacting, at least by speech, with the rest of society. The human is reduced to his use value, that is to say his initial value diminished by a coefficient of wear. It is hard to imagine a more direct opposition to human dignity in the sense of Emmanuel Kant, with the Kantian idea that humanity, in its own person as in that of others, must always be considered as an end, and never simply as a means. A first alteration had already occurred, and unfortunately it was on the occasion of the so justified fight against animal suffering, when the “antispeciesists” undertook to lead it in the name of the dubious notion of “animal rights,” when it would have sufficed to continue to heed the modest but incandescent, eternal, voice of compassion. With euthanasia it is no longer a matter of alteration, but of a plunge into the abyss. For Kant, for the thinkers of more naive centuries, human dignity was simply linked to the fact of being a man. We no longer see things the same way. Human dignity is altered in us, our life is in itself a process of alteration, and we must at every moment be ready to justify it in our own eyes, even in those of others (insofar as that makes a difference). For nearly two centuries, the specter of nihilism has haunted Western Europe. Now that’s it, here we are; we were not expecting nihilism in this form, it is neither dark nor twilight; it is rather colorful and cheerful. To picture it, one should not think of Dostoevsky, nor of Nietzsche, but rather remember a Simons store commercial (it is a Canadian clothing store chain) that was supposed to depict a happy euthanasia. It was a dignity to scream about.
Filmé au bord de la mer, il y avait des vagues et du violoncelle, un grand repas convivial avec du cheesecake et des éclats de rire, la chose était titrée « Tout est beauté », la future morte était jeune, émouvante et sympathique, il s’agissait d’une artiste, on la voyait dessiner des formes dans le sable avec un bâton. Simons a retiré son clip, il y avait eu sur Internet trop de commentaires sarcastiques se moquant de l’utilisation des codes de l’industrie du luxe pour promouvoir l’euthanasie. En effet, on se serait cru dans une pub Chanel ou Saint-Laurent.

Let’s dig a little into this matter of dignity. Back when I was researching the Vincent Lambert case, I remember a “white paper” on the operation of EVC-EPR centers, those created by the Kouchner law, and in which Vincent Lambert should have found his place if the medical system had worked properly. One anecdote struck me, that of a woman who had been silent for years, who suddenly started talking again during an unexpected visit. While a doctor expressed his astonishment, because for years he had tried in vain to establish contact, she replied: “What you were saying wasn’t all that interesting”. A very compromised state of health can excuse certain lapses in politeness, but still, it’s a lesson worth remembering: if people don’t talk to you, sometimes it’s because they have nothing to say to you.

Anyone who has written, or even simply tried to write, knows that it is sometimes possible — it’s hard to explain, but it’s true — to express in writing realities inaccessible to speech. And anyone who has actually written knows something else, something sadder: what you’ve written will only be a faint trace of what you dreamed of writing. Even someone as monstrously productive in literature as Balzac admitted it: the books you’ve written are less beautiful than those you only dreamed of. Speech is only a fraction of writing, which itself is only a fraction of inner life. Reducing a man’s mind to his oral communication skills is simply stupid.

If you look at things from the angle of morals, to behave with dignity would be to adopt, in the face of life’s sufferings and sorrows, an attitude of calm, restraint, stoicism. Dignity would, in short, be little different from emotional modesty; which already gives reason for suspicion. If modesty is in all cases a rather shady feeling, a bit too associated with shame, emotional modesty is, of all the forms it can take, by far the most toxic. I’ve heard the “dignity” of victims of this or that tragic news story praised so much in the media that I’ve come to take a dislike to the word dignity. In the face of great suffering, the healthiest attitude is obviously to cry, to scream, to moan, to beg for pity from the deity or from other people. The stoic is basically just a theoretical puppet, devoid of all plausibility, and stoicism a philosophy best left unmentioned.

It’s not only, I realize with surprise, on the sexual level that we are the opposite of the baba cool years that marked my youth. When I was a teenager, it was fashionable to criticize the saying “boys don’t cry”, and instead to encourage boys to freely express their emotions. The significance of this saying had, moreover, been greatly overestimated: literary accounts clearly show that knights of the Middle Ages shed tears without restraint at the death of their comrades-in-arms; it was only from the beginning of the 20th century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, that the injunction to modesty took hold, at the same time as the choice to hide death, and for the same reasons.

Half a century after the baba cool era, everything has changed, and it’s no longer just men who must hold back their tears; women, preferably, too. With so much dignity, with so much modesty in showing one’s emotions, others come to suppose that you hardly feel any, and that they can quietly go back to their own business. Dignity, in the end, has only one use: to legitimize the constant practice of the most perfect selfishness. It’s a considerable use.

La pudeur, version plus explicit of dignity, has other even more poisonous consequences when it no longer concerns only emotions, but attacks the physical body — and this is something much more serious, much more deadly and heavier than sexual modesty. Let dignity speak. Is it really modest and really dignified, when one is so close to being a vegetable, when one is physically so diminished, to appear in public? To show oneself, even, to anyone? Is it really modest and really dignified, ultimately, to exist?

Now that’s it, you are in the pipeline, you are ashamed of your own existence, and euthanasia awaits you around the corner. I, who have so often amused myself by mocking Nietzsche — and I couldn’t help myself this time again, he’s so funny with his mustache — I would still like to pay tribute to him by quoting these lines from the Gay Science:

“Who do you call bad? — The one who always wants to make others feel ashamed.

What do you consider most human? — To spare someone shame.”

We are, it’s painful to say, perhaps no longer quite human. After a detour of several millennia, the West seems to have returned to that ancient animal wisdom which drives, in almost all social species, the sick animal to move away from the tribe to die alone — knowing well that it has no compassion to expect from its fellows, that it is more likely to be, like the birds of Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, sent off with pecks. We had long believed ourselves to be a tribe of a higher order; we were mistaken, say the animalists, and this return to animal law, here’s the strangest thing, should be considered as a progress. What is established in any case is that progressivism functions absolutely like a ratchet mechanism. When a “societal advance” (abortion, death penalty, same-sex marriage, IVF, surrogacy, anything) has occurred, it is out of the question to go back, no one thinks of it. This assumption is antidemocratic: what one law has done, another law can undo; at least that’s the idea I have of the law; but it allows us to identify progressivism for what it really is: a destiny.

One may be right to think that it is vain to fight against destiny, and that every tragedy must go to its end. I can’t help but think that by asking for its citizens access to euthanasia, it is its own euthanasia that France is asking for. People have been surprised that I am hostile to this bill, even though I have often been labeled with a strange neologism: I would be a deprimist. Let’s admit it. It is true that I have worked to scrutinize the symptoms of Western suicide, the rise of nihilism; but I do not recall ever rejoicing in it. We are entering a world where it will be easier to die; I would have preferred a world where one could live.

Parisian police officers might take some hope from the fact that relations between France and Senegal have never been as fractious and bitter as those between France’s former colonial possessions in North Africa. Indeed, Senegal achieved independence without a bloody war of the kind that has scarred Algeria. But the Senegalese in France have high rates of unemployment and poverty, and as such form a central part of the marginalized populations of the banlieues. 

This is the same population that brought havoc to Paris only two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Champions League final between Arsenal and PSG. Once again, battle lines were drawn in the glamorous heart of the French capital between the riot police and so-called casseurs — meaning “wreckers” — the name given by the media and politicians to the nihilistic hooligans who so regularly enjoy a fight.

Within minutes of the end of the Champions League match, the French news channel BFM had already switched its coverage from a football match to the center of Paris, where you could watch in real time bins being set alight, youths dancing on burning cars, hire bikes on fire, shop windows being smashed and shops being looted. Bare-chested youths were flinging their arms open wide, goading the police to attack, while their comrades fired an onslaught of acid-filled bottles, fireworks and homemade mortars, often launched at police lines from cars or scooters in full flight. 

It was not the first time that a PSG victory in the Champions League had led to riots — last year’s triumph over Inter Milan had led to similar scenes. But on this occasion the police were prepared. On the morning of the final, the police had deployed 8,000 officers in central Paris and 14,000 more officers throughout France. In the event, there were 890 arrests — 45% more than last year — with 178 police officers injured, some of them seriously. One officer was badly burnt by a mortar firework and another run over by a stolen car.  

These scenes were not confined to Paris. More than 71 cities, towns and villages reported “violent incidents” through the night across France. If you did not know that this was in the name of a football match which had just taken place in another, distant country, you might have thought that France was in the throes of full-scale insurrection. As President Emmanuel Macron greeted the victorious footballers at the Elysée Palace on Sunday, he was moved to add a comment on the riots in his congratulations. “We are sick of it,” he said. Certainly, by midnight on Saturday, to most viewers this was less a celebration of a football victory than it was a scene from a war zone. 

That was also the immediate reaction of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), whose leaders were quick to condemn the violence. First to attack the government’s handling of the riots was Julien Odoul, an RN spokesman from Burgundy who decried the “unpunished hordes” and accused Macron of leading a government in “fire and blood”. The President of the RN, Jordan Bardella, was quick to follow up, using the same language, and denouncing “scenes of a near-civil war” in Paris and the provinces. On Monday morning, Bardella also made it clear that “there is obviously a clear link between our 30-year failure to manage immigration and the conflicts in question”.  

The response from the Left was less incendiary, less accurate and less honest. The Left-wing newspaper Libération barely mentioned the violence, preferring to devote its first six pages on Monday morning to the death, at the age of 104, of the distinguished Leftist sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin (who was, a rarity amongst French intellectuals, a football fan). At the same time, throughout France, representatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) were arguing lamely about poor “police mismanagement” of the “celebrations”, with lightly veiled accusations of police heavy-handedness. Clémence Guetté, Vice-President of the LFI in the Assembly National, went one step further and explicitly accused the police of “arresting people for no reason, firing grenades at families and young people simply because they had come together in a crowd”. Guetté said that there was a need for more “fan zones” and “better planning” to avoid future conflicts.  

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This was at best disingenuous, and amounted to a slur on those officers — publicly thanked by Macron at the Elysée alongside the triumphant team — who had literally been in the front line against an out-of-control mob of some 20,000 people on the Champs-Elysées. Understandably, the police argued strongly against the LFI’s version of events. In the pages of the conservative Le Figaro, Yoann Maras, the spokesman for the police union, said that it was too easy to launch “a witch hunt” against the police. “We refuse to accept the growing gap between official discourse and the reality lived by our colleagues on the ground,” he said. He went on: ‘There was not a single incident in Budapest (where the Champions League took place). We have this only in France.” The question Maras left hanging in the air was why this should be so.  

There is in fact no easy answer to this. What was clear to the police, however, who had been following encrypted messages on social media for weeks before the Champions League final, was that most of the casseurs on the Champs-Elysées were not city-center-dwelling Parisians but had flooded into Paris from the banlieues, which have fast, direct links to Charles de Gaulle Étoile, the vast metro station beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The common theme on social media was that the casseurs were planning to “bouffer les flics” (“devour the cops”). Many of them had little or no football affiliation. “I’m not really that into football,” said Raphaël D., arrested for drunkenness and insulting the police. “I’m more into basketball,” he said to a reporter from Le Parisien outside his court hearing. But he had come with his mates anyway for the ruckus. The same applied to Hichem S., an Algerian normally resident in Barcelona, who had also been arrested. Hichem S. presented himself in court as an unconvincing PSG supporter, having traveled from Spain to “kick up some trouble” with his mates in Paris.

Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, compared the phenomenon of street violence in France with British football hooliganism. The British problem had been solved, he wrote in Le Parisien, only by “extreme repression”. This, he said, was the only solution. For Bauer, the violence was therefore a problem of policing rather than a political issue. 

Nobody in France, on the Right or Left, really agrees with Bauer: his is a quite simplistic form of wishful thinking. Rather, it has been clear for several decades that the make-up of the French population has changed, partly due to mass immigration and the reluctance, generalized in most EU countries, to tackle this issue head-on. Immigration is only part of the story, however. The real political issue is that there is a substantial part of the population which hates the French Republic and which likes to take this hatred out on the most visible part of the Republic: the police.

One of the paradoxes here is that the French team is largely made up of players from an immigrant background. The tough training grounds of the French banlieues produce some of the best players in the world. Certainly most of Senegal’s best known exports to France and Europe are made up of footballers, including Sadio Mané, formerly of Liverpool, and Benjamin Mendy, formerly of Manchester City. 

On recent form, the French team, partially made up of players from the banlieues, are already looking like they could win the World Cup again. They have a formidable attacking force, not just with the speed of Kylian Mbappé but also with the likes of Ousmane Dembélé, Rayan Cherki and Michael Olise — who scored a hat-trick in the recent friendly with Northern Ireland — all looking to make their mark. 

Each of those players, being of immigrant heritage, are part of what the LFI is now calling “the new France”. It is a term first used, and sometimes still used, to describe the French colony of Quebec, but it has been reinvented by Mélenchon, who also speaks hopefully of the “creolization” of France. Mélenchon is enthusiastic about this strategy because he sees it as a genuinely new “revolutionary” strategy to transform France. His own family background — he was born and raised in post-Independence Tangier — is also a factor in determining his sympathy for the Arabic-speaking Muslim vote. (Mélenchon himself speaks a workable street Arabic.) For Mélenchon, “the new France” describes the hybrid demographic of the banlieues, a demographic whose votes the LFI are deliberately targeting as part of a campaign of “infiltration”: taking the voting system into areas which traditionally have a low voting record. 

This strategy is perhaps laudable, at least from the point of view of making democracy more accessible and even necessary to a disillusioned and disenfranchised section of the population. The RN, too, would like to court these votes, if only to break the deadlock which prevents them finally taking power at each successive presidential election. 

The stumbling block here, however, is that the RN is less prone to denial and euphemism. The Left likes to talk about les jeunes du quartier, as if they were a sparky group of teenagers rather than coked-up rioters; the RN talks about voyous — criminal hooligans. This language naturally sets them at odds with the voters in the banlieues, who often feel stigmatized and angry. 

Yet the “old France”, so despised by Mélenchon and his party, has not yet gone away. The political fall-out from the violence after the Champions League final — an almost universal howl of outrage from all parts of the center and the Right — proves as much. It remains to be seen, however, how long this low-key civil war in France between the “old” and the “new” can last before the current proxy war between the banlieues and “official France” becomes real — and therefore ever more vicious. Such a development would deepen the fractures in an already fragmented and damaged country.

As far as I was concerned when I spoke those words, I was offering my own perspective as a woman — but also saying something that every woman on this planet has always known, and that feminists have repeated for decades. We really must be wary of men because the problem of sexual violence is overwhelmingly a male problem. In France, 99% of rapes are committed by men. Women know. 

According to the three LGBTQ+ organizations who brought criminal proceedings against me — Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS, all of which receive funding by French taxpayers, by the way — my words amounted to incitement to transphobic hatred. On Wednesday, the judge delivered his verdict that, yes, I was guilty of committing a “public injury towards a person or a group because of their sex, their sexual orientation or their gender identity”. On top of paying €1,000 to the French state, I’m also liable for various other costs. All told, I’m obliged to pay €4,754. 

Of course, what matters here is not money but principle. Apparently it is now against the law for women to tell other women to be wary of the opposite sex. Naturally, my lawyers and I intend to appeal this Orwellian verdict, all the way to the highest court in France if necessary, since it marks a worrying shift in French freedom of expression — quite beyond the specifics of my own rather absurd trial. It seems to me basically unacceptable that a woman should be condemned for having expressed her misgivings about the safety of women and the reality of biological sex. This represents narrowing of permissible speech in France, the judicialization of ideological disagreement — and the growing influence of gender politics on a country that once prided itself on intellectual honesty. 

I uttered the fateful phrase in October 2023. In my work as a feminist writer and activist, I have long argued that allowing men to change their legal sex and be recognized as women has real implications in various areas, from medicine to law to parenting to sport — and that these merit discussion. I co-founded the feminist NGO Femelliste, and later co-authored a book investigating the excesses and consequences of modern gender ideology. 

When I was invited onto the France 2 show Quelle époque, hosted by the prominent TV journalist Léa Salamé, I hoped it would be a chance to have an open, honest and respectful discussion. I would be appearing alongside France’s first-ever transgender mayor, Marie Cau, then-head of the small northern village of Tilloy-Les-Marchiennes. 

In the event, the debate felt more like an ambush. I was accused of being part of the “far-Right sphere”, which could not be further from the truth. Then the contentious moment arrived when Salamé asked me what I, as a feminist, thought transgender demands might take away from women. I answered that these issues should not simply be opposed — “we must find common ground”. I then raised specific areas where conflicts arise, notably around sport and prison policy. 

In relation to prisons, I referred to documented cases in the United States and the United Kingdom, where male prisoners convicted of violence against women had self-identified as female and been transferred to women’s prisons — where they subsequently sexually assaulted female inmates. It was in this specific context that I said: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but as women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises.” 

Two months later, I received a complaint from Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS. The associations cited several of my statements in the program, including one in which I said that, in my view, Marie Cau was a “transfeminine man”.  This was framed as a “transphobic insult”. More broadly, the document portrayed me as someone who contributed to a climate of hostility, even suggesting that my words could be linked to the suffering or suicide of trans-identifying individuals. 

So the initial complaint was not narrowly constructed. It was an attempt, rather, to build a case around a series of statements that, taken together, characterized me not just as someone who had said something controversial: but as someone engaged in a broader pattern of harmful speech. This strategy did not survive legal scrutiny. Before the trial began, my lawyers Richard Malka and Marine Viegas challenged the admissibility and legal qualification of several statements. A significant portion of the complaint was dismissed on procedural and technical grounds; what remained was not the full set of accusations, but that single sentence — “As women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises”. 

Note that the sentence had become curiously detached from its preceding qualification: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but…” Indeed, I was speaking about a concrete category of risk — in other words, doing the opposite of generalizing. This did not prevent the complaint from accusing me of “abusive generalization”. This was the first lesson of the case: once a statement has been ideologically re-coded, context ceases to matter. 

At the hearing, the court returned obsessively to two things: the phrase “people with penises”, and the verb se mefier de — which might be rendered as “to be cautious of”, “to be wary of” or “to watch out for”. The prosecutor argued that my words were doubly discriminatory: first, because they implied that all men are dangerous; and second, because they targeted trans women, recast as “women with penises”, as objects of suspicion. The prosecutor even requested that I be sentenced not only to a fine, but to a so-called “citizenship training course” — a faintly comic euphemism for ideological re-education.

The court’s questioning suggested that my phrase “to be wary of” had to be understood as a hostile generalization. It was treated not as the language of female self-protection, but as a form of exhortation. The word “obliged” made it worse, the prosecutor argued. It transformed caution into an injunction. 

Then there was the phrase “people with penises”. The judge suggested that it sounded like a punchline, a provocation. I explained that I was in fact using a term that is deemed by many progressives to be more inclusive than merely “men” (since as we now know, not all men have penises). Indeed, “people with penises” comes from the same discursive universe as “people with uteruses”, “people who menstruate”, “sex assigned at birth”, and so on. However, it seems that when linguistic logic is applied in the wrong direction, it suddenly becomes indecent. 

The judge then pressed me, several times, on whether I believed all men were dangerous — attempting to force me into either caricature or capitulation. Did I think literally all men were rapists? Really? Every single one? At one point, I was momentarily thrown off balance by this insistence. My lawyer Richard Malka intervened and reframed the point. Not all men are violent, obviously, but the overwhelming majority of rapists are men. That is the social fact women live with, and it is what underlies female caution. It was a necessary intervention as the hearing repeatedly tried to re-code rational female behaviors as forms of ideological extremism. 

But as I learned, this new moral grammar has rendered lived experience all but illegible. Like all women, I have learned from childhood to assess risk. Do not walk alone too late. Watch your drink. Be careful with men you don’t know. Trust your instincts. These are all things we learn as we navigate a social world structured by asymmetrical risk. In court, though, the female habit of caution was recast as criminal suspicion. For this, ordinary reality had to be denied. 

I chose Richard Malka to represent me for a particular reason. His name is not just associated with technical legal expertise — but with some of the most consequential free speech cases of the past two decades. He was the lawyer for newspaper Charlie Hebdo, before and after the terrorist attack on its offices. Malka defended the newspaper’s right to publish caricatures of religion even though they were offensive. That case was about whether a society accepts that certain expressions must remain lawful even when they provoke outrage or worse. Freedom of expression, Malka argued, does not exist only for consensual speech, nor for ideas that flatter prevailing moral sentiments. It exists precisely for what shocks, disturbs, contradicts.

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Malka later represented Mila, a 16-year-old girl subjected to an extraordinary wave of threats and harassment after she criticized Islam in a social media post. The girl had committed no crime, Malka argued, and yet she had effectively been purged from civil society. “I can’t get over the fact that she lives as a recluse,” he told the court. “Imagine her life, she can no longer walk peacefully, she can no longer do internships, all doors are closed to her.”  In this instance, it was those issuing the death threats who were on trial, but the case raised the same underlying question: does the right to free speech remain protected irrespective of the sensitivities of whoever may be offended by it? Or does the concept of harm expand if the identity group is sufficiently sensitive to offense?

In both cases, Malka defended a strict, almost classical understanding of free speech: the law does not exist to protect people from being offended, but to protect the conditions of open debate. It is increasingly rare to find people who defend this position, even in France, which is why I had contacted Malka years before my trial — when I had already begun to face professional consequences for stating that, in my view, being a woman refers to biological reality. For years I had been targeted by activists openly calling for violence against me, even for my death, all while promising legal defense funds for those willing to attack me. When the complaint was eventually filed, I knew who to call. 

In principle, French law still distinguishes between opinion and incitement. The offense at issue — provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence — traditionally requires something more than a harsh statement. It requires an actual call to hostility or exclusion. Marka’s colleague, Marine Viegas, made precisely this point: “I will not fall into the trap set by the civil parties,” she told the court. “For or against trans people? For or against gender identity? That is not what this case is about. The only question is whether, today, in a democratic society — ours — it is still permissible to debate this subject, the ideology it has produced, its excesses, and its taboos.” 

Viegas argued that my words did not target trans people as such, but a category of individuals defined by specific acts and circumstances — in other words men who exploit loose self-identification rules to enter women’s spaces and harm women. In French law, that distinction matters. It is not an offense to criticize people for their conduct. Viegas also pointed out what should have been obvious: there was no call to hatred in my words, no exhortation to attack, expel, discriminate against. At most, she said, it was “a measured recommendation”, rooted in documented facts and limited circumstances. As she concluded: “Forgive us for having dared to say that women should be cautious of rapists.” 

Viegas also made the peculiar inversion of victim and accusers central to the defense. She reminded the court that the associations prosecuting me claimed to act in the name of tolerance and protection, while aligning themselves, explicitly or implicitly, with people who had subjected me to sustained intimidation. She cited messages calling for me to be “burned alive”, “crushed”, or “destroyed”. Those same actors, she argued, had now come before a criminal court to demand the policing of a single phrase. When you “attack everything and everyone”, as she put it, you lose the ability to distinguish between hatred and disagreement. 

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That, indeed, is exactly what I believe this bizarre case illustrates. Asymmetry is now structural. Explicit threats can be minimized, contextualized, or ignored, provided they come from the “right” side of any given moral divide. But a statement grounded in observable reality becomes suspect, actionable, even prosecutable if it disrupts the dominant narrative. The legitimacy of the act becomes secondary to the identity of the speaker. Once that shift is complete, the law ceases to regulate behavior. Instead, it regulates who is allowed to speak and who must be silenced. 

Perhaps the most revealing move by the prosecution was the implication that I had dredged up some bizarre, malicious fantasy — that my worries about male offenders exploiting self-identification rules to enter women’s prisons was the lurid invention of a woman obsessed with discrediting trans people. But as my defense made absolutely clear, the prison issue was real and documented — and these people were not being criticized for being trans but for being violent criminals. 

That was my point, and it remains my point now. Not all trans-identified prisoners are dangerous. Perhaps the vast majority aren’t. But some are, and women should be able to discuss the consequences without being accused of hatred. 

What is particularly dismaying about all this is that France has long imagined itself as intellectually distinct from the Anglosphere — where these debates have been raging for a long time. The Republican tradition is, at least in theory, universalist. French citizens are treated as individuals, not as members of identity groups, and public debate can be abrasive, even confrontational, without automatically becoming a legal matter. This is now beginning to shift. What is being imported is not so much Anglo-American law, but Anglo-American ways of interpreting speech, in which disagreement is reframed as endangerment and criticism as a form of violence. 

In court, I was told that statements like mine could contribute to suicides among trans-identifying individuals. Such reasoning does not belong to traditional French legal culture. It belongs to a broader cultural shift, visible across parts of the Anglosphere, where the boundary between speech and harm has been progressively blurred in public discourse. 

This was also a central point in the defense. Marine Viegas insisted that my case was not a marginal provocation emerging from the “far Right”, but part of a wide and ongoing debate with implications for many sectors of French society. And yet the language used to police it is distinctly un-French. We have imported a distinctly alien cultural reflex. In her closing statement, Marine Viegas asked the question the court should have asked from the beginning: by what right should the French public be deprived of this debate? I believe it is the right question. 

In the end, my case is not about whether my sentence was elegant, diplomatic, or gentle. It is about whether women are still permitted to speak plainly about sex, risk, and bodily reality: when those realities conflict with the demands of gender ideology. If a woman can be prosecuted for saying something that basically all women know to be true, then free speech in France does not exist. It is being conditionally tolerated, and only so long as it does not disturb the reigning moral consensus. For that reason, if nothing else, we will appeal — for I cannot accept that women have no right to speak our truths.

With dark hair, a round face and a large nose, Louis Alphonse, 51, looks every bit the part of the roi. Clearly, blue blood doesn’t dilute. Louis Alphonse is directly descended from a long lineage of French monarchs that includes Saint Louis, Louis XIV and the hapless Louis XVI, guillotined during the French Revolution. As head of the House of Bourbon, he’s heir apparent to the throne. Were the hand of providence ever to crown him, he would be Louis XX.

But while Monseigneur may look the part, he doesn’t quite sound the part. Born in Spain — his second cousin is Felipe VI — Louis Alphonse speaks French with a thick Spanish accent. He often grimaces as he stumbles his way through declarations about the eternal virtues of royalty. Think Manuel in Fawlty Towers rather than Antonio Banderas in Zorro.

The crown isn’t Louis Alphonse’s sole preoccupation, either. Unlike his forebears, the man has to earn a living for his family. Every day, he grinds. A financier by training, Louis Alphonse worked for years for Banco Occidental de Descuento, a Venezuelan bank owned by his billionaire father-in-law, a self-proclaimed “socialist” said to have been tight with Hugo Chavez. Since 2019 he has also been honorary president of a foundation that promotes the memory of his great-grandfather on his mother’s side: General Franco, who he claims “created the Spanish middle class, built dams and roads [and] prevented the installation of communism”.

Yet, right now, Louis Alphonse’s heart aches for his ancestral homeland. With France mired in political chaos —  and polls ranking Emmanuel Macron as the most unpopular ever leader of the Fifth Republic — Louis Alphonse has pitched himself as a king-in-waiting. “I see France in a situation of total blockage and I am dismayed,” he told France’s most-watched news channel last October, adjusting his webcam with customary panache. His message: “If France asks it of me, I will be at her service.” But he won’t go further. Like a Hollywood star angling for an Oscar, he lets his supporters campaign on their own initiative.

***

Far from Paris, in the small village in Corrèze, central France, a man dreams of helping Louis de Bourbon claim what fate stole away. Damien Pennes, 39, is a shopkeeper who has always felt a deep attachment to the monarchy. More than a year ago, he founded the royalist political party Lys Royal de France. It currently has around 142 members, though it punches above its weight on social media. Its spokesperson, a young woman who posts as Madame de France, has racked up nearly 200,000 likes on TikTok. It has a celebrity supporter too: Yellow Vests icon Jacline Mouraud, the hypnotherapist and accordionist who helped spark the protests that rocked France in late 2018.

Lys Royal is only fielding three candidates in the municipal elections next month — but that’s just the start. “Our aim, without pretense, is to run in the presidential election,” Pennes tells me. Still, should Lys Royal by some freakish miracle win, Pennes has no intention of governing. He would “do away with Lys Royal de France — as with all the other parties — in favor of the return of the monarchy”. He continues: “We have nothing else to gain from this… we are just simple French people. There are no nobles here, no great fortunes. We are shopkeepers, employees, care workers.”

The musketeers of Lys Royal aren’t alone. Other small outfits also advocate for a restoration. The most infamous is Action Française, an Orleanist movement long associated with the prewar nationalist Charles Maurras. Orleanists believe Jean d’Orléans, the descendant of the last French King Louis Philippe I, should be king; Legitimists back Louis Alphonse; Bonapartists aren’t really a thing since Napoleon was a proud product of the Revolution. 

But while they are divided on who should rule France, the monarchists are broadly unified on the question of how they should rule France. Most of them loathe UK-style parliamentary monarchy. The ideal is a Catholic sovereign who actually rules, albeit with devolved powers at the local level. Above all, what they long for is a strong leader who can embody an ultraconservative idea of France. For Emile Chabal, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh and the author of France, royalism may be “a negligible force in both French political and intellectual life,” but it is “one of the available far-Right ideological toolkits” in France today.

The monarchists share the same preoccupations as France’s far-right: the defense of national identity, opposition to high levels of immigration and hostility towards the European Union. Frexit is even on the agenda. Still, this doesn’t mean they support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally or Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête. Most abstain in national elections and reject the Left/Right divide, which they see as a dreadful by-product of the Revolution (which is, after all, where the very idea of a Left/Right divide comes from). Zemmour, who extols France’s Catholic heritage, is probably the most monarchy-coded French politician. In Chabal’s view, he combines a “reactionary, old-fashioned” program with “a celebration of a hierarchical vision of Frenchness”. But even that isn’t enough for royalists. Zemmour plays the Republican game — and that sin can’t be absolved.

This rejection of the very idea of French democracy means that royalists, perhaps inevitably, play a negligible part in actual French democracy. Still, they do know how to put on a good show. Every year, they commemorate the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 with a torchlight march across Paris organized by Souvenir de Louis XVI. This year, more than 700 people showed up. Their slogans: “À bas la République!” and “Vive le Roi!” 

And they also represent something far bigger than their small number. Some 17% of the French electorate support replacing the President with a King, according to a 2016 poll, and 39% say it would have positive consequences for national unity. Royalists are quick to cite these figures as vindication. The truth is that it’s more complicated. Most people aren’t familiar with royalist thought and probably picture a King as a French Charles III — rather than a divinely appointed ruler. 

But where French royalism is most relevant is in its opposition to liberal democracy. Across the West, we are witnessing a growing rejection of liberal principles, a backlash that has intellectual roots that go back to 1789. It draws on doctrines espoused by French royalists who abhorred the Revolution’s promise of democracy. In other words, the reactionary vibes of French royalism haunt our moment.   

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald formulated a grand critique of the Revolution: la contre-révolution. To them, the new system was illegitimate. Sovereignty didn’t come from the people but from God. It was mediated on Earth by long-established institutions: the monarchy, the Church and the family. Worse, democracy was a dangerous illusion. Far from leading the masses to happiness, it ruined them by unleashing their basest impulses. Chaos inevitably followed. The only winners were the new ruling elites gaming the system.

The return of the King was the prerequisite for the return of the old divinely sanctioned order. Royalism, therefore, became the animating force of the contre-révolution. And it was a force to be reckoned with throughout most of the 19th century. There were three kings after Napoleon’s fall. Even at the outset of the Third Republic in the 1870s, a restoration seemed on the cards. “There was a real hope of restoration for monarchists,” the historian Baptiste Roger-Lacan tells me, “and this hope engendered a republican reaction”. 

Even after royalism lost majority support in the 1880s, it retained the power to disrupt. The monarchist group Action Française took off in the early 20th century at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. “By its ideological radicalism and its capacity to attract intellectuals it became an intellectual touchstone on the Right and the far-Right,” says Roger-Lacan. Its maître à penser, Charles Maurras, espoused a doctrine of “state-anti-semitism” believing French democracy had been captured by “internal enemies”: Protestants, Freemasons, foreigners and, of course, Jews. 

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At its peak in the Twenties, Action Française counted 60,000 members and reached many more with its newspaper. Today, it claims to have 3,000 members (journalists say the number is far fewer). Among them is Robin Vaillant, 24, a brewer who lives in the North of France. He insists that antisemitism is no longer part of Action Française’s doctrine. In his view, it was never central to Maurras’s royalist project and can be “taken out” without undermining its coherence. Historians tend to disagree, seeing Maurras’s visions as inextricably linked with Vichy.

Still, its vision for France is reasonably clear: Action Française continues to support “a decentralized monarchy”. The King would hold “regalian powers”: justice; national security; defense and diplomacy; state finances. The French Parliament would be abolished, and local assemblies would spring up all over the realm. These assemblies would be elected to deal with everyday life. People would also join corporations — or guilds — to represent their interests. 

France would also no longer be secular. The King would be Catholic, and Catholicism would become the official religion — though other faith groups would still be allowed to practice. What about the will of the people? Royalists reject this too. There are issues, they argue, where vox populi should hold its tongue. “Can a French person give an opinion on nuclear energy when they aren’t informed, [or] on geopolitics, I don’t know, in sub-Saharan Africa?” asks Vaillant. “No, you need experts and the King sort of embodies that eminence with his ministers.”

People would only get involved where they know best. “People should give their opinion on questions where they are concretely knowledgeable: local and community life, the economy, the distribution of tax.”

The Legitimist vision of the restoration isn’t so different from this Orléanist version. It might differ on the details, but the basics are the same. “Action Francaise pinched all the good bits from the Legitimist doctrine,” says the good-humoured Loïc Baverel, head of the Cercle d’Action Légitimiste, who laments the fact that French monarchists spend more effort arguing among themselves than communicating with the public. “Our efforts of communications and interactions should be directed towards everyday French people,” he tells me, “not sniping at each other between telephone booths.”

Unlike in the UK, the King would not be a ceremonial figure in Baverel’s France. He would wield real power and head a royal council made up of a principal minister and specialized ministers. For royalists, liberal democracy has led to decline. It has unleashed progressive forces, eroded France’s Catholic identity and sold off its sovereignty to the EU and giant corporations. 

But the critique goes even deeper than that — it aims at the very idea of an elected government. Royalists believe that transferring power every few years to a new president — who comes with a new agenda and needs his party’s support to implement it — is reckless. It impedes strategic planning. Baverel’s initial attraction to royalism came from his frustration at “the inability of politicians to carry out long-term structural economic policies, which may require actions that are unpopular at first, because of electoral deadlines”.

So, the dreamed-of restoration would not just be a radical departure from what France is today. It would undo centuries of political development since the Enlightenment. It’s literally a reactionary project; its roots lie in the reaction to the French Revolution. Like de Maistre, today’s royalists defend a hierarchy they consider natural. In the imagined Kingdom of France, society would no longer be organized around the individual, but around traditional institutions and “organic” communities. The King would be the great arbiter. He would ensure, in Baverel’s words, “that society functions harmoniously and that justice is respected between the different intermediary or constituent bodies”.

But France is no longer where the reactionary party is at. These 21st century French counter-revolutionaries would surely have more success in another Republic born of revolution: the United States, where an unlikely band of monarchists are riding the coattails of President Trump, who has long fancied himself an American monarch. He has posted memes where he wears a crown with the tag “Long Live the King”. And he recently said that the only limit to his power is “his own morality”. Not even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, would have dared utter something so brazen.

Under Donald I’s reign, a movement dubbed the Dark Enlightenment is emerging. Its leading figure, Curtis Yarvin, is a tech bro de Maistre. He has decried democracy as “weak” and wants the US to become a monarchy. But he envisions an even more powerful king than the French royalists: a CEO monarch who runs the realm like a Silicon Valley tycoon. Yarvin has reportedly influenced the White House and counts Vice President JD Vance as a reader. Elsewhere in the Magasphere, the far-Right streamer Nick Fuentes brags about being “a reactionary” and dreams of turning the US into a “Catholic monarchy”.

But while Yarvin and Fuentes borrow gleefully from the counter-Revolution, their visions of monarchy are ultimately dictatorial. They aren’t interested in theories of regalian powers and decentralization. Roger-Lacan points to “post-liberals” such as the Catholic political theorist Patrick J. Deenen and the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule as closer in spirit to the French contre-révolutionnaires. “The American post-liberal movement really introduces in the US elements of counter-revolutionary doctrine that come from Europe,” he says. For him, post-liberals are “anti-moderns and anti-liberals who consider that liberal democracy is a catastrophe for humanity and that it was the last step of the separation, or the collapse, of Christian society.”

But the MAGA Right doesn’t just import reactionary ideas from the old continent. It is also obsessed with the aesthetics of traditional Christian Europe — cathedrals, medieval castles, Renaissance paintings — and fears this ancestral heritage is under threat. In its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration blames the European Union and migration for the “loss of national identities and self-confidence”. Europe itself risks “civilizational erasure”. At the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the “sacred inheritance” shared by Americans and Europeans. 

Ironically for European reactionaries, it’s the United States that is now boosting their message — and it’s a message that increasingly chimes with voters. In the UK, according to a 2025 Channel 4 poll, half of Gen Z believe the country “would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”. In France, things aren’t much better. A recent survey found that 41% of the population would favor “a leader who governs without parliament and elections”.

Amid this profound crisis of liberal democracy, it’s clear that French royalists have a card to play. Will they succeed? They are tiny in number but determined. “I tell people who feel discouraged by the numbers… the one thing that’s certain is that if we do nothing, nothing will happen,” says Loïc Baverel. While the monarchists will play basically no role at all in next year’s presidential elections, that’s not to say the ghost of their King won’t hover over it. Macron himself once remarked: “There is in the democratic process an absence. In French politics, the absent one is the figure of the King, whom I fundamentally think the French people didn’t want to die.” As such, the French “have tried to reoccupy this emptiness, to put other figures there”.

Whoever comes out on top in 2027 will be the leader who manages — if only temporarily — to occupy this emptiness. Charles de Gaulle did so in 1958 at the outset of the Fifth Republic. Napoleon did so in 1804, when he crowned himself Emperor. He reportedly said: “I found the crown of France in the gutter.”  

One day, royalists hope, the crown will rest once again on the King’s head.

“And here I am, in my seventies, a martyr, the symbol of a new feminist wave that I hardly know a thing about,” she writes. Had she been 20 years younger, she still wouldn’t have dared request the case be heard in open court, “too afraid of the looks: those damn looks that women of my generation have always had to contend with”.

And it is exactly this position, of being a woman born exactly halfway through the 20th century, modern but old-fashioned, newly feminist but endlessly forgiving, raped by perhaps 50 men but refusing to hate or blame all men for it, that makes her book particularly fascinating. She has already lived through tragedies, such as her mother dying very young and then her brother, possibly gay but tortured by it, dying young too. She grew up in a Europe freshly ravaged by war; her parents were French but working in Germany, so she was born into contradiction.

But here’s the thing that the book reveals, whether wittingly or unwittingly. While she bears a stoicism that is somewhat lost to my generation (like her children, I was born in the Seventies), one that has inspired enormous admiration in women all around the world, it is that stoicism that has driven her children mad. That insistence on dignity; that refusal to lash out, has sent some other people spiraling. Including me, I must confess.

Her own lawyer berated her for being her husband’s “best advocate”. “I believed he belonged in prison,” she writes of Dominique Pelicot, “but I would not kick a man when he was down.”

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It is her husband’s lawyer who has to come over during the trial and say not to be too easy on him, which Gisèle interprets, with no evidence, as her husband “speaking through the lawyer, recognizing his guilt”. All while knowing, for example, that he had actually increased his attacks on her after the police first seized his phone, knowing he would soon not be able to drug and rape her any more.

Of her elder son she says, “When I reminded David how close he had been to his father, how Dominique had always been there for him, helping him at every stage of his life, it only fed his rage.” Well, yes.

Then there’s the bit when her husband is in prison awaiting trial, before the news has gone public, but his cellmate discovers the nature of his crimes. Dominique contacts his wife to tell her that he believes their daughter Caroline must have blabbed something to this other prisoner’s family in the outside world, and Gisèle turns on their daughter to ask if it’s true. She does, in the book, acknowledge the folly of this, “that even now he had managed to manipulate us to turn against each other”, but you can imagine this was pretty damn hard for their daughter to take.

She and Caroline are nowadays largely estranged, because when they had to examine photos found in the father’s possession, of Caroline asleep in bed in her underwear, they reached different conclusions. Caroline has already published her own memoir and said she does not speak to her mother any more because her mother did not support her in accusing her father of incest.

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Gisèle’s take on the photos is this: “Basically, we were both looking at them from the perspective of who we were: I was warding off the worst-case scenario, while my daughter was heading straight for it.” Her daughter has an enormous emotional reaction to the whole thing, screaming in court, told off for it by her highly composed mother. “Did she let out the screams that I held in,” Gisèle wonders now, “allowing herself to collapse as I did not?” But ultimately, “we were so different in our approaches to life and its tragedies”.

It does seem cruel to ask a woman who has suffered so much to do even more for others or to accept her entire family life has been a lie — yet you can also understand what her children are asking her for. Incest remains beyond what she can believe her husband capable of. She just can’t go there. Later in the book the police link him to a cold case which raises the possibility he has also murdered a real estate agent — again, she is keen to stress that he legally remains presumed innocent.

Here’s the reason behind all of it. After a very sad childhood, Gisèle felt there was a spark in her that only came alive when she met her future husband. It is this spark, she says, that has got her through absolutely everything, including the revelations that have turned her family life into a barbaric joke. And for as long as that spark remains in her, she cannot separate it entirely from the man she loved. So while she is able to describe him as “my torturer”, she refuses to accept that all of their memories together are bad. If she does that, where will her mind have left to go?

“Must I blow the spark out now, once and for all, as David and Caroline seemed to be asking me to do?” she writes. “You don’t get a second chance at life. If I erased everything, it would mean I was dead.  And had been for years.” She says she was partitioning Dominique in two, to protect not him but herself, and that she was not turning away from the horror. “I was pitting myself against it with my tears, my solitude, my sorrow and my happy memories.”

The uncomfortable truth is that they do have happy memories. Indeed, one of Gisèle’s motives in writing the book seems to be pointing out all the ways in which they were just normal people living a reasonable life, or so she thought. If her expectations for that sometimes appear low — “he had only used physical violence on me once” — she is also the product of a time and a place.

Her husband was often a failure at work, getting them into debt, while she held down a job and got promoted. He had grown up sharing a bedroom with Nicole, “a little girl with a learning disability who was a ward of the state being fostered by the family”. Nicole was not encouraged to have any life outside of the family at all, even as a young adult still living with them, and when the mother died of cancer the father promptly married Nicole, his foster daughter, who was by then 25. “It does you no end of good to have a young thing in your bed,” his father said to him. Dominique’s brother Joel, a doctor and town mayor, suggested that incest was normal when asked if this girl had been abused.

Yet Dominique and Gisèle really did manage to achieve many of their hopes for a decent family. The kids grew up to get good jobs while the parents retired to a house in the south of France with a swimming pool which the grandkids loved to visit. Their children would joke that when the parents talked about their painful childhoods it sounded as bad as “something out of a Zola novel”.

Sometimes she comes home to find he has got dinner waiting in the oven for her, “mashed potatoes in two separate dishes, since he liked his with butter and I liked mine with olive oil and parsley”. The bitter irony is that so many of his kindnesses to her are in fact part of his depravity planning — her potatoes are laced with zolpidem and lorazepam. Drugs not only used to knock her out, but muscle relaxants too, which is how she couldn’t feel the rapes the next day. “How did I persist in seeing kindness,” she writes, “where there was nothing but manipulation?”

In court, the female magistrate keeps asking “What do you have to say about that?” As each new horror is revealed, or a new accusation leveled at her, the victim. Gisèle sometimes cannot think of anything to say — how can she possibly find yet more comments? One gets the impression that she has written the book to answer that wretched question once and for all. And what she has to say is that she feels disgust, shock, horror and has been through hell, but has come out of it with no resounding hatred for humanity, or men. That she has found love again. That “contrary to what people might think, unhappiness does not bring people together”, and that she desperately misses her estranged grandchildren. I pray with all my heart that she will get to see them again.

Soon enough, the basic facts became clear. On 13 November 2015, 10 years ago today, ISIS-inspired terrorists brought death to the city by the Seine. Three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, killing one. Yet it was the roving commandos in the city’s heart that were most shocking. Spreading havoc from a rented SEAT Leon, one group of gunmen killed dozens of innocents in cafés and restaurants. Worst of all, though, was the Bataclan, the music venue where 1,500 rockers were attending a concert. Ninety were mown down in the theater as they danced; 132 died overall.

Now, a decade on from the massacre, the killings still seem unreal. Naturally, France does its best to memorialize the slaughter. Last Sunday, some 2,000 runners wended their way from the Stade de France to the Bataclan for the so-called Marche de Liberté (“Course for Freedom”). That’s been shadowed by more official homages. Today, Emmanuel Macron and Mayor Anne Hidalgo will unveil a memorial garden at the Town Hall, and the Eiffel Tower will be bathed in the colors of the tricolor. Yet if all this happens under the rubric of Paris se souvient, Paris remembers, that barren bewilderment endures. For all the official homages, the attacks of November are still barely understood, and closure seems a very long way away — bad news for the Republic and the capital both.

In some ways, of course, France has found closure. Quite aside from the commemorations and vigils this week, there have been innumerable films and books covering the mayhem from every possible angle. One striking recent example is Paris, 13 Novembre 2045, written by the sociologist Amélie M. Chelly. Her novel follows the survivors of the attacks and the nightmares that haunt them. More prosaically, the Abécédaire du 13 Novembre, edited by Catherine Brun, covers the atrocity from a kaleidoscope of different directions, covering everything from songs to poems to graphic novels.

Then there were the trials of 20 people charged with involvement in the 2015 attacks, an epic affair lasting 10 months from September 2021. The longest criminal trial in modern French history, it encompassed over 300 lawyers and represented 2,500 plaintiffs, and was greater in scale than even the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and infamous “Butcher of Lyon” during the Second World War.

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Beyond their simple vastness, the trials exposed France to countless tales of tragedy. Among the stories was that of Maia, a young architect, who was sitting that fateful night at an outdoor café with Amine, her Moroccan husband. When the attackers came, Amine was killed instantly; Maia was stunned by the sudden silence when the firing finally stopped. Then she heard the gasping and wheezing of a young man she did not know. He was leaning on her, squeezing out his last breath. Maia later said that she would never forget him, but also that she would never know his name.

Beyond these stark personal revelations, incomprehension arguably endures on a societal level. In part, this is explained by the subsequent direction of French politics. For sure, there have been further Islamist attacks, yet the full-scale confrontation between France and jihadi, promised by ISIS among others, never materialized. This was partly due to the hard-headed police and military response to potential threats. A much-improved intelligence service doubtless helped too. Among other things, that involved tightening communications with other agencies, especially the Belgians whose laxity had created a security “black hole” exploited by the terrorists.

All this has arguably meant that France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned the 2015 attacks — an ideology which, as an article in the ISIS magazine Dabiq paraded in the aftermath, involved sharing photos of semi-naked corpses. Perhaps more telling was the article’s English headline: “Just Terror!” Amid the gloating, this represented a genuinely new slant on terrorist violence. What ISIS announced here was that indiscriminate murder was not merely a weapon of war, but also a perverted form of justice. It represented a shockingly direct challenge to both Western morality and the West’s conception of justice, based as it is on secular and utilitarian principles.

France, for all its secular earnestness, has yet to truly level with this fact. Certainly, political Islam remains a question to which no one has provided an adequate answer. For the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it’s simply a matter of integrating Islam into a non-sectarian Republican program: an impossibility given Islamist extremists violently oppose the very concept of the Republic. The far-Right, for its part, talks openly of “a war” against “foreign religions”: specifically targeting Islam. But, again, this is mere shadow boxing. Actually tackling France’s internal enemies would, among other things, involve targeting a sophisticated propaganda network and a prison system that fosters the formation of Islamist cells. Stuck in the middle, Macron applies more and more hardline secular principles, even as senior civil servants lately warned of Islamist “entryism” into the French state.

Yet amid these high-flown political tensions, it’s perhaps Paris itself that has most struggled to come to terms with the Bataclan. At the end of the last century, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote an influential essay called “Paris, Capital of the 21st Century”. Following Walter Benjamin, he argued that Paris could regain its Belle Époque position as “Queen of the World” — by opening itself to outside, non-European cultures. The massacres of 13 November shattered such heady utopianism, revealing the multi-ethnic capital as riven by hatred, especially in its forgotten banlieues where the French-born terrorists lived. This lays bare the identity crisis as the heart of modern France: how a secular, democratic Republic can contain the factions that loathe it.

To be fair, some are still trying to grapple with the attacks. One good example is “Programme 13/11”, an interdisciplinary research program under the auspices of the Sorbonne. Directed by the historian Denis Peschanski, it is gathering first-hand testimony for future generations. Peschanski himself has called the scheme a kind of “living monument” — even as he believes that, somehow, the savagery of the terrorists can be met with the “sciences” of the French academic system.

Perhaps: yet there is scant evidence to show that many radical French Muslims have been “deradicalized” by such initiatives. That’s shadowed by other traumas: a so-called “French Intifada” may not have happened, but the country has continued to be wracked by jihadi terror, from the 2016 Nice truck attack to the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty. It all points in the same direction: towards a deepening trauma across France’s collective memory.

Yesterday, every Paris resident received a special edition of À Paris, the city’s listings magazine. Inside, Anne Hidalgo addresses her public, proclaiming a message of “liberty and hope”. But as a Parisian myself, I can say that few of us really believe this — the wounds are still too raw.

Italy’s prime minister may have started as an anti-European, but she governs today as a pro-European moderate — or, as she would say, a “euro-realist”. And the received wisdom in Europe is that the French far-Right will do the same. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand Le Pen’s National Rally. Her party could not be more different from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. For one thing, the two have occupied opposing positions on the political spectrum — particularly on Nato and Europe. To expect the French far-Right to ape Meloni’s softening stance, then, is to fall prey to the fallacy of composition.

Meloni has been on quite a political journey. She entered politics in the Nineties as a youth activist for Italian Social Movement: the postwar neo-fascists. In 1995, its leader, Gianfranco Fini, reconstituted the party as the National Alliance — a new iteration which embraced liberal democracy, membership of Nato, and European integration. It was Fini, not Meloni, who turned Italy’s far-Right into a pro-European, pro-Establishment movement. He later became one of Silvio Berlusconi’s most senior ministers and one of the most pro-European voices in his cabinet.

In 2009, Fini merged his National Alliance into Berlusconi’s party, and then, in 2012, Meloni left the group to become leader of a new party: the Brothers of Italy. Her party was further to the Right than Fini, but still rejected fascism. And Meloni was a euroskeptic, very much in the mold of Britain’s British Conservatives pre-Brexit. But she has played the bloc to her advantage, and Italy is increasingly seen as a credible and stable partner.

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Things couldn’t be more different in France, where the towering figure of the far-Right is Marine Le Pen, president of National Rally. Though she is currently banned from standing for political office for five years, this has not affected her party’s ratings. Her 30-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella, has assumed leadership and is currently polling between 35 and 37.5% of voting intentions in the first round of the next presidential elections. The second-placed candidate is the former prime minister Édouard Philippe, who is at 15-19.5%. While it is hard to translate these numbers into second-round votes, for the first time it does look like the far-Right has a real crack at winning the French presidency.

The party has come some way since it was founded by Marine’s father, the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1972 as the National Front. It took a hard line on membership of the European Economic Community — as it was then called — on the grounds that it constituted a threat to French sovereignty. Le Pen Snr later rejected the single market, the euro, and Schengen. But he never got close to power.

His clan, though, still rules. And its ideology still holds. Under Marine’s leadership, the party’s position on Europe did seem to soften a little. She still wanted to exit the euro and Schengen, but not the EU itself. Instead, she wanted to renegotiate treaties. In practice, of course, this would not have been possible, so her position was never fundamentally different from Frexit — except in tone.

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Le Pen doubled down on her euro exit theme in the elections of 2017, and lost to Emmanuel Macron — the extremism of her narrative clearly contributing to her defeat. So, in 2018, she renamed the party National Rally and changed its message from exiting the EU altogether, to reforming it from within. Superficially this might sound like a Meloni shift. But in reality, it means something different, which became brutally clear in last year’s parliamentary elections.

After National Rally scored won a landslide victory — its biggest yet — in the 2024 European elections, Macron called a snap election for the French National Assembly. Bardella assumed charge of the party and, at one point during the campaign, it did look on the verge of achieving a political majority. This was only thwarted at the last minute when, panic-stricken, the opposition parties formed an alliance to force the far-Right into third place.

But over the course of those two elections, the party’s position on European integration hardened significantly. With Bardella as leader, he called for a referendum to reaffirm the primacy of the French constitution over European law and during the European campaign he came up with the idea of a stratégie tricolore: a menu of European integration dishes from which France would order as it saw fit.

The green category represents the European integration the party approves of — so, industrial policies, and scientific exchanges. The orange category contains those policy fields France would want to renegotiate — such as Schengen and the single market. And the red category holds the hard no-go areas — migration, energy, defense, borders. Bardella wants to prioritize French citizens for jobs, and reverse free movement. Tell me that you want to leave the EU, without telling me that you want to leave the EU. That’s Bardella.

His agenda is clearly incompatible with EU membership. In the past, the EU has displayed a good deal of forbearance when confronted with French rule-breaking — for example on fiscal deficits. But this goes too far. The EU could never accept a French proposal to change freedom of movement unilaterally. So while the National Rally might not campaign on a leaving the EU platform, it will end up breaking so many of its rules that a Frexit would be the only way to deliver on its campaign promises.

If you were left in any doubt, here’s more. In an interview with The Economist last week, Bardella said he wants the ECB to buy French debt. France is Europe’s largest debtor — and the debtor with the greatest exposure to investors from outside Europe. Technically, the ECB could do this. It has a tool it calls the “transmission protection instrument”, which would allow it to buy French bonds during a financial crisis. The argument in favor of a central bank bailout is that France is simply too big to fail. As president or prime minister, Bardella could threaten the ECB with a unilateral default.

It is easy to dismiss his comments as utter nonsense, as one French economist did in a conversation with me last week. I take it seriously, though, because a French government under Le Pen or Bardella could take Europe to the brink. France is a powerful agent. It is not Greece. Or Italy. Bardella also wants an EU budget rebate, like Margaret Thatcher once did. This would push an under-resourced EU that has over-committed itself on Ukraine into an existential crisis.

Such a scenario could not be more different from what happened in Italy under Meloni. Italy has constitutional safeguards in place against a unilateral withdrawal from the euro and international treaties. Meloni’s pragmatism makes perfect sense. She is attempting to make the bloc work in Italy’s interests. It is quite a different scenario in France where the constitution gives the President powers that are without parallel in west European democracies. The EU would not break up the moment the National Rally got into power. But there would be cardiac arrest soon afterwards.

 Gérard Araud, France’s former Ambassador in Washington, and current president of the distinguished Société des Amis du Louvre, reassured its members (philanthropists, art collectors, socialites, auctioneers, mandarins, social climbers, the bored and the beautiful) that he understood “their sadness” — especially as four of the missing pieces “were acquired with the help of [our] Society”. But fear not. Le président (a Frenchman of his social class is always le président of something) also stands in “full support” of the institution “and its teams”, and does not “doubt for an instant” that “everything is being done” to “find the criminals and recover their loot”. Today, “more than ever, we stand with the Louvre”.

It’s worth quoting this sorry missive at length, because it exemplifies the polite, bone-deep self-satisfaction of the French elites. This explains, more than anything else, how the largest and arguably best-known museum in the world could be robbed in broad daylight, in the presence of visitors and guards, by four men (two of them in yellow hazmat vests) using an ordinary disk-cutter and a cherry-picker they’d stolen earlier from a construction site. It took the thieves seven minutes to break through a first-floor window, smash through three recently installed modern display cases that supposedly featured the latest in reinforced glass, grab the jewels, and flee on souped-up scooters.

We know these details not because of the Louvre’s security cameras — but because at least one visitor filmed the thieves smashing into the glass display cases on their phone. Laurence des Cars, the President-Director General of the Louvre, has spent the last few explaining that she had commissioned a “comprehensive security overhaul” shortly after being nominated for the job four years ago, and suggested that cameras would be part of it. Since then, a little over a hundred have been installed. But, on average, only a third of the museum’s rooms have been outfitted, mostly with a single machine.

In an appearance before French senators on Wednesday, a distressed-looking des Cars emphasized that no one is protected from such “brutal criminals”, not even an institution like the Louvre — and the security personnel are “really upset” about the robbery.

But equally, the “nothing to do with us, mate” is strong among representatives of the five major unions for the Louvre’s 2,000-strong staff. They have called over 20 strikes over the past two decades that either completely or partially closed the Louvre, as well as forcing numerous partial closures of entire galleries, including the Mona Lisa room’s, for alleged “understaffing” in the same period. The Communist CGT union in particular has been denouncing “chronic underfunding, building maintenance issues, and lack of personnel for surveillance” while praising “the guards’ professionalism during [last Sunday’s] incident”.

Laurence des Cars, 59, was named at the head of the Louvre four years ago, with the decisive support of Emmanuel Macron, making her the first woman to helm the Louvre in the museum’s 228 years’ history. (That she was the scion of a famous writing French dynasty played a part in the president’s choice.) Last year, she appointed another woman as the Louvre’s Head of Security: Dominique Buffin, 46, a former police officer specializing in art theft.

On paper, Ms Buffin, who has been accused of being a “diversity hire”, has the qualifications for the job. What she probably does lack, however, is the political, administrative, financial and social clout to (metaphorically, mostly) walk into meeting and bang on the table to make the point that the security situation at the museum is untenable.

Des Cars herself does have such clout. However, she chose to please her real boss, the President (the arts were always the prerogative of the King in France, and not much has changed since). She staged, at no small effort or expense, the kind of glittering events he likes best (haute couture shows, a chic new museum entrance and café, Olympic and sports-themed “animations”, fund-raising gala dinners and balls) while seeming to attach far less urgency in the boring upkeep of the actual galleries.

“As in so many cultural establishments in France, the money goes to highly visible glitz,” a board member of a couple of smaller Paris and provincial museums explains. “Redoing the electricity circuitry is always postponed. The lack of cameras in rooms full of priceless and largely uninsurable treasures [the stolen pieces of Imperial jewelry are reportedly not covered] is typical. Why should museums be different from schools, universities, train tracks, state buildings? It’s no secret that France’s vaunted infrastructure, our 20th-century pride, is near collapse.”

It is significant that even when the National Court of Audits recently leaked wide-ranging, highly critical excerpts of a forthcoming report on the Louvre’s operations from 2019 to 2024 — detailing delays, misspending, security black holes, conceptual flaws and general complacency —neither Buffin nor des Cars seized the occasion to make an unholy fuss. There were few incentives to do so and many reasons not to. France is a country of institutional and personal conformism. It hates tall poppies, whistleblowers, disruptors, lone riders, and dynamiters of the hallowed status quo. Not only would they lose their jobs; they wouldn’t find another, ever, as they would be viewed as “personnes à problèmes”, i.e. capable of independent organizational thought.

This, incidentally, applies doubly to Frenchwomen in positions of power. The country certainly has its share of image-savvy diversity candidates promoted far beyond their intellectual and technical capacities (Ségolène Royal, the former socialist presidential candidate, springs to mind, as does the former Minister for Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem). Yet it also furnishes many instances of competent women isolated from networks of power often, but not always nurtured in male-dominated domains — from the higher reaches of the football world to the oldest-established Freemason manses, say. An understanding of unspoken ties, sometimes decades-old; powerful support networks created at post-graduate level in the better application courses following ENA or Ecole Polytechnique, for instance, is key to holding one’s own. The result is increased fragility, and higher risk to constantly weigh against possible rewards.

The publication of the Court of Audits report on the Louvre, which was slated to come out in January, has now been brought forward to the end of November. It may put an end to des Cars and Buffin’s careers — assuming they haven’t been tripped and fallen on their swords by then. (Macron flatly refused des Cars’s offer to resign on Wednesday.) All the same, in the ongoing French political crisis, the Louvre situation suddenly “fait désordre”.

But even the reappearance of Empress Eugénie’s and Queen Hortense’s tiaras in the Louvre’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon is unlikely to make much of a change to the downward spiral of French state competence. At best, it will ring-fence the theft as an anomaly, rather than what it is, an indicator of the general state of the country. The French will keep being drip-fed news of discrete scandals, one after the other, seemingly unrelated, and witness the breakdown of the world they once knew, wrought by elites who don’t want them to connect the dots.

Charles de Gaulle’s new constitution and the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 were designed to sweep all that away. The most significant powers were given to the president (elected for seven years) rather than a prime minister (dependent on the whim of parliament). In any case, parliament now had less power.

All of this has now fallen apart. François Bayrou was the second person to have been prime minister of France since President Emmanuel Macron unwisely held parliamentary elections last summer. Bayrou had to be sustained by a rickety coalition, a delicately balanced house of cards that he has now upset by calling a vote of confidence in his government. In doing so, he transformed a debate about a particular measure (a budget) into a decision on Bayrou’s government, the President, and the whole state of France.

Bayrou’s hero is a Fourth Republic prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, whose own government lasted for eight months. Modeling oneself on a man who never again held office after his resignation as prime minister in 1955 sounds like an odd strategy. But Mendès’s now famous phrase “to govern is to choose” underpinned Bayrou’s insistence on a confidence vote: it would force the political parties to make hard choices about public finances. A devout Catholic, Bayrou made a moral argument: piling up public debt places an impossible burden on future generations and creates a vicious circle as baby boomers are supported in their dotage by young taxpayers who cannot afford to start families. Mendès, too, was ostentatiously moral and, though he was a secularized Jew, he attracted particular admiration from progressive Catholics.

Yet the comparison with Mendès does not always work to Bayrou’s advantage. Mendès was serious and brave. He jumped from the window of a Vichy prison and made his way to London to join the Free French air force. This gave him a reserve of moral credit that no present-day politician can match. Mendès was a conservative (a liberal in the French sense of the word) in his attitude to public finances but progressive (a liberal in the Anglo-American sense of the word) in his attitude to other matters. The great achievement of his short-lived premiership was to extract France from Indo-China. And so even the student protestors of 1968 admired Mendès — rather as if stoned teenagers at Glastonbury were to chant “Oh George Osborne”. Bayrou has all the unpopularity that derives from his fiscal conservatism without the prestige that goes with a resistance record or support for decolonization.

Mendès was the real deal. The novelist François Mauriac admired both him and de Gaulle but suggested that the more uncompromising of the two when it came to hard choices was Mendès. Bayrou, by contrast, comes across as calculating and false. Some think that he knew that he could not win a vote of confidence and preferred a spectacular confrontation on an issue of principle that would allow him to present his defeat as an honorable one. More cynical observers point out that Bayrou has run for the presidency three times and suggest that he wishes to run again when Macron comes to the end of his second presidential term in 2027. Defeat now allows Bayrou to say “I told you so” about the economic state of France in two years’ time.

Bayrou’s demise reflects broader changes — some of them peculiar to France and some of them significant for most Western democracies. One major shift is in the nature of the French presidency itself. Since 2002, presidents serve five-year terms rather than seven, which has diminished their power to impose long-term stability. While De Gaulle and Mitterrand cultivated a monarchical mystique around their office, François Hollande ran in 2012 promising to make the presidency “normal” and fulfilled this banal ambition so well that he did not even try to run for a second term. Since 2017, Macron has worked hard to restore the prestige of the presidency — he has a taste for political theatre that owes much to de Gaulle. However, more than at any point since 1958, the presidency now seems a political office like any other. Some of those who voted against Bayrou were really voting against Macron and hope to force the President to resign before the end of his mandate.

Changing political communications have also contributed to a crisis in governance. Mendès used radio addresses to appeal directly to the French people over the heads of parliamentarians. Today, with no state monopoly of broadcasting and, even more importantly, since radio and television have lost their grip on public information, politicians like Bayrou resort to launching their own YouTube channels. Unsurprisingly, a 74-year-old man in a tie did not match the appeal of skateboarding cats or the Gen Z media-fluent president of le Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella.

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Macron’s own decision to found a new party — at first called En Marche and now called Renaissance — has disrupted the party system. En Marche enjoyed a period of spectacular electoral success, but its subsequent precipitous decline has not restored the fortunes of the parties that it displaced. The 577 deputies in the French parliament include members of 11 different groupings. No party comes close to commanding a majority of deputies and no politically feasible coalition could command such loyalty either.

In a strange way, bitter political hostilities were what once made France governable. In the Fourth Republic, there were times when the Communist Party got more votes than any other party — but the understandable desire to ensure that a group expressing unqualified admiration for Stalin should be kept out of power underwrote electoral alliances that brought the other parties together. More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National aroused uncomfortable memories of Vichy and antisemitism. When Le Pen got into the second round of the 2002 presidential election (with just under 20% of the vote), other parties united to support the Gaullist Jacques Chirac under the unappealing but effective slogan “better the crook than the fascist”.

But today, some leaders of the mainstream Right — including the Gaullist former president Nicolas Sarkozy — treat the RN as a party like any other and say that they would not rule out an alliance with it. If there is a political untouchable in France, it is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left La France Insoumise. Mélenchon is often denounced for allegedly flirting with Islamism or antisemitism — though, in truth, his party’s policies would have seemed unexceptional on the French Left just a couple of decades ago. Mélenchon’s political isolation is attenuated by an unspoken alliance with the far-Right. Marine Le Pen and Mélenchon benefit from having each other as enemies and from a general sense of political crisis. There will be a kind of general strike — an attempt to “block everything” — on Wednesday. It seems to have originated with social media posts from the far-Right before being picked up by Mélenchon. Revealingly, the Rassemblement National, now torn between a desire to bring down the system and a desire to pose as a potential party of government, has slightly distanced itself from the upcoming protests.

All this means that France is getting dangerously close to the point at which protest parties that trade on denouncing the “system” have attained a level of support that means that the system cannot function without them. None of this would matter if the financial problems to which Bayrou alludes were not real. His opponents say that France’s problems are hardly more serious than those of some other countries (which is not saying much) or that France can still service her debt (which is obviously true until it stops being true). The stability of the Fifth Republic was founded partly on the rapid growth of the Trente Glorieuses. De Gaulle was never a great one for financial rigor (Mendès resigned from his provisional government in 1944 because of their disagreements on this) but he avoided awkward fiscal choices because state finances floated on rapid economic growth. It is unlikely that any future French government will get such an easy ride.

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What happens now? Macron could dissolve parliament, but he is unlikely to repeat a stratagem that proved so disastrous for him last time. His numerous enemies want him to resign. But a Fifth Republic president has a right, some would say a duty, to serve until the end of his elected term. Only de Gaulle resigned before this. Pompidou died in office; Mitterrand served two full seven-year terms, though he was often in agony from the cancer that killed him just months after he left the Elysée Palace. In spite of his unpopularity with both the political class and the electorate, Macron has many strengths. He is still only 47 years old — more than a quarter of a century younger than Bayrou and younger than de Gaulle was in 1940 — and is possessed of extraordinary vigor and self-confidence. The very fact that the constitution prevents him from serving a third term gives him a kind of freedom: he does not have to care about opinion polls or maintaining alliances. However chaotic France’s domestic politics become, the president still controls a domaine reservé of foreign and defense policy, matters that have special importance because of Gaza and Ukraine.

When Italy faced similar circumstances in 2021, Mario Draghi formed a government of technocrats. Things are more complicated in France. The president who chooses the prime minister is himself both a technocrat (like most recent presidents, Macron is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and also, unlike his Italian counterpart, a party politician, who would find it hard to present himself as the arbiter of an apolitical solution. Probably Macron will find a prime minister who will stagger through government — obtaining a majority for particular measures without risking an overall vote of confidence. This will suit the centrist parties in the short term — because they defer a parliamentary election in which they would probably do badly. It will suit la France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National in the long term — because they will go into the next presidential election with all the advantages of being the anti-establishment parties.

The British should not be smug when surveying events across the Channel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced his Bayrou moment when his government proposed benefit cuts. Unlike Bayrou he did not dare make the vote into one of confidence, but this has not made the problem go away. Starmer seems to enjoy a large parliamentary majority, but the most striking novelty of the last election was the arrival of small protest parties — one of which might conceivably be the largest party in the next House of Commons. Labour looks less like a party than a sprawling alliance of political factions of the kind that would be familiar to students of Fourth Republic France.

It is hard to see how any prime minster, on either side of the Channel, can succeed with an electorate that rejects both public spending cuts and tax rises and with such a fissiparous party system. I suspect that the most pronounced political trend in the next decade or so will be the near certainty that incumbent parties cannot win elections. To paraphrase Mendès France, “to govern is to lose”.

What was remarkable, however, was an unexpected cri de coeur from the Prime Minister in the days before the confidence vote that ousted him. Bayrou had tried, and failed, to balance the books. Even the threat of an IMF takeover hadn’t helped. With little left to lose, Bayrou declared that the winners in French society have been the baby boumeurs. On live TV, two weeks before the confidence vote, he called them out for their selfishness. The next morning he likened French workers to slaves, arguing that France will be “forcing them for decades to repay the loans lightly decided upon by previous generations”. 

Plus ça change, you might say. Fiscal profligacy and debt have long been a French forte. To find France’s last balanced budget, you would have to go back to 1975, 50 years ago. But with the deficit estimated at 5.4% of its GDP in 2024, its debt at 114% of GDP, and Greek bonds now outperforming French ones, France is living beyond its means. And this splurge of public money is not reflected on the ground. French growth, at 0.6%, is sluggish. Domestic consumption is flatlining and investments are being held back. There is no engine in the French economy.

So where’s the money going? The Left has blamed supposed handouts to heavily taxed French companies. Marine Le Pen sees immigration as the big fiscal drain of our time. But anyone who takes a cold look at the raw numbers can spot the issue: a quarter of all public spending in France goes towards pensions, well above the EU average. At roughly €420 billion per year, this is by far the French state’s largest category of spending. It is comfortably more than what France spends on its education, defense, security, transports, research, justice and infrastructure combined. To put this in context, France’s pension spending could fund 30 new Channel Tunnels per year, or all of China’s military spending for around 300 days. A single minute of France’s pensions spending could comfortably fund even the most lavish state summit at Versailles. 

Worse still, pension spending keeps rising. In 2024, France increased pension spending by another €14 billion in 2024, just to keep payouts in line with inflation, despite the government scrambling to find billions in cuts elsewhere. And this was far from a one-off occurrence: of the €1 trillion of additional debt taken on during the Macron presidency, half can be traced back to pension spending. 

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None of this was the intention of the architects of France’s pension model, which was set up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The scheme relied on mandatory contributions that, in theory, constituted a “deferred salary” for when you retire. In practice, 28% of the total labor cost of a working-age French citizen goes towards pensioners. Taxpayers can only hope the next generation will be able to do the same. 

Back then, when the scheme was founded, there were four to five working-age Frenchmen for every pensioner. Now, that ratio has fallen below 2:1, and will only get worse in the years to come. The boumeurs, in other words, paid into the system when there were plenty of workers per pensioner, and are now enjoying its benefits at the expense of a diminishing workforce. And their pensions are but one example of the boumeurs’ unparalleled run of generational luck. Having enjoyed cheap housing when house-building rates were high and net migration low, the boumeurs are much more likely to own property. They have also enjoyed targeted tax cuts and other benefits. As a result, their disposable income outperforms the national average, a first time in French history and an international oddity. 

Emmanuel Macron, who will now have to form a new government, had tried to tackle pensions. When he was elected in 2017, he marginally increased taxes on pensioners. In 2019, he put together a plan to simplify the pensions system, eventually giving up during the Covid pandemic. In 2022, he increased the legal retirement age to 64, weathering massive protests. But he has never offered a true challenge to pensioners, not least because he owes his presidency to the grey vote. In 2022, 69% of 65+ year-old voters backed him over Marine Le Pen, while Le Pen edged him in the 18-34 category. 

The boumeurs have carried out a generational coup, but it is one that has largely gone unchallenged by the rest of the population, despite the burden on their paychecks. There are, of course, dissidents: some of these are economists, while others are X activists. These online posters have made into a global meme sensation the archetype of the head-in-hands millennial Nicolas, 30 ans, paying for the glass-clinking pensioners Bernard and Chantal, as well as the immigrant Karim. “Nicolas qui paie,” the catchphrase goes.

But the activists are the exception. Largely oblivious to where their taxes are going, French millennials provide little incentive for politicians to speak up for Nicolas against Bernard and Chantal. In 2024, when asked by pollsters which parts of public spending should be axed, 32% of the respondents went for family subsidies, 30% for unemployment benefits, and only 6% chose pensions. Perhaps the remaining 94% retain the deluded hope that they, too, will be able to enjoy the largesse of taxpayers when they retire.

Despite the divisions of French politics, then, there is one point of unity. Every single political party is terrified of touching the sacred cow of pensions. When Michel Barnier, the previous prime minister, pushed to have pensions only partially indexed on inflation — rather than bound to it — he was toppled by Le Pen. For now, her National Rally party is very happy to continue making inroads into Macron’s gray vote. With pensioners making up 35% of the electorate — as well as being the cohort most likely to vote — few politicians have a shot at ultimate power without them. 

Time and again, voters have reminded politicians to keep the taps on. In 1981, they elected the socialist President François Mitterrand, who dropped the retirement age from 65 to 60. It’s taken 40 years and hundreds of protests later for France to increase it painstakingly to 64. In 1997, the French voted for the Left and the 35-hour legal work week. 

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The longer the system persists, the more absurdities emerge from it. In the public sector, where salaries have been largely frozen for more than a decade, you often hear of situations where senior retired bureaucrats earn more in inflation-adjusted pensions than their waged successors. In education, French teachers are very poorly paid by European standards. Where is the money going? Pensions again. The state artificially props up the total employment cost it pays for teachers only to send the difference to cover for pensions. Everywhere you dig into France’s public spending, you find more hidden pension spending. Thanks to these artificially pumped up social contributions — which go towards former soldiers’ pensions — France’s Ministry of Defense can claim it reaches Nato’s 2% of GDP target. France’s pensioners unintentionally saved their country from Donald Trump’s wrath.

Less amusing for attentive French taxpayers is the reality that pensions spending has got so far out of control that public debt is now used not to pay for tomorrow’s investments but to subsidize the comfort of yesterday’s workers. And it is indeed comfort that is often being paid for, rather than actual need. In 2024, two-thirds of the increase in French savings were made by pensioners. Those aged 70 or over save, on average, 25% of their income, whereas 30 year olds only save 9%. These inequalities between generations pave the way for inequalities within generations, between those who will inherit and those who won’t. And the latter will see the rungs of the property ladder glide further out of reach.

Tragically, those inheriting property will do so, on average, in their 50s or 60s: too late to have a family, but only a few years before they, too, retire. Rinse, repeat. Many economists on the Left call for higher taxes on inheritance, but in the meantime the flow of transfers from the active population to the inactive continues. Inheritances and other financial transfers are expected to reach 20% of French GDP by the end of the next decade.

The French economy, as well as French society, is full of distortions created by the pensions gravity wall. Because their employees are so heavily taxed, French companies struggle to hire, and are therefore rendered less competitive. Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis, worsened by this high tax rate, has dragged fertility into a nosedive. Only a decade ago, it was at replacement rate. This decline in fertility will make France’s pension model even less tenable in decades to come.

This is not to say that pensions are the sum of all of France’s problems. The French economy in general is over-regulated, while uncontrolled immigration is applying further pressure to France’s social contract. But it is inescapably true that at the heart of France’s dismal fiscal situation is the matter of pensions.

At some point, the warning lights will be succeeded by sirens. Perhaps intervention might be necessary. Credit rating agencies have either downgraded France’s credit ratings or given a negative outlook for future ratings. In a desperate last attempt to keep parliament on board, Bayrou’s economics minister warned that toppling the government could have the IMF knocking at the door. For now, that is an unlikely scenario, but that doesn’t mean that France isn’t in trouble. When the next global crisis arrives, France will have to deal with it with very limited fiscal firepower. Come the next global technological revolution, France will have little fiscal space to invest. Even now, France’s dismal fiscal situation hamstrings Macron’s ability to fully lead a new era of European defense, despite his having laid the political groundwork for this kind of cooperation.

In 1991, one of Bayrou’s predecessors as prime minister, the Socialist Party’s Michel Rocard, prophesied that, in the years to come, the French pensions problem would be enough to topple five or six governments. Under Macron, in the last eight months alone, two already have fallen over that very issue.

And yet something has changed: never has a politician been as frank with the electorate about the pensions black hole, and its mode of intergenerational extortion, as Bayrou has been. In his last words to the National Assembly on Monday, he doubled down: “We have broken the bond of trust between generations, the very foundation of the social contract. Young people feel like a sacrificed generation, trapped in a form of servitude from which they must be freed. True awareness also means that older generations should come together to ease the burden of debt that the young will one day have to repay.”

It remains to be seen whether this last act of panache will be seen as a genuine cri de coeur or the ravings of an old politician on the eve of political retirement. Short of Macron calling yet another snap election and somehow winning a majority — based on current polls, he would most likely lose dozens of seats — the next prime minister will be in charge of another minority government and France’s fiscal situation will continue to slide.

And yet, while the situation is critical, it is not fully urgent. France can still afford a few more rating agency downgrades. Its cost of debt is rapidly becoming the highest in Europe, but, given that inflation still outpaces interest rates, the French state can still borrow. The French economy will continue to stagnate for years until it hits a serious fiscal wall or major economic crisis that would force the country to make massive reforms or sink.

So as long as the water boils slowly, the frogs might not know yet that they are being irreversibly cooked. Just enough time for France’s boumeurs to continue to reap the rewards of their generational coup.

When the UK had its financial crisis in 1976, Denis Healey, the former Labour chancellor, did what he needed and imposed austerity. “One never likes one’s bank manager”, he quipped as he went cap in hand to the IMF. But he swallowed the humiliation, and he took the money. The UK got a $3.9 billion emergency loan from the IMF. But Healey himself had to do the heavy lifting with tax rises and spending cuts.

Back then, the UK had a balance-of-payments crisis: it was running out of foreign currency reserves to pay for its imports. This is not the case today. The problem the UK has today, which it did not have in 1976, is a structurally weak economy with low productivity growth. The UK’s economic model, that of a late-capitalist rentier society, is no longer working. Yet, unlike in the Seventies, the UK lacks a political majority sufficient to arrest the toxic dynamic between rising debt and low economic growth.

Brexit did not cause the problem; but nor did it solve it. The Brexiteers fell into the same trap the Remainers had fallen into before. The UK had needed to reform its economic model for membership of the EU to be successful. The EU’s single market became dysfunctional over the years and no longer generated the growth it once did.

The Leavers also got this wrong. If they really wanted “to take back control” as they famously claimed, they similarly needed to reform the economic model: towards one that rewards entrepreneurship and innovation. It would have required a systematic reboot of the public sector. That did not happen. This is not something the IMF can help you with. It is not the unelected “ministry of finance for every country in the world” as Julius Nyerere, a former Tanzanian president once claimed. And it is certainly not the IMF’s job to bail out clueless governments.

If things in Britain are bad, though, they’re worse in France. France had its financial crisis in 1982, a year after François Mitterrand became the first Socialist French president. After a year of classic Socialist economic policy, the country was on the brink of a financial crisis, similar to the UK’s position six years previously. At this point, Mitterrand performed a policy turn that left his supporters in shock. He appointed Jacques Delors as his new finance minister, who, like Healey in the UK, delivered austerity — “an operation without an anaesthetic”, as Delors described it at the time. Delors, who later became president of the European Commission, aligned the French economy with that of Germany, and in doing so laid the ground for a long period of stable economic growth. Contrary to popular narrative, the UK, too, experienced an economic boom in the period from 1976-9. Margaret Thatcher did not come to power because of low growth, but because of a failing public sector.

Either way, and unlike in the Seventies and Eighties, neither François Bayrou nor Keir Starmer has the majority needed to deliver the policies which would fix the problem. In France, the situation is about to come to a head: Bayrou has called for a confidence vote to support his austerity policies and the consensus is that he will struggle to find a majority. He is still fighting. He went on TV the other day with an impressive rant in which he said the young French are being expected to pay off the debt “all for the comfort of certain political parties and for the comfort of the boomers, who believe that everything is just fine”. But the debt France has been accumulating is not for investments for absurd early retirement policies, and a bloated public sector. France has failed to present a balanced budget since 1974.

Unlike Bayrou, Starmer has a large majority — though not one large enough to pass the welfare reforms needed to meet his fiscal targets. Sure, he can raise taxes, and that will almost surely happen in this autumn’s budget. But this will only make the doom loop worse. As taxes go up, fewer companies invest, and people consume less.

And good people leave. When Brexit happened, some European expats left London. But for most, it still made sense to live and work in post-Brexit Britain. It remained a business-friendly place. But with Labour’s tax policies, which target expats and soon property, their incentive to stay is massively reduced.

The parallels between the UK and France are not coincidences. Something similar is happening throughout Europe. The underlying problem is productivity growth — growth per hour worked. The more widely used measure of gross domestic product, or GDP, is misleading because it conflates productivity and employment growth. An extreme example is Spain, where GDP growth is very strong. But this is due only to mass immigration. Spain, Italy, France, UK, even Germany now, all suffer from low productivity growth. This is why people feel so miserable. Their countries are getting richer on paper. But they are not.

The old trickle-down economic model worked well in the days of unbridled, global financial capitalism, a period that for the UK started in the mid-Eighties and ended in 2008, when its productivity collapsed. Italy’s wave of low productivity growth was kicked off around the time when it joined the euro. Germany’s began to stagnate in the second part of the last decade. France performed better than Germany and the UK until the pandemic but has since joined the low-productivity club.

For the time being, America has managed to buck this trend. It has high debt and high growth. But this could change under Donald Trump because his “Big Beautiful Bill” is even more reckless than anything we have seen in Europe. It would indeed be ironic if the most Europhobic president in American history ended up delivering a European-style low-productivity economy.

Yet, again, if that were to happen, it would be only part of a wider trend. You cannot pin this down to any one politician or political party. This is not about the Left versus the Right. The UK’s economy fell off the cliff during the global financial crisis when Gordon Brown was prime minister. Seven prime ministers from both the main parties presided over the aftermath. France is run by a rainbow coalition of the Left, the center, and the moderate Right, and not one of these parties even has a plan to reverse it.

The problem, rather, is the way in which debt and productivity interact. You have to look at the two numbers together, as well as the debt-servicing costs, which are determined by the interest rates and the repayment schedule. The debt ratio in the UK is 95.6%. In France, it is 113%. The US’s debt ratio is even higher, at 124%. But low productivity growth is making things worse in the UK and in France.

Germany has lower debt than other large European countries. But their debt burden is rising too. The German welfare state is out of control and piling up enormous future liabilities. All these European countries have distinct versions of the problem. But the underlying force is the same — a secular stagnation in productivity growth.

There are only three ways out of a debt problem: austerity, growth, and default. Some would add inflation to this list, but I don’t. Investors would demand higher interest rates to compensate for this, leaving the government in exactly the same tight spot as before.

The most authoritative work ever written about sovereign debt was “Growth in a Time of Debt”, written in 2010 by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. They studied 44 countries over 200 years and found that countries with debt-to-GDP ratios of over 90% performed worse than those with lower rates. The result was widely discredited at the time because their calculations contained errors, which received wide publicity. Unfortunately, these errors detracted from the main result — that there is a toxic interaction between high debt and low productivity growth. The paper’s findings have become even more relevant in the 15 years since publication.

So, beware of Reinhart-Rogoff. A debt spiral is like a slow-moving deadly disease. It is hard to forecast its progression. But one thing is certain: we are not going to wake up one day and discover that we’ve been miraculously healed.

This example should remind us that, though people typically associate fascism with Germany and Italy, there is also a French story. Ernest Nolte, one of the first historians to study the ideology, published a 1963 book called Three Faces of Fascism which argued that Action Française, an antisemitic nationalist movement founded in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, was the precursor of modern fascism. Most did not agree: Action Française is a counterrevolutionary movement that lacks the dynamic radicalism of fascism.

That did not stop Zeev Sternhell, a Polish-Israeli scholar, from locating the origins of European fascism not in Italy but in the convergence of the anti-liberal Left and anti-liberal Right in late 19th century France. Yet other historians have debated whether the so-called French Social Party (PSF), a genuinely mass movement which could have won elections in 1940, might be fascist too. It’s surely no surprise that the party’s slogan of “Work, Family, Fatherland” was adopted by the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Pétain.

After the collapse of Vichy, extreme Right politics was discredited in France. The postwar populist movement of Poujadism proved a flash in the pan. The extremists who resorted to terrorism against de Gaulle’s policy of accepting Algerian independence had little popular support. It was only in 1983 that the extreme Right remerged as an electoral force, when the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which had its roots in several extreme Right traditions, scored its first electoral victories. Today that party, now rechristened the Rassemblement National (RN), looks a contender to win France’s next presidential election.

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This alarming situation is the subject of Ugo Palheta’s Marxist analysis, Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen. Marxist interpretations of fascism have always linked it to economics. In the interwar years, the Communist Third International always stressed that fascism was a result of the crisis of capitalism, as the bourgeoisie resorted to extreme methods to preserve its power. The argument was that since capitalism was in terminal crisis, communist parties should steer clear of any attempt to shore up democracy: democratic socialists were as much the enemy as the Nazis. This eased Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany. As for France, the Communists hastily reversed course and allied themselves with socialists and even liberals in the so-called Popular Front. This was an updated version of the old policy of “Republican defense” going back to the Dreyfus Affair — in which parties of different political stripes temporarily joined forces in the higher cause of defending democracy.

Reading Palheta’s book evokes an odd sense of nostalgia, as all those rancid debates of the last century come flooding back. In the Seventies, we are told, the “crisis of capitalism” caused the bourgeoisie to opt for “neo-liberal” solutions: which duly paved the way for “neofascism”. Then, in the Eighties and Nineties, the “triumph of capitalism” allowed the far-Right to revive and take root, before a “crisis of capitalism” “put fascism back on the agenda” by eroding “the foundations of bourgeois hegemony” and pushing the “ruling classes” to opt for more authoritarian solutions. Macron’s “centrist authoritarianism”, we are confidently informed, is the last gasp before fully fledged fascism can emerge in the form of an RN victory. Etc, etc, etc.

In reality, there are significant differences between what was once considered to be “fascism” and the RN. Though one can be legitimately suspicious of the genuineness of Marine Le Pen’s detoxification of her party, it shows no insurrectionary tendencies. There is no sign that it intends, or would be able, to dismantle the institutions of French democracy and impose a dictatorship. The comparison with Meloni in Italy might be instructive here. That said, whether or not one wants to call it fascism, the extreme ethnonationalist and identitarian authoritarianism of the RN is a genuinely worrying threat. Among other things, a planned policy of “national preference” would condition access to social rights, including health care, to those with French citizenship. At the same time, Le Pen may end up actively discriminating against France’s million Muslim citizens, not least in her erstwhile enthusiasm for banning the Islamic headscarf in public spaces.

In a couple of years, then, France could soon be faced with a mix of Trumpism, Orbánism and Pétainism — clear enough from the polling numbers. Between the elections of 2017 and 2022, after all, the RN’s final vote rose from 34% to 41%. It is possible that Marine Le Pen herself may be ineligible to run, unless her recent court conviction for financial fraud is overturned. But her “dauphin”, the inexperienced Jordan Bardella, is no less popular, and his policies are largely indistinguishable from hers.

So how is this threat to be combated? Palheta’s book briefly offers an answer in the last chapter. It proposes establishing “popular, anti-racist and pro-feminist defense structures” and “local committees” to fight for “real democracy”. Etc, etc, etc. Who would organize and mobilize this grassroots activism? The suggestion seems to be that only the populist La France Insoumise (LFI) movement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon offers the “anti-liberal, anti-productivist rupture” that might block the path to fascism. But if Palheta is right that the LFI is the only hope, then there is no hope.

All the same, this depressing prospect does, at least, prompt some thoughts about the history of the French Left in general. In the interwar years, Léon Blum, leader of the French Socialist Party and the most morally inspiring leader in the history of European socialism, desperately tried to hold on to the party’s Marxist ideology: partly because he feared being outflanked by the Communists to his Left. He resisted any “revisionist” ideas that offered a plausible non-Marxist program. All the while, Blum tied himself in knots by distinguishing between the so-called “exercise of power” and the “conquest of power”. Yet what he patently failed to do was reflect on the kind of policies that the Socialists might actually pursue once in power. According to Marxist dogma, after all, this was only a provisional step towards the final revolution.

Those revisionists who tried to escape from this binary straitjacket of reform or revolution were dismissed as heretics. This was the fate of the most brilliant interwar Socialists, the Belgian Henri de Man, who had a wide following in France. The rejection of his ideas pushed him, and some of his followers, toward fascism. He ended up collaborating with the Germans.

After 1945, partly because of the example of people like de Man, the French Socialist Party refused to rethink its Marxist theory while in practice participating in governments that carried out torture in Algeria. There was never in France, as in Germany, a “Bad Godesberg moment”, when the SPD abandoned Marxism in 1959. On the western banks of the Rhine, “social democracy” remained taboo. In 1971, though, the defunct Socialist Party was hijacked and reconstructed by François Mitterrand, a man who had no previous Socialist beliefs or culture. Yet his supreme political skills allowed him to outmaneuver Michel Rocard, the figure in the party who offered a new version of revisionism. Rocard was a representative of the so-called “second Left”, which offered a less statist vision. He had no truck with the rhetoric of a “rupture with capitalism” espoused by Mitterrand, who, for his part, was politically cynical and economically illiterate.

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The result was predictable. Mitterrand, elected in 1981, had abandoned most of his policies within two years, while never actually offering any kind of doctrinal rethinking. He lurched from socialism in one country to ultra-liberalism in less than a decade. This was the beginning of the end of the French Socialist Party. Its death rattle took the form of François Hollande, whose inner Mitterrand prompted him in 2012 to offer some fiery rhetoric about his enemy being “money” — only to completely reverse course within a year of being elected.

This void on the Left offered an opportunity to Mélenchon, a former member of the Socialist Party. Enter La France Insoumise, which performed well in the presidential elections of both 2017 and 2022. Yet if LFI identifies Macron as its main enemy, it is an ironic mirror image of Macronism in that it exists solely as a machine to allow one man to take power. La Meute: Enquete sur la France Insoumise, a recent book by two French journalists, has exposed the party’s authoritarianism, bullying and sectarianism. The slightest criticism of Mélenchon leads to immediate exclusion. This, after all, is the man who once uttered the words: “La République, c’est moi”. Also problematic is Mélenchon’s admiration for Chavez and Putin, and his posturing on the Middle East. One must not fall into the trap of lumping all critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as antisemites: most are clearly not. But Mélenchon goes beyond anything that Jeremy Corbyn was (perhaps unfairly) accused of, not least when his party described the October 7 massacre as “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces”.

The idea, then, that this man, at this moment, offers a path to the “real democracy” that Palheta craves is delusional. That, of course, still leaves the question of how to deal with the RN. Unfortunately, there is nothing better on offer than the old policy of “Republican defense”. The liberal center has moved so far to the Right, in France as elsewhere, that a lot of nose-holding will be necessary. In the years before the Popular Front of the Thirties, the Communists used to say that the choice between the parliamentary center and the anti-parliamentary Right was like plumping for “plague” over “cholera”. However bad things may have become in France today, they are not quite that bad. The choice, for now, is between “plague” — and maybe measles or flu. The RN is definitely the plague.

To the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss the fact that so much of intellectual life was dominated by this topsy-turvy procedure seemed very strange. He spent most of his twenties drifting along the Rive Gauche at a time when his young Parisian contemporaries — Sartre among them — were beginning to formulate what would one day be known as existentialism. Abstraction was in the air; Paris was awash with armchair theorists claiming to have derived, a priori and armed only with a fierce intellect and a few translations of Heidegger, the basic condition of humanity. Yet what struck Lévi-Strauss was that most of these confident assertions were just conjecture: if you really wanted to know what human beings are like, then you probably needed to leave the safety of the café and meet some different types of human beings. In 1935, he did just that, abandoning his post as a secondary school teacher and boarding a steamship for Brazil, so that he could have a look at “human nature”, up close, for himself.

The legendary travelogue Tristes Tropiques (1955) is an account of that journey. Though its author is perhaps best known in the academy as the inventor of structuralism, the writing is anything but dry and theoretical: from the famous, ironical first line — “I hate traveling and explorers” — Lévi-Strauss styles himself as a reluctant hero, on a quest into the jungle to find mankind in his original condition. “I have often planned to undertake the present work,” he confesses, “but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me making a start.” To proceed, he must give up all pretense of academic discipline and propriety, and indulge his most immoderate Romantic impulses. The result is, in the words of another great anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, “a work which, though it is very far from being a great anthropology book, or even an especially good one, is surely one of the finest books ever written by an anthropologist”.

The bulk of Tristes Tropiques is concerned with Lévi-Strauss’s visits to remote peoples living in the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso: the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, whom the author arranges in ascending order of how “untouched” he believes them to be. This mania for the “untouched” and “unspoiled” and “uncontaminated”, borne of Lévi-Strauss’s youthful fondness for Rousseau, initially strikes the modern reader as rather overblown: the innocently naked Caduveo, for instance, cavort around in their own Eden, “protected by the grassy velvetiness of the outside walls and the fringe of palm trees”, their “flesh tones … set off by… the rich, bright glint of the teeth and fangs of wild animals among feathers and flowers”. But soon, Lévi-Strauss’s trained eye can’t help but notice more subtle social structures: the Caduveo’s tattoos, for instance, are a map of their aboriginal forms of social organization, which time and trade with the outside world have long since degraded.

For all Lévi-Strauss’s ridiculous paeans to noble savagery, the fact remains that every single one of his encounters with an indigenous people in Tristes Tropiques contains at least one such fascinating observation — many of which are still respected by first-rate ethnographers. He is sensitive and meticulous: most editions are accompanied by facsimiles of his wonderful drawings of clothing, drinking vessels and tattoos. He also avoids many of the pitfalls into which other anthropologists have fallen, before and since. Of the Bororo, for example, he sees not simply a unified “people” or “tribe” that has been intact since the dawn of time, but a group struggling with disease and resettlement by missionaries, and trying its best to live in accordance with its own traditions.

Even his rather naïve association of Amazonians with “primitiveness” has a certain truth to it, if we read it generously. When visiting the Nambikwara, for instance, he notices that their social structure changes according to the time of year: in the dry season, the fact that most food is gleaned from hunting makes Nambikwara society more centralized and hierarchical; in the rainy season, when agriculture is possible, the Nambikwara disperse into smaller family units. Recent work in archaeology suggests that this kind of social flexibility — alien to modern, bureaucratic states like Lévi-Strauss’s France — was exceedingly common among peoples who lived tens of thousands of years ago. In other words, by identifying primordial “human nature” with a certain openness, a capacity for choice and transformation that industrial societies have somehow lost, Lévi-Strauss might not have been entirely wrong.

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Nevertheless, in the years since Tristes Tropiques was published, its reputation has suffered. Its initial, rapturous reception — Susan Sontag called it “one of the great books of our century” — has since given way to accusations of colonial incomprehension at best, outright racism at worst. Many anthropologists consider Lévi-Strauss’s hymns to the unspoiledness of his “natives” to be a kind of backhanded compliment, a way of denying them the sophisticated, sexy fallenness of the West. Nor was this picture helped by the title of his next book, La Pensée Sauvage — which, although literally meaning something like “untamed thought”, is simply begging for mistranslation as “the mind of the savage”.

But perhaps we have misunderstood the political and intellectual stakes. If we treat Tristes Tropiques as a perfect catalog of the beliefs and customs of the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, we will surely find it lacking, especially in the light of half a century of well-funded ethnographic research. But if we treat it as a riposte to the lofty pretensions of Lévi-Strauss’s fellow Parisian intellectuals (not to mention today’s intellectuals) to know “human nature”, it starts to look like a welcome corrective. Beneath all of Lévi-Strauss’s pontifications about innocence and savagery lies a clear, common-sense conviction that things could be otherwise — that many human societies once were otherwise, and that, at least in a few remote corners of Brazil, they still are.

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It is doubly striking, therefore, that so many of the tetchiest criticisms of Tristes Tropiques have tended to emerge after 1980, from institutions in the US and UK that were in the throes of neoliberalism (a way of thinking whose most famous slogan, “There is no alternative”, is a perfect contradiction of the one intellectual assumption every anthropologist makes). In a sense, I suspect, Lévi-Strauss’s reputation was the victim of a resurgent notion of human nature that took the academy by storm in the final decades of the 20th century: a hard-bitten economistic one which held that the essence of mankind was simply to be “rational” (which, to the economist, means calculating, greedy, concerned above all else with the maximization of personal profit). This was almost as prevalent on the political Left as on the political Right: the only difference was that those leftist thinkers who opposed Lévi-Strauss’s “Romanticism” added that to refuse to ascribe such calculating, greedy “rationality” to indigenous peoples was to label them somehow inhuman, and fall victim to “inverted racism”.

But was this really Lévi-Strauss’s sin? In his final reflections, he strikes a remarkably shy, relativist tone: humanity is vast, perhaps infinite, and even the most skilled anthropologist can only ever offer a few, partial gropings towards its essence, if one even exists. “The paradox is irresoluble,” he writes: “the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but, on the other hand, the less likely it is… that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity.” He tells the legend of an Indian, who journeys to the edge of the earth, asks questions of all the people and things he finds there, only to be disappointed. He cannot quite understand them.

I like to come back to Lévi-Strauss again and again for lessons like these. Like many academics, I spend far too much time chasing around dreamy abstractions, many of which claim to contain the essence of human life or social organization. Books such Tristes Tropiques are a reminder that these efforts are, at best, only part of the story. Indeed, they are a corrective to much else besides: “Human nature” is reified ever more readily these days — not just by intellectuals, but by consultants restructuring economic life, lawyers refashioning society’s rules, HR departments rewriting the mores by which people interact. Everyone has his or her own preconceived assumptions, adopted for self-serving reasons, about what it might mean to be human. Except one. Follow him into the jungle this summer, and discover who you are.

In recent times, however, these brotherly bonds have been placed under severe strain. For the last year, France and its most-cherished former possession, Algeria, have been locked in a diplomatic cold war. And perhaps the most prominent figure to be caught in the dispute is none other than Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Grand Mosque.

Over the past few days, Hafiz, a native of Algiers who pledges support for the French Republic, has been accused of playing a shady double game. On the one hand, the Left-wing (and pro-Republican) newspaper Libération has called him “Algeria’s secret Ambassador to France” or the “eye of Algiers” in France: in other words a spy. All the while, the Algerians increasingly suspect him of working for the French secret services, while also sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood and other enemies of Algeria’s secular regime. Hafiz’s dilemma, then, is a neat encapsulation of the challenge facing both France and Algeria: how to dovetail two very different realities — grounded not on fraternal affection but in long years of mutual contempt?

In April this year, the French government announced that relations with Algeria are at their worst since 1962, the year Algiers gained its independence from Paris following a bloody and protracted war of liberation. That same month, the French ambassador was recalled from Algiers while 12 Algerian diplomats were expelled from France: after Paris accused them of espionage. The immediate cause of these tit-for-tat expulsions was a French police investigation into the involvement of an Algerian official in the temporary abduction of a TikTok influencer called Amir Boukhors. A vociferous critic of the Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the man known as “Amir DZ” boasts over a million online followers. For its part, the Algerians have accused Boukhors of fraud and what they call “infractions terrorists” — though his supporters argue he’s being targeted for supporting the Algerian version of Hirak, a youth movement that’s flourished in several Arab countries since the Arab Spring. Boukhors had been in France since 2016, and was given asylum status in 2023. During this time, Algeria issued nine international arrest warrants against him, but the French consistently refused to extradite him.

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In truth, though, the spat over Amir DZ is part of a far wider dispute. The current crisis arguably date back to July 30, 2024, when President Emmanuel Macron, in a letter to the King of Morocco Mohammed VI, wrote that “the present and future of the Western Sahara were part of Moroccan sovereignty”, even as he backed Rabat’s 2007 plan to take control of the region. This was partly to reward Morocco’s developing and successful business relationships with France. This was an unexpected and direct affront to the Algerians, who have long supported the pro-independence Sawhari Polisario group, which claims the desert territory as its own. No formal ceasefire in the Western Sahara conflict has ever been announced — the French, then, had jumped the gun, swerving ongoing negotiations over the territory and offending Algiers in the process. Algiers, for its part, then took the offensive and recalled its ambassador from Paris.

Since then, the Algerians have refused to back down, accusing the French, among other things, of “destabilizing” Algeria via the DGSE (its equivalent of MI6). At the same time, France has said Algeria had refused to repatriate citizens suspected of terrorism. For this, France threatened to drastically reduce the number of visas given to Algerians, the largest immigrant population in France. Tensions have been further heightened by Macron’s call for Algeria to free the 71-year-old Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who has been condemned to five years in prison on dubious charges of “undermining the integrity” of the nation.

In a further provocation, the 36-year-old French football journalist Christophe Gleizes, a specialist in African football, was arrested in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabyle region of Algeria, and has recently been given a seven-year sentence for “supporting terrorism”. His “crime” was interviewing a local football manager who was also known to be associated with the pro-Berber MAK (the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie), which the Algerian government proscribed as a terrorist organization in 2021. Despite the intervention of the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and the pro-Muslim Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Algerians have so far refused to free the unfortunate Gleizes.

For many observers on both sides of the Mediterranean, there is a wearying familiarity about the current conflict. Journalists in the Algerian media have necessarily been unable to voice their criticisms of their government publicly. El Watan, the distinguished French language newspaper in Algiers, has been strikingly neutral on the issue, fearful that funding cuts from the government will finally drive it into the ground. Online, however, there is a consensus among Algerian dissidents, at home and in France, that this overseas bickering is merely a distraction from Algeria’s deep domestic crisis.

Worse still, Algeria looks like it is being left behind by its Moroccan rival. At roots, the country’s woes are economic: which is why the government faces such fierce opposition from Hirak and other dissidents, who can plainly see from France and elsewhere that for all its beautiful beaches and historical wonders, Algeria remains a poor and isolated state stuck in last century’s anti-colonial mindset.

No wonder, then, that the philosopher André Comté-Sponville, writing recently in the pages of the business magazine Challenges, argued it was easier for the Algerians to “surf the wave of anti-French resentment than to modernize the country”. Comté-Sponville also pointed out that the French had largely moved on from their war with Algeria, and that the legacy of the pieds-noirs (French settlers forced to leave Algeria in 1962) and the harkis (Algerians who fought for the French and either settled in France or were killed in vast numbers back home) were now part of history.

But this is apparently not the case for the Algerians who, argues Comté-Sponville, have been caught up in a post-colonial fantasy of “hysterical” revenge against their old enemy. Citing Freud, the philosopher describes the Algerians as trapped in their own neurosis, refusing to see reality.

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Certainly, it is true that the complicated love-hate relationship between France and Algeria has as much to do with psychoanalysis as with politics. To an extent, this has its tangled roots in the poisoned soil of Franco-Algerian history. Soon after the French occupied Algeria, they turned the country into a département of France. This had the effect of immediately disenfranchising the Muslim majority population: which did not qualify for French citizenship, or otherwise couldn’t reconcile their faith with the demands of a secular state (something that’s still true in contemporary France). The result was a deeply divided society whose tensions defined the cruel and bloody tactics used by both sides during the War of Independence.

This has remained true since 1962. Most significantly, however, neither the Algerian government nor France has ever admitted their murky complicity during the so-called “black decade”, between roughly 1992 and 2002, when the Algerian authorities fought an insurgency of well-armed and well-organized Islamists. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people died during this period, though in many of the massacres it wasn’t always clear who was doing the killing: Algerian security forces and the French DGSE were both alleged to have been involved in secret operations.

While the eyes of the world have lately been on the Middle East, meanwhile, France and Algeria have found themselves once again in a Mexican stand-off, where further aggression on either side is liable to tilt dangerously. In geopolitical terms, the strategic stakes for France could not be higher, as the country has withdrawn from Burkina Faso and Mali and needs to keep Algeria onside to strengthen its hand in the Maghreb. There is a wider European dimension here too: the Maghreb is a kind of international buffer against migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of the instability and chaos of the Sahel region.

In the meantime, few French presidents have ever done as much as Macron to curry favor with the Arab world. It was no surprise, therefore, that the Elysée Palace pledged at the end of July that France would join Spain, Ireland and Norway — and now possibly the UK — in recognizing a Palestinian state. In the meantime, France has begun encouraging other European and Middle Eastern states to recognize Palestine too, working tentatively with Saudi Arabia on a two-state solution to the deadly stalemate in Gaza.

Macron’s deference to the Arab world is unsurprising: he wants to leave a legacy as a world statesman and peacemaker, as well as placate his own restive Muslim population — the largest in Europe. It is also in line with one of France’s oldest objectives in foreign policy: to be “une puissance musulmane” (“a power in the Muslim world”). This is an ambition which dates back to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798, and includes the occupation and division of Syria and Lebanon, protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and the annexation of Algeria. But as France tries once again to make its mark in the Middle East, it is Algeria, once France’s most prized jewel, which is proving to be the sharpest thorn in the French diplomatic side.

All the while, France’s economic presence in Algeria, long dependent on a shared history, is now been rivaled by China and even Italy — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warmly praised President Tebboune on an official visit to Rome and said that relations between Algiers and Rome were at an all-time high. At the same time, Algeria has been building links with Russia and Turkey, which have also been maneuvering aggressively against the French. They’re especially keen to take an interest in Algeria’s oil economy, which has flourished in the wake of the Ukraine war.

For its part, Algeria needs to reassert itself as the leader in the region after decades of retrenchment, which has seen it be overtaken by Morocco as the West’s most favored client. As it is, Algerian paranoia towards the West, and France in particular, has only hardened with a sense that the country is being surrounded by enemies. For the time being, then, there is no easy way out of the impasse, even if the Grand Mosque remains as charming and alluring as ever.

In reality, Trogneux is Brigitte’s older brother. The pair grew up in Amiens, in the north of France, with four other siblings and a family confectionery business which, to this day, turns out two million macarons d’Amiens each year. Among other things, the city is known as the home of Jules Verne, father of science fiction. But as fantastical as Verne’s writerly imagination may have been, even he would have struggled to conceive of a scandal such as this.

Owens is not the first to have disliked Brigitte Macron. The first lady, as we all by now know, was a teacher at Emmanuel’s Jesuit school and 24 years his senior. The couple have always maintained that their relationship remained “within the bounds of the law” during this period; in 2007, they wed when Macron was 30 and Brigitte, having recently divorced the father of her existing three children, was 54. It is this sex configuration, rather than the inherent issue of the age gap, which is viewed with queasiness — after all, Donald and Melania Trump are also separated by 24 years. That Brigitte is the elder party, that the couple met when Emmanuel was a school pupil and that the couple are French — a country whose sexual reputation, to Britons at least, still has the whiff of adulterous libertinism — meant the Macrons would always be easy targets for prurient speculation.

Coupled with his reputation for soft-touch liberalism and unfashionable Europhilia, this new Napoleon was never destined to woo conservatives. A lovers’ tiff caught on camera in May, as Brigitte pushed Emmanuel’s face away when the couple disembarked a plane, turned social media’s unease into full-blown distrust. A conspiracy theory is born.

The origins of the Brigitte Macron “transvestigation” — a depressing internet coinage for when people’s appearances are scoured for evidence of transsexualism — began with two strange French ladies. Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey, respectively a “spiritual medium” and a self-described “independent investigative journalist”, posted a YouTube video speculating about Brigitte’s birth sex in December 2021. Rey’s suspicions followed the classic transvestigation route: she noticed that Brigitte’s body shape seemed unexpectedly masculine in photographs and invented an elaborate personal history from there. Within hours, the video had amassed half a million views. Last September, Roy and Rey were compelled to pay Brigitte and her brother €13,000 in damages. This month, the verdict was overturned — not because the court ruled that Brigitte was in fact Jean-Michel, but because the threshold of defamation was not met. This case is now in the highest appeals court in France; another, concerning alleged online harassment by 10 individuals, goes to trial in October. Separately, Owens faces her own lawsuit in Delaware.

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In the conspiracy world, Owens is a breath of fresh air; in a rogues’ gallery of gammons, she is a canny, outspoken young black woman. She became famous by hosting Q&As with university gender goblins, precisely and without compassion dismantling their luxury beliefs. In one such viral video, she responds to an appeal on behalf of the trans students who felt “victimized” by her views: “Life’s tough, get a helmet man. I’m too pregnant for this. Next question.”

But sex realism only had so much mileage, particularly as it returned to the mainstream. Now, the Brigitte conspiracy theory opens a convenient new frontier in Owens’s truth crusade, a perfect confluence of culture-war claims which have become important to her personal brand. First, liberals compulsively lie. Second, those same liberals are sexual deviants, weaponizing their grip over a sleeping public to further shadowy homosexual/paedophilic agendas. And third, the cult of transgenderism has compelled normal people to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes. The first and third of these claims are difficult to dispute in the sense that all politicians necessarily lie, and that part of 2020s politicking has until now involved avoiding obvious truths about biological sex. The transvestigation reflex has not been helped by the fact that those who to the general public appear obviously male, like the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, have been defended in the name of kindness as put-upon non-conforming females. Gender suspicion is a consequence of institutional dishonesty, and Brigitte — verifiably a woman, though a slightly gangly one — is collateral damage.

As for Owens’s second crusade — uncovering the sexual deviancy of elites — revelations about the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s activities and the successful circulation of the conspiracy theory QAnon have created a constituency of American truthers who want to believe in the existence of a global paedophile ring at any cost, and are continually emboldened by, among other things, the reticence of their own president. Of course, a simpler explanation for the flourishing of such theories is the platforming, via social media, of commentators who are verifiably stupid. So it is that Owens has been able to claim, in the past, that the Moon landings were fake, that Bill Gates is a “vaccine criminal” and that Emmanuel Macron’s presidency is the result of a CIA mind-control experiment.

Owens’s claims may be deranged, but they are no more so than the various conspiracy theories which have to some extent always been part of life at the French court. Then, as now, the political wife is central: a figure of both fascination and anxiety. The inference behind the Brigitte conspiracy is that Emmanuel is an effete liberal man under the thumb of his powerful wife. Lady Macbeth asked the spirits to “unsex me here” to wield power behind the throne; conspiracy logic does the unsexing for Macron’s first lady. Internet weirdos hunching over images of the First Lady in a swimming costume, desperate to locate a spectral todger, may seem exceptionally prurient and cruel — but as Hilary Mantel demonstrated in her celebrated essays for the LRB, royal bodies (an elision you must forgive with republican France) have always been subject to vengeful, woman-hating scrutiny — just look at the lascivious fixation on Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber.

Conspiracy theories prior to, and to some extent responsible for, the revolution were transmitted via the libelles, pornographic pamphlets comprising anonymous vitriol familiar to those on social media today. Mantel describes them as “a pantomime mix of scenes of copulation and conspiracy, endless unbuttoning and tupping and frotting and plotting”. They catalogued, with slobbering glee, the dauphine’s apparent vices: incest, orgies, Swedes. In the hands of pamphleteers, workaday political crimes like naivety and venality become chaotic scenes of promiscuity and buggery. In the rationale of the libelles, these speculative leaps are perfectly coherent. So it is that in the modern culture wars, “citizen journalists” like Rey are compelled to morph suspicion of power into pornographic, defamatory flights of fancy. After all, what better proof that leaders are “not like us” than exposing them as a caste of depraved sex pests?

In an absence of lettres de cachets — the bulletproof decrees beloved by his kingly forebears — Macron and his wife must navigate global legal systems in order to put down whisperings of the First Lady’s little lad. It seems undignified to even engage with such tattle, but I have no doubt that the dismantling of Owens’s brand will be satisfying to watch, and so I too will be bringing out le popcorn. But letting this debacle pass without reflection on the timbre of modern political commentary would be a mistake; a return to the fervor of 1780s pamphleteers might just be a portent of an impending period of political chaos. We should be wary of the desecration of public discourse, symbolized by the sordid Owens-Macron saga. The perpetrators of our modern conspiracy theories may be a league of mouth-breathers, but they have big, credulous audiences. The real problem is that such gossip muddies, rather than clarifies, the waters of legitimate protest, and disenfranchises believers by plunging them into alternate realities which make them sound like idiots. There are many sensible reasons to criticize Macron: his wife’s awkward gait and dodgy blow-dry is not one of them. All eyes on Delaware, then — the entire world will see Owens in court.

These days, of course, the truth is more prosaic. Rowdy “bals populaires” can still be found, full of drinking and dancing, the most famous being the bal des pompiers held at the firefighters’ barracks at Port-Royal until 4am (not a good night for your house to catch fire). Usually, though, the arrival of 14 July simply marks the beginning of high summer. Rather than “Vive la France”, you’re more likely to hear “Vous partez quand?” (“When are you leaving?”) in Paris shops and offices. It’s a reference to the grandes vacances that will soon sweep France, reducing all activity in business and politics to the absolute minimum.

And though the march-pasts and fly-overs will still dominate the capital today, this demonstration of confident state power has increasingly faced an anarchic counterpoint. Over the last couple of years, the night of 14 July has seen running battles between the police and youths in the banlieues, with fireworks designed to celebrate the French nation instead aimed at the so-called “forces of order”, as well as schools, libraries and other Republican symbols. These battles took on a frightening intensity in June 2023, after a 17-year-old was shot at a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Back then, there was some talk of banning the 14 July festivities entirely. That didn’t happen, but this summer, too, there are nightly skirmishes in the cité (council estate) not far from where I live, muffled howls echoing off the graffitied concrete walls.

This is nothing new. Between order and disorder, indifference and activism, 14 July has long been contested territory. The bickering first began in 1879, when a semi-official public festival was held in France to commemorate that epic day 90 years before. The event proved so popular that the Third Republic decided to turn it into an official celebration. Yet then, as now, the problems started with that nastiness at the Bastille, with conservatives instead preferring a commemoration of the more peaceful Fête de la Fédération. Falling on 14 July 1790, it was a suitably wholesome celebration of Republican virtue, and safely free of lynching too.

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In the end, of course, the conservatives lost the debate. From 1880, the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall has been a national holiday. And, in a sense, the violence it recalls is appropriate, given the festival was partly encouraged to promote national unity after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. Yet, as the yearly chatter around grandes vacances implies, the French have often been unsure about what 14 July is really commemorating and why. Is it about the institution of the Republic? The French nation more generally? Or is it simply about bloody insurrection, one that famously freed only a handful of prisoners? Notably, there has always been a small but vocal fringe Royalist faction that believes the French Revolution was a mistake and that “Bastille Day” is simply the grubby glorification of proletarian violence.

Interestingly, though, this is not the position of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which has always proudly embraced 14 July — albeit with rising warnings of anti-Republican “barbarism” in the banlieues. And no wonder: the most shocking recent example of anti-French violence came on 14 July 2016, when a Tunisian terrorist ploughed a 19-ton cargo truck into the holiday crowds at Nice, killing 86 people.

Recent criticism of the holiday has come from the Left. Some have argued that the displays of military might are crassly jingoistic in an age of European unity, even as invitations to Algeria and Morocco cause a degree of post-colonial angst. These controversies have been compounded by absurd exhortations by well-meaning Leftist for Muslims to “pray for France” — on a day, let’s not forget, that commemorates the refounding of France as a strictly secular state.

There has always been an ambivalence in France’s Muslim Community — the largest in Europe — towards Le Quatorze. Hardliners insist that Islam forbids celebrating festivals belonging to non-Muslims, or “miscreants”. There have also been well-intended gestures from moderates such as the Union des Mosquées de France (UMF) who regularly appeal to Muslims to join in with “the spirit of fraternity” in the interests of national unity. The truth is however, that most Muslims of varying shades of piety think that Le Quatorze Juillet has nothing to do with them.

Most significantly, today’s celebrations have come under attack from Left-wing historians, with Patrick Boucheron, a medieval historian at the Collège de France, leading the charge. Boucheron is not only an academic but a media figure in France, regularly appearing on television to expound against French exceptionalism, the idea of the “Great Nation” with a duty to show the world how to live.

Instead, Boucheron argues that French history is merely a component part of what he calls “global history” — the complicated matrix of geography, geopolitics, and colonialism which have together shaped the present. His opponents accuse him of being “anti-French”, using dubious Anglo-American ideas to rewrite French history in favor of diversity. This was a talking point during the opening ceremony of last year’s Olympic Games in Paris, partly scripted by Boucheron, and which depicted the French Revolution, and especially Marie Antoinette, in an irreverent way (the unfortunate queen was shown holding her head in hands, singing a revolutionary anthem). There was also, most provocatively, no mention of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. “The Revolution was violence,” said Boucheron in his defense. “We have to show how it was. We should not exalt it.”

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It’s clear, then, that 14 July has lately morphed not just into a debate about history, or even the legacy of the past on the present. Rather, it has become a proxy for a far broader dispute — about what France is. For their part, Boucheron’s enemies accuse him of being part of a globalized intellectual élite, one which loathes France and its people. Typical here is Loris Chavanette, a specialist of the Revolution. In the pages of Marianne, a Leftist publication skeptical of liberal handwringing, Chavanette argued that Boucheron and his friends helped prod France towards “cultural and moral decadence”. Ignorance of 14 July, he added, “is the symptom of the fracturing of our national bonds”.

Yet for all their diffidence towards the holiday, and even if their own historical knowledge is blurred and unsure, most ordinary French people would probably side with Chavanette and not Boucheron. Though attitudes towards the 14 July are indeed a clear marker of how “fractured” France is these days, whether they think they are celebrating the patrie or the Republic most people still need to feel, even in some vague way, French. At the same time, a recent IFOP poll found that some 63% of French people, although in favor of Le Quatorze Juillet, were unsure of the meaning of the term Republic these days.

And besides, whatever the controversies that surround it, the fact is that the storming of the Bastille is not merely one of the most important moments in the story of France — it’s also a key moment in world history. It’s a totem, still alive in many political cultures across the world, not just Marxist but socialist and liberal too. Despite the apparent cultivated indifference of the French, it is also impossible to imagine France without Le Quatorze Juillet, a sentiment endorsed not only by the French at home but also homesick French expatriates who celebrate it in South Kensington, and other international French enclaves, as fervently as they do in Paris. Just whatever you do, don’t call it “Bastille Day”.