IN OTHER WORDS, THEY DEFEATED THEMSELVES:

Eric Zemmour provokes France’s elite with claims of national decline (Charles Bremner, 6/04/10, Times of London)

Eric Zemmour is earning fame and fortune charting his country’s decline, with his latest gloomy book Mélancolie Française flying off the shelves. [...]

The writer argues that France was destined for glory but everything went wrong when King Louis XIV lost to England. By inventing free trade and parliamentary democracy, the British outmanoeuvred the French on all fronts. “We always finish losing,” he said. “England managed to make out that Napoleon Bonaparte was the aggressor, when I believe that England was the aggressor.”

He said, however, that he admires Britain, and that he thinks that his ideas could be aired freely on the other side of the Channel.

British supremacy in the 19th century led to catastrophe, he said. “I profoundly believe that the English provoked the two world wars.” The US took up the role of global adversary, while Britain has concentrated on demolishing France in Europe, with the help of the French elite, he added.

The European Union was originally a French idea for controlling the continent, but British entry sabotaged the plan, he said. “When you talk to the Euro-enthusiast elite, they tell you ‘our adversary is England, they are stopping us uniting the continent, along with the Germans’.”

The thesis that lands Zemmour in the hottest water is his belief that France sealed its fate when it abandoned its tradition of assimilating immigrants, and embraced the concept of ethnic diversity. “French culture is not Muhammad,” he says. “It is François, it is Christian.”

The result is a new “barbarism”, with the emergence of Muslim ghettos that have broken away from society, he argues in his book. To back his thesis, he quotes Charles de Gaulle as saying that mixing Muslims and French Christians is “like blending oil and vinegar”.

He has the timeframe close, but it was following Descartes into Reason that began the French decline, an error the Anglosphere avoided. It's why France has no culture to assimilate immigrants to.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2010 7:08 PM