THE FAILED STATE:

Mr. Zemmour argues that the well-known French "melancholy" -- the typically French feeling of gloom and decline -- has its roots back in the early High Middle Ages. In his telling, as the Valois kings were building what would become the French nation into a prominent European power, jurists from the south -- where the tradition of Latin legal scholarship had survived the Dark Ages -- pined for a restoration of the Roman Empire. They saw the fledgling French monarchy as the tool to implement their beliefs. Joining the royal court, they laid the foundations of the modern nation-state by building Europe's first technocratic, merit-based central government bureaucracy, a crucial innovation in feudal Europe. This enabled King Philip the Fair to crush nonstate powers like the Knights Templar, and even to push the pope to move the seat of the papacy to Avignon.

This vision of a new Roman Empire, Mr. Zemmour recounts, explains the French self-definition of identity as relating to language, culture and laws (as with ancient Rome), and not simply a question of shared ethnicity or territory, as with most European countries. Hence the relentlessly expansionist foreign policy of the French state up to World War II. Hence the self-aggrandizing French belief in the country's vocation to greatness -- and hence the French melancholy, since the state failed to achieve that grand goal.

The Industrial Revolution happened first in England, where economic power fueled the expansion of the British Empire. When Napoleon lost Russia, the death of the Grande Armée also meant the death of the French dream of uniting the West under French culture and laws. Until then, France had always been the foremost European power, helped by greater population and natural resources, although always frustrated in its designs for true hegemony, either by meddling Hapsburgs, English resistance, or alliances of rival Europeans fearing French might.

The trauma of the 25 years of total war that followed the French Revolution caused France's birthrates to shrink and its power in the 19th century to wane. England ruled the seas, and Germany ruled the Continent. Two World Wars dealt the final blows to the French dream, the first leaving France too exhausted to build upon its victory, the second laying bare the nation's spiritual exhaustion.

Today, the Anglosphere is the new Roman Empire, and the culture that is to the modern world as Latin was to the ancient is Anglo-Saxon, not French.

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