TRUMPISM IS THE FRENCH DISEASE:

On April 21, the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles launched the kind of perfectly timed volley that sends French political and media life into overdrive. It took the form of an open letter, what the French generally refer to as a "tribune." Titled "For a return to honor of our governors," the tribune was signed by a group of high-ranking former military officials, including 20 retired generals, who warned that "the situation is critical, France is in peril, several mortal dangers threaten her."

Many of the signatories have long lingered on the fringes of French politics, grumbling over the Republic's lapse into decadence and decay. Christian Piquemal was one of the higher-profile among them. In 2016, General Piquemal was stripped of his retirement benefits and formally discharged from the forces after participating in a march on the migrant camp at Calais alongside the novelist and fascist polemicist Renaud Camus. Camus is one of the principal disseminators of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, according to which a globalist cabal is supplanting Europe's white population with African migrants.

The open letter was the latest salvo in a raging culture war within France on Islam, race, republicanism, and all things in between. "Disintegration" is the leitmotif of the soldiers' diagnosis of contemporary France. "A disintegration," they write, "which, through a certain form of anti-racism, has one single goal: spreading on our soil a general malaise, a hatred between communities. Today, certain people talk about racialism, indigenism, and decolonial theories, but beneath these terms hateful and fanatical agitators want a race war. They disdain our country, her traditions, her culture, and want to see it fall apart by taking away its past and its history." 

The letter peddles the old right-wing fantasy of a fifth column of rootless cosmopolitans disarming the country against its enemies, both internal and domestic. The generals then go on to name the cause of France's supposed national rot: "Islamism and the hordes of the banlieue," a reference to the predominantly immigrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of French cities. These forces are "leading to the detachment of multiple parcels of the nation and transforming them into territories beholden to dogmas contrary to our constitution."

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