Forty Years that Unmade France
Source: amren.com
Eric Zemmour is a well-known French author and television personality. Of Algerian-Jewish origin, he may seem an unlikely spokesman for French tradition, but he has emerged in recent years as a prominent scourge of ideological orthodoxy. He is unquestionably the most prominent mainstream French commentator who speaks candidly about race.
Eric ZemmourThis role comes with a price. In 2011 he was convicted of “incitement to racial hatred” for pointing out that most drug dealers in France are blacks and Arabs. He was again convicted of the same offense for maintaining that employers should be able to hire as they see fit (i.e., to “discriminate”). This year, he has been prosecuted for remarks about the criminal behavior of ethnic gangs.
His latest book, The Suicide of France, was released on October 1st and immediately became the top seller in France, displacing a tell-all memoir by President François Hollande’s former mistress. The book is a year-by-year chronicle of France’s dissolution–everything from harmful legislation to pop songs and movies that reflect or promote decline.
One of Mr. Zemmour’s principle themes is the role of free markets in promoting a present-oriented consumerist mentality that has squandered France’s moral capital. However, he also laments the loss of will by native Frenchmen and their displacement by mostly-Muslim immigrants. He has clearly struck a chord among those who are angry at the psychological capitulation of the past 40 years.
The beginning of the end
Mr. Zemmour argues that four quite different developments in the 1970-1972 period set the stage for ongoing France’s suicide. The first was a 1970 law that abolished paternal authority within the family in favor of “parental authority” shared between spouses. Fathers, in Mr. Zemmour’s words:
"incarnate the law and the reality principle as against the pleasure principle. They channel and curb children’s impulses in order to sublimate them. [But] fathers are an artificial, cultural creation who need society’s support to overcome natural maternal power."
In 1970, they lost that support. Mr. Zemour also believes that giving the mother equal power in the household pushed France decisively away from saving and towards consumption.
The second crucial development was a 1971 decision by the Constitutional Council, which has the power to declare laws unconstitutional. This was a complex case, but was the first time the Council went beyond checking laws for conformity with a higher legal norm and censured a law politically because of its content. Thus did France, in Mr. Zemmour’s words, “unknowingly abandon the shores of the Republic and enter with eyes closed upon the bumpy road of government by judges.” Americans are all too familiar with judges who seize legislative authority.
The third blow came in 1971 when President Nixon abolished the gold standard. This effectively nullified the Bretton Woods Agreement to which France was a signatory, and ushered in our current era of free-floating fiat currencies. Freed from the constraints of the gold standard, governments no longer worry about deficits. France has not had a balanced budget since 1981.
The fourth and final blow of this period was the so-called Pleven Law of 1972 (Socialists pushed it, but it is named after the Gaullist minister who adopted it), prohibiting “provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence” against persons or groups “on the grounds of their origin or their membership or non-membership in a particular ethnic group, nation, race or religion.” Passed unanimously amid much self-congratulation, this law, in Mr. Zemmour’s words, “introduces subjectivity where objectivity had prevailed; it condemns intentions and not acts; it gives judges the right and the duty to probe into people’s hearts and souls, to dig up thoughts and ulterior motives.”
The author emphasizes the significance of including “nation” among the protected categories. President Georges Pompidou was at that time bringing literally millions of foreign workers into France at the behest of the construction and automobile industries, and the Pleven law meant that no one could criticize their presence.
Georges PompidouAs Mr. Zemmour points out, the very concept of a nation requires discrimination–a determination that some people are “us,” while the rest are “not us.” Taken literally, a prohibition against making this distinction is incompatible with the continued existence of France, and in practice, the law is used to silence criticism of demographic displacement. As Mr. Zemmour has discovered, even citing verifiable facts can lead to a conviction.
The government made matters much worse by subcontracting the authority to prosecute under the Pleven law to private “anti-racist” organizations such as LICRA (French acronym of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) and MRAP (Movement Against Racism and for the Friendship between Peoples). “By authorizing them to take legal action against any unguarded opinion,” notes the author, “the State has given them the right of political and financial life or death over all dissidents.” Americans can imagine the consequences of giving the Southern Poverty Law Center the power to prosecute someone for any remark it did not like.
The Pleven law has been followed by other laws in the same spirit: the Gayssot law of 1990 against “Holocaust denial,” the Taubira law of 2001 defining the African slave trade as a “crime against humanity” and the Lellouche law of 2002 stiffening the penalties for “racist and anti-Semitic offenses.” As Mr. Zemmour notes:
"Beginning with the Pleven Law, a whole new field of sacred objects has arisen: immigration, Islam, homosexuality, the history of slavery, colonialism and the Second World War, the Nazi genocide of the Jews. A vast and varied domain that continues to grow, in order to satisfy all the minorities that consider themselves discriminated against."
For future historians, notes Mr. Zemmour, “freedom to think, write and express oneself will have been no more than a historical parenthesis of less than a century.”
Demographic displacement
One year after the Pleven law was passed, the oil crisis of 1973 dried up the demand for foreign workers:
"Logic would have dictated that a reverse flow be initiated. This is how the republic had acted during each economic crisis in order to protect “national” employment. Nothing was done by either right or left. This was the first essential break with the past, supposedly for humanitarian reasons."
And the French government went further, passing a “family reunification” law to bring the wives and children of North African workers to France. The result was that “hundreds of thousands of women and children were pulled up from their villages and their modest but peaceful lives to rejoin husbands and fathers they hardly knew.” Housing construction could not keep up, and shantytowns began to appear. Schools were overwhelmed and the quality of instruction for native French children sank as overworked teachers tried to teach Arabs to use toothbrushes and not to slaughter sheep in bathtubs.
In 1959, De Gaulle had warned his countrymen: “The French are French. The Arabs are Arabs. Those who believe in integration have the brains of hummingbirds.” Some politicians still understood this. In 1976, Prime Minister Raymond Barre tried to abolish family reunification, but was overruled by the State Council, which acts as the supreme court for administrative decisions. He then offered “return aid” of 10,000 francs to immigrants who agreed to go home. Spanish and Portuguese who were causing no problems took up the offer, while the North Africans at whom it was aimed stayed put. Barre then negotiated an agreement with the Algerian government for the repatriation of Algerians. Before its terms could be carried out, the Socialist François Mitterand was elected president and repudiated the agreement.
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