Anyone curious about what a “diversity-is-our-strength” infusion looks like has only to glance across the Atlantic at the rioting unfolding in France. Evidently, the widespread looting and destruction of property, the assault of a mayor and his family, and the death of a firefighter last weekend are not the economic and cultural enrichment the open borders and equity and inclusion gurus always promise.
READ MORE: France Burns, Macron Dances
The consecutive nights of riots aren’t just the product of four decades of unfettered immigration and weak border security — they’re the result of over two centuries of de-Christianization. The nation has been ablaze since its 1789 revolution. It’s now apparent that the flames were never extinguished.
The catalyst for today’s violence was the recent police shooting of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan descent who repeatedly failed to stop his vehicle when ordered to by traffic police.
The shooting was the match that sparked a gasoline-soaked dumpster fire of social unrest. The usual suspects blame “systemic racism” and France’s supposed failure to assimilate its immigrant population, which assumes that the hordes of first-, second-, and even third-generation immigrants setting fire to civilized society want to be integrated. It further ignores the tens of billions of euros already spent refurbishing low-income housing and inserting mixed-income housing units into affluent neighborhoods to “create social diversity.”
The Collapse of French Society Was Predictable
There’s been mounting evidence that France’s long-term experiment with uncontrolled immigration was about to collapse. In 2005, riots erupted after the accidental electrocution of two teenagers while hiding from police in an electrical substation. On Bastille Day in 2016, 87 people died, and 450 were injured in Nice when a truck, driven by a Tunisian with French residency, careered through a crowded beachfront.
Later that month, a Catholic priest had his throat slit by Islamic state militants during morning Mass. In 2020, teacher Samuel Paty was decapitated outside his school in Paris by a Chechen refugee. Two weeks later, three people were killed in a knife attack at a church in Nice by a Tunisian who had recently slipped across the border after arriving illegally on the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Last year, a 12-year-old named Lola was raped, tortured, and murdered by an Algerian woman. Last month, four young children were taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries after a Syrian national, granted “refugee status” in Sweden, started stabbing people at a park.
In an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron and the French government in 2021, 20 retired French generals claimed that France was disintegrating thanks to hostile suburban hordes, Islamists, and fanatics. They warned of civil war if the social chaos continued.
It wasn’t hyperbole. The disconnect between, on the one hand, an aggressive, predominantly North African element who populate the cities’ no-go banlieues and, on the other, a nostalgic population who pine for the yesteryear charm of la vieille France is palpable and poignant. (READ MORE: The Mysterious Secret Life of France’s Controversial Prime Minister)
Few can define what this “old-time” France looks like, nor when exactly it prospered. The alarming truth, as British economist and philosopher Edmund Burke lamented, is that the age of chivalry — the glory of Europe itself — was barbarically and unnecessarily disposed of when France spurned its ancien régime. Within years, the revolutionists had torn down the country’s ancient institutions and butchered a “most mild and lawful monarch,” as Burke described him, and a serene and patient queen who was “full of life and splendor and joy.”
The French Revolution Is the Root of Modern Social Unrest
The mob imprisoned and exterminated their opponents, rewrote history, reinvented the calendar, and refashioned man himself. They plundered churches, persecuted the clergy, and abolished ancient Catholic customs and feast days in a satanic drive to root out Christianity and, as French philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed, to “assail God Himself.”
France succumbed first to the bloodthirsty Jacobin dictatorship, then to anarchy, and eventually to military tyranny. The nation witnessed three subsequent violent uprisings in less than half a century, and ultimately, after the failed restoration of the monarchy, it yielded to republican democracy.
This latest wolf has been even more cunning than its post-revolutionary predecessors. Under its ravenous eye, political control was ceded to Stalinists, via the 1936 Popular Front coalition government of Léon Blum, then to the Nazis during World War II, and then it was auctioned off to the European Union with its open-borders subversion of national sovereignty.
Colonial protectorates like Algeria and Tunisia were lost, and their autochthonous populations were imported en masse and left to fester away in decaying, socialist-inspired, utopian housing projects.
Cultural and social capital was yielded to the riotous soixante–huitards and their post-war revolt against sexual taboos and “bourgeois” values, a movement profoundly influenced by “intellectuals” like suspected pedophile Michel Foucault, and which empowered the postmodern, neo-Marxist pivot to racial and gender “equity.”
France’s Christian duties as the eldest daughter of the church were rejected, religious education was banned from public schools, and the separation of church and state was implemented in 1905. Today, Mass attendance among the 60 percent of Catholics is a dismal 4.5 percent, and lawmakers are currently clamoring to make France the first country in the world to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right. (READ MORE: Postcard from Italy: How I Closed Pride Month)
Since the revolution, the real objective has never been never democracy, liberty, or human rights, but instead it’s been the steady de-Christianization of France. Today the French watch their children’s schools and local libraries burn to the ground and weep for their beloved République. But they give a free pass to the rebellious, post-revolutionary order, with its conveyor belt of constitutions and forms of government that made all this possible. To wit, the World Economic Forum puppet president, who last week was bopping along at an Elton John concert while Paris burned, was reelected only last year with overwhelming support from the wealthy, boomer inhabitants of the major urban areas now on fire.
The early 20th-century socialist leader Jean Jaurès believed a second revolution was necessary to finish the work of the first. But he also believed that it would resemble less an explosion and more “the silent budding of the trees in spring,” unfurling according to the defiant and harmonious will of the majority.
The riots, and the open-borders calamity that has enabled them, are only a spot fire. A vaster and more destructive inferno, amidst which the French remain nonchalant, still rages out of control. Indeed, more threatening to Western civilization than any Molotov cocktail hurled by the suburban racaille and the frenzied Islamists are France’s glorification of secularism, its defiant embrace of socialism and cultural relativism, the fawning over globalism, and the two-century-long frittering away of the nation’s most precious patrimony — its Christian faith.
Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian as well as secular institutions. She is a contributor to the Federalist, a practicing Catholic, and the mother of two young children.
