France’s Long Slide

France is in freefall. Industry, agriculture, public finances, trade, educational and cultural standards, health, scientific research—nothing is mastered any more, and everything is going downhill at high speed. The luxury-goods, defense, and aeronautics industries, along with wine and cereal crops, are the last islands of French excellence to survive in an ocean of mediocrity. The French people feel that they can no longer control their own destiny.

I often say that immigration is not the cause of anything, but it makes everything worse. It was collège unique and the methods of the pedagogists that destroyed the school. But the massive immigration of people from Arab-Muslim countries, most of whose parents have very little social capital and a dull hostility to French culture, has considerably accelerated the collapse of standards and violence. It was the 35-hour working week and bureaucracy that disrupted the hospital system. But the unlimited, free admission of patients from all over Africa overwhelmed and sank a French hospital system that 25 years ago was still recognized as the best in the world.

Violence is everywhere, haunting and distressing our fellow citizens. To understand what is happening to us, we need to go back to the concept of the “process of civilization” of Norbert Elias—the great German sociologist, one of the greatest of the 20th century, who analyzed the evolution of Western societies towards ever greater individual rationality, shepherded by ever more powerful and imperious states. This is what President Emmanuel Macron referred to in 2024 when he spoke of a “process of de-civilization” that would be at the root of the growing violence in France today. I think this is the wrong reference to make. What does the great German sociologist actually say? That France, her Church, and her kings have, over the centuries, transformed plundering, bawdy lords into refined, courteous courtiers, by teaching them self-control of their passions, impulses, and emotions. Over time, the bourgeois imitated the nobles and the people imitated the bourgeois. And all of Europe imitated the French. Europe, not the world. On the other side of the Mediterranean, in Arab-Muslim civilization, the process that Elias describes has never happened, and passions, impulses, emotions have continued to be suppressed by ferocious, brutal reprisals. When people who have learned to control themselves encounter, on the same soil, those who expect fierce and brutal reprisals that never come, it’s a safari for the latter, where the people who have undergone Elias’s “process of civilization” become game. Against them, anything goes. So there is no “process of de-civilization” of the entire French population, as the president of the Republic implies, but the explosive meeting on the same soil of two peoples who do not have the same history, the same mores, the same ways of regulating violence.