Civil War is a Real Threat in France

Rod Dreher is in Paris. His thoughts on the looming possibility of civil war in France.

From The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher

Le Roi Des Huîtres Est De Retour

(The King of the Oysters is Back)

Hello from Paris. Didn’t think I’d ever get here, but boy oh boy, did Camille Lorthiois, the press attaché for Artège, my French publisher, make it worthwhile. She greeted me in the office with a half-dozen fresh oysters on the half shell from Normandy, resting on a bed of ice. I just about cried. They were so, so good, as good as I remember French oysters. I say the process for Camille’s canonization should begin right now.

I shared a taxi into the city from the airport with a French businessman. He asked what I was doing in Paris, and I told him I was here to promote the French version of my book Live Not By Lies. He told a heavy story about what’s going on in his country. Wokeness is a big problem here, he explained. He finds it very frustrating that so many French people hate it, but almost nobody will speak out. Everybody is afraid. The whole country seems demoralized, he said.

“What about the Manif Pour Tous?” I asked, referring to the big movement some years back against same-sex marriage, and for the traditional family.

“Gone,” he said. “There are politicians who were there at the big march in Paris who today deny it. But they were there.”

Wokeness is a problem, he said, but so is the prospect of civil war. Yes, I said, I had seen that in the press, when the retired French generals raised the question in their open letter. It seems impossible to imagine how that would happen.

Perhaps because our taxi driver was Arab, the businessman didn’t get into it. Later in the afternoon, I was standing outside my publisher’s building waiting for Camille to come down after a meeting, when I struck up a conversation with another Frenchman who was also waiting there. We talked about the civil war possibility. He said it’s not at all far-fetched.

“Back in 2005, there were big problems in the banlieues,” he said, using the French word for suburbs. “Serious violence went on for a long time before it finally burned out. Well, today there are many, many more of those violent Muslim extremists there than there were back then. If they ever decide to kick it off at the same time all over the city, there are not enough police and security forces to handle them. They know that.”

The man told me that he had spoken to someone — I didn’t recognize the name, but he said it’s someone well-known in France as an expert in the domestic terrorism and crime field — who told him that France is one police shooting of a Muslim away from civil war. What’s also different now from 2005 is the existence of social media. “A police shooting, or rather their version of it, which doesn’t have to have much to do with truth, will make the rounds instantly, and everybody will hit the street,” he said. It could happen at any moment. Everybody knows this, he said.

So, it’s going to be an interesting week here in France on the Résister Au Mensonges press tour. The restaurants open tomorrow for outdoor dining. Joy will be unconfined.