Ici Paris

Charles Maurras made a distinction between le pays réel (the real country) and le pays légal (the legal country). The same is true of Paris. The real Paris still lives in the legal Paris.

From The European Conservative

By Rafael Pinto Borges

Even at its nadir, the French capital remains a beacon of liberty—and, paradoxically, a reason for hope in a Western renaissance.

“Ici Londres.” In the dark night of World War II, as France laid captive under the German jackboot, and European civilisation stood at the edge of the precipice, the words of Franck Bauer brought solace to a grieving people. During those years of trial, blood, and doubt, the soul of France spoke from its English exile, then the last, stubborn holdout of a free Europe. 

Despite the general somberness of our own age, Paris, too, can pride itself on remaining a fortress of hope—at least, to other Europeans. Few sane men, of course, would deny how bitterly the French capital has suffered in recent decades. Like elsewhere across the Western world, the sorry mark of decadence is almost omnipresent. The capital is increasingly scarred by the construction frenzy inspired by its ineffectual, left-wing mayor, Anne Hidalgo: it now always appears as if the city is a great building yard, with billions of Euros methodically spent in making everything worse than it was before. The coming Olympics have given the Paris-haters that run the city the ideal opportunity to tyrannise her, with the Place de la Concorde ignominiously covered up by a collection of misshapen carbuncles that insult the eyes of locals and visitors alike.

Sure enough, these are the visible consequences of a deeper malaise. The pride justly produced by the grandeur of Parisian architecture seems besmirched and belittledby the realities of contemporary France: no longer the fiercely independent nation it was under le Général—the great Charles de Gaulle—but a country captured by the shifting whims of its current president, the mercurial Emmanuel Macron. The rising un-Frenchness of Paris—demographic and, in a deeper sense, spiritual—completes the depressing panorama. The city is a microcosm of the West, made more painful still by its enduring, if dying, splendour. 

Light in dark places

As sorry as its present state may be, Paris fights on. France may have been the mother of revolution, but she is also the fille aînée de l’Église—the oldest daughter of the Church. Like Janus, this is a nation of two faces, of a people divided by its own contradictory sense of self. The France of 1789 is also that of 508, when Clovis, the Frankish King, was the first to be baptised into Nicene Christianity. The France of Voltaire is also that of Bishop Bossuet, the strenuous defender of the rights of monarchs; just as leftists and globalists the world over find continuous inspiration in the works of Camus, Sartre, and Foucault, so do conservatives owe boundless gratitude to the efforts of de Maistre, Maurras, and Alain de Benoist. The duality of the French soul, and—for better and worse—its immense creativity, remain true today, with Paris being one of the last Western capitals where men are still capable of engaging in learned debate.

One of these seats of liberty and intelligence is La Nouvelle Librairie, a ‘dissident’ conservative bookshop not far from the Palais du Luxembourg, where France’s Senate meets. Deep in the Quartier Latin, which it aims to ‘reconquer’ for the Right, it stands in a centre of cultural prowess—close, too, to the Sorbonne, and to where Peter Abelard, one of the brightest minds of the European Middle Ages, once taught his pugnacious interpretation of Christianity. It was perhaps this example—that of the militant intellectual—that inspired François Bousquet, the owner, to launch his new library. 

La Nouvelle is not large. It is tiny, in fact; its size and wooden interior give it the discretion and familiarity of a conspiratorial lair. It offers new editions in a wide range of fields and authors—many of them maudits. One is happy to encounter the more recent must-reads of conservative thought, like Renaud Camus or Benoist, as well as right-wing classics such as Maurras, Bernanos, Mishima, Jünger, and Schmitt. Its livres d’occasion, or second-hand books, provide no fewer opportunities to the independent-minded reader, with a plentiful selection available on the first floor. The author of these lines was well pleased to find Bainville’s eerily prophetic Les Conséquences politiques de la paix, a work whose difficulty of access contrasts with its urgent, deafening pertinence.

This wealth of choice is not all Bousquet has to offer in his bookshop. A highly accomplished author and thinker, he has worked for Le Figaro Magazine, a supplement of the country’s most important daily, as well as for the conservative Valleurs Actuelles. In 2017, he became chief editor of Éléments, the magazine founded by Alain de Benoist in 1973. When, in the following year, Bousquet opened La Nouvelle Librairie, he made it a haven of unimpeded debate between the many factions of the French Right. This is a role he is singularly well poised to play, much like his friend and close collaborator, the late Patrick Buisson. Like Buisson—who orbited figures as diverse as Jean Marie Le Pen, Philippe de Villiers, and Nicolas Sarkozy (whom he served as a leading presidential advisor)—Bousquet and La Nouvelle have had no party and no allegiance other than to France and European civilisation. He has welcomed Éric Zemmour for the presentation of his latest work, La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot. And he has spoken both at events organised by Marion Maréchal, who has joined Zemmour’s Reconquête party, and at those of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. In France’s fractured right-wing scene, it has been his great merit to see beyond the divide and to understand what really is in play.

French clarity

The great comte de Rivarol once remarked, “Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français” (What is not clear is not French). Today, too, the French remain refreshingly clear-sighted about the state of their country, Europe, and the world. While this author did not meet M. Bousquet during his recent visit to La Nouvelle Librairie, he was nevertheless happy to join a book signing session by Dénis Cieslik, a gifted young novelist who has just launched his first work, Inclure. The book is a cautionary tale. It offers the reader the dystopian reality of a woke France in the 2060’s: a state captured by Dada totalitarianism after fully going down the rabbit hole of progressive ideology. While humourous and light-hearted, Cieslik’s scenario of an all-encompassing dissolution of nation and community—indeed, of a wokist Jahr Null—accurately identifies not only the absurdity, but also the danger, of modern liberalism, and why stopping it is a fight for the survival of civilisation, beauty, and truth. 

Cieslik represents a new generation of witty right-wingers who have done much for the French conservative and anti-globalist movement. Thankfully, they are not in short supply. Stanislas Rigault, who at the age of 24 is already a most articulate spokesman for Éric Zemmour, is another example of this rising trend. La Cocarde étudiante, the conservative students’ union currently led by Vianney Vonderscher, has produced quality cadres for multiple institutions on the Right. And, prevailing over the odds and the skepticism of many (if not most), the new leader of the Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella, has proved himself worthy of the trust placed in him by Marine Le Pen. Bardella is enormously popular, his jovial style disarming much of the fear traditionally felt by swathes of the French public towards the party while managing to unite the fractious electorate into a common, anti-Macroniste opposition front. Indeed, the RN is now not merely the first choice of the young, but also and simultaneously of both workers and business owners—a feat that supersedes old divisions of class and exemplifies the extent to which, for the French, the ideas of sovereignty and a renewed belief in nationhood have become mainstream. 

If anything, this sense of clarity and change is only more evident outside the contours of the cosmopolitan, denationalised metropolis. In Paris, patriotism is a movement of the catacombs, even if vibrant and on the rise. It is a heresy lived in secret, with the ardour of conviction that always follows hostile persecution. It is quieter in the province, even in Île-de-France, but that is because, there, it is already hegemonic. One is impressed to notice how, in the tiny, often deserted villages of the campagne, politics seems to have been entirely monopolised by the RN. This is what, as early as 1947, Jean-François Gravier called le désert français, and Christophe Guilluy has more recently observed in his 2014 book La France périphérique: Comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires: forsaken communities where the local clinic, the school, the post office, the commissariat, even the quintessentially French café have vanished, devoured by Parisian hyper-centralisation; expanses where the presence of the State has often been reduced to the token flagpole in the Mairie; regions used, but not conformed, to the prepotence of the urban political class. Poor, set in their ways, and conservative by instinct, they are naturally averse to elite experimentalism. Their anger has been making itself heard in election after election—and is quite physically palpable to any visitor paying a modicum of attention. 

Listen to France

Political innovation runs deep in France’s veins. It was once the country of monarchical centralism, and the fashion spread. It was then, most unfortunately, the birthplace of the Enlightenment, Revolution, Republicanism, and the Code Civil. Europe repeatedly followed suit, modelling itself after French genius with the same gusto that its kings had shown for Versailles and that its bourgeoisie would later lavish on the likes of Yves Saint-Laurent. For good and ill, the French have long had the habit of being the West’s greatest influencers. 

That truth is a good reason for other Europeans to pay attention to France’s woes, and to France’s solutions. The cultural revolution currently engulfing French minds and French streets, French schools and French bookshops—its men of thought, its politicians, and its youth—will likely have an outsized importance for everyone else’s future. For those who love Europe and want to see her thrive, that is good news.