Ever since a hungry Paris mob decided it was a good idea to storm the Bastille in 1789, it has been amazing to notice how often major political currents in the Western World first take strong root in France. This is why a recent manifesto released as a You-Tube video from a collection of French youths is worth watching. The declaration of the “Generation of National Identity” is a startling piece and one of the clearest communications now underway from the growing ‘counter-revolt of the commons’.
Styled as a declaration of war from French youth, and translated into English on October 6th, 2012, the manifesto is a well-made You-Tube video in which over a dozen young French people deliver a powerful statement. They have a web site: www.generation-identitaire.com and all the appearances of a well-organized fringe party so far. It remains to be seen if they will really have traction but their statement is an angry one. The group appears to have been formed in the summer of 2012 and they have a confrontational history.
Some people might not be comfortable at their use of a strong-clear cut symbol either – a circle with the Greek Lambda letter, “Λ” in it: This is the ancient insignia of the Spartans who, as the manifesto reminds us, were famed for not retreating from the arena of battle.
The translation of their statement reads as follows:
We are Génération Identitaire.
We are the generation who get killed for glancing at the wrong person, for refusing someone a cigarette, or for having an “attitude” that annoys someone.
We are the generation of ethnic fracture, total failure of coexistence and forced mixing of the races.
We are the generation doubly punished: Condemned to pay into a social system so generous with strangers it becomes unsustainable for our own people.
Our generation are the victims of the May ‘68’ers who wanted to liberate themselves from tradition and from knowledge and authority in education. But they only accomplished to liberate themselves from their responsibilities.
We reject your history books to re-gather our memories.
We no longer believe that “Khader” could ever be our brother; we have stopped believing in a “Global Village” and the “Family of Man”.
We discovered that we have roots, ancestry and therefore a future.
Our heritage is our land, our blood, our identity. We are the heirs to our own future.
We turned off the TV to march the streets.
We painted our slogans on the walls. Cried through loudspeakers for “youth in power” and flew our Lambda flags high.
The Lambda, painted on proud Spartans’ shields, is our symbol.
Don’t you understand what this means? We will not back down, we will not give in.
We are sick and tired of your cowardice.
You are from the years of post-war prosperity, retirement benefits, S.O.S Racism and “diversity”, sexual liberation and a bag of rice from Bernard Kouchner.
We are 25 percent unemployment, social debt, multicultural collapse and an explosion of anti-white racism. We are broken families, and young French soldiers dying in Afghanistan.
You won’t buy us with a condescending look, a state-paid job of misery and a pat on the shoulder.
We don’t need your youth-policies. Youth IS our policy.
Don’t think this is simply a manifesto. It is a declaration of war.
You are of yesterday, we are of tomorrow.
We are Génération Identitaire
For those unfamiliar with the references in the above statement:
- May ‘68’ers – In early 1968, the French Communist and Socialist parties united to challenge de Gaulle and used a series of student protests to kick off a general strike. The demonstrations, particularly in Paris, took on a life of their own and became a definitive event for Left-of-Centre French baby-boomers.
- “Khader” is a common Muslim family name and is presumably used in the same way “Schmidt” implies a German identity or “Jones” a Welsh one.
- SOS Racism, or more properly SOS Racisme, is a French NGO dedicated to combating racial discrimination through protests and lawsuits. An arm of the French socialist party it has championed the cause of multicultural diversity in France since the 1980s. It also opposes affirmative action and supported the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten during the 2006 Mohammed cartoon protests.
- Bernard Kouchner is the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières and a French cabinet minister, the reference is believed to point to a 1992 photo-op when the humanitarian arrived in Somalia carrying a bag of rice during the famine.
Some people might prefer to see Génération Identitaire as a later day Ku Klux Klan or emergent Nazi Party. It might indeed become these things although so far its activities seem restricted to protest rallies. However, viewing groups like Génération Identitaire in such a light might be a mistake. The social realities in Europe are real enough: Government and public indebtedness is astronomical, largely as a result of social spending, youth unemployment rates are high, and tensions with Islamic immigrants are real enough.
Génération Identitaire has already made a provocative name for itself. On Saturday, October 20th, about 70 members occupied a mosque (which was under construction) in Poitiers for several hours before being ousted by French police. Poitiers is the site of the 732 victory by Charles Martel against a Muslim invasion that more or less marks the high tide of Islamic expansion into Medieval Europe – a battle widely (and rightly) seen as an important turning point. In the defence of the group, their occupation does not seem to have been marked by vandalism or violence – which argues discipline, cohesion and an agenda.
There are reasons to keep a close eye on Génération Identitaire given French political history over the past two hundred and fifty years. The late Norman Cantor’s 1997 book The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times contained a masterful over-view of the development of Western intellectual currents by way of leading to his exposition of modernism and post-modernism. Notwithstanding the book’s concentration on political and cultural life in the Anglosphere, he spends a lot of time reviewing political developments in France. Cantor, for those people who don’t yet understand it themselves, reminded us that art, politics, culture and expression are all fundamentally expressions of the dominant pattern of thinking of a particular time.
While the British Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 are rooted in Enlightenment thought and are products of the Age of Reason, intellectual life at the end of that period was rooted more heavily among the French encyclopaedists like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. The French Revolution and the following years of Napoleon could be argued to be the end of the Age of Reason and the dawn of the Romantic Era – these events certainly gave rise to the ‘left-right’ construction that still is a straightjacket to political perception and a direct trail leads from the Jacobins to the Marxists and the rise of both socialism and nationalism.
A century after the revolution, the prevailing French mood in the late 19th Century has been characterized as “Fin de siècle” – the end of the cycle. This is where the notion of revolt against the optimism of Anglo-American rationalism, materialism and positivism in society begins… the root of the counter-culture that is still very much evident in our own times. This revolt has been Nihilistic at times and it also strongly contributed to the rise of Soviet-style Marxism and Nazism – both of which were marked with a strong urge to topple the present and create a new future. That impulse is still very familiar to us.
By the late 1950s, Nazism had been thoroughly discredited and the attraction of Soviet Marxism had definitely soured…but it took the French to find a way to repackage Marxism and make it look all shiny and new once more. Jean-Paul Sartre’s influence on existentialism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism and a whole variety of other contemporary ‘ism’s is profound. He is one of the pivotal thinkers who finished off modernism and ushered in post-modernism.
French writers, philosophers and intellectuals might be creatures of the salons and cafes, but someone has to take their ideas out into the streets… which is something the French do every generation or so. After the siege of Paris during the Franco Prussian War and the insurrection of the Communards in 1871, much of Paris needed to be rebuilt. One wag observed that the new broad boulevards of modern Paris were a result of 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871 constructed to admit “light, air, and artillery” into the heart of the city. Angry Parisians might not have been able to build barricades to fight off troops anymore, but the local police were the first to heavily invest in stocks of tear-gas… a smell Paris has noticed more than a few times. The French police were the first customers to buy tear gas in 1912.
A vigorous French debate with fisticuffs in the streets over the false accusation of treason towards Albert Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army officer, dotted the period between 1894 and 1906 and in the 1930s, numerous violent left-right demonstrations had the effect of hampering French rearmament on the eve of the Second World War. The demonstrations of 1968 certainly started in France.
Political currents might not always start in France, but France is often the first place where the sparks are obvious. After the last 250 years, it seems only prudent to keep a close eye on developments there.
The second reason to keep an eye on Génération Identitaire relates to the first. The last few decades have seen a trend that the late Christopher Lasch defined as the ‘revolt of the Elites’- an era where self-selecting technocratic elite has come to manage all aspects of our society. The gulf between the general population and this elite has been remarked on by many commentators since Lasch, and has become fully evident in both Western Europe and the United States.
One of the best books recently published on the disparity between the elites and the commons in America is Christopher Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites: American After Meritocracy (Random House 2012), but the field of books on the subject in the United States is getting crowded. The situation in Europe is less well articulated so far, but counterparts – fair spoken and otherwise – are increasingly appearing in social media and the streets. As conventional politics fail, a host of aspiring new politicians are dragging their metaphorical soapboxes to our new cybernetic street-corners; some mean well and some probably don’t.
This technocratic elite that is their target is post-modernist in thinking and defined by the Baby Boomer generation. Another characteristic of this elite combines a disdain for their own cultural roots, which is combined with an encouragement for wholesale immigration. The post-modernist undervalues the history and institutions of his or her own society. Moreover, perhaps partly to underscore that rejection and perhaps to subconsciously weaken it while reinforcing their own self-perception of being open and tolerant, there has been elite encouragement of immigration in numbers in excess of their own society’s requirements.
In the Génération Identitaire narrative, the technocratic elites seem oblivious to this. So now, down in the street, where the new reality asserts itself first, thinking is changing and a new generation that is cut off from privilege is being heard from – and they are angry about it. Politics, as practiced in the Western World, is going to be sharpened and redefined again; it remains to be seen how noisy the process will be.
