"L’Heure Est Grave, La France Est En Péril, Plusieurs Dangers Mortels La Menacent."
It’s hard to see how France doesn’t eventually become the tinderbox described by the retired French officers and seemingly depicted in the upcoming film Athena.
Last week, I was introduced to an upcoming Netflix release titled Athena. Scheduled to debut on September 23, the movie centers on a police killing of a French youth, sparking a veritable civil war in a community bearing the film’s title as its name.
Here’s the official trailer:
Deadline Hollywood provides a detailed synopsis of the upcoming release:
The story begins just after the death of a young boy, in unexplained circumstances, throwing his three brothers and the whole of the eponymous Athena housing project outside Paris into chaos.
In a star-making turn, Dali Benssalah plays Abdel, a soldier in the French army who is called back from the frontline after the death of his youngest brother following an alleged police altercation, and finds his family torn apart. Caught between his younger brother Karim’s (Sami Slimane) desire for revenge and the criminal dealings of his older brother Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), he struggles to calm the rising tensions. As the situation escalates, their community, Athena, is transformed into a fortress under siege, becoming a scene of tragedy for both the family and beyond.
I plan on seeing the film and will share my thoughts on it afterwards, but I wanted to make a few observations ahead of time. First, France is no stranger to mass civil unrest, nor is the topic of civil war in the country outlandish. In fact, in the past few years, it’s become a prime topic of discussion.
In April 2021, a group of retired French military officers signed a letter warning of “national disintegration.” The letter sent shock-waves throughout French state and society, triggering responses both in condemnation and support for the retired officers. It also alerted the world to the fact all was not well inside one of Western Civilization’s linchpins.
Here are some highlights from the letter. What I’ve posted here is a transcription from Google Translate, so there may be grammatical oddities, but the message rings through loud and clear:
The hour is serious, France is in danger, several mortal dangers threaten it. We who, even in retirement, remain soldiers of France, cannot, in the current circumstances, remain indifferent to the fate of our beautiful country.
Here’s what they believed to be the greatest threat to the republic:
Disintegration which, through a certain anti-racism, is displayed for a single purpose: to create on our soil a malaise, even hatred between the communities. Today, some speak of racialism, indigenism and decolonial theories, but through these terms it is race war that these hateful and bigoted supporters want. They despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and want to see it dissolve by tearing away its past and its history. Thus they attack, by means of statues, former military and civil glories by analyzing remarks that are several centuries old.
The following passages created arguably the greatest stir, perceived as a suggestion (some would call it a threat) of intervention by the military in domestic affairs, perhaps even a coup d'état:
The dangers mount, the violence increases day by day. Who would have predicted ten years ago that a professor would one day be beheaded on leaving college? However, we, servants of the Nation, who have always been ready to put our skin to the end of our commitment - as required by our military status, cannot be passive spectators in the face of such actions.
And:
On the other hand, if nothing is done, laxity will continue to spread inexorably in society, ultimately provoking an explosion and the intervention of our active comrades in a perilous mission to protect our civilizational values and safeguard our our compatriots on the national territory.
The letter concluded with the grimmest of warnings:
As we can see, it is no longer time to procrastinate, otherwise, tomorrow the civil war will put an end to this growing chaos, and the deaths, for which you will bear the responsibility, will number in the thousands.
At the heart of civil war talk in France is demography and crime. For decades, the racial/ethnic make-up of the country has been altered dramatically, with a massive influx of immigrants mostly from North Africa, but also from the rest of Africa and the Greater Middle East more recently. Many of these migrants are Muslim, with a survey conducted five years ago indicating 8.8% of the population, or 5.7 million, adhere to the faith. By comparison, a study from around the same time showed Muslims in the United States constituted only 1% of the population. Despite America outnumbering France 5:1 in population, the U.S. still has fewer Muslims within its borders than does France!
France has also seen a large, steady influx of immigrants over the decades, with 272,000 arriving in 2019 alone. 8.5 million, or 12.5% of the population, are foreign-born, with many native-born French having foreign-born parents or grandparents. The actual number is likely to be far higher, given the state of illegal immigration in France and elsewhere throughout Europe, to say nothing of the U.S.
The picture that forms is one of France slowly becoming overwhelmed demographically and religiously, threatening the future viability of French culture and society. For reasons hotly debated, immigrants, particularly those of Africa and Middle East origin, aren’t assimilating and are creating a parallel society of their own, while steadily increasing their numbers. This parallel society is rife with crime and Islamic extremism, posing a threat to French public safety and social stability. Cities like Marseille, the country’s second-largest city, have long been hotbeds of both, owing to it’s large immigrant and Muslim population. Last month, the French Interior Minister observed immigrants commit almost 20% of crimes in the country, despite comprising less than 10% of the population.
Generally speaking, France isn’t what you’d consider a violent country - it’s homicide rate is less than that of the U.S. However, it’s overall crime rate is higher. In other words, you are less likely to be killed in France, but more likely to be assaulted or robbed. Islamic extremism also appears to be a more serious problem in France compared to the U.S., with periodic acts of violent antisemitism occurring in the country, spiking dramatically in 2021. More prominently, France suffered from a wave of Islamist terrorist attacks and murders during the 2010s, among the most egregious being the November 2015 Paris attacks and the murder of Sarah Halimi in April 2017. Halimi was a teacher who was thrown off her balcony after being beaten to death by an African drug-dealing immigrant. Her murder whipped up a firestorm of controversy, due to the authorities and the media downplaying the antisemitic nature of the crime and when the murderer was judged to be unfit for trial and escaped prosecution.
In their letter, the French military officers made note of the murder of Samuel Paty, a teacher who was beheaded by a Muslim refugee from Russia. He was killed after the killer’s daughter lied about Paty displaying an image depicting the Prophet Muhammad in explicit fashion. A large number of people ended up being implicated in the killing, even though only one person ultimately committed the heinous act, underscoring how endemic criminality and Islamic extremism had become in certain French communities.
It’s hard to see how France doesn’t eventually become the tinderbox described by the retired French officers and seemingly depicted in the upcoming film Athena. These issues played a major role in this year’s French presidential election, which saw Emmanuel Macron, retain office. However, the popularity of figures like Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, both of who see French crime, demography, and immigration as problematic and reaching a crisis level, indicates there is a strong underlying sense of unease among the population, even if they ultimately opted to retain the services of Macron, who’s viewed in many circles as ineffective in dealing with the crisis, if not a part of the problem himself.
How high are the stakes? Here’s The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher from last year talking about what he heard when visiting France shortly after the French officers’ letter was published [bold mine]:
In France last week, I heard a lot of talk about impending “civil war.” The term came up because of an open letter some retired French generals published in the French conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles, warning that the suburbs were about to explode. They called the coming catastrophe “civil war,” but from what I could tell in my various conversations last week, they’re talking about something more like The Troubles in Northern Ireland: long, sustained, urban guerrilla conflict. One source with whom I walked through the rain and across the river put it like this; this is very close to what I heard from other informed observers, so I’ll let this paraphrase stand for the rest:
If the suburbs all go off at the same time, France does not have enough police and military personnel to restore order. Everyone in power, both in the military and the civil government, knows this. So do the thugs of the suburbs. Anything could spark this conflagration. Anything. It could go off any day. This is what accounts for a lot of the deep anxiety in French life today. That, and the fact that there is no clear solution, and maybe no solution at all.
Perhaps because we had a longer talk than I did with other sources with whom I discussed the matter, this source said something I did not hear from the others (to be fair, I didn’t ask): that he would favor rounding up the Muslim troublemakers of the suburbs and shipping them all back to where they (or their parents) came from, without flinching, and without apology. This man — with an advanced degree, very cosmopolitan — doesn’t see any other way. He told me that this next presidential election, and possibly the one after it, will seal France’s fate. That is to say, by 2030, we will know if France will survive intact, or will collapse, one way or another. If this source is correct, France faces a terrible choice: either to cease to be a liberal democracy, or to cease to be French.
It’s surreal, especially as an American, to hear this kind of talk coming out of a developed-world country, one that’s been a bedrock of Western Civilization for as long as it has. Yet this is the reality the French have been living with for some time now. Nor should we see this as merely their problem. France is quite different from the U.S. and their problems don’t necessarily carry over across the Atlantic. However, I’ve said before that crime is a national security issue and a social de-stabilizer. France proves it, which is why Americans should not merely treat crime as something that comes with the territory. If it gets bad enough, it won’t merely become something that happens to other people. Our crime rates may not be as high as they once were, but peace is about more than just how much crime doesn’t occur, but whether the rule of law exists. The perception in both France and the U.S. is, increasingly, that it doesn’t exist.
I’ll be talking about this more in future posts. For now, I’ll leave you with what Tucker Carlson said last night about the shocking murder of Eliza Fletcher, a resident of Memphis, Tennessee, among America’s most crime-riddled cities. How the system deals with her killer will determine whether Fletcher becomes America’s Sarah Halimi. They already had one thing in common:
They were both teachers.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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You should read Guérilla by Laurent Obertone (French journalist and writer)
I don’t know if an English version is available but I strongly suggest this fiction book that captures the possible outcome of a conflagration in the Paris suburbs.
good post.