As rioting and arson sweep French cities, Europe’s governing classes are reaping the harvest of a fatal delusion that mistook the dismantling of inherited identity for moral progress. The Arson at Limoges Town Hall. In the 1975 thriller Peur sur la ville (Fear Over the City), French cinematic icon Jean-Paul Belmondo hurtles across the rooftops of Paris in pursuit of a twisted serial killer terrorising the capital. In the film - one of Belmondo’s umpteen policiers of the period - our maverick cop relentlessly hunts the predator to restore order to a threatened French metropolis. In contemporary Europe, the spectacle is far more unsettling: authorities are reduced to putting out fires while the intellectual and political elite splits hairs over whether a civilisation possessing a distinctive identity is itself an expression of prejudice. The film’s title supplies an uncomfortably precise descriptor for the present moment as France - that imperious republic of liberté, égalité, fraternité - again provides the sorry spectacle of a civilisation conducting its own funeral while insisting the proceedings constitute a celebration of diversity. On October 17, a masked mob set fire to the historic town hall in Limoges. Inaugurated in 1883, the ornate building had outlasted two world wars and the convulsions of a century, only to succumb to the fury of its own times as its clock tower collapsed in flames. The arson reportedly followed demonstrations over deteriorating public services and the rising cost of living. Which brings us to the central question of Europe’s modern crisis: What happens to a nation when its political and intellectual elites become progressively less certain that its inherited civilisation is worth defending? Michel Foucault, Taboo Prophet The arsonists in Limoges need not have read French high priests of post-modernism or structuralism like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Jean-François Lyotard, whose theories cast all tradition as oppression. But a sustained philosophical atmosphere in which inherited institutions are perpetually suspect offers a remarkably convenient climate in which to forget why societies preserve things in the first place. A civilisation is a long conversation between the living, the dead and the unborn. Its monuments are not decorative inconveniences, but the visible expression of a people’s historical continuity. The conversation breaks down when that continuity is severed. All too often in history, those who have pointed out the rupture have been banished from the room. Powell’s Ghost On April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell delivered a speech in Birmingham that secured his place among Britain’s most controversial political figures. In his inflammatory “rivers of blood” speech, addressing a Britain adjusting to post-imperial decline, Powell attacked the Commonwealth immigration system established under the British Nationality Act of 1948 which had allowed hundreds of thousands of South Asians and West Indians to settle in industrial hubs like the West Midlands. Quoting Virgil’s Aeneid, Powell predicted that unchecked demographic shifts and a lack of forced integration would lead to catastrophic civil strife, famously declaring: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” Powell’s explosive imagery led to his dismissal from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet the following day, while his speech was branded an unpardonable expression of racial demagogy. Enoch Powell, Classical Cassandra Yet Powell was no crude demagogue. A former Professor of Ancient Greek, fluent in multiple languages with a stint in India, his erudition made his warnings all the more chilling to a political establishment rushing to pass the Race Relations Act. While his rhetoric made open discussion of immigration policy a political taboo for a generation, Powell’s underlying question remains uncomfortably relevant today: can a democracy sustain an honest debate about national cohesion and integration if certain conclusions are declared impermissible before the evidence is examined? Much of Europe’s establishment has behaved as though the vocabulary of multiculturalism could substitute for the difficult business of governing a multicultural society. It has succumbed to what Roger Scruton termed oikophobia, or the reflexive repudiation of one’s own home and heritage. George Orwell diagnosed the same neurosis in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), observing intellectuals ashamed of their nationality and inclined to snigger at their country’s institutions. A nation can welcome immigrants and accommodate cultural differences. But citizenship demands respect for the law, acceptance of constitutional institutions and participation in a shared public life. When that compact weakens, the state must restore it without apology. Jacobin Dreams As the homeland of the Enlightenment - of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and d’Alembert - France occupies an especially interesting position in this story. It has traditionally been associated with universal citizenship and laïcité, or secularism. It is also the country whose post-war theorists furnished the West with sophisticated methods of questioning inherited authority. During the height of The Terror during the French Revolution, radical revolutionaries attempted to de-Christianise the realm, rewrite the calendar and convert the Notre-Dame Cathedral into a “Temple of Reason” in 1793. The Festival of the Supreme Being, by Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1794). Maximilien Robespierre They sought to treat a historic nation as an erasable palimpsest. They should have realized that when a parchment is scraped too many times, it tears through. Even Maximilien Robespierre, the radical Jacobin architect of the Reign of Terror, recognised that abstract formulas could not command the human heart, prompting his short-lived ‘Cult of the Supreme Being.’ Anticipating the anarchy of the Terror, Edmund Burke presciently observed in his classic treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): “When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated.” A state that mocks its past risks destroying the psychological foundations of civic duty. Contract Unbecoming Multiculturalism began with a defensible proposition that equal citizenship should not depend on erasing one’s origins. The difficulty begins when pluralism is treated as an open-ended obligation imposed upon the host society, while expectations of newcomers are treated as unreasonable. At that point, multiculturalism risks becoming an ideology of institutional evasion. France’s colonial past, including the Algerian War of 1954–1962, continues to shape its present. But history is not a hereditary sentence to be imposed upon the living. A state that refuses to articulate a common national identity creates a vacuum in which competing grievances struggle for authority. A confident civilisation should be able to confront historical injustice without converting inherited guilt into permanent political currency, and oppose racism without treating every criticism of immigration policies as ‘racism.’ Importantly, it should be able to celebrate diversity without pretending that diversity alone supplies the bonds of social solidarity. That is the political maturity Europe needs today. Not an endless oscillation between moral exhibitionism and angry reaction, but a clear-eyed recognition that a society must possess something it is prepared to preserve. In Fear Over the City, Paris was a city that needed to be rescued from the terror of a serial killer. In the Europe of today, that rescue must begin with an intellectual culture willing to distinguish criticism from nihilism, and a public prepared to insist that its inheritance is neither shameful nor disposable.
Comments