Éric Zemmour's The Suicide of France
The definitive account of France after de Gaulle is now available in English
If you want to understand what went wrong in modern France, Le Suicide français is the book for you. A sweeping history of France since the death of de Gaulle, it sold over half a million copies in its first year. Le Suicide turned the journalist and historian Éric Zemmour into a national celebrity and darling of the French right. It laid the groundwork for his presidential run in 2022.
For the first time, the book is now available in English. I wrote the preface and did the translation. You can order it now on Amazon for delivery in July. Zemmour has also written a new introduction and conclusion for the English edition.
Shortly after the book was released in 2014, the ever-insightful Christopher Caldwell weighed in on its significance. Caldwell explains Zemmour’s method:
As Paul Johnson did in his magisterial Modern Times (1983), Zemmour takes a half-century of events that have been shrouded in progressive clichés and places them in a more logical relationship. His method is the one that historian Richard Reeves uses in his biographies of U.S. presidents. Zemmour will take an episode in France’s political or cultural life, describe the long train of events that made it possible, and extrapolate to its consequences. These are generally episodes that show the French choosing to do away with something they had formerly cherished: the release of director Bertrand Blier’s sexual picaresque Les valseuses in 1974; the 1993 law abandoning the list of approved (usually saints’) names that had been in force for two centuries; President Jacques Chirac’s abolition of military conscription in 1996; the introduction of affirmative action in one of France’s elite universities that same year; the booing of the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, by North African immigrant spectators during a game against Algeria in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center; the lack of any commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz (1805), perhaps the greatest victory of Napoleon, who until that point had been revered almost as a demigod in French popular culture; and so on.
The French, like so many other Western societies, were waging a war of repudiation against their past. But if there was a single thread unifying the French version of the culture of repudiation, it was hatred for the founding father of the Fifth Republic. The core of Le Suicide français is a lament for what was lost with de Gaulle’s death.
In a different era, Charles de Gaulle might have earned a reputation like George Washington’s, and been revered for generations. But de Gaulle’s heirs, including many of the people he had raised up to the highest offices, turned against their benefactor.
After his death in 1970, French politicians made their peace with the free market and a less ambitious view of their country’s destiny. Its intellectuals came to treat their fathers as a bunch of collaborators. Zemmour now sees the post-de Gaulle consensus as an unpatriotic sellout. “We were taught to love what we used to hate,” he writes, “and to hate what we used to love.”
Hating de Gaulle was virtue-signaling for the generation of May ‘68. It was hatred for the model of authority that he represented. De Gaulle governed as a patriarch. For that, the soixante-huitards despised him and those who acted like him. One of the best insights of Zemmour’s book is how so much of left-wing politics is reducible to contempt for the father figure—in other words, to daddy issues.
The culture of repudiation also set the stage for the present drama of modern France: that of mass immigration and the escalating tensions between the French and Muslims. This also has its origins in the turn against the Founder.
After he took over France 1958, de Gaulle decided to make a brutal bet. He had come to power due to the Fourth Republic’s failure to solve the Algerian question; the army trusted him to defend Algérie française. Instead, de Gaulle decided to give it up. The stakes of this quarrel were high, as they raised the question of France’s territorial integrity. Algérie française was juridically no mere colony, but part of metropolitan France. It’s dubious whether de Gaulle had the legal authority to surrender it. But issues other than legality were at play; De Gaulle understood that Algeria consisted of two civilizations, not one. They were incompatible:
Les musulmans, vous êtes allé les voir ? Vous voyez bien que ce ne sont pas des Français. Essayez d’intégrer de l’huile et du vinaigre. Agitez la bouteille. Au bout d’un moment, ils se sépareront de nouveau. Les Arabes sont des Arabes, les Français sont des Français.
Have you gone to see the Muslims? You can clearly see they’re not French. Try mixing oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a while, they’ll separate again. Arabs are Arabs, and the French are French.
Algérie française was doomed to fail because the Arabs and the French were too different to share the same political order. As the Arabs and North Africans rediscovered Islam, their conflicts with the French would become more violent. To avoid this, de Gaulle surrendered Algeria to the Muslims, in order to spare mainland France from a war between civilizations.
This bought France time. Yet the culture of repudiation squandered de Gaulle’s legacy. The post de-Gaulle consensus was to import this civilizational conflict into every major city in France. As Zemmour puts it, they brought the future of Europe “back to Charlemagne and the 1683 siege of Vienna.” Citing René Girard, Zemmour argues that we are entering a time in which “Charles Martel and the Crusades will be closer to us than the French Revolution and the Industrialization of the Second Empire.” France’s destiny is to rediscover the wars of religion.
The energy of Zemmour’s 2022 presidential campaign lay in its challenge to a feckless political right. This theme was already apparent in 2019, when Zemmour gave the keynote speech at the Convention de la Droite, a one-off conference organized to reorient the French right in the face of its electoral failure in 2017. Zemmour stole the show, as I wrote for First Things:
Zemmour opened by accusing the participants: “You are not really serious.” The right is frivolous, not really in search of an alternative to progressivism. It does not properly understand progressivism’s goal: revolution, a revolution that can “tolerate no obstacle, no delay, no qualms.”
You can read the rest of that essay, written on the eve of Zemmour’s presidential bid, here. I also described some of the right-wing criticisms of Zemmour, as his strategy imitates a neo-Jacobin deployment of central bureaucracy to solve France’s woes (de Gaulle, the master of the plebiscite who never restored the monarchy, could be accused of the same). As for the campaign: let the thrill of it speak for itself, launched to such solemn notes:
The campaign smashed open the Overton window, but electorally it was a failure. Zemmour had a very short window in which to launch a new political party, swing voters accustomed to supporting other parties to his side, and then mobilize turnout. His campaign was also premised on the hope that Marine Le Pen, who had performed poorly in her run-off with Emmanuel Macron in 2017, would finally run out of juice. Instead, after years of diligent campaigning in the French countryside, Le Pen’s party outperformed Zemmour in the first round of the election, ensuring her place in the second. It grows by leaps and strides each election. Whether the Rassemblement National represents a conservative party is of course another question. But it is now France’s government-in-waiting.
Zemmour’s 2022 bid may have failed. Nevertheless, the Gaullist mode of politics he eulogized in Le Suicide has caught on.
As Peter Hitchens has described it, de Gaulle’s recipe for political success was relatively simple: a “combination of liberty, domestic socialism, well-armed patriotism, and social conservatism.” This blend turned out to be exceptional. Leaders after de Gaulle might pick a couple of these elements but at the price of rejecting others. Since none has repeated his success or captured the imagination as he did, the times favor giving de Gaulle’s strategies a fresh look.
De Gaulle’s realism in international affairs was not popular with the chattering classes of the Cold War. He saw the conflict more as a national rather than an ideological one, which meant he did not think the Soviet Union conspired to achieve a global empire. This was one of many reasons why he was often a thorn in the side of the Americans. His basic intuition was that nationalist identity would outlast world-historical, ideological quarrels. This provides a valuable framework for a multipolar environment that avoids cruder Manichean categorizations.
De Gaulle’s defense of national identity also incurred the everlasting ire of European federalists. He refused to endorse their more radical schemes to try and bury national sovereignty. Only de Gaulle’s death and a few historical accidents, including the rapidity of the end of communism in Eastern Europe, spurred their project forward. De Gaulle had many concerns about European federalism. One was that it would make the continent even more dependent on NATO and therefore on the American military. That’s what happened as the European Union took shape in the 1990s.
De Gaulle’s approach to political economy blended aspects of economic liberalism and national planning. He had a horror of debt, taking care to maintain fiscal restraint. But he also picked strategic industries to subsidize and support. De Gaulle’s overall objective was to consolidate economic sovereignty, minimizing dependence on other countries. “Without economic independence, there is no independence at all,” he quipped. Few would believe it today, but in 1966, France was the world’s second largest economy. At least where France was concerned, the 1960s was the happiest decade.
The lament for the lost de Gaulle was long unintelligible to Anglo-Americans. Because of de Gaulle’s aristocratic demeanor, he was deemed a man of the 19th century. This was true. But he was written off for it. This was very silly. It betrayed the petty progressivism that followed in de Gaulle’s wake, made possible by the egalitarian prejudices of the American century.
Since Zemmour wrote the first edition of Le Suicide, de Gaulle’s style of leadership and politics have received fresh attention in the English-speaking world. Ross Douthat has written on de Gaulle for The New York Times. Mathis Bitton has written on Gaullisme for American Affairs. Peter Hitchens describes himself as a “British Gaullist.” Even The Economist, about as close to a bastion of anti-sovereign, anti-Gaullist thinking as liberalism’s high clergy get, hops on the bandwagon. They published an amusing essay entitled “That irritating feeling that France was right: Donald Trump’s America makes Gaullism respectable again.” Above all, there’s Julian Jackson’s magnificent biography.
De Gaulle also does well in online chatter, with scenes set to classical Swedish music:
It’s been over a decade since Le Suicide was first released. Zemmour’s lament for the passing of de Gaulle has taken on a different tone. The book is still marked by melancholy for the regime de Gaulle built. Yet it reads less as a funeral rite for that era and more as a spirited manifesto for what the 21st century can do differently. Though the arc of history is long, it bends toward Gaullisme.
Too late: Arab invasion of France is fait accompli.
“Think of this: for the last 60-70 years, Europe has been pumping billions of Euros into the hordes of freeloading immigrants (many of them enemies!), instead of using the money to keep its military up to scratch. And it is wasting further billions of Euros on repairing a climate that is not broken. Europe is done.”
This author is a cool guy, and quite brilliant, he translated a book from French. That’s very impressive.