France on fire: the nihilists against the normies

They put a hijab on Joan of Arc. They climbed up Toulouse’s glorious monument to the teenage Catholic saint who vanquished the English and covered her sinful pageboy bob with a cloth shaped into a veil. They then stuck a Palestine flag under her arm, so that she looked less like the 15th-century peasant girl who turned the tide against English rule and more like one of those time-rich, turbo-smug keffiyeh chicks who occasionally forswears brunch to call Jews Nazis.

And all the while, the mob cackled. There were masked Islamists, no doubt offended by the whole idea of women, far less girls, leading blokes into battle. And bourgeois white students, who have very likely been exposed to post-colonial bollocks about how Joan has become a tool of ‘proto-imperialist mythmaking’, and how she – sorry, they – was probably ‘nonbinary’. And trouble-seeking banlieue youths who may not know who Joan was, and could care even less. Why should they, wrapped in the flags of Algeria and Morocco, give a toss about a long-dead girl who marched behind the Flag of Christ to liberate la France?

As a snapshot of the uneasy, unholy alliance wrecking France right now, it could not be bettered. Here was the grotesque new coalition of the modern French street – a neo-Bonapartist cabal of guilt-ridden rich kids, disaffected banlieue delinquents, rootless migrants and Islamists for whom nothing French is sacred, not even St Joan. This is the ‘progressive’ movement now not only in France but also across the West, where the left has ruthlessly abandoned ‘normies’ in favour of forging alliances with the marginal, the unproductive, the lumpen and the foreign. The ultimate pincer movement of moral decay.

Some in France call it the ‘boho-banlieue alliance’. The bohos are the ‘bourgeois bohemians’, privileged, educated leftists who patronise farmers’ markets and think border controls are fascism. The ‘banlieue’ element refers to the terrifyingly unassimilated second- and third-generation immigrant kids of the high-rise estates. As Jean Pierre Le Goff says, the French left slowly but surely turned its back on the ‘productive worker’ and entered into a toxic coalition with the supposedly downtrodden: angry youths, migrants, the homeless, Muslims. Sprinkle on some radical Islam and this alliance goes from mad to lethal.

The great revelation of the French riots has been the division of labour in this most sordid pact of the 21st-century West. Sorbonne youths bring the thin justifications for the violence, wanging on about ‘epistemic decolonisation’ and the ‘subversive queer temporality’ of bashing national monuments. The banlieue youths bring the muscle, smashing up stores and gutting buses with fire. And the Islamists bring the frisson of holy war, giving all involved the heady sensation of being part of a West-shattering jihad. Thus is pampered suburban nihilism transformed into a sacred crusade against civilisation itself.

Some of the scenes from France have been horrifying. We’ve seen white kids barking out a rap tune that glorifies Mohammed Merah, the Islamist who slaughtered a rabbi and three Jewish kids in Toulouse in 2012. He grabbed one of those kids, an eight-year-old girl, by the hair and shot her in the face at point-blank range. A France where youths diss St Joan and gush over an Islamo-Nazi is a France that is truly lost. We’ve seen historic buildings burnt down and busts of Marianne desecrated as youths in the Palestine colours cheer and guffaw. Meanwhile, the knackered old narcissists of the soixante-huitard generation get a thrill from it all and say: ‘It’s like ’68!’

There’s a distinctly Bonapartist feel to all this anti-republican nihilism. It brings to mind Marx’s wonderfully savage description of the alliances that brought Napoleon’s unimpressive nephew – Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte – to power in the 1851 coup d’état. His takeover, said Marx, was brought about by ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie’ aligning with ‘vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley-slaves, swindlers… pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers… brothel-keepers… organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of [his constituency]’, where ‘all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation’.

Such Bonapartist opportunism stalks France again. Sons and daughters of privilege mingle with Muslim radicals who loathe the republic. Rich-kid leftists watch with slack-jawed glee as the dumb and disaffected lay waste to entire boulevards. Radicals from the 5th arrondissement sing along to songs that revel in the racist butchery of Jews and the mass murder of Parisian concertgoers. What the BBC depicts as ‘mostly peaceful’ protests, what the European left flatters as an uprising of the unheard, is in truth the most violent manifestation we have yet seen of that unholy marriage of bourgeois nihilists and sectarian zealots, bound by their insatiable contempt for the very societies that feed, house and educate them. This mob is the militant wing of insufferable entitlement.

It is not only in France that the left has betrayed ‘normies’ for the fleeting thrill of aligning with Islamo-nihilism or ‘migrant anger’. The British left is far happier agitating for ‘migrant rights’, or the right of men to take a shit in the women’s bathroom, than it is with standing alongside the working class, whom it now refers to as pig meat (‘gammon’). To Britain’s left, the recently arrived bloke from Eritrea is a ‘victim’, while the working-class mum who asks what he’s doing in our country is a ‘fascist’. In the US, the left weeps for illegal immigrants and gushes over BLM rioting and stands with Muslims against ‘Islamophobia’, and then dry-heaves at the very thought of the Rust Belt working class and its ‘backward’ beliefs.

The fires in France have illuminated one of the great moral divides of our time: that between nihilists and normies. Between a bourgeois movement that has thrown its lot in with the violent self-pity of Islamists and intruders, and ordinary people with their preference for order, security, decency. The French author Aymeric Patricot calls these everyday people ‘les petit blancs’ (the little whites). In Britain we call them ‘the left behind’. In the US they’re called ‘the non-college working class’. They’re mostly quiet now. They won’t be for long.