A people was there, stable, occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or more other peoples substitute themselves for it. It is replaced, it is no longer itself.
Those are the words of Renaud Camus, France’s most controversial living intellectual. They describe a process he’s called “the Great Replacement.” He coined the term in 2010. Since then, the term has been bitterly disputed. Now, though, it’s becoming harder and harder to deny.
There are facts that most French people would agree on: that demographic change is happening in France, that it is substantial – greater than any other migration that has taken place since France’s beginning, more than a thousand years ago – and that it is having profound, irreversible effects on French life. But French law and custom prevents a full understanding of these changes. France doesn’t collect ethnic or racial data in her censuses or official statistics. This policy has its basis in Article 1 of the French Constitution, which describes the nation as an “indivisible” republic that guarantees equality for all citizens “without distinction of origin, race or religion.”
Far-left politicians in France have become more open in their embrace of demographic change
Data-protection laws, including the 1978 Loi Informatiques et Libertés, explicitly prohibit the collection or processing of personal data on race, ethnicity or political opinions. There are proxies for race and ethnicity in official data of course, but the general attitude, informed at least in part by France’s experience of the Vichy regime and the fate of her Jews, is that the Republic trumps all. The government should not categorise citizens in a way that could lead to discrimination.
In the past, then, it’s been difficult to quantify the precise extent to which France’s ethnic and racial changes. For the first time, France’s most important public-research institute has done exactly that, in a hugely detailed, years-long study.
The National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris has released a new report, drawing on interviews with close to 30,000 people living in France, beginning in 2019. On the basis of the Institute’s calculations, 34 percent of France’s population – just over a third – are either immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants.
More than 40 percent of the population have a tie to immigration of one kind or another, whether through personal heritage or marriage within the family. And immigration has been overwhelmingly non-European. Thirty-two percent of immigrants aged 18 to 59 came from North Africa, which was once under French colonial rule. Twenty percent came from sub-Saharan Africa and 16 percent from Asia. Twenty-eight percent were from other countries in Europe.
The Institute also looked at the crucial issue of integration and assimilation, and found that only European immigrants and their descendants choose to “distance themselves from the origins of their parents and benefit from a form of invisibility in French society.” “The analysis calls into question a simplistic assimilationist vision which would suggest that relationships with origins become diluted over generations,” the researchers note. “The results reveal a dynamic of hybridization and the emergence of ethnicized and racialized identities.”
In simple terms: the more immigrants come from outside Europe, the less they integrate. One of the more interesting aspects of Renaud Camus’s account of the Great Replacement is that it isn’t, in any obvious sense, a conspiracy. There isn’t a shadowy group, sat around a table in a darkened room somewhere, coordinating the destruction of France, Britain, New Zealand and the US by means of mass immigration. Nor did such a group or such a plan ever exist, Camus says.
Instead, the Great Replacement has happened because of the spread of a way of thinking he dubs “replace-ism.” People, and indeed things, come to be seen as interchangeable, equivalent pieces on a global playing-board. This has more to do with the spread of democracy, industrialization and capitalism, the decline of religion, mass education and mass entertainment than conscious design. We have erased all forms of meaningful difference and with it any barriers to the mingling of all the world’s peoples.
This flies in the face of everything we’re told about the Great Replacement as a dangerous far-right conspiracy theory. Now it sounds much more like an objective description of demographic fact, with a distinctly inoffensive, impersonal series of causes behind it.
Not that the Great Replacement is impersonal. Politicians on both sides of the political divide are grappling with it in very personal ways. In recent years, far-left politicians in France have become more open in their embrace of demographic change as a force reshaping France. Some have even gone so far as to try and reclaim the Great Replacement from the right, affirming that it does, in fact, exist and turning it from a harbinger of national suicide into a vision of a hopeful, better future.
That’s exactly what Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise – France Unbowed – has done. He’s hailed the “New France,” a “creolized” society of “motley, mixed ones,” and directly addressed right-wing politician Éric Zemmour at the beginning of this year by saying, “Yes, Mr Zemmour, there is a Great Replacement.” Zemmour made demographic change the central platform of his failed presidential campaign in 2022. He’s widely seen as the most right-wing politician in France, to the right of Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, which remains the favorite to win the next election, despite a judicial ban on her running for office.
For politicians such as Mélenchon, the Great Replacement is now a fait accompli, a done deal. France will never be what she once was; there is no going back. Instead, there will be a nouvelle France, a Sixième Republique to replace the current Fifth. Certainly, looking at these new odds, Jean-Luc Mélenchon can be forgiven for sounding so confident.
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