Olivier Echeinlaub (ed.), Pour un Réveil européen: Nature – Excellence – Beauté (Paris: La Nouvelle Librairie).

In Europe today, it is easy to fall into permanent numbness amidst the omnipresent falsehoods, frivolousness, and slouching. That makes it all the more remarkable when one encounters some who resist, some who hold to an ethos, to the legacy of an entire civilization . . . an invigorating oasis in the most sterile spiritual desert.

Thus I came across this remarkable little book by the Iliade Institute, “For a European Awakening,” with contributions from over a dozen French activists fighting for the cause of indigenous Europeans and their exceptional civilization. The book is part of Iliade’s growing collection of attractive paperbacks for the European wishing to reconnect with his roots and look to the future without flinching, covering issues as varied as European identity, poetry, demonization by the media, the Middle Ages, and the European dimensions of Shakespeare and Nietzsche.

The authors include a wide variety of contributors from the French identitarian cultural ecosystem, including teachers and university professors, historians, book and magazine editors, PhD students and graduates, and the occasional high civil servant and corporate manager. Among them we have the philosopher Alain de Benoist, Iliade co-founder Jean-Yves Le Gallou, and the young Thibaud Cassel, an alumnus of the European institutions.

The book represents an ethical synthesis, almost a manifesto, of what we might indeed call the Iliadic or Vennerian school of French identitarianism. The collection seeks to give intellectual and practical answers to the question: How is a self-respecting European to behave today? The work is organized according to the three Iliadic slogans:

• Nature as foundation.
• Excellence as goal.
• Beauty as horizon.

The result is an impressive medley of essays on topics as varied as economics, urban development, environmentalism, spirituality, work, and political philosophy.

The Iliadic school emphatically affirms the spiritual continuity of European civilization, from the ancient Greeks through the Romans and medieval Europeans right up to the moderns. One can rightly ask: Is there really such a Tradition – and not a fundamental instability – in European history? And anyway what of this survives among the rapidly declining, sad, and squishy Europeans of today? What commonality is there between the Greek explorer-pirate and citizen-soldier, the Roman farmer-legionnaire, the Christian knight or monk, the early-modern scientific and world-conquerors and . . . the European of today – the less said about which the better? What is really left of the mos maiorum, the ancestral traditions that sustained our societies?

Iliade does not propose a return to any particular tradition – Stoic, Christian, or other – but a kind of general elevated ethos drawing from Europe’s varied spiritual roots. One may deem it post-Nietzschean or neoclassical. At bottom, it is an elitist, aristocratic ethos challenging us to achieve individual excellence within an organic community, guided by the Hellenic trifecta of Nature, Excellence, and Beauty.

In terms of politics, there is a muscular rejection of the social contract, in favor of an Aristotelian vision of flourishing grounded in human nature, that of, inter alia, a social, spiritual, unequal, intergenerational, and hereditary animal. Hence a decidedly particularistic and biocentric worldview: “Ethos does not mean for the Greeks a universal morality founded on the opposition between good and evil: ethics is the way in which beings bear themselves in the face of the world over the course of their usual sojourn. The ethos of a people draws its roots from a tradition and rests on transmission” (147).

The basic fact of continuity with ancestral tradition lies in human nature. Indeed, we need “a realistic conception of human nature . . . based on the teachings of ancient wisdom bolstered by the discoveries of modern European science” (p. 31). Iliade happily integrates the latest biological science – the Anglo-Americans have long had a much stronger empirical tradition – into a very French intellectual tradition of deep knowledge of history and philosophy. Indeed, the reader gets something of a crash course in Greek and Roman ethical terminology, with ample references not only to French authors, but also and especially to great German thinkers (Schmitt, Jünger, Hölderlin, Heidegger . . .).

The historian Henri Levavasseur admirably sums up the insane hubris of the blank-slatist emancipatory project against human nature:

In the name of the struggle against all forms of discrimination, the advocates of the “blank slate” are determined to deconstruct the classic anthropological categories. They want to definitively impose, first through media and social pressure, then through judicial and State coercion, a “fluid” model of identity, meant to replace “natural” families and nations, entities considered to be oppressive or outdated. In this view, the sovereign individual must be able to choose its identity in complete autonomy: the social order has no other role than guaranteeing the existence of this free choice. . . . This deathly ideology however is crashing against the wall of reality . . . (p. 32)

This vision applies naturally to nations – considered as nothing more than contractual economic spaces – and, in horrifyingly surreal fashion, to biological sex itself. The result however of going so brutally against the grain of human nature is merely ugliness, sickness, and chaos, as witnessed by the perpetual ethnic strife of multicultural nations.

The revolt against identity – the last constraint – seems to flow quite naturally from the general collapse of behavioral standards since the Second World War, what we might call the Great Slouching:

Though it may seem difficult to establish objective criteria of “conduct” [tenue], everyone can instinctively define what must be rejected: unkemptness, vulgarity, slackness. The latter takes various forms: slackness of the body (flabbiness or exhibitionism), of behavior (lack of self-control, neglect of rules of courtesy), of the spirit (intellectual laziness, conformism), or of the soul (loss of a sense of honor, lack of courage or lack of faithfulness to one’s principles). (p. 152)

This ethical collapse naturally coincided with and entrenched Europe’s cultural and geopolitical collapse. The historian Philippe Conrad observes: “The ‘dark Twentieth Century’ witnessed global power’s center of gravity move to North America, itself bearing a new model of civilization, initially inspired by Wilsonian universalism and liberal illusions” (p. 8). Europe’s decline was aggravated by societal liberalism, most spectacularly expressed in France with the May ‘68 protests, a decline only partially masked by ongoing technological progress.

A strange phenomenon in postmodern life is the schizophrenic attitude towards differences between men and women. On the one hand, our culture denies that there are any significant psychological differences between men and women which might explain the radically different preferences of the sexes in many sectors.

If virtually all UberEats food delivery bikers are men and virtually all nursery caregivers are women, this is certainly not the product of differing psychology and physiology (indeed, such notions are oppressive stereotypes), but purely because men and women have been socialized differently since infancy. More to the point, any under-representation of women in some prestigious and influential sector – politics, tech, universities – cannot be justified on this basis.

Conversely, feminists will sometimes argue that women bring unique added value because of their differences from men. We have often heard the argument, well-grounded or not, that women-led nations did better during the COVID crisis. This is a socially acceptable argument to make, while naturally any claim that men might be better suited to any prestigious role will lead to immediate professional termination.

Personally, I believe such double standards themselves stem from the differences of male and female psychology in humans. Two studies found that girls are more egalitarian than boys as early as four years old:

In Study 1 we compared the egalitarian behavior and attitudes of American girls versus boys by tabulating the extent to which each gender awarded the same number of stickers to, and liked to the same degree, two puppets. One puppet followed the child’s instructions or actions while the other did not during a drawing task in which the child played the roles of leader and peer. In the peer role, girls exhibited more egalitarian behavior than boys. In Study 2, French‐Canadian children were shown two drawings by unknown peers—one messily and one neatly colored—, then asked to distribute stickers to each peer’s drawing. Again, girls exhibited more egalitarian behavior than boys. Results suggest the origins of gender differences in egalitarian behavior occur early in life and merit further investigation.

https://twitter.com/ImHardcory/status/1365140445618049027

This basic egalitarian tendency – to favor equal outcomes regardless of objective performance – seems to me to underpin a tremendous amount of today’s political correctness. Our societies are being simultaneously feminized, demasculinized (witness the declining sperm counts, testosterone, and muscle mass of today’s males), and infantilized. This appears to be the product of the combination of soft living enabled by the postwar Affluent Society and the steady ratcheting up of egalitarian ideology in the media and academia (a significantly self-reinforcing dynamic).

The now firmly-entrenched West-European Nanny State reproduces in many respects the matriarchal psychology and totalitarian ethics of Kindergarten: one must submit completely, one must say or do nothing that would hurt the feelings (let alone harm the interests) of any child, and everyone will be taken care of. In this scenario however, the helpless “children” to be protected come to encompass every real or imagined victim group: people of color, sexual minorities, migrants, and, of course, women. In this context, frankness of speech is completely devalued and indeed subject to extreme social ostracism.

Hence a spectacular self-reinforcing dynamic: the more power women acquire, the more our societies emphatically affirm that women are oppressed. Government and private institutions across the Western world are adopting ever-more systematic “positive discrimination” in favor of women: women-only training programs (especially in STEM) and, especially, quotas for female management. Actually, we no longer live in times virile enough to even recognize the discriminatory nature (“positive” or otherwise) of these programs.

In all this, the objective facts of biology are of no import. It matters not that sex differences in brain structure are well documented, as are massive sex differences in preferences (e.g. David Buss), largely in accord with what we expect for men and women’s vastly different reproductive incentives over our evolutionary history. Men would thrive or die according to their fighting ability in coalitions with other men. A particularly successful man might have dozens of children, while many would have none at all. Reproductively successful women by contrast would spend much of their life pregnant or caring for children, with absolutely no reason for her to have any particular appetite for risk.

Today, this evolutionary history would naturally explain why men are more violent than women by an order of magnitude, why men are far more prone to risky behavior (dangerous driving, stunts, heavy drinking . . . take your pick), but also why men are far more likely to engage in the risky business of becoming entrepreneurs and founders of start-ups. Most men are not particularly successful, but a few have the talent, drive, and luck to break through with a Star Wars, an Apple, or a SpaceX. Once the business is well established, the assorted naggers line up to redistribute the wealth. The dynamic is identical to a wife’s nagging her breadwinning husband to redistribute resources in the form of a family vacation (documented in photos to demonstrate social status to peers) or expensive private education for the children. The only difference is that the latter is comparatively legitimate.

Naturally there will be both cultural and biological components to observed sex differences – and, pointedly, the biological component will inevitably to some extent also produce cultural tendencies towards such differences – but the idea that these differences are purely cultural is absurd.

The City of Paris offers a unique perspective on France’s feminist future. Paris proper represents the urban core of 2.15 million inhabitants. That’s the famously gentrified and exorbitantly overpriced Disney Land familiar to numberless tourists from across the world. If President Emmanuel Macron represents mildly autistic entrepreneurial pure globalism, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo represents the trend of multicultural matriarchal social-democracy.

In a telling manifestation of the schizophrenia at the heart of moneyed globalism, Paris – a city unaffordable to working people, not least because of mass property investment by moneyed interests the world over from Emirati princelings to Russian oligarchs and African dictators – is governed by a Socialist-Green-Communist coalition.

Hidalgo’s deputy, the “ecofeminist” black former journalist Audrey Pulvar, hailed the hundredth anniversary of the French Communist Party saying: “This great party has counted for so much in the history of emancipation and the conquest of workers’ rights… the caricature which it sometimes subjected to does not resist to an examination of the facts.” Thus was celebrated a century of sterile totalitarian tyranny and mass-murder.

https://twitter.com/AudreyPulvar/status/1339473364134576132

This is indicative of the structural left-wing bias of the French democratic system. While Communists co-rule in Paris, any conservative politicians suggesting alliances with nationalists will be marginalized, demonized, and effectively eliminated. And this is despite the fact that the Front/Rassemblement National has no clear relationship, let alone a filiation, with the authoritarian right-wing régimes of the 1930s and 1940s.

This time, it’s for real!

Earlier this year, the French press released the results of a super-secret survey which found that, if forced to choose between nationalist leader Marine Le Pen and worn-out centrist-globalist President Emmanuel Macron, 48% would vote for Marine to lead their country.

Never has any Le Pen been reported to be within striking range of victory in this way. The pollsters claim that Le Pen’s score is explained by her securing of about one third of the center-right electorate and the mass abstention of left-wing voters who might normally vote for Macron to “bar the way to fascism.”

It’s hard to gauge how accurate the poll is. For one, the detailed results remain unpublished and the margin of error for second-round presidential polling is high. A June 2020 poll found that in a similar scenario 45% would vote for Le Pen and 55% for Macron. That’s still a loser, but far ahead of Le Pen’s actual electoral score from 2017: a disappointing 33.9%.

Perhaps Le Pen’s progress is indeed explicable with what Le Monde calls her “permanent normalization”: she is perpetually moderating her discourse and sending signals to make herself more “presidentiable” in the eyes of the mainstream media and skittish center-right voters (think pensioners and bourgeois Catholics disturbed by Afro-Islamization, but also wary of the potential instability and incompetence of a Le Pen presidency, particularly in the economic sphere).

Le Pen’s closer advisor and brother-in-law Philippe Olivier says: “There is no more detoxification, now is the time of presidentialization.”

The moves towards normalization include praise for Charles de Gaulle (loathed by Le Pen père for his abandonment of the 1 million Europeans of French Algeria), the commemoration of the victims of the Vel d’Hiv, agreeing with the media that the “Great Replacement” is a baseless conspiracy, and providing only qualified support for the persecuted group Generation Identity on grounds of free speech.

A sign of Le Pen’s attempt to break out of the “far-right” ghetto and join forces with the mainstream right: three heads of regional lists on the National Rally (RN) ticket are not RN members (the ecological essayist Hervé Juvin and the conservative politicians Jean-Paul Garaud and Thierry Mariani).

Le Pen no longer calls for the abrogation of the Schengen Area of free movement within the European Union, but only that non-EU nationals would be checked at France’s borders with European neighbors (how that would be done is unclear). Talk of leaving the euro common currency and restoring the franc are long-gone. In a recent op-ed in L’Opinion, apparently ghostwritten by high civil servants supporting the RN, Le Pen argues that studiously repaying national debt is a point of honor and morality.

In a debate with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, the Macronist even sought to attack Le Pen from the right saying: “you’re practically soft now.” Indeed, Le Pen now is very careful to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Islam is “a religion like any other” with its place in France, she says, reserving her trademark “far-right” rhetorical fury for the government’s failure to eliminate “Islamism.”

All this begs the questions: Is a Le Pen victory plausible? Does it even matter at this point?

From a purely tactical point of view, whatever the complaining of dissident nationalists, I have to say Marine Le Pen is broadly right. Yes, her dutiful submission to “house-training” by the media is disgusting and dishonorable. However, assuming one wants a shot at winning, there is not much alternative given France’s electoral setup.

France does not have proportional representation like in Italy – where it can pay to have a nationalist position appealing to only a part of the electorate – but a winner-take-all-system. You simply cannot afford to alienate 51% of voters, even if 25% love you for it.

But France also does not have a purely bipolar political system like the United States, where a Donald Trump could sweep to victory by first taking over the mainstream conservative party and then crafting a message to appeal to almost-half of voters. Le Pen’s game is not to take over a conservative party but to make her historically oppositional nationalist party into a default party of government.

Are the polls credible? A first point: one should not take anything the media says at face value. They make their living by the sensationalism of cultural street-walkers. The media has for decades had a symbiotic love-hate relationship with the Le Pens: at once giving them a voice and tantalizingly suggesting the possibility of a salutary/horrifying nationalist victory (ratings!), while also viciously defaming and demonizing them, in line with the media’s role as the Guardians of Morality. Call it the forty-year cocktease.

Personally, I am skeptical of a Le Pen victory, but I have been wrong before. French voter preferences really are very stable on the whole and the RN (former FN)/Le Pen brand is nothing if not established and polarizing. I don’t see what has changed in the last five years (as opposed to the last 40) to change a critical percentage of voters’ minds. Then again, I am not a formerly apolitical gilet-jaune prole, nor a bourgeois Catholic pensioner. Perhaps some of these groups are more open to Le Pen now, and some leftists will be so disgusted with the Macron presidency as to not vote for him to block “fascism.” But I find that hard to believe.

More prosaically, Le Pen regularly tops the charts of negative approval ratings, with ~47-51% of French people having a negative opinion of her. Although, admittedly, there has been improval of her net negative rating from -34% in January 2020 to -26% in February 2021.

Who knows! A lot could happen, or not happen, between now and April 2022. French national politics has gone from a stable bipolar system to an incoherent winner-take-all toss-up for whichever personality can win at a particular moment every five years, the whole system readjusting according to that personality’s party, with no coherent opposition. Far-left, Green, Socialist, conservative, nationalist, and centrist-globalist candidates all could plausibly make the second round. And the outcome of the second round cannot be foreseen with great confidence.

Another question: would a Le Pen victory even matter? The 2010s feel like a different era, the heady years of the euro-financial crisis and the migrant crisis, when our governments’ hapless flailing made it seem the whole liberal-globalist order was on the verge of collapse.

As our world tumbles forth towards ever-more-previously-inconceivable levels of absurdity, you better learn to laugh or you’ll be crying all day.

The latest example is the move by the French government to ban Generation Identity (GI), a civil society movement opposing immigration and defending native European culture. GI had just executed one of its trademark direct actions in the Pyrenees, with a few dozen activists patrolling the Franco-Spanish with vehicles and drones to identify illegal immigrants and report them to the police.

The government no doubt considers the ban to be part of a balancing act: as legislation is being passed to eliminate “separatism” within the Muslim community, so Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin considers that native French “separatists” embodied by GI must also be eliminated. But what does the use of authoritarian measures against Muslims and Europeans, who each want to live in their own way, say about France’s multicultural future?

While GI is being dissolved for opposing illegal immigration, those enabling this criminal behavior have been fêted by the cultural class (the most prominent being lawbreaker Cédric Herrou’s glamorous reception at the Cannes Film Festival, pictured above). More recently, several Green members of parliament went to the Franco-Italian border to help illegal immigrants dodge the police and find safe houses. Though the police encountered the politicians and were suspicious, the Greens faced no repercussions.

Generation Identity anti-illegal immigration operation at the Pyrenees.

For what it’s worth, there is a significant chance that a court will eventually annul GI’s dissolution. After all, the group was threatened with massive fines and imprisonment for a similar anti-illegal immigration action in the Alps but a court of appeals cleared them of any wrongdoing last December.

At the head of this circus is President Emmanuel Macron, himself a notoriously slippery figure, a “young and dynamic” hardcore globalist who will both make extreme attacks on the very notion on French identity and entertain a subtle but quite real dialogue with forbidden right-wing ideas and media.

Macron’s tic-like use of the expression “en même temps” (at the same time) has become something of a running gag: thus the president thoughtfully enunciates both sides of an issue, studiously avoiding pinning himself to anything. He recently told the Guardian: “I believe in continental [European] sovereignty, I believe in the Nation-States, I do not believe in neo-nationalism.”

Macron wants to be the president of all Frenchmen and colorful neo-Frenchmen. This extends, it must be said, to alienated nationalist voters. He will give interviews to “far-right” magazines like Valeurs Actuelles. He telephoned Éric Zemmour, the Sephardic intellectual who is the most “nationalist” voice on French television, after the latter had been verbally abused on the street by a Muslim.

He’ll even cite Charles Maurras, the archetypal French nationalist intellectual of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (equal parts anti-Judaic and anti-Germanic), to explain citizens’ alienation: there is too great a chasm between le pays légal (the legal country, i.e. the politico-legal apparatus) and le pays réel (the real country). A Macron aide was also criticized for meeting with Marion Maréchal (formerly Le Pen), Marine Le Pen’s popular niece. All this may seem insignificant but causes real consternation and hostility among the self-appointed guardians of morality in the media.

Last December, Macron gave a qualified defense of Maurras and the war hero-cum-collaborationist Marshal Philippe Pétain in an interview with the magazine L’Express:

I fight with the greatest strength anti-Semitism and racism, I have fought all of Maurras’ anti-Semitic ideas, but it is absurd to say that Maurras must no longer exist. I built myself on hatred and rejection of the spirit of defeat [of 1940] and the anti-Semitism of Pétain, but I cannot deny that he was the hero of 1918 and a great soldier. One should be able to say it. Because of the society of indignation, which is often a mere posture, we no longer look into to the nuance of history [les plis de l’Histoire] and we simplify everything.

Very sensible words. Macron has also explicitly warned against importing American cancel culture and racial grievance politics.

En même temps, in a breakthrough interview with the hip new globo-homo online media Brut, Macron sought to please this audience with a new plan to rename French streets with “300 to 500 names . . . stemming from our [Afro-Islamic] neighborhoods or immigration.” The “heroes” of “a whole part of our Black, Maghrebi youth” have not been “recognized.” Thus must the demographic Great Replacement of the indigenous French population logically be accompanied by a cultural Great Effacement of the physical symbols of the indigenous people. Macron has also acknowledged the existence of “white privilege.”

We also witnessed the strange spectacle of the President of the French Republic interfering in the U.S. electoral process following the Capitol Hill occupation, with a pious statement in front of . . . an American flag.

One could reasonably conclude Macron is a cipher. On one level, he is unafraid to engage with politically incorrect ideas (witness his repeated calls for dramatic action to be taken to reduce Africa’s birth rates). As a politician, he embodies a longstanding French executive tradition of trying to go beyond the left-right divide. In this instance, however, Macron wishes to fuse the eminently national French republican tradition with . . . today’s ethnomasochist, anti-borders, nation-wrecking left.

Ultimately, the patterns of postwar French history have been remarkably stable, notwithstanding a few great spasms (Algerian War-Gaullism-May ‘68, triumph of the Left in 1981). One may say that Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand made (semi-)serious attempts to inflect French history in certain directions, but overall the head of State, whatever his personal qualities, presiding over these processes seems to scarcely matter at all.

The tendencies will deepen and the absurdities amplify further, much further. We are only scratching the surface. To convince yourself, consider the dreams – self-evident and non-negotiable – of the Green-Pink-Red coalition governing the City of Paris . . . The ride has only just begun!

In contrast to the situation in the Anglo-American world – where detailed racial data gives a good sense of most groups’ educational and socio-economic performance, criminality, voting patterns, etc. – there is no systematic collection of such data in France.

This means that we have to estimate the general situation using proxy data, such as first names in birth registries and voter registration rolls, the percentage of children tested for sickle-cell disease, or parallels with comparable countries who do have some data (such as Great Britain and Belgium).

The French pollster Jérôme Fourquet has gathered a considerable set of data on France’s Muslim communities. As he documents in his book L’Archipel français, there is a clear pattern of residential (self-)segregation and socio-economic stratification along ethno-religious lines:

Even if this phenomenon [of immigration] is not new, the geographical concentration of certain communities, associated with the quasi-planetary diversification of migratory flows and the impressive demographic rise of populations from the Arab-Muslim worlds constitute major drivers for the archipelization of French society. (p. 143)

Settlement patterns are strongly influenced by “family and acquaintances networks” (p. 142). As a result, immigrant groups in France tend to not only be concentrated in particular neighborhoods, but also tend to come from particular areas and communities within the home country.

Using data from voter registration rolls, Fourquet could determine that in the municipality of Sarcelles (population 58,000, in the northern suburbs of Paris), 92% of Indians are from Pondicherry (a former French colonial possession) or the surrounding state of Tamil Nadu (p 142). Similarly, Sarcelles hosts a significant community of Christian Chaldeans overwhelmingly hailing from just three Turkish districts. If you give immigrants even a toehold into the country, this greatly facilitates the whole clan being brought over.

These ethnic clustering patterns are long-term if not permanent. For instance, Armenians are still heavily concentrated in certain areas of Marseille (making up 10-40% of some neighborhoods), despite the fact they mostly arrived in France after 1915, around a century ago (p. 142-3).

Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s most Afro-Islamic département, a county outside of Paris in the 1900s and the 2010s.

The tendency of ethnic clustering and self-segregation is being reinforced by the sheer scale of immigration, particularly Islamic. It is becoming easier and easier for Muslims to live among their own and not have to adapt to local French norms:

The greater the immigrant presence, the greater the tendency to reject mixed marriages among Muslims, reaching 35% or even 37% in neighborhoods and municipalities with a very high immigrant presence (15% to 30% immigrants or immigrants’ children in the local population). (p. 153)

One set of polls found conflicting tendencies: between 2011 and 2016, the percentage of Muslims who would be happy if their son married a non-Muslim rose from 41% to 56%, while those who would be happy if their daughter married outside the faith fell from 38% to 35% (p. 152). Interestingly, the more educated a Muslim is, the more likely he/she is to intermarry with a non-Muslim (p. 158). The less educated working class Muslims are more hostile to intermarriage, reproducing the pattern of ethnocentric sentiment inversely correlating with intelligence and socio-economic status.

Hostility to intermarriage is suggestive of the clash of values between native French and Muslims. As a rule, we can expect initially stark differences between liberal post-60s Frenchmen and first-generation Muslims hailing from relatively traditional societies, and then a partial convergence as the immigrants acculturate to the new environment (or, to some extent, as the French are reeducated to “adapt” to the newcomers’ cultures).

Convergence has always been limited. Muslims in France are no more likely to adopt French names for their children they they were in the past (p. 161). Muslim naming follows its own patterns completely independent from the general French population (p. 162). Whereas the French population overwhelmingly supports women’s right to abortion or gays’ right to “be free to live as they wish,” only small majorities of French Muslims also do so (p. 165).

Convergence may have, if anything, peaked as there is evidence of a resurgence in Islamic sentiment:

The studies and polls that we have all converge in indicating a greater frequency and observance of religious signs in the population of Muslim faith or origin. The turning point seems to have been the early 2000s. (p. 163)

In the early 1990s, around 60% of Muslims in France fasted for Ramadan, the figure for the 2000s varied between 67% and 71% (p. 164). In the 1990s, 35% to 39% of Muslims said they drank alcohol, a figure which fell to 32% in 2011 and 22% in 2016. The proportion of Muslim women wearing headscarves has risen from 24% in 2003 to 35% in 2016. Perhaps most surprisingly, a recent poll found that young Muslims are significantly more hostile to sex before marriage than are their elders. Whereas 55% of Muslims over 50 said “A woman should remain a virgin until marriage,” 74% of 18-24 year-olds were of this opinion (p. 167).

It is unclear what is driving this re-Islamization. In addition to the Muslim community’s growing confidence as it also grows in size, it may also be an ethno-religious reaction to certain polemics of the early 2000s: the War on Terror, the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and new measures by conservative French politicians to limit overt Islamization (such as the 2004 ban on headscarves in schools or President Nicolas Sarkozy’s “Le Pen-lite” campaigning). President Emmanuel Macron’s draft “law against separatisms” may have a similar effect, aiming as it does to eliminate Islamism through various measures so as to assuage native French fears, measures which will likely stoke greater ethno-religious sentiment and a feeling of persecution (justified or not) among Muslims.

We can expect to see a continued cycle reinforcing Muslim and native French ethnic/religious sentiment as measures appealing to the French offend Muslims, Muslims adopting behavior offensive to the native French, and so forth. One of the most common vectors of this: cases of alleged police brutality becoming causes célèbres for protest among Muslims (and Africans), in a context of distinctly higher Muslim (and African) violent criminality).