Jérôme Fourquet’s The French Archipelago provides a kind of dynamic radioscopy of the French nation as she has developed in recent decades. The picture, as detailed in my review of the book, is one of the fading away of the old sociological left and right, leaving behind a fragmented subcultural and political landscape, divided in multiple ways along educational/economic, ethnic, and religious lines.

As part of this, Fourquet meticulously documents the decline of Catholicism and the triumph socially liberal values in postwar France. The pollster identifies a number of patterns which are instructive both for France and other Western nations, which are virtually all experiencing similar changes.

The decline of Catholicism in France is overwhelming and apparent in innumerable areas:

• Baptism: once overwhelming, down to around 30% of newborns in 2015 (p. 25)
• Regular mass-going: from 35% in 1961 to 6% today.
• Divorce: taboo until the 1960s, then steadily rising.
• Marriage: once a “hegemonic social norm,” declining since the 1973 Oil Shock (p. 37). Out-of-wedlock births have steadily risen from 5.9% in 1965 to 59.9% in 2017. A caveat: this figure is not synonymous with broken homes and single mothers, as many unwed couples live together, typically within a civil union (PACS, p. 42).
• Abortion: 48% of French supported in 1974 (moreso among the young), with hegemonic 75% support across generations in 2014 (p. 44).
• Gay marriage: steady support of over 60%, though only around half of French support adoption by gay couples, with some fluctuation (p. 48). Older people’s opinion on the matter is rapidly converging with the young, with little class divide.
• Gay children: There is a marked male-female divide on the acceptance of homosexuality among one’s children. In 2000-03, two thirds of women said they would be perfectly happy with their child being gay, but only half of men said the same (p. 52).
• Medically-assisted procreation: half of French support allowing lesbians and single mothers to conceive children through in vitro fertilization, with the mention that “fatherless children” would be born. Two thirds of young people support the measure (p. 55).

Catholicism’s decline to marginality and even oblivion in France is evident from the number of Catholic priests. In 1950, there were about as many priests and monks in France as during the French Revolution in 1789 (around 170,000, bearing in mind the general population had more than doubled). Today, they number only 51,500 and the authors predict that Catholic parish priests will be a virtually extinct breed within 30 years (p. 28).

Number of Catholic diocesan priests in France

At the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, France provided three quarters of the Catholic missionaries proselytizing in Africa and Asia. Today, in a dramatic reversal, the bulk of new Catholic priests comes from the Third World. Some African prelates, such as Cardinal Robert Sarah, have themselves expressed grave alarm at Europe’s godlessness, infertility and invasion by Muslim immigration.

Catholicism has gone from forming the core of one of France’s two primary subcultures to merely one subculture for the 6-12% of French who remain practicing Catholics (6% being the ones who go to mass, 12% those who claim to be practicing). Even these have embraced many aspects of social liberalism (e.g. acceptance of sex before marriage). Practicing Catholics tend to be older than the general population.

Fourquet also documents other social changes. Only Muslims and practicing Catholics still prefer the traditional funerary practice of burial, with a majority of French now wishing to be incinerated after death (p. 57). Fourquet links this to the fact that most people no longer live in their old villages near to their ancestors’ graves and thus no longer feel the importance of lineage.

Tattooing used to be a very marginal practice (sailors, soldiers . . .) but has steadily risen and now stabilized, with a quarter of young people having tattoos (p. 59). Tattoos and the adoption of rare names represent “a major phenomenon of today’s societies: mass narcissism” (60). There has also been a steady growth in the number of young people who have engaged in oral sex.

The attitude of the French towards animals is also changing. In the mold of the Old Testament, the French used to consider animals as essentially humans’ slaves, to be used however they saw fit. Today, two thirds of French oppose the use of circus animals or the stuffing of geese to make famous French delicacy of foie gras. “Anti-specism” is a new fashion among academics and talking heads.

The evolutionary meaning of traditional culture

Many see in the decline of Catholic practice and customs a triumph over the irrational superstitions inherited from the ignorant past. Even a secularist should ask however: How did these values come to predominate and what do they represent?

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin himself had stressed that traditional cultures tend in a crude and primitive way to be guided by what is good for the community: “The judgment of the community will generally be guided by some rude experience of what is best in the long run for all the members; but this judgment will not rarely err from ignorance and weak powers of reasonings.”

Many traditional cultures, including those of the West, emphasize patriarchy, the specialization of gender norms, child-rearing, and familial responsibilities. It’s easy to conceive how nations and families adhering to such norms would naturally outcompete those who did not.[1] This is especially so if we recall the conditions of premodern life: a fairly high fatality risk for pregnant mothers, high infant mortality, and constant struggle – undertaken especially by men – in the physical and social world to secure the one’s security and livelihood.

After the Second World War, the emergence of an affluent society meant that the egalitarian and individualist tendencies of liberalism, which had always been present since at least the eighteenth century, would dramatically radicalize and upturn the social order.

Human beings have always chafed against the apparently, and often actually, arbitrary rigors and constraints of their particular culture. As the sophist Hippias is supposed to have said some 2400 years ago: “I regard you all as relatives and family and fellow citizens – by nature, not by custom. For by nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over mankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature” (Plato, Protagoras, 337c-d).

Put simply, young people increasingly could no longer accept the traditional familial and religious constraints of the past and no other coherent value system could rise to replace them – besides, precisely, an ethos of individual entitlement. What’s more rising prosperity and the welfare state actually meant that people could, more and more, get by materially with looser family ties. The father and husband’s economic responsibilities to the household were increasingly substituted by the corporation and the State.

Patterns of cultural change: deep generational shifts, not events

There is a striking contrast for the historian between how popular culture portrays National Socialism and how the historians present it. In popular culture, the portrayal is uniformly negative, to the point that National Socialism becomes a wholly incomprehensible phenomenon. At the same time, Nazi aesthetics and themes – whether or not these are framed within a noble struggle against Nazism – continue to enjoy widespread popular appeal. This is evident in the copious output of TV documentaries and Hollywood films dealing with World War II.

It is also evident in European and in particular francophone comics. Go into any European comic book store and Nazi iconography and themes feature in and on many of the books. Indeed, Nazism may well be the single most common topic, even among comic books not primarily dealing with history. Here is a sampling:

Dutch comic “The Kennedy Files: The Man Who Wanted to Be President,” on Joseph P. Kennedy’s tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, including his antiwar efforts, fascist sympathies, and criticism of the Jews.

Bruxelles 43: A look at ordinary life in German-occupied Belgium viewed through the eyes of a young girl.

Sixth volume in the “Children of the Résistance” series.

Promotional material for the Nazi superhero “der Ritter Germania,” part of the Block 109 comic series featuring an alternate timeline in which Nazis battle zombies.

Nazi furries portrayed in the Spanish noir detective series Blacksad.

Bruxelles 43 and Les Dossiers Kennedy make a serious effort to portray a sense of day-to-day normalcy and be historically accurate. The general tendency however is to have Nazis as generic go-to bad guys. As one might expect, most of these comic book artists are stronger on striking imagery than on history

This is particularly the case in the Block 109 series, which abounds in both evocative aesthetics and sadistic cartoon Nazis. Life and government in the Third Reich is imagined as a perpetual Night of the Long Knives-Kristallnacht-Auschwitz. Even military buddies are shown slaughtering each other at sociopathic random.

Paradoxically, the evils of Nazism serve as a pretext for artists to express their own sadistic tendencies. Cruel and sadistic revenge fantasies are a common theme, perhaps most famously portrayed in Quentin Tarantino’s popular 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.

Even the popular culture sometimes comments humorously on the Nazi-/Judeo-centrism of much of our cultural output. Seth MacFarlane’s American Dad! had this to say on the surest way to win an Oscar:

Video Link

Or consider the following scene from the excellent French spoof spy thriller OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies in which our dashing hero is interrogated by Nazis:

Agent OSS 117: “I won’t tell you anything, Moeller. The Third Reich and Nazi ideology have always left me . . . skeptical.”

Gerhard Moeller: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Isn’t it funny that Nazis always play the bad guys? It’s 1955! Can we have a second chance already? Thank you.”

Video Link

And the classic scene in the Cohen brothers’ The Big Lebowski:

Video Link

The historians – while virtually all acknowledging the great scale of Nazi atrocities in Poland and the Soviet Union – are also willing to take a more holistic view of the Hitlerian experience. Each historian, from his or her particular angle and area of expertise, is willing to go beyond demonological caricature and thus actually understand why National-Socialism was appealing to so many and why the Third Reich was so powerful.

Consider American historian Claudia Koonz’ 2005 The Nazi Conscience, which emphasizes that the appeal of National-Socialism was in being morally demanding. Harvard University Press presents the book as follows:

The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.

Claudia Koonz’s latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis’ vulgar anti-Semitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk.

This is the paradox, actually not particularly surprising in evolutionary terms, of National Socialism: simultaneously inspiring great altruistic idealism among the people and great ruthlessness towards ethnic outsiders. A recent book on foreign tourists in the Third Reich similarly emphasizes how many travellers were impressed by the idealism and activism they found, particularly among young people.

Or consider Clarkson University professor Sheila Weiss’ The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich, which is at pains to dispel facile stereotypes about “Nazi pseudoscience”:

Moreover, in discussing the actual science pursued by these human geneticists, the book will reinforce the efforts of other scholars who have tried to dispel a second myth common among the nonspecialist: that eugenics and racial anthropology, two essential subspecialties under the rubric of human heredity in the first half of the twentieth century, were “pseudoscientific” pursuits. Whatever one might think about them today, both were internationally respected and practiced by world-renowned human geneticists for most of the first half of the twentieth century. As the first chapter will make clear, neither eugenics nor racial anthropology was a Nazi invention. Both flourished inside and outside of Germany prior to the advent of the Third Reich. . . .

Moreover, Germany was unique, even among fascist countries, in functioning as a “racial state”—a nation where the criterion for citizenship was determined by race and heredity. National Socialist Germany approached a biocracy, that is, a government where biomedical ideals and biomedical professionals were central for the regime in both word and deed. (pp. 8-9)

French President Emmanuel Macron came to attention recently with a long interview in which he criticized the German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. “AKK,” who is also the leader of the ruling Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) and heir-apparent to replace Angela Merkel, had written in an op-ed for Politico: “Illusions of European strategic autonomy must come to an end: Europeans will not be able to replace America’s crucial role as a security provider.”

You can watch / read the interview (with English subtitles) to get a sense of official thinking by the reigning liberal-globalist wing of French politics, if you are so inclined. There’s not much new in fact.

The interview was more revealing for me in showing some of the new players in French foreign policy and in particular Franco-German relations. The interview was published by Le Grand Continent, a magazine released by the École Normale Supérieure, one France’s Grandes Écoles top universities.

There is evidently high-level support for this para-statal publication, with a highly attractive website and authors representing a wide range of high-level intellectuals. Besides the university and numerous students, various internationalist think-tank professionals and political party staff (mostly Socialist or Macronist, it seems) are involved. The line is decidedly Macronist, with almost Spencerian ambitions of creating an Europe-puissance. Given that the publisher was founded in 2017, one wonders if people close to the president himself are involved.

The interview has been bigged up on Twitter by various Anglo journalists and elements of the German foreign policy establishment. Some of the latter praise was somewhat embarrassing.

The head of the Munich Security Conference and of a policy school in Berlin:

https://twitter.com/ischinger/status/1328374692927954945

A prominent think-tank analyst:

https://twitter.com/ulrichspeck/status/1328234528515743745

This publication’s echo in Germany is an indicator of the “pro-French / EU maximalist” wing in German policy, which wants to go along with Macron’s grand designs for “European sovereignty” and “strategic autonomy.” The mainstream German establishment is wary of all this though, being aware of the fact that it will be expected to pay the bill for these schemes.

For instance, many Germans consider that Macron’s ambitions to federalize the Eurozone are but an elaborate ruse to put German taxpayers on the hook to bailout the bankrupt French banking system (“debt mutualization”) and put German economic policy under incompetent Med control.

Le Grand Continent will soon be translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish. But not English, the working language of all EU institutions. The publication is decidedly punchier and has more personality and vision than your standard EU fair, precisely because it is a national and, in particular, French scheme. Anything produced by the EU must go through a series of committees of committees where anything interesting or original will be carefully weeded out one by one by any objecting member. Hence the consistently insipid and vague nature of EU production.

I chuckled when Macron said “The EU has a tremendous amount of non-thought [impensé].”

As to Macron’s general message, there’s not much to say, except a lot of stuff is going on in the world right now innit. He’s alarmed by the decline of postwar liberal international institutions and “a crisis of the universal values borne by these structures.”

What it boils down to: the postwar Western establishment, called “liberal” for lack of a better term, and its values are in decline. This power elite’s influence solidified after 1945 and became hegemonic after 1989, but now is in rapid recession.

My reading: liberal power emanated from actually fairly small, but influential obviously, nodes in North America and Western Europe. (Even Japan can barely be put in this category, it is an ally, not an active player.) In no other part of the world did the assumptions of this coalition come naturally, but only predominated because of foreign influence (imposed by force, cash, or cultural soft power). As the West declines and itself becomes less coherent because of socio-cultural disintegration, so global liberalism is declining.

China, Turkey, Russia, Latin America, etc, don’t care about all these Western liberal-globalist obsessions.

The most telling part of the interview for me is when Macron flags the problem of “unacceptable” growing inequalities within and between countries. He thinks some kind of international cooperation could get rid of these: “Just as socialism could not work in a single country, the fight against this kind of [inegalitarian] capitalism cannot take place in only one country.”

Good luck with that.

Presumably Macron is thinking of the Krugman-Piketty snake oil of equality-through-redistribution in our new open-borders and multiracial context.

People will believe anything if only they don’t have to think.

Macron by the way mentions European demographic decline and the Africanization of Europe and the globe:

Today, we have reached a world population increase of 400 to 500 million people every five years. And above all, this increase shows acute imbalances : if you take the Europe-Africa region, for one European country demographically disappearing, in the same period, one African country appears. We are witnessing a kind of acceleration in the twists of history. . . . All of this also creates a re-conception of the world, of economic capacities, of futures, and obviously also disrupts transnational relations. . . . Africa is part of our societies. We have a part of Africa in all our societies, which also lives in tune. And when I say Africa, I mean Africa and the Mediterranean region in the broadest sense.

Amid all the blabber of policymakers and journalists, these demographic realities are what matters most for the future character of Europe and humanity. These changes are creating literally unsolvable and intractable permanent problems and tensions from a liberal-egalitarian perspective. But when will this be recognized?

European politicians fiddle while their people steadily fade away year after year.

Macron concludes, contrasting the good liberal-globalists to the bad nativist-authoritarians: “Popular democratic sovereignty is a treasure.” Just not on immigration.

Jérôme Fourquet, L’archipel français: Naissance d’une nation multiple et divisée (Paris: Seuil, 2019)

Jérôme Fourquet is a mainstream pollster with the venerable French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), the nation’s leading polling agency. He made a splash last year with his book, The French Archipelago: The Birth of a Multiple and Divided Nation, which presented a fine-grain statistical analysis of socio-cultural changes in French society and, in particular, fragmentation along ethno-religious and educational lines.

The book persuasively makes case that the centrist-globalist Emmanuel Macron’s election to the presidency and the collapse of the traditional parties of government in 2017 were not freak events, but the reflection of long-term trends which finally expressed themselves politically. The same can be said for the growing popularity of anti-establishment movements like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and the yellow-vests.

Following the works of many sociologists and historians, Fourquet sees French politics as historically divided between a Catholic Right and secularist Left. This divide had been highly stable since the French Revolution, if not earlier, with a dechristianizing core stretching out from the greater Parisian basin into the Limousin, with most of the periphery remaining relatively conservative. These subcultures united people of different classes within particular regions and corresponded politically with the conservative and Socialist parties who have taken turns governing France since World War II.

Percentage of Catholic priests swearing loyalty to the Constitution in 1791, a good marker of secularism.

Political party of representatives elected in the 1936 parliamentary elections. Supporters of the Popular Front Socialist-Communist coalition in red, pink, orange and yellow.

Since 1945, the collapse of Catholicism and the steady cognitive/economic stratification of French society have destroyed the reach and unity of the Catholic-right and secularist-left blocs. Macron was able to tap into the latent political demand of the wealthiest, most educated, and mobile 20% of French society, while the increasingly alienated and déclassés lower classes of French Whites have been falling out of the mainstream political system altogether.

Fourquet meticulously documents the social trends of the past 70 years: the decline of Catholicism, the Communist Party, and traditional media, the triumph of social liberalism, the division of cities into gentrified areas, crime-ridden ghettos, and the (self-)segregation of individuals along educational and ethnic lines. In all this, Fourquet’s book serves as an excellent statistical companion piece to Éric Zemmour’s Le Suicide français, which looks at many of the same themes through the lens of political and cultural events.

What’s in a first name? Quite a lot, actually

Fourquet uses a wealth of socio-economic and polling data to make his case. Some of the most innovative and striking evidence however is the big-data analysis of first names in France’s birth registries since 1900. This looks into the trends for numerous different types of names: Christian, patriotic, regional (Breton and Corsican), Muslim, African, and . . . Anglo. Far from being random, Fourquet shows that the trends in first-name giving correlate with concurrent social and political phenomena. For example, the number of people giving their girls patriotic names like France and Jeanne spiked during moments of nationalist fervor, namely the first and second world wars (p. 35).

More significantly, Marie went from being the most common name for girls (20% of newborns in 1900) to 1-2% since the 1970s. Unsurprisingly given the Virgin Mary’s importance in the Catholic religion, Marie was more popular in more religious regions and declined later in the conservative periphery. Marie’s decline thus seems to be a solid temporal and geographical marker of dechristianization (mass attendance and traditional Christian values, such as marriage and opposition to abortion and gay marriage, also collapsed during this period).

First names also provide a marker for assimilation of immigrant groups. Fourquet shows how Polish first names exploded in the northern mining regions of France in the 1920s and then fully receded within two decades. He shows the same phenomenon for Portuguese immigrants and first names in the 1970s. This assimilation is in accord with sociological data showing that European immigrants tend to rapidly converge in terms of educational and economic performance with the native French population.

Percentage of new-born males with a Muslim first name.

By contrast, Fourquet shows that people with Muslim last names almost never choose to give their children traditional French first names. He documents a massive increase in the proportion of newborns given Muslim first names from negligible in the 1960s to around a fifth of the total. There is also an increase in the number of people with Sub-Saharan African names.

Somewhat similarly to Europeans, Asian immigrants (disproportionately from the former Indochina) are much more likely to adopt French first names and perform comparably in economic and educational terms.

Beyond these stark ethno-religious demographic changes, Fourquet also highlights more subtle trends that often fall below the radar. First names also provide a marker for the degree to which the French have a common culture or, conversely, of heightened individual or sectoral identities.

Fourquet identifies an explosion in the number of different names used by the French. This figure was stable around 2000 from 1900 to 1945, rising to over 12,000 today. And this does not count the proliferation “rare names” – those for which there are less than 3 people with that name – among all populations. Fourquet takes this as evidence of increased individualism and “mass narcissism,” more and more people wishing to differentiate themselves.

In principle, until recently the French were forced by Napoleonic-era legislation to choose their first names from the Christian calendar, medieval European names, or Greco-Roman antiquity. All of France proper used a common corpus of names, with little local variation. The list of acceptable names was extended by ministerial instruction to regional and mythological names in 1966, while in 1993 the restriction was abolished. However, the trend of more-and-more names in fact long predates these legal changes. Evidently municipal authorities already were tolerating unusual names more and more.

What are the names in question? All sorts. The use of Breton (Celtic) names in Brittany has more tripled from 4% to around 12% (p. 127), with sharp rises corresponding to moments of heightened Breton regionalist politics in the 1970s.

Paul Valéry was a French poet and essayist, famous in the first half of the last century. Growing up in France, I knew Valéry chiefly because of a somewhat trite slogan attributed to him. He more recently came to my attention by the praise of the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.

Valéry is one of the most eminent figures in the French tradition of the moralistes – who are generally not, as the name might suggest, moralistic – those philosophers, going back to Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld and continuing right up to Cioran, known for their observations, more or less detached, good-natured, or biting, on social life and conventions.

Valéry had the distinction of living in perhaps the most decisive and consequential time in Western history, a time of catastrophic wars and political revolutions, culminating in the world we know today. He wrote a number of political essays commenting, more or less obliquely, on these developments, living through them as uncertain of the outcome as we are today.

Valéry dedicates Perspectives on Today’s World, his book of (mostly) political essays, to “those who have neither system nor party; who are thereby still free to doubt of what is dubious and to not reject what is not.”[1]

The book includes Valéry’s deep and subtle meditations on a vast medley of topics: of European exceptionalism, disunity, and decline (the industrial rise of Asia and colonial blowback are already foreseen), the bankruptcy of history as a field (lack of method, an excessive focus on high politics rather than long-term trends, hindsight being 20/20), freedom of thought and the life of the mind, the miseries of politics (antithetical to the mind), modernity as a great technical and socio-cultural phenomenon, France and her culture, Paris (“which continuousy attracts the flower and the dregs of the race”[2]), and much else.

On all these and more, Valéry commits to nothing, observing and analyzing with the philosophical detachment declared in his opening salvo. He is famously indifferent to the day-to-day flurry of events, “the froth of things,” being only interested in the deeper currents underlying human existence. Using this method, Valéry provides his reader with a continuous flow of thought, with often great insights and surprising parallels.

One is struck at how many of the problems Valéry raises are still with us. He speaks of the globalization of politics (distant powers responding to every local conflict, a new universal interdependence), the excessive stimulation and fads of modern media and culture, and the sheer speed of technological and social change, making it extremely difficult to base politics on sound predictions. From the vantage point of today, this almost seems quaint, given how much these trends have intensified in the age of borderlessness and social media.

The common thread running through many of Valéry’s quite diverse texts is the decline of Europe. Already at the end of nineteenth century, the first glimmers of Valéry’s European consciousness appeared with Japan’s war on China and the United States of America’s seizure of Spain’s colonial possessions, Valéry was troubled by these first (re)assertions of . . . non-Europe.

Valéry’s most famous saying is from the opening line of a 1919 essay, reflecting on European’s intellectual confusion in the wake of the First World War: “We civilizations know that we are mortal.”[3] He was distinctly aware of living at the high-water mark of European power, that just as that extraordinary tide had risen over the past four centuries, so that tide had begun receding . . . far more quickly than Europeans realized.

Before going into the causes and reaction to Europe’s decline, it is worth reflecting on the nature of her rise and what I do not hesitate to call her exceptionalism. Valéry is ready to concede the achievements of Hindu spirituality and Chinese technology and civilization. However, in terms of speed and explosive power, there is nothing to rival the Greek miracle of antiquity, especially in the fifth century before Christ, and European modernity since the 1400s.

The small European region has been at the top of the leagues, for several centuries. Despite her small size, even though the her soil is not markedly rich, she dominates the field. By what miracle? Certainly this miracle must lie in the quality of her population. This quality must compensate for the smallness of the population, the lack of square meters, the lack of minerals, which are assigned to Europe. Put on one scale the Empire of India and on the other the United Kingdom: the balance tips in favor of the smaller![4]

The Western and Japanese empires in 1914.

Valéry identifies a number of factors behind the West’s rise. Concerning the ancient Mediterranean, he notes that this sea was small and clear enough to be navigable even with fairly primitive means, the climate was temperate and hospitable, and finally this body of water connected three continents with very diverse peoples and civilizations, thus enabling great exchange of wealth, ideas, technology and craft. Thus, the ancient Mediterranean was the perfect setting for civilizational achievement, especially when a gifted and spirited people like the Greeks burst upon the scene, rapidly taking on many Egyptian and Phoenician innovations, and then surpassing them entirely.

For modern times, Valéry is struck by the contrast in China between slow but steady technological innovation and social and scientific stagnation:

How can one invent the compass, asks the European, without pushing further one’s curiosity and attention up to the science of magnetism; and how, having invented it, could one not think of leading a fleet far away to discover and master the lands beyond the seas? The same who invented gunpowder do not advance in chemistry and do not make cannons: they dissipate it with fireworks and vain nighttime amusements.

The compass, gunpowder, and the printing press have changed the face of the world. The Chinese who discovered them did not realize that they had the means of forever disturbing the world’s peace.[5]

Chinese civilization is marked by accretions, Western civilization by explosions.

Valéry often identifies Western psychological traits as a critical factor:

I cannot analyze this [European] quality [enabling exceptionalism] in detail; but I find by a cursory examination that active greediness,[6] burning and disinterested curiosity, a fortuitous mix of imagination and logical rigor, a certain non-pessimistic skepticism, an unresigned mysticism . . . are the most specifically active traits of the European Psyche.[7]

He attributes a kind of restless nervousness and ambition to the White race, a great factor of instability and accomplishment:

For fear of nullity, contempt, or boredom, we compel ourselves to become always more advanced in the arts, in manners, in politics, and in ideas, and we have shaped ourselves so as to only value astonishment and the momentary effect of shock. Caesar who considered that nothing had been achieved, given how much remained to be done and Napoleon who wrote: “I live only for the next two years,”[8] seem to have communicated this anxiousness, this intolerance towards everything that is, to almost the entire White race.[9]