How the far-left French radicals of the 1960s destroyed their nation and infiltrated American politics and schools

“This is the book that broke the spell of French progressivism,” says Nathan Pinkoski in his foreword to Éric Zemmour’s “The Suicide of France” (Encounter Books). Could it also be the book that helps break the spell of American progressivism?

In May of 1968, France’s far-left sparked a massive social uprising similar to America’s ’68 Summer of Love but even more explosive. Thousands of students, furious with France’s conservative norms, threw up barricades, clashed with police, sparked a massive workers strike and tried to create a total revolution. These radical nihilists worked to bring down France’s decent and free Fifth Republic, lauded faraway Maoist-Communist tyranny, and dismissed the Judeo-Christian traditions of the West.

Sound familiar?

Just as America’s leftists have mythologized the 1960s counterculture movement, France’s progressives have mythologized the chaos and destruction of May 1968. The nihilistic radicals’ goal was to overthrow the government. They failed in this at the time, but in the six decades since they have largely achieved their aims.

Zemmour, a journalist and occasional presidential candidate, tells the fascinating and disturbing story of how this liberationist ideology took over French politics — and how France’s moderates and conservatives were swept up in its elite prestige. This erudite writer has indeed exploded the mythology behind “the quiet revolution that destroyed a nation.” He does so in vigorous and inviting prose.

Zemmour’s book was first published in France in 2014. It was a massive success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. His calls for a return to tradition were decried and twisted by critics who maligned him an extremist and a “demagogue.” But its influence remains strong, and it has now been ably translated into English by Pinkoski — not a moment too soon, as it contains vital warnings for America.

The French mutiny began on college campuses. Postmodern French theory and its disciples had three goals: “Deconstruction, derision, destruction,” writes Zemmour. Institutions had to be dismantled. “Everything, even the most sacred — especially the most sacred — could and should be mocked.” Nothing could be left standing.

This was all to be replaced by ill-defined and ever more expansive “human rights” tied to transgressive behavior and endlessly proliferating “identities.” Adopting these attitudes became morally obligatory. These youthful revolutionaries adopted the remarkably juvenile slogan “It is forbidden to forbid.” They sought to create “emancipated” human beings severed from the very idea that liberty ought to be accompanied by self-restraint.

That ruinous belief spread off-campus and gave rise to a new activism that united collectivist politics with identity politics and crude sexual self-expression. Antiquated national loyalties, onerous moral restraints and a discredited Christian religion — goodbye to all that.

You would expect France’s conservatives to oppose this spiral. On the contrary: They joined in. Charles de Gaulle had established a strong presidential republic in 1958, buttressed by the support of the people. After his death in 1970, his successors caved to the extremists one issue at a time.

First, there was French Algeria. Zemmour is himself of Jewish and French Algerian descent. De Gaulle had initially sought to keep the colony under French control. He gave up on these prospects, not out of anticolonial convictions, but because he realized in the end that the French people and Algerian Muslims did not belong to the same civilization and could not indefinitely inhabit the same political community. De Gaulle’s realism on the issue, however painful to the French Algerians, made sense.

But the revolutionaries believed it didn’t go far enough. Out of some mix of guilt and naivete, France, even under center-right governments, opened the doors to massive Islamic immigration. As a result, France became increasingly Islamized and today suffers from violent friction between its Islamic immigrant and other communities.

Then there were the domestic issues. The radicals undermined the stable bourgeois family with consequences that have strained the social fabric and body politic. Legal abortion was first introduced by conservatives in 1975. At the time, they denied it would ever become an all-encompassing right. How wrong they were! Today, France has guaranteed abortion as a Constitutional right, the first nation in the world to do so.

Then, in the ’80s and ’90s, French conservatives rolled over as European governance shrank national sovereignty. They capitulated to socialist President François Mitterrand’s erasure of French power and history with the expansion of the European Union. “France is our homeland, Europe our future,” declared Mitterrand. As Zemmour writes, that really meant: “France is our past, consigned to the dustbin of history.”

All the while, the right pretended to be heirs to de Gaulle’s patriotic legacy. This faux Gaullism defended corrupt and ineffectual international institutions — the United Nations — more than they protected the vital interests of Frenchmen. De Gaulle was no pacifist and would not have sacrificed French interest for international law.

The betrayal went deeper in the 2000s. In 2005, the EU tried to impose the cumbersome and illiberal Constitution for Europe on France. That document refused to even mention the Christian dimensions of European history. The French people refused to ratify it.

But in 2007 the supposedly conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy acquiesced to the coercive imposition of the Treaty of Lisbon, which had much the same goals as the rejected constitution. Rather than ask the French people what they wanted in the form of a referendum, Sarkozy pushed it through parliament.

“The death knell sounded for popular sovereignty.”

What’s most alarming for American audiences is that Zemmour convincingly shows how French postmodernism and American wokeness reinforce each other. Extremist ideas and despotic practices ship back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean in a lamentable display of mutual imitation. For evidence, look at the syllabi of today’s American humanities classes. The crazy postmodern Frenchmen Alain Badiou Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze are now the core of these programs.

If French postmodernism helped corrupt the American academy, American anti-racism and political correctness found their way to France and undermined the commitment to universal “republican values” that was the bedrock of the French nation. A “culture of repudiation,” as Roger Scruton called it, is dominant throughout the Western world. Extreme imitates extreme.

Ironically, many French left-liberals acknowledge that American wokeness has become a parody of itself. They deem it excessively censorious and destructive of the public virtues. 

Zemmour’s judgments are sometimes excessively sweeping and thus need to be taken with a grain of salt. He clearly detests Jacobin terror and communist totalitarianism, but he can be too sympathetic to the French revolutionary state. And though his criticisms of American arrogance are not without merit, he understates the advantages that have marked postwar pax Americana.

Zemmour ends his provocative book by observing that people from every continent are returning “to the very essence of their civilization.” Russia is returning to Orthodoxy and the Tsars, China to Confucius, India to Buddha, and Islam to the Ummah. American conservatives, he adds, no longer hesitate “to proclaim the greatness of Western civilization, Jewish prophecy and Catholic majesty, Greek rationality and Roman law” against the “suicidal mirages of a nihilistic universalism.”

That leaves “only Europe and the West” — and I would add American woke elites — who are “slow to reclaim their roots, perverted as they are by a corrupted universalism.” About that Zemmour is surely right. 

Daniel J. Mahoney is senior research fellow at the Simon Center at the Heritage Foundation and a senior teaching fellow at Hillsdale College.