How young French Muslims are abandoned by society

Dalrymple writes, by way of understatement, that France has not been especially successful in integrating its immigrant population into the mainstream of national life. This, he points out,

need not be because of any higher levels of xenophobia or racial prejudice: a more rigid labour market will prevent integration quite successfully. Laws to protect the employed have the effect of enclosing unskilled immigrants not merely in ghettoes, but in workless ghettoes. Anyone who has visited the ring of Le Corbusier-style ghettoes around Paris (or other French cities) will soon realise that by comparison with their inhabitants the average Brixton drug-dealer is a model of integrated respectability.

Dalrymple explains that Islamic fundamentalism is not much in evidence among the disaffected young prisoners of France,

and is therefore of not much importance, at least numerically.

The problem is that Islamic fundamentalism

has its attractions for the more intelligent, or at least the more intellectual, among them, who seek a total explanation for, and solution to, their predicament. And as we have seen, it doesn’t take many people to disturb the peace of the world.

Muslim prisoners in France are

not deeply religious, or indeed deeply anything.

France has successfully secularised the Muslim younger generation,

but without having replaced the religious ethic by any other. They are left in a vacuum, suspended mentally and culturally somewhere between the Maghreb and France, but belonging fully to neither, and therefore at home nowhere.

The rigidity of the labour market

makes it more difficult for them to redeem themselves by work,

and modern culture,

which holds out easy enrichment as a solution to existential dislocation, makes crime a permanent temptation.

French prisoners of North African origin feel that French society is fundamentally unjust.

They do not so much deny that they have done what they are accused of having done, as justify it as a revenge upon, or at least the natural consequence of, that primordial injustice.

This resentment, Dalrymple notes,

is simultaneously a powerful provoker of crime and an obstacle to rehabilitation. What these prisoners need, apart from the passage of time that in itself cools the ardour of criminality, is not what they get in prison — antidepressants and tranquillisers by the bucketful — but a Socratic dialogue that will help them to overcome their resentment. If the principal cause of crime is the decision to commit it, then the removal of a justifying sense of grievance is of great importance. In addition, prisoners, and those who will soon become prisoners, need real opportunity, not chimerical equal opportunity, which is to say government of bureaucrats, by bureaucrats, for bureaucrats.

The superiority of Air France over British Airways

Dalrymple will not go into

the rights and wrongs of the managers’ decision to make 2,900 employees of Air France redundant, and whether such a decision was in effect forced on the managers by

• the financial situation of the company
• the intransigence of the staff who militated against any kind of change in their very comfortable billets
• the excessive social charges that the French state imposes upon all employers in France
• the subsidies received by some its main competitors

He will not go into the matter because he admits to

a weakness for Air France: I find its service agreeable by comparison with, say, that of British Airways, which is as lumpen as the nation of which it is the principal carrier, even though Air France is strike-prone and such a strike once left me stranded in Port-au-Prince. I did not mind this very much, for it allowed me to make the acquaintance of the eminent German author of books about Haiti, Hans Christoph Buch.

France’s chronic malaise

Dalrymple notes that among the country’s problems are

1. its frightful battery farms of resentment, trafficking and delinquency — in atmosphere if not physically, worse than anything in England
2. the decay of its vaunted educational system thanks to the belated adoption of gimcrack theories
3. its appalling modern architects, who are among the worst in the world. After 1,000 years of successful practice, the French now cannot build a decent house
4. its rigid labour laws, social charges, regulations and legal bias against small businesses that inhibit efforts at expansion and reward idleness

On 4., Dalrymple writes:

Only three weeks ago, two small businessmen — one a forester in the depths of la France profonde, the other a Parisian taxi driver of Vietnamese origin — complained to me that, after 40 years of work and paying taxes, their pensions would be no larger than those who had never worked in their lives. (The taxi driver said that if, in the second round of the election, it came to a choice between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, he would vote Le Pen.) I did not ask them how many people they knew of pensionable age who had never worked; but certainly I know people in France who regard a two-year sabbatical on unemployment benefits as their right rather than as a shameful act of exploitation.

The French are on a higher plane

France, Dalrymple observes,

• is well administered — many intelligent young people want to work for the government
• has among the best-maintained roads
• has excellent public transport
• is clean. There is less litter in 100 miles than in 100 yards in England. Either the French do not drop litter or councils are more assiduous in picking it up, or both
• provides markets everywhere, with local produce
• offers proper bookshops. One cannot attribute the much higher cultural level in France to bookshops alone, but they help to maintain it
• enjoys efficient roadside drain clearing services
• has better small shops, with greater attention to detail
• is more efficient: far fewer of the French working far fewer hours produce at least as much as the British

Monstrous Macron

Dalrymple likens Emmanuel Macron’s face to that of an ‘intelligent shark‘, and notes that his voice, ‘when he tries to play the role of passionate demagogue, is enough to shatter glass’.

Fillon sounds false note of national self-congratulation

Dalrymple observes that anyone who would be a candidate for the French presidency must write, or have ghost-written for him, a book, just as anyone who wants to be Britain’s prime minister must pretend to be a fan of some soccer team. This is not to say that the French are better at writing books than the English, or that the English are better at football than the French (for a start, English players tend to drink too much the night before the match).

Zowat elke persoon die Frans presidentskandidaat is, vindt het noodzakelijk om een boek te schrijven. Net zoals iedereen die in Groot-Brittannië premier wil worden, moet doen alsof hij voor een of ander Brits voetbalteam supportert. Dat wil niet zeggen dat de Fransen beter zijn in boeken schrijven dan de Britten, net zo min dat de Britten beter voetballen dan de Fransen. (Om te beginnen zijn Britse voetballers geneigd om veel te veel te drinken de avond voor de wedstrijd.)

One of the things Dalrymple finds annoying in books written by French politicians who hope to win election is the tone. It is one of national self-congratulation. The books refer to France as the country of human rights, in the same way as many Britons believe that the world envies them their health. Nobody is jealous of Britons for having miserable health and terrible hospitals, and the greatest of Francophils would hardly think of France as the country of human rights.

Een van de zaken die ik irritant vind aan boeken geschreven door Franse politici die hopen om verkozen te geraken, is de toon die je er in vindt: één van nationale zelf-felicitatie. De boeken verwijzen naar Frankrijk als hét land van mensenrechten. Precies dezelfde soort van mythe als die van de Britten die geloven dat heel de wereld hen hun gezondheidszorg benijdt. Niemand is jaloers op de Britten hun miserabele gezondheidszorg en verschrikkelijke ziekenhuizen en niemand, zelfs niet de grootste francofiel in de wereld, denkt over Frankrijk als zijnde hét land van de mensenrechten.

People who love France think of her landscapes, her towns and villages, her gastronomy, her literature, her savoir-vivre, her intellectual achievements, in short, her civilisation — in fact, everything except her human rights.

Mensen die houden van Frankrijk, houden van het land omwille van haar landschappen, haar steden en dorpen, haar keuken, haar literatuur, haar savoir vivre, haar intellectuele verwezenlijkingen… Kortom omwille van haar beschaving – in feite alles, behalve haar mensenrechten.

From P.G. Wodehouse, The Aunt and the Sluggard (1916)

France has a ‘universal vocation’, according to François Fillon. Dalrymple is allergic to nonsense of this kind.

 

Catapulted from clerk to field marshal

Dalrymple writes that he has always felt a little sorry for François Hollande. (This is doubtless, Dalrymple concedes, pure sentimentality.) The French president is like a clerk who has been promoted, suddenly and against his will, to field marshal in some war that looks like it is about to have a catastrophic dénouement. Dalrymple instinctively sympathises with people who are despised by everyone.

Ik heb altijd een beetje medelijden gehad met François Hollande (ongetwijfeld pure sentimentaliteit), omdat hij me altijd wat leek op een klerk uit een of ander postkantoor die ineens en tegen zijn wil gepromoot wordt tot veldmaarschalk te midden een oorlog die catastrofaal aan het verlopen is. Ik heb een instinctieve sympathie voor mensen die worden veracht door iedereen.

The crumbling EU soft-dictatorship

Dalrymple suggests that many of the 52% who voted for Brexit in the UK European Union membership referendum might have done so

because they feared that the ‘European project’ was the creation of a vast sovereign state to slake the thirst for power of megalomaniacs of the political class, impossible of even minimal democratic oversight, a giant Yugoslavia.

The leaders of France, Germany, and Italy have said that they want to push forward to closer political union. Dalrymple comments:

Consider the following. The French government, whose legitimacy no one will deny even if he denies its competence, is attempting some weak reforms of the rigid French labour market. This has resulted in months of conflict and continued violence. But at least the reform is the work, or attempted work, of a French government. Imagine if the reform were imposed by fiat of a European government despite the opposition of the French government and members of the European parliament.

The crook who beat Le Pen

Jacques Chirac, Dalrymple reminds us,

won an election overwhelmingly against Jean-Marie Le Pen because Chirac’s opponents to the Left voted for him on the belief that ‘better a crook than a fascist’.

However, Dalrymple notes that

compared with either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Chirac was a statesmanlike moral giant — though a crook nonetheless.

Nationalism is fraught with danger

But so is refusal to recognise that attachment to one’s culture and history is a normal part of human experience

A democracy that stifles debate on vital and difficult matters by means of speech codes, explicit or implicit, is asking, writes Dalrymple, for a fascist reaction. He points out that in France, the genie of unease about the North African influx cannot be returned to its bottle. For the sake of democracy,

vigorous, civilised debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.

France, Dalrymple reminds us, has

a large, undigested, and growing immigrant population from North Africa that congregates—unwanted by the bulk of the population—in huge and soulless modern housing projects that surround French cities, as if besieging them. There are now Muslim ghettoes in France so crime-ridden that the police will not enter, except in armoured convoys.

The Front national addresses

widespread anxieties that ‘respectable’ politicians have preferred to ignore for fear of appearing illiberal and unenlightened.

The party dares say on the subject of mass immigration

what many Frenchmen think and feel. A problem as essential to France’s future as how 5m North African Muslims are to be integrated successfully into French society has been left unexamined, obscured behind a cloud of wishful thinking and politically correct platitudes.

Dalrymple explains that the ‘respectable’ politicians,

by espousing the banalities of multiculturalism, left those with a desire to conserve something of traditional French identity with nowhere to go but Le Pen. By declaring that realities as obvious as the high immigrant crime rate and the resulting fear that many Frenchmen feel cannot be mentioned by the polite and sophisticated, they have ceded all public discussion of such evident facts to the impolite and the outré. The élites were the architects of the Front national‘s triumph.