Is France Finished? We’ve Heard That Before

Ever since Limoges burned, a corner of social media, mostly across the Atlantic, has already drafted France’s obituary. It isn’t the first time: France was buried in 1348, in 1420, in 1871, and in 1940, and each time she rose again in the middle of the eulogy. None of those recoveries was guaranteed. They were the work of French men and women who refused to sign the death certificate, and there are still some left today, ready to defend their Mother.

The obituary is premature

I don’t deny the crisis. I write about it here week after week, from the debt that is strangling us to the shipwreck of our political system, and just two days ago I explained why October 17 is not yet a revolution. The country is in bad shape, and denying it would be as wrong as burying it.

Nor am I going to play the game of competing miseries. America had its Civil War, six hundred thousand dead in a nation of thirty million souls; it had 1929 and its breadlines. In 1865, as in 1932, more than one observer would have pronounced it finished. It rose again. Every great people has its own catalogue of catastrophes, and ours does not make us superior.

It simply makes us familiar with one particular scene: the one where France’s death is announced, and France gets back on her feet halfway through the funeral oration.

Those who buried her before

1348. The Black Death carries off between a third and half of the kingdom’s population in a matter of years. Entire villages vanish; fields go back to wilderness. Who, at that moment, would have bet on the future? The country repopulated its countryside and finished building its cathedrals.

1420. At the Treaty of Troyes, a king of France disinherits his own son in favor of a king of England. Paris is in the hands of the occupier, and the Dauphin is reduced to a mocked « King of Bourges. » The kingdom is cut in two by a document signed with its own hand. Nine years later, a seventeen-year-old shepherd girl has him crowned at Reims.

1562 to 1598. Eight wars of religion, thirty-six years of neighbors slitting each other’s throats in God’s name, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a kingdom on the verge of breaking apart. The Edict of Nantes, then Henry IV and his minister Sully, rebuilt a peace that no one dared hope for anymore.

1815, 1870, 1914, 1940. Four foreign occupations in a hundred and twenty-five years. After Waterloo, an indemnity of seven hundred million francs. After Sedan, five billion gold francs demanded by Bismarck, paid off in barely two years, faster than he himself required, to free French soil. In 1918, nearly a million and a half dead, the northern departments razed to their foundations, and a war memorial in every village. In 1940, a country carved into seven pieces by the Nazi occupier: an occupied zone, a free zone, a forbidden zone, a reserved zone, Alsace-Moselle annexed, the North attached to the military command in Brussels, and an Italian zone. The Marshal signs, the elites resign themselves, the world turns the page. An obscure general has posters put up in London declaring that France has lost a battle, but she has not lost the war.

Every time, serious minds wrote the obituary. Every time, they were wrong.

Rising again is never free

Let’s be honest to the very end, since that is what gives weight to everything else.

France did not rise again on her own. In 1429, it also took English exhaustion and a change of heart in Burgundy. In 1918, it took the British and the Americans. In 1944, it took landings we could never have carried out without them. Nor did she rise again unscathed: the power that dominated Europe under Louis XIV and Napoleon became, over the course of these ordeals, a middle power. Our recoveries were real; they were not always triumphs.

And nothing is guaranteed. History is full of nations that never rose again, or not in the same form: Venice, Poland partitioned three times, Byzantium. « We have always risen again, so we will rise again » is not an argument. It is a prayer.

But that is precisely the point. If France rose again, it was not by some law of nature. It was because, at every collapse, a minority refused to accept fate: a peasant girl from Lorraine, the builders of the Third Republic who paid off the ransom through a national bond drive, the resistance fighters of the Vercors. Recovery is never a given. It is a choice, and every generation has to make it anew.

What is at stake today

Here I leave history for opinion, and I’ll say so plainly: what follows does not carry the same weight as Troyes or 1871. It is my reading, and everyone is free not to share it.

I believe our present ordeal is of a new kind. Our past defeats came from foreign armies. This one comes from within: from a ruling class that, for decades, has surrendered our currency, our borders, and the primacy of our own law piece by piece, and that overrode its people’s vote in 2008 to hand Brussels powers no one had ever entrusted to it. I also believe that several generations have been taught to see nothing in their history but its faults, until loving one’s country came to seem suspect.

And yet this people, said to be weary of itself, remains viscerally attached to its homeland. It filled Notre-Dame on the night it reopened, it defends its village steeples, it mourns its soldiers. You don’t mourn what you have stopped loving.

That battle is neither lost nor won. It is the only one on this list still being written in the present tense.

What cannot be erased

What our hasty gravediggers fail to see is everything that has come through all these ordeals intact. A language that was once the tongue of treaties and of Europe’s royal courts. Cathedrals, legal codes, Pasteur and his rabies vaccine, a cuisine UNESCO has inscribed on the list of humanity’s heritage. An army that still maintains its own nuclear deterrent and builds its own fighter jets. And that incorrigible lightness of being, which even our detractors come to savor every summer.

A middle power, yes. But a power that still carries weight, which is more than many younger, richer, and more populous nations can say. A country is not a GDP curve or a viral video. It is a lineage, and ours goes back fifteen centuries.

We will rise again

We will rise again, not because it is written, but because there are still French men and women ready to defend their Mother. There were some in 1420, in 1871, in 1940, when everyone else had already signed the obituary. There are some today. They make less noise than the algorithms, but they are here, and they have no intention of handing over the keys.

See you soon, in the concert of free nations.