StJohnOfPatmos
2d ago
Jacques Hébert
Jacques Hébert was not guillotined for being a public intellectual lmao, he was a political heavyweight who literally openly called for violent insurrection and paid the price.
Camille Desmoulins
Once again, not killed for being a public intellectual, but for being a member of Parliament who sided with Danton against Robespierre. Do you legit not understand the difference?
Jean-Paul Marat.
Marat was assassinated by a vengeful aristocrat acting on private terms - how does this have anything to do with the state's relationship to him? Huh? You're 0/3 so far on understanding the basic premise of my argument.
In fact if you name anybody of import in French literature he was prosecuted, exiled or threatened:
Simply not true - Voltaire was roughed up once by some aristocrat's goons, but he enjoyed vast state protection despite being a constant troublemaker. Molière obviously comes to mind, too. Zola only got sentenced for libel after publishing J'Accuse, a situation he voluntarily engineered to raise awareness about Dreyfuss. Descartes was never persecuted, neither was Balzac. Flaubert was found not guilty for moral offences and cleared of all charges - you're just listing random names, lying about them, and hoping I don't know any better, right?
be it leftists like Victor Hugo
You mean the guy elected to the Senate who had a boulevard named after him during his lifetime and received a massive state funeral, with his remains instantly delivered into the Panthéon? His previous brief exile - after which he received an official Imperial pardon and full amnesty - seems more significant to you than that?
Any idea of how it was some supposed softspoken liberal paradise, where everybody sang kumbaya,
Ugh, this is beneath the level of basic maturity for me. Not interested in responding further - write a normal comment if you want to have a sensible discussion. Less blatant lying too, please.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Isn't there a pretty obvious ceiling on that? For all his wealth, Elon Musk cannot consume the same amount as 10 million run-of-the-mill middle class Americans combined, nor does he probably want to.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
not so easy to tell if someone is Algerian vs. French given that they're almost always masked up
I lived in North Paris for 5 years. I can easily tell by the style of dress, voice cadence, vocal tics, and spastic body language when someone is a French-Arab. You're right that some "petits blancs" exist who ape them and their mannerisms, but given the vast video evidence - since they were routinely filming themselves doing the lootings and gloating about it - I would bet good money that the rate of ethnic French who partook in the looting is 5-10% at the absolute maximum, more realistically quite a bit less. I assume you're French, so we both know that even when French ethnics use arab slang like "j'ai le seum", they don't really sound like arabs/racaille, who mostly have a form of diction reminiscent of spitting or retching while talking.
Like the burning down of the Limoges city hall
Once again, not an instance of looting. The guy behind the Limoges arson attack was some banal ageing anarcho-leftist (a type that for some reason seems to grow on trees in South-West France, why is that?) who saw an opportunity to destroy a symbol of oppression or something equally asinine.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Le Pen wins, pulls a Meloni, governs to the center, nothing happens.
Yeah, I think this is pretty much guaranteed. French people are really endearing when they get all wide-eyed and spooked about the prospect of someone called Le Pen ruling in the Élysée Palace - meanwhile, the FN is basically a social-democratic party for lumpens and petit-bourgeois paupers with next to no substantial platform on taking meaningful institutional power and reversing French demographic trends. They're among the mildest "far right" party of note in Europe today, Le Pen can't even be bothered to say that Islam is incompatible with French values
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
I think UBI is increasingly likely should AI disrupt the job market as severely as many predict it will - after all, there can't be an exponential growth in the economy without a sustained level of consumption.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Annihilation also covers political upsets within a Presidential election, but yes, Submission is more prescient now than ever, although people forget that it's not really an Islamophobic book at all. It's probably the most sober and sincere positive assessment of Islam published by a Westerner in recent years, since it pretty convingly argues that Islam is more meaningful and reasonable than the post-Christian nihilism of Secular Europe.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
They're all good, but I'm personally partial to The Map and The Territory because of it's very sensitive focus on artistic production and the struggles of making meaningful art in the 21st century.
To be honest, Houellebecq novels are such page-turners that you can just begin with his first novel Whatever (it's very short, you can basically read it in 1-2 sittings) and work your way through his oeuvre chronologically. All of his novels have a similar voice and rhyme in their content, but most of them have a focused sub-topic he lends specific attention to, such as:
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Hippie culture and the Sexual Revolution (The Elementary Particles/Atomized)
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Islam and Western secularism (Submission)
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Sex tourism (Platform)
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Cloning and the distant Future (The Possibility of an Island)
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Antidepressants (Serotonin)
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Art (The Map and The Territorry)
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Terrorism and National Security (Annihilation)
If you don't want to read him chronologically, just pick whatever topic seems most compelling to you and start there.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
I've seen a lot of footage of the riots, and there's evidently plenty of ethnically French participation. The riots started in the some very immigrant-heavy parts of Paris but their spread to the whole of the country necessitates participation by plenty of Gauls, too.
This is absolute nonsense and a really horrid lie that needs to be dispelled firmly - I clearly referred to the mass looting, not the riots, as being nigh-exclusively committed by immigrants or immigrant offspring. Conflating the riots (burned cars, attacks on city halls and government buildings, etc.) happening in the context of the mass protests, which were indeed driven by mainly ethnic French people, with the organized looting of shopping streets in over 140 towns is a false equivalency, since they were separate incidents driven by separate actors. Please provide a single video source of looted stores in which even a small plurality of the looters can be identified as ethnic French. Every single video I saw, without exception, showed a crushing supermajority of looters being the usual suspects; just turning on the sound and hearing them speak (wesh wesh tema le footlocker, jure sur le coran wallah) is usually sufficient.
And no, the looting did not start in immigrant-heavy parts of town whatsoever - they descended from the banlieues into the city centres and targeted shopping streets mainly run by ethnic French. In some cases, the looting was so vast that it spilled into areas in which immigrants live (10ème arrondissement of Paris, for one), but they did not commence there and notably, those were not arab immigrant neighbourhoods, but mainly Indian and Chinese quartiers. The actual areas they live in were almost entirely untouched.
The rest of your comment I do agree with - both the RN and LFI have absurd spending policies that are laughable considering the fiscal crisis France is in. Eric Zemmour points this out often, but Marine Le Pen is essentially a left-wing woman running a family business, which just happens to be a far-right party.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
The really pernicious part of France's hate speech laws is that in theory and on paper, they are very robust in their universal application - there have been French-Arab rappers condemned for anti-white lyrics in their songs, for example. But whether or not a clearly hateful comment even makes it to trial seems to be at the mysterious discretion of unnamed judges and fonctionnaires (France's elite state bureaucrats), who pick and choose their cases with an evident bias. It has already widely been reported on that Marine Le Pens trial for embezzling EU funds was purposefully organised in a manner to maximally hurt her campaigning, as the embezzlement story was publicly known since 2014, but the French justice system inexplicably sat on the case for almost 10 years until she was a credible favourite to win the next election before bringing her to court.
StJohnOfPatmos
3d ago
Michel Houellebecq, widely considered the most important living French writer, is once again facing trial for hate speech-related offences, this time for statements he made in an interview in 2022.
In the interview, he hypothesised that once muslims become the hegemonic demographic of France, there will be "reverse Bataclans" - essentially native French engaging in acts of terror against their muslim overlords. The main inciting factor for the trial, which is happening at the behest of the Union of French Mosques (UMF) and the Movement Against Racism And For The Friendship Of Peoples (MRAP), was his statement that the Great Replacement is self-evidently not a "theory", but an easily measurable and observable statistical reality. He faces up to one year in prison and a fine of 45.000 euros.
This trial arrives right as key figures of the main French left-wing party, La France Insoumise, have called for the very mention of any kind of Great Replacement to be criminalised as hate speech (which it already more or less is, depending on how you phrase your stance towards it) - all while simultaneously promoting the concept of the Nouvelle France ("New France"), a deliberately ambiguous term that nonetheless carries a socioethnic component, seeking to uproot the traditional reading of France's national identity (Gauls -> Latins -> Christian Kingdom -> Republic) and replace it with one that gives equal historical and identitarian weight to the populations of the former colonies now living in France. The Leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, currently running for President and occupying the second place in the polls after Marine Le Pen (thus making him the most likely candidate to ender the run-off round of voting in May 2027), has long advanced the idea that traditional French culture is loathsome and scientifically inferior to the Arab World, going as far as saying that the Gothic style of Architecture originating in Saint Denis was due to muslim craftsmen. He has also stated that the language of France should no longer be called French, but should be renamed to "Créole", since the majority of French speakers in the world now reside in Africa. The tragicomedy is that, as a long-standing figure in the French Left originating from the Trotskyist milieu, Mélenchon used to be an outspoken advocate against any forms of religious or ethnic sectarianism - positions he has since walked back and apologised for as his party increasingly became a reservoir of naturalised foreign citizens and muslim interest groups.
As the Centre and Centre-Right of French politics remains weak and highly divided (there are 2 candidates running as the "centrist block", and 5 candidates running as moderate right-wingers, none of which have been able to make a meaningful dent in the polls), the upcoming election will almost certainly be the most politically polarised moment in the History of France's Fifth Republic, as the far-right and far-left face compete for the Presidency, an office which enjoys enormous powers under the current French Constitution, all while Parliament has lastingly fractured into 3-4 political blocks unable to form any kind of working majority. Despite the election still being half a year away, the country has already entered full campaign mode, further inflamed by the compounding social movements and mass demonstrations, the historic wave of looting committed by organised groups of nigh-exclusively arab/black immigrants and French-born children of immigrants, and the complete political isolation of Emmanuel Macron, who is now the least popular President in modern French History, leaving behind a spiralling debt crisis and an untenable spending deficit that risks to unleash economic devastation in the coming years. As a francophone and former resident of France, I have been closely following French elections since Hollande got elected in 2012 and believe me when I say this upcoming election is unlike anything France has seen in living memory.
Returning to Houellebecq, it is fascinating to see the decline of one of France's greatest traditions - a shared respect and deference across the political spectrum for public intellectuals and figures of artistic merit. Famously, Charles de Gaulle demanded that all charges against Jean-Paul Sartre be dropped, arguing that "one doesn't arrest Voltaire" - despite Charles de Gaulle being a conservative nationalist and Sartre being a Maoist fanatic at the time. Despite the fiery content of his novels, Houellebecq is a largely mild-mannered, soft-spoken person, and I assume he won't use this opportunity to turn the trial into a larger demonstration of France's current crises: in a country in which all forms of ethnic and religious censuses are strictly prohibited, how can one be charged for matters regarding a Great Replacement, legally unprovable by design? He has already responded to his upcoming trial, warning against "a judiciary which increasingly believes it alone can decide social and political debates". If he actually receives a prison sentence (unlikely, it will probably be a fine), he would quite literally be a political prisoner, jailed for stating an unprovable opinion.
I no longer live in France, but I maintain deep ties to the country and appreciate it deeply, despite its chronic flaws and the severe shortcomings of its population ("French people are cattle when it comes to politics", as De Gaulle said). It will be fascinating to see how this trial takes shape. At any rate, it's a good time to reread Houellebecq's books.
StJohnOfPatmos
14d ago
Just mentioning the USSR's social conservatism undersells the matter: well into the 1980s, it was considered bizarre and dubious for a soviet man/woman to be unmarried at age 25. If they were still unmarried at age 30, they were basically a freak and complete outlier in their communities. The vast majority of soviet women married around age 20 - there was simply no time for a meaningful sexual revolution in the tiny time frame of 2 years of adult celibacy. Housing policy should be considered, too: it was extremely rare for young bachelor to live alone, most soviets transitioned from living with their parents to living with their partner without an intermediary phase. No cars, either - meaning very few refuges where a young couple could get it off without anyone finding out.
Soviet living conditions and domestic conservatism essentially prevented any meaningful sexual revolution from being possible - there was very literally neither time nor space for it.
I doubt it - he knows enough to know that Marat, Hébert, and Desmoulins began as writers/intellectuals and died violently, yet he somehow also is completely, fundamentally mistaken in how and why they died?
Especially Marat, whose death circumstances are exponentially more famous than anything he did while living, is a blatant example. He knows Marat was murdered in his bath by a vengeful aristocrat woman, because that’s as elemental to Marat’s life and legacy as suicide in the Führerbunker is to Hitlers or exile on Saint Helena is to Napoleons - you don’t know Marat without knowing that. And yet he uses his name as an example of French government repressing a public intellectual? Not believable for an instance that this is an honest mistake.
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