“It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity … it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …”
—Charles Dickens
In his last book, a regrettably unfinished study of French identity, the celebrated historian Fernand Braudel spoke of the insufficiently understood “bipolarity between Paris and Lyon, which is a constant structure in French development.” The distinction extends far back into the country’s history, in Braudel’s argument, all the way to at least the 13th century. But we need not go so far back to find an important core of the polar relationship between the two cities, representatives broadly of two ways of defining France.
Paris is the birthplace of the 1789 Revolution, as well as the other major social disruptions that came later in 1848, 1871, and 1968. The first Revolution’s Jacobin Club was originally made up of Bretons, but it was transformed into the revolutionary body of legend in Paris. The sans-culottes, who were Marx’s lumpenproletariat that existed at the margins of the decent working classes before the invention of the term, and who brought terror and violence at a mass level to the upheaval, came from the most depraved of the Parisian outskirts. Paris is also the site of the Commune, that 1871 exercise in radical anarchism that sought to drag all of France headlong into communism. Marx looked to the Commune as an early incarnation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and Lenin saw it as the measuring rod of the early Bolshevik Revolution, hoping initially only that his revolution might survive the meager two months of that predecessor in collectivist insanity.
By contrast, Lyon was the site of one of the most significant revolts against the French Revolution in its most radical phase and the city was made a terrible example by the Parisian leaders of the revolution after the Lyonnaise revolt was put down. The story should be more well-known than it is outside France. The radical Montagnard Jacobin faction in Lyon was headed by the fanatical Joseph Chalier, who had befriended Robespierre and others among the most radical portion of the Jacobin factions while in Paris at the start of the revolution. Chalier exacerbated economic woes in Lyon with numerous incompetent communist measures and announced that he intended to follow the Parisian radicals by establishing a revolutionary tribunal that would fill the river Rhône with enemies of the revolution. The starving citizens of Lyon rioted and when Chalier moved to bring in units of the revolutionary army, insurrectionaries seized control of the government of Lyon.
Chalier was guillotined in July of 1793, as the Terror in Paris began to percolate. The Lyon insurrectionaries realized Paris would only install another Chalier, so they raised an army of 10,000 and declared Lyon independent of the Paris revolutionary authority. Though this Lyon movement was still supportive of the republic, it was led by a royalist opponent of the revolution, Louis François Perrin, comte de Précy. Paris sent elements of the Army of the Alps and, by early October, they had bombarded Lyon into surrender.
As Marie Antoinette was guillotined in Paris, Robespierre sent word to the Jacobins reestablished in Lyon that “Chalier must be avenged.” The whole city, except the houses of the poorest, was to be burnt to the ground, and the remnant renamed ‘Ville-Affranchie.’ In revolutionary newspeak, Lyon would be transformed into ‘Liberated City.’ Two of the most radical revolutionaries among the Parisian Jacobins, Collot d’Herbois and Fouché, were sent to Lyon to visit vengeance on the people of the city in addition to their homes. Chalier’s remains were deified and, in a perverse festival, carried through the streets of Lyon. Then the executions began. By the end of 1793, 2,000 citizens of Lyon would be guillotined, shot en masse by cannons loaded with grapeshot, and the survivors subsequently dispatched with swords and pickaxes. The memory of these atrocities would long endure in Lyon.
At the birth of the modern age, the ‘opposition Lyon-Paris’—the France of faith and tradition against the France of incredulity and revolutionary change—was in abundant evidence. And there remains a Paris-Lyon difference in how their associated political figures speak about contemporary French cultural politics. Even what might seem a trivial example points to this distinction. Last December there was a semifinal World Cup soccer match between the French national team and that of Morocco and authorities announced special police forces were being put into play in preparation for possible public disturbances. The fear was that supporters of the Moroccan team with origins in that country who are currently living in France as immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants might present a significant problem to civil order.
When the conservative former deputy in the National Assembly, Marion Maréchal, was asked to comment on members of the Moroccan team calling themselves the ‘pride of the Muslim world’ and exhorting viewers to ‘come to the good side’ by converting to Islam, she bluntly inquired what the public response would have been if the Spanish team had proclaimed themselves ‘the pride of the Christian world’ and called for the expansion of their faith. She noted the problem of allegiance to France in ‘binationals’ and argued for the need to create a love of their country in all immigrant populations. Regrettably, she noted, French institutions have abandoned this project, instead giving themselves over to talking incessantly about the horrors of colonialism, thereby making the already difficult process of integration all but impossible.
French Traditionalism in Lyon
Maréchal is well-known as a political figure in her country and internationally. But in 2018, after leaving political office, she expanded her intervention into France’s broader cultural struggle. She became the co-founder of a new private institution of higher education named the Institut des Sciences Sociales, Économiques et Politiques, or ISSEP. The chosen site of the new school was in Lyon. ISSEP’s motto is ‘Choose to Lead,’ and its mission has been straightforwardly consistent with that motto: to prepare a young generation with the business and management acumen needed for leading economic and political positions in French society, while culturally grounding them with a French nationalist and traditionalist religious identity. In this way, they will be prepared to challenge the globalist elite that currently runs the country.
The idea is to use the means of educational institutions to create a new and patriotic elite that can combat a governing class seen by conservatives as insufficiently rooted in French culture. Such an effort is profoundly well-rooted, sociologically. It is an effort to turn a successful component of the philosophy of cultural Marxism against itself.
The long, determined, and finally successful slog of the radical Left through the institutions in the West was theorized in the first third of the 20th century by revolutionary thinkers who had learned from the failures of the Marxist revolution in Western Europe. The central figure in that movement, Antonio Gramsci, produced a body of thought addressing the problem of consciousness in the working classes. So long as capitalist ideology was the only view taught in schools and elsewhere in the culture, no breakthrough against it would be possible. Gramsci proposed an effort by the revolutionary Marxists to infiltrate existing cultural institutions in order to produce and maintain anti-capitalist institutions, including schools. Only this, he argued, would permit the coming to consciousness of the working classes.
The idea of the cultural basis of bourgeois domination was already present in Marx. The German Ideology states clearly that the dominant ideas in a given society are the ideas of the dominant social class, and cultural Marxism further developed that theory, even if it has not effected the Marxist revolutions its advocates desired. In France, as in much of the rest of Western Europe, ideas rooted firmly in Marxist principles of social organization—such as that capitalism is fundamentally about classes dominating other classes—are the daily bread of public education. This cultural orientation has been leavened over the past several decades with the ideology of French guilt for the condition of its former colonies, implying in turn the country’s responsibility to openly receive as many immigrants as possible from those former colonies. Feminism too, and the contemporary Left’s hostility to the ‘hetero-normative’ family, now occupy a firm place in the pedagogical blueprint of French schools.
The operation of this far left cultural hegemony in elite French culture is relentless in its hostility to French nationalism. A recent France Culture podcast series on Jean-Marie Le Pen and his political party, the Front National (now the Rassemblement National), is a case in point. Ostensibly an effort to detail the historical record of the founder of the Front National, the series actually takes every opportunity to attack French nationalist sentiment and caricature it as dangerous and violent. At the same time, it unashamedly defends the far left, even in the form of Soviet communism. One segment of the series discussed Le Pen’s 1984 appearance on the mainstream television debate program L’Heure de Vérité. He began his intervention by asking for a minute of silence for “the memory of the tens of millions of people around the world dead under communist dictatorship, and to have a fraternal thought for the millions who are in the camps and gulags.” The podcast commentator classified this as “virulently anti-communist.”
The crisis in French education produced by the cultural victory of extreme anti-nationalism is increasingly noted even amongst the French Left. Jacques Juilliard, a celebrated historian of leftist politics, recently made an impassioned call for a ‘new patriotism’ in Le Figaro. His anti-elite language is of the sort so frequently disdained by the Left as the dangerous populism of the ‘extreme Right’: “The stupidity that is the most difficult to fight is that of intelligent people.”
In France, the promises of the May 1968 cultural revolution have degenerated into causes of malaise and decline. Sex has collapsed into gender, the liberation of women has become secessionist feminism, antiracism is now blatantly identitarian racism, and universalism has been converted into the endless division of society via the appetite for infinite difference. Moreover, the deleterious effects of the cultural revolution extend even into academic STEM fields: Julliard noted, with exasperation, that in the land of mathematical giants such as Pascal, Galois, and Poincaré, France now ranks only 23rd in STEM in the world, well behind much of Asia as well as the UK, the U.S., Germany, and Poland. France’s long-standing intellectual presence in mathematics is simply evaporating away.
Now, at the awful terminus of the cultural revolution, it seems that there is a step beyond Julliard’s contention about the difficulty of fighting the stupidity of intelligent people: if those ideas are given enough room and enough encouragement, then a time will come when there won’t even be any intelligent people left to formulate them.
