“Où va ma France?”: The App the Left Wants To Ban

screenshot from mafrance.app website
An app stirs controversy by graphically showing the devastating impact of immigration on the daily lives of French people.

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An online app that measures the deterioration of the social environment in France is causing controversy. Left-wing MPs want to ban it on the grounds that it uses statistical data to measure the ravages of immigration and the explosion in crime. Meanwhile, more and more citizens are using it.

mafrance.app” and its related X account “Où va ma France?” is an app and website that collects social data from across France, classified by department and municipality, and provides indices measuring five key areas: insecurity, immigration, Islamisation, ‘de-Frenchification’ (défrancisation) and wokeism.

It includes general indices (“general change index”) as well as more targeted indices (“Islamisation index”).

Interactive maps allow users to select a location and see everything that is likely to negatively impact the daily lives of French citizens: the percentage of sexual violence or the intensity of drug trafficking in a given neighbourhood, but also, in the medium to long term, the construction of a mosque or the potential establishment of a migrant centre.

Apart from these obvious and easily identifiable criteria, all kinds of external indicators help measure the extent to which local structures are subject to a political and social model likely to encourage immigration, such as political subsidies paid to associations.

The ‘correlation’ tool can be used to generate graphs linking data that are not usually related, such as the number of Muslim first names given in a municipality cross-referenced with the increase in petty crime.

A press review relaying all news items related to immigration and crime completes the dashboard available on the site’s home page.

As a guarantee of reliability, the statistics collected and used by the site are those provided by public bodies. The figures on security are taken from the SSMSI, the Ministerial Statistical Service for Internal Security. For other topics, such as birth names or the rate of social housing in priority neighbourhoods, the site’s creators have used published government data or studies from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE).

Beyond the objectivity of the data, a factor of subjectivity comes into play in the development of the indices. The site’s creator explains to the news site Boulevard Voltaire: “The value of the coefficients is subjective, and I accept that. I don’t disclose them because they are not objective data.”

These imperfections have not prevented the site from being successful, revealing a map of France disfigured by immigration. Since its launch, the platform has enjoyed growing success. The Twitter account has 21,600 followers and has continued to grow since the media turned its attention to the app. A recent promotional post for the app has been viewed more than 900,000 times on X and has received more than 6,000 likes.

There are countless users: “those who are proud of their identity, those who regret that they can no longer let their children walk home from school alone, those who would like to leave their homes with the door open,” as Boulevard Voltaire sums it up. They are often ordinary citizens who want to find out about overall trends in their city or region, but also French people looking for a new home, or even, more unexpectedly, estate agents who want to give their clients the best possible advice on investments based on the potential decline in the value of their property. In such situations, the tool for comparing urban areas proves to be formidable, clearly revealing a wounded France and a preserved France—which is increasingly reduced in terms of surface area.

Ultimately, the creator—who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous and works under a pseudonym—intends to constantly enrich his tool in order to offer a veritable ‘encyclopaedia’ of territories, listing mosques, but also fast-food restaurants and halal butchers, as signs of a colonisation that does not say its name.

The very possibility of such statistical exercises is obviously not to everyone’s liking. Linking crime and immigration in numerical terms is one of the taboos of the mainstream press and even of the vast majority of the French political class. Sabrina Sebaihi, a Green Party MP and vice-president of the France-Algeria friendship group in the National Assembly, is campaigning for its ban and has alerted Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez to the problematic existence of this site, which she accuses of taking France ‘back to the 1940s’ and the ethnic and religious profiling implemented by the Vichy regime.

The site’s creator defends himself against any accusations of stigmatisation: there are other sites such as trouvetamosque.fr that allow users to find Muslim places of worship, and they do not bother anyone, he argues.

What Sebaihi cannot forgive mafrance.app for is its daring attempt to give objective criteria to the feeling of dispossession that so many French people—and so many Europeans—experience deep within themselves. What’s more, the controversial website clearly demonstrates that the cultural change touted by state propaganda is not synonymous with greater well-being but rather with a profound deterioration in daily life. Everything is now more complicated, more risky, more dangerous in neighbourhoods where non-European immigration exceeds certain thresholds.

We can, of course, appreciate all the developments that this tool enables: it offers nothing less than a map of the secession, in the near future, of entire swathes of the territory. This is a fact that can no longer be ignored, and it is understandable that some people are concerned about it.

Hélène de Lauzun is the Paris correspondent for The European Conservative. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. She taught French literature and civilization at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in History from the Sorbonne. She is the author of Histoire de l’Autriche (Perrin, 2021).

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