American academic wokeism has been welcomed by France’s cultural elite. On a recent visit, during which I made the rounds at a few large Paris booksellers, I found translations of a number of bestselling BLM manuals from the American race-obsessed professoriate. Ibram Kendi’s antiracist ‘bible,’ translated into French as Comment Devenir Anti-Raciste, can be had all over the capital, along with mountains of recent publications in the areas of postcolonial studies, multiculturalism, queer theory, and feminism.
American woke cultural imperialism is also evident on the CV’s of French politicians. In May 2022, the French government appointed Pap Ndiaye as Minister of National Education and Youth. Ndiaye spent about five years researching his doctoral thesis in the United States. During that time, he was immersed in American academic dogma about race, and he adopted those ideas seamlessly into his own worldview. His research agenda shifted toward exploring structural racism in French society and his writings have been boilerplate Black Studies. In 2009, he wrote La condition noire: essai sur une minorité française and, during the Obama presidency, he published a short account of Obama’s place in ‘black America.’ Most recently, he has published an updated version of his history of blacks in America, subtitled “from slavery to Black Lives Matter.” Ndiaye has also given talks on Black Lives Matter.
Amidst this overwhelming cultural current, Marion Maréchal’s ISSEP recognizes both the importance of creating alternative institutions in which traditional French culture can be preserved and that it is vital to train new elites with conservative values. Such an approach is the only way to dislodge present elites and halt their anti-traditional onslaught. Gramsci believed that an organic intellectual class born of ‘working-class stock’ might be able to exercise a unique power in the cultural struggle for hegemony. Such intellectuals would be able to communicate in the primary language of the mass disaffected. For Gramsci, this was the urban proletariat. For traditionalists, it is Français de souche, deeply embedded in conservative and nationalist French culture and heritage.
Le Wokeisme en France
I was in France last autumn on a research trip that took me to both Paris and Lyon. I took advantage of the Lyon trip to visit ISSEP for the first time and was invited to give a talk. The topic was the woke revolution underway in American higher education. A full house of students, faculty, and interested community members greeted me. My French interlocutors knew a great deal about what was going on in this matter, and they wanted to be informed about how this cultural movement on the Left operated more generally, the better to combat its manifestations in France. At ISSEP, it was clear that there was a seriousness about identifying and confronting the international nature of this cultural war.
French students in higher education report much of the same cultural lunacy that has become daily news in the United States. At the nearby École Normale Supérieure of Lyon, there have been recent efforts to instruct students on the violence committed against ‘trans-people’ by failing to use their preferred pronouns. Drag shows—that omnipresent element of present American pedagogy—are also being mobilized at ENS-Lyon as teaching experiences by which non-trans students are beneficially exposed to a beautiful, liberating culture that might otherwise escape their notice.
Just as in the U.S., the radical push has extended outward from higher education to earlier stages in the educational process. Recently, at an elite private school in Paris’ 16th arrondissement, a pro-trans activist group was invited into the school to talk with twelve-year-old students about trans issues. In the course of the discussion, the students were badgered and called ‘transphobes’ for responding negatively to the question “Can men have babies?” Outraged parents turned it into a media affair. It seems that Pap Ndiaye, who has a son in the school, helped to arrange the visit.
ISSEP students are eager to confront this enemy, and they are intellectually well-prepared. During my talk, several of those in attendance asked precise questions about the concept of ressentiment in Max Scheler’s analysis. All were formally dressed and courteous, and all spoke a pristine and educated French. I thought of my conservative students at home, whom I admire for their courage in standing up to the woke monolith. But I could not help but recall their comparative lack of reading, and of the considerable number of them whose conservatism includes no serious attachment to any traditional cultural framework. Much of this is an historical issue, and certainly not the fault of the students. The United States is a country not historically suited to traditionalist conservativism, given its lack of a true Ancien Régime rooted in the traditional social and cultural order that was present in France and elsewhere on the continent. It is nonetheless an important point of difference in the American youth’s resistance to the progressive monolith compared to the resistance of their French counterparts.
Paris and Lyon Revisited
I had read Braudel and other sources on the Paris-Lyon relationship prior to my trip, but this was the first time I had been in the ‘Liberated City.’ Paris, on the other hand, I have visited many times. My experiences gave me the opportunity to return to the historic polarity of the two cities. Passing by the Sorbonne on a walk with my family, I noticed that Antifa graffiti was in evidence everywhere in this part of the Latin Quarter. I was particularly disheartened as I came upon the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève, which is situated on the Place du Panthéon. I have wonderful memories of reading for long hours here back in the days when I was working on my dissertation in the mid-1990s. On a wall of that library that faces the Église St. Etienne du Mont, within a stone’s throw of the Panthéon, vandals had spray-painted “Fascism kills” in enormous letters.
As I walked through Lyon, there was considerably less graffiti and no Antifa vandalism of public walls. Instead, there were numerous depictions of the Coeur vendéen. This cross and heart with the words “God the King” is a symbolic hearkening back to the royalist and Catholic resistance to the Revolution. Given the timing of the trip, I also found many posters and hand-written messages calling for “Justice for Lola.” Lola Daviet was a 12-year-old French girl who lived in a heavily immigrant-populated neighborhood on the northeastern outskirts of Paris. She was raped, tortured, and murdered in October 2022. The murderer, a female Algerian illegal immigrant, was known to immigration authorities, who had ordered her to return to Algeria but had done nothing to enforce the order. Predictably, the left-leaning mainstream press in France reported on demonstrations in support of Lola as the provocations of the ‘far-right.’ But in Lyon, there was evidence of deep antipathy for the elite’s dismissal of the crime.
There is a contrast in the scale of the two cities, as well. As soon as one descends from a Parisian taxi into the city streets en route from Charles de Gaulle airport, there is an impression of entering a human termite colony. On several occasions, I rode the #13 metro line, and every single train was filled well past capacity at every hour of the day in which I tried it. The online schedule reflected the traffic on that line, but it was unclear what, if anything, the metro officials were endeavoring to do about it. What a life, to begin and end the day crushed into a human sardine can, and how much easier the job of the pickpocket or the groper in such a setting.
In Lyon, by contrast, public space is organized on a much more human scale. It is the third-largest city in the country, with more than half a million inhabitants, yet it feels like a village. Walking downtown, at any hour of the day, one is not overburdened with the human presence as in Paris. From the Place Bellecour, Vieux Lyon is visible across the Saône, as is the rise of the steep hill atop which sits the magnificent Basilica Notre-Dame de Fourvière, dedicated to the Mother of God in thanks for her protection of the city against the Black Death in 1643. On this hill in A.D. 43, the Romans founded the settlement of, Lugdunum, which became the city of Lyon. As we walked up the hill from Vieux Lyon toward the Basilica, we passed through the Théâtre antique de Lyon, the construction of which the Romans began in the first decades of the first millennium. We sat for a while in the seats where once the citizens of the capital of the Gauls, under the Roman Empire, had been entertained only decades after the death of Christ. On the way back down, we sat quietly through an evening office at the Cathédrale Saint-Jean Baptiste, on which ground was broken in 1180. The church is enormous, more than one hundred feet high in the nave. Its imposing front façade reaches so far up into the sky that one has to situate oneself in the middle of the spacious Place Saint-Jean to get the whole edifice into a photograph.
As we sat in that vast holy place, the world outside the Cathédrale no longer existed in my mind. My thoughts fluttered away to the apex of the ceiling to seek the spirits of those who, nine centuries ago, had begun the work to make the structure in which I sat.
The Need for “A Great Religious Order”
Marion Maréchal was not in town when I visited Lyon, but I met the other ISSEP co-founder Thibaut Monnier. He exudes a youthful glow of unlimited energy and enthusiasm for the project of returning France back to the path that produced her. At a convivial dinner, I also spent time with several other ISSEP faculty members, each as passionate and as driven as the leadership of their institution. Over excellent local wine, our group talked of the France of Jeanne d’Arc, Pascal, Chateaubriand, Charles Péguy, Maurice Barrès, and Charles Maurras. There was an overpowering sense of commitment to something solid, to a cultural framework that can serve as an anchor for the struggle against the forces that are endeavoring to scatter historic France to the winds. An international sister school is already up and running in Madrid, and still more are in progress. There was throughout a spirit of confidence and good cheer in the face of a great challenge.
At one point in our conversation, I mentioned being struck by the language Maurice Barrès had used to talk about the French army during the Great War. Some 25 years had passed since I had first encountered his words during my research for a book, but I nevertheless recalled them as if I had just read them. He called the soldiers “a great religious order, suffering for France, accepting their own sacrifice, taking their place in a mystery the meaning of which they cannot conceive.” Today, in the great cultural war in which she is currently engaged, France has a new generation of formidable defenders; the very same who were at the table with me in Lyon.
