Lost in France
Like most British people, I have a love-hate relationship with France. I despise the French political establishment and its obsessional pride in helping to create the monster that is today’s European Union; the culinary peculiarities of many of its restaurants; or the doubtful driving abilities of many of its urban inhabitants. On the other hand, I love the physical and cultural landscape that France has to offer. I maintain a keen interest in aspects of French history, and absolutely adore the numerous glorious châteaux that pepper the countryside. I first visited France as a child in 1980. Since then, I have enjoyed a school cultural exchange to Le Touquet and Paris. I visited the beaches of the D-Day landings and travelled the full length of the country by train in my mid-teens and, more recently, have loved two summer holidays on the Côte d’Azur over the past decade.
To wake up last weekend to the news that so much of France had been attacked and ransacked by armies of feral youth brought a sense of sadness I hadn’t experienced in a long time. In fact, the sight of the Hôtel de Ville in Limoges – that wonderful Neo-Renaissance masterpiece – being engulfed in flames from a deliberate arson attack left me so deflated, I had to take a drive out into the countryside to try to put the image out of my mind. I don’t think the destruction of a building has upset me that much since the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11. The good thing about living at the foot of the Pennines is the ample amount of remote lanes one can escape to in order to gather one’s thoughts. As I sat there in my car, looking out over the brooding moors, I began thinking: ‘Just what the hell have governments across western Europe done to our continent?’ A country that gave the world pasteurization, Concorde, photography, the aqua-lung, Monet, metrication and stethoscopes, now reduced to seeing parts of its major urban areas transformed into guerilla war zones.
Even then, the rancid TV news media couldn’t even be honest about the realities of what had occurred. As urban France burned, the BBC (that organisation we’re still bullied into funding) described the riots as ‘mostly peaceful’ (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ujnXPFkAt_s). Lest we forget, this is the same corporation who pointedly did not refer to the Unite the Kingdom rally in London in September 2025 in the same way. Actually, it couldn’t even bring itself to be honest about the numbers attending then, let alone their conduct. Nearly a million people (including yours truly) gathered for that rally and, of the 25 arrests which took place, the majority came from the small rabble of Antifa disciples kettled on Whitehall! However, turn La Belle France into ashes, and the likes of Hugh Schofield will tell you it’s positively pacifistic!
Then, surprise, surprise we were given the impression these were riots rooted in student digruntlement about the condition of their places of learning. Let me tell you something: I was a pupil at a wonderful school, which was subsequently reduced (after my departure) to a shadow of its former self by a headmistress far more adept at embezzlement than ever she was at education. By the late 90s, students were having to endure cold classrooms in winter; suffer the indignity of cleaning those same classrooms; as well as relying on text books way past their useful age. I don’t ever recall reading about the boys and girls from there rioting and looting on West Wickham High Street to vent their anger and frustration. No, this was violence for the sake of violance, carried out by all the usual culprits – cultural imports in tandem with a radicalised Left that has managed to get away with giving the proverbial middle finger to civilised societies for far too long.
Like Germany, the UK, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Greece, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, France has been put through the tortuous ordeal of rapid demographic and cultural change over the last 30 or so years that was never approved by its own citizenry. Romantic Paris boulevards, formerly filled with the ambrosial aroma of warm baguettes and French coffee, now reeks from the putrid whiffs of tent cities, North African body odour and burning cars. It didn’t have to be like this, just as it didn’t have to be like this in London, Dublin, Brussels, Berlin, Marseille, Lisbon, Milan or Malmo. This predicament has been created by the deliberate choices of governments who wanted to treat their respective countries not as shining beacons of enlightenment with a shared sense of history, identity and values; but as denatured hosts of alien Third World hoardes to come and desecrate and/or leech off. Meanwhile the Left, ever keen to hitch themselves to any cause or any people that hate the West as much as they do, wallow in the ideological luxury of seeing once great European countries castrated of their independence by the unelected bureaucrats of the EU. Enfeebled into believing that open borders and multicultural ethics are the salvation of European peoples, instead of the societal suicide it now plainly is.
Don’t believe the mainstream media nonsense. Believe, as always, what you see with your own eyes. For example, the footage from sources that are prepared to not bend the knee to the prevailing convenient narratives – such as Australia’s News24 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvX0WJpQzTY). As Brendan O’Neill rightly says, this is what happens when you open your countries up to people who have no connection, no loyalty and no desire to see their environment prosper. My solution? The deportation of millions from Europe, in tandem with a wholesale crackdown on politically violent extremes. That is the way – the only way – Europe can ever return to anything like the place it was in the last decades of the last millennium. To continue along the path we have since the late 90s is a destination of ruination. France has shown us the conflagratory horror of what awaits if we don’t change course. You have been warned.
