Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,
France is burning. But why? The obvious answer to that question is that it has imported massive numbers of people – often young, military-aged men – from parts of the world where violence is more prevalent. Or, as the President of the United States put it over the weekend, “The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country.”
This is all well and good and, of course, there’s a great deal to it. France has, indeed, “imported the third world” (to use the Vice President’s phrasing). Interestingly, though, over the last couple of decades, France has imported far less of the Third World than its larger neighbors have, both in absolute and relative numbers.
Over the past ten years or so – since Third World immigration to Europe ceased to be a “problem” and became a “crisis” – no nation has seen a greater influx of foreign-born residents than Germany. From 2015 to 2024, Germany welcomed just over 6 million immigrants, which is equivalent to the rest of the EU combined. Its foreign-born population jumped from 13.4 percent to 20.9 percent, a massive increase, and the overwhelming majority of those immigrants came from “non-EU countries.” The UK followed Germany with more than 4 million immigrants, and Spain was a slightly more distant third (in total number of immigrants).
Relatively speaking, Malta saw its foreign-born population jump from 9 percent in 2013 to 32 percent in 2024, the largest increase over the last decade (or so). It was followed by Luxembourg, Portugal, and Germany.
Compared with almost all of its European cousins, France’s foreign-born population has increased relatively slowly, from 9.1 percent to 11.3 percent (albeit with a change in methodology). If the obvious answer were the correct answer, in other words, then Germany would be burning, Malta would be burning, the UK and Spain would be burning, but France would be fine. But it’s not. So again, why is France burning?
I know that the consensus is that what is happening in France today is likely to happen in Germany tomorrow, the UK the day after that, and all across Europe next week. Moreover, the conventional wisdom on the Right has it that the French uprising should be seen as a warning to the United States, which is to say that all Western nations have similar problems to France and all Western nations should, therefore, be preparing to deal with domestic Third Worldism at some point in the not-so-distant future.
Now, to be fair, there is some truth in this. There are significant and universal problems associated with importing huge groups from non-Western societies and consciously choosing not to “Westernize” them or integrate them culturally. The West’s crisis of confidence, its ideologically driven detestation of its own heritage, and its refusal to demand assimilation by its new residents are widespread failures that have produced and will continue to produce significant social, cultural, and economic issues. There can be little doubt about that.
At the same time, however, France is still different from the rest of us in the West. There is no real equivalent for the French experience – or at least there’s no real equivalent in Europe.
For most of Europe, the “migrant crisis” began in 2015, when more than a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa sought asylum from ongoing war and related devastation. For France, by contrast, its own migrant crisis started more than six decades earlier, in 1954, with the creation of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which issued a declaration calling for national independence on November 1 of that year and launched the Algerian Revolution/French-Algerian War. By the time the war technically ended eight years later, the Fourth French Republic had fallen, Paris police had massacred as many as several hundred Algerian immigrants in a single-day crackdown on dissent, tens of thousands of “harkis” – i.e., Muslim auxiliaries who fought for the French in Algeria – were resettled in France, and hundreds of thousands of economic refugees had fled Algeria for France (although some returned “rotationally”). Additionally, in 1968, six years after the end of the war, France and Algeria reached an agreement providing Algerians unique immigration and work status, which contributed to an approximate doubling of the Algerian population in France over the next 15 years.
What all of this means is that while France may have a lesser issue than its European brethren with a restless foreign-born population, it has a much more serious and much better-established problem with second- and third-generation immigrants, mostly from Africa. Those populations might not present a serious risk to the French state if they had been integrated in any serious or sustained way, but they haven’t been. If anything, they’ve been rather mercilessly isolated and segregated from the productive parts of French society. When I wrote above that France has no equivalent in Europe, what I meant was that France’s policies toward and treatment of its African migrants have a parallel of sorts, but one found, ironically enough, in Africa.
Two of the most significant and far-reaching acts of the National Party, the party of the Afrikaner white minority and the architect of apartheid in South Africa, were the 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act and the 1970 Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act. Both of these were presented to the world as magnanimous acts on the part of the National Party to give the country’s black population its own lands and a chance at political independence. In truth, of course, the Bantustans (literally “people places”) were the apartheid regime’s attempt to rid the white areas of the country of the black “surplus population” and to deprive them of their citizenship, thereby eliminating any claims they might someday make against their stolen property.
Black South Africans were divided up along rudimentary ethnic and linguistic lines and were then sent to the “homeland” that had been designated for their group. And when I say “sent,” I mean that they were told to go, were given no choice in the matter, regardless of their connection to the land, and were then physically forced to move. Once in their new Bantustans, the people were told that they were no longer citizens of South Africa but were, instead, citizens of their new “homeland,” which would be treated by the National Party regime as a “foreign” polity. In their generosity, the Afrikaners (that is to say, the descendants of the 17th- and 18th-century Dutch settlers) gave their black “former” countrymen 13 percent of the country’s absolutely most craptastical land – even though blacks constituted roughly three-quarters of the population and even though the country is among the most blessed by God in terms of beauty and natural resources. Strangely, all the gold and the uranium and the rest of those resources just happened to be located in “white South Africa.”
Anyway, the Bantustans served several purposes for the apartheid regime, but most significantly, they kept the black people where the government could keep an eye on them.
For much of the 1960s and 1970s, the French and South African governments remained on very good terms. France was apartheid South Africa’s second-largest foreign partner and its collaborator in nuclear research and energy. Perhaps one of the things that bound the two regimes together was their mutual distrust of their “surplus populations,” those undesirable foreigners, for whom they, apparently, had no use and no civil solution. That term, “undesirable foreigners,” has its roots in the internments of the late 1930s and the Vichy years, when camps like Rivesaltes held those the state deemed unsuitable. As the historian of modern France Jeannette E. Miller notes, Rivesaltes was one of the more infamous of “the two hundred internment camps… that dotted the French countryside during the ‘Dark Years,'” in part because it was “repurposed” by the post-war French government as a resettlement camp used to house harki immigrants. To be clear, the harki housing camps did not serve the same purpose as the Nazi transit camps, and they were not Bantustans, not even close. They were, however, brutal, ugly, depressing, and purposefully isolating. They were used by the French government to dispose of its unwelcome immigrants, the Algerians it felt a duty to resettle but whom it had no desire to integrate into French society.
These camps were also, in many ways, the antecedents to the nation’s now-infamous banlieues.
Banlieues is a generic term identifying any suburb of any of France’s major cities. But it’s also a term that has been used more and more over the past couple of decades derogatorily, a term intended to convey the ugliness, poverty, and despair of the mostly African, mostly Muslim suburbs of Paris. These ghettos were created to be “utopias for workers,” but, over time, came to be the place in which the descendants of African immigrants and other unwanted people are isolated. And they are almost entirely ignored by Parisian cosmopolitans – or at least they’re mostly ignored, springing to mind only when their residents riot or commit acts of terror. The banlieues are where today’s French keep their undesirables, their surplus population, the people whom they don’t want to think about but would nevertheless like to keep an eye on. The banlieues are the places the French keep around because their minorities exist and, as Spike Milligan noted, everybody has to be somewhere.
For the last decade-plus, ever since the terror attacks at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, American journalists have flocked to the banlieues to tell their story and to demonstrate their true beauty as hubs of “diversity.” These journalists’ real goal, of course, is to prove conservatives wrong about the banlieues being “no-go zones.” What they’ve done in reality, however, is prove something else altogether: namely that France is a pretty screwed-up country and one flirting for years with the type of violence it’s currently enduring. One such profile, penned by The New Yorker’s George Packer, gives a good sense of the conditions:
Ben Ahmed, who is thirty-nine, works as a liaison between residents and the local government in Bondy – a suburb northeast of Paris, in an area called Department 93. For decades, a bastion of the old working class and the Communist Party, the 93 is now known for its residents of Arab and African origin. To many Parisians, the 93 signifies decayed housing projects, crime, unemployment, and Muslims. France has all kinds of suburbs, but the word for them, banlieues, has become pejorative, meaning slums dominated by immigrants. Inside the banlieues are the cités: colossal concrete housing projects built during the postwar decades, in the Brutalist style of Le Corbusier. Conceived as utopias for workers, they have become concentrations of poverty and social isolation….
For all their vitality, the banlieues feel isolated from the city, and from France itself. Parisians and tourists rarely visit them, and residents complain that journalists drop in only to report on car burnings and drug shootings…. Many suburban residents, meanwhile, never even think of going to Paris. Compared with American slums, the banlieues have relatively decent standards of housing and safety, but the psychological distance between the 93 and the Champs-Elysées can feel insuperable – much greater than that between the Bronx and Times Square. The apartment blocks in the cités, often arranged around a pharmacy, a convenience store, and a fast-food joint, look inward. Many have no street addresses, obvious points of entry, or places to park. The sense of separation is heightened by the names of the surrounding streets and schools, preserved from a historical France that has little connection to residents’ lives….
To be clear (again), the banlieues are not Bantustans. Nothing else really could be; nothing else really could compare to the Nationalist South Africans’ ingenious depravity. At the same time, though, the similarities are striking – and telling. Conservative commentators mocked Sky News over the weekend for attributing the violence in France to “economic inequality.” That’s fair, but only up to a point. There is undoubtedly a meaningful economic component to the anger and frustration exploding throughout the country. That’s not the lone cause, of course, but it’s not insignificant. As for the “inequality” variable, that too is important. As angry and violent as some black South Africans are with their white countrymen today, imagine how much more frustrated and violent they’d be if the free world hadn’t applied the pressure necessary to overturn apartheid.
Now apply that to France.
The Western world is, indeed, at risk from importing masses of migrants who are unwilling to assimilate. Again, that much is clear. Still, the lesson to learn from France right now is that assimilation doesn’t happen by accident. To save themselves, the nations and peoples of the West must recover their civilizational self-confidence and must, as a result, make a much greater effort to assimilate their newcomers and their children – economically and culturally.
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