Plus ça. Change.

“Ce peuple, apparemment tranquille, est encore dangereux.”—Raymond Aron

On a sunny September afternoon in 2018, a friend and I went to another friend’s newly opened bookshop, The Red Wheelbarrow, on Rue de Médicis, across the street from the senatorial section of the Jardin Luxembourg.

The friend with me was Hermon Mehari, a trumpet player of Eritrean descent, born in Texas and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and soon to be a French citizen. The other friend was Penelope Fletcher, whom I have known since my teenage summers on this beach—

— on Hornby Island, where she was born and raised and where she opened her first bookshop at the age of 19.

And now, as of a couple of weeks ago—

—she has opened her fifth, which is right between the third and the fourth.

The new shop—all three counted as one easily rival any English-language bookshop in all of Europe—was once the bookstore and publishing house of the Action Française (AF), which was founded in 1889 by nationalist and royalist anti-Dreyfusards. Between the wars, the AF segue-wayed into much more violent and virulent extremism—it was their youth association that in 1936 dragged Léon Blum from a car and tried to lynch him, shouting “Death to the Jew” and kicking him in the head repeatedly, and leaving him on the ground for dead. Today they are a “laboratoire d'idées” discussing “issues that affect the national interest, such as sovereignty, ecology or globalization”, by which its 3,000 or so members mean Great Replacement theories, religious nationalism, the evils of abortion, civil rights, Jews, LGBTQIA+ and immigrants, especially Muslims, and uppity women, especially, it seems, Greta Thunberg, for reasons that escape me, and Simone Veil, whose statue—

Simone Weil statue in La Roche-sur-Yon, March 9, 2024. “THE CONSTITUTION KILLS OUR CHILDREN”

—they vandalized the day after the Macron government enshrined abortion rights in the constitution.

The AF quit the premises in 1925 but the man running it, Georges Valois, turned it into the publishing headquarters of Le Faisceau, a paramilitary fascist spinoff of the AF that modelled itself on Mussolini’s Fasci movement—blackshirts, parades, street fights with the communists, the whole kaboodle—before petering out of existence in 1928, when its founder went a little too left for his followers’ taste.

But that’s another story. Right now, I want to focus on the moment Hermon and I arrived at the shop and found its sidewalk packed with—

—affluent-looking intellectual types, mostly students but also young couples with babies in expensive pushchairs and toddlers in Petit Bateau.

The cop? He was one of a four dozen or so present because every person in the crowd except Hermon and I was carrying a copy of this book—

—which the author was signing inside La Nouvelle Librairie bookshop, which, you will recognize, is the same shop Penelope is painting in the photo above.

La Nouvelle Librairie opened around the same time as The Red Wheelbarrow. Next door. A publishing house and a bookshop, it was founded by François Bousquet, editor-in-chief of the far-right magazine Eléments and a collaborator of the “new right” godfather Alain de Benoist. Bousquet’s tiresomely anti-woke, likes to pad his nonsense with Foucault misquotes, and is close to most of the major asshats on the extreme right, including the author of Destin Française—which opened in the Number 1 slot that September and sold 120,000 copies by the end of the year.

Don’t recognize the author of Destin Française? Managed to avoid knowing anything about his Reconquête political party and ties to the reactionary media empire of the multi-billionaire Vincent Bolloré? Never had to hear how he “lies about the past in order to make people hate the present... and thus invents a detestable future”¹?

Lucky fucking you.

Eau-Oh... (Part III)

Anyway, it was a moment. That shocked me. And I am not easily shocked. For example, the lepennistes victory in the European election earlier this month didn’t shock me. After all, they came out on top in 2019, and before that in 2014. The size of their victory this time was alarming, but hardly shocking—every poll for weeks accurately predicted it. Macron’s response, dissolving the Assembly and calling a snap election, that was surprising, but understandable—there’s no way his government would survive a non-confidence vote this fall, so the dissolution was inevitable and imminent anyway. Why not get a jump on it? Catch left and right alike with their pants down, or, failing that, put the far-right in charge and hope they so fuck things up that the French snap back to their Cartesianated senses before the next Presidential in 2027. A dangerous game but the Macronistes don’t have much choice. Macron’s pretty much universally loathed. Having successfully decimated the centre left and right and unable to run for a third term, he is about as gimped a duck as there is, and his attrape-tout party is a tiny tent.

So what was so shocking about that scene in September 2018? No one was wearing Fred Perry or Ben Sherman. The only heads remotely skinned were the cops. Most shocking, there were as many women as men. Equally most shocking, Hermon wasn’t the only Black person in the crowd.

Compare the crowd scene above to —

—the gang that cracked Léon Blum’s skull in 1936. Or—

—these low-rent neo-fascists manifesting in Paris a month ago. Why weren’t these guys the dominant presence at the Zemmour signing? Where were the incels and the lunatic fringe? Why was everyone so depressingly normal looking?

Meanwhile, Penelope was filling her shop windows with anti-fascist titles.

And now, six years on, La Nouvelle Librairie is gone, subsumed by debts and Penelope’s ever-expanding empire.

So, there’s hope, right? Right?

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile—

—in the Pompidou, La Datcha has been given pride of place at the entrance to the permanent collection on the 5th floor. Painted after Mai 68 by Gilles Aillaud, Francis Biras, Lucio Fanti, Fabio Rieti and Eduardo Arroyo in pseudo-Soviet Realist style, it’s alternative title is Louis Althusser hésitant à entrer dans la datcha Tristes miels de Claude Lévi-Strauss où sont réunis Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault et Roland Barthes au moment où la radio annonce que les ouvriers et les étudiants ont décidé d'abandonner joyeusement leur passé (“Louis Althusser hesitating to enter Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes miels dacha, where Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes are gathered just as the radio announces that workers and students have decided to happily abandon their past”).

The firepower in the frame: that’s Barthes, arguably at the time the world’s most influential literary critic, on the far right with the tray of petit fours. Lévi-Strauss, seated in the big comfy chair, easily the world’s best-known anthropologist. Foucault, absently rubbing his bald head, the archeaologist of knowledge and power who shook and shocked the social sciences and still finds (mis)readers everywhere. Lacan, well, Lacan, as maddingly obscurantist as Althusser—and almost as reprehensible, but no one post-Freud has had anywhere near his impact on psychoanalysis, for what it’s worth.

And then there are all those deemed by the painters too worthy (or insignificant) for ridicule: Sartre, Braudel, Bourdieu, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Debord, Lyotard, Aron… all at their prime in this moment, part of a vital intellectual culture of international influence and renown unseen since the Enlightenement, and all now dead, replaced by a faceless and feckless crowd of Bousquets and Zemmours.

Triste, ça, non?

1. https://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Tracts/Zemmour-contre-l-histoire#