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Frank
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A people was there, stable, occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or more other peoples substitute themselves for it. It is replaced, it is no longer itself.
Those are the words of Renaud Camus, France’s most controversial living intellectual. They describe a process he’s called “the Great Replacement.” He coined the term in 2010. Since then, the term has been bitterly disputed. Now, though, it’s becoming harder and harder to deny.
The Great Replacement has happened because of the spread of a way of thinking Camus dubs “replace-ism.” People, and indeed things, come to be seen as interchangeable, equivalent pieces on a global playing-board. This has more to do with the spread of democracy, industrialization and capitalism, the decline of religion, mass education and mass entertainment than conscious design. We have erased all forms of meaningful difference and with it any barriers to the mingling of all the world’s peoples.
This flies in the face of everything we’re told about the Great Replacement as a dangerous far-right conspiracy theory. Now it sounds much more like an objective description of demographic fact, with a distinctly inoffensive, impersonal series of causes behind it.
Not that the Great Replacement is impersonal. Politicians on both sides of the political divide are grappling with it in very personal ways. In recent years, far-left politicians in France have become more open in their embrace of demographic change as a force reshaping France. Some have even gone so far as to try and reclaim the Great Replacement from the right, affirming that it does, in fact, exist and turning it from a harbinger of national suicide into a vision of a hopeful, better future.
That’s exactly what Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise – France Unbowed – has done. He’s hailed the “New France,” a “creolized” society of “motley, mixed ones,” and directly addressed right-wing politician Éric Zemmour at the beginning of this year by saying, “Yes, Mr Zemmour, there is a Great Replacement.” Zemmour made demographic change the central platform of his failed presidential campaign in 2022. He’s widely seen as the most right-wing politician in France, to the right of Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, which remains the favorite to win the next election, despite a judicial ban on her running for office.
For politicians such as Mélenchon, the Great Replacement is now a fait accompli, a done deal. France will never be what she once was; there is no going back. Instead, there will be a nouvelle France, a Sixième Republique to replace the current Fifth.
The Spectator
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