More than forty years ago, historian Pierre Chaunu published a collection of articles written between 1983 and 1985, which recast a history of history. Half of it was religious history: “At the religious heart of Europe” is a book which first of all recalls the essentials – that there can be no theology of final ends without a philosophical introduction; that nothing is lost of our ancient knowledge; that it is prudent to introduce scientific data; and that the Christian tradition has no more to dread the exploration of the soul than that of the atom and the stars. And above all, that the Meaning of life is linked to life itself. The idea of a collapse of our industrial societies is from Pierre Chaunu. Collapse comes from biology; it is the sudden drop in strength with the slowing down of vital functions, causing an intermediate state between syncope and adynamia because of a decrease in the excitability of the brain. The collapse of Europe is now overwhelming. Almost half a century ago it was still prophetic.
Our flagging demographics is a work of demolition, undertaken more than fifty years ago, pursued hypocritically, and which today no longer bothers to hide itself. If you want to survive, you need children. However, the free assassination of fragile life beneath the veil of maternal flesh, organized by active minority interests, has only accelerated its pace and firmly taken the keys of the earthly kingdom: the media. The fertility of a billion men has fallen by half in twenty years. This should rejoice all those who today recite the catechism of the new ecology; that which wants to save the planet by sterilizing part of humanity and by manufacturing sterile transgender people and depravity. If everything stops at death, what is the use of transmitting culture and life: The demographic collapse finds its source in another collapse, which takes place between 65 and 69, when there no longer courses any hope beyond death nor the will to transmit life with reasons for living it… Those who then still profess a hope no longer know how to formulate it. The 1968 crisis was but one symptom of a crisis that affects life first and foremost.
Until the 1960s, the ultimate meaning of life was given by the Church. The sundering immediately followed the Second Vatican Council. The “collapse” was dizzying. The tumbling of empty boxes (Sunday obligation, confession, extreme unction) was nothing; the very content had vanished. We look for meaning in vain today in the mush of Sunday homilies. The concrete reality of the paschal message is no longer the “truly resurrected,” but the entry into politics, or officialized humanitarianism whose diaconia convey the sickly message of charity.
The current poverty of the conclusions proposed at the end of the meetings of the CEF (Conference of Bishops of France) was inaugurated during this period, with the comical thought of making the Industrial Revolution a success at the Ecumenical Council of Churches and at the Council – to advance the Popularum Progressio when the ship had already sailed for the churches. The elementary course in worker sociology, silent on the objective horrors of the Gulags, purred in place of the resounding announcement of the words of Eternal Life. Today, the elementary course focuses on the sociology of Islam. There were two paths, two revelations: The rejection of Apologetics and the betrayal of exegesis. Renouncing the making straight of the paths of the Lord is today’s apostasy, of which Pope Francis’ Laudato Si reflects the total flattening of Bereshit bara elohim, (In the Beginning, God created). For half a century, the so-called religious press has been indifferent to religious content – the magazines, la Croix, la Vie, le Pèlerin have only disseminated the washed-out salt of the new Church that Pope Francis wants to promote with the insipid message that says nothing we do not already know. The desire to believe in survival is powerful; today the belief in another life is reborn under the Eastern model of transmigration.
And Islam offers disoriented women a spiritual incarceration that seems preferable to the perverse, perverted and perverting ethical model of Europe, drunk on its own pseudo-values. The fall in fertility has been accompanied by a breakdown of our education systems. With half the number of children, we want to educate them better – we do not educate them at all. In its broad sense, culture includes everything that is not genetic. Pierre-Paul Grassé liked to recall that we have two memories – a genetic engineering which builds our biological being in an environment, and a cultural memory; and a culture that had to be reprogrammed with each generation, in a variable social environment, organized by a cultural base in which the great founding texts of Europe still played their role. The Koran was not yet part of it.
In 1983, the figures were already known, and appeared in the book by Jean Stoetzel, Les valeurs du temps présent (The Values of Present Times). It was a Europe-wide survey – 300 elegant pages of an illustrated essay, with 63 summary tables and 70 graphs. In this book (the forgetting of which makes the neglect of a Parisian and Salonarde intellectual even more disconcerting) the age variable was underlined. Barring a miracle, said Pierre Chaunu, who had read a lot, and good books at that, in 1986, “the industrial world, in fifty years, will simply be trampled to death.” And here we are. All the ingredients were already there; and he listed them without pity: “Electoral cuisine buttered with pardons, socialism adorning its dear petty criminals, abortions and sterilizations in place of nurseries are nothing but erysipelas, pustules and the insensible plaques of a new leprosy.”
Since 1944, polls have shown that intolerance is politically on the left, and that it is spiritually detached from any positive religious tradition. Until 1965, strong pressure from communist ideas, the sexual revolution, the contraceptive crusade and Third World pacifism crippled American resistance in Vietnam and paved the way for the Khmer genocide. Cambodia still has not recovered from this horror. China is now turning Cambodia into a Las Vegas for its greedy, money-obsessed rich elite. NGOs, especially Anglo-Saxon, abound, more numerous than the mosques in Wahhabi-land.
To have large numbers of children, you need a certain generosity; you have to consider that the child is an asset, and not an element in a program between the car and the house. French socialism nurtures a conception of small civil servants, that of National Education in particular. The anti-natalist ideology is linked to this conception of the world, seen by these small, secure officials who emphasize this security and who are afraid of everything; of risk, of initiative, of free decision, and therefore of life. And for some, more and more numerous, the hatred of this Love took on the face of God on the cross, and which is liberating. The brutal refusal of marriage came from the flattened, foggy and boring societies of the North. Sweden was the first to no longer replace its population. Everyone recently praised its policy of welcoming immigrants… It has just brought that to a screeching halt.
In the 1980s, the best among us were silent – Jean Carmignac, Rémy Chauvin, Claude Tresmontant. We managed to make believe that Jérôme Lejeune, the greatest French geneticist of the time, was nothing but a vulgar doctor who defended the freedom of women to dispose of their wombs. If he had not had the insolence to break the taboo of denouncing premeditated infanticide in utero and the compulsory contribution of all of us in the financing of our self-genocide, a Nobel Prize would have been his reward. We are thinking of canonizing him, if the thugs in cassocks, who rule inside the Church itself, do not stand in the way.
The great asylum of old people, of the non-retransmission of life, is not the asylum of quiet death. Rather, this is where we are at: “Even before eliciting a penetration, invoking an alien invasion, aging creates from within a pretty little hell of Intolerance, resentment and bitterness.” For once, the historian was almost wrong. Almost. This little hell is not that of old age, too tired to hate, but that of youth, that of immigration, and that other, that which only knows how to pour out its shamelessness and its vulgarity, both ordinary and extraordinary, that which has been deprived of culture, which hardly knows how to present itself and which will soon have for language only a dialect of brutes. To communicate, you have to have something to say and to share.
There is no conspiracy. There is only a slow infiltration, the effects of which accumulate and which a combination of circumstances transmutes into a critical mass of transformation. The foreign invasion is here today. And their Tradition, to these men of Islam, is but an inconsistent counterfeit of the Old Testament. The Koran is just a jumble where, here and there, the distorted but still recognizable remains of figures from the Bible float like the wreckage of a ship, with one end of the mast still visible – the figure of Abraham.
Demography is a science whose origins are lost in the mists of time, but it is a science that has long been French and one of the few that continues to speak and write in French. Counting men and counting the things men need is a political act. We must count the living, and we must also count the dead. For the living and the dead will be resurrected in the promised great day of the Resurrection. Demography is a simple science which requires a triple culture: You have to be a good mathematician, doctor, sociologist-psychologist. Alfred Sauvy embraced all three. But who still knows his name? For millennia, until the 18th century, the variable was mortality.
Then the variable became fertility. Statistics was the complementary science. Today it is no more than an instrument of propaganda, in the hands of a power which organized infamy, the collective murder of life under the veil of maternal flesh, and which now organizes the placing under the veil of maternal flesh, the guardianship of populations. The concrete wall around living and free human speech is reinforced. The new watchdogs are increasingly violent, and it is they who hate – they hate the woman who bears the child, born from an act of communication and a promise of fidelity; they hate intelligence supported by the courage of truth; and finally, they hate life and the culture that bore it, along with Tradition gathered in writing.
Fifty years ago, we had three blocks: The rich and creative part of the industrial world in full collapse, and the disorderly and chaotic ebb of third world countries. There was only one bulwark of resistance: The still controlled bloc of Islam. It was already enough to figiure things out in 1984. Around the Mediterranean, with the Latin group (France, Italy, Federal Republic of Germany, Portugal and Greece) we reached 169 million. On the orher, 167 million. But more than 40% under twenty. Which meant that in 2020, the number of young people on the southern slope was five times higher than on the north. And that the reduced and old population would be 30% on-assimilated population of foreign, Muslim origin. The Marangé report already pointed out the refusal to assimilate and integrate these new immigrants.
Those who still arrive are simply not assimilable. They come from archaic, violent societies that are not equipped to understand our structures, not even our structures of receptivity. This anomic violence, sociology had already analyzed thirty years ago.
In 1984, the number one demographic problem was suicide in the industrialized world. But then we got new information: The resurgence of mortality in Third World countries – from illness; not from hunger. One reason for this redeployment of disease – the sanitary systems, that aging indigenous infrastructure in the former metropolises. Prophylactic systems collapsed in entire sections. It was then that the sterilization process was launched for Third World countries – a rocket launched by interventionist technocrats and their vision of little retirees. It was the fear of others that secretly guided the contraceptive revolution. We were afraid of the demographic explosion in the Third World; so, we made a magnificent machine to counter it. That machine has now reached the West. We could have corrected things with a third child policy. We did not. The socialist system continues to pay 20% for the child who lives and gives 80% to kill him, with the encouragement of all the press, under orders.
The threat is not covid 19 – it is senility in the West, and major epidemics in the Third World. The current pseudo-pandemic is just a tree that hides the forest of the West’s doom and devastating diseases, because colonization happened too quickly and badly. Where we die of hunger, it is because there is no civil peace with its benefits. And you only have to open a map of the world to see that more often than not, these are wars waged by the new Islamic order that claims to impose Muhammad’s law on the whole planet. Howl, fir-trees. Cry, fountains. Weep too, women who will bear children, alienated girls in a world without pity for them and which destines them to be but wombs.
Sad observation of the collapse, which we could foresee for more than thirty years. Perhaps it will be useful to wake up a few of the dying, just in time for them to ask forgiveness for the genocide of Europe, in which they were complicit through their denial of reality and their proud “conservative” or “progressive foolishness.” But there will be a small remnant who will learn French as we learned Latin or Greek. There will also be a little remnant to understand and put into practice the teaching of Jesus. We are going to experience the sadness of barbaric violence, the horror of a robotic humanity, the mass murders. In the midst of this near future of the victories of hell, the light of Easter will shine invincibly, because barbarians or artificial intelligence will neither see nor suspect its existence, so much is it of a different nature than their darkness.
The Christian is an agnostic who has been taken by the hand – this is called Grace. The Church still needs to rediscover the memory of her true vocation – to raise up men and women capable of taking by the hand those who no longer see anything but the funereal horizon that they have been designated as their only future, and a future without a future – and to show them the sky. An open sky where angels ascend and descend.
Yes, the angels ascend and descend above the sleeping Jacob. He is offered his Creator to embrace. Let us in our turn opt for the One who said, “I, I am the light of the world” – אנא אנא נוהרה דעלמא.
Marion Duvauchel is a historian of religions and holds a PhD in philosophy. She has published widely, and has taught in various places, including France, Morocco, Qatar, and Cambodia. [Translated from the French by N. Dass.].
The featured image shows, “Zola leaving the courtroom,” by Henry de Groux; painted 1898.