“To the French police officers I say: you are the last bulwark. If you give way, it will be great disorder. It will be the victory of the barbarians. Be proud of your uniform."
So said Philippe de Villiers, member of the European Parliament and founder of the Puy du Fou theme park in Vendée, which is centred around the history of France.
How much truth in so few words.
Thousands of police officers place their bodies between the horde that sets fire to everything it finds, prevents residents from going down into the streets in safety, and forces thousands of schools to close.
761 police officers and gendarmes injured by stones, firecrackers, and Molotov cocktails.
While England is no longer safe enough to host American warplanes even on its military bases, there is only a police officer standing between civilization and chaos.
In Bordeaux, the barbarians blocked the entrance to the Capucins police station and set it on fire to stop the officers from coming out.
At this moment there is nothing more important in Europe than what is happening in France.
Clémence Guetté, vice-president of the French Parliament and leader of the insurrectionary left, announces: “We will sweep away the old world."
If the police give way, who will defend this poor old world that they are so eager to sweep away?
The politicians who caused this disaster? For a week, Emmanuel Macron has said nothing.
According to an Elabe poll, 55 percent of the French say they approve of the riots.
Michel Houellebecq had already foreseen this defeat by exhaustion in “Submission":
“For some months the attitude of the center-left media had changed: violence in the suburbs and interethnic clashes were no longer mentioned at all; the problem was simply ignored; they had even stopped denouncing the ‘Cassandras,’ who for their part had ended up falling silent. People in general seemed to have grown tired of hearing the subject discussed; and, in the circles I frequented, the fatigue seemed to have set in earlier than elsewhere; ‘what must happen will happen’ - that was how the common feeling could be summed up."
If the police were to give way, only the army would remain, and I am sure few want to see the army take control of Europe’s streets.
Five years ago, French generals wrote a letter to Macron that caused a sensation: “Act, or there will be an explosion, and then we will have to intervene."
Officially the DGSE, the General Directorate for Internal Security, has mapped 150 French districts “in the possession" of the Islamists.
These “lost territories" are not distant provinces. They are schoolyards where French has become a guest, stations where the name of the Republic can still be read but is no longer spoken, internal borders drawn by the habit of surrender.
“If one of ours falls, we will drop everything, we will let everything burn," they now warn from the police union.
A warning of unprecedented gravity.
If the Islamic inhabitants of the suburbs had not taken control of the riots, it would have remained an ordinary high-school mobilization. That is the real novelty of these images: the barbarians have conquered the school.
From Paris to Viry-Châtillon, the police officers burned by the barbarians are beyond counting.
Fires follow one another at police stations in Cannes, in Cavaillon, in Le Havre, in Nîmes, in Roubaix…
In Marseille, two off-duty police officers dragged out of their car and almost lynched.
The police in Limoges are attacked with Molotov cocktails after being lured into a “sensitive" area of the city. A four-hour battle.
The situation is described by the former head of the French secret services, Pierre Brochand (the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure):
“1,500 portions of territory, in a ‘leopard-skin’ pattern, escape the full control of the public authorities, and the social pressure exerted there is contrary to our ways of living and thinking. In these enclave counter-societies, a low-intensity guerrilla war is spreading against what remains of the national state and, more generally, of French influence (firefighters, doctors, teachers, referees). A pessimist would even note the return, in a lesser form, of the colonial insurrections: police stations as forts, checkpoints, mutual ‘raids and withdrawals,’ cellar-sanctuaries, day/night contrast, the struggle for the ‘conquest of hearts.’ All that is missing - and it is no small thing - is the structure of the Algerian FLN."
The other countries will follow if they do not correct course.
Meanwhile, across Europe, on October 7, people were shouting “long live October 7" in the streets.
The great Georges Bernanos wrote that civilizations die of their own weariness before they fall under the blows of their enemies:
“The causes of decadence are almost everywhere the same in history: excessive individualism and hedonism, the softening of morals, social egoism, contempt for heroic values, the intellectualization of the elites, the decline of popular education, the diversion or abandonment of spirituality and the sacred. Other causes are frequent: alteration of the ethnic substrate, degeneration of natural aristocracies, loss of historical memory, oblivion of founding values. Decadence arrives when the concern to maintain the people-community in history weakens, when the communal bonds of solidarity and lineage grow feeble. To sum up, one can say that decadence sees apparently contrary symptoms come together: the excessive intellectualization of the elites, ever more detached from reality, and the primitivization of the people. Panem et circenses… Europe today is in a situation of this kind".
Yes, this is Europe today.