American Thinker

by Lars Møller

    France—long the self-proclaimed guardian of high culture, of cathedrals and Cartesian clarity, of Enlightenment rationality and the moral vocabulary of Christian inheritance—now confronts scenes of disorder that would have been unthinkable to its earlier custodians. In the streets of its cities, young cohorts drawn largely from Muslim immigrant communities assert themselves with a confidence born of demographic momentum and ideological certainty.

    The response of the governing class under Emmanuel Macron has been a studied detachment—the sociological equivalent of what clinical psychiatry once termed belle indifférence, the serene unconcern of the hysteric in the face of symptoms that disrupt ordinary life. This posture, cultivated since the retreat from North Africa, has allowed the progressive erosion of the nation’s historic cultural core while elites congratulated themselves on their openness and compassion toward the cultures of the world.

    The withdrawal from Algeria and the Maghreb marked more than a geopolitical retreat. It inaugurated a moral and demographic inversion. Successive governments, first Gaullist, then Socialist, and finally centrist-technocratic, treated the influx of populations from former colonies as an opportunity for national renewal rather than a structural challenge.

    The labor needs of the Trente Glorieuses shaded into family reunification, asylum claims, and chain migration. Official statistics remain constrained by the French republican taboo against ethnic or religious censuses, yet successive surveys reveal the scale of the change.

    An Ifop study conducted in 2025 places self-identified Muslims at approximately 7% of the adult population of metropolitan France, up from 0.5% in the mid-1980s. Other institutional estimates for the broader population, including younger cohorts, range nearer 9–10%.

    According to INSEE’s 2023 report (based on data collected in 2019–2020), 44% of immigrants identify as Muslim. While this religious affiliation remains robust into the second generation—encompassing 32% of all descendants of immigrants—the trajectory diverges sharply by lineage: Islam is maintained by 54% of descendants with two immigrant parents but plummets to 23% among those with mixed parentage (one immigrant and one non-immigrant parent). Among the population with no migration background over two generations, the figure drops to just 1%.

    More consequential than sheer numbers is the character of the religiosity. The same Ifop inquiry documents a process of re-Islamization, especially among the young. Thus, 80% of Muslims describe themselves as religious, a figure far exceeding that of other confessions. Daily prayer has risen from 31% in 1994 to 62% in 2025, while Friday mosque attendance has more than doubled since 1989.

    Among those aged 15–24, religious intensity peaks. Approval of positions associated with political Islam has roughly doubled since the late 1990s, with one in three expressing sympathy for at least one Islamist current, the Muslim Brotherhood foremost among them.

    Parallel reports by senior civil servants and parliamentary groups have traced networks of “entryism”—the quiet colonization of schools, local associations, sports clubs, and municipal structures by Brotherhood-linked organizations seeking to establish parallel norms. Macron’s 2021 law against separatism closed some radical mosques and associations, yet subsequent Senate inquiries conclude that the advance continues under softer, more institutional forms.

    Throughout these decades, the elite preferred the consolations of moral superiority. Multiculturalism was framed as the inevitable corollary of France’s universalist vocation. Skepticism about cultural compatibility was dismissed as residual colonialism or, later, as “Islamophobia.”

    The Christian matrix of French civilization—its liturgical calendar, its artistic canons, its anthropological assumptions about the person and the family—was treated as a disposable historical residue rather than the living condition of national coherence. Church attendance collapsed, and the non-religious rose toward 37–40%.

    In the banlieues, a different sacral order consolidated. The warning lights flashed repeatedly: the 2005 riots, the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher murders, the Bataclan massacre of November 2015 that claimed 130 lives, the Nice truck attack, the teacher beheadings, and the endless smaller stabbings and vehicular assaults.

    Each time, the official response combined ritual condemnation of “terrorism” with renewed insistence that the problem was not Islam but its “instrumentalization.” The remedy lay in more social spending and more vigorous affirmation of republican values. The deeper civilizational question was ruled out of order.

    The current phase has acquired a sharper edge. Street mobilizations of recent years—whether the 2023 riots following the death of Nahel Merzouk or the more recent waves of school blockades and urban unrest—reveal a tactical convergence between segments of the far left and Islamist networks.

    La France Insoumise and its satellites have cultivated the Muslim vote through energetic defense of Palestinian causes and relentless accusations of systemic racism against the police and the state. Intelligence assessments and parliamentary reports note the opportunistic alliance.

    The revolutionary left seeks the collapse of the existing capitalist and republican order; the Islamists, confident in demographic trajectory and doctrinal certainty, pursue the long-term implantation of their own social norms. Both sides find utility in the battle-ready youth of the cités.

    Cultural symptoms accompany the political ones. In July 2026, a rapper performing under the name BORO700 released a track that explicitly glorified Mohamed Merah and Salah Abdeslam, with the refrain “Bataclan, je l’ai shooté à l’œil.” The song was chanted at lycée blockades, and the artist is scheduled to stand trial on October 21 for glorification of terrorism.

    Such artifacts are not isolated provocations. They express a mood of triumphalist memory among certain youth cohorts who regard the 2015 massacres less as national trauma than as acts of righteous violence. The spectacle is distasteful in the extreme; it is also clarifying. A civilization that once produced Racine and Pascal now listens, in parts of its territory, to the aestheticization of its own slaughter.

    Macron’s governing style has exemplified belle indifférence. He has spoken of separatism, republican principles, and the need to free French Islam from foreign influence. Moreover, he has enacted legislation and closed institutions.

    Yet the deeper architecture of policy remains intact: continued high levels of legal immigration, reluctance to confront the fertility differentials and cultural incompatibility that drive long-term population replacement, and an elite consensus that any robust defense of historic French identity risks the stigma of the far right.

    The president and his circle appear to inhabit a world in which the visible disintegration of social trust, the parallel societies of the banlieues, and the demographic forecasts of Pew Research and national institutes are secondary to the management of short-term electoral coalitions and the maintenance of a progressive self-image.

    The indifference is beautiful precisely because it is cultivated: a philosophical pose that elevates abstract openness above the concrete survival of a particular people and its inherited forms of life.

    Tragically, the process recalls the late stages of other high civilizations that lost the will to transmit their own spiritual and cultural substance. The French case is especially poignant because the nation once possessed an unusually articulate tradition of self-understanding—from the Capetian sacral monarchy through the classical age to the republican synthesis.

    That tradition is now treated as one option among many in a marketplace of identities, while a rival monotheism, younger in its European incarnation and far more demographically vigorous, advances with the confidence of those who believe history favors them.

    The left’s millenarian desire for the end of Western capitalist society finds an unexpected partner in an Islamism that views the same society as ripe for supersession. Both parties, in their different registers, welcome the disorder.

    A nation that once exported its language, its law, and its arts is now watching, with eyes wide open, as the progressive barbarization of its public spaces and the hollowing of its historic culture unfold. The moral detachment of a conceited elite has become the psychological precondition of that surrender.

    Civilizational recovery is illusory. As it is, the homeland of high culture continues its descent under the sign of a cultivated and lethal serenity.