There is an unprecedented and revolutionary change going on on the Seine: a relative social homogeneity, which the French had been used to is being replaced by a multicultural society, mostly in the ethno-cultural dimension. The main means of conveying for that is a mass and uncontrolled immigration. The more it is mass and eclectic, the great, more rapid and profound the change.

Great Replacement

To describe this phenomenon the term “Great Replacement” has appeared, understood: a great replacement of one population by another. This term appeared in 2011 in the title of a short essay Renaud Camus and has become an international buzzword. In Poland it has been evoked recently by Jakub Majmurek from “Krytyka Polityczna” who defined it, rewriting almost word for word from the English Wikipedia as “far-right conspiracy theory inspiring acts of terror”. Irrespective of whether they are defended or severely condemn, there are few expressions capable of triggering such great passions by the sole fact of its use.

The term out of which the partisans of political correctness tried to make a humiliating threat or even a taboo, sort of a contemporary leprous cluster like “the final solution”, made an unexpected success and moved from a drawer full of theories to the high life. N the political life on the Seine it was given citizienshi by Eric Zemmour, the recent candidate in presidential election, the diabolization of whom was so advanced that it couldn’t make things worse.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE The term “Great Replacement” perfectly matched the civilization crusade which became the goal of a new political movement, characteristically named “Reconquista”. After all reconquista is nothing else that reversing the results of a population replacement, expulsion of settlers and invaders carried out by hosts regaining their lost territories.

When Zemmour ennobled this a bit embarrassing term, other candidates in the presidential election began to use it – like Marine Le Pen, so far reluctant as to the use of such radically anti-immigrant rhetoric which ruined her strategy of de-diabolization or even the center-right and moderate Valérie Pécresse.

Biographer of Emmanuel Macron, journalist Marc Endeweld has recently stated that even the president employs this formula in the close circle of his associates when talking about immigration and Islam. This anecdote from the pinnacles of power confirms that this term, born on the political and literary margin – to which many would like to push it back – is now taking a center stage in the public debate.

The problem with the “Great Replacement” is that it has its place more in the stands of electoral meetings than in scientific studies, because the people who use and give the term often understand it in divergent ways.

Its author, the writer Renaud Camus, defends the idea that in Western Europe, and especially in France, there are currently taking place population changes which he summarizes as follows: “here it is one nation and almost immediately, within a generation, one or more other nations appear in its place”. For the author, this phenomenon is “the most serious shock that our country has experienced since the beginning of its history, because if such an advanced change of population and civilization is brought to an end, then its further history will no longer be their history, nor ours”.

The leading French demographer Michele Tribalat, whose merits in the constant straightening of political baldness among French experts are invaluable, does not speak about it at all, saying that Renaud Camus himself does not want to situate the debate on a strictly scientific level.

Well, Camus is a writer and artist, with a slightly poetic soul, so the keen eye of science does not tempt him. “The great replacement does not need a definition” he argues. This is not a concept. It’s an everyday reality, which people see when they walk down the street”. He himself claims that it is a poetic descriptive metaphor, and prefers to juggle with numbers numerous polemical and brilliant analogies with the occupation period, for example dusting off such concepts as “collaboration”, which he uses analogously in relation to pro-immigration circles and politicians.

Taboo and political Lysenkoism

It does not change the fact that this theory is based on facts, and other more serious scientists confirm in their research that the “Great Replacement” is taking place. Jérôme Fourquet, who has been popular for some time now, who was able to make bestsellers of his books on statistics and demographics, sold in hundreds of thousands of copies, writes, for example, that “the true nature of immigration is obvious to us, but it has been hidden or treated instrumentally for too long”.

The issue seems simple. A constant and uncontrolled influx of immigrants, on the one hand, and the surplus of births by foreign women, on the other, logically mean that the number natives in relation to newcomers is proportionally shrinking. The situation, which is easy to observe in many cities, proves that change is not a pipe dream.

There is, however, one great difficulty in discussing this polemical concept – the lack of access to numbers or objectively verifiable facts to support or reject the Great Replacement thesis. In France, ethnic issues are a taboo difficult to understand, and ethnic, but also religious statistics are prohibited by law. Section 226-19 of the Information Freedom Act (CNIL) of 1978 prohibits their collection on pain of a fine of EUR 300,000 and five years’ imprisonment. There is no specification of nationality in a census like in the USA or Poland. Besides, nationality and citizenship in French have merged into one today, which does not help in the debate.

On the one hand, this makes it impossible to provide hard evidence of the demographic evolution of France, which would end the discussion, and on the other hand, it enables the intellectual balancing of various charlatans, such as the leading French demographer Hervé Le Bras or the television political scientist Clément Viktorovitch.

There is real political Lysenkoism in French demography, subordinated to ideological dogmas of political correctness which is trying to prove that the evolution of the population through mass immigration does not take place at all, or at least is not alarming. Experts mix data and manipulate definitions, do not distinguish dynamic flows from a static situation hic et nunc, starting a sentence, talking about foreigners to end it with an application for immigrants, etc. Nevertheless, the maize still does not grow in the snow…

Demographers with a reliable, strictly scientific approach, for whom numbers and data are the necessary material for their work, must resort to various tricks to bypass political taboos. The aforementioned Jérôme Fourquet, otherwise the director of the prestigious Ifop survey institute, perfected the method of counting names given by parents to newborns on the basis of data available in registry offices. On its basis, he was able to trace the evolution of the Arab-Muslim population in France over the past decades (from less than 1% in 1960 to over 21% in 2020).

At times, counting names can become a trap for those wishing to circumvent legal restrictions. The mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, who in 2015, based on the name criterion, reported on television the information that 69% of children in public schools in his city are Muslims, learnt it well. As a result, an investigation was launched against him, and the police searched the mayors office, hunting for physical or IT illegal ethno-religious files, fortunately non-existent.

Likewise, other clever indicators for bypassing demographic taboos, such as neonatal screening for sickle cell anemia. This disease occurs only in children -- and parents from Africa, the Antilles and partly from Asia, but not from European parents, allows an approximate indication of the ethnic proportion in French farrowing rooms. But when demographers began to exploit the data of the association dealing with the prevention of this disease, which, for example, allowed the conclusion that the proportion of non-European infants in the Paris region reaches ¾, the association was dissolved, and the targeted research was extended to all newborns.

Foreign enclaves

Nevertheless, the realities of French demographic evolution thrown through the door, squeeze in through the window and can no longer be ignored or denied. The presidential campaign of 2022 became a turning point.

The pope of Lysenkoist demography, Hervé Le Bras, who made his life mission from the struggle against the concept of the “Great Replacement” had to revise his denial. He admitted that although there is no great replacement”, there is a whole series of “small replacements”, that is, a radical and spectacular replacement of the indigenous population of some cities and areas by people of immigrant origin.

In this way, what everyone had seen and knew for a long time was officially stamped: there are demographically alien enclaves on the territory of France, these islands of the title “French archipelago” from Jérôme Fourquet's best-selling book. Virtually everyone knows them in France: the Seine-Saint-Denis department near Paris, where there are already more mosques than churches, “northern bastion” in Marseille popularized by Netflix's series, the inflammatory suburbs of Lyon, and actually every major French city, etc.

Moreover, the political class also had to bow their heads before the hard pronouncement of the facts after decades of negating them. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon invented the politically interesting term “creolization” – derived from the term “creole” for people of mixed origin, mainly descendants of whites and indigenous peoples in former overseas colonies. President Macron, presenting his proposal to populate the deserted countryside with a population of immigrant origin, used the term “demographic transition”, following the example of the now popular “energy transition”. It was probably intended by the president to combine positive ecological connotations with some sort of inevitability.

That’s a difference in vocabulary – says Eric Zemmour – which in fact reflects the same reality as the term “Great Replacement” he uses. One population replaces the other, the rest are details. Mass immigration is a fact and is changing the nature of France. To deny it is shameful and ideological blindness.

Explosion of crime

How has this mass immigration changed France in recent decades? When you look at the daily news in the media, especially social media, the first thing that catches your eye is immigrant crime, the most spectacular aspect of this shift alongside terrorism.

It is a fact that certain types of crime have become the sole prerogative of – or, as the French puts it beautifully, “chasse gardée” or a reserved hunting ground – of the immigrant population. This is evidenced by prison statistics, in which 24.5% are foreigners. Moreover, how many immigrants? How many French of immigrant origin? You can already see how the directors of prisons very keen on compiling ethnic statistic reports fined over EUR 300,000 ...

In any case, the new French have gained a monopoly in drug trafficking or organized crime, like the Auvergne newcomers in Parisian bistros. I wonder if Hervé Le Bras would agree with the statement that the brutal Nigerian Black Axe mafia pushing the Corsican Sea Breeze out of Marseille is one of those “small replacements”?

Another informal quasi-monopoly reveals police data on violence in everyday life, the daily, tiring, making you unwilling to leave the house after dark, undermining the elementary socialization that binds every healthy community. Statistics show about 700 daily acts of violence on a national scale, violence without a cause, that is, not motivated by theft or any other rational premises.

The infamous MENA, unaccompanied minors, often in fact minors, not only on paper, are “shining” here. The prefect of the Paris police, Didier Lallement, one of the figures of macronism, at the antipodes of political incorrectness, stated in a recent book that half of the street crime in the French capital is the work of foreigners. Deducting from the remaining half citizens of immigrant origin, there is little left for the indigenous.

But this is not the only, or even the most important, transformation of French society. The crime explosion is the tip of the iceberg scratching the bottom of the Titanic, and the real change is that of culture and civilization.

A social tissue that is torn

Because today’s immigration is of a different nature to the previous migratory waves that had been present in France for over a century. It is often pointed out that immigration is nothing new in France. For over a hundred years, Italians, inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, and even earlier, Poles, have been coming to work in the vineyards, mines and factories located in upon the Seine. Today Garcia, Perez and Fernandez are on the list of the most popular surnames in France, and every sixth inhabitant of northern departments has a Polish ancestor.

Demographic Lysenkoism plays this note with the grace of a violinist who has grabbed a jackhammer. Art is art, a citizen is a citizen, the number of Killers in prison must be correct, and as long as they are correct and calculations are in balance, there is no problem at all, and indicating threats is a hallmark of the “extreme right”.

However, today’s immigration is different from the previous ones. A son, or grandson of a Polish miner from Valenciennes could have been named Stanislas or Jean-Pierre but exactly as the French he celebrated Christmas, gave up his seat to women, didn’t sniff at pork or at a glass of wine and when his daughter married below her station, he wouldn’t cut her throat.

Nowadays, immigrants come not from neighboring countries belonging grosso modo to the same cultural circle, but from other civilization areas, bringing with them different customs and values.

The fact is that immigration has changed radically since the 1970s. Distances between countries of origin and France have increased, both in terms of kilometers and in terms of cultural differences. Assimilation no longer seems possible. It is impossible to demand that the newcomers abandon their traditions and adopt the traditions of their host country when they are too divergent. The only thing that can be required – for the state to be able to function at all – is integration, i.e. acceptance of the rights of the host, and only if they are not too strict and do not conflict with the habits of newcomers, such as Sharia law and French secularism.

When interviewed by TVP Weekly about how to summarize the problem with immigration in one sentence, Philippe Vardon, a patriotic politician from Nice who has been struggling with its negative effects at the local level for years, replies that “the loss of homogeneity resulted in the loss of social ties, the tissue is completely torn, so there is no longer any natural, simple solidarity”.

The negative side of immigration is not primarily economic problems or even police statistics, but a profound and revolutionary cultural change that has turned a relatively coherent monolith into the already mentioned “French archipelago”. This monolith was not a religious, social or political one, but it was built around the same plinth of values, common, or at least understandable to all alleged signatories of the invisible Rousseau’s social contract.

Now it is changing, society is breaking up into identity islands, often radically contrasted. The causes of this phenomenon are, as usual, complex and heterogeneous – globalization, individualism, secularization, etc. – but colonization-type immigration is one of them.

Speaking about the social consequences of immigration, political scientist Pascal Gauchon argues that multiculturalism reduces mutual trust and the willingness of different communities to cooperate due to the lack of a shared sense of identity. Society is fragmented, national solidarity is disintegrating, and the indigenous people are unable to find a common platform with immigrants who are too different from them.

On different islands of the archipelago

“Vivre ensemble”, or “co-existence”, the official slogan of the French elite, is being negatively verified by the behavior of members of these elites who are not even willing to live next to their protégés, send their children to the same schools and submit to the same rules of life that they do. The disappearance of the national bond is visible at the local level, along with the spatial separation of communities: closed elite estates, villages of indigenous remnants in the provinces, immigrant housing estates in the suburbs. The theoretical French model, full of slogans about equality, brotherhood and peaceful coexistence, has in practice changed, paradoxically, into a spontaneous and voluntary American-type apartheid.

The aforementioned phenomenon of giving Muslim names in the second and third generations illustrates not only the numerical growth of this island of the archipelago, fed by a constant influx of new immigrants maintaining the “matrimonial market”, but also ingraining in one’s own traditions and values, and the will to reject integration. Many enclaves in the suburbs of French cities are simply reconstructions of Arab, Turkish or African villages, sometimes literally.

Can the concept of colonization in reverse be better illustrated? Shocking and racist? But it was Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, assistant to the renowned professor of sociology Pierre Bourdieu, who called the decree on family reunification of 1976 “the founding act of transforming labor immigration into colonization immigration”.

“What can co-existence (le vivre-ensemble, a piece of this multicultural Newspeak efflorescence) be like, when we don’t even eat the same?” – rhetorically asks the above quoted politician from Nice.

It’s hard to disagree with him. While gastronomy is probably the only area in which reasonably dosed cosmopolitanism actually enriches culture, is it enrichment when indigenous cuisine disappears and is replaced by foreign culinary traditions?

It is widely known that in large cities, the Chinese run thousands of restaurants, not only Chinese, but also Thai or Japanese, but they are intended for tourists and French, while they themselves eat at their own places, which are hard to find in Michelin guides. Likewise, Indians who have their own venues where they eat dishes so spicy the European palate can’t stand it, while the Indian restaurant ad usum Delphini serves barely colored curry to justify the adjective “exotic” from Tripadvisor. You can also mention the famous African fairs, where products are sold, the name and origin of which remain unknown to European neighbors. The invasion of Turkish kebabs, known for incomprehensible reasons as the “Greek sandwiches”, is also symbolic.

Sometimes an example is more telling than an elaborate analysis. Everyone knows the airport in Orly near Paris, but many less of its housing estates and population. There are six Muslim butcher shops in the city with a population of 25,000, and only one traditional, selling all kinds of meat, including pork. Anyway, it is about to be closed this year.

The city mayor speaks amicably: “We have nothing against halal shops, but we want to present a diverse offer”. The new butcher, who has just opened the sixth Islamic shop, is more realistic. “If I start selling pork, I will only make 20% of my turnover and close the business in a year. Muslim clients prevail here. It is the principle of supply and demand that regulates the trade, not the town hall”. If this is not one of the “small replacements” of the population, what is then?

By how many towns should this single example be multiplied? Several dozen? Several hundred? How many enclaves are there where Sharia, in alliance with the invisible hand of the market, is dismantling traditional society for the sake of the newcomers’ community? How many blocks of flats have only halal meat, halal bakeries, alcohol-free markets, bars without entrance for women, cafés open late at night during Ramadan?

Another example: Fontenay-aux-Roses, another town outside Paris, where the tenants of a five-storey block of social flats asked for relocation because their block was haunted. In response, instead of ridiculing the absurd demands, the authorities sent them an imam and a Christian exorcist to exorcise the building. “We believe in witchcraft” said the tenants, where “we” means their community, a Muslim and African one.

According to the Jean Jaurès Foundation, “while in 1981 only 18% of the French believed in witchcraft, it is now 28%”. 40% of people under 35 and 25% of people over 35 believe in witchcraft.

If you look for areas where assimilation or integration functions, you can be surprised to find that there are such, but the mechanism works the other way around. It is not the indigenous majority that assimilates the newcomers, but the influxing minority which exerts such a strong attraction that the French, especially young people, subjected to multiculturalism, or rather “otherculturalism”, through public education adopt foreign customs, fashions, language, cultural codes, and even religion and values.

A good example is the invasion of rap, which in terms of popularity, whether in the commercial or underground version, very quickly replaced the French song, pop, rock’n’roll etc. in young people. The entire subculture based on this musical style lives in close symbiosis with communities from blocks of flats: performers, musicians, producers, but also the subject matter is almost one hundred percent immigrant, even if the trend was promoted by the socialist minister of culture, Jacek Lang in the 1980s.

On the different islands of the archipelago, not only do you not eat the same things, you also don’t spend the same amount of time. Even social plagues have changed radically.

France, the country of wine, has become a country of marijuana. The recreational and socializing role of alcohol has lost its importance and it is the consumption of marijuana that has become a mass phenomenon, and the trade in it has grown into an economic sector of great importance. Dealers as rivals of vineyards? This is by no means an anecdote, this phenomenon has serious sociological consequences. “The drug economy plays a major role in the secession of the suburbs, where the drug dealers establish laws and provide a career path for young people” writes Jérôme Fourquet.

18 million bargain consumers and 2 million addicts are a solid market for an economic sector estimated at EUR 3 billion a year in black market. Stereotypes about poor immigrant suburbs are extremely untrue.

The Trouble of Hibernatus

The illustrations for the “Great Replacement", sometimes crawling and sometimes galloping, can be multiplied endlessly and there are enough of them for a large book, not an article. Wherever the islands of the archipelago come into contact with each other, there is inevitably a zone of friction and problems that waste valuable energy to be solved. Like in the case of public transport drivers refusing to work because there was a woman in the cab during the previous shift.

Or, in schools, parents imposing pork-free menus in canteens, while 15% of teachers find violations of secular school rules by students rejecting the curriculum e.g. in the matter of the Holocaust, and the overall level of education drops like the IQ of the population.

Or, left parties abandoning the values of the secular state, this French stronghold, the smallest common denominator left in France after the virtual annihilation of the Catholic matrix, winking knowingly at black racism. A growing phenomenon known by an Anglicism “white flight”, consisting in that the white population is pushed out of successively colonized areas, mainly to the west: to the western departments of either the Paris region or even of France: to Brittany, to the Vendee, just as Jews flee from Muslim suburbs to Israel or to safer neighborhoods.

Today Hibernatus (in which one of the roles was played by Louis de Funès), revived from lethargy after several decades, would have an even greater cognitive dissonance than the film prototype transferred from 1905 to the 1970s.

“They are at home at our place” said President François Mitterrand in Rennes in April 1988, referring to the descendants of immigrants. The ambiguity of this phrase suggests that these second-generation immigrants have some “at our place” some “at home” that is no longer “our place”. When the host changes, home changes.

– Adma Gwiazda
– Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists