Brighton, England

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Living between France and Britain, I am struck both by how different and how similar they are, the differences obvious and the similarities underlying. Chief among the underlying similarities is the imperative need for, and the simultaneous complete impossibility of, reform.

The need is economic, and the impossibility is political: For a large enough constituency having been established for an unviable status quo, that status quo becomes unassailable—except, ultimately, by reality, which tends to arrive and make itself felt in a very unpleasant fashion.

Both countries live well beyond their means and have done so for years. They have large deficits of almost every conceivable type. They have deindustrialized and maintain their populations’ standard of living, for the moment, by means of cheap imports and borrowing, not for investment but for current consumption. Social pathology is similar in both countries, though more visible, and seemingly extreme, in Britain because it is geographically half the size of France with a similar size of population, the presence of this pathology being therefore more difficult to avoid or screen out of one’s mind. The general contempt for the political class in both countries is the same, as is the government’s failure to control its borders, and also the inability, or even unwillingness, of the police and criminal justice system to prevent or suppress crime.

“The legacy of Hitler was to make any mention of national interest, or any desire to preserve a way of life, the next thing to genocide.”

The world-champion pessimist on the state of France is perhaps Pierre Vermeren, a historian who writes regularly in Le Figaro. He disregards entirely the fact that France remains a very attractive country (it is not for nothing that it receives more foreign visitors than any other), that the life expectancy of its inhabitants is among the highest in the world, and that real grinding poverty, as it was known in the past, has been eliminated. He concentrates exclusively on grim trends—grim, that is, if you have any regard for the French civilization and way of life.

The French birth rate has long been below replacement level, yet the population is growing, thanks to continued mass immigration, the nature of which has changed. Originally it was to supply cheap labor to industries that were expanding, but since the 1970s it has been largely a matter of family reunification, which is a self-propelling process.

Of those born in France, according to official statistics, 40 percent are born to parents of recent immigrants, many of them non-European. A further 10 percent are born to the so-called overseas départements of France—such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and so forth. Of course, none of this matters if you think that the only thing important for the culture of a country is the number of its residents, one human being much the same as another, but Vermeren is not of this view.

Whatever you think, Britain in this respect is very much in the same boat as France. The country has come to resemble more and more a large hotel rather than a homeland of anyone in particular, luxurious for some but cheap and run-down for many.

Vermeren says, “The choice of international immigration to compensate for the fall in birth rate has attained its end: Our population is still growing. But this has changed the social, cultural, and anthropological equilibria of the country…. Its acceleration up to the present day attests to the unbreakable will of our governing elites, without the people ever having been consulted.”

I am not sure that inertia does not play as big a part as design, and during all this period France remained a democracy, as much—or as little—as any Western country is a democracy. But what were the causes of the fall in the birth rate, and what are the reasons for the policy of what he calls the “repeopling” of the country?

The fall of birth rates is an international phenomenon, universal except for Africa. There is everywhere the absorption of women into the workforce and professions, which makes family life not only more difficult for them, but less attractive. In Europe in particular, there was the shock of the First and then, to top it all, the Second World War, with its “moral legacy” of genocide, which Vermeren says haunted the baby boomer generation, whose prominent intellectual leaders in France equated the French riot police with the SS. The surest way to avoid a repetition was not to reproduce, and noisily to repent everything in the past. The legacy of Hitler was to make any mention of national interest, or any desire to preserve a way of life, the next thing to genocide.

Vermeren says that a hatred of France became general in the intellectual life in the country from 1960, while at the same time there was a moral revolution in which traditional restraints were first mocked and then legislated out of existence.

Radical ecologists and neofeminists have convinced quite a lot of the youth that to have children is to endanger the planet or prolong the patriarchy and the enslavement of women (equality of power and wealth being the only goal worth pursuing).

Meanwhile, for the less intellectually inclined part of the population, a vision of life as essentially one of endless entertainment, or distraction, has been sold and accepted. Every minute must be filled with it, and children would be an interruption to it. In addition, the sheer practical difficulty of daily life for those of modest or moderate income has increased. Ordinary workers cannot expect public housing—that is for ghettoized immigrants, drug dealers, and the unemployed. They are pushed out into the far suburbs. These are hardly circumstances propitious to the upbringing of children. An eighth of workers have never lived in a couple, and in any case the realistic prospects for young people without much education, as theirs would probably be, is hardly alluring. For them, there await three addictions: gambling, pornography, and drugs.

And then, says Vermeren, there are the children themselves, such as they are: odious little tyrants who kill any desire for children. They are spoiled and undisciplined, as many grandparents and passengers on trains will attest. No longer are children told to shut up and go to their room, but parents seek deep causes for their tantrums and reward them with attention and little bribes.

I thought that I was a gloomy fellow, but M. Vermeren out-glooms me. Luckily, I will not live to find out whether he is right.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).