The Threat of Jean-Luc Melenchon

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

European leaders are making a bad habit of echoing the violent rhetoric of the anti-Zionist activist class. Back in September, it was Spain’s Pedro Sanchez who lamented that “Spain, as you know, doesn’t have nuclear bombs, nor aircraft carriers, nor large oil reserves. We alone can’t stop the Israeli offensive, but that doesn’t mean we won’t stop trying, because there are causes worth fighting for even if it’s not in our sole power to win them.”

 

This casual violence from a European president was a notable escalation, but it would not be the last.

 

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the powerful leader of the French left and prospective presidential candidate in the next national elections, has a history of voicing his inner anti-Semitic thoughts. He blamed Jews for killing Jesus in an interview, for example, and defended notorious British anti-Semite Jeremy Corbin.

 

French elections often pit the right wing against a coalition of left and center parties, with those votes coalescing around a centrist candidate to win in the runoff round. But next year, Politico Europe notes, the candidate with the votes to make the second round against the right wing may very well be the far-left Melenchon instead of a centrist.

 

While there will no doubt be concern about the opportunity that would open for a nationalist right-wing president, Melenchon isn’t less extreme in his own politics. Here’s what he said about Israel and Lebanon this week on social media, flagged by the Algemeiner:

 

Israel is invading and annexing all of southern Lebanon. Netanyahu has raised his flag over Beaufort Castle. This French name should remind us of the thousand-year history that binds us to Lebanon. We owe the Lebanese people aid, solidarity, and support in the face of genocidal forces.

 

He added: “The aircraft carrier would serve as a more useful symbol in the Mediterranean than in the Strait of Hormuz, to remind Netanyahu that his interference in our elections and his invasions of our allies’ territories are viewed as threats by the French. The UN Security Council must condemn Israel and organize the withdrawal of its forces from the occupied territory.”

 

So Melenchon believes Lebanon is still a French colony, essentially—that Israel’s seizing of the castle is an act of war against France. Then he accuses Netanyahu of interfering in French elections, suggesting that too is an act of war.

 

But the last part may be the most deranged. Israel took South Lebanon from Hezbollah, not the Lebanese army. Hezbollah is an Iranian occupation force. Why isn’t Iran’s occupation of South Lebanon viewed as a threat to France? Because when he talks about “invasions of our allies’ territory,” the ally is apparently imperial Iran.

 

If it sounds crazy to think Melenchon sees Iran as an ally against Israel, it shouldn’t. The Western left has been marching for three years explicitly cheering Hezbollah and Iran. In fact, it’s been cheering loudest for Hamas, the Iranian satrapy that carried out the savage murder spree of October 7, 2023. Hamas recorded its exploits on that day, and admitted to some of the worst of the crimes not caught on camera. If Melenchon’s ideological base can celebrate the Iranian militia carrying out a massive campaign of sexual torture and child murder, why wouldn’t Melenchon also see Iran as the good guy in this fight?

 

This is something the West needs to grapple with before it gets completely out of hand. It is not that the European left, along with its acolytes in the U.S., want the end of war in the Middle East. It’s that they want a different war—one that pits Western militaries against Israel and fights alongside Iran.

 

That obviously won’t happen—now. But the desire to reorganize the alliance around Iran and its associated “resistance” movements is there. And it should be a five-alarm fire in any corner of Europe that has retained its sanity.

France’s Populist Surge Is a Cautionary Tale for America’s Right

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, December 28, 2025

 

As American conservatives grapple with the future of populism beyond Trump’s final term, France provides a sobering reminder: Populist anger can storm the gates of power, but only fiscal discipline can hold the fortress. In France, French authorities’ use of “lawfare” against Marine Le Pen has paradoxically boosted her National Rally (RN), sending it soaring in polls and making a takeover in 2027 increasingly plausible, much like how Alvin Bragg’s case strengthened Donald Trump.

 

French President Emmanuel Macron, reduced to appointing his fifth prime minister in two years, has watched his coalition crumble over unpopular attempts at entitlement reform and welfare tightening. In opposing these reforms, National Rally sadly mirrors so many other right-populist movements — including in America — who refuse to tackle entitlement spending, pretending instead that (well-needed) immigration reform is enough to get back on track.

 

Earlier this year, Le Pen, the Rally’s former leader, was convicted of embezzling EU funds and barred from running for office for five years, effective immediately, and was sentenced to four years in prison. The case is up for appeal in January.

 

As a Member of the European Parliament, Le Pen was entitled to hire accredited parliamentary assistants (APAs), i.e., policy advisers, and administrative staff paid by the European Parliament — a similar arrangement to congressional staff. Rules prohibit APAs from working on domestic policy or national campaigns, yet Le Pen’s staffers allegedly did just that.

 

Anyone who has worked in Brussels knows that this practice is widespread, even if technically against the rules, and Le Pen’s high-profile national ambitions naturally blurred the line between EU and French matters for her staff. Notably, the prosecution conceded she gained no personal financial benefit from the supposed “embezzlement.”

 

Much like Alvin Bragg’s convoluted case against Donald Trump, this lawfare has backfired: Convicting and barring Le Pen from office has done nothing to dim her or her party’s rising star.

 

Instead, it has provided room for another rising star: By forcing Le Pen to take a step back, her successor, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella, has been allowed to properly step into the limelight.

 

A bombshell poll released last month showed Bardella is currently set to beat all major contenders for the presidency in the election scheduled for 2027. Le Pen, who was the party’s presidential candidate in 2017 and 2022, lost both times after making it into the second round, as supporters from the other parties banded together to stop her ascension to the highest office.

 

Bardella, much like JD Vance, benefits both from his youthful charisma and from not having the associated baggage. Unlike most anti-immigration, nationalist parties in Europe that have sprung up in recent decades, National Rally has been around since 1972, and the party still represents the “old-school” European nationalism that is suspicious of decadent American culture and capitalism.

 

Under Bardella, National Rally is clearly changing, with the party adapting a more positive view of the United States. Bardella himself was set to speak at CPAC earlier this year, until what appeared to be a Nazi salute by Steve Bannon caused him to cancel.

 

While a long-time protégé of Marine Le Pen, Bardella has also distinguished himself by taking a more critical line against Russia, breaking with his predecessor’s position that Russia did not pose a threat to Western Europe. National Rally’s closeness to Russia has been a barrier for many voters who otherwise may support them.

 

Unfortunately, while modernizing its view on Russia and the United States, National Rally remains stuck in the past in other, crucial ways. Like Vance, Bardella has doubled down on irresponsible social security policies that would make the French fiscal crisis worse, not better.

 

There is no doubt that France has conducted an immigration policy for decades that may only be described as dangerously naïve and suicidal in its altruism, much like America did under Joe Biden. Unfortunately, National Rally appears to have bought the view that simply closing the border is sufficient to return France to its past glory.

 

The reality is that immigration is not the main reason why the French economy has stagnated. In fact, one key reason behind France’s liberal policy on immigration is that its population is aging, with birth rates similar to America’s, and its generous welfare state has left the country in an even more dire position vis-à-vis entitlements than the United States.

 

On average, public pension expenditures equal 14.8 percent of French GDP; more than all but two countries (Italy and Greece) in Europe, and more than twice that of the United States. With France now facing a debt-to-GDP ratio of 114 percent, runaway deficit spending, and with its credit rating downgraded, Emmanuel Macron has proposed modest cutbacks to the welfare state, including to retirement benefits.

 

Unlike what one might expect from a right-wing party, National Rally has fought these reforms tooth and nail: In 2023, Macron was able to raise France’s retirement age from 62 to 64, a reform that, as of this month, has been suspended after opposition from, among others, the Rally. Instead, National Rally has promised to allow more people to retire even earlier, at the age of 60. The party supports reducing the number of years a worker must contribute before claiming a pension, and raising the minimum old-age pensions. Furthermore, National Rally’s success in the 2024 snap election was instrumental in undoing Macron’s previous cuts to unemployment benefits.

 

One crucial reason why Europe has fallen behind the United States economically since the beginning of the last decade is that the EU over-regulation prevented it from taking advantage of the global tech boom that produced much of the growth in the United States, post-2010.

 

Under National Rally, this is unlikely to change, as the party is highly skeptical of foreign tech giants. Instead of attempting to attract investment from the likes of Google, RN wishes to pursue “digital sovereignty,” and its uncompromising policy even on skilled labor migration runs the risk of strangling the country’s struggling tech sector. This mirrors a tendency among some on the American populist right: While H-1B visas have undeniably been abused, a growing faction pushes for restrictions so sweeping that they threaten to shut out high-skilled talent American innovation needs.

 

While National Rally does support many pro-business policies, they, being traditional European nationalists, also fully embrace protectionism, failing to see that international competition is exactly the spur that the sclerotic French economy needs to boost productivity, cut waste, and force long-overdue reforms. After years of rising food prices, RN also still opposes the EU-Mercosur free-trade agreement that would provide Europe with a much-needed source of cheap food, citing the threat the agreement would pose to French farmers. This short-sighted, neo-mercantilist view on foreign competition is one that the party shares with many American right-populists.

 

Perhaps most tragically, in a country with the third-highest labor taxes in the OECD and the most strikes in the EU, National Rally, despite framing itself as the free-thinking anti-establishment party, refuses to propose the kind of structural, Thatcherite reforms that France so desperately needs.

 

Ultimately, the French elite’s lawfare against Le Pen backfired, elevating Jordan Bardella and handing National Rally its first real shot at power amid Macron’s collapse.

 

But this masks a deeper tragedy — and a vital lesson for America’s right. Clinging to protectionism and entitlement bloat, the Rally provides no escape from stagnation. France’s voters may empower populists in fury, only to wake to continued decline. U.S. conservatives must avoid this trap. Populist momentum must be channeled into genuine structural reforms, even if this requires tough conversations with voters — of the type that both National Rally and much of the GOP still refuse to have.

 

Currently, the same populists who style themselves as fearless truth-tellers — boldly exposing the dangers of unchecked immigration — grow conspicuously quiet when the subject turns to entitlement spending. This is true not just for France and the United States, but also for other European countries such as Italy and the Netherlands. For all their anti-elite rhetoric, they shield voters from the hardest fiscal truths, perpetuating the very irresponsibility they condemn in others. On fiscal issues, the purported truth-tellers adopt the establishment’s oldest tactic: To kick the can down the road while pretending the problem does not exist.

 

With Social Security trusts set to be depleted by 2033–34, France’s fiscal and political chaos today is a grim preview of where the United States may find itself tomorrow, if conservatives fail to build a movement uniting tough immigration enforcement with unapologetic, pro-growth fiscal conservatism.

The French Are Just Ahead of the Curve

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, October 20, 2025

 

Metric units have physical referents, revised a few years ago: A meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/ 299,792,458^th of a second. The kilogram is derived from the Planck constant. (Formerly, a gram was the mass of one cubic centimeter of water at 4 degrees Celsius; now, it’s just 1,000^th of a kilogram.) The Kelvin scale is based on the Boltzmann constant. Etc.

 

Under the recent changes in the metric system, a second is defined as one-half of the average life expectancy of a French government in 2025.

 

Votes of no confidence. A new prime minister every few weeks if not every two seconds, literally. A surprise credit downgrade. Nationwide protests and strikes. An ascendant far-right party.

 

France really, really doesn’t want to do entitlement reform.

 

France has had either five or six governments and prime ministers since 2024, depending on how you count: Sébastien Lecornu resigned earlier in the month but was immediately reappointed. I’ll count him as two.

 

President Emmanuel Macron’s term extends into 2027, but his approval rating is retreating faster than Napoleon on a sled. He is being pressured to resign, with some of that pressure coming from inside his own camp. A self-described pragmatist and centrist, Macron is seen by many in France as too aloof, too interested in international affairs—in his legacy—and too insulated from the baguette et beurre issues at home. Forced to appeal to the left in order to beat back the rising force of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally, Macron has suspended a law gradually raising France’s pension eligibility age from 62 to 64.

 

The problem is that France cannot afford to put off pension reform.

 

France is a persistent violator of European Union debt-control rules, taking the great place of dishonor once held by former fiscal basket-cases such as Greece. The Europeans take a narrower view of sovereign debt than Americans do, and the markets are more skeptical of the ability of European countries to carry large debt loads: As a share of GDP, France’s government debt is less than that of the United States (about 116 percent for the French vs. 123 percent for les Américains), and so, in that respect, France is being punished not for its absolute debt load but for the political chaos and irresolution that demonstrates and confirms the fundamental French disinclination to deal with the problem.

 

France’s deficit in 2024 was 5.8 percent of GDP, the largest since World War II and nearly twice the 3 percent limit imposed by the European Union. In comparison, EU countries ranging from Greece to Denmark ran modest surpluses in 2024, with the Danes enjoying a surplus amounting to 4.5 percent of GDP. (By comparison, the United States would have to run a surplus of about $1.4 trillion to match that performance; instead, the U.S. government ran a deficit of about $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025.) France’s persistent deficit is not great in straightforward economic terms, but, more important, it is a signal that France’s political leadership is unable or unwilling to meet its obligation to impose reasonable fiscal discipline. For the skittish debt markets, it does not matter whether Paris could sort itself out—it matters that Paris apparently won’t. Lenders care about whether a borrower can repay a debt, but they also worry about whether a borrower is inclined to do so. Willingness to make good on obligations matters as much as ability to do so.

 

Six out of seven French voters disapprove of Macron’s job performance. One analyst describes the public attitude toward the president as “hatred.” And, as such, he does not have the clout to impose his will on the legislature, where power is divided among the left, the right, and the center, but it gets pretty complicated pretty quickly: Lecornu survived his most recent (as of this writing!) no-confidence vote thanks in part to support from elements of both the Socialist Party and the much-diminished center-right Republicans. (If you think our Republican Party is useless as teats on a boar, check out France’s Groupe Droite Républicaine.) The current system of French government, a legacy of Charles de Gaulle, is designed to avoid this kind of paralysis, but it apparently is not fit for purpose.

 

There is a structural lesson in that for Americans. As our presidency continues on its way from Gaullist to Napoleonic, American governance is becoming less stable, less predictable, less coherent, less effective—more autocratic, more chaotic, more sclerotic, more dangerous—than it was under our original constitutional settlement, when Congress was the supreme branch and the executive charged with executing Congress’ laws rather than making its own up on the fly. Goodness knows I am not the biggest fan of capital-D Democracy in its cultic form—the populist-majoritarian notion that if 50 percent plus one of the voters decide to nuke the moon that makes it a good idea—but in that great eternal contest between king and parliament, parliament generally does a better job.

 

I don’t want to go fishing in Jonah Goldberg’s pond here, but there are real operational problems with the high-progressive model of governance, which combines democratizing tendencies on one hand (e.g., wrecking the political parties with the primary system, expanding referenda and ballot initiatives, etc.) with anti-democratic tendencies on the other (shifting real power from legislative committees to legislative leadership, in the Pelosian mode, and from the legislature to the executive, in the Wilsonian mode, while empowering supposedly disinterested experts to impose empiricist rationality on both market outcomes and democratic outcomes, etc.). Some of you may remember that in the late 20^th and early 21^st century there was a robust movement afoot, mainly among Democrats and center-left types, to expand the power of the presidency and make the office even more powerful by extending the length of terms and increasing executive discretion—indeed, the notion that a less-accountable president would be a better president, because he would be liberated from thinking about reelection, is very much with us, as this 2024 column from a political science professor exemplifies. The underlying assumption here is that presidents know what needs to be done and need to get things done but are prevented from doing so by niggling political concerns.

 

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was answering similar arguments way back in 1986:

 

The basic argument for the one-term, six-year Presidency is that the quest for re-election is at the heart of our problems with self-government. The desire for re-election, it is claimed, drives Presidents to do things they would not otherwise do. It leads them to make easy promises and to postpone hard decisions. A single six-year term would liberate Presidents from the pressures and temptations of politics. Instead of worrying about re-election, they would be free to do only what was best for the country.

 

The argument is superficially attractive. But when you think about it, it is profoundly anti-democratic in its implications. It assumes Presidents know better than anyone else what is best for the country and that the people are so wrongheaded and ignorant that Presidents should be encouraged to disregard their wishes. It assumes that the less responsive a President is to popular desires and needs, the better President he will be. It assumes that the democratic process is the obstacle to wise decisions.

 

Both Schlesinger and the argument to which he was responding are at least partially wrong. We the People, bless those thick American skulls, are about as likely to be wrong about any given issue as right about it, but their wrongness is not randomly distributed and, in that way, partly self-correcting. Popular wrongness tends mainly to point in the same direction or directions: in favor of more spending and more benefits; against taxes to pay for that; reflexively against liberalism across the board, from free speech to free trade; in favor of using the power of the state to disadvantage or humiliate the very long list of people they hate; in favor of violence and aggression until these become wearisome or expensive. As the economist Bryan Caplan argues, the American system slightly advantages the policy preferences of high-income people, who lean more in the direction of his own libertarian views than does the median voter—and this, he argues, is “what makes democracy tolerable.” Caplan may be intentionally provocative at times, but his analysis is largely correct. (Speaking of which, Caplan has a new book forthcoming, to be titled Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets. Here is his lecture on the theme.) The notion that elections are a check on the president assumes that what is intelligent or good is also what is popular—which is, of course, the basic problem with that capital-D Democracy I mentioned earlier. Voters are about as likely to reward presidents for bad policies as for good ones.

 

There are other problems with majoritarian safeguards: Donald Trump, to take an obvious example, has twice been elected without a majority. Chuck Schumer and Mike Johnson, two of the most powerful men in government, represent no national majority.

 

But removing or reducing democratic checks, or loosening other effective constraints on the executive, does not do the job, either. Presidents thus liberated do not suddenly become selfless philosopher-kings with no interests of their own, because reelection is not the only appetite at work in the political belly. You will have noticed that lame-duck presidents in the United States—or in France—do not suddenly become more courageous, more intelligent, more reasonable, more sensible, or more responsible. Many of them become quite the opposite. Donald Trump isn’t using the U.S. military to murder seafaring South Americans because he thinks this is going to help him or anybody he actually cares about (helpfully for him, that is a very, very short list) win an election. He is using the U.S. military to murder South Americans because he wants to murder South Americans and does not have the skill or the sack to do it himself.

 

Macron has spent the last few years jet-setting around the world pretending that France is still a major global power capable of sorting out big problems in the Middle East or Ukraine because that is how he prefers to spend his time and because he thinks that this is the way one ends up being remembered as a great statesman, and Macron apparently does not want to be remembered as what he is: a reasonable, capable technocrat. I happen to like and appreciate reasonable, capable technocrats and would happily march Donald Trump and his whole stinking gang off to whatever desert island you like in exchange for a few good technocrats—or a stack of old newspapers, for that matter, or a kind word—but you get what I mean.

 

Which is to say: The French did not fix what is wrong with their political system by making their presidents more powerful. The French are not going to fix their political system by humbling Macron or by driving him from office and thus humbling the presidency itself.

 

Our problems are different. But the United States is not going to fix what is wrong with our system by making the presidency more democratic or less democratic. Executives of whatever character—from democratic to monarchical—tend to be predatory. Give a man power, he wants more power and feels himself entitled to it; if he succeeds, that means he deserves more power, and if he fails, that means he didn’t have enough power to get the job done. A king demands more power in the name of God, and a democratically elected executive demands more power in the name of the People. Anti-Trump Americans rallied this weekend under the slogan “No Kings,” but why not “No Presidents”? The Swiss get along perfectly fine without a single-man executive, and so do many U.S. states such as Texas, where the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, and other high executives are independently elected and exercise independent powers. I am persuaded that the “unitary executive” theory put forward largely (though not exclusively) by conservative-leaning legal scholars is based on an overly broad reading of the relevant constitutional provision, that the “executive power” in the vesting clause is the power to execute Congress’ laws, not the power to act like a freelance imperator-cum-god-king. There is a reason Congress can override the president and not the other way around.

 

And therein we may discover the root issue: The presidency is a problem, but it is not the main problem, which is Congress. And Congress is just democratic enough, as it turns out. Congress’ problem is not structural but moral—it is paralyzed not by factors related to democratic accountability but by the disinclination of members to do their jobs. It is, to borrow from Jonah Goldberg again, a parliament of pundits. The most important factor in American politics is not ideological but dramaturgical: It is easier for We the People to pay attention to the doings and sayings of one man than to follow 435 representatives, 100 senators, nine Supreme Court justices, two dozen or so Cabinet members, endless committees and subcommittees, etc. But while spreading politics out through “regular order” in Congress through its committee system tends to dilute the poison of those passions that John Adams warned us against, routing every national dispute through the apparently (we are to believe) sacred person of the president concentrates the venom.

 

The French presidency is in many ways grander than the American one—the French executive has powers the American one does not and is subject to fewer checks—and it seems smaller only because it is attached to the government of a much less important country. (Please do not take this as an insult to the French—I admire France and have seriously considered moving there once or twice, but the facts are the facts.) But that grander presidency is of no use to the French when their parliament cannot do what is needful because the people, Nous le Peuple, will not permit their government to act intelligently and patriotically.

 

Our government finances are, in context, slightly worse than those of the French. And while Marine Le Pen may have come from a positively neofascist background, Donald Trump is by far the more dangerous demagogue, and he found his way to Le Pen’s neck of the political woods as though he were to the Vichy manner born. But, more to the point, the American people are no more serious about good, decent self-government today than the French are, and everything else depends on that. If you want to see where the United States is going, take a look at France just now—and I do not mean the view from the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat. The French are not unique—they are just ahead of the curve.

 

(A Little More) Economics for English Majors

 

Regular readers here will notice that I have from time to time referred to Father Robert Hugh Benson’s not-very-good 1907 novel, Lord of the World, a fictional account of the last days and the rise of the Antichrist. It is a novel set in the future—the future as imagined in 1907, that is, and the suppositions about technological change are (as very retro futurism tends to be) hilarious: Many Englishmen are living underground at that point (crowding, you see) and everybody eats some kind of Soylent Green-style synthetic foodstuffs, and people still hurry off to Blackfriars station to catch the “eighteen o’clock,” but now it is a zeppelin instead of a bus or a train.

 

You can learn a good deal about the past by looking at what people thought the future was going to look like—The Jetsons, for example, is entirely a product of its time—and one of the interesting little tidbits in Lord of the World is the unquestioned assumption that the final triumph of worldwide communism means ... free trade.

 

That sounds crazy, but it is not.

 

Karl Marx was not exactly what you would call a free-trader, but he favored free trade as a kind of warming lamp in the incubator of capitalism, something that would help capitalism reach its final form before giving way, as his so-called science of history predicted, to communism. But many socialists in the 19^th and 20^th centuries favored free trade on economic grounds, understanding, as they did, that free trade undermined the position of the landowning aristocracy and politically connected industrial interests while providing the poor and the working classes with less expensive food, clothing, and other necessities. I’ll write something longer on this one of these days, but much of what was meant by the word capitalism as used by 19^th-century and early 20^th-century critics was nothing that Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek would recognize but something more like what we call “crony capitalism.” The crony capitalists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries were not free traders but protectionists—the Anti-Corn Law League, to take an obvious example, was most energetically opposed by the sundry dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons who owned most of the English farmland and who had the most to lose from competition from imported grain.

 

In the United States, it was New England industrialists who most strongly supported high tariffs and the principle of protectionism, to the extent that these businessmen (who would go on to form the heart of the Republican Party) would defend even a bad tariff, such as the infamous “Tariff of Abominations,” on principle.

 

While their heirs and epigones have their own beefs with free trade and globalization as practiced in our time, many of those old socialists and anarchists took a view of industrial cartels and monopolies very much akin to that of modern libertarians. Anti-trade protectionism, on the other hand, was not conservative in the sense that the word describes a tendency in American politics that ran from roughly the New Deal era until the day before yesterday, but it was conservative in the sense that it was a position associated with the conservative elements, the party of property and large business interests, the party hostile to immigration and skeptical of social change, and, overseas, the party of the established church, the monarchy, hereditary class distinctions based on ancestry, etc.

 

While the conservatism of the 18^th and 19^th century is a very different beast from the postwar Buckley-Reagan-Goldwater conservatism whose economic libertarianism came to define much of the agenda of the 20^th century Republican Party, one can detect something identifiable as a particularly American and republican form of conservatism going back as far as both Presidents Adams, who were protectionists, supporting tariffs in part for the same reason their contemporaries believed in things such as astrological portents and miasma—brilliant men as they were, they were profoundly ignorant in many regards, gentlemen philosophers who, if they read Aristotle in the evenings, did so by candlelight.

 

A friend points out a recent book written by Marc-William Palen, a history professor at the University of Exeter, and published by the Princeton University Press: Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. I will read it and report.

 

Now that old-school republicanism has been rediscovered by some of our left-wing friends, who only a few years ago were offering obsequious loyalty pledges and singing literal hymns of praise to Barack Obama (who was celebrated—let us not forget—as a semidivine figure) perhaps they will rediscover some other worthy elements of their intellectual patrimony, such as skepticism of centralized authority, subsidiarity, the role of civil society (including the constructive role played by religion), and—maybe!—free trade, too.

 

Words About Words

 

An advertisement for the fashion brand Moncler contains this retch-inducing marketing copy: “Starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Warmer Together brings iconic designs to the fore. Hooded down jackets for men and women spotlight enduring Moncler codes, telling a story rooted in brand DNA.” To me, this reads like someone accidentally published the internal marketing strategy memo as ad copy, “telling a story rooted in brand DNA,” etc. But in the depraved times in which we live, marketers write to consumers as though they were writing to other marketers, and this passes for sophistication. It reminds me of the legendary episode involving George H.W. Bush giving a speech and then apparently reading his stage directions: “Message: I care.” Some companies are really, really good at “telling a story rooted in brand DNA”: Ralph Lauren and his hermetically sealed little fantasy world, BMW, Nike—and so are non-corporate brands such as Harvard and feminism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

But I do hate the way that corporate-speak has infiltrated ordinary conversation. Every time I hear some college sophomore talk about his “personal brand,” I want to slap him and say, “You’re 19 years old, dummy!”

 

And Furthermore ...

 

While I’m indulging my inner ... I don’t want to write snob, but, maybe ... this column in the New York Times caught my attention: “These Boots Have Lasted Me 12 Years. Unfortunately, They’re $600.” The boots in question, made by R.M. Williams, are described as “the first shoes I reach for whether I’m wearing black jeans and a T-shirt or a dark navy suit. Over more than a decade, they have become such an integral part of my wardrobe that last year, I ordered a new, identical pair to wear at my wedding.”

 

Two things: One, R.M. Williams makes gardening shoes. Really good gardening shoes, including some that they pretend are “dress” boots, but these are not getting-married-in boots—these are mowing-the-lawn boots, maybe drinking-beer boots. Ain’t nobody ever going to convince me otherwise.

 

The second and more remarkable thing is the hilarious pretense that $600 for a pair of boots is a heavy lift for the readership of the New York Times, which has long enjoyed a relatively high-income readership. I haven’t opened up the print Times in a while, but the first few pages used to be a who’s who of luxury brands, and the Times itself offers as a “case study” of its advertising capabilities its work with Cartier, which is not a brand for people who worry much about spending $600 on a pair of shoes. The Times has published nearly a dozen stories about Hermès, the French luxury house, in 2025 alone, and the year is not out. A half-dozen of those stories are about the famous Birkin bag, a purse that starts around $9,000 and goes up—waaaaay up—from there, and which apparently is very difficult to buy even if you have the money. Other prominent Times advertisers include Patek Philippe, Mercedes-Benz, Land Rover, and others of that sort. Tiffany & Co. famously ran an ad in the New York Times every day for more than a century, finally giving up on print in 2021.

 

I am sure that there are New York Times readers who sweat a $600 pair of boots. Things are tough on the Upper West Side, I hear. Lord help them if they ever find out what the high-toned rednecks in Oklahoma are spending at Lucchese or what the cool kids are laying down at Adidas.

 

One of my least favorite of all American social quirks is the apparent need that well-off Americans have to pretend that they are hardscrabble hustlers just struggling to put together the funds for a pair of gardening shoes to get married in. It is, among other things, insulting to the people who actually are made to count every nickel.

 

(I do not mean to characterize the author of the Times article that way, necessarily. I don’t know anything about him; I am writing about the context here, not the author.)

 

In Closing

 

“No Kings!” say our friends on the left. I hope they mean it this time. But I suspect that what we will see is progressive politicians taking Trump’s excesses and abuses as a permission slip the next time they are in power. I do not have any time for whataboutism, but it is a fact that Kamala Harris, to take an example, did her best to use the powers invested in her as attorney general of California to punish political enemies, taking unconstitutional steps in the process. Barack Obama insisted “I’m not king”—he used the actual words!—when describing the limits on his power to change U.S. immigration practices, and then he turned right around and did the thing he said he didn’t have the kingly power to do. My hopes are not high in this regard. But maybe someone will disappoint my pessimism.

A State of Fantasy

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, September 25, 2025

 

When you recognize a nonexistent state, don’t be surprised if you get a nonexistent response. Only children and the mentally ill are stirred by make-believe. This week, in proclaiming the existence of a Palestinian state, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, and Saudi Arabia have either entered the playground or the asylum. In either case, their imaginary land has little effect on adult reality, and the Trump administration recognizes as much.

 

Politico notes that Trump officials “have chosen to treat recognition as an activist show, rather than a menace that must be thwarted by expending diplomatic and political capital.” That seems right, as American leaders also don’t respond when a new nation is declared in a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

 

If I were a Gazan who yearned for genuine statehood, however, I’d be far more alarmed by the recognition stunt. When heads of state join hands and leap into fantasyland, it’s an admission of their real-world failure. They’ve given no indication of how Hamas is to be dethroned short of military action, and they have no bright ideas about how the hostages are to be released. You only need a plan if you have an actual goal. For these governments, the goal was recognition itself. 

 

The fictitious Palestine is meant to supplant the prospect of a real one. It’s true, to a degree, that the announcement “rewards” Hamas. But “placates” or “humors” are more apt verbs here. I somehow don’t think that the architects of October 7 envisioned a pretend Palestinian state to arise in the minds of a few impotent leaders while the real Gaza is all but re-occupied by Israel.

 

Recognition doesn’t put pressure on anyone to do anything. And that’s the point. It’s meant to relieve pressure on leaders whose anti-Israel constituents are demanding action. Britain and France are steadily Islamizing. That’s a real-world problem for Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron. Instead of addressing it, they’re establishing themselves as the great statesmen of virtual reality. In the end, this won’t save them or their countries. It’s not clear, at this point, that anything will. Donald Trump was not wrong when he said at the UN on Tuesday that many U.S.-allied nations are being overrun by unassimilated immigrants and “going to hell.” One can’t blame Starmer and Macron for trying to make the trip a little more comfortable.      

 

None of it matters to the future of Gaza because the only force shaping the facts on the ground there is Israel. For almost three years, the Jewish state has been picking off its enemies from top to bottom, crippling terrorist networks, and fighting successfully for its existence. Over the same period of time, the rest of the world has been cosplaying at “free Palestine.”

 

We are arriving, then, at a fitting end for everyone involved. While Israel is very near total victory in the real world, the cosplayers have founded a purely notional Palestine. The first fact is already changing the course of history. The second isn’t even affecting the present.

Trump Shows Moral Clarity in Rebuking Macron on Palestinian Statehood

By Philip Klein

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

 

In a welcome display of moral clarity, President Trump chastised French President Emmanuel Macron over France’s recognition of a Palestinian state.

 

In a joint press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Macron was discussing his decision to recognize a state of Palestine.

 

Trump then responded, correctly, that the decision rewarded Hamas.

 

“It honors Hamas, and you just can’t do that,” Trump stated emphatically, with Macron sitting right next to him. “But we want our hostages back, and we don’t want them back in ones and twos and take the next two years to do it.”

 

He went on to say, “You can’t honor [Hamas] doing anything like you suggest. All you can do is say, we want our hostages back and we want the war to end. . . . But people forget October 7 was one of the most savage days in the history of the world. There’s never been anything like that. We’re talking about babies being sliced in half. You’re talking about young children having their heads chopped off. You can’t forget that.”

 

At another point, he interjected to emphasize, “I’m on the side of Israel, I’ve been on the side of Israel really my whole life.”

 

It’s hard to recall an American president dressing down a foreign leader to his face with such an emphatic defense of Israel.

Palestinian Statehood Declarations Are an Insult to Palestinians

By Noah Rothman

Monday, September 22, 2025

 

We’re confronted with the curious condition in which, following the recognition of Palestine as a state by a handful of Western capitals, almost no one is talking about the reaction to it among the Palestinian people. Indeed, Palestinians themselves are little more than an afterthought in the debate over their own political future. This was all about Israel.

 

The governments of Australia, Canada, Portugal, and the U.K., with France likely to follow their lead soon enough, talk about the extending of statehood to Palestine as a means of either punishing Israel or coercing it. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hopes that his government’s maneuver will force Jerusalem to recommit to the “two-state” solution. “The current Israeli government is working methodically to prevent the prospect of a Palestinian state from ever being established,” Canada’s Mark Carney said in a bitter address that marked a supposedly celebratory day. The gambit has so far “not curbed Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza,” the New York Times admitted, a tacit confession that shackling Israel was the whole point of this enterprise.

 

It’s not entirely clear why these left-of-center governments thought their maneuver would have any effect on Israel’s military posture. Their recognition of Palestine is contradictory and ill-considered policy on its merits.

 

The “terror group, Hamas, must release all hostages immediately,” British Undersecretary of State Mike Tapp wrote on the day his government rewarded Palestine with recognition as a state. That was always an option available to Hamas, and it is one the terrorist organization has largely spent nearly 24 months avoiding. What is the rationale that would lead Hamas to conclude that the jig is up, its terrorism has backfired, and it must surrender its last sources of leverage over Israel? Their resistance on the battlefield might be futile, but it has objectively produced dividends on the global diplomatic stage. From Hamas’s perspective, terrorism works.

 

Indeed, the incredible foolishness of this initiative is crystallized in the fact that the British government is preparing to impose sanctions on the entity it just recognized because, in contravention of all the principles to which the civilized world is beholden, it turns out that the Palestinian “state” is run by terrorists.

 

“For the first time in its history,” France’s i24 News reported, the U.K.’s “Labour Party will take concrete action against Hamas.” The report frames the Labour government’s gesture as one that is designed to “minimize the backlash” against the Starmer government among the vast majority of Britons for whom Hamas is not popular. If London was being consistent, it would extend those sanctions to the whole of the Palestinian Authority. After all, in 2006, the last time elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council — a legislative body that is recognized only in the West Bank — took place, a majority of its seats went to Hamas’s political party.

 

In illustration of London’s cowardice, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has repaid Starmer’s generosity by demanding no less than £2 trillion in “reparations in accordance with international law.” According to the Daily Mail’s reporting, some “international law experts have described £2 trillion, roughly the size of Britain’s total economy, as a ‘good place to start.’”

 

Canada, too, insists that the Palestinian Authority must undergo “much-needed reforms.” It should “fundamentally reform its governance,” “hold general elections” next year, and “demilitarize the Palestinian state.” Indeed, “Hamas can play no part” in any future Palestinian government. What mechanisms does Ottawa propose to realize these objectives now that it has recognized the statehood of an entity that has met none of them? Indeed, Israel is engaged in the demilitarization of one of the Palestinian territories and is doing its utmost to expel Hamas from power, not that Canada has exactly been supportive of those efforts.

 

In advance of Australia’s capitulation to the demands put to it by proponents of Palestinian nationalism, Canberra also reaffirmed its commitment to sanctioning some of the region’s most active terrorist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “We continue to work with the international community to isolate Hamas and end its grip on Gaza,” said Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong. “We have made clear that there can be no role for Hamas in a Palestinian state.”

 

You most certainly have not made that clear. By recognizing a Palestinian legal entity that has not expelled Hamas from its ranks, you’ve ratified the legitimacy of that legal entity as it is presently constituted. Indeed, Australia, Canada, and much of Western Europe have managed only to convince sentient observers that their commitment to constraining Israel is far deeper than their rote and perfunctory condemnations of the Palestinian regime.

 

But then, this whole scheme is hopelessly complicated by the reality of “Palestine” as it is presently constituted. None of the governments that recognized it as a state observed the fact that we are not talking about one Palestinian entity but two. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are distinct and noncontiguous geographic territories. They are governed by mutually antagonistic sects that are not above going to war with one another when they get the chance. They have discrete foreign policies and divergent relations with regional actors. They have unique economies and divergent social contracts. They are, at most, proto-statelets that are wholly dependent on outside assistance for survival.

 

Nothing about this status quo suggests that the Palestinian territories are ripe for statehood. In fact, granting that status now functionally consigns the Palestinian people to subjugation at the hands of the authoritarian and terroristic cabals under which they’ve languished for so long. It seems that no one gave much thought to the Palestinian people in all this. No, Israel was the target of this maneuver. In that sense, this long-sought dispensation to the Palestinian nationalist cause is an insult to the Palestinians themselves. It’s not about them and it never was. It’s all and only about the Jews and their borders.

France & Britain: Slip Sliding Away

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

 

Britain and France are still heading toward financial crisis.

 

The yield on Britain’s 30-year government bonds (Gilts) continues to rise, and at the time of writing has hit 5.65 percent, taking the latest spike (the fifth, depending on how you measure them) to a new high for the year. Meanwhile, a pound bought €1.21 at the beginning of the year. Now it buys around €1.16.

 

The signs are that a crunch is not far away, but Britain may have two advantages over France, which, of the two, may be the first to face some sort of reckoning.

 

To start with, Britain’s economic crisis is unlikely to be exacerbated by political chaos, at least in the immediate future; the longer term is a different matter.  However awful it may be (very) and however ominous some of the signs of deep discontent, Britain’s hugely unpopular government is not about to fall: It has a massive parliamentary majority, and its MPs know how they would fare at the ballot box should they revolt in enough numbers to trigger a snap election. Moreover, an overwhelming share of the U.K.’s government debt is denominated in pounds, meaning, at least in theory, that it can print itself clear of any default — for a while.

 

France is not going to default either, but a major political crack-up may be less than a week away. France’s prime minister, François Bayrou, heads a (sort of) center-right minority government, which has survived in power with the tacit support of either the Socialists or Marine Le Pen’s RN. Bayrou has now called for a parliamentary vote of confidence on September 8 on his proposed package of budget cuts and tax increases.  As of the weekend, both RN and the Socialists have said that they will vote against the package. If so, that will be that.

 

But what will that be?

 

No one really knows, but The Spectator’s John Keiger comes up with some thoughts:

 

President Macron could appoint France’s fifth prime minister in two years. But who would want the poisoned chalice of applying austerity measures with no possible majority in the present National Assembly? The President could call new elections as he did in 2024. But opinion polls suggest another minority government, albeit clearly dominated by the Rassemblement National. A third scenario would be for President Macron to resign. That would lead to a new RN French president, by no means committed to austerity measures.

 

I doubt if Macron has any interest in resigning early (his term does not end until May 2027). His first move will be to try to see if someone can be found to pick up that poisoned chalice. That would mean appointing a prime minister to head a caretaker government (which has only limited powers) until a replacement is found, which took nearly two months in the aftermath of the last parliamentary elections. There is no formal time limit for this process, and the longer it lasts, the greater the unease in the markets is likely to be.

 

The implications of the latter could be grim. France’s debts are almost all denominated in euros, a shared currency. Some technical wheezes apart, Paris does not have access to a euro printing press. If the interest rates it has to pay start rising still further, there is no resort to that dangerously “easy” out. That said, the EU does not want a rerun of the eurozone crisis, only this time centered on France, its second largest economy, rather than little Greece. Despite, presumably, German grumbling, in the event of panic, the European Central Bank would somehow be drafted in to restore calm.

 

But how politically realistic would the usual quid pro quo — austerity — really be?

 

After all, as Keiger points out:

 

With a 6 per cent budget deficit and national debt to GDP ratio at 113 per cent (predicted to rise to over 120 per cent), France is already operating at twice the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact requirements. In November last year, the country was placed in excessive deficit procedure (EDP). As a result, under Article 126 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, France is required to provide six-monthly plans to the EU Commission on the corrective action, policies and deadlines it will apply to return to a 3 per cent deficit by 2029, failing which astronomical fines could be imposed.

 

There is little chance France can comply with the plan.

 

The EU is “rules based.”

 

It is (almost) always a good idea for a country to have its own currency.

 

Only one of the foregoing two sentences is true.

Seeing France for the First Time

By Dan McLaughlin

Saturday, August 30, 2025

 

Mont St. Michel at dusk.(Photo courtesy of the author)

 Two years ago, I shared my reactions as a provincial, ill-traveled New Yorker upon taking my family for the first time to Britain. We recently returned from eight days in Paris and two in Normandy. It was my first-ever trip to the European continent, which doubled as a 30th wedding anniversary trip and a family vacation with my son (age 28) and daughters (26 and 19). I share with you, dear readers, my impressions of France.

 

The Eternal France

 

American conservatives have long scorned the French. There are sound reasons for this. Conservatism itself, especially in the Anglo-American world, was born as a self-conscious tradition in reaction to the French Revolution. French political history is an endless procession of bad ideas overcorrecting for previous bad ideas. Communism was first tried in France, in the 1871 Paris Commune, which the French resolved by a general massacre of the Communards. French foreign policy for centuries has cozied up to the enemies of liberty in general and the friends of Marxism and Islamic radicalism in particular. Some of us are old enough to remember “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and “old Europe,” or, for that matter, the long French effort to stand aloof from the Cold War.

 

For all of that, French society is not all Rousseau and Sartre. Say what you will of the French, they retain a strong sense of themselves as a distinct nation with a distinct culture and deep roots in their own history and soil. Even amidst the twin crises of low domestic birthrates and mass immigration across the West, there is little doubt that half a century from now, there will still be a France and it will still be identifiably French — something one might struggle to say today even of England. It helps that, per the most recent French census data, even in cosmopolitan Paris, foreign-born Parisians are overwhelmingly likely to have come from Francophone countries once run by France (and the biggest exception is Parisians born in Portugal). If what endures of France is still a culture reflexively skeptical of Anglo-American mores and systems, it at least is a culture that knows who and what the French are.

 

Large areas of France remain stubbornly agricultural even today, with all that implies of the traditional rhythms of the land. If nothing else, Parisians remain connected to that tradition by the preponderance of locally grown food and wine in the Parisian diet. In the Franprix mini-marts where we shopped, one could find wonderful bottles of Côtes du Rhône for under $7 (in Euros); in the bakeries, a fresh baguette for less than $1.50. The countryside in Normandy looks very much as it did in 1944, and is identifiably similar to how it looked in 1848 when Tocqueville campaigned for office there, still thick with greenery and full of the famous hedgerows descended from the Viking system for subdividing plots of land.

 

The City of Lights

 

Paris does not feel like New York or London in its layout. Due in good part to D.C.-style height restrictions that preserve the sight lines to the Eiffel Tower, the skyscrapers are mostly jammed into the La Défense business district outside city limits, or in scattered spots well outside the city center. Only 2.1 million of France’s 68 million people live in Paris, which has few high-rise apartments or private houses. Another 10 million or so live in the surrounding metro area — a ratio of city to suburbs that is more reminiscent of Boston than of the world’s great megalopolises. Moreover, so much of the city’s population clears out in August that whole neighborhoods and business districts seem like ghost towns abandoned for tourists to treat like Paris theme parks.

 

In spite of its antiquity — the city was legendarily founded by the Romans in 52 b.c. — the Paris we know today is mostly a creation of the middle of the 19th century, when Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, tore down most of the old medieval center of the city (outside of the Latin Quarter near Notre Dame) to create the city’s famous broad boulevards and uniform apartment buildings. Of all the complicated legacies of the French Second Empire (1852–70), this is its greatest monument. The Opera House is still prominently flanked by the Napoleonic eagle. By contrast, the Latin Quarter is full of very un-French-themed eateries, from Irish pubs to a place promising authentic Kansas City BBQ.

 

Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements, administrative districts like precincts or wards, except that an American city’s administrative districts don’t each have their own coat of arms. Until city limits were expanded in 1860, there were twelve arrondissements; the outer eight had been suburbs. We rented an apartment in Belleville, a neighborhood in the 19th arrondissement whose large Chinese population and dense concentration of Chinese restaurants and Asian food marts made it feel more like Flushing than like Paris. It’s not like any other place in the city.

 

Arts et Métiers Metro Station, Paris (Photo courtesy of the author)

 The Paris Metro is a sprawling system and not open that late (its closing hours were hard to discern and seemed to change by line and by day). One subway line was where we got the authentic French experience of something being on strike (euphemized in a sign as “closed for a social movement.”) And yet, the metro was cleaner than New York’s subway, better maintained than D.C.’s, and more modern than London’s. Most of the cars were air-conditioned, whereas the London Underground cools passengers by opening the windows for the breeze. One of the delights of the Metro was the Arts et Mѐtiers station, which since the mid-1990s has been whimsically decorated like the inside of Jules Verne’s Nautilus.

 

We never did encounter the legendary rudeness and scorn of Parisians, even when some of us attempted to speak French. There is, I confess, something especially civilized about the word “merci” for the ubiquitous thank yous. The sidewalk cafes lived up to billing, and the irritating presence of cigarette smoke was nonetheless a stark contrast to New York — we weren’t enveloped by Manhattan’s ubiquitous clouds of pot smoke anywhere. Gas prices were appalling, albeit camouflaged at first glance by being quoted in Euros per liter. The Seine is just a giant party every night; we even repeatedly saw barges that were hosting wedding receptions.

 

American fast-food joints have penetrated Paris, but mostly not in large numbers. I spotted McDonald’s, Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway, Burger King, and Five Guys. Of these, only McDonald’s and Starbucks were present on anything resembling a regular basis, and scarcely that. American cultural products (such as ads for the new Naked Gun movie, a stage production of the Lion King musical, and Margot Robbie on a magazine cover) were more common. The main eatery in the park across the street from the Eiffel Tower is a taco stand.

 

I didn’t read newspapers or watch TV in France, but even so, I was pleasantly surprised at the total absence of Donald Trump’s visage or obsessive anti-Trump imagery. At least some of our obsessions are not entirely consuming everywhere.

 

The Tourist’s France

 

As tourists behind a language barrier (I speak no French beyond “bonjour” and “merci”), much of what we encountered was official France — the story the country tells to visitors in museums, cathedrals, and other tourist attractions, much of it reproduced in English for visitors. Here, at least, is a France that is not afraid of its profoundly Catholic heritage and does not apologize for its own history and people. Europeans tend to overemphasize how young the United States is — our Constitution is the oldest still in use, and we’re older as a nation than most of the countries on earth, including Germany and Italy — but it’s striking to be in a country that honors medieval Catholic saints among its military heroes. The Feast of the Assumption is still a public holiday in France.

 

We visited a staggering number of religious sites: Sunday Mass at Notre Dame, a vigil Mass for the Assumption at Sacré-Cœur, the church of Mary Magdalene (which contained a borderline-blasphemous mosaic of Napoleon sitting at Christ’s feet), the Basilica and home of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the cathedrals of Chartres and Bayeux, and Mont St. Michel, a site established in a.d. 708 While there were still signs of the anti-clerical damage done by the Revolution in its day, the churches all remain places of reverence, and from statues in public parks to museums such as the Louvre and the medieval Cluny museum, Christian art was offered without embarrassment.

 

Basilica of St. Therese at Lisieux (Photo courtesy of the author)

 I’d like to report that Mass at Notre Dame said by the archbishop was a transcendent experience, but we were in the back of a stiflingly hot church full of worn-out tourists and impatient children, enduring Mass in a foreign language. Even so, one could not quite escape the enormity of the place – not in size or age alone, but in a sense of how many souls down the centuries had sat through Mass in this same space. By contrast, the 10 p.m. vigil at Sacré-Cœur seemed unpromising: While the church (built to dedicate France to a national spiritual renewal after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71) commands a staggeringly scenic view from the highest point in Paris, it was surrounded by a partying crowd of people drinking beer and listening to street musicians on the steps. But inside the church was a different story: a 9 p.m. candlelight vigil and procession that streamed back in for Mass with a passionate and notably multi-racial congregation that filled the church to the rafters, fairly clearly most of it Parisians.

 

We saw many fine history and art museums, including the must-see Musée de l’Armée (the military history museum that includes the colossally extravagant tomb of Napoleon), the museum of the Bayeux Tapestry, the Museum of Paris, the Louvre, and the Musée de l’Orangerie (which is built around the monumental panels of Monet’s final room-sized Water Lilies). French history is at every turn presented matter-of-factly, warts and all, but with a clear and not always subtle celebration of the strongmen of French history — Louis XIV, Napoleon, and especially Charles de Gaulle. Military disasters and ill-advised guillotinings are offered as such alongside the great moments of French history. The war museum didn’t blanch at maybe the grimmest moment of French military history, when Churchill ordered the sinking of the French Mediterranean fleet in 1940 to prevent it from being used as a weapon for the Nazis.

 

Nothing can prepare a visitor for the labyrinth that is the Louvre. Its layout is bewildering, its scale massive, its maps inadequate, its rooms poorly marked, and even finding its exit is confusing. Yet it is a hoarder’s paradise of art from the ancient to the modern, with things crammed into every corner in such volume that one could easily overlook, say, the famous portrait of Louis XIV or the Code of Hammurabi.

 

Perhaps none of the tourist sites of Paris is less curated than Père Lachaise Cemetery, which holds luminaries ranging from Chopin to Jim Morrison to Oscar Wilde to Baron Haussman to the Armenian national hero Andranik, whose grave is topped by an equestrian monument. There’s a real dichotomy between the First World War era graves, which bespeak only sadness, and the Second World War and Holocaust memorials, which bristle with justified rage and name the Nazis and Hitler all over. The memorials to those deported to the extermination camps are profound.

 

Auschwitz memorial, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Normandy

 

August 2025 turned out to be a prime time to see the sights of Paris and, particularly, Normandy. Notre Dame is still under reconstruction, flanked by enormous cranes, but it has reopened. The Bayeux Tapestry, however, is going off display after September 1, and its museum will be renovated through 2027 while it is controversially on display in England. The 900-year-old tapestry is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, supplemented as it was in the museum by headsets with a narration of its scenes of the Norman conquest. For me, it may have been the highlight of the whole trip. Its scenes and colors remain surprisingly vivid after having been handled roughly and nearly destroyed on countless occasions over the past nine centuries.

 

Ranger monument, Pointe du Hoc, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author)

 Pointe du Hoc is in worse shape. The site of the impossible climb of the U.S. Army Rangers on the morning of D-Day is crumbling due to natural erosion compounded by 1944 bombardment damage and post-1944 trampling by tourists, to the point where the Ranger monument (where Ronald Reagan gave a famous 1984 speech before the Ranger veterans) is fenced off and likely to be removed to a new location soon. Already, the jutting cliff that guided the Rangers that morning is no longer connected to the mainland.

 

Cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author)

 What stood out to me about seeing Omaha Beach in person is how wide it is. I knew from histories quite how far the men who landed there had to come, but there’s no substitute for seeing it to grasp how broad the front was on which they landed. Films such as Saving Private Ryan (which was shot on a beach in Ireland) make the battlefield look much more compressed. Of course, the wide mass of men that were thrown onto those beaches — half of them National Guard units — were the only way they were able to overcome the bitter and unexpected German resistance.

 

Omaha Beach, Normandy (Photo courtesy of the author)

 France may be more distant from us than England in its literary and political traditions, of necessity, but the depth of its history and the irresistible charms for the tourist of Paris more than compensate.