(325) Negrón especulado

France: the situation in France has been negative since at least the 18th century, if not the 17th—the country’s population problems began, in fact, in the 18th century; and these problems only became worse over the years—in the late 1890s it was known the population was in trouble, Céline knew it in the 1930s. The decline started sometime in the early 18th or late 17th century—that’s when religion collapsed in France (and with it fecundity—19th-century thinkers used to pin the cause on things like widespread prostitution but it’s not that). It’s no surprise that Descartes—not strictly atheist but his thought inclines to that—was French; and Baron d’Holbach, just before the Revolution, composed among the crudest materialist philosophy out there (as in, “the mind is in the brain—the brain is made from chemicals”).

The Revolution slit France’s wrists for good—though it would take two further centuries for her to bleed to death. At the time, the French were obsessed by English ideas—Locke, Newton (popularised by Voltaire)—from the 17th century; they just rationalised them and applied them in a dogmatic manner, hence the French Revolution was the English Revolution but “rational”. The Americans emulated the French in thought, though they had their revolution first—as Whitehead observed, the Founding Fathers thought in a French way (that’s why Washington, DC was laid out by a French man).

There has been no change in France’s direction for 300 years—as with “wokeness”, which can be traced back to the 1940s and beyond, I see no indication that this will “disappear” over night. There has been constant decline in France for 300 years—why would it change now? It can only get worse. A coup? The French army is now so incompetent that rather than just doing a coup, they composed a letter that threatened a coup—so the plotting officers were arrested (it will not happen—if it does, it will be bungled). The problem is spiritual.