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Le Figaro Magazine: "Philippe de Villiers: "Every night, I woke up with a start: what will become of our grandchildren?""
GRAND ENTRETIEN : The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games sharpened his pen. In his new book, the writer and founder of the Puy du Fou believes that this moment was a real turning point, marking France's break with its own history.
Philippe de Villiers. JEAN LUC BERTINI for Le Figaro Magazine
LE FIGARO MAGAZINE. - In your introductory chapter, you explain that you wrote this book in reaction to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. " We acted out France's suicide before the whole world ," you write. Isn't that a little excessive? Or the comparison with the fall of the Roman Empire?
Philippe DE VILLIERS. - This moment of festive, exuberant nihilism will go down in contemporary history as an indelible marker, the clear sign that the post-French imaginary thought it had a duty, in public allegories, at a time when France - host country - was making a spectacle of itself to the whole world, to make official its break with the twenty-sec-old pact between the greatness of France and the freedom of the world. The multiscenia that was administered to us was an allegory of our abasements: France no longer seeks its prosopopoeias in its memories. It swaggers and dresses itself up with a sumptuous, grating contempt for what the world has so admired it for. Indeed, this ceremony reminded me of the end of the Roman Empire, when the patricians, at the edge of their hypocausts, cackled as they repeated: " die while having fun ".
More than a "transgression", this ceremony marks, in your opinion, a turning point, even a tipping point. Why do you say that?
A civilization is a social state in which the person who arrives in the world quickly realizes that what he believes he can contribute is infinitely less subtle than what he receives in spite of himself. Well, we've tipped over into the opposite social state. And that's why this ceremony is a prefiguration of a posthistorical world. A world of inconsistency, where long time fades behind the fleeting whim of unlimited commodification. A world where the moment after eats up the moment before. Where the fad drives out the firefly. Where the "adolescentric" shelters the perverse and the scabrous. The new thaumaturges des écrouelles médiatiques have practiced transmémoire, grafting one memory onto another. Jacques Attali summed up the ceremony's watermark best: "What we'll remember is all the transgressions we saw there, of all kinds. I think that what we are witnessing here is a period in which France will have blazed a trail." Here comes the great Transgression.
If this ceremony shook you to the core, wasn't it also because it was an "anti-Puy du Fou"? Your whole life seems to have been guided by a desire to reconnect with the treasures of the past, the very opposite of deconstructive progressivism...
It wasn't me who spoke of an "anti-Puy du Fou". It was the organizers themselves. They described themselves as a "counter-model", thus designating a model. They have elevated the Puy du Fou to the status of a matrix reference for the hymn to France of all time. They thus saluted, in their own way, one of the high points in the living memory of the Millennium Depot.
What does your title, Mémoricide, mean? Is it an implicit reference to the Vendée genocide? Is memoricide the methodical destruction of our past, our history, everything that made France what it is?
Memoricide is when, in the name of human rights, which have become the human rights of the sand of liquid society, we decide to deprive a population of the most precious achievement of the old peoples: the right to historical continuity, the right to go back to past centuries to find the missing melodies.
You explain that you no longer recognize France. What is your France? How do you define it?
France is suffering from the ablation of its memory. An entire people is trying to survive with an atrophied memory that is no longer being passed on. A penitential memory: we practice amnesia for greatness and hypermnesia for cowardice. Worse still, an inverted memory: we're living in reverse what our fathers lived through. We are experiencing an inversion of landmarks, filiations, neighborhoods and ideals. I believe that our country's prognosis is vital. Many of our elites are what we used to call, in the days of Joan of Arc, "disowned Frenchmen". What set my pen on fire was that, every night, I'd wake up with a start: what will become of our grandchildren? What are we going to tell them? What will we pass on to them? I wanted to pass on to them all the most precious things I had received. This book will, I hope, be a viatic of survival. With an attempt to define the meaning of French decline and hope.
What role did Emmanuel Macron play in the great effacement you describe? If the process began before his presidency and has gone beyond it, have we reached a decisive stage during his presidency?
He comes from the Anywhere world, which has nothing but disdain for the Somewhere world. Nowhere versus Somewhere. He's the eponymous figure of the globalized bourgeoisie, attacking the redneck, the garden pavilion model, the Bodins duo, the virilism of the barbecue. He embodies the elitist progressivism of the Anywhere. He is tearing society apart as he seeks to turn France into a global laboratory of diversity. He dynamites all ties. He touches on death, life, transmission and filiation. " Eritis sicut dei", you will be like gods. He is Faustian, Promethean. He hates the old France above all else. He disaffiliates everything he can get his hands on. He hates the word "tradition". He wants to reverse everything, "change the paradigm", as he pompously confides in his Sorbonne lectures. In other times, he would have dreamed of being the alchemist, with his retorts to transform lead into gold. The problem is that he has done the opposite. He's ruined his mandate.
What role did Europe play in this process?
It has been a hidden gas pedal. I think the Western Moment has passed. We've entered a period of dependency. The two slogans repeated to satiety by the Cercle de la Raison: "l'Europe-puissance", and "l'Europe, c'est la paix", each received their coup de grâce with the Green Deal and the Ukraine. First coup de grâce: the Green Deal. It strangled our companies, but above all it encouraged the Buy China Act, i.e. the invitation to turn to China. Under Green Deal standards, we have no choice but to buy Chinese. It's a fine piece of work. As for the war in Ukraine, it favors the Buy American Act, since the main beneficiaries of the sanctions are the Americans. This is the double servitude of Europe. And we have become the only space in the world that no longer knows where it comes from, that no longer believes in itself. France has lost its sovereignty to Europe, which has become an American, Chinese and African protectorate, before moving on to the caliphate phase.
The memoricide you describe involves a form of "populicide". Is militant progressivism destroying all forms of popular culture? But are we witnessing a revolt of the people through the ballot box?
Yes, there are lumps on the mashed potato. Having been fed on the milk of post-national culture, the elites of megapolized France have rediscovered their censal instinct. They look to the world. They no longer look to the people. They distrust them. They believe they see the irredentist wave of populism rising everywhere. We can feel the growing confrontation between the Metropolia, which demands migrants to wash dishes in 3-star restaurants, and the Peripheria of the Formica society, dispossessed of its future. We're living through a regime crisis. The little people are being singled out. They are being kept at a distance. Power no longer has legitimacy. The decarbonized elites have taken their leave and are bringing back to France a new people, out of breath, sobered up, torn from their roots: new arms, new bellies, new aggregates of consumers and future sushi deliverymen on Avenue Foch.
Your book is dark, but it's not just a book to say that everything's ruined. Do you believe in the rebirth of France as you do in the rebirth of Notre-Dame? In the current chaos, are there any signs of a new awakening? How can memory save us?
The Christian matrix of society is dead. At the age of 18, I forged a motto: "A society is saved not by warnings, but by achievements that are hung against the grain." France rhymes with suffering, where it sometimes finds the sublime of new blooms. France falters, then regains its momentum. There is always a circumstance that turns desperate situations around. There's a kind of French redemption at the heart of all these downfalls. She falls. It rises again. It denies itself. She finds herself. She slips. She recovers. She tears. And reconnects. Throughout our long history, there's one word that keeps coming back, as if woven into the tapestry of our ups and downs: "All is lost...". And then there's another word - the word of catharsis - which quickly flanks and contradicts the first: "All is safe...". Rarely side by side, they walk together. These are two millennia of a semantics of recovery. My conclusion is about saving memory. All is lost? All is saved.
Did you write this book for future generations?
I remembered a conversation with Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he came to visit me in 1993. He told me: "In the evenings, at curfew, we waited at home in the dark. Sometimes, under the door, we'd catch a glimpse of a flickering light. This meant that behind the door was a refuznik, a firefly-carrier. We had to open it. He was dressed in a large cape. Under the cape, he hid a typewritten manuscript, a clandestine resistance manifesto called a samizdat." Well, this book is a samizdat. The dissidents were in the East, now they're in the West. It's up to our young refuseniks to watch under the door for the ray of light that carries the samizdat.
It can also be read as a disguised autobiography. You describe yourself as a rebel, proud to be a minority... Why?
Condemned to swim upstream like a salmon in the muddy Loire of winter floods, I was an outcast, toasted by the superior vertebrates of the System, who regarded me as a specimen of inferior vertebrate, fresh from the collections of the Musée Buffon. For fifty years, I was asked to wear a rattle at the gates of the Cité. The only leprosy left in France is conservative leprosy. I used to be a leper, but I've been made to look like one. I spent my life taking up two challenges: the first was to repair a genocide, that of my native Vendée. I dreamed of its symbolic promotion to a province of the mind. The Vendéen is a rebel. To be a Vendéen is to confront the infernal columns of yesterday and today. The Vendée has become a pedagogy of evasion in the face of the Terror. The second challenge was to repair a memorial, that of our country. Today, the question is no longer the same. We're in a black hole. It's no longer a question of whether France can recover the moral resources it needs to revitalize itself; it's a question of whether it can be reborn. If I had to learn just one lesson from my whole life, to share with the youth of tomorrow, I wouldn't hesitate for a second. Knowing you're in the minority is an obstacle in appearance only. The minority is the vanguard. Future minorities will be made up of escapees, survivors of science and the new medical conventions. They will sleep with their eyes open. The living dead of the System will be swept away by the blazing fire and crystalline purity of the new French intentions of these restive spirits, freed from bourgeois and censorious fears. It's for these minorities that I've written these lines. "Minority? The great luxury of our time...
Mémoricide, by Philippe de Villiers, Fayard, 384 p., €21.90. ,
