732 And All That

Islamic expansionism dismembered France as recently as 1962, when she was mutilated by the loss, not of three colonies, but of three départements, integral parts of the French State and nation.

That was the perspective from which, in and through the person of a decorated veteran of the Algerian War, she opposed the greatest catastrophe since 1962 for what was originally Christendom on three continents, covering every inch of the Mediterranean’s shores. For what remained of that, 1962 was the greatest catastrophe since 1948 (itself the greatest since 1923), and 2003 seems set to have been the greatest until a similar intervention in Syria.

And that is the perspective from which France is in dispute with the Islamist Government of Turkey, drawn as it is from the party that created and still influences Ennahda in Tunisia, where you will not be hearing French on the streets for very much longer now. But the Sixth Caliphate still faces France.

Never forget that talk of what would originally have been a Second Western Alliance, but against Islamic rather than Communist expansion, has been a commonplace of French political discourse ever since the 1950s.