Founding editor of The American Conservative, Scott Mcconnell, explains to readers that the white working class citizens who France’s globalist leaders have forgotten, have increasingly been replaced in their traditional suburbs by Islamist Muslims with little connection to Gaul. He writes (abridged):
The mass protests of the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests), named for the high visibility garments French motorists are required to carry for emergencies, may have a short-term impact on France’s politics. They could further diminish French President Emmanuel Macron’s already low approval ratings, and perhaps put some pressures on his legislative majority
Guilluy has built his arguments around the growing divide between the winners of globalization—Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, and other major cities, which host industries able to produce for the global market—and the French periphery, smaller cities and rural areas that are failing to keep up. The major cities are home to France’s major corporations, banks, and culture organizations. Demographic changes in and around those cities have intensified the divide. Low-paying service jobs—minding the children, cleaning up at restaurants, trimming the hedges of the new bourgeoisie—are increasingly held by immigrants.
The white working class, which used to inhabit the Paris suburbs, what was once called the Red Belt, has shrunk in numbers as French manufacturing has declined. Formerly white working-class suburbs, like the towns of Seine-St.-Denis, are now largely populated by immigrants and increasingly dominated by Islamist Muslims.
The public housing built in the decades after World War II to house a growing working class has seen a massive flight of native French people. In today’s Paris suburbs, riots and “car b q’s” erupt with some regularity and low-grade ethnic tension is a constant.
Over the past 20 years, the French central government, spooked by riots and terrorism, has moved piles of money into these immigrant suburbs, seeking to ensure that new immigrants will become normally assimilated into French life. Such efforts have not been particularly successful.
It’s not especially clear how France will emerge from this dilemma, which is largely self-created.
Read more here.
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