Back to number one Calypso sex show Caribbean rhythm, I have special guest today Leo Caizaris, French Bonapartist historian and thinker on French and international literary matters. I have long enjoyed his translations of unusual Napoleonic texts, especially your translations Leo of Napoleon's love letters to Josephine but which I've used as a form of game I use as a form of game on grills but let's talk that later welcome back to show Leo how are you yes bonjour I'm feeling very good yes Leo last time we spoke it was before the French elections now they have just taken place on Sunday NPR is claiming a progressive victory and they are interviewing taking statements from anti-racist protesters saying this great victory meanwhile people on the right are being pessimistic doomers and so on

I know you have some quite different unusual takes on this is NPR giving Americans a fair view of what happened in France this weekend in elections? I don't think NPR gives Americans a fair view of anything, but certainly not on France. The elections specifically in France yielded, as we said actually, you know, it's quite fortuitous since we made a few, you know, risky predictions here and there. There was a fantasist one, one, but the realistic one, which we pointed out, turned out to be correct, which is that the Haren did not take over France, it didn't do that much better than the European election, and the country is, in theory, ungovernable. The makeup of the assembly is that this leftist popular alliance did get the largest portion of seats, so 182 seats in the assembly.

Macron's party got 168, which I believe, I think at this point, I was the only person online saying that Macron was not going to disappear or he wasn't going to totally fail. And in fact, he did quite well. His coalition did not totally disintegrate. He still has a very important, the second biggest block in the assembly. So you know, the president did good. Then the R.N. did 143 seats. So yes, the left did have a majority of seats, but you have to keep in mind that LFI, which is this, you know, ménageance party, this quote-unquote far-left party, actually lost seats. They lost three seats, and instead what happened is that there was a total resurgence of the Socialist Party, which Macron is doubtlessly going to use to form a government later on, I think. Yes, I see.

But why is the right wing then this word blackpilling in France? I see various people in French right wing who are like you, maybe skeptical of Le Pen and skeptical of claims that they would take over all of Parliament. And they too are saying, why am I tired of this? Because for the next week or two, the French right wing, which was so inappropriately triumphant prior to this election, is now going to wring its hands and say it's all over and this. Yeah, I think that the reason why there's so much blackpilling is, again, just a lack of lucidity on the parts of most people on the right. They were in party mode a little bit, and they overestimated what was going on. But it doesn't mean that everything is bad, actually. You know, Iran did do very well.

They increased the amount of seats that they have by a large portion. And actually what's extremely encouraging, I would say, is that you're actually seeing leftist people on Twitter, online, even out in the streets, make up random scenarios like, you know, conspiracy-type scenarios of macro-enabling fascism and such extraordinary things. As soon as you see your opposition going to very wildly conspiratorial thinking, which Which usually dumbass right wingers do, you know, that's good. That means you're in the right direction. And I'm seeing, you know, all sorts of people on the left saying, you know, they're very happy, of course, that Rennes didn't take up an absolute majority. But at the same time, they're telling themselves, why did they gain so many seats?

Who would have thunk that, you know, some months ago, the Rasson-Blondin and the Sienaar would have like a quarter of the assembly? I mean, this is nuts. So they're clearly seeing the direction things are going. And in the long run it's not how they want it to be. That's just my personal opinion. I think that Le Pen is a problem for the right in general. Actually the money behind right now Héren, who's a French billionaire that you probably know, he actually thinks she's a left-winger. He doesn't like her too much. He enjoys Bardela because he wants him to be more of a Maloney figure and be good for business for him. So Le Pen is very much seen as sort of the left by the elite in France. So definitely the Le Pen family is a problem in general.

However, I would say that it's not just because of that. In fact, they ran a lot of mean, just plain retard candidates all over the place. So it was extremely easy for the media in between the two rounds of the election to just interview these people. And you would just find out that they're completely low IQ, have no idea what they're doing, no idea what they're saying. So she purged all the serious people from the party just because, for example, they made like some joke or because they were seen at a party with some offensive hat or something. So you're always going to end up with morons. In America, she's seen even by dissident right-wingers with a capital D that she's a big champion of the working class versus the globalists and she's really taking, she's the true right

and then the other parts of the right in France aren't the true right. But she's kind of a, she's kind of a cock, no? I mean, she came out against the German party AFD, if I'm right. And also, can you explain again for audience what happened with Zemur in France in this election cycle? And did that hurt things? Did that hurt the right in this election? For Zemur specifically, short term, I don't think it mattered so much. But long term, it does hurt the creation of French wine, I hope. Well, let's pass on the. Okay, okay. So long-term, it will hurt the creation of a true union of the right, the fact that she's, it's just purely out of ego that she completely denied Zumur, and this is a problem for the right. Because if you look at the center-right,

Eler, and what Sioty did, this could have easily gotten, I mean, if there was a compromise to do at any point Eren, which is what she constantly does, she just constantly compromises and tries to clean up the image of the party or whatever. Why not do that with the center-right? And in fact, it shows the smallness of thinking of these people on the center-right party. They could have easily agreed to an alliance with Eren and they would have de facto been writing the policy program of the next government. Instead, they chose not to do that. And what happened to Zumur to explain it more specifically is that as soon as the vote in the European elections happened, Marion Maréchal, who defected to his party in 2022, she basically

went on her own, probably because she thought that she would get a minister position should the Hérens get an absolute majority or some of her people or whatever. And in a way she foresaw the correct direction of things, which is that the left and the right are polarizing and the center is slowly shrinking over time. So long-term, it might work out for her, but for now, this infighting was just very, very stupid. What it did is that it relegated Roquenquette, the most party, to basically mean party status. I mean, he got 0% of the votes in some places, you know, 0.6, 0.7, like this is like mean party status. But however, I have to say that just because the results were not totally amazing for the right or whatever, you have to keep in mind that now people in parliament, they get a budget.

lot of money, tens of thousands of euros to distribute to young people. This is a problem they have in Italy and France and Germany, all these sort of populist right-wing parties. They simply do not have talent. They do not have people to staff the parliament offices or whatever and these people get a shitload of money to do that. Those are the taxes that go to this. So if you're a young person today in France or in Italy or in Germany and you have a law degree or something, you don't really know what to do with your life but you want to get into politics. You know, even before the elections run, send your CVs to these people, you know, any of these candidates. At this point, they're begging for people who are talented.

Yes, you mentioned, excuse the attack my throat, you mentioned Eric Cioti. This is a man, correct me if I'm wrong, he is either from South France or centered there. He is leader maybe of center right in France. What was his position during this election? And how did he come out of Did he improve position? What happened? So, Éric Seutille is a politician from Nice, so he always has had high ambitions. He always felt that, you know, he was not at the right station and he always wanted to do better. But right now he's the president of L'Érépublicain, which is the center-right, normie, mainstream party, which calls itself, you know, the heir of the Gaullist tradition or whatever. And as president of the party, he made the decision to ally with Hérenn for this election,

and it created a schism within the party. So all of the oligarchs of Hérenn, people like Xavier Bertrand, François-Xavier Bellamy, Laurent Vauquier, they basically completely defected and tried to exclude him from the party. They actually still control the Twitter account. And I find it very funny that, you know, because ex-France, I don't know if I'm allowed to to say this, you know, this is very controversial, but ex-France is quite close with the government, by the way. Elon Musk often comes to France and talks to the government about, you know, the way that politics influence the social media sphere, right? And so I'm just wondering, how come the ex-formally Twitter account of La République, how come that was allowed to be used by a schismatic faction within a political party?

This sounds like something that should have been immediately solved as soon as French courts ruled in favor of Ceti, but it was not. It's very interesting. Yes, I see. So his party, center-right party broke, kind of broke apart because he sided with Le Pen and the Twitter account for this party, the Republicans was, Le Republiquen, was not run by him, by his opponents, is what you're saying. But did he come out, what ended up in election, did he improve his position? Because the reason I ask is, I know friends who are as hard right as can be, who describe themselves in private as pan-European meta-Nazis, perhaps with some irony. But they have high hopes for people like Siyuti and low hopes for people like Le Pen because of the record of failure of the Le Pen family.

What do you think about that and did he improve his position? So I think that's absolutely correct. Just before I forget, I'll explain how he did. So he won his seat in his circumscription, the first district of Nice. So that's good news because Héler actually ran a candidate against him, which is very funny. And he had his own faction called, you know, the Ministry of the Interior has to classify parties, give them a sort of, you know, initials to describe them. And they didn't put his candidates with Héler, which is even funnier. They classified his, not Le Pen's candidate, only Sioty's candidates, they described them as union xtreme drat, union of the far right. So Héren actually complained about this.

They summoned an institution called the Council of State in France, which is a Napoleonic institution. Just to clarify for audience, because they may not, you're saying the French government forced the center-right party that sought for pragmatic reasons to ally with Le Pen's party, it labeled them the union of the extreme right simply because some of the party chose to break off, but it did not label Le Pen's party far-right. That's right. And so the Hérens actually complained about this. They filed an official complaint to the Council of State, which is a technocratic institution, a polyonic institution, that for any government matters, they're supposed to be competent to explain if things are within the law, etc. And they said that, yeah, I mean, they allowed it, they allowed it.

And they explained that, unlike, for instance, LFI and such parties, they wouldn't, and the French Communist Party, they did not classify them as far left, as they said that communism and such things are part of the traditional leftist policy, which is very funny. So if you want to know more about this, the relation between the quote unquote communists and the liberals and the new left and how it develops in Europe, you should check out Marquis Cartaga, a great account, who talks about such things. Yes, no, this account, good, I will link it. I want to ask you, Leo, is this fixture of the Le Pen family, where one family now on its third generation is allowed to embody, let's say, the right-wing or hard-right opposition, the nationalist opposition?

To me, as such, it seems very strange to Americans, perhaps not because they are used to political dynasties. Especially, I should add, what's not known, maybe general public, is that the conservative world in the United States especially works this way. Things like think tanks, conservative publishing world, publishing houses, and so forth. It's all a family shop. They're on their third or fourth generation. It's about getting jobs for your cousins and so forth. That's very common in the United States. People are used to it. I think it's terrible because if you take a step back, you say, wait a minute, it's not a genetic thing, how is it possible that, well, let's just take John Podklorac, or Irving Kristol's son, Bill Kristol, or many other such, you know, Jonah Goldberg is the same,

how is it possible that they look at their parents and say, oh yeah, I want to do, I want to go in that, that's the family business, and the family business is political commentary. It sounds to me like a failure of individuation on the part of these people, but leaving that aside, it's just bizarre. Why should you, as the son of someone else, be more adept at political commentary, which is bullshit to begin with? It's bizarre to me. But in Europe, apparently, and I don't know of other countries where this is accepted, but in France, at least on the right, It's same thing with the Le Pen family, and this is an unfortunate family. They have never won, and excuse me for being pessimistic. I think as long as this family does not fuck off out of French politics, the nationalist side

will never win in France because there is such resistance, simply sentimental resistance against the name of Le Pen that a lot of French will just not vote for them. Am I wrong on this? And how can this family be made to fuck off? Why in the first place are they the face of this nationalist faction in France? I completely agree. And you have to keep in mind that that's one of the reasons, by the way, that Bardella is being groomed sort of to be like the next guy, to erase sort of the stigma of Le Pen. Unfortunately, I mean, Bardella literally got to where he was just because he, you know, he was in a relationship with Le Pen. So it's the same deal. But he's completely enslaved to the Le Pen family. Which one? He was banging Madyon, is that it? No, no, no, no, no, someone else.

A granddaughter of Jean-Maly. He was banging Ava. Okay, sorry, go on. Well, I mean, others are doing that, you know, around the European... I do know that, yes. Yes. I mean, you find the same proclivities all around through these weird populist right-winger tradcon parties who all somehow want to do a think tank reunions in the United States. I'm deeply suspicious of any of those. I know the reasons why they do. Meloni, by the way, has done this quite a bit because she hopes that she'll get a pass for her things if she has approval basically from the conservative factions in the U.S. I mean, I as a Frenchman, I view this with deep suspicion, but maybe others don't. Well, you should. It's incredibly corrupt and also many other things which I'll mention in a moment.

But is this the only plan to have Bardella? I should tell you an audience, my first friends on the far right, if you want to call it that, were French monarchists and again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I was told by this guy who was French monarchist that two and a half percent of France wants the king back in Versailles with the church and the army. In other words, not like a constitutional monarchy but they want actually the thing back and they have all kinds of even astrological kind of Q-type predictions saying that if the Jews could wait 2,000 years for their homeland, they can wait a few more centuries for the return of the king, and there are various astrological charts showing that the king will return to France.

And I don't know if 2.5% of France buys into all of this, but apparently it's sympathetic to this monarchist project, and there are many old French families who are like this. They are all, by the way, sedevacantists. Please note this to American integralists, let's say Washington, D.C., Catholic conservative intellectuals who believe that, you know, in the current pope and that he will bless a pan-American Catholic monarchy. The French monarchists, the real ones, are sedevacantists because they believe that the pope betrayed the church and betrayed France by siding with democracy. But these were the first people I know. I don't know if their websites are up anymore. They had websites like Semper Fi 1793 and other things commemorating the one day and so forth.

My views, of course, are quite different. I come from Nietzschean type view, which is secular and very different from this. but these were my first friends. They hated Le Pen, Caizaris, they hated Le Pen, and they like this man, Philippe de Villiers. I don't know if he's still in French politics, but their point was no, Le Pen has no hope in French politics. Sorry for tangent, do you have any comment on this? Yeah, no, it's a perfectly good tangent because I was going to say that these people specifically, It's true that they're, you know, a small but important faction that is not represented at all in the political landscape today. Some of what Zemur was trying to do was specifically to appeal to those people, which we call,

you know, usually l'écateau or something, but what they really are is the heirs of what was called les hiltres, you know, in French political tradition. To learn more about that, you should read a book called Origins of the Right in France by René Remont, where he explains the different strains of the rites, a very, very interesting book, especially in how it defines Gaullism, actually. But what I would say to these, actually, I'm extremely sympathetic to these people spiritually as well, because in a way, I mean, they are, you know, the real French in a way, you know, it is them, it's clear, you know, even in their way of life, in their physiognomy, in their history. They are the true friends. Unfortunately, my message to those people

is that they're going nowhere right now. You know, they can keep waiting for 2000 years like the Jews or something. I don't think that's a good plan because Philippe de Villiers, for example, specifically is a great speaker. He's a very educated man, erudite man. Actually, he's an aristocrat. He descends from the regent of Louis XV. And not only that, but his brother Pierre de Villiers was the equivalent of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, like the head of the army below the president in France under Macron, and Macron actually fired him because he was complaining about the budget. So what I would say to these people is that what actually restored monarchy in France historically after the revolution? Was it the royalists? No, the royalists actually failed on everything.

Reactionaries are stuck in a problem inside a tunnel to which they do not perceive the right? What actually restored monarchism in France? It was Napoleon. What restored the legitimacy that was interrupted by the revolution after the Third Republic collapsed? It was Charles de Gaulle. And Charles de Gaulle said specifically, he said, yes, we are in a monarchy, but it is an elective monarchy. It is of a completely different essence than that of the hereditary monarchy of the Ancien Regime. It has instituted a new legitimacy which creates a junction with the legitimacy interrupted by the revolution, but this legitimacy rests upon the people." The current political landscape in France, right this second, as Charles de Gaulle also

said, nothing about the French people has changed since Caesar described them. Galle est omnis de huis in partis tres. And today you have three big political blocs. None of them represent the interests of the nation. All of them just want to take power away from an executive that they hate for their own little petty ends. And so the country is actually falling back into parliamentarism. And I know that quite a lot of my compatriots would want this because they're traumatized by bad leadership. They want less control from the government. They want more decentralization. But that is small thinking, you know. Charles de Gaulle used to say that the strengths of the French are their bravery, their generosity, selflessness, their impetuosity, their curiosity, their capacity for invention,

a gift they have retained to adapt to extreme situations, and their weaknesses are the clans, reciprocal intolerance, their sudden anger, internal strife, and the jealousy they harbor towards the advantages that other French people may acquire. He said that what is true is that in the face of the greatness of France, I often encounter the smallness of the French. and so the French people have a tendency to constantly divide themselves and if they don't have a head the country goes to shit. Yes and I should tell audience that this episode primarily we will discuss more interesting things like Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon and perhaps some literature that we both like if we have time that bears relevance to meaning and future of France but in this first segment

and everyone curious about situation in Europe and elections. So let's return in following segments to what you just said, Leo, because very interesting. But for now, I want to ask you these families that we've just mentioned, who you called in some sense the real French, the, let's say, true hard-right monarchists, which is It's amazing that even 2% of France wants the King back and such. I went on Twitter first time in 2013, in part because I wanted to try spreading my own message to a mass audience, but also because I was, I mean the triggering incident, I was extreme excited by what was going on in 2013 with the protests against gay marriage, which in In the United States, you may know the gay marriage thing was passed, there was hardly any protest.

Whereas in France, the French conservatives fought against this. There were massive protests and it got ugly on the street, they fought the police. And who was it who fought the police? As far as I know, it was the sons and daughters of these old monarchist royalist families. They went out on street and went head-to-head with the cops, throwing maybe not Molotov cocktail and such, but really got physical with them. That excited me. I went online to witness this and so forth. I have friends who went to Paris at that time. By the way, you may not know, I went to Paris previously in 2004 and 2005, trying to see What would happen, perhaps, I had a wrong opinion of imminent revolution in France at that point, Leo, if you can believe, and I wanted to go fight on the street there.

But I found that the only people who were fighting were the Muslims for the Palestinians in the second Intifada. And on the other hand, it was Tagar, these kind of Jewish type, I don't know if they're but it's kind of you know street fighters of the same type and I said well this isn't my fight so I left and I went to beach and so forth but this France always seems to be spearhead spearhead in European scene and I am wondering if these royalist youth are going what you what is your assessment of them do you think that they could I'm not saying violent or anything that they could lead a reform party in France in the following years, or is there a Gaullist or secular counterpart to them that is just as vital and strong that can take leadership of this?

Can they be convinced to unite with the Gaullists and the Bonapartists for future of France? I don't know. Right now there are no vital factions of any kind, that's why we're in such a freeze, know. But a lot of these monarchist types, they did join Zumur's team actually, you know, his head of PR, all sorts of people like that. They were from that great election. But I mean, my issue that I have with them is that, again, I would say they're wasting their energies, you know. Pierre de Villiers, for example, what has he done for the last two decades? I mean, he runs, he runs like a TradCon LARP circus theme show, you know, in his district, which is fantastic. It's great. If you're into history and everything, It's really an amazing thing. But besides that, what has he done?

Even when Zumur ran, he was extremely hesitant. He canceled speeches. These people, they're way too careful. I think the problem with them is that they just need a champion. They need someone who can embody their values without maybe specifically bringing back Catholic monarchy or whatever. I mean, it can be done in name without being done in practice. But so I think these people need to believe in someone that can unite various strains of the right, because they on their own, they simply don't have the numbers and they don't appeal to the modern sensibilities of the French. Yes, I agree with you. Look, Leo, let's come back and talk more interesting, longer term thing, and also examples of de Gaulle and Napoleon.

But before I go to break, I wanted to ask you, so leaving aside the long-term question, in the short term, the next year or two, the next three years, what you see happening in France with current political thing? Some people say it's ungovernable chaos now, what's going to happen? So yes, on paper, technically, it is an ungovernable country because the parliament has no clear majority and so all the parties are infighting whatever to declare government. Now unfortunately for the people who want chaos, technically speaking, France does not require this parliamentary circus. The Constitution specifically states that the president nominates the prime minister. So he can go outside of the ELYSI today, grab the first schmuck he sees on the street and make him the prime minister.

Of course, that will probably not work out and the government will be dissolved, etc. But my point is that the executive in France, unlike the virtual majority of Europe, is not beholden to the legislative. The legislative is just one election and at the end of the day the president still has his legitimacy and that he was elected by the French people for the next five years. So he can perfectly well govern and that's what he's doing. He told his prime minister to stay put. So while the parties are all going to feud with each other and while he does his thing, his government is just going to run as usual. Yes. When is next French presidential election? 2027. Do you have, I know it's a way away, do you have any prediction for what's going to happen or such?

Is Macron going to be the Putin of France? Is he going to be there for 40 years? I think he very much has such aspirations. Like I said, if he had balls, if he was a character of history, he could resign now and actually make that happen. But because he doesn't look like he's ever going to do that, this is just my personal fantasy. What I think is going to happen is that he's going to be a sort of like a kind of Obama-esque figure where I don't think he will ever leave the political sphere like his predecessors did, you know? But the two candidates that the Macronist camp has to succeed is basically this Atal guy who's his prime minister. Unfortunately, he's just, you know, he hasn't accomplished anything, this guy.

And who the actual, you know, the money, you know, the guys that back Macron financially and own the media that is amenable to him, et cetera, they actually want Gerald d'Armanin, the interior minister. So my guess is, is that it's just, you know, it's gonna be, you know, whoever in the micronis camp selects versus Le Pen and it will be the same deal and the Le Pen will lose in the second round and yeah, and it'll continue micronism. Unless, you know, unless something else happens, but that's the current direction. Well, Leo, yes, this problem with specifically the French and the American hard right, nationalist right, they are, for most part, as my friend Europe Esperance said, I don't know if you remember him, he was Danish crazy guy, we had many disagreements.

Ultimately, he left over what's happening in Ukraine and so on, the Scandinavians, they hate Russia, they are very much for Ukraine. But he was, I think, ultimately right about the French right and the American right that they are stupid and malicious. And the way things are going, both France and America now, it doesn't matter how bad things get because of the kind of hysteric maliciousness of the people running these parties and what's going to happen is they are going to be corralled and so it creates just a large ghetto but still a ghetto that can be contained at maybe 35, 40%, so always losing, you know, and that's, they have to get rid of this Le Pen and they have to get a guy like, not Zebur, because he's a bit crazy too, but maybe Seyote, yes, you know, Seyote,

who can, and he should be allowed to cuck publicly, you know, and people should not allow, should not attack him for cucking, I don't know if you agree with that, but I don't want to keep you more, we should go back, discuss more interesting things in the following segment, what do you think? Yeah, I think just before we end, I would just say that I wouldn't despair entirely because of Paris specifically. I was walking about a year ago with my friend Edmund, who's a poet, he's a good account, a really good poet. I think he's one of the only people who's actually creating art nowadays in our sphere. But yeah, so I was walking with him and I told him that Paris is very much what ancient Athens was in our modern era. It's the only place where such political experimentation

happens all the time on anything. We had communism, we had crypto-fascism, We had empires, we had republics, we had everything. And so if there's anything, any explosion that will happen, it's in that city. I believe in this. And I want to actually discuss with you the present and current state of Paris in the following segments. But I will march on Paris. Yes. And I will come with you on top an elephant. But let us go first to smoke break. I need smoke break. What do you think Leo? And then we come back. Let's go. I don't see. Yes, we'll be right back. To show I'm here with Leo Caizaris. We are talking French election, but also very many other things more important on this segment and following. We will be talking French history and meaning of France.

We talk Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon and many such things. Welcome back to show Leo. I wanted to ask you, I recently posted now article by Eric Prince. You may know him, he is founder of Blackwater. I had him on my show some episodes back, and he is one of the most important, you say, mercenary leaders. You have to admire, whatever you think of him, you have to admire this man's competence as opposed to most people who are in government. Now he gets things done on small budget. And in this article, where he is called Too Big to Win, and he points out the numerous failures of American military industrial slash neocon ideological establishment over the last 20, 30 years, Afghanistan and Iraq being the most prominent.

But I am interested in this place, Africa, because it is a place in world with much possibility for future. It is maybe only, let's say, whole in the world along with parts of Indonesia and others that are unexplored pockets. It is not determined. It is unknown space possibility playground for future projects. In any case, my own ideas aside, he points out that America America has spent a lot of money, effort over the last years building bases in Niger and many other such things. But recently America was kicked out of such by Russia, Wagner, private military contractor and so forth. I mean technically by local forces, but it's really by this Russian mercenary force. And of course, these governments, Niger and others, are part of France's ex-empire, its

territories, that it has, as far as I know, maintained close relationship with after the end of colonialism, which was maybe important to the French economy. I don't know if it was, you correct me on that, but whether or not it was important to French economy, it was part of France's prestige as a major world power. It was the metropole that people in these areas, the elites in these areas, look forward to going to Paris, studying in Paris, being educated by French civilization and so forth. But now it looked like Macron for all of his monarchical possibilities and aura, his abandoned France's mission in the third world or the global south or its ex-empire, call it what you will. I know you have some opinions on this. Why is this happening? What's going on with this?

Yeah, maybe I can share a small anecdote about Macron specifically. The very first job he got in government while he was studying at Léna, l'école nationale d'admissé tracem, which is essentially just the school where government bureaucrats get formed. you're guaranteed a government job or you're refunded all your tuition. So his very first job was an internship of six months. So you get to pick, you know, which embassy you go. You can go to London, you can go to Washington, D.C., all these like prestigious places, right, that people like to go to. He picked the Embassy of Nigeria, so he stayed in Abuja for six months. That was his very first job in government. And his class at Lena, he was part of the students that very much demanded that their

promotion be dubbed Senghor after the Senegalese president. So it's very interesting that he has all these models of this, like the very first president of Senegal as a model, et cetera, these kind of things. But I think the reason why the African— Well, hold on. Before we go on to actually Macron's absconding of French rule and responsibility for these areas, which is quite at odds with what you just said, you will explain that I'm sure. But I wanted to interject and ask you, because I said on the very first episode of this show Caribbean Rhythm, I told Macron to declare his love of black men. Is this why you think he went to Nigeria? Is this why he chose this post? For the prestige of my country, I cannot possibly speculate on such matters back.

But what I can say is that the last time that Macron was over, for example, when he was visiting the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a fucking mess, by the way, he was spotted in the nightclubs of Kinshasa, you know? What does that reflect on the prestige of France when your head of state is partying in the nightclubs of Kinshasa, right? One can only speculate. And I just want people to know I own the restaurant in the Howard Johnson in Kinshasa. There is a nice buffet of bushmeat, organ bushmeat served there if you want. Sorry, go on, go on, Leo, yes. What going on with France absconding of its of its rule under the Macron in these areas Yeah, so there's a concept called La France Afrique, which is this idea of France keeping

a zone of influence and helping the countries of, you know, Central Africa and former colonies to develop, right? There's an agency called AFD, in fact, Agence Française pour le dévultement. It's right next to Gare de Lyon in Paris. If you ever, you know, take a train to Gare de Lyon, maybe you walk past that place which, you know, absconds tens of billions of euros to go to Algeria, Senegal, Congo, whatever, and there's homeless people basically sitting outside that place 24-7. Yeah, and so what I can say just concretely is that the French elites today do not believe in France-Afrique. There's not a single person in that corps that wants France to be in Africa. They don't believe in that mission at all. And partly it's ideological.

And another part is that it's just looking at reality, is that there were many military operations in the Sahel. The first one was Serval, which was on the invitations of the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, et cetera. And it grew into Opéração Barcan in 2014, I believe it started, or 2014, sorry, 2014. And it ended formally in 2022 under the orders of Macron. What was that for? Tell the audience. So basically, the problem that these governments have is that their military forces are factionalized and there's always inevitably going to be some faction that tries supporting, you know, some Islamist group, whatever. And so their first solution is, of course, to ask France for help. And so we did that. And by the way, Opération Serval and the very beginning of Barkin, I think someone

like Eric Prince would very much appreciate the way that France ran those ops. We don't do, you know, carpet bombings and that kind of thing precisely because we simply just don't have the resources to, right? So instead what we do is very, very surgical operations and we have some of the best special forces on this planet, I believe. And the very early phases of these operations were complete successes with very, very small amount of casualties, surgical strikes. But the problem is that to solidify the results of these operations, France asked its allies to allow a multinational force in the Sahel supervised under French military leadership. Now the problem is that our quote unquote allies view such efforts with deep suspicion because they think it's neo-colonialism or such things.

And so these efforts were constantly sabotaged. And so these factions in the military who very much do not, of the African militaries of the Sahel, who don't want their countries to fall apart every three to four years because there's some Islamist group that pops up, well, they're just going to go to whoever actually gets the job done, right? Which is why Wagner and other such militias or PMCs rather have moved in instead. So it's sad, but it's a repetition in a way of what Hidalgo Beria used to see during the Cold War, which was our allies would undermine us and then we'd get kicked out by the Russians. Yes. A strange repetition. We will return shortly to this writer Hidalgo Beria in a moment. By the way, since we're on the subject of France in Africa, are you aware of the wonderful

movie Beaux Travail by Claire Denis, one of my favorite movies about French soldiers in Djibouti, I think. I am not. I'll have to watch that. Yes. It's a very artsy movie, it's not so political, but it shows French Foreign Legion soldiers in Djibouti, extreme artsy movie, psychedelic feel, almost Lynchian, I strongly recommend this. On the list. It's with the actor who, I forget his name, but he was in Leo Skarek's early movies, you know he very ugly but very memorable face I don't remember his name you know I'm talking about the guy Mauvais sang and boy meets girl I can I can look it up now but Denis Lavant yes I think I think is yes I think it's this yes Denis Lavant yes he very ugly is that by the way this Denis Sorry, this one shall we go on on short tangent, but the Neil of our face?

Would you call this a typical French face? I would not I would not. Because he looks strange. But at the same time, there are French men, especially from alpine regions. And if you are aware of the Troigro culinary family, they run the oldest three-star Michelin in France. Yeah, they have these round faces and these sort of like snub noses. You find the same phenotypes all around the Swiss Alps and in Savoy. And in Anatolia for that matter. Indeed, yeah, that's true. It's odd. It makes me think that, look, this is a polite show, I don't want to compromise me, but I I think it makes me think that Gobineau is on to something about the pre-Aryan substrate of France being the majority, but we can come back to… We can come back to… Yes, this is very interesting matters.

Yes, I know you have some opinions on the formation of the early French state, maybe we discuss this later. But look, so France absconds its responsibility in Africa, Russia moves in, you say it was also because of France's unwise reliance on its allies and its dependence more like dependence yes but why France doesn't is this naive question because France had Bob Denard before who was French mercenary just to remind audience and it used people like Bob Denard one of few men I mentioned in my book as embodiment of Bronze Age spirit in in our time but he was His adventurer and mercenary, very colorful man, ended up trying to take over the Comoros Islands three times, and France used men like him to admissions all over Africa, but no longer does. What happened with this?

Yeah, so Bob Donner specifically, he was under the structure that... So de Gaulle basically had a guy called Jacques Fouquard in his government. He had a sort of unofficial, you know, gray area position. He didn't really have like a ministership or anything. But in reality, he was the head of the SSA, the Secret Police. And so, yeah, Jacques Fouquier was in charge specifically of the entire African policy of the de Gaulle government. And so his job was basically that whenever there was a chimp out somewhere, he would ensure that, you know, some elements that could be denied, you know, etc. would be sent there to get things moving. And so Bob De Niro is very much part of those efforts. Yes, I don't understand why France doesn't use someone like him now or before instead

of relying on undependable allies. By the way, what you said whenever there was a chimp out, this is just condition of life in the tropical regions of mankind. The English administrators had a saying, the Jacarandas are in bloom, it will soon be time to send for the gunboats. The Jacarandas are these trees that bloom in hot times in tropical areas, they're beautiful or blue flowers and so forth. But France had this, and by the way, before I ask you, because you know where I'm going with this, I intend to ask you about the difference between the French government now under Macron and others versus the way it behaved under de Gaulle who was very active in France's ex-empire. But what in relation to that, is France's role in its ex-empire simply one of prestige

as Portugal's role was in its ex-empire, where it didn't really get so much economic benefit? In fact, it was a cost for Portugal, but it maintained its empire at cost because without it, it would just be this small country in the corner of Europe, which it has become. Is France's involvement prior to Macron in the Third World and other parts simply for prestige and power or did it get, you know, economic benefit? For example, Ivory Coast chocolate, yeah, no blood for chocolate, okay. Was there something, do you have comment on that maybe? The colonial situation of France in the beginning was very much a liberal project, just as it It was, for example, specifically for the Belgians, I translated the primary source

on the Belgian Congo, the very famous, you know, cut noses, ears, whatever the bunk myth. It was very much the same thing for France, because what it was is that essentially the people who grew up in the Grand Armée of Napoleon, right, people like Bugeau and these military officers, you know, they were now part of a France that had lost its prestige. And so their cope for that was basically to go into Africa, to go into Algeria, to go into places like that, and to enlarge France abroad. And the policy was very much a civilizing policy, right? There was a passage actually from Zoumoure, actually from Zoumoure d'Estain Francais, where he says, you know, it was a policy of the greatness of France founded on human rights,

and that Napoleon III, he actually gave strict instructions that in the Maghreb that the The Arabs would not, quote, know the fate of the American Indians. He wanted an Arab independent kingdom governed by Muslim law, but protected by the French army, where colonists and Arabs would live side by side, but those who wanted to become French citizens should abandon their personal status, which meant that they would abandon the Sharia and their laws, whatever, and become French full force. And that was a policy that de Gaulle very much admired, but that just was just not possible anymore in his era. And so the economic benefits for France were virtually not great until very, very late. I would say after World War II we're having Algeria, having Polynesia were a godsend because

it allowed France to supply itself with oil and to have, more importantly, places where we could test our atomic force, which we definitely would not have been able to do otherwise. Yes. Well, the fact that it's such a late economic benefit, I would think contradicts Marxist ideas about the genesis of empire. Maybe in the case of France it's arguable, but in the case of Portugal, where it was a century's long, the oldest actually European overseas empire that ran at a loss for hundreds of years, simply because they didn't, you know, in part they didn't want to be a small corner of Europe. In other part, I think they really did believe in this idea of Portuguese, similar to what you just said, Portuguese civilizing, in their case it was a multiracial empire type idea

that may be distasteful to some people, Leo. I mean, some people did benefit, of course, for example, middle-class bourgeois families like the Bouloret family. Their money entirely came from colonization. When he goes to Togo, he's treated like a head of state. Just tell the audience, Bouloret is this Breton billionaire who is backing Zemur and now the Le Pen party, yes? That's right. Vincent Bouloret, he owns Cenews, he owns a lot of telecommunication companies, he's a mini-feud with Bernard Arnault, who backs Macron, and Xavier Nel, who's kind of like our Elon Musk, and his money is entirely from like this colonial trade that his family... What, chocolate? What, they like chocolate? No, no, he runs like logistics, basically. Yes. Well, look, you mentioned de Gaulle.

I know you have many opinions on this. Charles de Gaulle, who is he? And yes, his policy in the third world was quite different from that of modern French governments. But who is Charles de Gaulle, first of all? How did he come to leadership of France? So Charles de Gaulle was from a family of bourgeois, from Lille in the north of France. If you look at his face, he looks very, you know, northern slash Flemish, you know. And he was very much a Germanophile, actually. And so he was part of this generation that was born and grew up after the 1870 defeat, the Franco-Prussian War, and so his entire life he was just driven by this idea of, you know, revanchism, that France would restore its lands that it lost during the Franco-Prussian War.

So he joined the school that trains all military officers of the land army in France, which is founded by Napoleon, called the Saint-Cyr, the Ecole Spicile Militel de Saint-Cyr, so he went there and he was not appreciated, actually. First of all, I mean physically, he looked, you know, he was very tall, his limbs were fairly thin, he looked kind of comical, but also he had delusions of grandeur, you know. When he was 17, he wrote a short novel where he envisioned himself as the savior of France, you know. And so the only reason actually he managed to get through Saint-Cyr is because his examining officer at Saint-Cyr vouched for him and liked him a lot and got him through. And that examining officer was called Philippe Petain, by the way.

And so, yeah, de Gaulle got out of Saint-Cyr, and he enlisted immediately to World War I. And already there, you can actually see his political ambitions, which I think would appeal to any sensitive young man in France today who looks at the state of things. So he writes to his mother in 1915, December 23rd, where he's on the front lines. And he says, my very dear mother, I have received your rubber, your boots, your vest, and your lamp. The whole of it is welcome and very useful. We are living in the water like frogs and to get out of it, we must lay in our shelters and hanging beds. Other than that, there is nothing to do because this water comes from the flooding of the end and its affluence etc etc. Then he says

the parliament is becoming more and more odious and stupid. The ministers literally have all their days taken by sessions in the chamber, the senate or their commissions. To the preparation of answers they will have to give to the reading of requests or their most absurd injunctions from the first wine merchant that politics has turned into a deputy. They could absolutely not, even if they wanted to, find the time to administrate their department or the needed authority to galvanize their subordinates. We will be victorious when we will have swept away this scum and there is not a Frenchman who and would not scream out in joy, the soldiers in particular, other than that, the ideas in motion, I would be very surprised if this regime survived the war. But it did survive the war, you know,

and so de Gaulle was still, you know, not very liked within his military hierarchy, so he was sort of stuck at Colonel for a while. He wrote, shortly before World War II, he wrote a book called Verlarmé de Métiers, Towards a Professional Army, where he advocated for France to create mechanized divisions and take advantage of the new invention that was a French invention, the battle tank. And he was accused by the government of wanting to do a coup d'etat, basically, and form his own separate army. And so he was not heard, and instead his book was translated into German by a guy, an anon, the pseudonym Gallicus, you know, which is very suspicious, you know, I couldn't presume but you know, I think I know who that is.

And that book was read widely amongst the German officers, especially General Hans von Schick. And it is widely reported that Hitler also read it, by the way. And yeah, I mean, they basically applied these ideas which were already anyway in motion and that was the thinking of the time. And so ironically, de Gaulle was finally given command of the 4th Motorized Division at the Battle of Mont-Courné, and it was the only action during the Battle for France in 1940 where there was success. And then what happened with him during World War II? You say his mentor was Petain, who was leader of Vichy, France. What happened with de Gaulle during World War II? I mean, the entire army was demoralized and de Gaulle was at the time undersecretary for war. So he was part of the government.

The government fell apart and it was basically they just decided to hand over power to Petain and the assembly did which the assembly was mostly made up actually of the popular front who had won in 1936 and they were commies of course. And so, yeah, they abdicated their powers and allowed Pétain to take over. And as soon as that happened, de Gaulle actually was in Bordeaux, he had just landed from London, and he asked Paul Baudouin, I think, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had the list of who was on the government, right? And he looked at him as he was just coming out of the office of Pétain and asked him, am I on the list? And he says, Pierre Ordini was told this by Baudouin specifically, General de Gaulle came out of the shadows and asked me if he was in the government.

I knew full well he was not, but to save time I pretended to consult my paper, which he came over my shoulder to read. No sooner had he finished going through it than he whispered still over my shoulder, I know what I have to do. And so he left, took the plane to London, and he was alone, had no resources to his name. All he had was basically the pretension to want to represent the French honor of France that had not been defeated, that had not abdicated. big idea. He is an important man in French history. I have my own particular views of him which I will say in a moment and you can argue against them. I have criticism of him from the right. But you have ideas of Charles de Gaulle as somehow a spirit of only possible

let's say nationalist or right-wing alternative in France, if I'm not stating your position correctly, you say, but why is that? How did he come to embody French path in modern times? I know that American conservatives do not like Charles de Gaulle for reasons quite different and I don't like him. They don't like him because his relationship to the United States was at times tense, his relationship to NATO was tense and so forth, and they think he was a vain man who inappropriately tried to take France down its own particular path. I know Harvey Mansfield, who is a man I like very much, but he doesn't like the goal for these kinds of American conservative reasons. What's your opinion on him and his role in French history?

Yeah, that's not surprising that American conservatives dislike him, but the thing with de Gaulle without getting into the right-wing last reign, which we'll get into later after World War II, I would say what de Gaulle represented is the possibility for France not to be extinguished, not to be defeated. You know, Petain was part of… I actually think that Petain was a hero, which is something that you cannot say in France today. It is taboo. And it's part actually of this renewal after World War II that disallows this. I personally know actually someone who was in the Council of Ministers during G.C. Al-Dastan's presidency where they were discussing bringing Pétain's body back to the L'Enveride where all our great military men are buried and it's just a great controversy

to just kind of do it. It's taboo. And I think that Pétain was a hero because he gave France time to not disappear like Poland did so many times and fall into this traumatism of having a country that was wiped off the map. If you've ever seen this movie, the famous movie Casablanca, there's a scene in it halfway through where they're in this restaurant and there's a bunch of German officers who were singing Die Wacht am Rhein, Es brachten, ruf, wiederne, hal, wie, schwärtke, gler und wochen Kral, zum Rhein, zum Rhein, zum Deutschen Rhein. And so the character in the movie asks the music band to play La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. And then the whole bar erupts into this and you can see that the extras cry. And that's because they were actual French exilees

who had taken refuge in the United States, the actors. And so you can see in their faces this trauma of having a country that's defeated, disappeared, wiped off the map. And the only reason that didn't happen because a man de Gaulle who had almost no resources just took it upon him to do that. And he did it at the expense because the Allies, of course, Winston Churchill only approved of a de Gaulle that would serve him. And as soon as there was any tension, whether it was in the Levant for France's possessions, the mandate in Lebanon and Syria, or in Algeria or in Indochina, he constantly faced obstacles. There are islands, you know there's an island off the coast of Canada, Newfoundland called Saint Pierre et Miquelon, which was almost seized by the United States and it wasn't

because de Gaulle ordered one of his ships to take the island by force and he was immediately rebuked by the State Department around 1941 or 1942 I believe. And you had this pattern all over the place where he constantly found the Allies eating up pieces of France and if he hadn't been there to impose himself and declare by his very presence that France had not been defeated, that it would continue to honor its obligations and that it would be part of the victorious powers, then France would just be in a relevant country today. It would have no power, it would have no prestige in the world and it would have no role to play and thus it would have no right to exist. He actually met with Roosevelt right before they were going to take Paris.

And in that meeting, Roosevelt directly tells him what his plan was for the post-war order. And he says, I quote from de Gaulle's memoirs right now, which everyone should read if you want to understand de Gaulle, he says, his conception seemed to me an imposing one, although disquieting for Europe and for France. It was true that the isolationism of the United States was, according to the President, a great error now ended. But passing from one extreme to the other, it was a permanent system of intervention that he intended to institute by international law. In his mind, a four-power directory – America, Soviet Russia, China, and Great Britain – would settle the world's problems. A parliament of the Allied nations would give a democratic appearance to the authority of the Big Four.

But short of handing over the quasi-totality of the Earth's surface to the other three, Such an organization, according to him, would have to involve the installation of American forces on bases distributed throughout the world, and of which certain ones would be located in French territory. Roosevelt thus intended to lure the Soviets into a group that would contain their ambition and in which America could unite its dependents. Among the four, he knew in fact that Chiang Kai-shek's China needed his cooperation and that the British in danger of losing their dominions would yield to his policy. As for the horde of small and middle-sized states, he would be in a position to act upon them by the aid he could provide.

Lastly, the right of peoples to decide for themselves the support offered by Washington, the existence of American bases would give rise to new sovereignties in Africa, Asia, and Australasia which would increase the number of states under obligation to the United States. In such a prospect, the questions relative to Europe, notably the fate of Germany, the destiny of the states along with the Vistula and the Danube as well as the Balkans and Italy's destiny, seemed to him quite subordinate. In order to find a satisfactory solution for them, he would certainly not go to the length of sacrificing the monumental conception that he dreamed of turning into a reality. I listened to Roosevelt describe his plans to me, as was only human, his will to power clothe itself in idealism.

The president, moreover, did not explain matters as a professor, setting down principles, nor as a politician who flatters passions and interests. It was by light touches that he sketched in his notions, and so skillfully that it was difficult to contradict this artist, this seducer, in any categorical way. I answered him, nevertheless, that in my opinion his plan risked endangering the Western world. By considering Western Europe as a secondary matter, was he not going to weaken the very cause he meant to serve? That of civilization? In order to obtain Soviet approval, would he not have to yield them to the detriment of Poland and Baltic, Danubian and Balkan states, certain advantages that threatened the general equilibrium?

How could he be assured that China, emerging from the ordeals on which its nationalism was being forged, would remain which he was now? If it was true, as I was the first to think and say, that the colonial powers must renounce the direct administration of the peoples they ruled and practice with them a regime of association, it was also true that this enfranchisement could not be affected against those powers themselves at the risk of unleashing among the unorganized masses a xenophobia and anarchy dangerous for the entire world. It is the West, I told President Roosevelt, that must be restored. If it regains its balance, the rest of the world, whether it wishes to or not, will take it for an example. If it declines, barbarism will ultimately sweep everything away.

Now Western Europe, despite its dissensions and its distress, is essential to the West. Nothing can replace the value, the power, the shining examples of these ancient peoples. This is true of France above all, which is of all the great nations of Europe, the only one which was, is, and always will be your ally. I know that you are preparing to aid France materially and that aid will be invaluable to her. But if it is in the political realm, that she must recover her vigor, her self-reliance, and consequently her role. How can she do this if she is excluded from the organization of the great world powers and their decisions if she loses her African and Asian territories? In short, if the settlement of the war definitely imposes upon her the psychology of the vanquished?"

And later on, he says, Later, however, an anonymous source sent me a photostatic copy of a letter Roosevelt had written eight days after my departure to Congressman Joseph Clark Baldwin. In it, the president alluded to some shady American deal with the French, quote, Compagnie general trans-atlantic and warned his correspondent to be careful I did not get wind of it, for once I was informed I would not fail to liquidate the company's director. In his letter, Roosevelt further formulated his estimate of myself and our meetings. Quote, De Gaulle and I, he wrote, have examined and outlined the subjects of the day, but we talk more deeply about the future of France, its colonies, world peace, etc. In relation to future problems, he seems quite tractable from the moment France is dealt

with as a world power. He's very touchy in matters concerning the honor of France, but I suspect that he is essentially an egoist. I was never to know if Franklin Roosevelt thought that in affairs concerning France, Charles de Gaulle was an egoist for France or for himself. So you see that essentially this plan, which has been the ruin of the Western world so far, would have very much excluded France and in so doing would have caused… I mean, Poland, for instance, France was the only power, once it was allowed to be part of the victorious power, the only power who refused to ratify the recognition of the Polish so-called government that the Soviets had installed. The Anglos completely ceded to that. The Soviets were, of course, okay with it, and China was okay with it.

And even though de Gaulle knew that France's word meant nothing at the time, at least history would record that, that it was France that took the side of the West in that event. And you have many, many other instances where that happened. Yes. This is very interesting, Leo, and what you just read from de Gaulle's memoirs is unimpeachable in the sense of I do think France, not Germany, although, you know, maybe it should have been maybe Germany's destiny, but for better or worse, it was at the time you're saying after the war and still is that France is the heart of Europe, and if de Gaulle saw France's continued prominence in the post-war order as a way to guarantee European civilization, that hard to argue against. But in what you just read, he mentions France's role in Africa and Asia.

And so you know where I'm going with this because the way de Gaulle really, the birth of the French Fifth Republic is in the Algeria crisis and there are French patriots who think de Gaulle is let's say a traitor in that. I know it's a strong word, but just to tell the audience, they may not know the same personages you and I know, I tend to follow the views of this man, Hilaire du Berriere, who is a kind of James Bond figure, international spy, and he's American, he's born in North Dakota, but of French Huguenot ancestry, and he ended up franchising, you know, in the same, he became French, you know, he trans-French essentially. He was a pilot very early on in the 1920s, an international spy. Ended up being Bao Dai, the last Vietnamese emperor's right-hand man.

He's a liaison to French interests and French intelligence services in Vietnam before the French left and the Americans came. and he has this book I recommended when Moldbug came on my show, and now it is sold out. It's very hard to find. It's called Background to Betrayal, published 1965, in which he points out that the Americans came into Vietnam and essentially destroyed all the anti-communist factions by supporting this man Dien, who was a Vietnamese anti-French nationalist, anti-imperial, against the Vietnamese imperial house, but ended up basically destroying Vietnam's ability to resist Soviet-supported communism because it was only the local Vietnamese secret societies plus the French presence in Indochina that was stopping the commies from taking over that region.

And anyway, he's known for that work, but he has newsletter and many other such thing in which he attacks the Gaul eventually quite viciously as a traitor for his abandonment of French Algeria, where I remind the audience, if you listen to my first episode, I make appeal precisely to this because there were, I believe, a million and a half Frenchmen who had lived there for 150 years. They had more and longer presence there than present so-called Israelis do in Israel. And really, they were ethnically cleansed. And there was obviously crisis over the Algerian civil war. And would you mind reminding audience of what happened during that crisis, how the Gaul came to power, and perhaps, I know you don't agree with me, but arguing against what I'm saying now,

which is that the French hard right opposes the Gaul for what they see as his betrayal of French interests in Algeria. And before you start, I want to read something from Hillel du Berriere's newsletter. This is as early as 1960. It is true that Berriere was for the Gaul early on, but soured on him as the Algeria crisis deepened. So I will read something because it's still pertinent to world, actually, United States, even political situation. I'm reading now. Algeria, why? It is too early to judge the extent of the Communist Party's victory in this affair. Now, he's writing this in 1960, February. Sustelle's elimination is indicative. Had he remained silent, he could have stayed. He took the stand dictated by his conscience.

With the Gaul taking advantage of his victory in Algiers and the mood it created to strengthen his power, the Reds were striking too while the iron was hot. The Communist Party has been in Coventry since 558. They used the Algiers insurrection to break out and assume leadership of the workers' forces and left-wing socialist groups against fascists in quotation mark, which a left-inspired press created for them. The cry of fascists is communism's trump card against any menace. No matter how authoritarian, the Gaul's power does not disturb the communists as long as it is cracking down on their enemies. Throughout the crisis, they demanded pitiless sanctions, punishment for the so-called fascists, weeding out of the reactionary enemies of democracy.

These repressive measures followed the pattern that brought rocracy to power in Hungary. By denouncing, eliminating or isolating every hostile force, while keeping their own strength intact, Rakhosi's Communists gradually excluded all effective opposition. The destruction of the opposition by slices Rakhosi's labeled Operation Salami. The wave of arrest warrants, recalls and investigations after the Algiers affair was not followed by a corresponding crackdown on the Reds. In its readiness to resurrect the cry of so-called fascism, our American popular place is lending itself to the game of communism and von Lier's office in Cairo. The beneficiaries are the Reds in France, America's liberal theorists should look ahead some months from now.

If France loses the self-determination plebiscite by refusal to heed the advice of every statement or general in touch with the Muslims, the free world is lost. The arrival in metropolitan France of some three million Europeans and Muslims who dared not or will not remain in Algeria will lead to a dictatorship there in three months. All the safeguards against such a dictatorship swinging to the left are being systematically removed now, be they generals, colonels, ministers or organizations." I end quote and end reading, obviously there was not, or maybe you want to say there was such dictatorship in France, but you can see this is a maybe extreme adoptive French patriot's view even as early in 1960 of the goal, what he sees as the goals bundling in Algeria where

he accuses the goal essentially of being a cuck and only attacking the people to his right and allowing the communists to win in Algeria and so forth. What you have to say about this and about how the goal came, let's say, to prominence during the Algeria crisis and so forth? Yeah, so that's a great passage, and I would say it's largely correct from the perspective of French right-wingers. Now the problem with it is that it omits certain nuances, like Sustel, who was the huge champion of French Algeria, was a man of the left. Now why did Sustel champion Algeria so much? It was out of a humanist, very much the Republican colonization sort of tradition, right? So Sustel used to say things like, there are no differences between a peasant of Sevene

and a peasant from Kabili, right, in Algeria. Now the thing is, is that de Gaulle, it depended on the timing, you know, de Gaulle had a mission. People like that, you can never really classify, even though, you know, de Gaulle for sure is a right-leaning man, but you can never classify these people as like men of the left or of the right. De Gaulle was his own man. He had a mission. His mission was to restore the rank of France in the world. And as long as something aligned with that, he was fine with it. If it impeded his mission, he got rid of it in the most ruthless manner. So what de Gaulle used to say, to answer Sustel on this humanist thing of loving Algeria, which is, personally, I think it's a real shame that France lost Algeria.

In a way, France was relegated to the rank of a simple masquerading as this nation state when it really has much higher ambitions than that, and it's because we lost Algeria that that began. But you also need to look at the circumstances of the time. So why did de Gaulle think that he had to just cut the guardian knot and get rid of Algeria? He lied to himself, of course, I think. Great men always lie to themselves, they invent narratives to continue their path. But he had the Americans on one hand and the Soviets on the other who were threatening to basically sanction the shit out of France. And so de Gaulle became a ruthless realist and he said, you can integrate individuals and up to a certain point only.

You do not integrate peoples with their past, their traditions, their shared memories of victorious or lost battles, their heroes. You think that between the Pinoy and Arabs it will ever not be the case. You think they have the feelings of a common fatherland, able to overcome all divisions of races, classes, religions. You really think they have the will to live together. Have you ever thought about the fact that Arabs would multiply by 5, then 10, while the French population would remain almost stationary? There would be 200, then 400 Arab deputies in Paris. Can you imagine an Arab president at the Élysée? And then he also used economic arguments, right? So he would say, we founded our colonization from the beginning on the principles of assimilation.

It was claimed that we could make the Negroes good Frenchmen. We had them recite our ancestors, the Gauls. Not very clever. That's why decolonization is so much more difficult for us than for the English. They always recognized differences of race and culture. They organized self-government. All they had to do was loosen the reins a bit and everything would work out. We denied these differences. We wanted to be a republic of a hundred million identical and interchangeable Frenchmen. That's why the French experienced decolonization as a tearing apart. Well, I created the community precisely so that each of the peoples who compose it can follow their own paths as they wish, preferably in good agreement with us because ultimately it's in the interest of everyone.

It's beautiful equality, but it's not within our reach. Wanting all the populations of the overseas territories to enjoy the same social rights as those in the mainland, an equal standard of living, would mean that ours would be halved. Who is ready for that? So since we cannot offer them equality, it's better to give them freedom. Bye bye, you cost us too much." Millions of Frenchmen wouldn't have had to be essentially ethnically cleansed, but what you read, Leo, is very compelling. Before we go to break, because audience may not be familiar even with the general features of history in that time, can you just explain to audience what happened during this Algeria crisis just very, very generally? Because I know this man, Ilair du Berriere, I mentioned he actually housed in his, like

a safe house in Paris, French military who had essentially rebelled against the Gaul, without going necessarily into too many details unless you want. Can you just give the audience a general view of history during that time? Yeah, and I'm glad you're giving me the opportunity to because it's actually very important. It's the literal foundation of the current regime in France. So what happened in 1958 is that de Gaulle had been out of politics for 12 years. He had decided after the war, he had formed this provisional government whatever and given the administration back to the old powers to say that – they wanted him to go on the balcony in Paris on the day of the liberation of Paris, which by the way, the Allies did

everything in their power to ensure that French troops would not go into Paris on that day. But de Gaulle ordered the division that was allowed to land, the mechanized division of Leclerc to go straight to Paris to liberate him, so that they would be the first in there. And so they wanted him, the notables, the politicians, to get up on the balcony and proclaim a new republic, but de Gaulle refused to do that, because if I did that, I would admit that the regime had fallen, but it hasn't. And so he was okay with giving back power to these incompetence just to restore the rank of the nation. But the problem is that he said that the presidency would not give him the authority to rebuild the country, and so he resigned, hoping that he would be called back, but it lasted 12 long years.

And basically what happened is that there had been a huge discrepancy between the policy of the government, which was this parliamentary regime of cliques, of factions that couldn't make a single decision on anything, that had just come out of a huge defeat at Dien Bien Phu by an extremely valorous foreign legion who fought until the end over there. And those same people were now in Algeria seeing the same situation. They were winning every battle, but the government was not allowing them to win the war. And so these people actually threatened the government, and they said, we want the Gulbak. And if you do not bring the Gulbak, in a week we will land in Corsica, which they did. A paratrooper regiment landed in Corsica. Then they started doing bombings in Paris, by the way.

And then they said the next week will be in Toulouse, and the week after that will be in Paris. And so to avoid the country's civil war, call the Gul. And so ironically, this is very, very similar to, in a way, if you want to do a fun historical parallel to 18th Primer, the Napoleonic coup. But Napoleon had much less nerve than de Gaulle. De Gaulle said nothing. He didn't give way to the army. He didn't say that he was supporting anyone. He just stayed in his house and said, just posted a statement and said, I am ready to assume the powers to fix the problem. And he summoned the president and then, imagine, a private citizen summoning the head of state. And he went to his house and they just talked, there was nothing.

But after that, he said, I am ready to assume the powers of the republic, blah, blah, blah. So he had completely neutered the Fourth Republic's government and he had then through other intermediaries told the army to stand down. And so Dogol was given special powers to go to Algeria. He went to Algiers, he stood on the forum where an immense crowd acclimated him. And if you look at the videos, it's not just Pied-Noir, it's not just French people, it's also the Arabs. You can look at their faces, they were waving French flags. All of them were rallied under the character, the historical percentage of Charles de Gaulle. He got up on the podium and he said, I have understood you, je vous écompris. Now this is a bit of a meme now in modern France, because people tend to say that doesn't

mean anything, right? I mean, he just said that and then abandoned Algeria, right? So what gives? My interpretation of this is again, that I think that de Gaulle didn't know what he was going to do in Algeria, you know, he just went and tried to give people an impression that he was now here, that he was going to lead the country and bring back stability. Now what he means, and I'm sure that, you know, de Gaulle was educated with the ideas of the empire. You know, Saint-Cyr's military school was very much, you know, where the military caste of France was bred, you know? And so for a guy like him to abandon Algeria, it must have hurt, man. But the thing is, is that he told himself, you know, I have the Americans on one side, I have the Soviets on one side.

My only mission in the world is to make sure that France's foreign policy is respected, that people respect the rank of France in the world. And if I keep having this ball and chain that is called Algeria with me, then we're fucked You know, our economy cannot support to give these people equal rights and the second we cannot support the idea of being blockaded by the Soviets and the Americans and being in and being a country that's held in infamy. So he said, very, you know, coldly, very cruelly, I mean, what happened to the Pinoy was an absolute tragedy. And in fact, during the Council of Ministers, many of his ministers, including, you know, Alain Perfitt, who was just for audience, he had no other with the French colonists in Nigeria. That's right.

You know, there were two, three, four, five generations in Algeria. Algeria was their home. They had probably never seen France, you know. But to him, you know, in a council of ministers where they were discussing the question, and Alain Perfit, his minister of information and his confidant actually, he told him, you know, there's like hundreds, tens of thousands of people divorcing on Marseille right now. And Charles de Gaulle said very coldly, I think you're exaggerating things, you know. And that was extremely cold and cruel. The problem is that when you get in front of the path of a man like that who has a mission, it didn't matter anymore. He was ready to sacrifice tens of thousands of people to ensure that the rank of France was preserved. Yes. No, understood Leo.

And so, yes, this is birth of current Fifth Republic, correct? That's right. That's right. A presidential monarchical system where the president actually has the powers of a Roman style dictator. Yes. interesting and interesting to see what happened in coming years with anyone if anyone can pick up the crown of this but Leo I've been keeping you for a while on this segment what you say you let's take another break I need to have a drank I need to have a drank and smoke and we come back you want to come back you want to talk Napoleon and such I think this is a fantastic idea for them this very Very nice, we will be right back. Et gueux les états dans, nous que de toutes de pas, seu j'ai seu l'écipé. Vous, est vieilleurs et vous de votre le targez.

L'adorez vous avec nous défendre où la patrie. Et gueux de bons, entendre les vous, entendre le garde, dans bivant aussons chaudelas. Dans les marceaux et cléberdent d'autre. Le queur français garde à jamais l'évace. So, so, Timo de Fierro d'Inid, et t'en t'en vous éfant, c'est n'y a l'en. Vamos a t'assé en de vamos. Nous ce tous chandes désées pourqué. Et que n'esées t'en d'amos que de toute de pas. Ce j'ai ce l'ésez-pé. Vous émerieur et vous de votre l'étage. N'y a l'en vous avec nous défendre la patrie. Et que de vous entre les mous, Son n'est le garde dans Mais dans la plaine nous mieux rie sur les seins C'est on la montage et sur les ausséons La mort valerque nous dimons seins Vois c'est que trois savoir quoi soger C'est le revail des égles tris en fait

La téroic au français ton n'appet Toujours présentéz-moi vont les rafins Napoleon is a main subject of this next segment, where I return now with Leo Caesaris, French writer and historian, and we have been talking the French elections and the example of Charles de Gaulle in French history. Welcome back to show. Leo, you were talking about Gaul, Charles de Gaulle and Gaulism, but Charles de Gaulle, correct if I'm wrong, is just one instantiation in our time of Bonapartism in French society what is this because I have told people oh I have young French Bonapartists coming on show and they asked me what do you mean it's somebody who actually supports the house of Bonaparte of course it's not it's something else it's the example of Napoleon Bonaparte of what he means in

France and actually and I would agree with you on this because we share this love of Napoleon unadulterated, unlike our opinions on Charles de Gaulle, but what Napoleon actually means not just for France but for modern world in general. But yes, how do you see this? What is Bonapartism in French tradition? So I would again recommend reading René Raymond's book on the right in France. It has the same trouble as everyone else to define specifically this current of gullism and bottom partism, you know, and it's because they're based on individual greatness. So just like in, you know, you mentioned several times on your show, you know, Peronism, there were the left Peronists, the right Peronists that, you know, there are at this point entire

departments in American universities dedicated to Latin American studies of, you know, what is actually pluralism. Is it the left? Is it the right? And so it's the exact same thing in this case because it's the current of a great man. It's high above party confessional politics. And so the great man comes, he spends the energy that was accumulated for him, and then everyone tries to ape him or misinterpret his mission once he's long gone. All he can do is set the vision and be a founder of a new people if he succeeds. So for de Gaulle, it's the same. You see de Gaulle today, who claims to be Gaullist? Well, basically everyone. If you say you're anti-Gaulist, you are not really taken seriously in the political sphere today.

Whereas in reality, no one here currently in power or in parliament or whatever actually represents anything that de Gaulle stood for or his vision of France. And as for Napoleon, it's the same. I mean, in the Second Empire, Napoleon III had a famous quote that I'm misremembering right now that, you know, you can be anything as a Bonapartist. You can be himself, he called himself a socialist Bonapartist, you know. But what I would define Bonapartism as is, yes, as you said, not exactly what most people think of it as, you know, being loyal to the House of Bonaparte or whatever. In fact, I actually have some links to organizations that the House of Bonapartes are members of, but nothing is going to come out of there.

It's very much a LARP, which, you know, there's still esteemable people, but nothing is going to happen there. So what do I mean by Bonapartism? I mean, first of all, the praise and extolling of individual greatness in the form of a single champion, a man of power who can rally peoples of all different predilections, no matter where they're from, whether they're from the left, whether they're from the right. It's not about the petty squabbles of today right this second. It's about higher things, higher ambitions, the creation of higher types of art, higher struggles. So naturally I think that these things tend to come from the right, but in a way they also must struggle against the right. So if you look at Napoleon on 13th Vendénieur when he was tasked with quelling the royalist

uprising that was coming on to Paris, he had the power to single-handedly hand Paris to the royalists if he wished. And Napoleon was not, you know, people would call him reactionary, I guess, today. You know, there's a very famous bit of him saying that he saw the day that they dragged the king, Louis XVI, outside of the Treaty, you know, and he said in Corsican, of course, to his companion, he said, Colleone, you know, he said, what an idiot to let himself be dragged by the scum like this, you know? And so why didn't he restore the monarchy? Why didn't he side with the royalists? Like today, we could side with the Legitimists or with the Orleanists or whatever, you know? It's Napoleon the Mafia Don from Corsica, yeah. That's right, that's right, that's right, exactly.

And so why didn't he do that? Because that world was dead, you know, he wasn't going to bring back something that was going to fall apart after three years that the people's sensibilities were not amenable to anymore. You know, Gobineau says himself that laws, at the end of the day, they have to adapt to the sensibilities of a people. And so what did Napoleon do? He recreated France, France of the 17th century, the France that gave the example in Europe that was admired for its joy, for its art, for its higher culture. That France was gone. You know, it was never going to be brought back. There's an amazing essay by Emile Cioran, who's a, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but he's a Romanian philosopher that was a huge Francophile and lived in Paris

that our friend Romanian Haidac on Twitter translated. It's an incredible essay. And what he writes in that is that France was supposed to die. France was supposed to be extinguished and live out its days as a great civilization that had declined and been extinguished. But instead we had a miracle is that a man Napoleon Bonaparte came out of nowhere. and restored it and recreated its people, gave them new laws. If you read some of the things that were said in the Council of State when they were debating the Civil Code, which has now taken over the entire planet, it's the most popular way to govern a nation today, so much so that even Japan tried it at some point. And so what were they talking about in those discussions in the minuets of the Council of State?

know Napoleon was talking when the question of you know should adoption be permitted to unmarried people and Napoleon would say so that it may be honorable the adopted individual must enter the family otherwise we would place adoption in parallel to bastardy which is the crassest insult we would reduce the number of marriages and following that the population why should we get married if we could have children without enduring the burden of marriage it is said that that these are fanciful fears, we must foresee things from afar. Who would have said that the discovery of the New World would destroy the population of Spain? These things do not come immediately. They are the effects of centuries. It is the drop of water which pierces

granite. Marriage and the population could be affected later on by a cause which would not immediately act upon them. Marriage, it is said, is quite fashionable. That is true, but we must ensure it remains so. To respect our current mores, adoption must only be a rare supplement to the effects of marriage and not a way to escape it. Adoption should be brought close to the honorable commitment of marriage. Thus, its usage cannot be granted to the unmarried. It would be astonishing that a man who lives in celibacy should be able to transmit his name. The child who would bear it would be mistaken for the bastard and would chair his debasement, if, as we agree, the highest consideration is owed to marriage, and the one who has put off marriage

should not be able to replace its effects. Adoption should not be placed in opposition to the marital union. Otherwise, we would be destroying the spirit of the family." You know, these are questions of quite high order, you know of what is how is the French people to perpetuate itself and and and these things in a way they have to be done in an esoteric fashion and they have to be done thinking about centuries to come. And Napoleon had such breadth of vision to think about such things while fighting battles, while trying to stay in power, while rebuilding France after the revolution, he still had time to think about such deep questions. And he didn't have, you know, the learning that all these Councillors, all these people

who were, you know, experts of ancien régime laws and Roman law, whatever, he did not have these, he didn't have this education. What he had is that he read Plutarch and Rousseau, you know, so it's just, it shows you the breadth of vision when a man of genius comes along. Yes, I mean, the way you put it, and I agree with this, is he might be most influential lawgiver and therefore in ancient words prophet in modern times, maybe his laws, the Napoleonic Code, everyone knows of this now, might be as maybe more influential, I hope, well I I am blaspheming, but something, at least in short run now, as what happened with Jesus' law giving in ancient world, Leo. And so this quite amazing development in our time, I would emphasize—again, correct if

I'm wrong—despite Napoleon's agreement with the Church, I would emphasize that the The Bonapartist faction in France is secular. Am I wrong on this as opposed to, let's say, the religious reactionaries and then the left socialists on the other hand, this would be a third way. Am I wrong about that? No, it's very much the case. I mean, the thing is that Napoleon restored Catholicism. It's just really funny, you know, the royalist faction, which wanted deeply the church to come back in France did not succeed, right? Who brought back religion, the order of established religion in France? It was Napoleon, who's not really some deeply held religious confessionalist. When he went to Egypt, he larped as a Caesar and Alexander. He called himself Ali and the

friend of the prophet and whatever, and he fantasized about marching on Constantinople as a sultan. Yes, this reminds in ancient world Lysander, the Spartan general who became the first Greek to be worshipped as a god, and this, yes, very, well anyway, you go on, yes. Yeah I mean it's just, Napoleon was, I think the reason why I keep talking about Napoleon all the time, because I very much personally think that, you know, even based on my pseudonym right? That Caesar is the example for all sensitive young men out there. But the problem with Caesar is that you have so little to go on. There's a very famous, well it's not famous actually, it's quite hidden and I rescued it from a stupid mamser who was

going to throw out this book. Gerhard Brandes was this Danish author who discovered Nietzsche. I have this copy on my shelf, 1929 copy that he dedicated to Lord Viscount Haldane and They were just going to dump it at this fucking university. So I rescued this book and in it he says something absolutely incredible. He says that there can be no doubt that Caesar through his conquest of Gaul is the founder of the modern French nation by delineating its borders, by regrouping that people into one structure, by getting them to abandon their customs, their Moors, even their names and adopt Roman more so that in the end, centuries later, the Franks would decide that they wanted to preserve Rome, but unlike the Goths, not in Rome, but in France, right?

But again, you have so little to go on with such a man of genius because so long ago, you could say anything. You could dismiss him. You could say that his successors propagandized his life or whatever. With Napoleon, you cannot do that. Napoleon is so recent, way too recent. He left so much writing. People don't know about it because it's tiny. He wrote memoirs that he dictated and they're quite crude, they're written in the form of a… It's funny. He starts his memoirs which are basically just commentaries of his campaigns, The Campaign of Italy, The Campaign of Egypt, and The Hundred Days. And he starts the very first book with Italy is divided into three parts. It's just complete Cesar Larper, you know? And so…

There have been many other men, great men throughout history, but Leo, I will put musics in the following 20 seconds because actually I forgot my wine in the fridge and I must go in because I cannot continue to talk without wine because, you know, once you start drinking you can't stop. So I will get up just for 10 seconds to get wine. Do not look at screen. I don't remember if I turn off camera. I may be naked. Please do not be awed by my prodigious power. This is like Moses, you know, the qaren, where he gets the ray of light. Is this what's happening? It's something like this, the fire. But look, you can talk or I can put music, but literally five seconds I'll be right back. Go, go, go, run. Yes. Well, I am back. Yes.

We are talking now with Leo about Napoleon and Bonaparte question of which it is a destiny of France, it is connected to destiny of France and Europe. As it happens now, Macron, whether he likes it or not, he is inhabiting this archetype set up by Napoleon and that de Gaulle, who we have discussed, inhabited prior to him. And it should be said, however, that Napoleon, if you read War and Peace, he was seen, of course, because of his wars and conquests, as he was seen as the Antichrist by the old order in Europe, at least by the old, by the Ancien Regime and by the old religious order and so forth, and he became, you had a post to this effect, Leo, that he was a universally reviled figure in 19th century, something like what Hitler

has become in our time, and I want you to comment on this. Is this true? because I think it is, but on the other hand he inspired so many wonderful artists and writers that both you and I admire. Stendhal, Balzac, Victor Hugo Tolstoy who I just mentioned, Beethoven maybe negatively, Byron, many others. It is French friend who I don't want to name who mentions this this problem. How do you explain this? What's going on? So he definitely was the Hitler or the Kritias or whatever archetype you want to use of the post 19th century world order. Just tell audiences they might not know. Kritias, an ancient Greek philosopher, leader of 30 tyrants who committed such atrocities in Athens toward the end of Peloponnesian War that, yes, you can think he was unspoken name, he was the kind of Hitler

of the 300s BC in Athens, so revived. But go on. Yes, and it's very much, of course, because he was just an explosion in the middle of this European order with people like, you know, who I very much consider, you know, as his family show, can I say, you know, faggots like Like Metternich or you know these kinds of people. Metternich is an overrated faggot. Yes, he's a fag. That's right. And so Napoleon was such a dangerous explosion that his entire historiography is quite a lot of crap, I have to say, especially the English written one. People ask me all the time, do you know a book or what book do you recommend about Napoleon? And I can never give them an answer, because first off, I mean, I don't read English books on Napoleon. Oh, you don't like Simon Shama? You don't like... Oh, God.

I mean, all of these stupid books, you know, Napoleon the Great, whatever. Sorry to interject. My favorite part of Simon Shama's book about Napoleon was when at the end, he tries to nitpick, excuse me, at the beginning, he tries to nitpick about Napoleon not doing it well in school, Leo, you know, if you can believe that. He didn't do his homework, you know. Yes. They obsess about such trivial matters. You saw it in this stupid movie, Ridley Scott Napoleon. It's like, oh yes, he did everything because he was cooking to his wife. You know, it's like, well, I have letters that he was writing to her and he basically dragged her all the way to creating the empire, you know? So it's just complete nonsense, these people.

And the only English book I can recommend on Napoleon is David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon. That is the only one. Carl de Gaulle wrote a letter to David Chandler telling him that he was the best scholar on Napoleon. He wrote that letter in French, of course. But yeah, so that's probably the only one. But otherwise, I actually basically only read primary sources. So I've only read Napoleon's own words. Napoleon himself says, you can dismiss that, of course, and say, oh, of course, he would write good things about himself. Yeah, if you're a small brain person, for sure, that would be what you think. But Napoleon himself says, you know, my voice is as good as another, you know, I have seen other people explain my intentions or some things to an order of battle that I have given.

So why should my voice not count as well? And the reason why they couldn't erase him, even though he was reviled by, you know, English historiography, and it's, you know, his son, his son Napoleon II, which we call in France Liglung, the small eagle. He was sequestered in the court of Austria. They were so scared of him, they wouldn't even give him a single military command because they were afraid that he would just blow up and take over Europe again. Imagine how potent his legacy was. And in fact, it must be said that Napoleon II, who died very young, he was a sensitive young man as well, and he said, by the way, if my mother had been Josephine, my father would not have died in St. Helena. Very

harsh words. But so, yeah, and so Napoleon II, his body, his remains were brought back to Paris to lie next to his father by the decision of Adolf Hitler, actually. He chose as a gesture of goodwill to send the remains back to Les Enverides in Paris. I think that's very interesting. Yes, very, very interesting. But what this means, so he was reviled because because he's basically conquest of Europe and as maybe people understood it at the time, conquest of the world, but he was also inspiration for all these artists and writers and became a kind of sub-current, a spiritual and artistic sub-current in Europe. How is that possible military leader genius become spiritual, artistic sub-current? Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it? When he was in Germany, he met with Goethe and

And his conversations with Goethe are enlightening. He criticizes his tragedies. He tells him, oh, why did you write this this way? This isn't natural. It shouldn't have ended this way. And Goethe agrees. And he was surprised that he had read his work. And Napoleon was very much sensitive to art. And he inspired, of course, like you said, Beethoven, Goethe, all these people who saw at the end of the day, the spiritual emanation of his vision, which was a super united Europe. The voice of good, the music of Beethoven, it cannot be said that it is simply German. It's absolutely European. And this is something, of course, that Nietzsche reiterates all the time. Yes. In fact, I am going to read now a famous passage from Nietzsche, from Twilight of the Idols

A favorite passage of mine and yours as I understand it Leo, in which he mentions Napoleon. I am reading now, my concept of genius. Great men, like great ages, are explosive material in which a stupendous amount of power is accumulated. The first conditions of their existence are always historical and physiological. They are the outcome of the fact that for long ages, energy has been collected, hoarded up, saved up and preserved for their use, and that no explosion has taken place. When the tension in the bulk has become sufficiently excessive, the most fortuitous stimulus suffices in order to call genius, great deeds and momentous fate into the world. What then is the good of all environment, historical periods, zeitgeist and public opinion? He is saying they transcend all that.

Take the case of Napoleon. France of the revolution, and still more of the period preceding the revolution, would have brought forward the type which was the very reverse of Napoleon. It actually did produce such a type. And because Napoleon was something different, the heir of a stronger, more lasting and older civilization than that which in France was being smashed to atoms, he became master there. He was the only master there. Great men are necessary. The age in which they appear is a matter of chance. The fact that they almost invariably master their age is accounted for simply by the fact that they are stronger, that they are older, and that power has been stored up longer for them. The relation of a genius to his age is that which exists between the strength and weakness,

and between the maturity and youth. The age is relatively always very much younger, thinner, less mature, less resolute, and more childish. Let me just interject. I'll continue reading, but this is just such a wonderful slap in the face to all people right and left today who believe that the age and historical forces determine the time and so on. No, the age and historical forces are midgets compared to what a fortuitous great man like this can be, who makes a complete plaything of his age, but I continue reading Leo. The fact that the general opinion in France at the present day is utterly indifferent on this very point, in Germany too, but that is of no consequence. The fact that in the country the theory of environment, a singular neuropathic, neurotic notion, he's talking

about the theory I just mentioned, the theory of the milieu, that the milieu or historical forces or trends determines everything. The fact that this theory has become sacrosanct and almost scientific and finds acceptance even among the physiologists is a very bad an exceedingly depressing sign. In England, too, the same belief prevails, but nobody will be surprised at that. The Englishman knows only two ways of understanding the genius and the great man, either democratically in the style of Buckle or religiously after the manner of Carlisle. The danger which great men and great ages represent is simply extraordinary. Every kind of exhaustion and of sterility follows in their wake. The great man is an end. The great age, the Renaissance, for instance, is an end.

The genius, in work and in deed, is necessarily a squanderer. The fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The instinct of self-preservation is, as it were, suspended in him. The overpowering pressure of outflowing energy in him forbids any such protection and prudence. People call this self-sacrifice they place as heroism. In quotation marks his indifference to his own well-being. His utter devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland, all misunderstandings. He flows out, he flows over, he consumes himself, he does not spare himself, and does all this with fateful necessity, irrevocably, involuntarily, just as a river involuntarily bursts its dams. But owing to the fact that humanity has been much indebted to such explosives, it has endowed

them with many things, for instance, with a kind of higher morality. This is indeed the sort of gratitude that humanity is capable of, it misunderstands its benefactors. Benefactors, that's right. Yes, what do you think this Leo? I think this is perfectly correct, in fact you see that Arthur is like in an unpublished fragment of Nietzsche in one of his notebooks, I think it's during the period where he wrote Thus Spoke Theoristra, it's an excellent passage, it's so annoying to find it every time because it's unpublished. He says that he hates when a historian does not have the understanding that he must take off his shoes because the ground that he's treading on is too holy for him. So he thinks of people like Michelet, people like Ten, Thiers, these historians who use

exactly this theory of the milieu to say, oh yes, the revolution created Napoleon and such things. Whereas Nietzsche's own source for Napoleon's life and psychology comes from Stendhal. And Stan, that is really just exactly it. He says, according to me, you do not find an analogous character to Napoleon, you only find it amidst the condottieri and the little princes of the year 1400 in Italy, the sforza, the piccinino, the castruccio, castracani, et cetera, et cetera, men who are strange that are not too profound politically in the sense that we usually think of it, but on the contrary, constantly making new projects and the measure that their fortune extends. They're attentive to see circumstances and they're counting in an absolute manner only

on themselves, heroic souls born in a century where everyone seeks to do and not to write, unknown to the world, and explained only in part by their contemporary Machiavelli. It was not in the plan of this great writer who wrote a treaty on the art of seizing, stealing away liberty from the citizens of a city to speak of the excess of crazy passion who all of a sudden have come to grace the talents of the prince. It goes, it is seen under silence and with great wisdom that these buffs of sensibility who improvised make these men forget all reason, whereas people think of them as apparent calculators and impassable. When the continuous presence of danger has been replaced by the pleasures of modern civilization, their race has disappeared from the world.

So as a sensible usage of this great moral change, the cities built on mountains by prudence have fallen back into the plains by commodity and the power went from the feudal lord intrepid to the scheming frippen and the patient manufacturer. It was thus in the middle of all these fashions and these events that are so similar to those of the 14th century that it was given to the modern centuries to reproduce that Napoleon was born. terrible events could have crushed a mediocre genius and made of the young Corsican a flat slave of France, but that was not Napoleon. Yes. It's wonderful, Leo, and I am guessing from the way you are reading that you are translating in real time from Stendhal's words on Napoleon. But this is very wonderful.

I had an episode recently on the Stendhal book, Red and the Black, and of course I think Stendhal's greatest books, Red and the Black and Charterhouse of Parma, are precisely and explicitly in some way about Napoleonic heritage in post-Napoleonic France. I think with you on show, it's useful to repeat for audience what this actually meant. Why at a different point, I'm paraphrasing now, Nietzsche refers to Napoleon as the kind of star of all the greatest spirits and artists of the 19th century. And just as a quick image, as maybe a course image as I can do on entertainment radio show, in this book, Red and the Black, it is about a sensitive young man who come from a provincial town in the French provinces and moves to Paris eventually, but he is so stifled by,

well, really what I called the long house, this kind of heavy, traditionalist, gerontocratic-run life, and Napoleon, for all the great minds of that time, represented an escape from this stodgy retrograde 19th century, let's say, traditionalism on one hand and its associates, the leftism on the other. Maybe I not express it right at this drunken point of night, but what did Napoleon represent you think for men like Stendhal in his books and for men of spirit in 19th century? So Stendhal has a very interesting article that was never published. He wrote, it was as a letter to a friend of his who's a lawyer and politician from Florence called the Vincenzo Salvagnoli. And he attached to this letter that project of an article that he never published.

And he literally summarizes the book in there, right? And he says, Julien, who's the protagonist of The Red and the Black, is indeed the small humiliated peasant, isolated, ignorant, curious, full of pride because his soul is generous and he's surprised to despise the baseness of the rich Monsieur de Renal who would do anything for money. Julien sees himself surrounded by enemies every day in his presence. This Napoleon whom he adores is cursed because he had made a captain and soon a general out of a young peasant who had courage. In order to play his role as a devout young priest, Julien is forced to loudly curse Napoleon. And you have other, you know, he says also, as the priest's chelon and the mayor of

Renard, our ardent royalist Julien never names Napoleon without attaching insulting epithet to this name, which he secretly adores. And then in chapter, I think it's chapter 15 of the second tome, this young woman, Mademoiselle de la mole, she repeats that Julien taught her this sentence, there are things that you do not write, as in a letter, right? And this is a direct quote from Napoleon when he heard the surrender of Bailão. And so it constantly reoccurs that you have this young man who is a great soul, who has great aspirations, great ambitions, he's just born in the wrong time, and not only is he born in the wrong time, his aspirations are difficult to attain, but he can't even loudly praise his hero. It's one of the most intolerable things, you know?

And why is it that Napoleon, even though there were these interdicts that you couldn't even name him in public, you couldn't possibly support him in public, even if he were a liberal or whatever, his name was struck out. Why is it? It's because even in England, he had admirers. Napoleon was not allowed to take many books out. That was the only thing he wanted, to take books out so that he could write his memoirs and to serve for the memory of France. He was not allowed to take books out to St. Helena. How did he get books? Great admirers in England sent him thousands of books for that purpose. And Napoleon, he wrote, He said, Also, even when I am no more, I will still remain for the people, the polar star of their rights.

My name will be the battle cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes. Such people, whether they reach such heights as Napoleon, as Caesar, or even in our modern era, men of great power who are called egomaniacs, Putin, Berlusconi, Trump, all these sorts of figures who rise just from their own names, they're not asking for any rewards in this life. The only thing they ask is that they be able to inspire the next people who want to be like them in the future. That's all they ask, for their name to live on, to inspire people like them. Well, it is the ancient achillean of the Indo-European hero, everlasting fame among mortals. But I think actually Napoleon, it's not simply something that can be dismissed as individual megalomania or such.

But in his vision for Europe, his introduction of locode, his spiritual vision for future of Europe that inspired so, in fact, I would say all of the greatest minds maybe of the 19th century and after, he stands as example of something new, Leo, something that could be what, again, Nietzsche later describes in Beyond Good and Evil as the formation of of a united European case based on new spiritual principles that could lead to a universal culture of mankind across the world. And I know now this sounds unusual and strange, but it is only in Napoleon, not really in the 20th century facsimiles of Napoleon, but in Napoleon himself, that Europe's true future promise for a global mankind exist, but leaving such musings behind for a moment, I've been keeping you for a while.

You can comment on what I just said, if you want, on Napoleon as the example of, let's say, European unity and eventual mastery of the earth, but would you mind remarking again on the prospect of France now in the next let's say three to four to five years in the short run and then the prospect of France in the very in the very long run and therefore the prospects of Europe would you mind commenting on this of course um so i would go always in the present why is it that i think that France has the best chance for an explosion and to accomplish its destiny you know if you read Emile Chorin's essay on France that i mentioned previously Yes. France really had two expiry dates already. It had the revolution and then it had World War II.

Both of these should have been the death of France, and that would have been okay. France would have still been a great contribution to mankind, but it would have still sunk into dishonor. What Charles de Gaulle did is that he gave France the chance to accomplish its destiny finally because, you know, with all the, you know, the chauvinism that we display, with all the self-confidence, with all the delusions that Frenchmen display all the time, which is what we're accused of, nevertheless, it is the destiny of France to create Europe. Why? Because without Europe, France has no reason to exist really. Other nations, they could be perfectly fine with the structure of a nation state. In fact, a lot of them wish to crumble under regionalism even, and perhaps that would be

more prosperous for them. But the idea of reviving the ideas of antiquity, freedom of movement, the creation of a new people that could preserve or at least decline in style, not in this miasma of mass migration. It's like you said when Nietzsche says that the great man comes and he's an end. When Caesar comes, he doesn't come to herald the golden age of Rome, although we might interpret it that way. He comes to end it, and he was so successful that he gave it 2,000 years of glorious decline. That's the best you can hope for. So I would hope that someday France would have the opportunity to accomplish its destiny, which has already started. The problem is that there is no man currently that can fulfill that vision. the creation of a European state and therefore a European peoples.

And the reason why France is best positioned to do that is because it is the only country in Europe that has kept a semblance of sovereignty and allowed its executive to reign supreme over the country. In a council of ministers where de Gaulle was discussing the referendum that he was going to submit to the French people to settle the election of the president of the republic by universal suffrage. Why did he do that? Why did he make it that way? Because that way, his successors could not pretend to go back to the structures of parliamentarism that existed before. It would make it so that the president had full legitimacy that he had demanded from the people. And so in that same council of ministers, Malraux, who was a great character and his

minister of culture, he said, Clémenceau, Panneuve and Briand were ousted from the Élysée by the notables, yet each of them could have saved the Republic. Your successor must be able to save the Republic. So Franco gave his country time, you know, and we're seeing how far that goes. De Gaulle also gave his country time. He's giving his country time so that one day a person who has the will and the confidence to do it can adopt these powers and then fulfill the vision that is natural to France, which is the creation of a European order. Yes. Well, look, I agree with you and hope with you actually for France led because that is the only possible thing in the next century or two. France led Europe that can take Europe to international rivalry, if not dominance.

I hope for this in the long run also. But I will hold you, Leo. I ask you again, in the short run, what is your prediction for the next, let's say, three to five years in France? If you want to even go year by year on what will happen, that's fine. I don't know if you want to make such predictions but I'm curious what you think. I know my audience is also. I think that this year will be difficult because at the end of the day there are many, many people who wish France to fail on everything that it tries to fulfill, including the French themselves, actually, chiefly the French themselves. So, right now, we have the Olympic Games very soon. Everyone is wishing for that to fail, including the French people. And it would be a humiliation, of course, if that resulted in a shitshow.

Then after that, there's a vote for the budget and the country is deeply indebted. So whatever government, you know, whether it's going to be a leftist government or Michael Hulme continues… Sorry to interrupt. My favorite courtesan wants me to go with her to Paris during the Olympic Games because because of the many kinds of people who will be there for us to do various orgies. I don't want to do this, Leo, because I'm afraid of the low quality and such. What do you think about this? I think that if you are willing to endure the administrative bloat that they have going on for it, why not? Because the thing is they restored this like COVID crap where you need like a QR code to drive around the city. It's absolutely awful, and it just really shows the smallness of mind and brains of

these people. It's just, I mean, can we just, you know, can we just pull these people out of their antiquated chairs? They're just, they're not fit for those offices that they have. They're a bunch of monkeys who are masquerading as rulers, you know, it's just, it's insane. But yeah, so you have that to contend with, that you have to apply for a fucking QR code to just walk around the city if you don't have a quote-unquote justification, which is just absolutely awful. It's insane. Yeah, it's just retarded, but that's because they just didn't find a better way to handle the security situation, essentially. It's just a failure. Yes. Well, look, I interrupted you with a joke and such, but what – okay, so you think next year and such will be difficult.

What do you see in the three to five-year span, if you have any predictions for that? I think that the right is going to continue to make gains. That's just the direction of things. Even you see like the votes are going completely in the right direction, pun intended. But I don't think Le Pen has a winning chance at the presidency. I think as long as she's at the head of, you know, whatever right faction, she will fail. That's Zoumoul's conclusion and I agree with it. I think that the country will seriously decline for sure, but I think it's dynamic and still powerful enough. I mean, it has an atomic arsenal. It has a seriously interesting and spectacular military force, which is never acknowledged. It's the only armed force in Europe that is of any seriousness.

can't even, you know, transport their vehicles even throughout the same continent they're in. Whereas France operates on every continent and all the time and it's by necessity because we have overseas territories. So I think it's just going to be more of the same a little bit. I only have dreams back. I cannot make predictions to what will happen. No, I understand. I understand. Leo, look, I've been keeping you. I share the same dreams with you of a France-led united Europe that presents for mankind a kind of aspiration that has been submerged at least since 1950, but I think actually since 1900 and before, since the age of Napoleon. I hope this makes come back. I have been keeping you for a while. I'd like if you came back sometime soon and we talk lighter matters such as the current

state of Paris and what's going on in day-to-day life there, a city we both admire. But before I let you go, I want to ask you, I just noticed, as we are talking, the Euro soccer football championships are taking place. Spain has defeated France 2-1. Not yet, not yet. Oh, it's not over yet? No, no, it's not over. But if this is the final result, will you concede that Spain with its tercio that the Spanish tercios will be reborn? And and now Spain will will unite the Americas the South America and lead Europe I don't know. I don't want that to happen I think Spain is a great nation worthy of its name And if destiny should fall that way I would concede it However, I must say, I must say that I can't help but notice that on the Spanish team,

there are names like Émric La Porte and Le Normand, which are French players. Please, please acknowledge this. But yeah, I mean, we, you know, this stuff, like I said, in the future, this will just be folklore. You know, we are producing a European minded cast of people in this amazing dynamic sphere of ours. names like Baron Husafel, Sueviman, Poped, whatever, Vulpes, you know, all these people are all linking ties across European nations. And so it's all good, you know, if Spain has to do it, then so be it. Yes. Well, very good. We will be back at some point soon to discuss this, the new so-called new United Europe. Leo, thank you so much for coming on show. I say ave Napoleon and so forth. Ave Napoleon, ave Kaiser. Yes, very good. Until next time, Leo. Europanatione salaam.

We said we would end show. However, because I'm very drunk. Because you're drunk, yes. I'm very drunk at end of night. And I decide to tell courtesan no longer to come and continue a pleasant show with Leo Caesaris about a common love of ours, which is the city of Paris, which, Leo, I met you in Paris, is this correct? We had a nice long walk, even though it was cold outside, I think. That's right, yeah. Yes, Paris is one of the most beaten up cities in propaganda efforts today. If you look on Twitter or other places, you see especially so-called dissident right figures. They are recycling images from neighborhoods that have been migrant neighborhoods actually for decades. This woman, Lauren Southern, specializes in this.

She goes to some Paris neighborhoods that have been maybe Algerian or whatever from the Maghreb for decades. She pretends that's what all of Paris is. I've commented this before. I don't want to dwell on it. But Paris is, I look forward, Leo, to returning there after the Olympics are over and staying for a while because I greatly enjoyed my time there meeting you, other people walking around is still a vital, beautiful city. It's full of young Parisians. It has its own natives. It's not just a tourist destination, as so many European cities now want to become a kind of outdoor museum-slash-nursing home. Paris isn't that. They have not completely Disneyfied it, though they try. I know you have some opinions on that. And regarding the migrant and such situation, it is a nuisance.

I did not see tent cities. I did not see so many homeless. But there are problems if you go in subway, for example, which is inevitable because so much traffic – I know you have some opinions on how they try to sabotage the daily life through restricting car traffic, so you are forced into subways, which, yes, you see a lot of non-Parisian, non-French faces there. Or if you go to certain untoward places like the, excuse I don't pronounce French well, but the Hallmarket in the center of Paris, it looks like a disgusting airport terminal just full of kind detritus from all over the world. Or in certain restaurants the staff is all foreign, this is unfortunate. I tell people, do not follow any of the Google Maps reviews when it comes to Paris restaurants.

In Paris, as opposed to other cities, you should download the Michelin app and only follow that, because the Google reviews, if you have, let's say, Sri Lankan staff, which is very common in a Paris restaurant, they get their 2,000 Sri Lankan cousins to upvote the restaurant, and so you will eat quite bad food if you follow only the Google reviews. But aside from these kinds of minor nuisances, which perhaps people are unaware that they will arrive, this kind of diversity, unfortunately, will arrive in Asia also. In fact, diversity already exists in Singapore. But also now I just read a report about Tokyo that there are already 10 percent foreign-born people in Tokyo and most of the young Japanese who live in Tokyo put no stock in Japanese

let's say ethnic homogeneity that the right prizes so highly for city life abroad. They do not prize, I'm quoting now Nathan Softness who I do not agree with on many things, but he is right about this, that most people do not prize their ethnic heritage or homogeneity any more than a kebab stand, and I'm afraid that out of popular indifference, Tokyo and Japan is going to become this in the next few decades also. So it is hard to blame Parisians for that, but I will say that life in Paris is still very pleasant. There are many problems, which I know you have opinions about. I've been going on for five minutes on this, Leo. What do you have to say about this? What do you have to say about Paris now, Paris life now? So I grew up in Paris.

I was born there and I don't live there currently and there's not a day that goes by that I don't wish every day that I was there. So the life for a young Parisian nowadays like me is usually just exile, right? Which means that, you know, I come back quite often. I'm there, you know, basically like at this point dozens of times a year as soon as a a friend of mine is there or whatever, I just go just to give them a good time, you know, so they don't follow. Like me, and I'm the most handsome man in the world, yes, Leo? I must say that all these calumnies that are circulating on Twitter are absolutely false. I've seen it with my eyes. It's true. It's true. Yes, go on. Yeah. And so for me, it's very much the it's not a meme at all, you know, it's the most beautiful city in the world for me.

And it is true that certain subway stations smell like piss and whatever and that kind of stuff, that's true, but that doesn't take away from the dynamism of the city. I just feel like things are possible when I'm there. You can walk three hours non-stop and not get bored. The amount of wealth that Parisians don't even realize, or even tourists when they go there, they don't realize how wealthy the city is in terms of architecture. The Morris columns that were built in 1868, the Wallace fountains, those green fountains that are decorated with four statues of women usually, this shows you these fountains that were put up to bring water to the city because most people didn't even have running water back in that day. I mean this is a crazy achievement of urbanism for the time.

And even today, I mean a lot of people in general in cities, they have hyperchlorinated water or whatever, well, you can go outside in Paris today and get fresh spring water straight from a fountain. I mean it's just amazing and it's a real chance for people who live in the city. And when I was a kid, you know, the kiosks for the newspaper, even though nobody buys newspapers anymore, but just those small things, you know, you walk around, you have the trees around you, chestnut trees, and you walk around, you see a kiosk, it's just there's so much nostalgia about the city. Yes, I think when you say a city is not just its buildings, this is true on one hand, but on the other, I don't know anywhere else, including places like Tokyo or other great

cities of the world where you can just walk around and constantly be in state of enchantment as you are in Paris because of its architecture and such. But it's not just its architecture. I know there are efforts recently to rebuild Budapest, for example, or other East European cities. But somehow Budapest, I was there in the early 2000s and it was not so nice looking as now, but it had a vital life, whereas now they've managed to turn Budapest into a kind of corporate slaves plus tourists combo, you know, so it's not so exciting anymore. When people extol the virtues of clean, well-lighted streets and such, I hear a certain voice that's not to my kidney, Leo. Paris still has, I don't want to sound like Libtard talking

about vibrant and such. I don't find violence as such vibrant. But I walked around for hours alone at night and never encountered the problem in Paris. I know there are problems, but I mean to say it has a vital life of its natives that hasn't been tamed, you know? Oh yeah, I completely understand what you mean about clean streets and this kind of caricature that people say. I was recently in the Illyrian provinces to see my Balconoid friends Ulla and Jonas, the great guys. And over there, I have to say, there's a sense of order, the streets are extremely clean, but you just constantly feel this sort of like this is like a touristy... You know, in the city centers it's very much just like... And it's because of things that

happened during World War II. The cities were bombed and so they rebuilt them and such things. But Paris had the extreme chance, again I'm going to keep saying because of the good, that the city was not bombed. And so it didn't have to rebuild in this L'Arpy way. In fact, today I would say we have the problem that the people in charge of the city are retarded urbanists. They give out these contracts to these morons who of course it's like their cousins or something right to to redo the Champs-Élysées and it's in this like horrible just style which is extremely expensive like you know 30,000 euros for like a fucking table you know and it's just it shows the mediocrity whereas personally I you know I would I'm not saying that we should keep

the city as is forever that's not what I want at all in fact a lot of it should probably be rebuilt and recreated but no one would trust anyone to do that today because of how mediocre the leadership is, but they did try to do such things in the 70s and the 80s, which is why you've encountered the forum, we call it Le Hall, which looks like a fucking airport terminal, it looks ugly as shit. And La Tour Montparnasse, of course, this ugly tower, we call it the Wart, La Verie, because it just stands out, it's just a complete mess, and they've put up bids for people to rebuild it, have different concepts, and it never got done, it's amazing. So we Parisians, we joke that the best view of the city is from La Tour Montparnasse because it's the only place where you can't see it, basically.

Yes, I'm going to, I'm drunk, I interject. I'm going now that you say the name Montparnasse, I'm going to post the Chirico painting Gar Montparnasse. It's his take on Gar Montparnasse. Do you believe that this is the true take? Have you seen this painting? Is it an entry to another world over there. All of these stations have eerie vibes when there's no one in them. When you go like very early in the morning before people start going to work or coming in rather from the provinces and around Paris and late at night, they're very, very eerie especially. So Gald Montparnasse is one of them but I think also Galdernest is very strange when there's no no one in it. And funny enough is that all those stations usually if you look around you'll sort of understand who came in from the provinces.

So Guillermo Parnas is noteworthy for being like a hotspot of like a Britain creperies right because all the Britons used to arrive to Guillermo Parnas and just set up their businesses around there. There's a shitload of crap places over there. Leo, what do you think of this doomerism on the alt-right or the dissident-right regarding Paris? I think it's a kind of compliment, because the psychological basis for it, when you have people posting, oh, Paris is lost and such, the reason they do that is because of Paris's reputation in some sense as the heart of the Western world. Sure, people know New York is in some sense that or such, but it's Paris is really the cultural and image heart of the West. So maybe you should take some pride in that, but what do you think about this doomerism

about it? When I was there, I saw some homeless, but it was quite limited, you know. The homeless situation, so just to address the doomerism first, I mean, I think it's It's just funny, you know, because there are a lot of things that we constantly rile about in Paris. There's a funny campaign that was mounted against the mayor on social media, it's just people taking pictures of the absolutely stupid things that the mayor is doing like, oh, greenify the city, right? The green party, the socialists, let's greenify the city, which you should greenify the city. Paris is a fucking sauna in the summer, you know? But in however, like a decade at this point that they've been in charge, there's not a single pretty tree or anything they've planted.

There's a bunch of plastic pots of plants that are dying. It's really shit. These people are incompetent, right? And so there are problems for sure. But the idea that, oh, you know, people are, there's like hundreds of thousands of people praying to Mecca, like in the middle of the, you know, the 8th Al-Nismar or something is absolutely ridiculous. In fact, you know, I mean my opinion is that of course there's a general decline that cannot be dismissed, but some things do actually get better. We have to be realistic about that. When I was little, Gare du Nord was, you know, you couldn't go there after 8 p.m. if you were a woman or like a young person or whatever. You would get mugged immediately. Léal, actually the farm Léal was mug town, you know, like 15 years ago. Now it's not.

Now there's like cops with guns everywhere and this is, you know, it has to be said, this is Macron actually who is under his direction that these things happen. I just want to interject, Leo, because I want you to go on about this. It's an important subject. But what you bring to mind to me is this focus that dissidents, populists have with crime, with cleanliness and so on. I think it's very misleading because you can actually have a low crime and low dirt and such, but still it's an airport terminal. And that's kind of what you're describing now. It's very unfortunate, whereas, you know, before the current war you could go to West Ukraine and it would kind of be a wasteland, but it would have its own national character

and charm and such, whereas these places you are describing in Paris that are actually now highly policed and in some sense improved, but still, yes, this is just my interjection to say the priorities of the... it's inspired by the neo-reaction faction who are pussy faggots, who are people who were walking around, let's say New York or other such cities, and a black guy looked at them the wrong way and they were afraid and they wrote 40,000 words on why it was necessary to have an authoritarian regime to put down crime. I'm sorry, I'm just not, I don't like this kind of airport diversity, but I'm not because of the crime or the dirt or such, people don't realize you can actually solve those problems but it will still be airport terminal, Leo, you know? Completely agree.

I mean, we have the same phenomenon, you know, the center-right voters inside Paris, there are very few ones that there are because Paris is mostly left of course, but there are strongholds very much of like a bourgeoisie or whatever, petite bourgeoisie, that are the people – you can segregate via metro line actually, subway lines in Paris. So if you're someone that takes usually metro line one let's say which is very clean, it has a station called Franklin Delano Roosevelt which is spotless all the time, there's never any strikes, the line is completely automated, it's clean as fuck, right? If you're the type of person that usually takes this line, that means you go from Paris to La Défense or things like that, so you work in finance or such things. You know, you're doing pretty well.

One day, you know, you'll see some Algerian hoodlum or whatever, and suddenly you'll decide, oh yes, we must be strong on crime or whatever, and it's like it's just completely missing the point of the higher matters of what animates the city and the country, you know. That's not the point. It's not that there's like a thug or two on the subway. This isn't where the problem lies. Yes. It's the opposite in some ways. My information may be out of date, but I heard that the waterfront of Genoa, for example, was never gentrified. It's been dangerous, and parts of Naples also, and yet these cities, precisely because it's not gentrified and nice and crime-free and it doesn't have well-lighted streets, precisely Only because of this, the airport terminal diversity thing hasn't arrived yet.

But look, I don't know if you have opinions on this. Genoa is very interesting actually because the port looks like a dump, right? All the best food is there. All the nice restaurants are which if you're a tourist, usually you go in and you queue for like three hours. It's actually insane. I don't know how these people do it. They queue for like three hours for it to get like a plate of pesto, right? I mean, it's good food, but three hours, I mean, Jesus. You should just know the owners, call them ahead of time, book, and you're done. But Genoa has this huge contrast where the port is a bit of a dump. And then on top of the city, there's what's called Palazzi dei Rolli, which is the houses of quote-unquote the merchants' families, the prominent merchant families of the city.

And they open their houses once a year for people to visit. And they're absolutely beautiful, incredible houses. Yes. No, this sounds very nice. Of course, we've been talking on this episode about Nietzsche. There is wonderful Nietzsche aphorism in the gay science about Genoa, about precisely the houses you just mentioned. I will not read it now. People can Google and find it. But Leo, you say you are a Parisian, you're born there, you grew up there, but yet you do not live there. So there must be some problems. People have been forced to move out. One of the reasons life is so hard for native Parisians is traffic. I know you have some opinions on this. The insane things. But it doesn't need to be this way. It's not just because of overcrowding. It's because of insane so-called, you know,

and I'm an environmentalist, a real one, but the policies, the bike lanes, and so this kind of crap. I know you have opinions on this. No, the real environmentalists are on the right. I want to beautify the city. I want the city to have nice trees, even fruit trees. A lot of these great cities used to have quarters, neighborhoods where specific fruit trees used to grow. They're all gone. These people, they just launder communism under the guise of, oh, we will plant six trees in this alley. And it's like, oh, great, you've destroyed half the lane so only two cars can pass through at a time now. Fantastic. And the trees are all dying, by the way. So the right absolutely has to take over that shit because a lot of the city administration in Paris, which are

not elected people, by the way, they're the result of basically the Green Party just colluding between each other and getting into those administrations now. So the right has totally given them up. You know, I mean, the mayor of Paris, you know, two decades ago, used to be Jacques Chiac, who was a right wing center right, you know, politician. And now Now it's like all these insane people. So the right absolutely needs to take over this agenda of environmentalism, which is its right by tradition essentially also. And so the reason why as a young person it's very difficult to live in Paris today is first of all it is impossible to get housing. The availability of rented accommodation today, as in finding a house to an apartment even

to rent has dropped by 75% in the last three to five years. That's drastic. And the reason for that is because the mayor has a plan to install 40% social housing in the city, which will totally kill it. And other than that, why would you buy an apartment in Paris and rent it if you're going to have to cap it and rent it to a bunch of low-lives or whatever? So it's just they're driving young people out. As a student, you know, if you rent one of these things that we call chambre de bon, which are basically the way house manion buildings, those nice fancy buildings with the blue tiles, used to work is that they used to be quite shitty apartments actually back in the day. In the bottom, usually the owner of the house used to run a kitchen, a canteen, so people

could come and eat, have dinner, whatever, kind of like how it was in ancient Rome, you know, where people used to eat at tavernas or whatever. And on the very top, usually, the domestics used to live and they were extremely tiny apartments. So now, because of the extreme density of the population and the lack of availability of housing, even the Chambord de Bonne are now repurposed as full-fledged apartments for students. So they put in some really tiny-ass kitchen or really small bathroom and it's like, oh, here you go, 10 meters square, have fun, 1,500 euros a month or something. It's ridiculous. No, it's absurd. And look, you've told me that the Rue du Rivoli was built initially by Napoleons as a kind of thoroughfare through Paris.

But now, when I come to see you, it takes me an hour to get from the Marais to the Napoleon monument. I know you have some opinions on this because of the disgusting bike lanes, you know? Yes. So my theory about the bike lanes is it's very much on purpose, but maybe I'm giving them too much credit because what the bike, first off, they did it during COVID. So they couldn't do it during, you know, normal times, they just started doing roadworks during COVID and they just put the mess up there on the city. So the idea is, is that if they have bike lanes everywhere, they will reduce accidents, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is such bullshit. These people on bicycles are insane. They don't look left or right, they don't look in front of them.

If someone's in front of them, they'll run them over. I mean, it's just horrible for pedestrians and if you're driving a car, you're 24-7, you have your hand on your heart hoping that you don't hit one by accident, right? They don't respect speed limits, of course, they don't care. They don't respect red lights. It's just a complete mess, you know, and I think the goal of it is to eventually say, oh, the traffic is too dangerous for the cyclist, so we have to ban cars, sorry. Yes, no. Look, these are serious problems with the city. I don't mean to whitewash. But in the end, I would say the lifeblood of day-to-day life in Paris is still wonderful and I would strongly recommend it to Americans. Well, maybe you want me to tell people not to come, but I have...

Please, please do not come to Paris. It has fallen. Do not come. Yes, no, but listen, I don't have mass audience. I have small audience. Maybe you want them to come. Yes, we want people of quality. Please learn French. That way we can make fun of you for it. I would tell my audience, do not expect, you know, heaven, but it's not what you've been sold online and if you are, it's full of excitement, I think, yes? Yes, the food is amazing. I don't think there's a place on the planet, besides probably Spain actually, which I've had the great opportunity to experience last year, very, very good. But the just wide span of restaurants and historic brasserie that you have, there are places that have been around for hundreds of years at this point, places like Uppiette

cushion that run 24-7, just like really, really high quality food for the price. And besides that just the monuments, the diversity of the city when you walk around, there's so much things going on, different neighborhoods. Just going into my childhood bakery and seeing just inside it looks like a fucking luxury apartment but it's just normal because that's just how it is there. And you have the opportunity, if you're a sensitive young man out there, you have the opportunity that men of antiquity had that you can go and pay your respects at the grave of a great man of history. Yes. You can't do that anywhere else. Yes, next time I come we will properly do this at grave of Napoleon, but before we leave, Leo, because I've been keeping you for a while, tell also

audience about a social situation in Paris because I walk around, I walk in random places all over the city and it's one of the few places in the world that it's full of conviviality. Strangers talk to me, start conversations with me and such. You have such experiences and also related matter, what are Parisian girls like, because famously they disdain foreigners and tourists but perhaps no, perhaps they like, I don't know what to say. So on the social situation it's very very dynamic again because there are a lot of young people in the city and the more young people you have in the city the more dynamic of course the nightlife, social life is going to be, so going to a bar you're always going to find people you can talk to of course if that's what you like going to you know

Brasserie you'll find a lot of tourists of course but depending on where you go it honestly if you if you if you go out of you know the typical if you go outside of you know the first only smaller places like that like Louvre you you can be in places where there are basically only locals to be honest but it's hard to say because honestly like Paris has no historic center the entire place is just yes you know it so so it's difficult to go to a place where there only only locals, you know. But on Parisian girls, yes, they're very snobby for sure. But maybe I could quote actually from the same article by Sandal, by the way. So it's funny because this article, you know, we have all this lofty, you know, conversation

about this book. But when you read his article, it almost looks like Sandal was the first PUA back. Yes, the pick apart, yes. Exactly, yeah. He talks about how the book is, let's see, he says, I'm trying not to spoil the book too much. Why? It was because by chance, through dint of pride, Julien had the behavior necessary to pick the vanity of Mademoiselle de la Merle two or three times, seriously, not playfully. He was on the verge of leaving her there. This is the whole secret of love among Parisian women. Today, through his coldness, Julien leads Mademoiselle de la Merle to declare to him her love by letter. This painting of Parisian love is absolutely new. It seems to us that it cannot be found in any book. It makes a beautiful

contrast with true simple love, not regarding itself of Madame d'Orenal, which is this woman from the countryside that he met. It is the love based on intellect compared to the love of the heart. Besides this contrast, Sharpe, in France, loses much of its merit in the eyes of people who, like us, live three hundred leagues from these nuances which are so difficult to paint." So he's pretending to be an Italian in this article. Such is the intellectual love that exists in Paris among some young women. What's the most decisive thing a young girl can do? Well, this young girl from Paris will get herself kidnapped without love, only to give herself the pleasure of believing she has a great passion. Julien's love affair, the story of which we do not have the space to tell the reader,

will end… oh this is spoiling the book, hold on. I have to skip this. The author dared much more than that. He dared to paint the character of a woman from Paris who loves her lover only as much as she thinks she is on the verge of losing him every morning. Such is the effect produced by the immense vanity which has become almost the only passion in the city where there is so much intellect. Elsewhere, a lover can make himself loved by protesting this ardor of passion, his fidelity, etc., etc., and by proving this laudable quality to his beloved. In Paris, the more he convinces himself that he is fixed forever, that he adores, the more he ruins himself in the mind of his mistress. This is a something that the Germans will never believe, but I am well afraid, however,

that Mr. de Stade was a faithful painter, that French is all vanity and activity. Young men want to be loved in a civilization where vanity has become, if not the passion, at least the feeling of every moments. Each morning, politely persuade the woman who the day before was your beloved mistress that you are about to leave her. This new system, if it ever takes hold, will renew the entire dialogue of love. In general, until the moment of the alleged discovery of Monsieur de Stendhal, when a lover did not know what to say to his beautiful hue when he was on the verge of getting bored, he would quickly fall into the protest of the most lively feelings, an ecstasy in the transports of happiness. Monsieur de Stendhal arrives with his two amusing volumes to demonstrate to poor lovers

that these words, which they believe without consequence, are their ruin. According to this author, when a lover is bored with his mistress, which by all means can sometimes happen in this very moral century, very important, so hypocritical and consequently so boring, the best thing to do is simply not to deny one's boredom. It is an accident, it is a misfortune just like any other. This will seem very simple to our Italy, the naturalistness in manners and speeches being here the ideal beauty. But in France, a country more affected, it will be a great innovation. So I mean, he's tying the idea that you know, this reactionary France of post Napoleon that has become a very moral, fagging society, as he says, creates a situation where vanity

becomes so huge that, you know, romance is affected. Yes. Which was not the case in the national regime. No, you are describing dread game of Stendhal is describing dread game before the fact. This is very nice, but it's very appropriate the French people should be originators of this erotic over-stimulation. Nietzsche again mentions that France is the only place where the so-called universal love of mankind is believable because of the French man's erotic over-stimulation towards all objects. Yes, there's this caricature from, I don't remember with this, I think it's a German caricature of colonialism and it shows the different types of colonialism and it shows basically Germans you know getting giraffes to line up in like a military line right in Africa

then it shows Belgians you know King Leopold basically eating a black dude right and then the English it shows them like milking them for money in a machine and then the French it shows them basically just falling in love with everything that moves. Yes no this is very funny but what you described the story of Julien Sorel in Stendhal's Red and the Black and then I think parallel, not quite the same, but parallel story of Bellamy is told by Guy de Bonpassant. Yeah, Bellamy is, you know, you really have to understand that these books, which are like really the classics of French literature that get their own playa edition, this edition of book that is leather-bound and very beautiful with Bible paper, etc. These types of books, they are fiction,

of course, but they are social commentary that is much more effective than any, you know, non-fiction, whatever sociology book that you can imagine, Maupassant is a critique of the Third Republic, the 18th centuries, or rather 19th, sorry, rule by media, rule by the journalists. Yes, the 1880s, yes, yes. Yes. Well, just to remind audience, it's the story of a veteran who becomes a journalist in Paris. He's from Normandy. He's a handsome, sensitive young man who ends up rising through French society by having a series of mistresses which he treats very much like what you just described, Leo. Yes, exactly. Yes, it's kind of a parallel story to Stendhal. It's always meant for... And you know, I think that in America, people who read these books are obviously,

you know, I don't think they think they're appropriate for children, you know, but in the French national education system, these books appear, you know, when you're a young teenager actually. Yes. Are they taken, tell me, are they taken as models by 14-year-olds as I want to aspire to be like this, to seduce a series of wealthy mistresses and rise to Parisian society? No, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, the thing is, the way it's laundered in the French educational system is always through like through literature you know you can write whatever you want you can make whatever a movie you want however uh uh loud it is whatever uh as long as it's well written it's okay and it will integrate you know for instance we always have this problem of you know these taboo authors all over

the world you know authors that you can't cite anywhere because they did something bad whatever they uh you know said that Hitler was a good guy or whatever so in France we don't have that problem actually so Gobineau for instance who wrote a very very impolite essay you No, it doesn't matter. He's taught and he gets his own Pliade edition. So he's considered a great French author because his novel, Les Pliades, as well as all his other novels, are considered masterpieces of French literature. Céline, you will see him top the list of best French books, whatever, always in any library, any ranking or whatever, even normally rankings. He will always be up there like either second, third, whatever. Voyage aubourg la nuit is considered one of the the best French novels? Yes. No, this is good.

Well, Leo, I would like to discuss such matters with you in more detail in the future, but I've been keeping you for a while. By the way, for those, I assume my audience know, but Céline and Gobineau are, you know, Céline, so-called fascist author, although not really, and Gobineau, the father of steampunk racism and such. But yes, the French are not so moral fag as other Western nations. You know, General de Gaulle, he still approved the condemnation of authors who had written for Vichy passionately, not because of censorship, but because he respected the value of letters in France. He said that talent also has responsibility. He graciated most of them, by the way, but he still allowed the condemnations out of respect for the profession of literature in France.

You have to remember that Pétain, Foch, all these great generals of France, they also sat at La Quédémie française, this institution of literature. It's hand-in-hand in France. No, this is very interesting, Leo. I know it's a sensitive subject, but maybe you want to come back and talk about these post-war writers, some of them were executed, some committed suicide and so forth. But let's leave that for future time. I've been keeping you now for a while. I am very happy you come talk Paris and such thing on an extra segment of show. Before we go, do you mind saying, I can edit it out, but what's your favorite bakery? You say you like bakery in Paris. I am afraid to say this because uh okay so yes my favorite depends depends no no it's okay it's

okay it depends for what uh for for for a croissant i usually like either uh dupain des ides or la maison d'isabel the problem with la maison d'isabel is some idiot put it on a tourist guidebook so now it's like full all the time but the good thing about la maison d'isabel for tourists is that they do two shifts so usually most bakeries in paris if you don't come at like 7.30 in the morning you will not get a hot croissant, okay? So it's just you're already getting a bad experience which is very dumb for tourists because they think they're having a French croissant but they're getting something that's like four or five hours sale, right? So get there early in the morning or go to La Maison d'Isabelle because they always keep making

them because of how many tourists there are. And then the other one that I used to love for a baguette was Uteau P, which is very small, but now it got selected as best baguette of Paris and therefore now the president gets to eat this bread and so now it's like full of tourists now it's fucking impossible to get better yes uh i if you go and wait in line uh wait you said mezon disabel and utopia what's the third one japan is that the one you recommend because i will tell listeners you go there and i may be behind the corner looking i may take i may i may uh grope i may For your first croissant, I would recommend to go to La Maison d'Isabelles for sure, and be careful that Bap is not watching you.

Yes, I may gripe you at Maison d'Isabelles. Very good, Leo. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope you come again. We talk many things related to France and other matters. Yes, hail Bap, vive la France. Yes, long live eternal France, ave Napoleon. Talk soon, Leo. Fambino You are the best, I love you You are the best, you are the best of your friends You are the best, I love you I am good at the door You are the best, I love you But you are the only one For I love you You are the best, I love you That you're a child of Italy You're a child of Italy You can't talk to me With this you're blind You can't talk to me You can't talk to me You're going to play your ball You're going to play your ball You can't film me Like a messier of cigarettes You can't take me on the train Or the train

You can't take me on the train I don't know what to say I don't know what to say You are everything I live You are everything I live You are everything I live You are everything I live You are everything I live You are everything I live You are everything I live