Pierre Brochand was head of France’s DGSE counter-intelligence agency from 2002 to 2008. Since 2019, he has made repeated calls for a radical change in his country’s immigration policy over what he says is the looming threat of civil war.
In a discussion about immigration on the public radio station France Culture last April, Brochand issued a warning which found its full expression in the week of violent rioting and looting that took hold of France after the shooting of a teenager of Algerian origin on June 27:
“If we do nothing or if we do little, we are going to head either towards a progressive implosion of social trust in France, that is to say towards a society where the quality of life will collapse and where it will be less and less pleasant to live, or, by successive explosions, towards confrontations that will make France a country where one will not be able to live at all.”
Now, in an interview published on July 6 on the website of Le Figaro daily newspaper, Brochand exposes, as Le Figaro puts it, “the deadly cocktail of a society of individuals based on openness and democracy and the arrival of entire diasporas with totally different cultural backgrounds.”
The least that can be said is that the former counter-intelligence chief’s analysis stands in sharp contrast to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin’s own analysis made in the National Assembly on July 5. According to Darmanin, the riots of the previous days are not linked to immigration as “only” 10 percent of the rioters were foreigners.
In Darmanin’s eyes, the non-White youth that caused mayhem on the streets of France for days, often invoking the Quran and the name of Allah, have no link to immigration as they are French citizens. The French minister contradicted himself, however, saying that as the average age of rioters was 17, they were born under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, and it is too late to control immigration anyway.
Sadly, this is a perfect illustration of Brochand’s pessimistic observation last April on France Culture, when he said he did not think there is currently enough courage among the French political class to do what is necessary to avoid the worst-case scenario: that of confrontation.
Pierre Brochand was director of the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE) from 2002 to 2008, as well as an ambassador of France in Hungary and Israel.
“Closing borders in the name of the precautionary principle – the Polish way – has never been seriously considered in our country,” Brochand said to Le Figaro after the recent rioting, which has seen over 700 members of security forces injured, some 4,000 arrested, and many towns and cities devastated. For Brochand, the reason is a mixture of humanism and economic interests, i.e. the need to import cheap labor.
Brochand says the changes that have led to the current decomposition of French society happened in the 1970s, when France made its transition from a modern national state to a society of individuals.
Together with the immigration of workers, France began to experience what increasingly became an immigration of settlers (Brochand uses the French term “immigration de peuplement”, which can also be translated as “colonizing immigration”). The transition to a society of individuals has created what he calls a scissor effect. Hence, in Brochand’s eyes, internal partition is the natural inclination of the multicultural societies of Western Europe.
This is not new, as Pierre Brochand said that he remembers when he was the French ambassador to Hungary in the years 1989-93, just after the fall of communism in that part of Europe, he would often hear from his Hungarian interlocutors: “We are lucky we can see first-hand the damage that non-European immigration is causing in your country, and we certainly don’t want to imitate you.”
“In everyone’s eyes, we are now the ‘sick man’ of the continent, the Security Council, the G7, and the G20,” laments the former head of France’s counter-intelligence, as France is indeed the country with the highest proportion of inhabitants with a non-European immigrant background, and immigration figures have been beating new historic records under President Emmanuel Macron.
Others, like in neighboring Italy where mass immigration began at the beginning of the 2010s when Berlusconi’s right-wing government was overthrown with the help of Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, know very well that what is happening in France now will likely happen in their country in a decade or two if nothing is done.
An illustration of such apprehension can be found, for example, in an article published on July 5 by the Italian conservative daily newspaper Il Giornale with the title: “The roots of France’s ill and the fear that looms over Italy.”
Meanwhile, a large majority of French people are strongly opposed to what increasingly appears to be a dangerous social engineering experiment by the liberal elites, something Éric Zemmour has called a Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Western liberals and Islam against the White, heterosexual, Catholic French man. Indeed, 74 percent of French people now think there are too many immigrants in their country and 62 percent would want France to disobey EU treaties and EU law to stop immigration.
The latter is an important point, in particular in light of the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against Switzerland that was delivered just a few days ago, which extends the right to family reunification even to refugees who have only obtained a temporary residence permit and not asylum. Let us not forget that EU member states have the obligation, as per the EU treaties, to abide by the rulings of the ECHR.
“When diasporas swell out of all proportion — with at least 5 million additional arrivals since 2005 — reaching a critical mass that makes them confusedly aware of their irresistible strength, when compromises and unilateral concessions become confessions of weakness calling for transgression, when these counter-societies have the audacity to set themselves up as competing sovereignties in the same ‘one and indivisible’ space, well, the pressure cooker’s lid blows off, as soon as the opportunity arises,” explains Brochand in his July 6 interview published in Le Figaro.
“It is worth pointing out, first of all, that isolated riots have been commonplace for 40 years, in every corner of the country, under the technocratic label of ‘urban violence,'” goes on the former DGSE director, noting things have evolved “to the point where no one pays any attention to them anymore, as if they were part of the landscape.”
According to Brochand, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 may have taken part in the urban violence, creating a situation much more dangerous than in 2005, when similar rioting took place in France’s suburbs. Nothing comparable had ever happened since the French Revolution of 1789, notes Brochand, and, this time, even provincial towns have been affected by the troubles alongside the centers of big cities, in contrast to what happened 18 years ago when most of the rioting was constricted to the so-called sensitive neighborhoods.
“I would describe the present catastrophe as an uprising or revolt against the French national state, by a significant proportion of the youth of non-European origin present on its territory,” says Brochand.
“Will we draw the right lessons from this, given that the country’s vital prognosis is at stake? Will we consider remedies other than yet another ‘plan for the suburbs?’ Things being what they are, I doubt it,” he concludes on a pessimistic note.
Brochand’s words echo those pronounced on the CNews French news channel on July 2 by Gendarmerie Colonel Philippe Cholous:
“We need to analyze this situation not in terms of what is happening now, which is terrible, but in terms of what could happen if it gets out of hand. There’s obviously anger in the suburbs, but I think there’s also anger among the middle classes, the good people, France’s working people. There’s also a great deal of resentment on the part of the forces of law and order, who are very often abandoned by politicians. (…) The level of exasperation and resentment, the level of violence, and above all, the fact that in certain areas there is a real hatred of France, with weapons circulating, means that the potential is explosive. And just because there are fewer vehicles burned or businesses attacked doesn’t mean that the potential risk is decreasing.”
It is worth noting that after a week of chaos, the French government has not renounced its plans to legalize the stay of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who work in sectors lacking labor, which is going to greatly reinforce the pull factor for illegal immigration to Europe, as each such legalization in a major European country has done in the past.
According to a July 7 poll for CNEWS television about which political leaders the French trust most to find solutions to the current situation in their country, published on July 7, where respondents were asked to give their first and second choice, 32 percent said they trust none, 27 percent pointed to Marine Le Pen, 22 percent to her party chairman Jordan Bardella, and only 20 percent to President Emmanuel Macron, and 13 percent to Éric Zemmour, who is depicted as being more to the right than Marine Le Pen.
Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, came only fifth, as he is trusted by only 12 percent of respondents, whereas only 11 percent pointed to Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne as their first or second choice of someone who could bring solutions to the unfolding crisis. Interestingly enough, the leader of the center-right party Les Républicains, Éric Ciotti, with only 6 percent of the French who trust his ability to bring solutions, lags behind far-left leaders Jean-Luc Mélenchon (9 percent) and Fabien Roussel (8 percent).
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