The Barbarians Are Already Inside — France, Iconoclasm, and Islam

It is difficult to produce a more apt description of the animals delighting in the destruction of the Eldest Daughter of the Church than Cardinal Robert Sarah’s 2019 remark in The Catholic Herald: “The barbarians are already inside the city.” While the burning of Limoges’ city hall was not literally done to provide immediate warmth from a fire made with one’s “beautiful oak door”, as Raspail put it in The Camp of the Saints, one might consider the rhetoric of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of the democratic socialist and ecosocialist LFI party, when he says that “The heart of the matter is the protesters’ demands, the problems facing students and the high cost of living”. As incredulous as one might be at the anti-civilizational radicality of the notion that centuries-old architecture, artwork, and monuments of civilization are worth destroying in order to protest, nominally, against Macron’s austerity policies, there are apparently millions of real French people who think this way. They are entirely indifferent to the iconoclasm of the edifices of Western civilization and openly hostile to its very existence.

These events are not sufficiently explained by economic factors. No civilized person, certainly no Frenchman, who grows frustrated with his ability to make ends meet decides to fashion a makeshift hijab and place it on the head of a statue of St. Joan of Arc alongside a Palestinian flag. So attention is drawn, once again, to one question: how can one reconcile the growing Muslim population with the continued existence of a French secular republic de laïcité, while hopefully eschewing a Houellebecqian submission?

Marine Le Pen, the right-wing RN party presidential candidate for the election in 2027, has been criticized for taking a seemingly weak stance on Islam, namely its theoretical compatibility with the French Republic. However, Le Pen may not have been entirely forthcoming in her statement and a consideration of what is meant by the words “Islam,” “compatible,” and “Republic” may lay bare the manifest reality of the situation. Realpolitik may be a better explanation. Across the top demographic polling analysts, France’s population is roughly 10% Muslim, a number that has grown from 2% in the 21st century. According to a 2025 IFOP poll, about 40% of this population approve of Islamic fundamentalist positions, a number that has also doubled among France’s Muslims this century. According to another 2022 IFOP poll, 7% of Muslim voters chose Le Pen, while 69% chose Mélenchon in 2022. In addition to France’s Muslims, there may be moderates who perhaps would not feel it conscionable to vote RN if the presidential candidate was seen as illiberal.