This article is based on this dutch article of Martijn Benders
We circle around the Arc de Triomphe, and Véronique laughs manically, caught in an epiphanic visit to her own youth. Back then, she would regularly zip around this donut, a dim-witted child by her side, constantly biting her.
I keep seeing the same police officers, armed with machine guns, passing by. I try to steer clear of every incoming Frenchman wanting to make a turn, all the while musing about the brilliance of the croissant and why, in Houellebecq’s elongated Marlboro ad, one sees little of the true France. No, what is truly French is running into Van Uffelen at an exhibition of the cubist Herbin. The diamond seeks the cube, the sickle seeks the bread.
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to hang that above my sofa,’ I hear the renowned D66 politician say to her husband while viewing her figurative cradle.
The encounter completely disoriented me. It is the height of absurdity, running into Van Uffelen at a cubist exhibition.
No, Houellebecq is not a Frenchman, he is a lost cowboy. I haven’t watched the pornographic film that Stefan Kirac Ruitenbeek made with this character. I know that in Serotonin he describes the Dutch as a nation of whores, and I don’t want to have that burned onto my retina again. No, I’ve seen enough commercials in my life, thoroughly sick of that endless stream of boys’ books that baked the hyperreality of the writer’s script – everything that ever lived moves into representation, as Guy Debord, one of the founders of situationism, described it.
Céline was a pitiable figure, but he still lived. When I read his books, I don’t hear that voice-over of the Spectacle, also an outdated term, because Baudrillard, who built on Debord’s ideas, came up with a catchier term: simulacrum. Reality continuously recreates itself into ever more hallucinatory and empty variants: after the boys’ books come the educators, then the Instagram poets, with cute little texts on colorful balloons.
And the croissant, how genius is that, and also not French: it’s an Austrian pastry perfected by the French in all its Christianity: the bread that is bread enough. The moon that devours itself and needs no sugar. In Austria, the pastry is called Kipferl, which I would freely translate as Kipverel, a much heathen name in which you can feel the movement of the sickle, the sickle cuts into itself, and then the day layers unfold.
But enough, let’s cross the mouth. It’s an open door to discuss French pastry skills here, which truly embody the essence of Frenchness. And also the other thing, that you can hardly imagine a black man becoming president of France. Why is that? Paris is now almost half black. But you hardly see them in the elite. It’s all well and good, but you wouldn’t want to hang it above your sofa, so to speak.
Population replacement? Nonsense. Céline already wrote it: France is a mess of happenstance that blew in, where a line was drawn around it, and people started pretending they all had something in common. In Céline, you can still hear the anarchist speaking, who knows that all of this is completely arbitrary: there is nothing to populate; French identity is a hallucinatory invention, and anyone dealing in such sour inventions is the top drug lord: Twitter is full of them.
But it is typically French: Americans and the British already had colored leaders; the French and the Dutch did not. Are we a nation of whores? It’s possible, but I’ve never felt any kinship with that parking lot by the North Sea run by the secret service. Population replacement? How can you populate a parking lot by the North Sea? You can at most park illegally, and that I do by definition because my inventions don’t fit the identity politics that are the craze of the day. How can you debate with a toddler like Wilders?
No, belief in ‘population replacement’ requires belief in the croissant as a French invention, and that you must strangle and forget all that Kipverel-like, until only you and your crucified mouth may exist, maybe with a series of exciting Hollebek books on your wall, so I thought while doing the Donutino around the Triumphal Arch, sweetening in the giggle fit of my love. But what would the French word for that dreadful term be, Arcpeupelion? No, grand remplacement, that’s what the French call that theory. The Great Replacement. But the real great replacement, those paranoid folks don’t see: they’ve become a Simulacrum themselves, on the leash of a demonic spectacle.
Debord. His first book was wrapped in sandpaper. An enviable concept. A book that damages all books placed next to it. What kind of book was it, anyway? I haven’t read it. I too am often tempted by some demonic spectacle, which makes me read too few real writers and thinkers and give surrogate space in my life.
My work too needs a sandpaper cover.
The Arc de Triomphe was designed by Jean-François Chalgrin, modeled after ancient Roman triumphal arches. The monument depicts naked Frenchmen defeating bearded barbarians. Originally, Napoleon intended to provide Paris with four triumphal arches, but in the end, there were only two. He himself only lived to see a Trompe-l’oeil version of this arch: the monument remained unfinished for a long time and was only completed some 50 years after his death. It is a square croissant-avant-la-lettre, the letter N as the moonlike staple of the alphabet, which can bind everything together, even Frenchness.
Martinus 17-07-2024