Acculturated France

"I will fight with all my strength against the division that is undermining and defeating us. For the next five years, I will serve on your behalf with humility, devotion and determination."
"France has won! Everyone said it was impossible. But they do not know France!"
"Globalization can be a great opportunity."
"There is no such thing as French culture. There is culture in France, and it is diverse."
French president-elect Emmanuel Macon

Triumph on he Champs Elysees : CNN

Is it even remotely possible for a 39-year-old who has just succeeded in being elected to the highest political post in his troubled country, a self-admittedly determined personality who never takes dissent for an answer, to be modest? And the devotion to his vision of the country whose best interests he will now apply himself selflessly, will it truly be in that country's best interests? He has, as the old adage goes, his work cut out for him. Oh, and the death knell for French culture, proclaimed so casually; interesting. No sacrifice too great? Wait for more!

"It's entirely unprecedented in the Fifth Republic. It's extraordinarily unusual, the way he has broken through the system -- coming from nowhere."
Francois Heisbourg, French defence expert, Macron adviser

"There is huge uncertainty regarding the parliamentary elections to come, because France's main political forces were largely absent in the second round -- the traditional right wing, the Socialists and the far left."
"Now they are frustrated, and they are ready to take their revenge in the legislative elections."
"You might have higher mobilization for the parliamentary elections than usual, which, given turnout in the presidential election, could mean a higher legitimacy for the parliament than for the presidency."
Patrick Weil, French legal scholar, historian

The Socialist government of the departing Francois Hollande has exhausted itself. Or perhaps it is that the social pressures targeting, threatening and destabilizing France have exhausted the capacity of that long-governing party to cope meaningfully and give assurances to the French that all is not as unstable as it seems. Nicholas Sarkozy was poised to reverse all that.

But there are diversions. The French public, at the very least, has been right royally entertained with the antics of its leading public figures in the political sphere. The spectacles provided by one politician after another in their turn, of mistresses, illegitimate offspring, menage a trois, musical chairs with wives and casual sleep-ins-and-overs, betrayals and embarrassing published memoirs and accusations; in all a quite lively scene of boudoirs and indiscretions and tabloid revelations.

They inject a badly needed note of hilarity from time to time to deflect attention from personal mismanagement of love affairs to trepidation and fear of the threats of violence that roil the nation now and again.

Marine Le Pen's National Front did not succeed in persuading voters that she and her party had the solution to the presence and threat of Islamist violence, but nor is the new president-elect's casual assurance that there is no French culture dreadfully reassuring. Many within the country may have felt that to be wince-inducing, given the French love affair with itself, its heritage and its values, its culture so admired throughout the rest of the world.

But of course, Mr. Macon is perfectly correct, there is no French culture any longer in the sense that it is rapidly dissolving, and while not quite "diverse", there is the polarized 'cultures' of France's past and the culture that speaks of the presence of the banlieus and its disaffected, surly and violent inhabitants out of which emerge those discontented and prepped-for-action jihadis responding to Islamist incitement to present France with the ultimatum of surrender.

But it isn't just the jihadis even though their vicious lethal attacks exploiting their infiltration within the country. Those monstrous attacks on French citizenry with the obvious message of spurning French laws and values and culture tell only the most obviously shocking exposure of the imposition of Islamist 'values' over those of the indigenous French. The other portion is the use of France as a way station on the route to Europe's disintegration as it becomes a colony of Islamist outreach.

Perhaps this is destiny's way of demonstrating that France's colonialist past has come back to haunt it; the exotic peoples whom France conquered and dominated, leaving with them its language and laws have turned the tide to conquer and dominate France, bringing with them their language, culture, heritage and religion which exhorts the faithful to spurn the kuffars and their laws. Offering their own in a spirit of Islamist generosity.