Valls planting a “peace tree” in Évry dedicated to Palestine—before becoming a fanatical Zionist.

Go go Part 1.

Valls’ Early Career: A Neoliberal with an “Ethnic” Rotten Borough

Valls calls himself a “Blairite” and a “Clintonian.” This is appropriate. He indeed represents that “right-wing” edge of the Socialist Party, the part that wants “modernize” the left by jettisoning the White working class in favor of unabashedly conforming to globalism and indeed even changing the name of the party. The globalist paradigm — with unlimited open borders for immigrants and corporations — is incompatible with traditional left-wing goals, such as effectively taxing the rich, regulating finance, maintaining the welfare state, or protecting jobs and wages. Thus, Valls wants a “New Left” which abandons the old dream of socialism, while still claiming to be in some sense of the left. He represents both the Left’s selling out to global plutocracy and a kind of realism as to what can be achieved under the constraints of open borders.

An early case in his political life illustrates this well. In December 1980, Valls and Bauer attacked the Communist mayor of Vitry-sur-Seine’s for a plan to remove immigrants from the town. Valls was almost kicked out of the Socialist Party for this, as it was then allied with the Communists. This limited opposition to immigration dissipated in the Socialist Party as (often Jewish) Trotskyites and “anti-racists” rose in the organization, and the alliance with the (effectively Stalinist) Communists was dissolved and. (Can we ever emphasize enough, from a nationalist point of view, the moral superiority of Stalinists over Trotskyites?) As Vice Mayor of Argenteuil, Valls promoted illegal immigration with a “republican baptism” of illegals at the town hall in which supporters committed to help the lawbreakers to remain in France (32).

Valls then rose with the “modernizing” wing of the Socialist Party represented by Michel Rocard. During Jospin’s term as prime minister, Valls was in charge of relations with the media, acquiring a reputation for intimidating journalists who asked the wrong questions. A magazine reported: “The methods of this Catalan of origin are sometimes brutal: fits, threats against journalists [. . .] charged with following day by day the head of government’s action, the Homeric rages of the young Socialist are well-known” (32).

Valls reaped the benefits of the French ruling class’ steady replacement of the indigenous French population when he was elected in 2000 as mayor of Évry, which his authorized biographers describe as “a mosaic city, where the [ethnic] communities, numerous, have gradually become ghettoized” (39). He thus enjoyed a kind of rotten borough through the Socialists’ appeal to ethnic blocs of voters eager to benefit from wealth transfers from the native French majority and allergic to the conservatives’ symbolic Islam-baiting. Valls urged public subsidies for mosques and allowing all foreigners resident in France to vote in municipal elections. (More recently as prime minister, Valls has suggested giving up on reforming the Constitution to allow non-EU foreigners to vote in municipal elections as too divisive and unpopular, and instead wants to “concentrate [. . .] on naturalizations.”[12]) In 2008, he was reelected as mayor of Évry with over 70% of the vote and a staggering abstention rate of 63%. Ratier reports that 45% of residents benefit from social housing.

Valls himself however is rather cynical about the Africans and Muslims in his “multicultural” city. He lives in an upper-middle class White area. Like a Potemkin village, graffiti sprayed by urban youths are hastily removed when out-of-town notables visit. In a June 2009 TV appearance, Valls, apparently unaware he was being filmed in the streets of the city, commented sarcastically with open scorn on the overwhelmingly non-White crowd around him: “a fine image of the city of Évry. . . . Could you put me a few Whites, a few Whites [in English], a few Blancos?” (40). Valls went strangely unpunished for the remark. It goes without saying that no nationalist politician would be allowed to make such a statement without being required to atone profusely or be excluded from “democratic politics.”

Valls’ short temper was also notorious at Évry. One municipal councilor said: “[Valls’ staff] are scared as hell. [. . .] Manuel has a fascistic side. He is a real dominant male who has a certain brutality. The guys obey. Sit! Don’t move [i.e. like ordering a dog]” (66).

Valls occupied a rather strange niche: Enjoying a safe left-wing ethnic stronghold, he was free to promote himself as a “modern” neoliberal, with policies anathema to the Socialist Party base, such as bringing the national deficit under 3% of GDP, increasing the value-added tax, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, abolishing the 35-hour workweek, and so on. Valls emphasized communications, increasing that share of the municipality’s budget by 800%. During his term as mayor between 2001 and 2012, municipal debt increased by 70% while its taxes shot up 45.7%.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarkozy told Valls in February 2004: “Manuel, you will see . . . One day I ask you to work with me . . . And you will accept joining the government!” (34). In the event, Valls turned down the newly-elected President Sarkozy’s offer in 2007. But it is striking to observe how the degree to which the two men play similar roles in their respective political camps. Both agree that the globalist program should be maintained — submission to the American Empire and EU integration, giving international finance free reign and offshoring of jobs abroad, supporting Israel and spreading chaos in the Middle East, and ultimately physically replacing the indigenous French population with Africans and Muslims.

This process, naturally, creates enormous amounts of stress and anxiety among the French, due to a palpable loss of national independence, to constant double-digit unemployment, and the social dysfunction, criminality, and socio-cultural change the Afro-Muslims bring with them. Sarkozy and Valls are more television personalities than empowered statesmen, appealing to these anxieties by playing the tough guy in the media, empowering the surveillance state and removing civil liberties, without addressing the underlying globalist causes.

Valls won less than 6% of the vote in the Socialist Party’s 2011 primaries to choose their presidential candidate. He remained a fairly marginal figure until he was propelled to the interior ministry and finally the office of prime minister following his fellow Socialist François Hollande’s election as president in 2012.

Valls the Pro-Palestinian

Ratier carefully documents a very curious aspect of Valls’ career: That before becoming Zionist-in-Chief in the government, he was as mayor of Évry a staunch supporter of Palestine and a fierce critic of Israel. With its heavily Afro-Muslim demographics, Évry is a leading bastion of pro-Palestinian sentiment in the country, and Valls was happy to pay lip service to this cause for years.

Évry-Palestine, founded in 1988, was the largest pro-Palestinian organization in France. It was subsidized by the municipality and even promoted the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement, which today is outright illegal under French law on grounds of “national discrimination” (this same boycott, obviously, was considered a perfectly legal and even moral tool when it was applied to South Africa in the 1980s). Évry was symbolically twinned with the Palestinian refugee camp of Khan Yunis.

After being elected mayor in 2001, Valls helped to organize the “Six Hours for Palestine” festival at the town hall. He hosted senior Palestinian officials. In November 2002, he participated in a meeting of EuroPalestine — a hodgepodge of pro-Palestinian figures presenting lists in the European elections — and signed a petition for the suspension of the European Union-Israel Association Agreement. Valls’ speech from the occasion is worth quoting. He referred to Israel’s “terrible oppression over another people” and said the Israeli Labour Party was “making a terrible mistake which has made it lose its soul by participating in the coalition led by [Ariel] Sharon.” He continued, noting

the conscious destruction of the Palestinian Authority, the terrible repression and its trail of deaths, the occupation and destruction of towns, villages, and houses, the continuation of [Jewish] colonization which violates international law and which indeed has never ceased, the unemployment, social and sanitary misery which the Palestinians experience. [The Israelis] want to destroy the infrastructure, memory, and future of this people. This is unacceptable and requires the mobilization of the entire international community. [. . .] Israel must respect the UN’s resolutions. For this a show of force is indispensable and so yes we must convince parliaments and governments to suspend the European Union-Israel Association Agreement. (49-53)

The speech is remarkable in both the intensity of its moral condemnation of Israel and its urging of, in effect, economic coercion. (The EU-Israel agreement gives Israel greater access to the European market and various funds.) Actually putting material pressure on the Israelis to respect human rights, as opposed to just voicing empty platitudes, is a big no-no both for strongly-identified Jews and “anti-racist” Jewish organizations in France.

This was not an isolated event. In February 2003, Valls demanded that France use her veto to block any United Nations resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq and expressed concern about the humanitarian impact of the longstanding embargo of the country. In 2006 he again co-organized and attended Six Hours for Palestine. In 2007, he urged support for the Hamas-backed National Unity Government of Palestine and demanded that the West “undo the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip which condemns almost 1.4 million people to live in a ghetto” (53). He went on to attack “the construction of a shameful wall, the continuation of colonization.”

All this has changed however, and today Valls enthusiastically meets with the hardcore Jewish racial nationalists who rule Israel, such as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. And that is besides the shockingly unconditional declarations of support for Israel and Zionism.

Valls’ Zionist Turn: Love or Interest?

Valls’ turn towards Israel was first evident in his decision, in January 2009 at the height of the Israelis’ murderous Operation Cast Lead against the Gaza Strip, announcing Évry’s twinning with an Israeli town. In November 2009, he declined for the first time to host Six Hours for Palestine at the town hall.

Having divorced his first wife after having four children, Valls remarried with the Romanian-origin Jewish violin-player Anne Gravoin in 2010. The marriage apparently unlocked considerable networking opportunities for Valls. One attendee of the wedding reported that: “It was fun, the town hall was chock full. Anne, of Jewish origin, had invited a branch of her family, orthodox Jews. [. . .] [There were] men who wore kippas, coming from Manhattan or London, and imams from the Essonne [the county Évry is located in]” (21, 44). One magazine reported that “Anne Gravoin opened to her husband her ‘cultural’ networks, show-business, and does not hesitate to say in socialite dinners that ‘Manuel’s career’ owes her a great deal” (20). Valls was keen to advertise his new love interest, appearing in Paris Match with a full-page photograph of them kissing.

There have been many claims that Gravoin has played a major role in her husband’s embrace of Zionism and in particular in his relentless persecution of the Cameroonian-French comedian Dieudonné. Former foreign minister Roland Dumas — who had served under President François Mitterrand, himself highly critical of Jewish power[13] — claimed that Valls was “under Jewish influence” through his wife.

While women often command a powerful influence over their husbands, I tend to think that Valls’ Zionist turn is more hard-headed: Simply, he is pandering to the most powerful ethnic networks in the country. His wife is complementary to that end. As he rose in the Socialist Party, his constituency shifted from the anti-Zionist Afro-Muslims in the party’s base, to the Zionist Jews that are critically overrepresented among the party’s elite. Valls apparently calculated this Zionist turn was necessary to having a successful national career, with support both in the party and the media. As a typical “democratic politician,” Valls was willing to prove perfectly unprincipled and change his opinions to suit the constituency of the moment.

In February 2010, the Évry municipality’s subsidies to Évry-Palestine were cut. In November Valls cosigned an editorial in Le Monde entitled “The Boycott of Israel Is a Shameful Weapon.” In March 2011, he blocked the holding a debate organized by Évry-Palestine. In June 2011, he gave his infamous Radio Judaïca Strasbourg interview in which he declared:

My family has deep ties with Vladimir Jankélévitch [a Jewish philosopher], who has written the most beautiful book one can write on the unpardonable and on the Shoah. By my wife I am eternally bound to the Jewish community and to Israel. Come on! So I do not come here to be lectured on the fight against anti-Semitism. (112)

Ratier speculates that Valls chose this particular media as it was listened to by the Jewish community but not by the French public at large. In any event, Valls’ unusual declaration of identification with Jews and Israel went viral on the Internet. Later, Front National spin doctor Florian Philippot, civic nationalist and reputed anti-Zionist, alluded to Valls’ statement during a prime time television debate in February 2014: “These foreigners, if one day they become French, [I want] them to be proud of being French, eternally bound to France; come on, Monsieur Valls” (113).

In April 2012, Valls signed an incredibly one-sided “Friends of Israel” charter. In May 2012, he told a CRIF dinner: “When a Jew of France is attacked, the Republic itself is attacked” (60). At an event with CRIF President Richard Prasquier, he said he would “fight anti-Zionism, this anti-Semitism which aims to negate Israel” and that he was “proud to be part of a government which wants to build a strong friendship with Israel.” In September 2012, Valls told a synagogue: “the Jews of France can be proud to wear their kippa” and “the Jews of France’s carnal attachment for their country could obviously not prevent ties uniting them with the land of Israel.” He has elsewhere said that, in the name of secularism, “[t]he [Islamic] veil [. . .] must remain for the Republic an essential struggle.”

In November 2012, Valls was hosted as the guest of honor at the annual gala of Radio J (a Jewish radio station), at which he declared: “The Jewish community is France and France without the Jewish community is no longer exactly France” (61). Valls has repeatedly made statements of this type.[14] In January 2013, Valls stated: “France without French Jews would not be France [. . .]. There is a Judaism of France, nourished by numerous sources and steeped in the values of our Republic. This Judaism has deeply influenced France, her culture, her literature, her music, her society” (61).[15]

In September 2013, Valls told the Jewish Central Consistory: “Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism [. . .] are the same thing” (63). In January 2014 he said on television: “The Shoah is a sanctuary, one cannot desecrate it.” In February 2014 he told a newspaper that he was “worried by a kind of desacralization of the Shoah” (81).

Finally in March 2014, there was his infamous appearance at a Jewish rally in Paris in which he declared: “Anti-Zionism is the open door to anti-Semitism [. . .]. The Jews of France are more than ever the Frenchmen at the vanguard of the Republic and of our values.”

More generally, Valls has been keen to meet with American Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In February 2013, he and Hollande hosted Ronald Lauder, the Jewish-American billionaire and head of the World Jewish Congress, at the Élysée Palace, where Lauder received the Légion d’Honneur. Valls eagerly hosts media events whenever a real or imagined anti-Semitic attack has occurred somewhere, no other ethnic community in France enjoying such careful attention. Valls has cordial relations with ultra-Zionist Jewish member of the National Assembly Meyer Habib, a nominal conservative.

The Zionist Rises: Valls Enters the Government

Manuel Valls was appointed interior minister in May 2012, following François Hollande’s election as president. Hollande later conceded he had been elected by default as the alternative to Sarkozy, not by any popular enthusiasm. Valls was promoted to prime minister April 2014 by the hopelessly unpopular Hollande, with approval ratings perpetually hovering around 20%.

The character and brands of the two men are indicative of wider trends in French society. The flabby Hollande is the ultimate non-entity. He has never, in his entire career, done anything original or outside of Socialist Party orthodoxy. The result: absolute impotence. Hollande has had no direction in his career other than to represent the Socialist Party and to respect the Maastricht Treaty negotiated by his predecessor Socialist François Mitterrand. Maastricht, in exchange for a hollow promise of “European Union,” prescribed neoliberalism (free trade, free movement of capital, privatization) and a perverted ordoliberalism (state dependence on financial markets, an unaccountable central bank, making employment secondary to low inflation). These principles became enshrined in the Constitution and thus immune to the whims of changing majorities.

Thus, Hollande represents the Socialist Party’s impotence and empty promises: Having abdicated control of whole swathes of economic policy, the party is powerless to protect the French against the negative winds of globalization or to defend the masses’ purchasing power — the latter being the prime claim of a legitimacy in a consumer democracy. Hollande’s inability to resolve the financial/euro crises or reduce unemployment, his central campaign plank, have been deeply damaging to the Socialists. This was after Hollande had promised to to take on German Chancellor Merkel and create a more Keynesian Eurozone (in fact, he quietly accepted Merkel’s balanced budget amendment into French basic law, humiliatingly accepting a merely symbolic concession of pseudo-stimulus from Berlin). This is also after Hollande had campaigned declaring: “My enemy is the world of finance.”

Years later, Hollande remains impotent. There is little indication that EU regulation will tame the financial markets and the unfathomably frequent capital flows. The EU’s proposed financial transactions tax remains stuck at the drawing board. Nothing was delivered.

All that was left was for Hollande to tax the rich a bit more, a measure which in over-taxed France has become self-defeating and futile when the rich (like Gérard Dépardieu) can exile themselves abroad. There was nothing left but “societal” measures (such as legalizing homosexual marriage, at best irrelevant) and using the last vestigial military and diplomatic powers of the French state in service to the American Empire and international Zionism. Thus, Paris has been trying to make itself relevant by arming Islamic fundamentalists in Syria and by approving sanctions against Russia. France has lost arms sales to Russia, but won some in the Arab petro-monarchies.

In all this, Valls has been in the background, steadily being built up by the media, portraying him as the stern leader the French want (notably during the “Leonarda Affair” in which he deported an Kosovar Albanian family).

Hollande appointed Valls prime minister in March 2014, perhaps in the hope of a more effective government, or of benefiting from his relatively greater popularity. Being unable to achieve any of his left-wing promises besides man-on-man marriage, Hollande also no doubt saw the appeal of reassuring the French with a TV-tough guy like Valls — an angry neoliberal who might be better able to coerce his narrow parliamentary majority to pass right-wing economic reforms made necessary by the open borders and euro regimes. These reforms have incidentally been undertaken by the young Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker with the Rothschild Group.

Valls’ “Hatred of Nationalists”

The Valls government has thus abandoned any pretenses of being able to defend social justice. But it has also failed to reduce unemployment, maintain purchasing power, or reduce crime. Valls has therefored turned to anti-fascist theatrics to rally the Socialist Party’s depressed left-wing base. A sweaty, impassioned, and angry Valls threatened Alain Soral and Dieudonné at the party’s summer conference of 2013:

This struggle [against the far-right] will continue. When a journalist, Frédéric Haziza [a strongly-identified Jew and Zionist], is insulted, defamed, tarnished, on the Internet, by Mister Soral, who has inspired the far-right, who finds curious ties with others, I think of Dieudonné, that means indeed that the struggle is not over and that we will pursue it because it is necessary for the Republic, the liberty of the press, and democracy.

Thus Valls also likes to rant, in an almost Hollywood-Hitler fashion, against nationalists. Dieudonné has had much fun parodying Valls’ appearances in the National Assembly, shouting endlessly and unable to control a pronounced nervous shaking in his left hand.

Valls has in general spent a rather inordinate amount of time harassing and persecuting nationalists. Indeed, Ratier speaks of Valls’ “hatred of nationalists.” There was fairly rough treatment, including use of tear gas, against peaceful protesters opposing homosexual marriage. There was the liberticidal response to accidental death of the skinny antifa provocateur Clément Méric during a fight he had instigated against a nationalist. After this, Valls banned the Jeunesses nationalistes révolutionnaires (Nationalist Revolutionary Youth) and Œuvre française (French Work) groups, neither of which had been involved as such.

Valls has also upped persecution of Dieudonné and Soral. This has included repeated politically-motivated tax investigations. In January 2014, Valls moved to ban Dieudonné’s comedy show Le Mur, saying: “The struggle against racism and anti-Semitism is one of the Government’s essential concerns and demands an energetic action” (115). There was then a surreal sequence of events as judges moved, with incredible speed, to preemptively censor Dieudonné and ban his appearances on the extraordinarily vague and arbitrary grounds of “threat to public order,” “human dignity,” and “national cohesion.” Numerous jurists were disturbed by the decision as an attack on free speech. These included people with no love for Dieudonné, such as the Jewish homosexual Socialist former minister of culture Jack Lang, who called the verdict “a profound regression.”

After the Charlie Hebdo massacres in January 2015, Valls helped organize massive demonstrations in Paris in defense of free speech and moved to subsidize the obscene, Muslim-baiting, and anti-nationalist weekly. The very next day, he moved to arrest Dieudonné for publishing a mysterious joke on Facebook: “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” expressing common feelings with both the far-left cartoonists and the Islamic terrorists.

Valls’ tenure has also seen the criminalization of the quenelle gesture, which roughly means “up yours,” despite no law to this effect, including prosecution of high level dissidents like Soral and of ordinary people (including of one man who performed a quenelle in front of Valls). Speaking of Dieudonné and Soral, Valls said in January 2014 that “French democracy will know how to defeat, sooner or later, the little businessmen of hatred” (86).

All this “anti-fascist” agitation has not, however, helped the Socialists maintain their popularity or their dwindling supporters’ devastated morale. Already many years ago, the former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin conceded that the Front National was not a fascist party and “therefore any anti-fascism was merely theater.” The Socialist Party is then crusading against imaginary demons to shore up its inability to deliver its economic promises.

The Front National has steadily, but far too slowly, risen under Valls’ watch, winning unprecedented votes in European, municipal, and regional elections. But, at just over a quarter of the national vote, Valls has been able to safely exclude the FN from any effective participation in French politics.

Conclusion: The Bushification of France

Valls-the-tough-guy embodies the gradual return of the French state’s authoritarian and bellicose streak in recent years. He has completed the “neocon-ization” or “Bushification” of France. There has been the passage of new legislation to spy on citizens. Twitter has agreed to grant the government access to messages upon a simple email request. After the recent Paris attacks by Muslims left over 130 Frenchmen dead, the government declared an indefinite “state of emergency” rendering habeas corpus rights null and void. Valls declared, aping Bush to perfection, that France was “at war with terrorism.”

The state of emergency is to be retroactively legitimized by an amendment to the French Constitution. Valls informs us it will endure “until we have gotten rid of the Islamic State,” in other words indefinitely. Again: We cannot emphasize enough how much Western leaders’ “strategy of chaos” — spreading civil wars in the Middle East and Islamic colonization in the West — ultimately strengthens their power by legitimizing the need for wars in support of Israel and for liberticidal counter-terrorism measures.

Valls represents the harnessing, on the left, of French patriotism and the authoritarian French state for alien causes: The American Empire, Israel, and global plutocracy. His stated model is Georges Clemenceau, prime minister during the final years of World War I. This is an entirely appropriate model: There, a deracinated, anti-European form of French patriotism was subverted for a titanic and disastrous conflict with the sister nation of Germany, leaving millions of dead. And to whose benefit? To the Bolsheviks ruling Russia. To the United States, that increasingly Judaized liberal and financial empire. And to the Zionists, who had secured the Balfour Declaration from Britain to establish a Jewish ethnic homeland in Palestine. In each respect, Jews were among the major beneficiaries. Today things are little different, but one can echo Karl Marx’s bon mot on history repeating itself: The first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce.

Time will tell if Valls’ political career will survive much longer. The economy is weak, unemployment remains high, and petty crime is up. Valls’ popularity rating has held up reasonably, with generally just under half the public having a favorable view of him (though his government is generally less well-viewed, with one poll finding a favorability rating of just 27%). He continues to pander to Zionists with repeated declarations of fealty to Israel. The Franco-Israeli relationship is increasingly coming to resemble the American-Israeli one, with no official distinction between the two countries’ interests. But it is uncertain whether this will be enough to keep Valls in office or whether “the System” will soon be through with him.

Probably Valls is hoping that President Hollande, having failed to reduce unemployment, will not run for reelection 2017. Then, he could present himself and, facing a divided right-wing vote, might be lucky enough to go to the second round against Marine Le Pen, against whom he would unfortunately surely be the winner (as a result the FN’s systematic demonization by the media, its equally systematic marginalization by the rest of the political class, and, it must be said, by some self-marginalizing FN policies which play well to the fringes of the electorate but alienate mainstream voters).

Valls’ tenuous position in the Socialist Party could then be maintained by the French regime’s curious insistence on maintaining the sham of the two-party political system, the conservatives and Socialists defending basically identical policies, with the only real political alternative, the nationalist, being safely excluded from participation. Unpopular with the Socialist base, Valls could well endure to play the left-wing tough-guy on television and preserve the myth of France’s two-party democracy.

More broadly, if we take mainstream French media accounts at face value, Valls’ attainment of power through his networking with Bauer and Fouks reflects the influence of secretive networks and of ethnic networks in a mass media democracy like contemporary France. Valls’ power and repeated incredibly pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist statements reflect an imbalance: There are no more ethnocentric power networks on this planet than Jewish networks, these same networks are hysterically opposed to non-Jewish nationalisms and, partly as a result, ethnic Europeans are simply not allowed to openly profess ethnocentrism.

Valls the politician is of little import, besides being an exemplar of how low politicians in the West will sink in order to achieve power, fame, and fortune. But the forces he answers to and represents are much deeper and promise, if left unchecked, to destroy both France and indeed all Western nations.

[12]“Valls renonce au droit de vote des étrangers : ‘je préfère me concentrer sur les naturalisations,” Fdesouche, October 28, 2015.

[13]Guillaume Durocher, “‘The Lobby-That-Doesn’t-Exist’: Politicians and Pundits on Jewish Influence in France,” The Occidental Observer, October 1, 2015.

[14]In fact, the Jews — considered to be usurious exploiters of the peasantry, godless and immoral, and ruthless rivals to French burghers — were expelled on numerous occasions by the Kings of France, notably by by Philip August in 1182 and Philip the Fair in 1306 . . . but they always came back. No one has claimed that France ceased to be France on these occasions. In fact, both Philip August and Philip the Fair are considered major figures in the French nation-building process.

[15]Ironically, Valls is partially agreeing with many traditionalist critics of Jewish power in France, such as Joseph de Maistre and Charles Maurras, who denounced Jewish elites for promoting “republican” egalitarian and individualist values.