Oo la la!
France.
Frankism.
Jacob Frank.
Jacobins.
Frantzue (Frantzve).
Just some dots I want to connect when I have time.
In the meantime ...
How a Certain Strain of French State Philosophy Became the Most Dangerous Ideology in the Modern World
By John Mappin — for IF Magazine
There are countries whose power is measured in divisions, fleets, or GDP. And then there are countries—more precisely, state traditions—whose danger lies not in their armies but in their ideas. France, for all its breathtaking beauty, architectural splendour, and aesthetic self-confidence, has long exported not only wine and couture but something far more potent: a worldview. A worldview that marries intellectual hauteur, moral exhibitionism, and a distinctly psychiatric philosophy of control, perfumed in such elegance that one barely notices its corrosive effects until it has already crossed national borders and ideological frontiers.
To call France the “most lethal country in the world” is, of course, not to impugn the French people—many of whom are as baffled by their own governing class as the rest of us. Rather, it is to point toward a deep historical pattern: the remarkable ability of the French state and its intellectual vanguard to generate world-shaping doctrines that mask coercion behind sophistication, and which have repeatedly unleashed devastation far beyond the boulevards of Paris. From the eighteenth century to the present day, one can trace a continuous thread of state-sponsored ideology—part psychiatric, part aesthetic, part imperial—that has acted as a cover for interventions, manipulations, and, at times, civilisational vandalism. And at the heart of this strange genealogy stands one unforgettable figure: the original theoretician of cruelty, the Marquis de Sade, whose name gave us the very word sadism.
I. De Sade and the Birth of the Aestheticised Cruelty
One does not need to read far into the writings of the Marquis de Sade to understand how his worldview would echo across centuries. In de Sade we find the fusion of three quintessentially French state impulses: 1The intellectualisation of cruelty 2The aestheticisation of vice 3The conviction that human beings are clay for the sculptor-ruler De Sade’s philosophy was, in many ways, the first great modern manifesto of unrestrained domination disguised as liberation. It was also one of the earliest examples of an idea that would become central to the French governing and cultural elite: that if one describes tyranny in sufficiently elegant prose, one can pass it off as enlightenment. It was no accident that psychiatry as a mechanism of state power—classification, coercion, “correction”—found such fertile soil in France. Nor was it accidental that the French colonial imagination adopted de Sade’s core principle: that power is justified by the pleasure of the one wielding it.II. The Colonial Empire: Sadism in Bureaucratic Form
When France embarked on its colonial ventures across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, it did so with a paradoxical flourish: barbarism wearing perfume. The rhetoric was always the same—civilisation, enlightenment, culture—yet the methods were textbook Sadean: domination, possession, extraction, and control. The Atlantic slave trade did not rely merely on economic incentives; it depended on a philosophical conviction that other human beings were objects. France’s brutality in places like Haiti and West Africa was carried out under the tricolour not by accident but by conviction—and then lacquered over with a thin sheen of Parisian refinement. French colonial governors wrote treatises on virtue even as they ordered floggings. Parisian newspapers rhapsodised about the civilising mission while forced labour camps churned out rubber and sugar. What distinguished France from other colonial powers was not the scale of its violence—horrific though it was—but its unmatched talent for disguising its excesses beneath couture, cuisine, and philosophy. The British exported common law. The French exported illusions and cruelty.III. The Perfume Bottle: Aesthetics as Political Camouflage
Where other empires eventually admitted their sins, France perfected the art of transforming guilt into a brand asset. The more catastrophes French policy unleashed, the more aggressively the French state—and its cultural machinery—produced beauty, fashion, and philosophical abstraction as a kind of moral deodorant. Perfume for the nose, couture for the eye, existentialism for the mind—these were not merely cultural products but instruments of national absolution. The scent of Chanel No. 5 was, in geopolitical terms, more than a fragrance; it was a fog machine. The effect has been profound. Even today, many view France less as a state actor and more as a museum gift shop with nuclear weapons. This misperception has allowed a distinctly French moral arrogance—born of centuries of self-perception as civilisation’s curator—to operate unchecked.IV. From Psychiatry to Ideology: The Modern Export
If France’s colonial era fused aesthetics with oppression, its post-war era fused psychiatric theory with social engineering. In Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and their successors, we find the intellectual descendants of de Sade: thinkers who relativised truth, destabilised identity, and reduced human beings to mere constructs. Their disciples exported these ideas across the Atlantic, where they blossomed—particularly in American universities—into today’s most volatile ideological fashions. Which brings us to one of the strangest developments of the twenty-first century: the near-religious fervour with which certain French philosophical currents have amplified and exported the transgender ideology, not as a compassionate response to human suffering, but as a metaphysical assault on meaning itself. France, ever the aesthete, gave the world the idea that identity could be sculpted like a marble bust. That the self was infinitely malleable. That categories—male, female, true, false—were oppressive inventions rather than descriptions of reality. This was not liberation. It was the psychiatric worldview disguised as progressive theology.And, as ever, it came wrapped in beauty, couture, and intellectual sophistication.
V. The Assault on the Catholic Church
No institution suffered more from the French ideological export machine than the Catholic Church. France’s historical conflict with Catholic authority—dating back to the Enlightenment and sharpened during the Revolution—has evolved into a cultural project: to desacralise the West by aesthetic means. The transgender ideology, when weaponised in this manner, functions not as a pastoral concern but as a metaphysical coup. It demands that the Church surrender its anthropology, its cosmology, and ultimately its authority in exchange for the approval of Parisian cultural arbiters. This is why French intellectual influence has been so corrosive: It offers heresy in the packaging of holiness.