"What I cannot understand and which plunges me into an abyss of sorry perplexity, is why and how so many informed Frenchmen and so many French politicians contribute knowingly, methodically -- I don't care to say cynically -- with the certain immolation of France (let us avoid the qualifier of eternal which disgusts the beautiful consciences) on the altar of an aggravated utopian humanism.
I ask myself the same question in connection with all these omnipresent associations of rights to this, rights to that, and all these leagues, these think tanks, these subsidized headquarters, these networks of manipulators insinuated into all the wheels of State (political education, judiciary, parties, trade unions, etc.), these innumerable petitioners, these correctly consensual media and all these "clever" folks who day after day and with impunity inoculate their anesthetic substance into the still healthy body of the French nation.
Even if I can, at a pinch, credit them on the one hand with sincerity, it sometimes saddens me to admit that they are my countrymen. I feel the sting of the renegade word, but there is another explanation: they confuse France with the Republic. "Republican values" have deteriorated ad infinitum; one knows it fully, but never with reference to France. However, France is from the outset a country of [common] blood. On the other hand, the Republic, which is only one shape of government, is synonymous for them with ideology, ideology with a capital "I," the major ideology. It seems to me, to some extent, that they betray the first for the second."
Jean Raspail, The Fatherland betrayed by the Republic (Le Figaro, June 17, 2004).