1. Is France dead? As a cohesive Western, Judaeo-Christian nation: yes.
There was something darkly symbolic about the fire that nearly destroyed the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris on April 15 – the morrow of Palm Sunday — and the fall amid heavy smoke of its 93-metre iron spire. One couldn’t help linking the religious and architectural disaster with a deeper crisis: the passing of France as a distinct country, or at least as the Western, Judaeo-Christian nation it had hitherto been presumed to be.
Writing in Causeur the morning after, Hadrien Desuin, a conservative journalist, conveyed some of these feelings as he observed: “Beyond the cathedral’s fire, France itself is burning …We have witnessed the Church’s slow death … and now even the old stones are collapsing… Yes, France may die… That’s what Notre-Dame’s flames tell us.”
Prophesying imminent doom is admittedly as old as civilisation itself. While most such warnings remain merely rhetorical, many others are however validated by ensuing events, from the forebodings of Cassandra of Troy three thousand years ago – as recorded by Homer — to Winston Churchill’s statements in the wake of the Munich accords in 1938.
2. Swedish town bans Islamic headscarf in primary schools



