Arnaud Imatz is a French historian and Hispanist, whose latest book, Resistir a lo políticamente correcto en la historia [Resisting political correctness in history] {2024), contains one clarification after another, or in the words of Dalmacio Negro (R.I.P.): “a solid reflection on the causes of the historical-political situation of France in relation to that of Spain from the point of view of political ideas, based on an impressive series of data.” Imatz also contributes to spreading knowledge against the Spanish Black Legend in his country of France. Here, sits down with Hughes, editor of the Spanish journal La Gaceta Iberosfera/Ideas for an in-depth interview, through the kind courtesy of La Gaceta Iberosfera/Ideas.
Hughes (H): Let’s start with the present. How do you see Macron’s Gaullist moment? From outside France, we get the sense that there is a certain tendency towards pretense.
Arnaud Imatz (AI): The comparison of Macron with De Gaulle seems dubious to me, not to say grotesque. One hastened the ruin of France, the other stopped its decline. Macron is a cynic, remorseless, an amoral character for whom anything goes. He lives for the moment. He is a weathervane, obsessed with polls and appearances; a narcissist who only loves himself and, unfortunately, not his people. He also has a pedophilia problem, which marked his adolescence and undoubtedly continues to weigh on his life (the relationship of a 14-year-old boy with a 39-year-old woman, his French teacher! A strange relationship that continues to fuel rumors in France and the most incredible hypotheses in the foreign press). Unfortunately, France is currently the third country in the world that hosts the most child pornography.
De Gaulle, on the other hand, was a Catholic of conviction, a man of firm principles and high morals, committed to his country for the long term. He never stooped to the language of a braggart, nor did he allow himself the warmongering gestures of a braggart. De Gaulle could be criticized for his mania for French grandeur, but he had a sense of moderation and limits. A fervent believer, he once said of his severely disabled daughter: “Anne was also a grace. She helped me to overcome all the failures and all the men; to see higher.” A spontaneous reflection, from a loving father, which is more revealing than many of his speeches. De Gaulle undoubtedly had many enemies (which was normal and above all understandable in the case of the French people of Algeria and the Harki whom he had abandoned to their fate), but he was widely admired and respected in France and abroad and his country enjoyed credibility on the international scene. Macron is the laughing stock of the world with the exception of the major French media, both public and private, shamefully servile because they are closely monitored and controlled by the government.
Macron is a globalist, a federalist, a wokeist, an immigrationist and a pro-European. He is the elected representative of the bohemian bourgeoisie and of the older electorate, especially that of nursing homes. This so-called “Mozart of the economy” has turned France into a second or even third-rate power. Under his mandate, France has been expelled from Africa in favor of the United States, Russia and China; the social and health system, national education, justice, the police and the army have been devastated. The public debt is abysmal (3300 billion euros). France is a country of old people with a deadly demographic collapse. It is a country where crime, drug trafficking, immigration, Islamism and Islamist terrorism have spiraled out of control. French culture collapsed in 1993, at the end of Mitterrand’s term of office, and then everything went to hell. But in eight years Macron has grimly completed the job!
The worst enemies of De Gaulle and Gaullism were the Atlanticists and the communists. Today they are their epigones, the neoconservatives and other right and left supporters of NATO and the EU system. Since the “founders” Jean Monnet (the agent of the United States, according to De Gaulle) and the Nazi-converted jurist Walter Hallstein, the will of the EU’s supporters has always been a federal Europe under the protectorate of the United States and, therefore, of NATO, and led by a technocratic and globalist elite. Significantly, Macron still dreams of becoming the president of a federalized EU. This politician, who has always hated the nation, the fatherland and traditional values, now has the nerve to magically present himself as a patriot, defender of national unity and caudillo. A skilled manipulator of public opinion, he plays on the fear of war to impose his false and extravagant “narrative.” And it worked temporarily: his approval rating went from 20 percent to 26 percent. Unlike him, De Gaulle always wanted and defended a Europe based on nations and peoples.
H: There has also been talk of possible Gaullism in Trump
AI: Trump is a national-populist leader whose democratic legitimacy is unquestionable, much to the annoyance of his opponents. He was elected not only by the electoral college, but by the majority of the people. He is doing what he was elected to do, and he has the enormous merit of confronting the Deep State. The three assassination attempts against him have only strengthened his resolve. But the similarities with De Gaulle and Gaullism end there. Trump is a baroque businessman who loves peace and trade and defends the interests of the United States. He wants to put an end to the pauperization of the American middle classes that have suffered under the management of the pseudo-elites of the Democratic Party and the neoconservatives. De Gaulle was also a national-populist leader, but he was a classic politician, a military man, a sovereignist and respectful of the identity of the people, who defended the interests of France and the French.
Trump’s main concern is the decline of the United States and the rise to power of his country’s main adversary, China (and not Russia). And he is not wrong. So far, he has been the only US president not to have started a war during his term of office. And if a peace, hopefully a lasting one, is ever achieved between Ukraine and Russia, it will be mainly thanks to him, and secondly with Putin’s help. European leaders, because of their warmongering and extremism, count for nothing in this peace process. One fact reveals the mediocrity and blindness of these self-proclaimed European pseudo-elites. For the first time in history, since the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), a geopolitical problem that concerns them directly is being negotiated and resolved without them, only between the United States and Russia, and in a country of the Deep South, Saudi Arabia. From now on, the United States is the big winner (it has made tens of billions selling its arms and gas to Europe) and the Europeans are the cuckolds of history.
That said, although De Gaulle was a sincere—not servile—friend of the United States [and not an Americanophobe, as he demonstrated during the Berlin (1961) and Cuban missile crises (1962) by resolutely siding with the United States, nor a Europhobe, as those who confuse the EU with Europe would have us believe], he was not, however, a defender of the American way of life. He was a sovereignist, attached to French identity and an apostle of the Third Way. At the heart of Gaullist thinking was the desire to reconcile the national idea with social justice. This is what earned him the hatred of both “Americanophiles” and communists and other fellow travelers who were Sovietophiles. De Gaulle always resisted domination by the United States and the USSR. In fact, as early as 1966 he decided to withdraw from NATO. Leader of the non-aligned countries, called a dictator by his adversaries, history has since shown that he was much more democratic than any of his successors at the head of the French state.
H: Do you think that Vance’s speech is so important?
AI: James David Vance’s historic speech in Munich on February 14th was undoubtedly of the utmost importance. It heralded a break with the past, a real paradigm shift, if not a revolution. For me it was one of the most exciting moments of my life. Even more so when I saw that he had left the audience he was addressing speechless, stunned and transfixed. It was a pleasure to see the old politicians squirm and weather the storm when Vance concluded: “God bless you!
And what did he say? By the way, that Europeans should take responsibility for their own defense or at least “share the burden.” Let’s not forget that the United States defense budget is the highest in the world ($970 billion). Those of the countries of Europe and the rest of the world are infinitely inferior. By way of comparison, China and Russia have budgets of 250,000 and 130,000 million dollars respectively, not to mention the 90,000 million of Germany and the 60,000 million of France. The French army is non-existent, apart from a few nuclear missiles and submarines (290 nuclear warheads compared to 3,700 in the United States). It could only have 30,000 men at its disposal and would not be capable of maintaining more than 100 km of front line, with barely a week’s supply of ammunition, compared to a Russian army established on a 2,000 km long line. After so many years of political incompetence, it would take at least twenty years to develop a military force of a similar size. This demonstrates the “madness” of Macron’s warmongering rhetoric.
The United States maintains more than 800 military bases around the world (the Russians do not even have twenty). The Chinese, whose power is growing by leaps and bounds, intend to considerably increase the number of their military bases abroad. Between 2018 and 2020, the number of articles in Chinese scientific journals rose to around 400,000, far outstripping the United States, which produced just 200,000. Between 2014 and 2023, more than 38,000 GenAI innovations came from China, out of a total of 54,000. That is to say, six times more than the United States. Trump’s fear, much more far-sighted than that of our leaders, is that Russia will fall into China’s orbit. Europe and Ukraine (which has only been independent since 1991) are, therefore, secondary concerns for him. And this is nothing new. Back in 1984, when I was working as deputy chief of staff to the secretary general of the OECD, I could see that the main interest of US diplomats was no longer Europe, but the Pacific and Asia. Trump’s desire to restore his country’s economic and social power by drastically limiting the growth of the defense budget is understandable.
But the most important thing about Vance’s speech is undoubtedly his urgent call for respect for peoples and democracy, his denunciation of censorship and attacks on freedom of expression, his criticism of mass immigration (on which no voter on the continent has ever been consulted), his denunciation of the anti-democratic drift of the European elites; a master class, but evidently inaudible and scandalous for a political-economic-media caste bloated with pride, arrogance and pretentiousness.
H: In your book, and talking about De Gaulle, you recall that he already spoke of the end of Europe. Has Europe died politically?
AI: De Gaulle did not believe in a Europe of shopkeepers and technocrats. He believed that, if Westerners from the Old World remained subordinate to the New World, Europe would never be truly European. He believed that Europe should be the Europe of nations and of peoples and not an institution for technocrats or professionals, limited and without a future, which in the end would always benefit the Americans in order to impose their dominance. He said that Europe had to be “independent,” that the European world, however mediocre it might be, could not accept indefinitely the Soviet occupation for some and American hegemony for others. Twenty years after De Gaulle’s death, prestigious American political realists such as Kissinger, Mearsheimer, Kennan, Nitze, McNamara and many others warned of the dangerous consequences of NATO’s expansion (2000 km) to Russia’s borders… And we know what has happened since then.
H: Your book is a kind of anthology of resistance to the political myth. Don’t you think that there is almost a real distinction between people, greater than left and right: those who create political myths and those who have revealed or overcome them?
AI: Yes, of course, but here we are talking about myth in the sense of fantastic and deceptive narrative, of imaginary narrative, and not the “mobilizing” myth of Georges Sorel, which is based on the representation of a possible and victorious future from which present reality must be born. To this end, in this book I have deconstructed thirty-two politically correct myths and prejudices, half of which refer to France and Europe and the other half to Spain and the Hispanic world. I believe that unmasking the myth-makers and ideologues who propagate historical falsehoods, whether they be left-wing or right-wing, is the most important, respectable and exciting task of any serious political scientist or historian of ideas.
H: Who is worse off, France or Spain? What different and common ills do they present?
AI: As far as I know, the loss of a sense of transcendence, materialism, unbridled individualism, consumerism as a way of life, social fragmentation, the scourge of wokism, the deterioration of the health system, the degradation of national education, the avalanche/invasion of immigrants, the crisis of justice, the police and the army, the demographic collapse, the constant expansion of drug trafficking, terrorism, uncontrolled public debt and the ruin of the State are very serious problems that both nations share. However, there are perhaps two notable differences: one, which does not play in Spain’s favor, is the permanent exacerbation of centrifugal tensions due to separatist or independence forces, and the other, which plays to France’s detriment, is the unstoppable rise of Islamo-leftism.
H: How did you become fascinated by or take an interest in Spain? And above all, how is it possible that you still feel the same?
AI: Firstly, for family reasons, one of the two branches of my family was Basque and Basque-speaking and the other was from Béarn, but Basque by adoption after the end of the First World War. They lived on the banks of the Bidasoa river and they all loved Spain and the Spanish. Then, due to my reading and higher education at the University of Bordeaux where I defended theses on Vitoria and Suarez and then a doctoral thesis in political science on The Thought of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Since then, I have never lost my interest in the history of Spain and its political life. How was I able to maintain that interest? Well, exactly as I did with France. In other words, I am increasingly interested in history and less in the day-to-day politicking.
H: Has your understanding of Donoso and your José Antonio changed over time? Do they engage in dialogue with each other? Do they still live? Do they tell us things about the present?
AI: Donoso Cortés deals a mortal blow to the progressive philosophy of history. He had the intuition that the immaculate conception of man is the beginning of the road that leads to inhuman terror. I guess that the conviction of the militant or ideologue of belonging to the side of good and of building a better world based on a “new man” is always the bearer of the worst despotism. He understood that the material order is nothing without the moral order, that the order of preference should always be religion first, politics second and economics third. I explain that a society that loses its religion sooner or later loses its culture. Look at the current situation of the EU, which has refused to recognize the Christian roots of European and Western civilization.
As for the black and caricatural legend of José Antonio, it is very far from reality. José Antonio had a marked inclination for goodness, a goodness of heart as the master Azorín underlined in his time, a kindness which, together with a high conception of honor and social justice, a selfless love for his nation, unquestionable physical courage, the magnetism of a leader, a constant intellectual concern and a keen sense of humor, inevitably endear him to anyone who takes the trouble to read or study him. Furthermore, he has the immense merit of having denounced, more than 90 years ago, as Ortega y Gasset did before him, the two forms of moral hemiplegia: “Being a right-winger, like being a left-winger,” he said, “always means expelling from the soul half of what one has to feel. In some cases, it means expelling everything and replacing it with a caricature of the half.”
H: You talk about the realist school of international relations. Why does that point of view irritate the globalists so much?
AI: The realist political tradition is centuries old, going back to Thucydides, Xun Zi, and later to Saavedra Fajardo, Hobbes and Tocqueville, to name but a few authors. But the classical theory of international relations is much more recent. It emerged at the beginning of the 20th century as a reaction to the idealistic and utopian belief in the spontaneous and necessary harmony of interests between nation states. Realist authors criticize the exclusively moral approach to international politics that seeks to apply democratic principles to a world scene marked by anarchy and imperialist struggles. In their opinion, this moral approach paradoxically encourages the intensification of conflicts through a Manichean discourse: “we are the good guys and it is our duty to impose our concept of democracy on others”. This attitude is a prime example of the end-justifying-the-means heterotelism deplored by the Bible: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want.” This obviously greatly irritates the self-proclaimed pacifists, defenders of the Alliance of Civilizations, who are always paradoxically in favor of war to once and for all get rid of the “bad guy” who doesn’t think like them.
H: Don’t you think that around Ukraine and its war, points of view are forming in Europe that no longer have exactly to do with left and right?
AI: Yes, of course. Historically, right and left values are not immutable. The exchange of ideas is constant. There are no timeless definitions of right and left, a division that, by the way, is barely a century and a half old. Today the most important division is the one that pits the rooted peoples against the pseudo-elites who are vectors of uprooting; the one that pits the democrats who defend the sovereignty and identity of the peoples against the oligarchs who are supporters of global governance.
H: You are one of the few authors who admits a positive meaning of populism. Is our political culture essentially oligarchic? To what extent is there a liberal hatred of the people?
AI: Well, according to the official doxa, populism is nothing more than “vulgar demagoguery”, “a danger to democracy”, “a disguise of the extreme right or of fascism”. But in reality, the common denominator of all populism is the democratic and anti-oligarchic dimension. It is the cry of the excluded, of the humble disgusted by the corruption of their supposed elites. Populism proclaims the supremacy of the people, the inviolability of popular sovereignty. It accuses the establishment of defending representative democracy only for its own benefit and wants to re-found democracy with a dose of direct democracy (in particular with the referendum of popular initiative). It is not a question of completely eliminating the oligarchies, but of controlling and/or replacing them. As for the hatred of the people of the neoliberal (I do not say the liberal because there are several liberalisms), to get an idea it is enough to cite the example of the yellow vests, a popular, peaceful, which at the beginning was not left-wing but patriotic and interclassist, and which was the victim of terrible repression (with more than fifty people left permanently disabled, 24,000 injured, 3,100 criminal convictions and 400 prison sentences).
H: Doesn’t the fight against political correctness, ostracism, silencing end up affecting you personally? How come you’re doing so well?
AI: Goodness me! I don’t handle it that well. It’s not an easy or comfortable attitude, but I console myself by telling myself that getting up instead of lying down is a duty, a question of ethics and elegance. And in any case, the greatest comfort in life always comes from God, family and friends.
H: Jean-Marie Le Pen recently died. Did we in Spain understand his importance or did we never get past the demonized Le Pen?
AI: With all his excesses and defects, Jean-Marie Le Pen was an unparalleled denouncer of population replacement from 1972 onwards, like Enoch Powell in 1968 in England or the writer Jean Raspail in 1973, but the fate of the Cassandras is never a happy one. He was a fierce adversary of De Gaulle, not so much for having understood very early on that France no longer had the energy necessary for an imperial destiny, but for having knowingly fueled a misunderstanding about his willingness to keep Algeria. However, as early as 1959, the old General warned his ministers about the risks of integrating Muslims and the dangers of migratory submersion in such lucid and severe terms that today would lead to the criminal conviction of any citizen who dared to express themselves as he did. Therein also lies the ultimate reason for the lasting demonization of J.M. Le Pen.
H: Will France maintain that cultural vitality that still fascinates us, despite everything? Where does it come from? How does France nurture discussion, public conversation?
AI: You are much younger than I am and, if I am not mistaken, your years of education go back to the years 1990-2010, a time when France was still in good shape. So I can understand your residual enthusiasm and fascination for France. But since then, unfortunately, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. The cultural level has dropped considerably, not only in the political class, where it is now particularly mediocre, but also in all strata of society. The admirable reconstructions of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and the spire of the Saint Denis Basilica, or the successes of the luxury goods and tourism industries are, unfortunately, only the exception that proves the rule. Excellence is increasingly rare. It is significant that in debates or pseudo-debates the “entre-soi” (only for their own) always reigns. When these debates are more open, sensible and rational arguments quickly give way to invective and insults. In politics, it is said, despair is absolute folly, and we know that history is full of the unexpected, but the truth is that we would need miracles to get out of this situation and I don’t think that, for the moment, either the French or the Spanish really want them. At this stage of decomposition and incomprehension, I confess that what most obsesses and worries me is the double lesson of the Franco-American René Girard, notably commented on by his Spanish disciple Domingo González: Firstly, the politics of “fear of war” is extremely dangerous and voluntary servitude only lasts a short time. Secondly, any overly divided society always tries to re-establish its unity through violence, designating a scapegoat, an enemy, even if that enemy is not guilty. The only thing that remains then is hope, a theological virtue, “a heroic virtue” as Bernanos said.
