Emmanuel Todd Prophesies the Defeat of the West

By

Michael Ledger-Lomas

French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.

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Review of La Défaite de l’Occident by Emmanuel Todd (Gallimard, 2023).

The Western admirers of Vladimir Putin’s Russia are a strangely assorted bunch, with each finding quite different things to like about it. Tucker Carlson raves about the living standards. He returned from a recent journey to Moscow enthusing over the spotless Metro system and the cheap supermarkets. The Putin-understanders of the German far right see in him a fellow champion of ethnonationalism. The French demographer, sociologist, and all-around provocateur Emmanuel Todd is cooler and higher minded in his praise: he is drawn to Putin’s mastery of geopolitics.

Todd’s latest book argues that Western powers are locked in a doomed effort to prop up Ukraine in its war with Russia. While it has sold well in France, it has also earned some scornful reviews. Le Monde dismissed him as a false prophet and a copyist of “the Kremlin’s propaganda.” La Défaite de L’Occident (The Defeat of the West) is undoubtedly soft on Putin. Yet it abounds in imaginative and occasionally shrewd explanations for the fears and jealousies which rack Western states. Its appearance is an opportunity to take the measure of a thinker at once systematic and mercurial, a cynic but also a moralist whose one consistent aversion is to self-satisfaction.

Family Fortunes

Todd’s dual identity as a demographer and firebrand is unusual. In a brilliant recent study, the historian Jacob Collins makes sense of it by placing him in what he calls an “anthropological turn” in French intellectual life, which began in the 1970s. The events of 1968 had shaken a narrow and repressive establishment but had not brought about a socialist nirvana. The Communist Party’s vote in national and presidential elections slumped and union membership tailed off. The oil shock of 1973 dampened economic growth and cast doubt on the Left’s assumption that the aim of politics was to share out an expanding affluence. These reverses encouraged some youngish intellectuals — who were not themselves anthropologists but read a lot of their work — to reground their understanding of politics and citizenship in the systematic study of human nature. Although Todd is the grandson of Paul Nizan, a celebrated Communist writer, and a youthful member of the French Communist Party, he soon shed a Marxist understanding of politics as the epiphenomena of class struggle and sought alternative models in the anthropological study of history. Perhaps it helped that he is also related to Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Todd ended up at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Peter Laslett supervised his doctoral study of peasant communities in preindustrial Europe. This was an important detour. Todd might seem in manner to be the model of a Left Bank intellectual who is viscerally opposed to “les Anglo-Saxons.” David Frum, the Bush staffer turned hack, once devoted a think tank blog post to sneering at Todd’s exquisite hair and reflexive skepticism about American power. Yet his thinking owed much more to Laslett’s wistful empiricism than to the antifoundational French Thought which once alarmed North American conservatives.

In his celebrated book, The World We Have Lost (1964), Laslett had argued that the key to past societies was less their economies than their distinctive family structures. Contrary to what Marxists claimed, it was not capitalism that had ripped apart the fabric of English life by subordinating it to market forces. In this telling, preindustrial England was already capitalist — what mattered was that its unit of production was the household of a nuclear family and its servants. Before the coming of factories, there were no faceless masses, few lonely people, and no social classes to speak of. Labor was intimate, rather than alienated, which did not make it any less exacting than modern work, merely different in kind. England’s patriarchal politics had followed its family structure: they reserved power to the tiny proportion of gentlemen whose horizons stretched beyond the villages in which they lived.

In Todd’s telling, preindustrial England was already capitalist — but its unit of production was the household of a nuclear family and its servants.

Laslett’s thesis reinforced Todd’s sympathy with the nineteenth-century French sociologists who had already found in the family a means of explaining the comparative political stability and economic vitality of European societies. In a series of voluminously documented books, Todd went on to chart elaborate homologies between political ideologies and family structures across not just Europe but the world. The republican triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity oscillated according to the relationships between fathers, sons, and siblings. Freedom flourished in societies such as England and the United States where most families were nuclear: children escaped from the authority of their parents and formed households of their own. Germany or Japan, where children had lived under the thumb of their parents in “stem families,” tended towards authoritarianism. The French Revolution had drawn its egalitarian inspiration from the Paris region, where families had divided up inheritances between siblings. Communitarian ideologies did best in societies such as Russia, where families had lived in large agricultural communes.

The Discrete Charms of Demography

France’s national institute for demographic study, which soon hired Todd to undertake such work, was a globally minded but thoroughly centrist body. When its founder Alfred Sauvy coined the term “the Third World,” he evoked the insurgent “Third Estate” whose demands had triggered the French Revolution. Yet the point of studying developing countries was to identify structures which could assist their integration into the global market. The institute also sought to benefit the domestic economy by determining the rate at which economic migrants should be admitted to France.

Todd recognized that his charts and maps could become a platform for prophetic interventions in public life. He made his name even before his arrival at the institute with his 1976 book, La Chute Finale (The Final Fall). This work marshaled stray but alarming indications of the Soviet world’s demographic problems — such as rising infant mortality and falling fertility, despite an absence of economic growth — to predict its collapse. Profile writers to this day mention it as an example of his prescience, even though the trends he identified no longer seem grave or permanent enough to explain the meltdown of the Eastern bloc.

After his lucky essay in Sovietology, Todd became better known as an analyst of France, who celebrated what he saw as the Hexagon’s uniquely complex weave of family systems and thus of ideologies. He regarded such diversity as positive, not least because it would militate against a nativist rejection of the North African economic migrants whose presence in France became a much-discussed phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s. Yet by the time he published Après la Démocratie (After Democracy) in 2008, he was fretting about social divides which threatened the coherence of the republic and the viability of its democracy. One of these was education. Todd had always regarded the spread of universal literacy as an engine of democratization and a potent solvent of prejudices and inequalities, especially between the sexes. But he came to lament the later twentieth-century expansion of higher education, which in France and other Western countries was introducing a rift between the 40 percent or so of citizens who had benefited from it and all the rest. Globalization exacerbated this divide, because people with higher education sided with the wealthy elite in the misguided hope of sharing in its gains.

Religion, however, was the prime agent of division. In 2015, Todd’s interest in it generated his most incendiary intervention in debates about France’s democracy. After terrorists in Paris killed the staff of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine and four Jewish shoppers and staff in the Hyper Cacher supermarket, mass marches took place throughout France. These proclaimed the unity and secularity of the republic and the right to freedom of speech — up to and including the blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad published by Charlie Hebdo. Several months later, Todd caused great offense by publishing Qui est Charlie? (Who is Charlie?), which interpreted the marches as the symptom of a “religious crisis.” He argued that they were dominated by the professional classes, by regions peripheral to the egalitarian core of France where more authoritarian family structures lingered, and — crucially — by former Catholics.

“Zombie Catholics”

Todd’s earlier work had always stressed the importance of religious divisions but put them second to his cartographies of the family. He viewed family structures as foundational to all ideologies, including religion. He noted that regions with authoritarian and inegalitarian family structures were under the sway of the Virgin Mary, whereas the Parisian region had long ago cast off the Church in favor of Marianne, the incarnation of republican liberty and reason. However, religious practice had collapsed since the 1960s, even in traditionally faithful regions. How then could Catholicism be a factor in the Charlie marches?

Todd’s earlier work had always stressed the importance of religious divisions but put them second to his cartographies of the family.

Todd’s answer was that even people who had abandoned their faith might still perpetuate its reactionary attitudes. Arguing that a religion can shape minds in its absence may seem a bit of a stretch, but the Charlie marchers skewed old and had been thoroughly socialized in the faith they abandoned. Todd called them “zombie Catholics.” His weakness for a zinging phrase makes them sound ghastlier than he perhaps intended, because he actually regarded the residual commitment of Catholic regions to social solidarity as an advantage in the age of neoliberal competition. The overrepresentation of the zombies in the Charlie marches exposed their hollowness: they were more concerned with maintaining France’s distribution of social power than with defending universal rights and freedoms.

If Catholicism’s implosion left the “zombies” relatively unscathed, French secularists did not fare anywhere near as well. Todd — an atheist himself — once believed that the French had coped with the death of God rather well. Life no longer had any meaning, but it carried on decently and comfortably enough. Yet it had now become clear to him that the “flying buttresses” of the Catholic Church had propped up atheism all along by giving it something to oppose.

Secularization bereaved well-educated and well-off secularists. Missing the thrill of metaphysical combat, they cast around for a new enemy to unite them. They found it in Islam — the religion of a marginalized minority in France, but one they now professed to see as a threat to Western civilization. Although the French critics of Charlie were right to allege that many of the correlations it drew between the marches and the past geography of religious allegiance and family structure were sloppy and lacking in causal power, its warnings about the rise and social anchorage of “Islamophobia” stand vindicated today — and not merely for France. In countries such as Britain, the conviction that Islam and Muslims pose a threat to Western societies differs from crasser forms of xenophobia in being a pathology of anxious elites, one spouted by newspaper columnists as often as it shouted by street brawlers.

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Emmanuel Todd Prophesies the Defeat of the West