The Tower and the Sewer

When you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign.

Eudora Welty, “The Wide Net”

On an overcast morning in the late 1980s I visited the church across the way from my apartment in Paris. I was curious. The parish, St.-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, was then the headquarters of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a schismatic opponent of the Vatican II reforms who had just been excommunicated by Pope John Paul II. Conservative Catholics from all over the city squeezed into the church on Sundays to hear Gregorian chants and the Tridentine Mass recited in Latin—a beautiful, forbidden experience.

After the service a fair number of congregants gathered in the church’s small courtyard to chat and leaf though some of the right-wing books and newspapers that had been laid out on folding tables. When I hovered over one of them, a young man behind it mentioned a shop where I could find more in the same vein. He tore off a scrap of paper and wrote down an address, telling me that the bookstore had no sign—there had been arson attempts at earlier locations—and that I should just knock on the door.

I went, I knocked, I was given the once over, then admitted. After passing through a thick crimson drape I discovered a jumble of overstuffed bookcases lining the walls of a good-size room. Despite appearances there turned out to be order in the disorder: the collection had been laid out chronologically according to the French right’s conflicting historical obsessions.

The first bookcase was devoted to the neopaganism of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right), which since the 1960s has been inspired by the writer and editor Alain de Benoist; his On Being a Pagan (1981) is considered one of its foundational texts. This group is in a sense the most radical, if minuscule, force on the European right because it places Eden so far back in time that it blames the advent of Christianity two millennia ago for Europe’s relentless decline. The next bookcase, though, contained histories extolling Christianity’s victory over paganism and pining for the simple harmony of the monastic Middle Ages. Next to those I found lush volumes celebrating the unmonastic grandeur of the Catholic House of Bourbon. A few bookcases were then given over to the catastrophe of the Revolution, with hagiographies of the counter revolutionary uprisings of the Chouans and the Vendeans.

Farther down the aisle were strongly anti-German books focused on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. After those, predictably, was a large collection of anti-Dreyfusard works, all supposedly proving that even if Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t a German agent, then at least his supporters were. Yet in the bookcase next to it I found philo-Germanic biographies of Nazi generals like Erwin Rommel and of the heroic Vichy collaborators.

Angry books on French Algeria then followed, including memoirs by officers in the Organisation Armée Secrète who resisted the French withdrawal from its colony and in retribution tried to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle in 1962. The last bookcase