Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Did Brexit save Britain from France’s fate?

Riot police battle to restore order in Paris (Credit: Getty images)

Stéphane Rozès, the author of a book entitled ‘Chaos’, was on French radio this week receiving congratulations for being a visionary. The chaos which he described in his book, published last November, is now being played out in France, as hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Asked to explain its cause, Rozès explained that it has been building since 1992, the year France signed the Maastricht Treaty, the beginning of the European Union. 

Rozès is not alone in this view. One of France’s best known philosophers, the left-wing Michel Onfray, has been saying the same thing for years.

‘France died in 1992, the date of the Maastricht Treaty,’ he said in an interview in 2018. ‘We gave up our sovereignty for a liberal supranational managed by a very autocratic device that has the money, therefore the media, therefore the opinion: what I call the Maastricht State.’

Onfray was naturally delighted with Brexit. One week after the Leave vote, he was one of 20 French intellectuals who signed a declaration demanding France renegotiate its Treaty with the EU.  

Saluting the ‘courage’ of the British people in voting to leave the EU, the signatories called it ‘a slap in the face for the technocratic drift in which the current European Union has allowed itself to be trapped for at least three decades’. 

Insulting the proles is never a wise move for a French president

They urged the then president, the Socialist François Hollande, to draw the right lesson from the triumph of the Leave vote, namely that ‘citizens no longer accept being governed by unelected bodies, operating in total opacity’. Brexit should serve as the catalyst to reconstruct the European project, focusing on ‘three crucial issues whose neglect has led to the collapse of the current European construction’. These were democracy, prosperity and strategic independence. 

Hollande did not heed the warning; on the contrary, he doubled down on Europe, making no secret of his disapproval with Brexit.

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