France's 'Great Replacement' - in  numbers
France's 'Great Replacement' - in numbers

In France, questioning peacefully about the effects of immigration remains a dangerous undertaking. Between our colonial past, the traumas of the Second World War, the fear of playing the extreme right, everything is combined to make it a taboo. In demographic terms, however, the truth is simple to say that: immigration plays an important role”. Thus went the inquiry of the French weekly L'Express. The writer Renaud Camus called it the “Great Replacement”. His fears, too often dismissed as paranoia, are well based on numbers. 

Why France? For two reasons, essentially. It is the country with the oldest, most important and stratified immigration experience. And because it is the country that grows most demographically in Europe, together with the United Kingdom. “All indicators converge” says L'Express. “From 1960 to 2011, immigration increased the population residing in metropolitan France by about 9.7 million people (15.4 percent of the total). The number of births increased by 27 percent. And without it, the total fertility rate would not have been two children per woman, but 1.86”.

The figures were calculated by Michèle Tribalat, an apolitical demographer whose serious work has never been challenged. “According to my calculations, half of our population growth for fifty years is due to the decline in mortality, but the other half, in fact, is represented by immigration”, confirms Hervé Le Bras, one of the colleagues with whom Tribalat often fights on the French intellectual and cultural scene.

And to highlight the dramatic increase in the birth of children with at least one foreign parent comes a number on the contribution of immigration on the total number of births: “From 15 percent of the total (in 2000) to 24 percent (in 2016). In 2014, 40 percent of newborns had at least one immigrant grandfather”.

L'Express explains that “some relativize, recalling that France is traditionally a country of immigration. They are right and wrong. The reason is that our country has welcomed foreigners significantly for about one hundred and fifty years. Wrong, because this movement has marked a great break with the fifteen centuries that preceded it. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the mid-nineteenth century, the base of the French population remained, in fact, surprisingly stable”.

In twenty years, the French Muslim population is supposed to have increased by 25 percent according to the lowest estimates, by 50 percent for the median estimates, by 100 percent if we compare the Insee figures and the government from 1997 to 2014, jumping from 3 to 6 million. 

The Insee publishes the civil status numbers for the names assigned to children born in France since 1900. In Seine-Saint-Denis, 42.9 percent are Muslim names, in Val-de-Marne 26.3, in the Rhone 23.5, in the Bouches-du-Rhône 20, in the Hérault 19 and in Paris 17.1 .

In Seine-Saint-Denis, with its 1.6 million inhabitants, according to a parliamentary report recently revealed by Figaro, between 8 and 20 percent of the inhabitants are illegal immigrants (they could be up to 400 thousand). France is imploding under this immigration frenzy. And its political and cultural élite seems to having accepted it as inevitable.