Reviewed by Godefroy Desjonquères.

Reading Chantal Delsol’s Prosperity and Torment in France as a French person is a discomforting experience. As Delsol rightly points out, the French people are haunted by the memory of their former grandeur, and having their biggest flaws so bluntly exposed to their powerful ally cannot but trigger a sense of patriotic irritation. Of course, it is all the stronger given that Delsol’s assessment is, as often, very much on point. Her book provides Americans with an excellent entryway into the peculiarities of the French mindset and the causes of their political troubles.

Delsol takes as her starting point the contradiction—which in France has inspired numerous essays in recent years—between the nation’s objective prosperity and the pervasive sense of dissatisfaction among its people. Of course, France is not as prosperous as it once was, and the present political situation, which has crystallized over the past few months around the increasingly problematic issue of our spiraling debt, provides objective grounds for concern about the country’s situation. Yet this does not alter the heart of the matter: the French did not wait for the crisis to start complaining, and, as Delsol shows, the malaise runs deeper.

The strength of her analysis lies in her ability to highlight the great diversity of causes behind this malaise, while simultaneously demonstrating their underlying coherence. France’s shortcomings—statism, individualism, corporatism, egalitarianism, etc.—feed into and reinforce one another, even in their apparent contradictions. She paints France in the manner of an impressionist, layering broad strokes drawn as much from her vast erudition as well as her personal opinions and experience; and though some of these strokes, taken in isolation, are open to debate, the overall composition proves undeniably compelling. 

This global picture is shaped by a few central ideas, the most important of which runs as follows: French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, “a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.” But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy. How so?

Chantal Delsol traces this love of ideology to the tradition of centralization, which has been at the core of France’s political formation since long before the Revolution. When every aspect of daily life is governed by an omnipotent central power, all that is left to the elites are metaphysical quarrels and imaginary republics, which come to be confused with life itself. Solzhenitsyn showed in The Red Wheel that the French Revolution was “prepared, nurtured and inspired by intellectuals.” It is hardly surprising that these intellectuals, whose thought had seldom been tested against reality, remained blind to the concrete conditions in which their ideals might take flesh. The “republican universalism” to which the nation has laid claim since the Revolution is a striking case in point, one that Delsol analyzes with great subtlety. Fraternity, she shows, is the French Republic’s attempt to breathe life, in the age of individualism, into an ideal that is historically and philosophically holistic: the exaltation of a civic friendship with a tangible, almost corporeal dimension, meant to foster authentic communion between modern individuals. In the mind of these thinkers, such an ideal could only be universal in the proper sense of the word—a brotherhood not of the French people, but of all men. 

Such an ideal is obviously contradictory: “it crumbles by its very utopianism. Indeed, every friendship concerns specific circles: one cannot be a friend to all of humanity.” Yet that is exactly what revolutionary France claimed to be, and it is the ideal that continues to drive contemporary France. To this day, for many French intellectuals, being French is not a particularism, because it is first and foremost a question of values, and values are universal. We are but the vanguard of a universal brotherhood. As Delsol rightly points out, such a sentiment can only endure in the face of reality in the debased form of a tepid compassion, whose universality is possible precisely because it is utterly devoid of political substance. 

This naïve exaltation of unity, which goes hand in hand with a strong egalitarianism and a natural distrust of differences, is essential to Delsol’s explanation of what she sees as France’s democratic immaturity. Democracy rests on the possibility of distance and dissent, something with which France was never at ease. From Bonaparte to De Gaulle, we have a natural attraction towards providential figures that claim to embody the common good and national identity beyond partisan disputes. In Chantal Delsol’s view, attachment to unity turns against democracy when it reaches this intensity. At this point, one is reminded of Carl Schmitt’s analysis of political life: when the only party one claims is that of humanity itself, one’s opponents can never be political adversaries to contend with, but only ideological enemies to be destroyed. As Chantal Delsol shows, Emmanuel Macron embodies this French perversion of republicanism against democracy: because he claims to transcend the divide between left and right, the far right is the only enemy he acknowledges, an enemy that he routinely identifies with evil itself. His electoral results prove the effectiveness of the tactic.

Against this corrosive vision of politics, Delsol argues for the irreducible relevance of the political divide between right and left. She endorses David Goodhart’s opposition between the “anywhere” and the “somewhere” as its relevant contemporary expression, geographically and symbolically embodied, in France, in the opposition between Paris and the Provinces. Delsol has long been an advocate of rootedness and patriotism as conditions of possibility of democracy. In this regard, she belongs among the important conservative thinkers of contemporary France, such as Pierre Manent and Rémi Brague, whose works remind us that the universal can only exist and be embodied through the particular. 

She nevertheless sets herself apart by a distinctive insistence on federalism as an indispensable condition for genuine rootedness and a properly functioning democracy. As Daniel Mahoney rightfully points out in his introduction to the book, she is a truly original and unclassifiable thinker in the French intellectual landscape. Prosperity and Torment offers an interesting defense of this federalist position by showing how these two flaws—the naïve universalism and the refusal to engage in democratic confrontation—are linked to the complete absence, in the French political tradition, of any authentic sense of subsidiarity. 

This might be one of the starkest differences between France and the United States, the latter’s political tradition being rooted, as Tocqueville saw two centuries ago, in the importance of its intermediate bodies. On the contrary, France was built on the relentless effort to diminish the importance of these bodies, an effort initially undertaken by the Capetian kings and brought to its peak by the French Revolution, which went so far as to make it illegal to “instill in citizens any intermediary interest, to separate them from public affairs through a spirit of corporatism” (loi Le Chapelier, 1791). This radical position fosters individualism and, in turn, a loss of the sense of personal responsibility. Contemporary France is plagued, Delsol argues, by the refusal to hold citizens responsible for their own well-being, the State being blamed—and willingly blaming itself—for every negative aspect of their daily life. Hence the complete inability to control public spending: our current financial situation is but a consequence and a symptom of our deeper political issues.

As I suggested earlier, Delsol’s analysis stands out for the breadth of its perspective. Her essay covers topics as varied as corporatism, the French love for status and strikes, immigration, religion and secularism, populism and the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, and the EU. Her point of view, while always informed, is presented in a very personal manner and suggests an informal discussion one might have with an American friend or colleague. This makes for an engaging and pleasant read, and certainly a thought-provoking one. If that friend or colleague holds France’s interests at heart, he might very well be alarmed by the harshness of her diagnosis. 

In The End of Christendom, Delsol’s civilizational pessimism was balanced by her religious hope. Prosperity and Torment in France, which focuses primarily on politics, offers no such consolation. Its conclusion is all the darker because, if one follows Delsol’s demonstration, any solution can only be implemented in opposition to our deepest and most longstanding historical and political instincts. Delsol’s work opens with a quotation from Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution, which provides a lucid description of the French people, “more capable of genius than of common sense.” This is both cruel and flattering—the pride of the French extends even to their most harmful traits. Earlier in the same passage, Tocqueville had described another of these French traits, one which might help spare us from despair: “naturally fond of home and routine, yet, once driven forth and forced to adopt new customs, ready to carry principles to any lengths and to dare any thing.” Impossible n’est pas français…

Godefroy Desjonquères is a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His dissertation focuses on the political philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. He recently translated MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity into French (Presses Universitaires de France, January 2026).

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This essay is part of a symposium on the thought of French political thinker Chantal Delsol in light of her latest book, La fin de la Chrétienté or The End of the Christian World.

Chantal Delsol’s essay offers a sharp and convincing description of the state of Christianity in the twenty-first century. She also proposes an eloquent but controversial account of the subsequent role Christians ought to be playing in the upcoming era, as followers of a religion made politically powerless by its cultural marginalization. Drawing on a comparison between the two major “normative inversions” of our history, namely the rapid Christianization of the West in the fourth century and its even faster unraveling since the second half of the twentieth century, she outlines a possible ethos for contemporary Christians, revolving around the recognition and acceptance of the end of Christendom. Believers are invited to become “secret agents of God,” patient witnesses of Christ in a world gone back to paganism. Political action is to be replaced by testimony, evangelization, and patient equanimity. In other words, the “culture war” is lost, and believers ought to be reaching hearts and souls rather than seeking votes and political influence. 

By reaffirming the distinction between Christendom and Christianity, Chantal Delsol implicitly brings attention to the proximity the latter bears with modern liberalism, in that it affirms the separation, within each individual, between the citizen and the believer.^[1] It is thanks to this distinction that her political pessimism (she openly writes as a Catholic, with the diminishing societal stance it entails) can coexist with spiritual hope (as is demonstrated by her vibrant reference to the contemporary importance of monasteries). And it is because of this distinction, she seems to assert, that Catholicism can survive its own cultural and political annihilation, if it is able to redefine its ethos accordingly.

Chantal Delsol thus raises a decisive question: is spiritual engagement compatible with political retreat? By giving some elements of comparison between her analysis and Louis Dumont’s anthropological approach of the same matter, I want to suggest that, while her demonstration is extremely convincing on a religious level, it underestimates some of the political conditions that make her own stance viable. 

From Saint Paul to Diognetus: The Outline of the Christian Ethos

In his Essays on Individualism, Dumont draws on the distinction between holism and individualism to try to shed light on the anthropological nature of Christianity and its role in the birth of modern ideology. Christianity, he asserts, is founded upon a hierarchical distinction between the spiritual and the temporal. On the spiritual plan, all temporal distinctions are reduced to insignificance by the individual relationship between God and the soul. As Paul writes, in a famous passage of his letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Therefore, at its fundamental level, Christianity asserts a radically individualistic and universalist doctrine. Inside this level,^[2] however, on the temporal plane, those very distinctions are recognized as fully legitimate: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” In Dumont’s analysis, Caesar’s dominium is made legitimate by Christianity because of its utter insignificance in the only dimension that Christianity concerns itself with: the spiritual. From which comes Dumont’s anthropological definition of Christianity: “the emancipation of the individual by a personal transcendence, and the union of individuals-out-of-the-world in a community who walks upon the earth, but whose heart belongs in heaven.”

The concept of the “individual-out-of-the-world” (i.e., the individual whose defining values are related to a higher plane than the temporal) allows Dumont to define the ethos of primitive Christians. And this ethos resonates remarkably with the one outlined in Delsol’s essay: a calm recognition of a certain latitude in temporal affairs, including those that contradict the evangelical message. It is to this ethos that Chantal Delsol seems to be referring. One of her avowed models is the one defended in the Epistle to Diognetus, an anonymous work of apologetic written under Roman pagan rule, in the second century:

[Christians] display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. 

It is in this sense, I think, rather than in a strictly anthropological one, that Delsol’s diagnostic of a Western return to paganism is to be understood: from a Christian point of view, ethics is to be defined once again from the hierarchy (in Dumont’s sense) between Jerusalem and Babylon. “Once again”: because as Dumont saw, it was the Christianization of the West, culminating in medieval Christendom, that made this ethos irrelevant. 

The Temporal Transformation of Catholicism

As Antiquity progressed into the Middle Ages, the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual progressively lost its political relevance. Earthly affairs became more and more inspired by the spiritual (the abolition of slavery, equality between man and woman, religious “enchantment” of daily life, etc.); in return, Christianity (and, at its center, the Church) gained more and more temporal power. Thus, Christendom was born out of the very phenomenon that would see it disappear, after one thousand years of relative stability. The history of modernity is the history of the transformation of the individual-out-of-the-world into an individual-in-the-world, one who demands that the values formerly limited to the spiritual plane be applied on the temporal one. The Christianization of the West and its secularization are two sides of the same coin, i.e. the progressive blurring of the separation between the temporal and the spiritual.

This movement transformed Catholicism from an individualistic, Stoic-like religion, living in the world from outside it, to what Delsol calls a “holistic religion”, one actively defending an organic and hierarchical organization of the mundane, in the name of Christian principles. It is this transformation, she demonstrates, that made Catholicism an anti-modern force until the second half of the twentieth century. And it is this transformation that Christians should now renounce. The end of Christendom, in other words, should mean the return of the “Diognetian ethos.” It is interesting, in this regard, that Delsol should identify the legalization of abortion as the ending point of Christendom; and that, as an example of the Christian ethos she calls for, she evokes the renouncement to anti-abortion political engagement. It is indeed the very example chosen by the apologist in his epistle:

They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. 

Abortion and infanticide, condemned by Christianity, were accepted and practiced under Roman law. But political engagement in this matter does not enter the author’s reasoning as a Christian apologist. The fight against abortion is a spiritual one, not a political one: it works through prayer and individual conversions, not through law-making and collective ethical schemes. 

Spiritual Engagement and Political Renouncement 

Delsol’s historical and ethical demonstrations thus appear in their coherence. Christendom was not the original paradigm of Christianity but its historical deviation. Modern liberalism, in this regard, is to be regarded as an opportunity to come back to the original paradigm, one of strict separation between the temporal and the spiritual.

But the comparison with Dumont’s own analysis raises a serious question about the viability of the individual-out-of-the-world ethos. For the Christian, the submission to earthly powers is made acceptable by their relative inferiority towards spiritual powers. For the modern liberal citizen, it is quite the opposite: the submission to spiritual powers is acceptable only insofar as it is subordinate to a submission to the temporal order. In this regard, Chantal Delsol writes very convincingly to her coreligionists, but it does not seem to be her goal to address citizens of liberal countries. The problem is that the majority of today’s Western Christians fit both descriptions. How, then, is a Christian citizen supposed to act qua citizen in a post-Christian era? 

On a practical level, the evangelical message is such that there is no fundamental incompatibility between one’s ordering it as hierarchically superior to his citizenship on the one hand, and their country’s demand that they recognize the preeminence of the civil order, on the other hand. Any contradictions between these two orders should be resolved by political docility (“If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also”) and the Stoic acceptation of the insurmountable distance between this world and the next. In extreme cases, it is to be assumed all the way to martyrdom, as was the case with early Christians, and still is in some parts of the world. But this is a Christian answer, which does not resolve the problem of political engagement in itself. 

Thus, Chantal Delsol’s essay compels us to reformulate a classic problem of contemporary Christianity, that of the practical organizations Christians should create or adopt to live their lives as Christians. Should they “run for the hills” (as is suggested, for example, by Rod Dreher) to create independent communities governed by Christian ethics? Or, answering their earthly vocations as witnesses of evangelical truth, should they fit in, insofar as it is compatible with their beliefs? 

What Catholicism recognizes, and what Thomas Aquinas teaches us, following Aristotle, is that there is no moral life possible outside the political community. It also teaches us that a political community that abandons all notions of the common good, as modern liberalism does, is no fertile ground for moral development. Although earthly affiliations are to become irrelevant in the Kingdom, where all are to be “one in Christ Jesus,” on earth they are a necessary condition to developing the moral virtues that enable one to live a sanctified life. If Catholics accept this premise, the question is not whether they should engage in political matters, but rather: where do they identify their communities? If they are to correspond to the political communities of modern liberalism (i.e., the nation-state), the political disengagement Chantal Delsol seems to defend would be incompatible with the development of moral life. Are they, then, to be defined “out-of-the-world,” in secession with the mundane, on the model of monasteries? It is not what Chantal Delsol seems to suggest, and neither does it seem compatible with what the Epistle to Diognetus defined as the Christians’ mission to be “the soul of this world”:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity.

This problem may constitute the main intellectual and political challenge for contemporary Catholicism. It is not in itself the subject of Chantal Delsol’s essay. But one of the great merits of her deep and engaging reflection is that it presents the issue with all its philosophical and spiritual depth by reminding Catholics that, whatever the answer, they ultimately and fundamentally remain strangers in this world.

Godefroy Desjonquères is a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His dissertation explores the political and moral implications of holism in social philosophy, drawing mainly on the works by Ludwig  Wittgenstein, G. E. M. Anscombe, and Alasdair MacIntyre. In parallel with his thesis, he is currently translating MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity into French.  

A version of this essay was originally presented at a conference on the themes of Chantal Delsol’s latest book hosted by the Abigail Adams Institute, First Things, and the Zephyr Institute.

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