To be French today is a little like being the Cheshire Cat: the smile remains, the cat is gone.
The line is Régis Debray's. Born in 1940, he rode with Che Guevara, did time in a Bolivian prison, advised Mitterrand, and founded "mediology." He does not mean that France is finished. He means that France — and the form of European civilization it stands for — has undergone a series of metamorphoses. Not a sudden death; a slow evaporation. The shape is still there; the contents are hollow.
In NLR 159 he has written a long memoir, simply titled Metamorphoses. A man who has crossed two centuries takes stock of all the changes he has witnessed. Nature has not changed (the daffodils, the butterflies, the carnations, the cherries are as they ever were), but "the way we live, react, feel and think has been entirely remade."
Debray does not lay these metamorphoses out as a flat list. If you look closely, a single thread strings them together: a civilization that organized itself around "the future" finds that the future has receded. What the receding tide leaves behind — an inflated present, hollowed-out signs, a death with nowhere to be put — is what Debray truly wants you to see.
His stance is condensed into six words: to explore, yes. To forget, no.
The Future Has Receded
The first thing to change is the sense of time.
Our verbs slipped from the future tense into the imperfect. We went from desiring to assessing.
Those words that begin with "pro" (progress, programme, project) have lost their luster; those that begin with "dis" are on the march (disenchantment, disengagement, disintegration). The planners are out of work; the restorers are on the rise. The age of tumult gives way to the age of maintenance.
Debray offers an exquisite self-diagnosis: the subversive is in fact an unacknowledged traditionalist. The guerrillas of Latin America borrowed the names of ancestors — Sandinistas, Tupamaros, Zapatistas. Men of fire need archives. Now that the past is receding, the future too has come apart. "When a nation no longer makes history, it compensates by producing historians."
This process has its institutional expressions. The Republic rested on two pillars — free, compulsory, secular education and universal conscription. "The lycée and the barracks." The driving forces of democracy are altogether different: "money and opinion. Profit and media." The shift is no revolution but an adjustment: Jules Ferry gives way to Michael Jordan, the schoolyard to marketing spiel, the postal letter to the phone in the pocket. What was once "one and indivisible" is now "a mosaic of minorities."
The collective superego, too, has dispersed. There once was "a certain idea of France." It has been replaced by "I, myself." Debray writes out a string of metamorphoses: nation becomes society; citizen becomes resident; the future becomes the news; the school becomes the day-care; fraternity becomes the registration form; the army becomes a NATO contingent.
One figure makes this evaporation tangible: the number of psychologists in France doubled in five years; the number of activists fell by four-fifths. There used to be programs; now there is the weather forecast. And wind turbines in the alfalfa fields.
The Hollow Sign: From the Franc to the Euro
The first hollow shell left behind by the receding future is the most tangible — money.
Debray performs a semiotic autopsy on the euro, with a coldness to rival a forensic report. What is on the euro notes? Windows, bridges, arches, aqueducts, viaducts — "obviously all allegories of the free circulation of goods" — but not a single human figure. No portrait, no motto, no date, no place.
The eurozone as no-man's-land. A nowhere as boring as the day of the European Parliament elections.
Compare the dollar: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton. The eagle's head (the executive), the shield (the legislative), the tail feathers (the judiciary); the olive branch and the arrows of war; the eye of providence atop a thirteen-tiered pyramid; Annuit coeptis — "Providence favors our undertaking." The dollar suits "a nation summoned by a sense of destiny." The euro resembles Monopoly money.
Our notes, signifiers without signifieds, mirror our churches without altar boys, our parties without militants, our armies standing idle.
There is a formal logic to this argument: the wider the scope, the shallower the substance. A symbolic system that tries to cover all of Europe cannot bear the concrete memory of any single nation. No political entity has ever been born of economic interest alone. Debray asks a cold question: is it really so hard — to depict the nation without falling into nationalism, to depict Europe without falling into Eurocentrism? The European Central Bank later "improved" the design: future euros will bear rivers and birds, perhaps also artists and scientists. Debray's verdict: the central bankers "took pains to design what any seven-year-old could have thought up — and at far greater expense."
The Triumph of the Visual Is Not the Triumph of Comprehensibility
The hollowing does not stop at money. There is the medium itself — Debray's home turf.
The proportion of readers has been cut in half in fifty years. About one French person in five still reads. Never have so many books been published in France, for so few readers. The shop windows are piled high; the bedside tables stand empty. The revolutionary genealogy of print is clear: "the Reformation, the Revolution and the Republic, those three daughters of the printing press, all had Gutenberg for a grandfather." Voltaire said it: what is truly terrifying are the portable pamphlets that sell for thirty sous. If the Gospel had cost twelve thousand sesterces, Christianity would never have taken root.
And then comes the core proposition of Debray's mediology — a single line that will leave you, ever after, a little more on guard against whatever appears on your screen:
Every photograph is a portrait of a person, never a portrait of humanity. The triumph of the visual is not the triumph of comprehensibility.
We Have Misplaced the Instructions for Death
The deepest hollow is about death.
We are perhaps the first civilization to have lost the user's manual for death.
In 1963 the Vatican lifted its ban on cremation, when fewer than 1 percent opted for it. Now it is nearly 50 percent. Of the 600,000 deaths in France each year, there are only 2,000 palliative-care beds. On August 24, 1914, the French army lost 15,000 men in a single day — forgotten.
The point is not about the demise of ritual but about the collapse of meaning. Death as an absolute endpoint is a recent discovery. When the promise of immortality disappeared, the foundation of meaning collapsed with it.
Human life has in effect been drastically shortened by the disappearance of eternity. Life expectancy has nearly tripled in two centuries, yet our existence has never seemed so brief.
Robespierre's "the French people recognize the deity and the immortality of the soul" — outmoded. Catholic clergy: 177,000 in 1950, fewer than 10,000 today. "In France, the homeland of revolution, hardly anyone believes any longer in a radiant future either."
Both transcendence narratives — the religious and the secular — have collapsed. Freud's "dark continent" has changed its longitude. It is no longer sex that conceals its secret — sex is everywhere. It is death that hides.
The twentieth century reconnected love and sex. The twenty-first will have to reconnect life and death.
The Eternal Weakness of the Strong
In the crevices between all these metamorphoses, Debray has also tucked a political observation about space. It forms a counterpoint to the "receding of time" above.
Europe: a peninsula of time; America: a continent of space.
We think ourselves unique. Perhaps we are merely behind — and then caught up. The cowboy became the astronaut. America exports language, hot dogs, movies, AI; Europe gratefully imports them. "Geography has killed fewer people than history."
Debray tells a personal story. When he was an adviser to Mitterrand, an American presidential delegation came to lunch at the Élysée, and he was asked to hide. From a window he watched the Secret Service take over the palace — "sturdy, relaxed young men" shouldering aside the "pot-bellied" French police. The ladder of power: when the French president visits his "Zulu counterpart," French security does the same to others.
This is the eternal weakness of the strong: too fat to fit through the tunnel.
The logic of asymmetric warfare: the North controls space and strikes where it likes; the South possesses only time. The Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis drove out the American soldiers. The thin outlive the fat.
Language Outlives Empire
All the metamorphoses point toward a question Debray refuses to say out loud: when the form of a civilization remains but its contents have evaporated, what is left?
His answer is not given head-on but in a single line at the end — like a sigh that turns into a declaration.
Latin outlived the Roman Empire. Greek outlived Athens. "When nations as memory finally perish, you can bet their obituaries will still be written in French."
This line is more stubborn than it looks. It says: some things outlast empire. Not power, not territory, not military force. But that way of perceiving and thinking that has congealed in the language — the preference for precision, the demand for clarity, the impatience with vanity. Beneath all the metamorphoses, one thread has not broken.
The smile remains. The question is: who is still smiling.