The French are good at maths

A current poll shows that 61 per cent of the French believe that the Great Replacement Theory is valid.

The essence of the Theory is that the combined effect of Muslim immigration and Muslim women’s higher birth rates will gradually turn France into a Muslim republic or, more likely, caliphate.

This news brought back the memory of the torture to which I was subjected at school. The torture wasn’t physical but mental. Its principal instrument was the mathematical problem of a swimming pool with two pipes.

Water flowed in through one pipe and out through the other. Since the pipes had different flow rates, the swimming pool would eventually either overflow or empty out, can’t remember which or how fast. I do remember the sheer torment of trying to figure out the answer when all I wanted was to peek under the girls’ skirts or play football.

It’s good to see that almost two-thirds of the French are considerably smarter than I was then and, if I’m being totally honest, still am to this day, at least when it comes to solving little puzzles like that.

Actually the word ‘believe’ is a misnomer when applied to the Theory or to anything else that can be proved or disproved by empirical evidence or mathematical calculation. ‘Accept’ is more appropriate: if demographic factors vindicate the Theory, it’s a matter of fact, not faith.

It’s a different matter, of course, whether people wish to accept facts that make them uncomfortable. Some do, some don’t, but apparently the French fall into the first category.

Calling them racists, xenophobes or Islamophobes (see photo above) is good knock-about fun, and it’s joyously had by all who cherish their pet biases and dismiss any contradicting data. Yet even a man of my modest mathematical attainment would suggest that the issue should be impervious to any ideology, right, left or centre.

All one has to do is compare the birth rates (assisted by immigration) of the Muslim population of France to those of the indigenous French population (compromised by emigration). If the former is greater than the latter, the replacement in question has to happen sooner or later.

The wider the gap, the sooner it’ll happen – and here I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those selfless and persevering teachers who chose not to give up on me all those decades ago. It’s thanks to them that I eventually secured a (barely) passing grade and acquired the ability to look at measurable facts dispassionately.

Now, the Muslim population of France is variously estimated at between six and ten per cent of the total. The French think tank, L’institut des libertés, calculates that the average white French woman produces 1.4 children. Since the birth rate of the total population is 1.9 per woman, Muslim women must be bearing somewhere between three and four children on average.

Some demographers don’t buy those figures. According to them, Muslim women resident in France have birth rates close to those of their white neighbours. Yet even those deniers admit begrudgingly that, close as those figures may be, they are still higher – though not by as much as L’institut des libertés claims.

Bringing to bear on this problem my memory of that swimming pool with two pipes, I’d suggest that asserters and deniers differ only in establishing the exact year of the French Muslims achieving an overall majority.

L’institut des libertés calculates that France will have a Muslim majority by 2057. Frankly, I don’t know what year emerges out of the deniers’ calculations. But respect for the memory of those teachers driven to distraction by my absence of interest in their discipline makes me reject the possibility that the Great Replacement won’t happen at all.

If the current trend continues, it’s not if but when, I’m afraid. And so are almost two-thirds of the French who hate to see their lovely country going to les chiens.

Their fears are stoked by Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, one of whom may well challenge Manny Macron in the presidential run-off next year. Adding fuel to the fire is the novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose best-selling dystopic fantasy Submission paints a harrowing picture of a Muslim France.

If the problem is as real as it seems to be, then the only question that remains is what can be done about it. And here I’d like to quote a great bon mot by Jean-Claude Juncker, to whom I was so beastly when he still headed the European Commission.

“We all know what to do,” said Jean-Claude. “We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” Hence the answer to the practical question posed above is a resounding nothing. Rien, in French.