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1/ Ten years ago today, Dominique Venner, a French right-wing scholar, former soldier in French Algeria, and former political prisoner, went into the Cathedral of Notre Dame, walked up to the high altar, pulled out an automatic pistol, and calmly shot himself in the head.

2/ The gesture, intentionally echoed the suicide of the great Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, whom Venner greatly admired, who committed ritual suicide at the Japanese Military academy after failing to convince the officers to return to the Samurai tradition.

3/ The nominal spur for Venner's action was the passage of a gay marriage law in France, but Venner's discontents went much further, pointing to the growing Islamization of France, and the collapse of the French family, and the general loss of civilizational confidence.

4/ Venner's overall political stance is impossible to quickly summarize. He once participated in a Raid of the offices of the French Communist Party in protest of the Soviet's brutal crackdown on the Hungarian Revolution.

5/ Venner would subsequently take part in an attempt to Overthrow De Gaulle for Abandoning the French cause in Algeria, and be jailed for 18 months.

6/ In the late 1960s Venner abandoned political action in favor of full-time scholarship where he wrote voluminously about everything from the French Resistance o the American Civil War.

7/ At this time Venner would found two periodicals: Enquête Sur L'histoire and La Nouvelle Revue D'histoire that would have an enormous influence on the emerging French New Right.

8/ His book on the Red Army would win a prestigious prize from the Académie Française, indicating the respect he was accorded as a scholar, despite being outside of France's political mainstream. However, Venner's work is little-known and rarely translated into English.

8/ His only work translated into English is The Shock of History: Religion, Memory, Identity, a series of Interviews that Venner granted shortly before his death which show the seriousness and depth with which Venner examined the West's moral, spiritual and physical decline.

9/ The book has an introduction but the renowned American paleoconservative scholar Paul Gottfried, who read and appreciated many of Venner's works in the original French.

https://www.amazon.com/Shock-History-Religion-Memory-Identity/dp/1910524441

10/ Not all of Venner's political enthusiasms were well directed and even those that were do not necessarily translate into an Anglophone context. Nor can his suicide be approved from a Christian viewpoint, even as a dramatic political gesture.

11/ Yet Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's right-wing National Rally party praised Venner and remarked on Venner's suicide as an "Eminently political act" that aimed to "Wake up the People of France."

12/ Despite his flaws, Venner was an important intellectual figure who addressed the crisis of the West many years before it was fashionable to do so.

For those interested in such issues, he is well worth reading.