Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, by Christophe Guilluy (New Haven: Yale University Press; 184 pp., $25.00). The French dislike what they call “Anglo-American economics” even more than they dislike English and American cookery; also, more recently, progressive Anglo-American views regarding the supposed identicality between the sexes. Christophe Guilluy, a well-known geographer, author, and man of the left, argues that

it is plain to see that France has become an “American” society like all the rest, inegalitarian and multicultural.  In the space of a few decades, the implacable law of global markets has asserted its authority everywhere, replacing a society founded on egalitarian ideals by a polarized society seething with tensions of every sort beneath a placid surface.

Apparently, his new book was written, or at least translated, before the Gilets jaunes commenced their Saturday rampages two weeks after the celebration last November of the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the Great War.  Still, his description of France as a country wracked by social and political tensions is entirely accurate, and so is his condemnation of “Anglo-Saxon economics” insofar as he equates it with globalization.  Guilluy attributes these unhappy developments to the fact that a sizable portion of French society, though not itself belonging to the country’s dominant class, either benefits from globalization or is shielded from its unpleasant effects.  Among those effects, he says, are unprecedented economic insecurity, “metropolization,” the replacement of the native inhabitants of the wealthiest and most successful French cities by wealthy immigrants from Paris, and by the peripheralization of those in provincial cities bypassed and economically isolated by the global economic system: the complaint that lies at the heart of the Mouvement des gilets jaunes.  “Globalization,” Guilluy asserts, “has revived the citadels of medieval France.”  In America and the contemporary West today, the results include “the same spirit of populist revolt” as was manifested by the election of Donald Trump, by Brexit, by the rejection in 2005 of the European Union in those parts of France that voted no in the Referendum of 2005, and by the remarkable rise of the populist right in Sweden.  Hence Guilluy’s “twilight of the elites”:

The existing order will finally break down not as the result of some decisive event; it will break down as the result of a slow process of social and cultural disaffiliation on the part of the working class.  The political class in the broadest sense—not only politicians but cultural leaders, intellectuals, and journalists—now begins to dread the prospect of a modern slave rebellion.  For a new form of class conflict, which had long been assumed not to exist, is now plain for all to see.

Guilluy argues that in France the alliance between economic liberalism and cultural liberalism has destroyed the left itself as a resistant force against globalization by setting the economic and political agenda of the governing parties left and right, in this way threatening the formation of a one-party state.  “It was exactly this alliance, of individualism and the market, that opened the way to the present inegalitarian system.”  As a former candidate for the French presidency noted some years ago, “nothing [in Guilluy’s gloss] would remain of the traditional right or the left if the one abandoned the nation and the other abandoned society.”

This is indeed what was happening in the U.S. before Donald Trump’s appearance on the political stage, and is happening in Great Britain today as the Tories, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats combine to defy the Referendum of 2016 and repeal Brexit: the greatest constitutional crisis to face the U.K. in modern times, one easily comparable to what the United States faced in 1861.  Who can foresee the dimensions of the coming crisis in France?  Doubtless the results of the elections on May 23, so feared by Brussels, to determine the membership of the next European Parliament will offer a strong hint, if not something much more than that.

Symbol or Substance? A Dialogue on the Eucharist with C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham and J.R.R. Tolkien, by Peter Kreeft (San Francisco: Ignatius Press; 232 pp., $16.95).  Peter Kreeft enjoys imagining three-way conversations among famous people, as he notes in his Introduction.  In this instance he chose to focus on the Eucharist as a matter of dispute between the Christian churches, since “as a Roman Catholic the Eucharist is [for me] what it cannot be for a Protestant, viz., the source, summit, sum, and substance of my Christian life.”  His book is theologically erudite, convincingly imagined, and as a representation of human conversation entirely natural.  George Sayer, Lewis’s friend and the author of Jack (Kreeft thinks it the best biography of C.S. Lewis), feigned disbelief of Peter Kreeft’s claim that he never met Lewis: “Your Lewis in Between Heaven and Hell matches not only the way he wrote but the way he talked.”

Lewis, an atheist in his youth, was influenced in his conversion to Christianity by reading Chesterton and was baptized an Anglo-Catholic.  Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic.  And Billy Graham was a Southern Baptist evangelist.  The arguments Kreeft attributes to all parties range from the intellectually brilliant to the respectable, though I do not believe that the Rev. Graham—who once told Larry King that abortion is the taking of a human life, defended it in certain circumstances, then declared that “poverty in the world” is what troubles him the most—belongs in the company of genius.

How can the Eucharist be a Holy Symbol, as Kreeft’s Graham argues?  A symbol cannot be holy of itself—only a sign of Holiness.  Reading this, I recalled Flannery O’Connor’s famous remark to Mary McCarthy.  (“Well, if it’s a symbol, to Hell with it.”)  And thought also of Tolkien’s beautiful comment to his son in a letter, which reads almost as a canticle:

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that . . .