Dominique Venner, The Shock of History: Religion, Memory, Identity, Arktos Media, 2015, 160 pp., $21.00.
On May 21, 2013, a Frenchman virtually unknown outside of Europe suddenly burst into the consciousness of racially aware Americans. That day, Dominique Venner walked into the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and shot himself in the head. As he explained in his suicide note, he took his own life as an act of sovereignty–of control over his own destiny–and in protest against what his beloved France had become: a husk of a once-great nation, whose rulers submitted to American dominance, celebrated a decades-long invasion by unassimilable foreigners, and had legalized homosexual marriage.
Venner was a political activist and also a prominent historian. He was awarded the Broquette-Gonin Prize of the French Academy in 1981 for “philosophical, political, or literary achievement that inspires a love for the true, the good, and the beautiful.” Yet, until his death, none of his work had been translated into English. Thanks to the indispensible work of Arktos Media, this slim volume–composed for English-speakers–makes a few highlights of his thinking available to new audiences. ...
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