Choose your philosophers carefully (French Edition)

"Whatever became of France? Once the most beautiful, brilliant and civilised country on earth, it is now caught in a seemingly irreversible spiral of decline....
    "Older French generations are just beginning to realise how bewitched they were by the intellectual gurus who seized power in the chaotic aftermath of 1968.
    "Perhaps the cleverest, most cynical and most pernicious of these Pied Pipers was Michel Foucault. His books and lectures undermined the moral foundations of French history, society and intellectual life. Only now, decades after his death in 1984, is France gradually coming to terms with the fact that it allowed its collective mind to be befuddled by an evil genius ...
    "[Prize-winning French novelist] Ernaux’s works are saturated in the solipsism and nihilism of [this] nation in decline.
    "A subtler French writer than Ernaux, Michel Houellebecq, published a far more prophetic novel earlier this year. Anéantir ('Destroy') is set in 2027, as Macron leaves office. His vision of France is grim: stricken by poverty and unemployment, it is a rapidly ageing society. Hence his focus is on fatal illness. Unlike Ernaux, whose depiction of her mother’s dementia is shockingly cold-blooded, Houellebecq’s writing about the end of life is suffused with humanity.
    "Yet even Houellebecq sees no sunlit uplands for France. For him, as for most of his compatriots, Macron cannot come clean soon enough about the failures of leadership that have reduced France to such relentless economic, social, political and educational decline. The pessimism of the country’s greatest writer speaks volumes about a nation gripped by the politics of cultural despair.
    "Houellebecq’s last testament is his valedictory elegy for a France that has lost its raison d’être. Under Macron, the French have reversed Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum. Now it should read: 'I no longer think, therefore I no longer am'.”

~ Daniel Johnson, from his post 'How France became trapped in a spiral of chaos and decline' [links added]