France: Banality, Unreality ... Upholstery?
Integration’ is the official line. But integration into what? The sorry spectacle of ‘successful’ integration—into a banalized, technized, upholstered way of life, carefully shielded from self-questioning—is that of we French ourselves. To talk of ‘integration’ in the name of some indefinable notion of France is merely to signal its lack...
This society faces a far harder test than any external threat: that of its own absence, its loss of reality...
- Jean Baudrillard, in an essay on car-burning immigrants, the absence of French society, and the welcome end of Western Civilization ( "The Pyres of Autumn, New Left Review, Jan-Feb 2006)