"Imagine what a Huguenot state could have achieved."
The cultures of Scandinavia and the Netherlands were in large part defined by Protestant values; likewise, the cultures of Spain, Italy and Portugal were profoundly shaped by Catholicism. If the former nations had remained Catholic, or the latter group had become Protestant, their cultures would now be very different from what they are.
I've always thought that France is the great exception here, since the dominant determinant in its modern history was secularisation at an unusually early stage; even before the Revolution, a wary scepticism was a longstanding feature of much of its intellectual culture. I think if France had accepted the Reformation, it would be less different from what it is today than almost any other country.
Still, a French Huguenot colony would have been something else, since religion would have been a core part of its identity in a fashion oddly alien to "the eldest daughter of the Church".
The other interesting case is the German-speaking countries, confessionally mixed, but with normative Protestant values culturally dominant. This is even somewhat the case in overwhelmingly Catholic Austria.
Well Bessent, his treasury secretary, is a former partner at Soros Fund Management.
But if you really want to go into conspiracy land note that Bessent’s mother was a McLeod while Trump’s mother was a MacLeod. Basically it’s a Hebridean conspiracy…😉
And Trump surely has some Dutch ancestry too and indeed a Dutch phenotype: tall, blue eyes, blond hair (once upon a time); comes from New Amsterdam; likes doing deals; speaks bluntly - even his name is Dutch, shared with their famous Admiral Tromp!
Nice to see the LBK article here, lol. Crazy story. Herxheim is like a European version of the Aztec human sacrifices. There's a weird impulse among scholars to explain Herxheim as some kind of elaborate "reburial ritual" or whatever when it was pretty obviously a cannibalism buffet IMHO. Or at least I think that's the parsimonious explanation.
"What was it about 1914-45 that made you think humans tend to live in peace with each other?"
I looked into this a bit and apparently there was a desire among academics in the postwar era to prove that the preceding several decades were anomalous. People just didn't want to (understandably IMHO) accept that what had happened in the World Wars was pretty ordinary, just with better technology. (Read up on the 30 Years' War and then imagine what it would have been like with poison gas, machine guns, aerial bombardment, and rail cars.)
I don't know if it sounds like too much of a conspiracy theory, but it seems to me that an unspoken priority of American foreign policy since the 1990s has been to stop Russia coming in from the cold. There are only four possible superpowers in the world: the United States, China, India (but not yet), and a Europe in which Germany and Russia are allies. Preventing the emergence of the latter was, surely, one way of prolonging the unipolar moment.
Almost right from the start, the Russians were treated as vanquished enemies rather than repentant sinners. Europe has participated in this, despite the fact that a hostile Russia is much more dangerous to us, since we live next door, than to the Americans. Perhaps this course of action was inevitable once the EU and NATO expanded to include countries in the former Soviet bloc that regarded Russia with well-grounded hostility and suspicion. Having said that, I wonder where we'd be now if there had been an effort at reconciliation between Europe and Russia after the Cold War similar to the efforts made to achieve Franco-German reconciliation after World War II.
Personally (and I mean no disrespect to the Americans in saying so), even though we share a common language and historical background, and despite the pervasive influence of the United States on modern British (and wider European) life, I still find American culture remarkably alien. The way the Russians think, act and behave also seems alien to me in many respects, but somehow less so despite everything. I feel more kinship with the culture that produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky than to the postcolonial heresy across the Atlantic. Historic Western civilisation - the civilisation that I feel myself to be part of - is a thing that stretches from the Algarve to Vladivostok.
The purpose of NATO, they used to quip, was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. More seriously, the US was a keen (founder) member of NATO - it was always by far the lead nation - because for its own reasons it didn’t want Western Europe “going Communist”. Once the Berlin Wall came down, we saw a new phase: US troops and weapon systems operating as close to Russia as Poland and Lithuania, under the NATO umbrella. Why? That’s a big Q, but now that Russia has ground down NATO-trained and NATO-equipped Ukrainian troops, it seems the White House sees no value in hanging out with its Euro-buddies any more, preferring to shore up its position in its own continent. I don’t blame them.
Isn’t Greenland a colony?? Isn’t colonialism evil?? Trump is correct about Greenland, it is strategically important and Denmark can’t defend it. BTW the US has been trying to obtain Greenland for decades
Things are “shambolic” in Minnesota because of criminal liberal activities. Your “intelligent” liberals are the source of violence, fraud, and corruption.
Madjack, I am a paid subscriber to EW but I am having trouble, doubts about him. I think he doesn’t get it. It takes a monster to fight a monster and Trump is undoubtedly, unquestionably the best and only Pol capable of doing this job. It is nothing less than the demolition of an entire order, the destruction of leviathan. This order has wrought havoc on the entire west. This author is arguing for colouring within the lines, rules and civility. His argument is null and void. His argument against Trump is sure to fail.
This is what it looks like - Trumps destruction of convention - learn to love it.
Agreed. I appreciate his view from “across the pond” but we are all trapped by our times and culture. I grew up as a conservative WASP. I am appalled that I find myself supporting and advocating for, of all people, Donald Trump! Strangely he is the one who has arisen to stand against the abundant evil of our age. God has a sense of humor.
His incivility is off putting to you, but not me, in truth, it’s the opposite.
“The Civilized man is more experienced and wiser savage.”
Henry David Thoreau
They are artful and able to hide behind their education and manners. He is a comeuppance extraordinaire and I love it. TDS is the best part. Saving our world is good too.
Ed, how would a unified Europe, even a rightward leaning one, handle mass migration? It seems to me that a European super government inevitably behaves exactly as Brussels already does.
Morning Ed. I’m chuffed to bits, as footballers no longer say, with the mention.
First of all, thoughts and prayers for the Guildford bookshop workers, I hope they’re receiving trauma counselling after finding the evil secret history of their workplace, and that at least some of their friends and family will still speak to them.
On the Huguenots and South Africa, I’ve just finished George Owers’ fantastic “The Rage of Parties” about the emergence of the Whigs and Tories in the aftermath of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. From the start, among other differences, the Whigs were in favour of “engagement” with Europe (ie war with France), while the Tories didn’t see the benefit and begrudged the cost.
The popularity of the Whig policy had been greatly enhanced by the arrival of Huguenots expelled by Louis XIV, who revitalised high-end manufacturing, improved the connections with continental trade and added to the strength of British banking and finance, greatly assisting the capacity of the state to wage war on the continent, by paying for Protestant armies from Holland and Germany as well as their own.
The Tories had a suspicion of finance as it was dominated by people-not-like-us…dissenter clans (40% of the founding directors of the Bank of England), Jews and European Protestants from Holland and Switzerland, ultimately paid for by dunderheaded English landowners (and their tenants).
The perceived contribution of the Huguenot arrivals to Marlborough’s brilliant victories over France softened English attitudes to welcoming persecuted Protestant refugees from Europe. Louis’ latest victims were the “Palatines” - I had never heard of them before, who lived in German states in the Rhineland that Louis was trying to incorporate and purge of religious deviation. New Huguenots? Step this way, refugees welcome.
Unfortunately rather than skilled and sophisticated manufacturers and merchants, the Palatines principal skills turned out to be cultivating vines. In a war burdened English economy, the appearance of an additional group of culturally distinct unemployables, whose initial treatment was contrasted with the lack of provision for the domestic poor, was a disaster for the Whigs. With the Tories winning an electoral landslide, it was possible to end the war, and one of the fruits of victory was “encouraging” the Palatines to go home.
Extremely long preamble, but given that one of the few remaining strengths of the South African economy is wine making, maybe some of those “Huguenot” settlers were actually Palatines?
I've lived in York on an off since 1985, and also in Leeds, Hull and Slough. I concur with ChatGPT that Leeds > York > Hull > Slough. As a place to live, Leeds is under-rated and York is over-rated. Hull has some pleasant parts, some unpleasant parts, and feels rather cut off from the rest of Britain. It's close to Beverley, the Yorkshire Wolds, and the coast. I didn't see a single purple-haired art hoe when I lived there, but that was in the 1990s, before it became a "City of Culture". Slough has many good ethnic supermarkets, and is surrounded by nice places, such as Burnham Beeches woods, Cliveden country house, and Eton and Windsor. I'm convinced that the real purpose of the Jubilee River "flood defence scheme" south of Slough is to stop Chalvey, Slough's majority-Asian southern suburb, from extending into the bucolic countryside around Eton.
In my opinion, the experience of living in York has been getting gradually worse since the mid 1980s, for various reasons. If you come here as a tourist, my advice is to walk at least some of the city walls and the snickelways (buy the snickelways walk book), if you visit the Minster, go up the top of the main tower (this costs extra), if you like trains visit the railway museum and the nearby North York Moors steam railway (in Pickering). If you want to visit Betty's, the Shambles or the Viking museum, it's best to do so at "off-peak" times. Avoid the public toilets, which are horrible!
One city I've never visited, but I'm told is really nice, is Lincoln.
'Imagine what a Huguenot state could have achieved.'
I've often wondered what the world would be like if France had simply dumped its Protestants in North America, just as England used its colonies there as a relief valve for nonconformity. I imagine there would be an impressive Canadian Geneva and Francophone Protestant Switzerland in North America and a very different Anglophone North America.
I imagine a Huguenot Canada would have gone the way of dissenting New England - a “social gospel” church that found its greatest achievement in the emancipation movement and then declined into liberal politics and religious irrelevance.
Sir, you are my favourite Substacker by far, but on Trump and Greenland/Europe, I think you need to have a lie down in a darkened room with a damp flannel on your head! Greenland is in North America, not Europe; it is an island colony, not part of Denmark; the US took it over in WWII and still have troops there; it is sparsely populated with a native population who are whatever the current term is for eskimos, with a lifestyle to match (which carries on whoever owns their island). I personally doubt it even qualifies for NATO protection, for the same reason that NATO didn’t get involved in the Falklands War in 1982. Everyone, just calm down!
No haranguing by a US president, either "we are all in this together" or "you suck and need to change your ways" is going to make the slightest difference to the future of Europe. You need to create a more dynamic economy by deregulating and getting rid of you destructive "net zero" energy policies. And avoid social disintegration by changing your insane immigration policies. Good luck with all of that.
I have cognitive dissonance because the narrative I hear on the British online right is that there's a right-wing vibe shift, woke is over, the Overton window has shifted, the left is out of touch and intellectually stagnant, and Reform winning the next election is a sure thing.
But if you look at the Politico Poll of Polls it's:
Reform: 26%
Conservative: 18% (!)
Labour 18% (!)
Green: 16% (!)
Liberal Democrat: 13%
Scottish Nationalist: 3%
Welsh Nationalist: 1%
Right-wing parties: 44%
Left-wing parties: 53%
A 9 point advantage to the left!
Reform would still win the next election, due to the first-past-the-post electoral system. But the number of people intending to vote Reform peaked in August-October 2025 and has been gradually declining since then. And when an actual election happens, people might vote tactically, or there might be agreements between left-wing parties to try to stop Reform winning. Not to mention 16 and 17 year olds will be voting for the first time (and Commonwealth citizens can vote too, right?).
I feel like now that Twitter is right-wing, maybe the British right are suffering from the same complacency and out-of-touchness they accuse the left of, assuming that their own little bubble represents British public opinion more generally, and that they have nothing to learn from people on the left. Perhaps there should be more right-wing posters on Bluesky?
A thoughtful comment. However, I disagree. There were regional elections about a year ago in which Reform did spectacularly well - in the county of Kent, for example, Reform now controls the county council after winning all but a handful of districts (the opposition wins were split between Green, Liberal, Labour and I think one Independent). I expect the Labour Party to collapse soon, with their liberals voting for the Lib-Dems, younger people going Green, the white working class going for Reform, with the Muslim caucus itself fragmenting (I think Reform are after the conservative, patriotic, non-radical Muslim electorate, as well as the conservatives generally).
"Imagine what a Huguenot state could have achieved."
The cultures of Scandinavia and the Netherlands were in large part defined by Protestant values; likewise, the cultures of Spain, Italy and Portugal were profoundly shaped by Catholicism. If the former nations had remained Catholic, or the latter group had become Protestant, their cultures would now be very different from what they are.
I've always thought that France is the great exception here, since the dominant determinant in its modern history was secularisation at an unusually early stage; even before the Revolution, a wary scepticism was a longstanding feature of much of its intellectual culture. I think if France had accepted the Reformation, it would be less different from what it is today than almost any other country.
Still, a French Huguenot colony would have been something else, since religion would have been a core part of its identity in a fashion oddly alien to "the eldest daughter of the Church".
The other interesting case is the German-speaking countries, confessionally mixed, but with normative Protestant values culturally dominant. This is even somewhat the case in overwhelmingly Catholic Austria.
I want to start a 'Trump is an agent of George Soros' conspiracy. Are you in?
Well Bessent, his treasury secretary, is a former partner at Soros Fund Management.
But if you really want to go into conspiracy land note that Bessent’s mother was a McLeod while Trump’s mother was a MacLeod. Basically it’s a Hebridean conspiracy…😉
And Trump surely has some Dutch ancestry too and indeed a Dutch phenotype: tall, blue eyes, blond hair (once upon a time); comes from New Amsterdam; likes doing deals; speaks bluntly - even his name is Dutch, shared with their famous Admiral Tromp!
Nice to see the LBK article here, lol. Crazy story. Herxheim is like a European version of the Aztec human sacrifices. There's a weird impulse among scholars to explain Herxheim as some kind of elaborate "reburial ritual" or whatever when it was pretty obviously a cannibalism buffet IMHO. Or at least I think that's the parsimonious explanation.
"What was it about 1914-45 that made you think humans tend to live in peace with each other?"
I looked into this a bit and apparently there was a desire among academics in the postwar era to prove that the preceding several decades were anomalous. People just didn't want to (understandably IMHO) accept that what had happened in the World Wars was pretty ordinary, just with better technology. (Read up on the 30 Years' War and then imagine what it would have been like with poison gas, machine guns, aerial bombardment, and rail cars.)
I don't know if it sounds like too much of a conspiracy theory, but it seems to me that an unspoken priority of American foreign policy since the 1990s has been to stop Russia coming in from the cold. There are only four possible superpowers in the world: the United States, China, India (but not yet), and a Europe in which Germany and Russia are allies. Preventing the emergence of the latter was, surely, one way of prolonging the unipolar moment.
Almost right from the start, the Russians were treated as vanquished enemies rather than repentant sinners. Europe has participated in this, despite the fact that a hostile Russia is much more dangerous to us, since we live next door, than to the Americans. Perhaps this course of action was inevitable once the EU and NATO expanded to include countries in the former Soviet bloc that regarded Russia with well-grounded hostility and suspicion. Having said that, I wonder where we'd be now if there had been an effort at reconciliation between Europe and Russia after the Cold War similar to the efforts made to achieve Franco-German reconciliation after World War II.
Personally (and I mean no disrespect to the Americans in saying so), even though we share a common language and historical background, and despite the pervasive influence of the United States on modern British (and wider European) life, I still find American culture remarkably alien. The way the Russians think, act and behave also seems alien to me in many respects, but somehow less so despite everything. I feel more kinship with the culture that produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky than to the postcolonial heresy across the Atlantic. Historic Western civilisation - the civilisation that I feel myself to be part of - is a thing that stretches from the Algarve to Vladivostok.
The purpose of NATO, they used to quip, was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. More seriously, the US was a keen (founder) member of NATO - it was always by far the lead nation - because for its own reasons it didn’t want Western Europe “going Communist”. Once the Berlin Wall came down, we saw a new phase: US troops and weapon systems operating as close to Russia as Poland and Lithuania, under the NATO umbrella. Why? That’s a big Q, but now that Russia has ground down NATO-trained and NATO-equipped Ukrainian troops, it seems the White House sees no value in hanging out with its Euro-buddies any more, preferring to shore up its position in its own continent. I don’t blame them.
Isn’t Greenland a colony?? Isn’t colonialism evil?? Trump is correct about Greenland, it is strategically important and Denmark can’t defend it. BTW the US has been trying to obtain Greenland for decades
Things are “shambolic” in Minnesota because of criminal liberal activities. Your “intelligent” liberals are the source of violence, fraud, and corruption.
Madjack, I am a paid subscriber to EW but I am having trouble, doubts about him. I think he doesn’t get it. It takes a monster to fight a monster and Trump is undoubtedly, unquestionably the best and only Pol capable of doing this job. It is nothing less than the demolition of an entire order, the destruction of leviathan. This order has wrought havoc on the entire west. This author is arguing for colouring within the lines, rules and civility. His argument is null and void. His argument against Trump is sure to fail.
This is what it looks like - Trumps destruction of convention - learn to love it.
Agreed. I appreciate his view from “across the pond” but we are all trapped by our times and culture. I grew up as a conservative WASP. I am appalled that I find myself supporting and advocating for, of all people, Donald Trump! Strangely he is the one who has arisen to stand against the abundant evil of our age. God has a sense of humor.
His incivility is off putting to you, but not me, in truth, it’s the opposite.
“The Civilized man is more experienced and wiser savage.”
Henry David Thoreau
They are artful and able to hide behind their education and manners. He is a comeuppance extraordinaire and I love it. TDS is the best part. Saving our world is good too.
Ed, how would a unified Europe, even a rightward leaning one, handle mass migration? It seems to me that a European super government inevitably behaves exactly as Brussels already does.
Morning Ed. I’m chuffed to bits, as footballers no longer say, with the mention.
First of all, thoughts and prayers for the Guildford bookshop workers, I hope they’re receiving trauma counselling after finding the evil secret history of their workplace, and that at least some of their friends and family will still speak to them.
On the Huguenots and South Africa, I’ve just finished George Owers’ fantastic “The Rage of Parties” about the emergence of the Whigs and Tories in the aftermath of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. From the start, among other differences, the Whigs were in favour of “engagement” with Europe (ie war with France), while the Tories didn’t see the benefit and begrudged the cost.
The popularity of the Whig policy had been greatly enhanced by the arrival of Huguenots expelled by Louis XIV, who revitalised high-end manufacturing, improved the connections with continental trade and added to the strength of British banking and finance, greatly assisting the capacity of the state to wage war on the continent, by paying for Protestant armies from Holland and Germany as well as their own.
The Tories had a suspicion of finance as it was dominated by people-not-like-us…dissenter clans (40% of the founding directors of the Bank of England), Jews and European Protestants from Holland and Switzerland, ultimately paid for by dunderheaded English landowners (and their tenants).
The perceived contribution of the Huguenot arrivals to Marlborough’s brilliant victories over France softened English attitudes to welcoming persecuted Protestant refugees from Europe. Louis’ latest victims were the “Palatines” - I had never heard of them before, who lived in German states in the Rhineland that Louis was trying to incorporate and purge of religious deviation. New Huguenots? Step this way, refugees welcome.
Unfortunately rather than skilled and sophisticated manufacturers and merchants, the Palatines principal skills turned out to be cultivating vines. In a war burdened English economy, the appearance of an additional group of culturally distinct unemployables, whose initial treatment was contrasted with the lack of provision for the domestic poor, was a disaster for the Whigs. With the Tories winning an electoral landslide, it was possible to end the war, and one of the fruits of victory was “encouraging” the Palatines to go home.
Extremely long preamble, but given that one of the few remaining strengths of the South African economy is wine making, maybe some of those “Huguenot” settlers were actually Palatines?
Janan Ganesh the Pepys of Cool Britannia’s fading afterglow.
😁…or Adrian Mole?
I've lived in York on an off since 1985, and also in Leeds, Hull and Slough. I concur with ChatGPT that Leeds > York > Hull > Slough. As a place to live, Leeds is under-rated and York is over-rated. Hull has some pleasant parts, some unpleasant parts, and feels rather cut off from the rest of Britain. It's close to Beverley, the Yorkshire Wolds, and the coast. I didn't see a single purple-haired art hoe when I lived there, but that was in the 1990s, before it became a "City of Culture". Slough has many good ethnic supermarkets, and is surrounded by nice places, such as Burnham Beeches woods, Cliveden country house, and Eton and Windsor. I'm convinced that the real purpose of the Jubilee River "flood defence scheme" south of Slough is to stop Chalvey, Slough's majority-Asian southern suburb, from extending into the bucolic countryside around Eton.
In my opinion, the experience of living in York has been getting gradually worse since the mid 1980s, for various reasons. If you come here as a tourist, my advice is to walk at least some of the city walls and the snickelways (buy the snickelways walk book), if you visit the Minster, go up the top of the main tower (this costs extra), if you like trains visit the railway museum and the nearby North York Moors steam railway (in Pickering). If you want to visit Betty's, the Shambles or the Viking museum, it's best to do so at "off-peak" times. Avoid the public toilets, which are horrible!
One city I've never visited, but I'm told is really nice, is Lincoln.
'Imagine what a Huguenot state could have achieved.'
I've often wondered what the world would be like if France had simply dumped its Protestants in North America, just as England used its colonies there as a relief valve for nonconformity. I imagine there would be an impressive Canadian Geneva and Francophone Protestant Switzerland in North America and a very different Anglophone North America.
I imagine a Huguenot Canada would have gone the way of dissenting New England - a “social gospel” church that found its greatest achievement in the emancipation movement and then declined into liberal politics and religious irrelevance.
Sir, you are my favourite Substacker by far, but on Trump and Greenland/Europe, I think you need to have a lie down in a darkened room with a damp flannel on your head! Greenland is in North America, not Europe; it is an island colony, not part of Denmark; the US took it over in WWII and still have troops there; it is sparsely populated with a native population who are whatever the current term is for eskimos, with a lifestyle to match (which carries on whoever owns their island). I personally doubt it even qualifies for NATO protection, for the same reason that NATO didn’t get involved in the Falklands War in 1982. Everyone, just calm down!
No haranguing by a US president, either "we are all in this together" or "you suck and need to change your ways" is going to make the slightest difference to the future of Europe. You need to create a more dynamic economy by deregulating and getting rid of you destructive "net zero" energy policies. And avoid social disintegration by changing your insane immigration policies. Good luck with all of that.
I have cognitive dissonance because the narrative I hear on the British online right is that there's a right-wing vibe shift, woke is over, the Overton window has shifted, the left is out of touch and intellectually stagnant, and Reform winning the next election is a sure thing.
But if you look at the Politico Poll of Polls it's:
Reform: 26%
Conservative: 18% (!)
Labour 18% (!)
Green: 16% (!)
Liberal Democrat: 13%
Scottish Nationalist: 3%
Welsh Nationalist: 1%
Right-wing parties: 44%
Left-wing parties: 53%
A 9 point advantage to the left!
Reform would still win the next election, due to the first-past-the-post electoral system. But the number of people intending to vote Reform peaked in August-October 2025 and has been gradually declining since then. And when an actual election happens, people might vote tactically, or there might be agreements between left-wing parties to try to stop Reform winning. Not to mention 16 and 17 year olds will be voting for the first time (and Commonwealth citizens can vote too, right?).
I feel like now that Twitter is right-wing, maybe the British right are suffering from the same complacency and out-of-touchness they accuse the left of, assuming that their own little bubble represents British public opinion more generally, and that they have nothing to learn from people on the left. Perhaps there should be more right-wing posters on Bluesky?
A thoughtful comment. However, I disagree. There were regional elections about a year ago in which Reform did spectacularly well - in the county of Kent, for example, Reform now controls the county council after winning all but a handful of districts (the opposition wins were split between Green, Liberal, Labour and I think one Independent). I expect the Labour Party to collapse soon, with their liberals voting for the Lib-Dems, younger people going Green, the white working class going for Reform, with the Muslim caucus itself fragmenting (I think Reform are after the conservative, patriotic, non-radical Muslim electorate, as well as the conservatives generally).