Emmanuel Todd ataca outra vez, acusando britânicos e franceses de Russofobia. Talvez ele sofra de Russomania, ou pior, Russofilia. PRA
Emmanuel Todd
Substack, July 20, 2025
Last April, I was interviewed by a Russian television channel about Western Russophobia and I had an epiphany. I more or less replied: "It's going to be unpleasant for you to hear this, but our Russophobia has nothing to do with you. It's a fantasy, a pathology of Western societies, an endogenous need of ours to imagine a Russian monster.”
As I was then in Moscow for the first time since 1993, I had experienced a shock of normality. My usual indicators - infant mortality, suicide and homicide - had shown me, without moving from Paris, that Russia had survived its crisis on the road out of communism. But such a normal Moscow was beyond anything I had imagined. And I had the intuition, on the spot, that Russophobia was a disease.
This intuition solves all sorts of questions. I had persisted, for example, in looking to history for the roots of British Russophobia, the most obstinate of all. The confrontation between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century seemed to justify such an approach. But then, in both world wars, Britain and Russia were allies, and they owed each other their survival in the second. So why so much hatred? The geopsychiatric hypothesis provides a solution. British society is the most russophobic, quite simply, because it is the sickest in Europe. As a major player and the first victim of ultraliberalism, the United Kingdom keeps producing dramatic symptoms: the collapse of its universities and hospitals, the malnutrition of its elderly, not to mention Liz Truss, the shortest and craziest of British prime ministers, a dazzling hallucination in the land of Disraeli, Gladstone and Churchill. Who would have dared a collapse of tax revenues without the protection, not just of a national currency, but of an imperial one, the world's reserve currency? Trump is also messing about with his budget, but he is not threatening the dollar. For the time being.
In the space of a few days, Truss had dethroned Macron on the hit-parade of Western absurdities. I confess to expecting a lot from Friedrich Merz, whose anti-Russian warmongering potential threatens Germany with much more than a monetary collapse. The destruction of the Rhine bridges by oreshnik missiles perhaps? Despite French nuclear protection? In Europe, it's carnival every day.
France is going from bad to worse, with its blocked political system, its economic and social system on credit, its rising infant mortality rate. We're sinking. And there we have it: an extra russophobic upsurge. Macron, the Chief of Staff of the French Armed Forces and the head of the DGSE (some secret service of ours) have just started singing the ultimate russophobic song: France now is Russia's number 1 enemy. This is crazy: thanks to our military and industrial insignificance, France is the least of Russia's worries, as it is busy enough with its global confrontation with the United States.
This latest Macronian absurdity makes recourse to geopsychiatry indispensable. A diagnosis of erotomania is inevitable. Erotomania is that condition, usually but not exclusively feminine, which leads the subject to believe that they are universally desired, sexually, and threatened with penetration by, say, all the surrounding males. Russian penetration, then, threatens...
I must confess to being weary of Macron bashing (others are taking care of this, despite general journalistic servility). Fortunately for me, we had been prepared for the President's 14 July speech with brand new official madness: idiotic speeches by two of the regime's little soldiers, Thierry Burkhard (Chief of the Armed Forces Staff) and Nicolas Lerner (head of the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence services). I'm not a constitutionalist, and I can’t tell whether it augurs well for democracy that two of the managers of the State's monopoly on legitimate violence are spilling out over the airwaves, in a press conference (Burkhard) or in anguished ramblings on LCI TV channel (Lerner), to define France's foreign policy in advance.
The fact remains that the public and free expression of their Russophobia is a treasure trove for the geopsychiatrist. I get two essential elements about the state of mind of the French ruling class (these interventions were taken as normal by the majority of the political and journalistic world and therefore tell us about the whole group).
Let's listen to Burkhard first. I'm using the Figaro transcript with its obvious imperfections. I'm not touching anything. How does our Chief of Staff define Russia and Russians? "It's also because of its people's ability to endure, even if the situation is complicated. Here too, historically and culturally, this is a people that is capable of enduring things that seem completely unimaginable to us. This is an important aspect of resistance and the ability to support the State". Let me translate: Russian patriotism is unimaginable for our military. He's not talking about Russia, he's talking about himself and his kind. He doesn't know, they don't know, what patriotism is. Thanks to the Russian fantasy, we are discovering why France has lost its independence, why, integrated into NATO, it has become a proxy for the United States. Our leaders no longer love their country. For them, rearmament is not about France's security, it's about serving an empire in decomposition which, after throwing the Ukrainians and then the Israelis into the fray against the world of sovereign nations, is preparing to mobilise the Europeans to continue sowing havoc in Eurasia. France is far from the front line. If Germany is a Hezbollah, our mission as proxies will be to be the Empire's Houthis.
Let's move on to Nicolas Lerner on LCI. This man seems to be in great intellectual distress. Describing Russia as an existential threat to France... With its shrinking population, already too small for its 17 million square kilometres? Only a nervous wreck could believe that Putin wants to penetrate France. Russia from Vladivostok to Brest? The fact remains that, in his distress, Lerner is useful for understanding the mentality of the people who are leading us to the abyss. He sees Russia imperial where it is national, viscerally attached to its sovereignty. “New Russia”, between Odessa and the Donbass, is quite simply the Alsace-Lorraine of the Russians. Would we have described the France of 1914, ready to resist the German Empire and take back its lost provinces, as imperial? Burkhard does not understand patriotism, Lerner does not understand the nation.
An existential threat to France? Yes of course, they sense it, they are right, but they are mistaken in looking for it in Russia. It is within themselves that they should be looking. The existential threat is twofold. Threat no. 1: our elites no longer love their country. Threat no. 2: they put it at the service of a foreign power, the United States of America, without ever taking our national interests into account.
When they talk about Russia, French, British, German or Swedish leaders tell us who they are. Russophobia is a pathology, no doubt. But above and beyond, Russia has become a formidable projective test. Its image is similar to the plates of the Rorschach test. The subject describes to the psychiatrist what he sees in shapes that are both random and symmetrical. In so doing, he projects some deep, hidden elements of his or her personality. Russia is our Rorschach.
