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 probed Europe’s past because he loved Europe and its people. He believed that no one could understand any people or culture unless he completely rejected universalism:

Men exist only by what distinguishes them: clan, lineage, history, culture, tradition. There are no universal answers to the questions of existence and behavior. Every civilization has its truths and its gods . . . . Every civilization creates its own answers, without which the individual, man or woman, lacking identity and archetypes, is thrown into a world of chaos. Like plants, men cannot exist without roots. Every individual must discover his own.

Universalism is a dangerous illusion because “it stunts our ability to comprehend that other men do not feel, think, or live the same way we do . . . .” He writes that “higher civilizations are not simply regions of the planet, they are different planets entirely.” He urges Europeans to search for their own, unique “spiritual morphology,” because “a human group is not a people unless it shares like origins, in a specific location, commanding a space, giving it direction and a border between the inside and the outside. This location, this space, is not only geographic but spiritual.”

A people’s spirit is embedded in tradition, which comes from the past, but gives life and meaning to the present: “If a tradition survives over time, it is because it rests upon the hereditary dispositions of related people.” Europeans must steep themselves in their traditions because they:

make us who we are, unlike any other. They constitute our perennial tradition, our unique way of being men and women in the face of life, death, love, history, and fate. Without them we are fated to become nothing; to disappear into the chaos of a world dominated by others.