In the middle of the afternoon on May 21, 2013, a 78 year-old historian walked up to the altar in the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, pulled out a pistol, and shot himself in the mouth. Dominique Venner, a white-nationalist extremist whose writings range from eleven volumes on the history of firearms to an apologia for the Vichy regime to a survey of the traditions of “Europeans” over the last 30,000 years, meant for his very public suicide to be a symbolic protestation against the destruction of racial, national, and cultural identity. In a suicide note left on the Notre Dame altar, Venner denounced the unmooring of the “anchors of our identity” and hoped for a future rebirth of ancestral French and European values. The goal of his final act was to kindle the race consciousness of his fellow Frenchmen and Europeans, so that like him, they might see with clear eyes that a cathedral like Notre-Dame was built by “the genius of my ancestors” and perceive a communal European memory stretching back to Homer. For five decades, Venner had argued for the paramount importance of a white heritage and ancestry that give people's lives shape and meaning. On the day of his suicide, Marine Le Pen, the nationalist leader of the French far-right political party Front National, tweeted, “All our respect to Dominique Venner, whose last gesture … had been to try to wake the people of France.” Venner's suicide, meant as an alarm for the sleeping race-blind, seems primarily to have shaken those who were already awake.

Among the “awoken”—in this case, the far and extreme right in North America and Western Europe—the intense and pervasive belief that communities of place, people, and nation have been seriously eroded in the last few decades has caused a retreat back into identity. In Europe over the last decade, increasing immigration from the Middle East and Africa, combined with nearly a dozen major terrorist attacks between 2010 and 2017, have bolstered a populist right that often whispers—and sometimes openly and vehemently advocates—xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric. With the rise of ethnic nationalism has come a heightened attention to defining authentic Americanness and Frenchness and Europeanness and, in turn, whiteness.