Les Monstres Among Us

THERE HAS BEEN MUCH TALK LATELY, on both sides of the Atlantic, about how democracies die. In their recent book of that very title, the Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize how, in modern times, demagogues and autocrats generally come to power not through dramatic coups but through the ballot box and the complicity of enablers. The recent rise of right-wing extremism in Europe—freely elected populist autocrats now rule Hungary and Poland, and extreme right-wing parties have made significant gains in Austria, Germany, France, and Italy—as well as the election of Donald Trump in the United States, seems to support their thesis. Ugly forces—xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism—are multiplying.

In France, anti-Semitism has increasingly taken violent form, including the torture and murder of a young Jewish cell-phone salesman in 2006, the murder of four hostages in a kosher supermarket in January 2015, and, most recently, the murder of an octogenarian Holocaust survivor on March 23. Lawmakers and politicians