Culture

Apollo Will Return — An Archeofuturistic Short Story

As soon as she understood that this was the end, Jeanne decided that the best thing to do would be to transmit a testimonial to her civilisation to future generations. It was useless to consider electronic formats — the old DVDs, the dead computers, the USB keys that were useless now that nothing could read them; the webcloud devoid of subscribers . . .

I

For a month, neither the Internet nor the telly, nor radios, nor smartphones, nor, apparently, even the electricity had been working. It was the great disintegration. There was nothing left but paper, and even this, being excessively acidic, would not hold out for long and would crumble to dust in thirty years.

So her eyes fell on the safe. Paper, she thought, could last a long time locked inside it. She gathered up everything she could, and packed the following into that small space:

An issue of Paris-Match, the last to ever appear, dated 5 June 2025, and soberly headlined ‘The End,’ with Paris in flames on the cover; an issue of Voici, two years out of date, with the obituary of Johnny Hallyday on the front page; her high school textbook on the history of France, her yearly planner with overview maps of France and of the world; a Bible, a copy of Homer’s Iliad, and collections of several European poets; Aristotle’s Politics, and various photographs: Mont Saint-Michel, the palace at Versailles, a view of the airport from Roissy, another from the towers of La Defense when they were still intact, a photo of the Earth taken by a satellite, etc.

But she worried that, despite her precautions, it all might fall into dust or be ruined by humidity. Then she remembered that, back when she was an adolescent, when she took a book-binding course, her teacher had told her that nothing was more resistant to time than letters engraved on soft leather, kept safe from humidity.

Her pretty Gucci calfskin jacket, purchased three years ago on the Corso in Rome for 1,500 Euros, would do nicely. It would have to be sacrificed. With a big tailor’s scissors she cut the back of the precious garment into a sheet, fifty centimetres square; she laid it flat on the dining-room table and sat down to carefully carve a text in stick letters with the point of a knife. She had to be concise:

Mont Saint-Michel, 23 June, 2025 A.D.

To the men of the future: My name is Jeanne Riquetout and I am witness to the very rapid end of a civilisation that was born thousands of years ago. This civilisation slowly expanded to cover nearly all of the Earth, which was populated by eight billion people. (She tried to avoid technical or complicated terms.) We can travel all over the planet thanks to our flying machines, and earthbound machines that go at great speed. We can see each other, talk to each other, write to each other from one end of the world to the other, thanks to other machines. We succeeded in going to the moon. We placed thousands of artificial satellites in orbit around the Earth. We exchange products from one side of the ocean to the other, between all peoples, thanks to immense boats that are 300 metres long. We make buildings as tall as hills. But our world is collapsing. This is the result of a pileup of catastrophes that began about ten years ago.

It’s useless to go into details, she thought. No time. Thinking of the Rosetta stone, which Champollion could use to decipher hieroglyphics thanks to the Greek version, she translated her text into the foreign languages she had mastered, Italian and English. By comparing the three, linguists of the future would have an easier time cobbling together a translation. She also supplemented her texts with diagrams and drawings, carved a bit amateurishly into the leather: an airplane, an automobile, two people conversing over distance with the help of a screen. She explained briefly what each drawing was. She copied out the alphabet, numbers, a few simple mathematical formulas. She drew a table of the metric system. All of this took an entire day. She had to hurry, because the ethnic bands of pillagers and defilers would not be long arriving at the Mont.

II

When she had finished, to be even more certain that the piece of leather would be preserved, she put it in one of the 100 percent waterproof bags that she sold in the boutique downstairs. It was supposed to also offer protection from humidity in the air. It was a soft cylinder of bright orange carbon plastomer. But there was some space left in it, and she had another idea: she jammed in the few precious jewels she had, her smartphone, mute and dark; it was now useless, but it might intrigue future archaeologists, if there were any, if civilisation ever asserted itself again. In its tiny volume, it carried the principles of telephonics, radio, optics, televisuals, electronics…

It wasn’t the fear of death that oppressed her, nor the hunger that began to torment her (she only had ten days’ worth of canned food left, and she was rationing), but the poignant nostalgia for what was already an ancient world. And above all, the haunting idea that this world-wide civilisation that was melting down in a world-wide fracas had been almost entirely constructed by men of European ancestry, the great cohort of her ancestors — whom all the other peoples had imitated. But they had allowed the virus to penetrate the organism, had tragically become too inimical to themselves, or too open to the world. She remembered having read, as a teenager, back when everything was still functioning — the beautiful days, the Indian summer — a few texts by authors who were forbidden by the fashion of the day, by censoring ideologues and judges, but who had predicted very precisely what was going to happen. Her father had managed to procure them under the noses of his military superiors.

She remembered a passage that explained that the very idea of a global civilisation was a deadly trap that could only end with the brutal implosion of the global system. She remembered a sentence that had struck her: ‘To try to unify a heterogeneous humanity into a homogeneous system will always end in an explosion.’

She still had the prescient book — a bit yellowed now — in which this reflection was written, and she hastily stuffed it in the cylindrical bag with the other objects. And suddenly, when she opened the safe, she saw the revolver, with its bullets still intact, and the brooch. And they took her breath away.

III

It was the service revolver of her great-great-great-grandfather, Amaury de Cinq-Fort, dead at Verdun over a century ago. The brooch, which had belonged to his spouse, Jeanne d’Albray, hid within it a Patek watch with a mechanism of gold, silver, and platinum. An extremely precious jewel. These two objects, according to the family’s tradition, must imperatively be handed down to its descendants without ever being separated from the bloodline. According to family legend, a fortune-teller had ordered her great-great-great grandmother to institute this strange protocol. A Greek, a certain Delphina Pythia, who titillated the emotions of high society at the end of the Belle Epoque, and who, they said, had predicted the wreck of the Titanic.

Fine, but Jeanne had never married and had no descendants. The revolver would be very useful for self-defense, and the watch could help her negotiate some favor, in this nascent world of primitive violence. However, she couldn’t make herself take these objects from the safe to appropriate them for herself. A strange power held her back. But what if the legend were true? What if the prophetess had intended for these objects to wind up precisely with her, a generational cul-de-sac? So that she could hand them down, not to her immediate descendants strictly speaking, but to the men of the future? Perhaps these two objects, the revolver and the watch, would have a destiny?

Jeanne put them in the bag and closed the safe. She cried silently. She went out on the second-floor balcony of the house and looked at the summit of the Mont, the spire that topped the abbey. It was already quarter till ten and the sun was setting on the bay, in bloody flames. But for several months already, no digital camera had been able to capture the scene. It was probably the last peaceful sunset. The death of the sun?

Not a gull nor a cormorant cried, as though they, too, had fled. All that could be heard was the sad hiss of waves retreating along the shore below, on a muffled breath of westerly wind. The bell tower of the Abbey sang, calling to one more prayer. The swan song. It rose up between the deserted, shuttered houses.

IV

For two weeks, panic had reigned. The population of Mont Saint-Michel had fled, not knowing where to go but hoping to end up somewhere. Faced with brutal chaos, the people, lacking memory, didn’t get together to resist, but dispersed and scattered. Even the little police squad, who were supposed to represent the State and defend the population, had deserted a month before because the source of their orders — the State itself — had evaporated. It was every man for himself. During the long fall of the Roman Empire, a new defensive order had spontaneously created itself, a prelude to the Middle Ages. But now, nothing. It was chaos.

There were only about fifty people left on the deserted Mont, all of them old, like the prior of the abbey, two nuns, and an old monk. Not a single child. She was the sole representative of youth. But she made it her duty to remain. And anyway, where was there to go? She had accomplished her mission. The last bit of news from outside that she’d caught — by listening, via a battery-powered transistor, to a radio station (France-Inter) that still broadcast one programme per night at eight, from Paris, in the basements of the Maison de la Radio, thanks to a generating set, had chilled her. The previous evening, the last inhabitants of the Mont, assembled in the village hall, had heard the flat voice of the lady presenter drone the final litany of the old world: ‘This is our last newscast. The President of the Republic has disappeared. Everyone, please try to regroup together if possible . . . (Sobbing) We too — we have to flee. Long live the Republic. Long live France! (Sobbing) Adieu.’

She went into the nave, where the Prior was chanting his pious incantations before the old people on their knees. He began to sing an Apostles’ Creed in a strong voice in Latin, accompanied on the organ by an old musician-monk who made the vaults shake. She wasn’t listening. She wouldn’t listen anymore. Even if it was magnificent. It was too late. Her eyes swept about the nave, the stained-glass windows, the delicate decorations under the powerful architecture. All of it would be gone before long. Broken, burned, or peeled away by the salty winds from the northwest.

V

She left the church and turned toward the high rampart. While leaving her house, the Bluebird, no doubt for the last time, with the premonition that she was going to die, she had heard a sort of clamor in the distance.

She looked at the raised walkway that linked the semi-isle to terra firma. No, it wasn’t one of those old and reassuring columns of tourists that she saw advance from the car park, in the last light of day, but a menacing horde of scruffy young men with bronzed complexions. There were about three hundred of them, she guessed, and armed, some of them with firearms. She could begin to make out their vociferations. She thought she could hear their war cry: Allah Akbar! They were coming there for pillage, murder, rape, desecration, and vengeance. For the kill. In the distance, well behind them, she could see a column of black smoke. Probably the village of Pontorson, whence they came and which they had burnt.

It would be perhaps twenty minutes before the barbarians arrived. She thought of suicide, of throwing herself from the top of the ramparts and into the Channel. But that would be beneath the honor of a descendant of the marquis of Cinq-Fort, who had died in combat. She slowly descended onto the pier, and walked with a determined step toward the herd of dark, ridiculous lunatics. She stood between them and the Mont, hands on hips, knowing she was going to die, raped and torn to bits. And she screamed at these scum as they advanced, a strange refrain she had heard in her childhood without understanding what it meant, but which, suddenly, became clear as the sun to her: ‘One day, Apollo will come back, and it will be forever.’

This short story is an excerpt from Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism 2.0 (Arktos, 2016). If you liked this text, be sure to check out the whole book.

Guillaume Faye
the authorGuillaume Faye
Guillaume Faye was born in 1949 and received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris. He was one of the principal organisers of the French New Right organisation GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d'etudes pour la civilisation europeenne) during the 1970s and '80s, and at the same time cultivated his career as a journalist, particularly in the news magazines Figaro and Paris-Match. In 1986 he left GRECE after he came to disagree with the direction of the group. For more than a decade, he worked as a broadcaster for the French radio station Skyrock, and on the program Telematin which aired on France 2 TV. He returned to the field of political philosophy in 1998 when a number of his new essays were collected and published in the volume Archeofuturism. Since then he has produced a series of books which have challenged and reinvigorated readers throughout the world.

25 Comments

  • Hey, AltRight….

    Don’t buy any of Arktos Books……..

    These People are BEYOND Shady……….

    Their (((Editor-in-Chief))) is blocking all my Comments on his Article…….

    Certain People made a Deal to Survive………

    They’re now throwing Former Financial Supporters under the Bus……..

    SHAD-D-D-D-DYYYY………

  • Why do we keep telling us pathetic stories of doom? We keep failing because we always decide not get the revolver and die honourably in battle, we always shed a tear and recite a poem!! The only thing we need to not die is to unapologetically put our life over the life of our enemies. The way every reasonable human being has behaved for a hundred thousand years. How can we look at the hordes and not learn the lesson? Pacifism is suicide! Our enemies know it, our ancestors knew it! FIGHT! Never shed a tear! FIGHT

  • Jews push muzzies into White nations to destroy them. The principle actors leading the world to this civilizational death, on purpose and with malice aforethought, are Jews (see Kalergi plan, Barbara Spectre comments, etc.). Jews are pale-skinned Semites opening the gate for their darker cousins and worse.

  • I have not yet read the piece, but merely the fact that Identitarian fiction is being created is a good sign. Much more is needed. Indeed, it should be a mandated, regular feature of this site, and others.

    The Alt-Right as a whole has fought well on the meme front and the essay/blog front, it has been all but absent from the battlefield on the entertainment front (Vox Day’s efforts notwithstanding). Every Alt-Right publishing house should be publishing novels, short stories, etc on Alt-Right themes. Every Alt-Right blogger/writer/whatever should be trying their hand at fiction, at screenplay writing, at indie filmmaking, painting, sculpture, everything, something.

    If there were an “Alt-Right Indie Film Festival” organized tomorrow, how many entries would there be? Likely none — but regardless, not enough. It’s not a lack of talent that leads to this situation. It’s despair at the absence of perceived opportunities. But chicken and egg — without the content coming first, the opportunities will never exist.

    And yes, I count myself as deficient in this score as anyone. Narrative is hard. Storytelling is a skill. Painting (at least, good painting) is work. Filmmaking is a thing to learn. It’s harder than meming. It’s harder than essay/blog writing (which we all learn in high school and university). But if we’re to have any chance, we need to put our skin in the game.

      • Their relative lack of visibility is precisely my point. If a novel gets self-published at Amazon but no one hears about it, does it really exist?

        Ask anyone in the Alt-Right who wrote the Culture of Critique and what its basic premise is, and nearly everyone will be able to respond. (And rightly so — it’s among the most important of Alt-Right texts; likely the most important of all.) But where is a single novel with a similar level of public recognition — even among Alt-Right circles, let alone in the broader world?

        The closest would be Camp of the Saints — but that isn’t really a white nationalist novel per se, and predates the Alt-Right regardless, so it doesn’t count.

        And that’s just novels. What about, as I said, indie films, or just screenplays, or symphonies, or paintings, or sculpture? There isn’t much — and however much there is, there isn’t anywhere near enough.

    • Hey, I read “Eternity Beach” too. About a year ago. Great book. Best white nationalist novel I’ve ever read, in fact. I also reread “The Turner Diaries”, just for sh*ts and giggles.

    • Is there a digital version(epub, mobi or pdf) of it?
      On amazon it’s only in paperback, but I stopped buying and reading paper books a decade ago..

  • Can’t help but feel this is all a bit ironic. The story stars a melancholic woman hearing about the fall of her country’s government as some sure sign of incoming doom while in truth these two things are exactly what would bring about the fall of the country in the first place. Feminized statism. In truth if the French government were really to fall in a period of chaos it’d be the perfect opportunity for actual nationalists. You’d see millions of rough men under identitarian banners descend upon deserted military bases and make foreign populations beg for a place in the new France.

    • While I don’t fully agree with your observation (the story does, for example, not reveal whether the government is already run by nationalists, and just did not have enough time to resolve the migrant problems caused by previous governments and to prevent the collapse), you should bear in mind this is only the first chapter in the book. You’d probably be surprised by the development in later chapters.

    • “You’d see millions of rough men under identitarian banners descend upon deserted military bases and make foreign populations beg for a place in the new France.”

      Oh, right. Because thats exactly what’s happening in South Africa, as that country descends into ruin. Oh, wait — no, it isn’t.

      People just assume that apocalypse automatically would lead to a nationalist revival. It might — or might not do so. Passive acceptance of degeneration might occur instead. And if it were to happen at all, it might only begin after untold centuries of regression.

      • The accelerationists are like, “If we destroy everything and reduce ourselves to the smallest minority, we win! Be sure not to vote, goyim…err, I mean fam!”

        Fuck that South African-tier nihilism.

        Help get disaffected blue-collar and rural voters registered:
        https://lookaheadamerica.org/donate/

    • YES. Exactly!!! the feminised weak who shed a tear a recite a poem deserve to go. If that story were to happen sure she’d die but on the other side of the country a group of men would fight to the end. Good lord, it’s France! the land of Napoleon! This is the stories we should be telling ourselves: http://qr.ae/TU8fc4
      Looking a martial bravery with a sneer brought us to this moment. Sensitivity and compassion too. Equanimity too. Irony, detachment, over education, indulgence and dialogue too. MORE NAPOLEON, LESS TEARS.

  • You mourn the loss of something these invaders never had or ever could. Their dull unintelligent brains are not much different from simians. those who seek to get you to believe that simians were your ancestors lie to you and tell you these dark imbeciles have some “innocence” you have lost, but in truth they are just the dullards who did not advance but DEVOLVED into that state. Eugenics was banned for the simple reason that ADVANCEMENT would leave behind those that had DEVOLVED to lower creatures. Through bad habits and no production, the dystopian future just inevitably drowned the “Enlightenment”. Instead of thoughts, decadence, immorality and decay have set in.
    Do not expect the invaders to care. Eat, sleep ad fuck are their WHOLE MENU of options in life. They are WORSE than animals, in that they COULD have risen and did not. They slunk downward due to bad habits and immorality. They want to Kill God as He is the Source of Such Morality. In Truth, they will all die. You do not have to join them you know. Violence is all these savages know or respect. If they ask for respect, VIOLENCE is all that can be used to earn it from such lowly beasts.

    • Denying evolutionary biological reality isn’t helping……..

      Human morality arose naturally out of human conditions and circumstances…..

      Using our intelligence to construct civilizational systems which had endurance, stability, growth, and prosperity…….

      ‘God’ was created by our minds because we are finite creatures susceptible to much pain, suffering, fear and damage………

      It is a mental meme used to aid in survival………

      Or maybe, it was created as a means for controlling human populations…..

      Or both……

      Either way it works, psychologically……

      Until you try to logically and rationally prove its existence in reality…….

      But, my ancestral history is rooted in religious faith…….

      And so while I can no longer compute “They want to Kill God as He is the Source of Such Morality”…….

      I can fully understand the degeneracy and decay which surrounds us all……

      And the anger, frustration, and desire to destroy and escape from this cesspool……

      • All our myths tell of devolution from the golden age. The negro is the lowest example of man’s decent into a primate like form. Evolution assumes they can be brought up to our level. They cannot.

        • I’m a White Identitarian/White Nationalist……

          But, there are plenty of Negros that are smarter and more successful than me…….

          I’m not smarter than Neils deGrasse Tyson……..

          My White Identitarianism/Nationalism isn’t based on being individually supreme over all other individuals of every single ethnicity/race……

          Because that is Blatant Delusion…….

          My White Identitarianism/Nationalism is grounded upon basic historical facts, such as, Neils deGrasse Tyson is an expert in a scientific field created by White Europeans…….

          And we have a fundamental right to be proud of this Heritage……

          Which is what our Racial Enemies want to deny us…….

          And what we refuse to allow the Memory Hole to Swallow…….

          • Yes that is true but it is NOT RELEVANT. They are another people to compete or conquer. PERIOD. Compassion and understanding is over.

        • Well said. I’m a devolutionist myself. Every Aryan religion, minus Christianity (which is not Aryan, imo) speaks of this. It’s wise to heed them.

        • Eh, I guess xtianity does, somewhat, very minutely with Adam & eve, but nowhere near the level of Germanic paganism, ancient Hinduism, Roman paganism, Egypt, etc…

      • Yes, you are 100% right. That is why a god of meekness and compassion is a disease in this predicament. Our god (or mental state) must be one of action, bravery, honor, conquest and martial virtue. The most important question one can ask about a man is what gods does he worship? Pleasure, transcendence, dialogue, compassion and peace? WRONG GOD. Bravery, honor, action, victory, will and conquest? GOOD GOD. What the fuck is this thing of shedding tears when once civilisation is in flames? What a shame…

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