Gone are the days when France was the object of liberal romance and conservative calumny.

In a grassroots explosion that rivals the Tea Party, the "Manif pour tous" or "March for All" movement has mobilized as many as 500,000 people to storm François Hollande's government in Paris and demand a halt to the proposed bill that would legalize gay marriage.

France now stands as an island of traditional family law, still clinging to its civil code and its Napoleonic code dating back to the 1790s.  On all sides of the French Republic lie countries that have casualized the family structure and passed gay marriage and gay adoption blithely: the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal.  Signs point to Britain doing the same.

The same Gallic pugnacity that makes so many American conservatives irate is now presenting the West with its familial Waterloo.  The Gauls, like the Yankees, simply refuse to do what the rest of the world tells them they ought to do.  The news coming from France is not being translated into English very much; I suspect that the grassroots motivating the march to defend children lie in outlying regions like Provence, where white French Catholics are socially conservative and may not speak English as fluently as the cosmopolitan Parisians who are pushing the "marriage for all" movement to placate the capital's gay lobby.

I encourage people to consult a free blog I've put up here, which offers breaking translations of what is going on in France.  There is much to learn about their organization of this movement, since it has cut across religious lines, political parties, and sexual orientations.  The three ringleaders are a disaffected socialist (Laurence Tcheng), a middle-aged bawd (Frigide Barjot, a stage name), and a young gay atheist (Xavier Bongibault).  They have managed to rally around a central conflict of rights.  The right of gays to have children cannot, in their trenchant view, trump the rights of children to have fathers and mothers.

Gay men in France have had enough of being spoken for and exploited by a cynical gay lobby in Paris, as you will see if you scroll through the various testimonials I've translated into English.  One idea I have floated to Pierre Tardy, a French family advocate now living in Pennsylvania, is to create online petitions so that people around the world can bombard President Hollande with pressure to grant the referendum that the Manif movement asks for.  We'll see what develops.

UPDATE: Estimates always vary, but on the Manif Pour Tous live feed, the marchers against Hollande's  gay marriage bill say they can prove that at least 800,000 allies converged on Paris, while photos and recaps show Francophone rallies on all continents.  Details are rolling out here.  There were many invocations of Les Misérables, with the gay left cast as the wealthy villains abusing orphans.