One third of France’s population now consists either of immigrants themselves or of the children and grandchildren of immigrants.

This fact is not based on assumptions or insinuations. It emerges from official figures.

Behind the report stands the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), and it is based on interviews with nearly 30,000 people over six years, writes The Spectator.

More than 40 per cent of the population has, in one way or another, a connection to immigration. Of immigrants between the ages of 18 and 59, 32 per cent come from North Africa, 20 per cent from Sub-Saharan Africa and 16 per cent from Asia. Europeans account for 28 per cent.

This represents a significant shift in relation to the France we knew a few decades ago.

What is interesting is what the figures say about integration. According to the report, only Europeans allow themselves to be “assimilated” in the traditional sense. For other groups, the researchers observe what they call “hybridisation” and the emergence of ethnicised and racial identities.

The classical assumption that ties to origins weaken over generations is explicitly rejected.

The very fact that the report exists is remarkable. France prohibits by law the collection of ethnic and racial data, a policy which, since the Vichy regime, has been nearly impossible to discuss. INED has nevertheless managed it. The figures are now on the table.

Renaud Camus, the man who in 2010 introduced the term “the Great Replacement”, has for many years been characterised as a conspiracy theorist. Camus himself has never maintained that the change was planned by anyone. It was, and is, the result of Western societies gradually losing the ability to distinguish between themselves and the rest of the world.

The INED figures confirm that he was correct about the development.

What is most interesting, however, is that the Left is now beginning to speak openly about what it previously called conspiracies of the far Right. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, earlier this year declared directly to Éric Zemmour that “yes, the Great Replacement exists”. The only difference is that Mélenchon sees it as an opportunity. A new, “creolised” France. A Sixth Republic on the ruins of the Fifth.

For him, the matter is settled. France will no longer become the country it once was.

Marine Le Pen and Rassemblement National remain favourites for the next election, despite the fact that she herself is subject to a legal ban on standing for election.

The question is whether the French electorate agrees with Mélenchon that the matter is settled.