Experts in urban fauna have apparently discovered a ‘sacred triangle’ between the Parc Monceau and Neuilly in the west of Paris. A short distance from the wind-blasted northern arrondissements with their ‘robust but primitive population’, the leafy avenues and eco-landscaped gardens of private mansions on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne have created a special microclimate. Here, a protected human species has found its natural habitat and breeding ground. Avaricious, nepotistic and practically inexterminable, it has caused death and suffering on an unimaginable scale while amassing wealth which far exceeds its natural needs.
Some of its sub-groups are well known – the Michelin company, for instance, whose rubber plantation outside Saigon in the 1940s used torture and incarceration as routine personnel management techniques. Others, such as the French Coal Mining Company of Tonkin, have disappeared or mutated into other parasitic corporations.
An Honourable Exit is a logical successor to Éric Vuillard’s much longer and more luxuriant Conquistadors (not yet translated into English), which recounts the annihilation of the Incan empire, and his Goncourt Prize-winning The Order of the Day, on the captains of industry who smoothed the path of Hitler and whose companies prosper to this day.
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