That’s the title of my article (here) in the 24 February 2022 issue of the London Review of Books, which was posted on the LRB website on Wednesday—and has been making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook. I was invited in late October by LRB editors Adam Shatz and Jeremy Harding to write an article on Zemmour, of some 4,000 words. So after reading some seven of Zemmour’s books plus lots of other stuff, attending his December 5th Villepinte rally, and generally following the SOB daily, I submitted, the day after Christmas, a text of a little over 8,000 words, which was significantly edited over the subsequent weeks by the LRB editors and cut to 4,790 words. Some of my style was lost in the process, which is always inevitable. [The original version of the text is below the image]. Thanks to Adam and Jeremy for the opportunity to publish in such an august review! I will have much more to say about Zemmour, and the French presidential campaign more generally, in the coming weeks.
Here is the original unedited and uncut version of the text (N.B. I followed British spelling and punctuation conventions).
ARUN KAPIL ON ERIC ZEMMOUR — FOR THE LRB (DECEMBER 26, 2021)
The French presidential election campaign is moving into high gear, with the stakes higher than ever – for Europe as well as France – and the outcome uncertain. Through last summer, an Emmanuel Macron-Marine Le Pen rematch looked inevitable, with polls predicting a comfortable Macron victory, albeit narrower than in 2017 (when he took 66 percent of the vote). The scenario of a rematch – which the overwhelming majority of voters polled do not wish for – was, however, upended with emergence of Éric Zemmour’s candidacy, which he formally announced on 30 November but was considered all-but-inevitable since at least September. Propelled into the mid-teens in the horse race polls – and dominating media coverage, particularly on the all-news television stations (BFM-TV, LCI, and especially the Fox News-like CNews) – Zemmour suddenly appeared as a contender for qualification in the second round of the presidential election on 24 April, potentially knocking Le Pen into third or fourth place in the 10 April first round – a sizable chunk of Le Pen’s voters defecting to him – to face off against Macron (a face-off that Macron would be heavily favoured to win). Alternatively, Zemmour’s candidacy, by splitting the far-right vote – which has reached a rather breathtaking third of the electorate – could enable the second-round qualification of Valérie Pécresse, the somewhat surprising victor of the 4 December primary of Les Républicains (LR), the heir of neoliberal-inflected neo-Gaullism and dominant party of the French right. And if in some unlikely scenario that has Macron finishing third and with Pécresse squaring off against Zemmour, she would also win, with voters of the left – remembering her longtime mainstream conservative persona, in the image of her political mentors Jacques Chirac and Alain Juppé, and despite her increasingly rightist rhetoric and neo-Thatcherism – turning out in sufficient numbers to block either candidate of the far right (as for a possible second round qualification of a candidate of the left, e.g. Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the ecologist Yannick Jadot, that prospect belongs, at this writing at least, to the realm of political fiction).
Whatever the scenario, Éric Zemmour is now a major actor on the French political scene and is likely to remain so after the presidential election, moving the ‘Overton window’ on his chosen issues. Zemmour has been tagged by much of the mainstream media with the label ‘extrême droite’ – and rightly so – placing him in the same corner of the political spectrum as the Le Pen family’s Rassemblement National (RN). There are, however, some differences between the two, which have facilitated Zemmour’s rise. Zemmour is a singular personality for an aspirant to the presidency polling in the double digits, as, in addition to never having run for election or exercised any governmental function, he has never been a card-carrying member of a political party or engaged in political militancy of any kind. He thus enters the race without the baggage of a far-right past or carrying a redhibitory ‘lepeniste’ millstone around his neck. Zemmour is, as one knows, a journalist-writer-amateur historian, who has spent his entire career in the mainstream media: national dailies, notably Le Figaro (France’s Daily Telegraph and The Times wrapped into one); as a morning editorialist on the radio station RTL, favoured by voters of the right; and with regular slots on mass-audience evening television talk shows and as a debate-show host on CNews (whose proprietor, Vincent Bolloré, is France’s answer to Rupert Murdoch). These alone have made him, without question, France’s most recognizable, high-profile journalist since the mid 2000s. As a reporter at Le Figaro, Zemmour’s beat, as it were, was the political right. He thus got to know every last personality of consequence in the different formations of the right – and pretty much on the left as well – forging amicable relations with many (his latest book, La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot, reveals the names of some of the fine Parisian restaurants where Zemmour broke bread with this or that politician or behind-the-scenes operator). In addition to the political class and grands corps of the state, Zemmour also developed a voluminous carnet d’adresse among CEOs and other high-flyers in the corporate world, where he is well-introduced – and which is benefitting him considerably in his presidential bid. In short, Zemmour is, unlike Marine Le Pen and her father, not an outsider in Paris’ elite political world. He has not been a man with whom one does not want to be seen in public.
Zemmour’s media-fueled notoriety was cemented by his best-selling books (he’s published some twenty), which, despite the length of some (500 pages or over), are reader-friendly, where he offers his singular, decidedly polemical views on modern French politics, society, and culture, in short chapters that read like extended blog posts, arranged in chronological order and written in a breezy, agreeable style. The leitmotif of his œuvre is the decline of France; for Zemmour, it’s been all downhill for France since at least the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War, which consecrated the global primacy of England – Zemmour rarely calls France’s cross-Channel neighbour Great Britain, and never the United Kingdom – and set in motion the continental supremacy of Prussia/Germany in the following century. Napoleon Bonaparte – a Zemmour hero – tried to rectify matters but in extending the continental empire beyond France’s ‘natural’ borders, which includes Belgium, Luxembourg, the German Rhineland, and northwestern Italy – for Zemmour, these lands are still French, in his mind at least – was too ambitious, with the world-historical defeat at Waterloo the ultimate consequence. After 1815 it was definitively over for France’s vocation to be the dominant nation on the European continent, which was really terrible, as France had been the ‘beating heart of Europe, and thus of the world, for a thousand years’. France was Europe. The expanding colonial empire did not reverse the decline. Zemmour is not a partisan of colonialism, asserting that the English got the best parts of the world and with France’s colonial conquests yielding little of value apart from soldiers for its wars – and with post-colonial immigration creating big problems for France later on.
If France’s decline was terminal by the 20th century – when it went from being a historical ‘subject’ to an ‘object’, an ‘actor’ to a ‘spectator’, ‘withdrawing quietly from History’ – the era following the death of Zemmour’s hero and model, Charles de Gaulle, was the coup de grâce. In his 2014 mega best-seller (500,000 copies) Le Suicide français, Zemmour offers an apocalyptic tour d’horizon of France from 1970 through the 2000s, when absolutely everything that happened in or to the country – politically, economically, socially, culturally, even technologically – was negative to downright catastrophic. Among the calamities to afflict France – and which give an idea of Zemmour’s world-view – were the 1970 law establishing equality in the family between husband and wife, thus ending the primacy of paternal authority; the 1971 end of the Bretton Woods system, inaugurating a finance-dominated ‘liberalized, globalized, free trade world, to which France had to submit’; the entry of ‘England’ into the European Economic Community, as America’s ‘Trojan horse’ (N.B. Zemmour is not an Atlanticist or Americanophile); the 1972 anti-hate speech Pleven law, signifying the ‘end of freedom of expression in France’; the emergence of a ‘gay lobby’ and which became all the more powerful in the 1980s; the emergence of the ecology movement; the 1973 law limiting the ability of the state to borrow at low interest rates from the Banque de France, bringing about the quiet end of ‘Colbertism’ and the ‘vieux monde économique français’; the publication of the translation of Robert Paxton’s Vichy France; the law authorizing divorce by mutual consent, ensuing in large part from the underhanded effort by ‘American capitalism’ to ‘destroy the father figure’; the Royer law, which, in the guise of protecting small shops, facilitated the proliferation of large retailers, with ‘urban degradation’ and ‘malbouffe’ (junk food) the consequence; the Veil law legalizing abortion; the 1976 Haby law on middle schools, ending the precocious tracking of working-class and rural children into vocational education and manual employment; the shift, so perceived by Zemmour, in French cinema, from portraying ordinary Frenchmen and women positively to portraying them negatively, as narrow-minded and racist, not to mention feminizing the image of the ‘white heterosexual male’; the 1979 layoff of 20,000 steelworkers, symbolizing the irreversible decline of French heavy industry…
And that’s only the 1970s. The litany of French misfortune into the 1980s and beyond includes, to cite just a few, the broadcasting on television (entirely public at the time) of the series Dallas, ‘a redoubtable weapon in the colonization of minds, which the Americans call soft power’; the arrival on the market of the personal computer (invented in America); the emergence of the anti-racist movement among second-generation youths of Maghrebi origin; in 1989, the American-style parade on the Champs-Élysées on the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the Islamic headscarf affair in Creil, and the fall of the Berlin wall – rendering inevitable the reunification of Germany – all signifying ‘the defeat of the Grande Nation’ that was France; the Évin law that sought to counter alcoholism and tobacco consumption; rap music; the Maastricht Treaty and its implementation, meaning that ‘the French people were now all alone in the face of globalization’; the European Court of Justice’s Bosman ruling, allowing professional football players the unlimited right to sign contracts with clubs anywhere in Europe (so France’s best left for wealthier clubs in other countries, with French clubs replacing them with players from Africa) ; the abolition of military conscription; the 2000 reorganization of the Airbus aerospace corporation as an ‘Anglo-Saxon-style enterprise’, which, for France, was ‘a defeat’; the 2001 election of the gay Socialist Bertrand Delanoë as mayor of Paris and its transformation into a ‘global city’ (and thus less of a French one) and gentrified playground for ‘bobos’; China’s admission to the WTO, which all but finished off French industry; and one gets the idea.
The list of France’s setbacks is inexhaustible. While France’s existential enemies – the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (England and America) and Germany (the Prussian part of it) – never let up in their existential efforts to undermine her – to reduce France to vassaldom and insignificance – the veritable culprits are contemporary French elites, of the left and right both – it was indeed a ‘suicide’, after all – who sold France out to globalization, economic liberalism, multiculturalism, and all the other ills execrated by Zemmour. This world-view is par for the course on the far right, though while most of his viewpoints meet with nodding heads in his corner of the political spectrum, a few are unexpected. E.g., the speech by Dominique de Villepin, President Chirac’s foreign minister, at the United Nations Security Council on 14 February 2003, expressing France’s opposition to America’s planned invasion of Iraq. The speech was applauded by all who opposed the US administration’s bellicose policy and received near unanimous praise in France. It was a high moment for France’s moral standing in the world. But Zemmour, who otherwise entirely agreed with the French position, didn’t like Villepin’s speech, finding it too pacifist in tone and with its starry-eyed talk of respecting international law and norms, of always preferring peace to war. No great power worthy of the name would put forth such a peacenik discourse, Zemmour implied, and certainly no self-respecting Gaullist. Villepin was presenting France as Venus, to borrow Robert Kagan’s metaphor, whereas for Zemmour, France is Mars (or should be).
In his lament over France’s forty-year ‘suicide’, Zemmour counter-intuitively expresses regret at the inexorable decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of the French Communist Party (PCF), and with kind words for its proletarian secretary-general of the era, Georges Marchais. The PCF was the leading party of the working class – taking 20 to 25 percent of the vote in most elections in the postwar period through the 1970s – which Zemmour, who idolizes ordinary working Frenchmen and women, respected, and despite his anti-communism. And the French Communists, despite their slavish alignment with the Soviet Union, were France-first patriots and whose economic productivism was entirely compatible with the dirigiste model of the Gaullist era, which Zemmour so idealizes. But most importantly for Zemmour was the PCF’s sounding the alarm, from the late 1970s, on the deleterious effects of immigration – from the African continent, though such was not said out loud – which was negatively impacting on wages and the labour market for French workers, or so it was claimed. Moreover, PCF mayors in the Paris region’s ‘red belt’ were reporting, so Zemmour says, on the big problems that were ensuing from the government’s policy of encouraging family reunification, with migrants from Mali, Senegal, Morocco, and other ex-colonies sending for their wives (sometimes more than one per husband) and numerous children, which was altering the ethno-racial physiognomy of working class banlieues around French cities – and was a contributing factor in the 1980s defection of PCF voters to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN).
Zemmour’s nostalgia for the PCF in its heyday clearly differentiates him from the classic extrême-droite of the FN/RN, which would never say anything nice about the ‘socialo-communistes’. That Zemmour is a dyed-in-the wool reactionary goes without saying – and which he will readily admit himself (on this score, he has written ‘I still live in 1800’). He incontestably radicalized from the mid-2000s – reflected in the title of journalist Étienne Girard’s inquiry on him [footnote: Étienne Girard, Le Radicalisé: Enquête sur Éric Zemmour (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2021)] – but prior to that his political outlook situated him squarely in the nationalist, Eurosceptic souverainiste camp of the parliamentary right that emerged during the 1992 referendum campaign over the Maastricht Treaty, whose leading figure of the time was the late neo-Gaullist political heavyweight Philippe Séguin (for whom Zemmour expresses great affection). Zemmour identifies, even nowadays, with the old, neo-Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) founded by Jacques Chirac in 1976 – of which LR is the successor – and which, from Zemmour’s standpoint, had healthy Eurosceptic reflexes until Chirac sold out in endorsing the Maastricht Treaty. The souverainiste current also has a kindred counterpart on the left – identified early on with Jean-Pierre Chevènement and with which Jean-Luc Mélenchon came to be associated in the mid-2000s – and with bridges to souverainistes of the right, explaining in part Zemmour’s past friendly relations with certain personalities on the other side of the political spectrum (including Mélenchon).
Zemmour’s radicalization may be seen in his rhetoric on two issues. One – and on which much ink has been spilled, in both France and Anglophone coverage – is his treatment of the Second World War and effort to rehabilitate Philippe Pétain and the Vichy regime, which Zemmour in no way sees as being in contradiction with his exaltation of Charles de Gaulle. In this, Zemmour is upholding the discredited thesis of Robert Aron – which was predominant in the 1950s and ‘60s – of de Gaulle and Pétain having, in effect, operated in tandem – despite the latter having had the former sentenced to death – as the ‘sword and shield’ (glaive et bouclier) in the face of the German occupation, and with Pétain surreptitiously reconstituting the French army in North Africa into a fighting force that, at the opportune moment (and with Italy having quit the Axis), would resume the war against Germany. With the war over and France having regained her sovereignty, Pétain would have unveiled a new constitution for France very much like the one crafted for de Gaulle and implemented in 1958. As for the deportation of the Jews, Zemmour insists that Vichy did not wish to aid the Germans in the endeavour, only doing so to save old stock French Jews by assisting in the round-up of foreign Jews (many who had been naturalized in the late 1920s and ‘30s but then stripped of their French citizenship by Vichy), but which was nonetheless a solely German operation commanded by the Gestapo. Pétain and the Vichy regime thus had nothing to reproach themselves for on this score. Zemmour goes so far as to also let Vichy off the hook for the 1940 and 1941 anti-Semitic laws (Statuts des Juifs), which were even more draconian than Nazi Germany’s 1935 Nuremburg laws. That the Statuts des Juifs were enacted with no pressure from the Germans – which is an indisputable fact – does not prevent Zemmour from insisting that there was indeed implicit pressure from the occupation authorities, that if Vichy had not taken action against the Jews, Germany would have likely invaded the ‘free zone’, thereby occupying all of France (which it did anyway in November 1942). For good measure, Zemmour adds – and he has said so publicly – that Jews in 1930s France were perhaps getting a little too powerful and overbearing, with recent Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe a little too visible on the streets of Paris, and that this naturally rubbed ordinary Frenchmen and women the wrong way. This coming from a Jew himself.
Zemmour’s writings and public words on Pétain and Vichy have, needless to say, been rubbished by professional historians who have conducted primary research on the subject – which Zemmour has not – among them Laurent Joly, Simon Epstein, Patrick Weil, and Robert Paxton himself, whose aforementioned 1972 book – and follow-up 1981 Vichy France and the Jews, co-authored with Michael Marrus – blew apart the heretofore dominant interpretation of Robert Aron. When the French translation was published, the initial reaction among Paris critics was on the order of ‘Who does this American think he is to come and tell us about our history?’, but which rapidly gave way to overwhelming praise and acceptance, and with the consequent change in the historical paradigm in regard to the dark years of Vichy and the occupation. Thus Zemmour’s fixation on Paxton – and Serge Klarsfeld – and what Zemmour calls the Paxtonian ‘doxa’, whose hegemonic stature on the subject is lodged like a figurative fishbone in Zemmour’s throat, leading him to some unexpected takes, e.g. his review in Le Suicide français of Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au revoir, les enfants, which may well be the most powerful ever made on the German occupation of France and the deportation of the Jews. While the film has been acclaimed by all and sundry, Zemmour gives it the thumbs down, critiquing it for, among other things, its apparent seeking to impose a sentiment of collective guilt on the French people for what happened to the Jews in France.
And then there’s Zemmour’s outright denunciation of President Chirac’s 16 July 1995 speech on the anniversary of the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, in which he assumed responsibility in the name of the French state for the deportation of the Jews. That the Jews on that day were rounded up by the Paris police, acting on orders from Vichy and with no logistical support from the German occupation authorities, is an uncontroversial fact, but for Zemmour, Chirac’s speech constituted an unacceptable rupture with Gaullist dogma – plus that of François Mitterrand – which had it that the legitimacy of the French state during the occupation resided in London with de Gaulle, not in Vichy, and that France thus had nothing to apologize for after the war. Zemmour’s ire at Chirac’s apology was shared by neo-Gaullist souverainistes at the time but he is pretty much alone in continuing to express it nowadays.
The second big issue on which Zemmour’s radicalization is manifest is immigration and Islam, and the grave threat these are seen to pose for France’s national identity, indeed to France tout court. With identity Muslims in France numbering some four to five million – upwards of 90 percent with origins in former French colonies on the African continent – and approximately seven percent of the population – higher than any other Western country whose Muslim population is the product of immigration – the question of Islam and its increasing visibility has obsessed the French political and chattering classes – across the board on the right and to the centre-left – since the 1980s. The consensual view – from the Socialists to Macron, LR, and the RN – is that it is Islamism and ‘Islamist separatism’ that pose a danger to France, not Islam as a religion, which, one is repeatedly assured, is not incompatible with the values of the Republic or of French society more generally. And there is no question of stigmatizing Muslims as individuals. That Islamism in fact has no public presence in France, that no political or civil society movement of French Muslims advocating Shari’a law or ‘separating’ from the Republic even exists, has little bearing on the ongoing obsession. There are indeed Salafists and plenty of headscarf-wearing women in banlieue-ghettos around French cities – notably in the department of the Seine-Seine-Denis on Paris’ northern and eastern rim – but they are not visible to those who do not live or work in those areas or have no occasion to visit. Salafists are out of sight for the near totality of those who fret about their presence in banlieues and other localities they never set foot in. The notion that political Islam poses a challenge, not to mention a threat, to the French Republic is a figment of the collective imagination. In this respect, one notes that the Islamic umbrella organization Musulmans de France – which has been linked since the 1980s to the transnational Muslim Brotherhood and whose annual weekend get-together at the vast Parc des Expositions in Le Bourget attracts tens of thousands of pious Muslims – is never designated by politicians, even on the hard right, as a vector of Islamism and that should consequently be banned by the Ministry of Interior. (To digress, one recalls interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy cultivating a privileged relationship in 2003-04 with the organization, known at the time by the acronym UOIF). It may be added parenthetically that there is not a single political or civil society movement of French Muslims, or a single Muslim personality of any public consequence, who contests the principle of laïcité as spelled out in the law of 1905. Not one. [footnote: On French laïcité, of what it is and how to understand it, see Patrick Weil, De la laïcité en France (Paris: Grasset, 2021)]
For Zemmour, however, the danger to France is not an Islamism of the imagination but of Islam tout court: of the religion itself, and that he does not differentiate from Islamism, asserting that they are one and the same. He insists that he does not have anything against Muslims as individuals but his discourse over the years suggests otherwise. Zemmour’s fixation on Islam is, of course, well known to all in France with a minimal interest in politics, but many perhaps do not know the extent of it. In 2016 Zemmour published a 540-page compendium of his morning RTL editorials, Un quinquennat pour rien, with a previously unpublished 37-page introduction titled ‘France and the challenge of Islam’ (La France au défi de l’islam). The book, which was mainly of interest to Zemmour’s die-hard fans, was not a best-seller and the reviews of it made little mention of the introduction, so it largely passed under the media’s radar screen. The introductory chapter is, however, quite arresting, for the virulence of Zemmour’s views and how he proposed to confront the challenge of Islam. Written in the wake of the January 2015 terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket, and then the 13 November massacre, Zemmour declared that these were the opening salvo in a ‘French civil war, indeed a European one’, constituting an unprecedented ‘challenge to European civilization in its heartland’.
Civil wars involve bloodletting among the population of a state, with armed men and women, and thousands of casualties – and, in modern French history, preceded by the invasion of a foreign army (1793-94, 1871, 1944-45). The foreign invaders nowadays are jihadists of Islam, most lately the 2015 ISIS terrorists, whom Zemmour does not differentiate from the Muslim population of France, as Islam and its adepts are of the same essence everywhere, as are the battles in Islam’s eternal war against all that is not Islam. The reification of Islam and essentialization of Muslims is on another level here. The struggle of the FLN ‘mujahideen’ during the Algerian war of independence, who were ‘combatants for jihad chasing away infidels from a land of Islam that had been sullied by the infidels’ presence’, is thus of a piece with the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that has been underway throughout France since the 1970s, which has seen ‘Français de souche’ (i.e. native ‘white’ French) and the ‘descendents of assimilated European immigrants’ in effect expelled from their homes, ‘by violence, threats, theft, rape, and insults’, thereby facilitating ‘the conquest of enclaves in France now under the thumb of Islam’. Moreover, all that represents or symbolizes France – the ‘police, fire fighters, doctors, nurses, letter carriers, even simple delivery personnel’ – are seen in these enclaves as ‘agents of a foreign, colonizing state’.
That this perception of reality is, objectively speaking, a delirious fantasy that exists only in Zemmour’s head is beside the point, as he and his many fans – and including more than a few who are not fans – believe it to be reality, and no amount of social scientific or informed journalistic inquiries will change their minds (not that they are likely to read them in any case). In a recent televised debate, Zemmour offered as evidence for his dystopian portrait of the Islam-controlled enclaves the 2021 hit movie BAC Nord (English title: The Stronghold), an action thriller about three cops who take on drug trafficking gangs in the tough housing projects of Marseille’s quartiers nord. A work of fiction – and with, as it happens, nary a mention of Islam or jihad.
Though Islam is waging war against all that is not Islam, Zemmour underscores the special place of France in the Islamic imaginaire. Citing the islamologue Gilles Kepel, we learn that, for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are the Jews, the Crusades, communism, and laïcité, all of which have a French lineage: France being the first European nation to emancipate the Jews, France having launched the Crusades, the 1871 Paris Commune serving as a model for communism, and France upholding laïcité as a principle and ‘art de vivre’. For all this, Paris and France must be hit hard. France must be hurt and with vengeance wreaked upon it, debased and humiliated, and then vanquished and conquered. Following all this, France, ‘after it has been thrown into the flames of hell’, must be Islamized.
Participating in this ‘hybrid war’ against France, it must be added, are the waves of refugees and other migrants fleeing wars and state collapse in the Islamic world, considered by Zemmour to be faux refugees and bogus migrants, who are, in reality, soldiers without uniform spearheading an invading army of Islam, in an asymmetric invasion without tanks or aircraft but that is of a redoubtable efficaciousness nonetheless, bearing out the ‘literary prophecy’ of Jean Raspail’s 1973 The Camp of the Saints – a novel that was heretofore confined to the ultra right fringe but is now read in respectable conservative company. And in the vanguard of this Islamic army were the million-odd Syrians who descended on Europe in 2015, receiving critical assistance from carefully crafted propaganda operations – such as the photo of the ‘little Aylan’ washed up on the beach in Turkey, melting hearts among the beaux esprits across the Western world – and, above all, the perfidious decision by Germany to throw open the door to the faux migrants and so-called refugees, decisively contributing for the third time in a century (the first two in 1914 and 1939) to ‘the European suicide’. So while it is mainly France that has committed suicide, it is not only.
That Zemmour considers Islam to be ‘incompatible with France’, which he asserts more than once, goes without saying. And he makes it clear that he does not believe that Islam can be modernized, as supposedly moderate Islamic theologians and thinkers do not seek to modernize Islam but rather to Islamize modernity. As for individual Muslims, who practice or identify with a religion Zemmour baldly calls an ‘enemy’ of France, he leaves the door open a crack in offering them the possibility of ‘assimilation’ into the French nation, which, at minimum, would oblige Muslims to transform their practice of the religion into a purely private one – as if the great majority don’t already do this – invisible in the public square, ‘a simple spirituality, ahistorical, and apolitical’, as Napoleon Bonaparte demanded and received from Judaism. Zemmour is fond of repeating the line from Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous 1789 speech, ‘We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals’. The same line should be pronounced for Muslims – who ‘must choose between Islam and France’ – but such is impossible, as for Muslims, Islam is a nation, while being a religion, a system of law, and civilization as well. For Islam to be relegated to the strictly private sphere and as a simple spirituality is, Zemmour informs us, ‘vehemently rejected by 99 percent of Muslims’. No less. So much for assimilation.
Zemmour sums up his conception of assimilation in the shopworn proverb, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, which, in the Rome of Antiquity, he reminds us, translated into the obligation for new citizens to wear the toga and Latinize their names. For France today, this means two big things, the first being the interdiction of any garment or other manifestation of religiosity in public space – defined as space outside the home and places of worship – which of course means the hijab, even the simplest headscarf or bandana worn by a pious Muslim woman. That such an interdiction is manifestly unconstitutional and would subject France to international opprobrium, not to mention provoke mass civil disobedience and majorly complicate France’s relations with the Islamic world, is of zero concern to Zemmour. The second – and a veritable Zemmourian obsession – would be the legal obligation of parents to give a newborn child a French first name, as mandated in the 1803 law proclaimed by Bonaparte – formally abrogated in 1993, to Zemmour’s consternation, but to be immediately reinstated in his presidency – which restricted authorized first names to ones figuring in ‘the various calendars, and those of known figures from ancient history’, the principal calendar being that of Catholic saints. Muslims would thus be obliged to give their children Christian names (when asked if Zinedine Zidane should have instead been named, say, ‘Jean Zidane’, Zemmour said yes). But not only does Zemmour misconstrue the 1803 law, which specified ‘various’ (divers) calendars – and made no explicit reference to the Catholic one – it was never applied to Muslims born in metropolitan France or anywhere else in the French empire, who have never been obliged to give their children Christian names.
On these two matters – and on that of assimilation more generally – Zemmour’s deep convictions are informed by his experience of growing up as a Jew in France in the 1960s and ‘70s, whose parents migrated from Algeria (where Zemmour has never set foot) to the Paris banlieue before the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence in 1954 – whose dénouement in 1962 led to the departure to France of almost all of Algeria’s 135,000 Jews. In his 2018 book Le Destin français, he describes a childhood in an observant, Conservative (traditionaliste) family, where the rites of Judaism were practiced in the home, synagogue, and at school – he attended Jewish schools through lycée – but with no outward displays of religiosity in public. The yarmulke was not worn on the street, as israélites – which is how assimilated Jews in France were referred to until the end of the Second World War – respected, indeed adhered to, the implicit strictures in laïque France in regard to ostentatious religious symbols in public space. And such was a good thing, with immigrants from Italy, Spain, Poland, and other Christian lands – plus Algerian Kabyle Berbers, who, we learn from Zemmour, were only nominally Muslim – behaving likewise in the quest to assimilate into French society, effacing public manifestations of religious and what ‘Anglo-Saxons’ call ethnic identity, thus facilitating social harmony among all. Frenchmen and women may have torn themselves apart politically during the mythic trente glorieuses of Zemmour’s childhood, but otherwise everyone got along just fine, and particularly in the working class Paris banlieues of Drancy and Montreuil-sous-Bois where he grew up.
In assimilating into French society, Algerian Jews, in Zemmour’s recounting, had a head start, as the 1870 Crémieux decree that collectively granted them full French citizenship had been preceded by the rabbinate there accepting the primacy of French law over that of the Halakha and in all domains, as the Grand Sanhedrin convened by Emperor Napoleon I had earlier in the century (Zemmour claims that the same deal was on offer for Algeria’s Muslims but that such a secularization was naturally impossible for Islam). Algerian Jews – nine-tenths of whom were indigenous to Algeria, speaking Judeo-Arabic or Judeo-Berber – thus set about to Gallicize, adopting the French language, French styles of dress, and the like, imitating their israélite brethren in metropolitan France (that this did not stem the anti-Semitism of Algeria’s European settlers, who continued to amalgamate the Jews with the Muslim indigènes, is another matter). So when Algeria’s Jews arrived in metropolitan France en masse in 1962, they were 100 percent assimilated French.
In his personal hierarchy of identities, Zemmour is, it goes without saying, French above all and only very secondarily Jewish, which explains his sharp differentiation between French and foreign Jews during the occupation and backhanded apologizing for Vichy’s supposed sacrificing the latter to save the former. He indeed reproaches the ‘foreign’ Jews – who had immigrated to France from Eastern Europe over the previous six decades, far outnumbering old stock israélites by 1939 – for their non-assimilation, going so far as to explain away the anti-Semitism of the Action Française and its leading lights – Charles Maurras and Jacques Bainville being important intellectual references of his – as having been precisely driven by repugnance toward this non-assimilation – an anti-Semitism that was quite unlike the racialized variety of the Nazis. The anti-Semitism of the old French right largely became a thing of the past after the Second World War, so Zemmour claims – that he, a Jew, is now the presidential candidate of neo-Maurrasian Catholic traditionalists suggests that he may not be entirely wrong in this [footnote: See the cover article by Benjamin Sire in Franc-Tireur (17 November 2021)] – though the postwar era also saw, and to Zemmour’s dismay, French Jews abandoning their self-identification as israélites in favour of that as juifs, signifying that Jews had now adopted an explicit ethnic identity and no longer prioritized assimilation into French society. This is most starkly reflected in the strong identification of French Jews with Israel, which, for Zemmour, is a foreign country like any other, toward which he has no particular sentiments and, as Étienne Girard reports, never visits (his wife often does but he does not accompany her). Zemmour indeed deplores the overt, post-1967 Zionism of French Jews, as well as the increasing prevalence of Orthodox Judaism in the community (the product of the 1950s and ‘60s immigration of Jews from Morocco and Tunisia). The public celebrations of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and waving the Israeli flag is what, in Zemmour’s telling, provoked de Gaulle’s (in)famous 1967 petite phrase of the Jews being ‘an elite people, sure of itself, and dominating’. [footnote: In a later meeting with the Chief Rabbi of France, de Gaulle said that his words had been misunderstood and that, in his mind, he was in fact praising the Jews.] Zemmour’s disapproval of the strong identification with Israel – which in no way signifies sympathy with the Palestinians – leads him to criticize the peak association of French Jewry, the CRIF, for acting almost as a second Israeli embassy in Paris. In sum, Zemmour’s assimilationist obsessions extend to French Jews, with him considering adepts of the israélite model, namely old stock French Jews and Algerian Jews of the Crémieux decree, to be entirely assimilated into French society, but with ‘Ashkenazi Jews’ (with origins in Eastern Europe) – who control the CRIF – and Jews from Morocco and Tunisia – who predominate in religious education – being less so.
If assimilation means the effacing of all markers of difference, of melting into the crowd and ‘looking French’, this poses a thorny problem for those whose skin colour makes them not ‘look French’. And it is indeed a problem for Zemmour, who adheres to the notion of the ‘great replacement’ as conceptualized by the novelist Renaud Camus, which has it that a conspiracy is underfoot to replace white European populations with dark-skinned peoples from Africa and Asia. In supporting the contention that to be French is to indeed be ‘white’, Zemmour refers to the higher authority of de Gaulle, who, according to Alain Peyrefitte, once submitted that
It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They show that France is open to all races and that it has a universal vocation. But on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are first and foremost a European people of the white race…
Zemmour is also fond of quoting de Gaulle’s apparent late 1950s-early 1960s words to Peyrefitte on the Arab migrant hordes who would inevitably descend on metropolitan France were Algeria not cut loose and granted independence, of the village of his country home, Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, becoming ‘Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées’, and of trying to assimilate Algeria’s Muslims into French society akin to mixing oil and vinegar, which might appear to blend but will inevitably separate.
De Gaulle’s putative words were uttered privately to his close collaborators – Peyrefitte and Jean Foyer, in particular – who then divulged them well after the fact (and de Gaulle’s death). It is known that de Gaulle considered only his public statements and what he put down on paper to reflect his veritable thinking, though this is an irrelevant detail for Zemmour, who in any case does not need quotes by great men or statistical data to support his insistence that the ‘great replacement’ is underway. In a half-hour interview on the public radio station France Inter on 16 December 2021, Zemmour offered as proof of the ‘great replacement’ what one sees daily on the street, in the metro, on the train, in cafés, at the post office, in schools, in short, in public life in France: lots of swarthy and dark-skinned people, who are ‘colonizing visual space’ and are simply everywhere. Zemmour looks at a group of non-white people and, without wanting to know anything about them – who they are, what they do – essentializes them and sees their very presence in his midst as a problem, indeed a threat to France. He judges them not by the content of their character but by the colour of their skin. There is a word for this, which is racism. Éric Zemmour is a bona fide racist by any commonly accepted definition of the term. Jean-Marie Le Pen and Donald Trump, to cite two kindred personalities to whom Zemmour has been compared, have not publicly spoken about people of colour in the way Zemmour does regularly. Incitement to racial hatred is proscribed in France under the 1972 Pleven law – a law Zemmour naturally wishes to abrogate – for which he has been prosecuted several times and convicted twice (so far). Whether or not the candidacy to the presidency of the French republic of a hate speech recidivist should even be legally permitted is a question that has yet to be posed.
Of a piece with Zemmour’s racism is his obsession with ‘foreigners’ (étrangers) living in France, whether undocumented or legally (and including students). Sounding tough on immigration is par for the course for politicians on the right – and even for some on the left – but none vituperate against les étrangers with Zemmour’s virulence, who are so obsessively determined as is he, should he have the chance, to rid France of their presence. If Zemmour is a racist, he is also a xenophobe, a label one hesitates to affix even to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has visited many countries and speaks English to boot. By contrast, Zemmour rarely leaves the Paris area, where he has lived his entire life. According to Étienne Girard, he spends summer vacations on the Côte d’Azur, winter holidays in the Dominican Republic (Club Med), and, in his early 20s, went to New York a few times to visit an American girlfriend met at Sciences Po; otherwise, there is little indication that he has traveled much even inside France, let alone abroad. And while he certainly learned Hebrew in school, he does not read in foreign languages and his spoken English is reportedly poor.
Zemmour’s racism and xenophobia are not new. He has been harping away on his obsessions in regard to immigration, Islam, and France’s identity for years, and while these have subjected him to opprobrium on the left – as well as in sectors of the right. [footnote: See, e.g., the powerful guest essay in Le Monde (15 October 2021) by President Chirac’s last chief-of-staff, Frédéric Salat-Baroux, “‘Le risque de guerre civile, Eric Zemmour n’y répond pas, il le crée’.”] – he maintained his high-profile perches in the mainstream media and whose opinions were considered, if edgy, not beyond the pale. The contrast with Jean-Marie Le Pen in his heyday – who was relegated to the political margins and excluded from polite company – is noteworthy, even though, in his anti-immigration discourse, he never spoke about Islam or Muslims (or even Islamism, for that matter). [footnote: While Jean-Marie Le Pen incontestably does not care for Jews, anti-Semitism was not a part of his or his party’s rhetoric; and in regard to his more notorious utterances, such as the Holocaust having been a ‘detail’ of the Second World War, Zemmour has defended Le Pen.] As for Marine Le Pen, Zemmour’s candidacy has achieved the remarkable – and disquieting – feat of making her appear almost moderate. How Zemmour managed to maintain his relative respectability may be explained by the simple fact that, in addition to being a Jew, his obsessions are also those of the French political class more generally; he merely takes commonly-held positions on the right and part of the centre-left and pushes them to their outer limit.
On the question of assimilation, this exigency is not only implicit in the universal conception of the French nation, but, as the historian-demographer Emmanuel Todd posits, has an almost anthropological basis as well. In his typology of historic family types across the world, Todd stipulates that the prevailing family structure in northern France – and centred in the Paris basin – which he labels the ‘egalitarian nuclear family’, carries with it the precept of equality among all people, of ‘l’homme universel’ – the ethos of the French Revolution and the French republican model that ensued – but with the flip side of this being pressure on individuals to efface all markers of difference. Persons who are equal must resemble one another. There are, however, other family types with ancient roots in France, notably what Todd calls the ‘stem family’, predominating in parts of the country where religious observance has been particularly strong, which is authoritarian, unequal, and not assimilationist. The consequence of these contradictory, anthropologically-driven attitudes toward assimilation in the same polity, Todd argues, is a happy tension that paradoxically sees the dominant ideology of republican universalism and its assimilationist ethos benevolently allowing for the persistence of important, even fundamental cultural differences in its midst. [footnote: Emmanuel Todd, Le Destin des immigrés: Assimilation et segregation dans les démocraties occidentales (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994); also see his La Diversité du monde: Famille et modernité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).] The result of this happy tension is a France that, ideological appearances to the contrary and not to deny the reality of discrimination , is exceptionally tolerant of diversity and markers of difference – as much, if not more so, as any country to which it could rightly be compared – and which has, moreover, been highly successful in integrating the large numbers of immigrants from former colonies who have arrived on its shores over the past century. In his crude rhetoric on assimilation and immigration, Éric Zemmour reveals that he fundamentally misunderstands his own society.
The expectation of immigrant assimilation gave way in the 1980s to that of ‘integration’ and ‘the right to difference’, but with the term ‘assimilation’ making a comeback in the early 2010s on the right, notably by Nicolas Sarkozy and others in his party. The discourse on assimilation has indeed become dominant on that side of the political spectrum, as with several pamphlet-style books on the theme by right-leaning authors hitting the bookshops of late, so Zemmour is hardly alone in his obsession. [footnote: Anne Chemin, “Face aux craintes de l’islam politique, la notion d’’assimilation’ fait son retour,” Le Monde (31 March 2021).] That the political-intellectual-media class – across the board on the right and well into the left – shares the Zemmourian fixation in regard to the apparent non-assimilation/integration of Muslims may also be seen in the ubiquitous use of the term ‘communautarisme’ whenever the subject is publicly broached. A neologism devoid of social scientific value and which does not translate into English (‘communitarianism’ and ‘communalism’ are different phenomena) or any other language, the word did not even exist in the French language before the 1980s and did not figure in the two standard dictionaries of the French language through at least the 1990s, emerging in polemical discourse with the increasing visibility of the Islamic headscarf. [footnote: For a social scientific discussion of the concept, see Fabrice Dhume-Sonzogni, Communautarisme: Enquête sur une chimère du nationalisme français (Paris: Demopolis, 2016)] The latest edition of Le Nouveau Petit Robert thus offers this definition: ‘Tendency to accord primacy to the specificities of a community or communities (ethnic, religious, cultural, social) over that of the larger social whole [i.e. of the national community writ large]’. Whatever this is supposed to mean, communautarisme is considered a scourge by those who speak about it, with only Muslims – who do not, in fact, constitute a ‘community’ in any sense of the term – being tarred with the disreputable label. And this despite the fact that certain immigrant-origin populations – Armenians and Orthodox Jews, to name two – engage in behavior that could easily be tagged as communautariste by politicians, but are never.
In his latest book, Zemmour cites the names of major political figures, including on the left, who he claims privately share his general assessment of immigration and Islam, some of whom have actively solicited his policy recommendations, among them Emmanuel Macron, François Hollande, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, and Xavier Bertrand. Zemmour’s policy prescriptions on immigration would involve the ending of the following: the issuance of almost all residence cards; family reunification, so that legally resident foreigners – and even French citizens who marry non-citizens – would not be able to live in France with their spouses; the principle of jus soli in nationality acquisition (in effect since 1889), which would thus obligate persons born and raised in France to foreign parents to naturalize at their majority, the procedures and rules for which are sure to be draconian; dual nationality for non-Europeans; social benefits for non-citizens (which they have nonetheless paid taxes for); and almost all student visas and asylum requests. Moreover, dual nationals convicted of crimes and misdemeanors (presumably including minor drug offenses) would be stripped of their French citizenship, and with the ‘national preference’ for citizens in employment implemented (this being a long-standing revindication of the French extreme-right). Many of these prescriptions are advocated by the hard-right flank of LR, notably by Éric Ciotti, who squared off against Valérie Pécresse in the second round of the LR primary. Even former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls has called for suspending family reunification, among other restrictionist measures. Zemmour, though he pushes the envelope on the issue, has plenty of company on the wave on which he is surfing.
In the introduction to his 2016 Un quinquennat pour rien, Zemmour declares that the ‘civilizational war’ with Islam that France is engaged in can only be won with a protracted ‘cultural revolution’, via a modern-day ‘Kulturkampf, a combat for civilization’. More practically, a ‘state of cultural emergency’ must be decreed, that would ‘render inoperative all jurisprudence enacted in the name of human rights, to stop the invasion and colonization of our land, if there is still time’, and with the rule of law giving way ‘to protect the nation in peril’. As for the constitutionality of what Zemmour proposes, he has, in true Bonapartist style, promised a referendum immediately following his election to curtail the authority of courts and judges to block his initiatives and measures – in effect, allowing him to rule as a dictator. In the event of a high participation second round pitting Zemmour against Macron or Pécresse, Zemmour will certainly lose. But if a sizable percentage of voters of the left were to stay home, resulting in a precipitous drop in the participation rate, a Zemmour victory, though still unlikely, cannot be excluded out of hand. The future of French democracy is truly at stake this coming April.
Congrats! Will read with interest.
Looking forward to reading this.
Reading done. Great job. My only regret is that you were not offered the chance to write 8 000 words about a nobler and more interesting character. Zemmour is just a new furunculum on France’s backside. It is very unpleasant, but it can be treated. But if it had to deal with the French Right-Right, then I think that the strategic reversal of mama Marine Le Pen, deeply moving as the good candidate flying to the rescue of the widow and the orphan, the forgotten, the anonymous and the abandoned, should have caught the attention of your sponsors rather than follow the buzz of the Z shit fly.