Zemmour Rises

‘M y parents assimilated, so why won’t Muslims?”

That is the constantly restated refrain from Éric Zemmour, who announced his candidacy for the French presidency this week. In a melodramatic video set to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, he said the French people were waking up to name the feeling that had welled up inside them, a feeling of “dispossession,” the recognition that the country they lived in was no longer their own. They still had in their hearts the memory of another country, the one that they had known in their childhood or had told their own children about. And here it is worth quoting at length:

You remember the country found in films and books. The country of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV. The country of Bonaparte and General de Gaulle.

The country of knights and ladies. The country of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand. The country of Pascal and Descartes. The country of the fables of La Fontaine, the characters of Molière, and the verses of Racine.

The country of Notre Dame de Paris and of village church towers. The country of Gavroche and Cosette. The country of barricades and Versailles. The country of Pasteur and Lavoisier.

On through the centuries he went, calling out the names of the characters, types, and achievements of France, before working himself up.

This country — at the same time light-hearted and illustrious. This country — at the same time literary and scientific. This country — truly intelligent and one-of-a-kind. The country of the Concorde and nuclear power. The country that invented cinema and the automobile. This country — that you search for everywhere with dismay. No, your children are homesick, without even having known this country that you cherish. And it is disappearing.

Zemmour is often called the Trump of France because he is against mass immigration, and he’s a popular figure known from television. But he’s much more than that. He is a populist intellectual, the author of best-selling history books and the son of Berber Jewish immigrants from Algeria. He has been arrested for — though not convicted of — hate-speech crimes. He finds things that are unsayable, and then he says them. “Right and left have lied and concealed the gravity of our diminishment,” he said in his speech. “They have hidden from you the reality of our replacement.”

What Éric Zemmour is doing — perhaps more aggressively than any contender for office before — is explicitly putting the question of Islam into the center of French politics, where it has existed as an anxiety for decades. And, in truth, it cannot any longer be ignored. Nearly 70 percent of the prison population of France is Muslim.

And he is likely to be a much more formidable opponent of President Emmanuel Macron than is Marine Le Pen, the leader and inheritor of the far-right political party that is now named National Rally. Zemmour, just by being who he is — a man of Jewish extraction, and tracing his roots to Algeria — is a more politically correct choice than the more native nativists. And yet, his slightly outsider status gives him greater freedom of expression and freedom of provocation.

It gives him something else. France has had within itself a divided memory. There is the France of tradition — the first daughter of the Church, the France of Joan of Arc. And there is Revolutionary France, the nation that led Europe finally out of the Middle Ages and into modernity. It was only the experience of two world wars and existential conflict with Germany that produced a man who seemed to embody both visions of France. That man was Charles de Gaulle. When a man like Éric Zemmour defends the France of tradition, he is going a long way toward proving the viability of Revolutionary France’s concept of citizenship.

Zemmour’s announcement was dramatic, and slightly dark. He reached as deep into the well of nationalist rhetoric as one can go. He called out the media, the EU, academia, and all the elites, compiling them together as one “cold and determined monster” rising up to dishonor the citizens of the real France. But he needs to also play up the sense of merry, swashbuckling adventure that was part of de Gaulle’s brand of politics.

And he will also need to go deeper. What exactly would he have the Muslims who live in France do? The French state has tried to build up institutions to make Islam more like the Catholic Church that French secularism knows how to contain and barter with. This has failed. Recent presidents have tried to push the secular vision harder in French education. This is also failing.

And there would be no talk of “replacement,” of course, if French people themselves were reproducing themselves. The French nation would be heading toward diminishment even without migration, just as Japan and South Korea are.

Zemmour held out that in his beloved France, “The charm of our art of living excites longing and joy in all who taste it.”

Benjamin Franklin recognized the appeal of this way of living. “Every man has two countries — his own and France,” he is reputed to have said. But the scandal of the present in France is that its way of life has not seduced the people who have moved to and made their lives in France. It is a failure that the French have not truly apprehended and that elected governments will have a devil of a time addressing. Can a minority population be “converted” into living for simple pleasures à la bonne franquette? By what force?