‘My 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:
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