Since Eric Zemmour—a far-right journalist, television commentator, and provocateur—declared his candidacy in France’s upcoming presidential election, his poll numbers have been high enough to suggest that French citizens are taking him seriously. Zemmour’s signature issue is hostility to immigration in general, and Muslim immigration in particular. His hostility extends to the children of immigrants, although he is himself the son of Algerian-born Jews. Zemmour is also hostile to much else, as David Berlinski explains:
Multiculturalism, women’s rights, homosexuality, American historians, the young, the fat, no-fault divorce, 1968, dowdy women, the Rolling Stones, hairy transsexuals, . . . affirmative action, the feminization of French society? He was opposed to them all, professional French women especially. . . . He is in favor of female modesty, good manners, decorum, the elegance and refinement of life, the arts, fine dining, and the sense of virility that affords a man the pleasant sense that, Thank God, he was not born a woman.
On Islam, Zemmour is unyielding. There is an irremediable clash between French and Islamic civilizations. Should they find themselves in the same room, one of them must get out.
While, Berlinski writes, Zemmour’s political incorrectness can offer a certain kind of transgressive thrill, his dangerousness becomes clear in his treatment Vichy France, and the French role in deporting some 75,000 Jews to their deaths. Zemmour clings stubbornly to long-discredited myths about the war years, such as the claim that French officials protected those Jews who were French citizens.
The Jews whom the French sent to their death, Zemmour believes, were sent to their death because they were not French enough. Citizenship is no longer at issue. A sinister new moral calculus has come into play. In his desire to champion being French beyond the possibility of denial or defection, Zemmour has come close to excusing mass murder.
Anxieties that have affected so many others have affected Eric Zemmour. He is what he seems, an outsider forever burrowing into the center of things but forever consumed by the anxiety that he is not burrowing far enough. It is hardly a surprise that he feels obliged to suggest that 100 years after his innocence was decisively established, Alfred Dreyfus may well have been guilty. . . . Both French and German Jews were consumed almost to the point of madness by the wish to demonstrate that they were French or German enough. It did them no good.
And what exactly, does Zemmour propose to do about France’s Muslim population, about which he is so concerned? He’s never been very specific.
Like the coarser figures in the Vichy regime—the odious Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, for example—he wishes chiefly to get on with it and never mind how. The idea that France has been invaded or otherwise infected or that the French are in danger of replacement by Muslims—these are ideas that drag the soul downward. The word expulsion comes too readily to Zemmour’s lips. It would have been far better had he managed to keep down what should never have come up.
Read more on Cosmopolitan Globalist: https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/french-toast