They all rolled their eyes when I asked them what they thought of Éric Zemmour, the smirking far-right polemicist running for president. My students thought he was racist and wrote him off as a crank. They hated Marine Le Pen of the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) but took her seriously. You had to accept that she was part of the political furniture, but this guy was beyond the pale. He had, after all, been convicted of hate speech.
Yet even then he was depressingly mainstream, writing bestsellers containing Vichy apologia and hate-filled screeds against feminism and homosexuality. He had a column at Le Figaro where he penned conspiratorial pieces arguing that Christianity had made France but Islam was trying to break it. Recently, Zemmour has become a semi-permanent TV fixture. A murky infrastructure of donors and online shock troops supporting him has emerged, and he tours France meeting fans.
Zemmour’s politics are horribly nihilistic. His ideas are straight from extremist Renaud Camus’ “great replacement” theory of a concerted demographic annihilation of white Europeans by immigration. Although his new book, La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (France Has Not Spoken Its Last Word), is tinged marginally with optimism, his conclusion about the supposed renaissance ignores living standards and lapses into a war cry against foreigners and those who dare object to police brutality.
He is frequently compared to Donald Trump, though politically Zemmour is a different beast. He is, in his own words, engaged in a Gramscian struggle over culture. His strategy seems more considered than Trump’s spasmodic demagoguery. » | Oliver Haynes | Thursday, December 2, 2021
This article was highly commended in the Guardian Foundation’s 2021 Hugo Young award, which champions political opinion writing among 18- to 25-year-olds
