Pop historian Éric Zemmour - The hi-vis ‘reactionary
The pop historian Éric Zemmour has fashioned himself as an evangelist of French culture — and has become a driving force for French conservatism, writes .
To follow Éric Zemmour around Paris last Autumn was to make a tour of the city’s slightly faded belle époque salons.
In September, after his latest book, French Destiny, was published, Le Figaro, France’s centre-right daily paper, where Zemmour is a columnist, hosted a talk at the Salle Gaveau.
A 1906 chamber-music hall, painted pale yellow and lined with parterre boxes, it is just two blocks from the presidential palace. “I’m not going to introduce Éric Zemmour,” his presenter told the sold-out hall, noting that you would have to live at the very edge of the universe to escape him.
“I’m always intimidated when someone says something nice about me,” Zemmour replied. “It happens pretty rarely.”
At 60, Zemmour is slight, with thinning hair and a spry energy. In a normal week, he might be a guest on morning radio, discuss the death of Gaullism on his Wednesday-evening talk show and publish a column on the genius of the French language.
But when he releases a book — he has written three since 2014 — his frequent speaking engagements mean additional opportunities to expound on his preferred topics: the historical curtailment of French dominance, and the elites who have destroyed what remains of French identity.
All this time in front of the public increases the chance that he will do what he is best known for: defy the still-robust codes of French politesse. “I have the great fault of being unable to concede,” Zemmour says. “I’m not glorifying being this way. I just can’t help it.”
It is a trait that ensures not only that Zemmour is to be found everywhere, talking, but also that everyone, everywhere, is talking about him.
In the lobby, before the evening’s programme, Zemmour’s colleagues were chattering about his latest clash, the so-called ‘affaire des prénoms’. On a talk show the previous Sunday, Zemmour went on a riff about the importance of a first name in signalling Frenchness, a long-standing obsession of his. (In 2009, he publicly castigated the minister of justice, Rachida Dati, for naming her daughter Zohra.)
Zemmour concluded by informing one of the panelists, a young journalist with Senegalese roots named Hapsatou Sy, that her mother was wrong not to give her a French name — say, Corinne — to show that their family was dedicated to the task of assimilating.
Everyone laughed, but the producers cut the cameras and the conversation continued off-screen, where Zemmour told Sy that her name was “an insult” to France.
Sy took to Twitter the following day: She was considering not only quitting the show, she wrote, but also filing a complaint for hate speech. Normal business on France’s TV networks, radio stations and social media platforms practically came to a stop, as every member of the left, despite vowing never to repeat Zemmour’s name, offered a defence of Sy, and every member of the right denounced a siege on free speech.
Most of Zemmour’s books are what he calls “historical essays.” His narratives, based on a personal reading of many works by historians, are long (the last three were more than 500 pages each) and intended for an audience already familiar with Robespierre and the Girondins.
He can skip straight to the riffs, turning events from many centuries ago into neat paradigms for today: “It’s exactly the same!” is one of Zemmour’s favourite phrases.
His explanations delight his audiences; they have the pleasant totality of fables.
In a radio interview the week before his appearance at the Salle Gaveau, Zemmour nodded in vigorous agreement when he was asked if he was nostalgic and reactionary.
These tendencies appeal to a wide-ranging, well-heeled, conservative crowd but haven’t cost him the loyalty of a younger audience. At the Salle Gaveau, I spoke with one such fan, a 27-year-old named Jacques, the founder of a successful startup.
“I’m not nostalgic,” Jacques said. “I think there’s a lot that’s not working in modernity. But we have to say that when you come to a country you have to integrate and assimilate.”
Zemmour’s detractors often link him to the Rassemblement National — formerly the National Front — but his true allegiance is to Bonapartism.
His nostalgia is not, as they claim, for Les Trente Glorieuses, the decades between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s, when growth was high in France and immigration was more limited, but rather for the early 1800s (or, at the latest, for the 19th-century grandeur that died with Charles de Gaulle).
In Zemmour’s view, Waterloo was the beginning of the nation’s decline; the Prussian defeat of 1871, sealed France’s fate. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was not a universal truth, but a political tool used to further the dominion of the revolutionaries — something to be dispensed with when necessary.
“I’m accustomed to saying that when you have the biggest population in Europe and the giant army of Napoleon, the Rights of Man are magnificent, you can impose it on everyone,” Zemmour said that evening.
But when you’re 1% of the world population, and when we have 1.5 billion Africans at our door who, in the name of the Rights of Man, want to come to France, I say the Rights of Man are the death of France.
The audience responded with an energetic round of applause.
Everyone on the French right pays attention to Zemmour, but his pining for the lost paradise of Greater France is particularly resonant for older readers, many of whom attended his talk a few days later at the Théâtre Montansier in Versailles.
“Anyone over 70 was born at a time when empire was just the reality,” Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the École Polytechnique in Paris, told me.
“For them, it was completely natural that we had colonies everywhere. And I think a large part of public opinion, especially those who are over a certain age, though it’s fading, is still deluded by this past, thinking it wasn’t so bad.”
Zemmour’s 2010 book, Mélancolie Française, was a lament for France as the heir to Rome, destined to be recognised for its exceptional civilisation. Without irony, he cites the memoirs of Chateaubriand who, wounded in the siege of Thionville in 1792 and taken in by a group of Flemish women, reflects: “I have the feeling that they treat me with a kind of respect and deference; there is something superior and delicate in the French nature that other peoples recognize.”
Zemmour maintains that it is because of the 1763 treaty between France and Britain, which ceded much of French territory in America to the British, that globalisation is English rather than French.
In 2010, as a guest on a talk show, Zemmour repeated one of his favourite claims about immigration: “People who come from immigrant backgrounds are stopped more frequently by the police because most drug dealers are black or Arab,” he said. “That’s a fact.” (This is impossible to verify; in France, it is illegal for government agencies to gather statistics based on race or ethnicity.)
When the TV segment aired, the show’s producers ran a chyron that read: “Zemmour has gone off the rails.”
Jacques de Guillebon, the editor of a new right-wing magazine, L’Incorrect, credits Zemmour with being the first to speak about immigration publicly “without a complex.”
“Fifteen, 20 years ago in France, you didn’t have the right,” de Guillebon told me. “He influenced a lot of people who didn’t dare to think what they were thinking.”
France has long had its own version of the free-speech wars. France has strict hate-speech statutes, which can be applied at the discretion of investigating judges.
Zemmour has spent hundreds of hours and thousands of euro going to court to defend himself against charges of “inciting racial hatred.”
Zemmour found new fodder for his battle with “leftist elites” in mid-November, when 280,000 French protesters calling themselves the gilets jaunes, or “yellow vests,” demonstrated across the country against a tax increase on diesel fuel.
President Emmanuel Macron had announced the tax as part of France’s climate-change policy, creating a strange predicament for urban liberals. Normally they would support a working-class movement against the mechanisms of power, but the gilets jaunes were protesting, at least initially, a policy liberals hold dear.
Zemmour did not miss his chance to underscore this contradiction and skewer his opponents, remarking that the gilets jaunes were a French manifestation of a global phenomenon. As the protests continued to dominate the news cycle — blocked roads, vandalised businesses and monuments, tear gas filling the Champs-Élysées — Zemmour wrote and spoke incessantly on the topic. Ultimately, he declared Macron’s mandate dead.
Zemmour’s newest book, French Destiny, is in some ways a response to the surprisingly successful Histoire mondiale de la France (Global History of France), compiled and edited by the noted historian Patrick Boucheron and published in 2015.
Where Boucheron presents French history as a product of diverse ethnic and geographical influences, Zemmour adheres to Thomas Carlyle’s dictum that history is “but the biography of great men”: the most powerful win, and rightly so. For Zemmour, the strict hierarchical social order born of Catholicism, divorced from the church and joined with the principles of Roman law is what gives French society its unique structure.
The significance of Zemmour’s evangelism for the “Catholic culture” of France turns on the fact that he is Jewish and of Algerian descent.
In French Destiny, Zemmour writes for the first time about his family and childhood. “I think that we are the children of a generation, even more than we are the children of our parents,” Zemmour told me.
French Destiny was the top seller on French Amazon for weeks, and he had been doing nonstop publicity appearances by the time I finally sat
down with him in a cafe on the Boulevard Haussmann, not far from Le Figaro’s offices.
He ordered a tea and stirred some orange marmalade into it to soothe his throat, nursing a cold he caught the week before.
“In my generation, we were French, we appropriated French history, people coming from every horizon became French,” he said.
In his new book, he “wanted to show how history was the vector of assimilation.”
Eric Justin Léon Zemmour was born in a Paris suburb in 1958. His parents, descendants of Berber Jews, came to Paris from Algeria in the 1950s, during the French-Algerian war.
Zemmour tells of his grandfather’s showing him an old postage stamp bearing a turbaned fighter holding a gun; his family name, which means “olive tree” in Berber, is blazoned across the top.
According to Zemmour, the Berber tribe to which his family belonged resisted the French invaders before embracing them. His passion for his family’s adoptive land feels almost American — except, Zemmour insists, they were not immigrants. The Crémieux Decree of 1870 made Algerian Jews, but not Algerian Muslims, French citizens: They had migrated, not immigrated.
After high school, Zemmour attended Sciences Po, the feeder school for France’s political class, and took the entrance exams for the École Nationale d’Administration, the finishing academy from which almost all of the country’s high officials, including presidents, have graduated; he passed the written entrance exam but failed the oral one.
He began working as a political reporter for Le Quotidien de Paris, which he described to me as “right-wing anarchist” — a French tradition of irreverence toward the establishment, which, he said, “despises the moralism of progressives.”
When the paper closed in the 1990s, he took a position at Le Figaro and began appearing on early-morning television news, where he cemented his reputation for being “fully contemptuous of the liberal bourgeoisie,” as one TV producer put it. In the meantime, he published three novels and 10 books of essays.
Zemmour’s 2014 book, French Suicide, was a work of pop history that courses through key legal decisions, pivotal figures, and cultural anecdotes in the 40 years following the “soft” revolution of May 1968, when university students famously took to the streets of Paris and upended traditional social structures.
Throughout the book, Zemmour polemicises against the cultural decay that he believes ensued: the “creeping feminisation” of society, which prioritised consensus over authority, peace over war, and the individual over the family. French Suicide sold 500,000 copies — more than 6,000 a day at one point — making him one of the most widely-read authors in France that year.
In retrospect, it is easy to see that the book thrived within the same civic breakdown that, a few years later, would allow Emmanuel Macron to overturn the French political system entirely.
In Zemmour’s imagination, his family is the model of French assimilation. His parents arrived from a Judeo-Arab culture but gave their children Christian first names; Zemmour studied the Torah privately, but removed any external symbols of his faith in public, presenting himself as fully devoted to the principle of laïcité, or French secularism. What’s more, he didn’t experience this as any kind of internal contradiction or compromise. Why couldn’t immigrants today do the same?
Throughout French Destiny, Zemmour poses the question, echoing the 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, of what a nation is: a “territory, a people, an administration,” or a “spirit, a set of values, an idea.”
He appears to depart from the far right in choosing the latter: “I believe that one becomes French through literature and history, if you didn’t have the luck to be it through blood and soil,” he writes.
Yet there is an essentialist argument running through the book. Zemmour claims not only that Charles Martel’s defeat of the Omayyad caliphate near Poitiers in 732 gave rise to the Frankish empire, but also that this confrontation between civilisations is being repeated today.
In October, the news broke that Zemmour would be giving a talk at Issep, a new higher-education institution opened in Lyon last September by Marion Maréchal, the niece of the National Front leader Marine Le Pen. All the media outlets in Paris ran jittery headlines.
Issep stands for Institut de Sciences Sociales, Économiques et Politiques, which is remarkably similar to Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, the official name of Sciences Po. Maréchal’s aim, it seems, is to set herself up as a competitor.
At Issep, Zemmour had an especially receptive audience. One man in his 40s told me that the passion for France that Zemmour and Maréchal share is rare.
“People are hungry for that,” he said. “There are so few people like Zemmour among the journalists, the personalities we see on TV — they’re all anti-France, cosmopolitan. He is not.”
He was especially tired of hearing that there was no such thing as French culture.
“All these people who want to think for us today in France, they don’t love France,” he said.
They think France is some vague idea that belongs only to a few.
One Issep student asked Zemmour about his belief that France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, between 1756 and 1763, was the beginning of the nation’s decline.
“It seems like a long time ago,” the student said, “but for you, the history of France has been a succession of failed attempts to compensate for this defeat. Is there still any meaning in asserting the existence of a grand French destiny?”
Zemmour was ready with a response, observing that France’s colonial conquests were an attempt to compensate for that defeat. Today, he went on, French elites have decided, ignobly, that a new kind of French power can be obtained only by entwining the country within the European Union.
For him, the process of writing his most recent book, he explained earlier that evening, recalled “the legend about the person who is dying and sees each major stage of his life pass before his eyes: Now we are reliving the main crises we experienced during a thousand years of history.”
But each generation, he said, rewrites the history of France in accordance with the problems they confront. The students seemed satisfied. They thanked Zemmour for travelling such a long way to answer all their questions.
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