January 13, 2022 11In mid- November Éric Zemmour, the
French far- right presidential candidate,
professional provocateur, and virulent
Islamophobe, made a campaign stop
in Bordeaux, one of France’s most
affluent bourgeois strongholds. The
hall was packed, notably with young
white men in baseball caps who came
for the rousing speech, but there were
also many women, several of whom
thanked Zemmour for his rejection of
“feminist dogma.” Thousands of peo-
ple were lined up outside to buy copies
of his latest book, La France n’a pas dit
son dernier mot (France Hasn’t Had
Its Last Word). Whatever happens in
the election next April—Zemmour’s
chances of winning are almost nonex-
istent—he will certainly sell boatloads
of books, as he does every time he pub-
lishes another lament about national
decline or “suicide,” as the title of his
best- known book, Le Suicide français
(2014), proclaims.^1 That is perhaps the
moral of this story, if there is one: Zem-
mour responds to a deep and profound
French anxiety that the nation is in free
fall, a downward spiral that is somehow
the fault of Muslim immigrants. He of-
fers a crude exaggeration of what many
believe but few dare to admit.
In France, moralistic hand- wringing
over “decadence” is an intellectual
tradition, and in some ways Zemmour
is merely a continuation of the fear-
mongering of the fin de siècle and the
early twentieth century, when the likes
of Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras,
and Édouard Drumont decried the per-
ceived erosion of the organic national
community. But most of all, Zemmour
is a contemporary media creation,
foisted onto the public by CNews,
France’s equivalent of Fox News, which
is backed by the right- wing billion-
aire Vincent Bolloré.^2 He has used his
platform as a television commentator
and, until recently, a columnist for Le
Figaro to launch endless culture wars
that far more reasonable people then
feel compelled to fight. He claims that
he is motivated by a sense of history,
French history in particular, but there
are moments when that history catches
up with him.
That night in Bordeaux was one of
those. Toward the end of the evening
Zemmour allowed a few questions
from the audience. The first came from
an older man who introduced himself
as the founder of an organization called
Vigilance Halal, and he asked whether
Zemmour, if elected president, would
ban ritual slaughter, which is part of the
dietary rules for both observant Mus-
lims and Jews. “You are the only candi-
date to say that Islam is not compatible
with the republic,” the man said. This
much, at least, is true. Zemmour has
repeatedly declared that Islam does
not belong in France, has been twice
convicted in French courts of racismagainst Muslims and minorities, and
has even floated the idea of deport-
ing certain Muslim citizens. The man
clearly approved of these antics, but
he phrased his question more clearly
to make sure Zemmour had heard. “I
would like to know if you would ban re-
ligious sacrifice,” he said.
There were murmurs of discomfort
among the audience, who at that mo-
ment were forced to confront the one
thing about Zemmour that everyone
knows but hardly anyone will mention:
he is a Jew—a Jew who spits on Jew-
ish history, is further to the right than
France’s traditional far right, and has
elicited the ire and embarrassment of
institutional French Jewish leaders
as he seeks to deny the real history of
the Holocaust in France.^ Even more
perversely, Zemmour has allied him-
self with unrepentant anti- Semites
like Jean- Marie Le Pen—the ninety-
three- year- old patriarch of the French
far right and convicted Holocaust de-
nier—who are still somehow fixtures in
French public debate. But he is a prac-
ticing Jew nevertheless, a member of an
Orthodox synagogue in Paris who grew
up in a kosher home, as he describes
in detail in his book Destin français
(2018).
Zemmour became visibly uncom-
fortable at the question about ritual
slaughter, even though moments like
these—attempts to reconcile the real-
ity of his identity with the cartoonish
toxicity of his political program, to the
extent that he has one—are inevitable.
A man who is never at a loss for words
suddenly found himself a little tongue-
tied. “I confess it’s a difficult question,”
he said, searching for a pivot. “I would
try to find a compromise. I think we
should work toward a compromise.” As
I watched him struggle to answer, it oc-
curred to me that he knew what he was
really being asked, which was whether
he was French or Jewish, an imaginary
binary that exists in the minds of many
supporters he has cultivated. This is the
paradox of Éric Zemmour: those who
accept him as he is see him as a char-
latan, and most of those who love him
might want a fundamental part of him
to disappear.
Central to Zemmour’s discourse is
the decidedly French anxiety of le grand
remplacement (the great replacement),the conspiracy theory elaborated by the
French w r iter Renaud C a mus, por tend-
ing that the white Christian majority of
France and Europe is being “replaced”
by hordes of nonwhite, and especially
Muslim, migrants from North and
West Africa. That theory, of course,
has reverberated elsewhere, including
in the US. Behind the demographic
and existential nightmare of the great
replacement, there is an obvious nos-
talgia for a world that never quite ex-
isted. Unsurprisingly, this yearning for
an atavistic France is the essence of
Zemmour’s campaign pitch; he styled
himself a latter- day Charles de Gaulle
in the official announcement of his can-
didacy at the end of November.
But there is an obvious violence
too. Fear of the great replacement has
generated deadly attacks around the
globe—most notably in Christchurch,
New Zealand, in March 2019, when
fifty- one Muslims were shot dead by
a gunman in two different mosques.
During his appearance in Bordeaux
Zemmour condoned more violence to
stop “ethnic substitution.” “We should
be free to denounce those who attack
us... those who want us to disappear!”
he said. Yet he panders to those who
might well prefer the ethnic substitu-
tion of his own Jewishness—a great re-
placement of himself.Soumission, the best- selling 2015
novel by Michel Houellebecq, is a para-
ble about the fall of France—this time
to the Islamists, not the Nazis. In the
book, which happened to be published
the same day as the Charlie Hebdo
massacre and two days before the re-
lated assault on a kosher supermar-
ket on the outskirts of Paris, a North
African Islamist wins France’s 2022
presidential election. So far, the can-
didate sucking up all the oxygen in
the real- life 2022 election is indeed a
North African ideologue, or rather an
ideologue of North African descent,
but he is not the character of Houel-
lebecq’s imagination: he is a Jew from
an Algerian family, not a Tunisian Is-
lamist. The great replacement is his
political promise, and perhaps also his
personal promise. After all, the decid-
edly unironic name of his newly estab-
lished political party is “Reconquête”(Reconquer), which harkens back to
the Reconquista, the centuries- long
military campaign by which Christians
rid medieval Iberia of its Muslim con-
querors. But that campaign ultimately
expelled the Jews of Spain as well.
Zemmour can neither speak for nor
claim to represent the French Jewish
community, Europe’s largest and argu-
ably most vibrant. I am not French, but
I am Jewish, and my experience of Jew-
ish communal life in France during my
six years here has mostly been one of
delight at its intellectual rigor and pub-
lic pride. The rabbi of our Paris syna-
gogue, Delphine Horvilleur, one of the
most prominent voices in global liberal
Judaism today, is a good example: she
is a best- selling author, a proponent of
interfaith dialogue in a time of mount-
ing public hysteria over both Islam and
Islamism, and a respectful participant
in public debates that sometimes have
nothing to do with Jewish affairs. This
mindset probably characterizes the
attitudes of most other representative
members of the French Jewish estab-
lishment, but Zemmour nevertheless
expresses an extreme distortion of an
anti- Muslim sentiment that is very pro-
nounced among some segments of the
community.
The complicated and undeniable
truth is that Islamist anti- Semitism
poses an urgent and increasingly vio-
lent threat to Jews in France. In March
2012 an Algerian- French gunman,
Mohammed Merah, targeted the Ozar
Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse,
killing the rabbi and three children
under ten, one of whom was an eight-
year- old girl he caught by the hair and
shot point blank. Incidents like these
have been occurring ever since: the
attack on the kosher supermarket in
2015; the 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi,
who was hurled out a window to her
death; and the torture and murder
of the eighty- five- year- old Holocaust
survivor Mireille Knoll in 2018. I will
always remember that during my first
year in Paris, we were instructed to
leave the synagogue after Kol Nidre
services in groups of three, with no vis-
ible signs of being Jewish.
There are ways in which Zemmour’s
hostility, however vulgar and violent it
may be, channels a feeling of anger and
even despair in the French Jewish com-
munity. At other times, he sounds like
a Likud hard-liner, especially of the
Netanyahu era.^3 “It’s simple, if I dare
to say it,” Zemmour told me when I in-
terviewed him in 2018. “Anti- Semitism
was reborn in France with the arrival
of the populations from Muslim ter-
ritories, where anti- Semitism—if you
like—is cultural.” But homegrown
French anti-Semitism is itself a cultural
tradition, and Zemmour has arguably
done more than anyone else in public
life today to revive its vitriol and its
vehemence.Zemmour’s innumerable provoca-
tions unite the obscene and the absurd,Who Does Éric Zemmour Speak For?
James McAuley
Éric Zemmour at a campaign rally, Bordeaux, France, November 2021Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg/Getty Images(^1) Reviewed in these pages by Mark
Lilla, March 19, 2015.
(^2) See the in- depth report by Raphaëlle
Bacqué and Ariane Chemin, “Com-
ment Vincent Bolloré mobilise son
empire médiatique pour peser sur la
présidentielle,” Le Monde, November
16, 2021.
(^3) See Anshel Pfeffer, “Eric Zemmour
and Benjamin Netanyahu, Two Jews
with a Shared Dream,” Haaretz, De-
cember 10, 2021.
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