12 The New York Reviewand he has a twisted obsession with
revising—and even denying—some
of the most painful episodes in the
French and Jewish pasts. He has dis-
puted, for instance, the innocence of
Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army cap-
tain wrongfully convicted of treason in- Dreyfus’s innocence, Zemmour
has said, is “not obvious.” He has re-
peatedly defended Philippe Pétain,
the leader of the Vichy government,
which openly collaborated with Nazi
Germany in deporting Jews from
France during the Holocaust. “Vichy
protected French Jews and gave up the
foreign Jews,” he said in September
on CNews. This is the same defense
that Pierre Laval, a senior Vichy of-
ficial, offered in his postwar trial for
collaboration in October 1945. He
was subsequently executed by firing
squad.
But Zemmour insults the Jews of the
present as much as the Jews of the past.
In La France n’a pas dit son dernier
mot, he writes that the families of the
Jewish victims of the 2012 Toulouse
attack were less French because they
chose to bury their murdered relatives
in Israel:
Anthropologists have taught us
that where we are from is the coun-
try where we are buried. When it
comes to leaving their bones, they
especially did not choose France,
foreigners above all and wanting to
stay that way beyond death.These are things that even the most
outspoken far- right ideologues stop
short of saying, even if they happen to
agree.“To know that a man like him,
who openly questions the innocence
of Dreyfus, who rehabilitates Vichy,
who reopens the debate on the dual
identity of Jews—there is a consensus
among French Jews that this is nothing
less than an encouragement of anti-
Semitism in France,” Bernard- Henri
Lévy, perhaps Zemmour’s most out-
spoken public critic, told me recently.
“The only difference between Éric
and me is that he’s Jewish,” Jean- Marie
Le Pen told Le Monde in October. The
details in the interview are something
even Houellebecq could scarcely have
invented. In January 2020 Le Pen and
his wife, Jany, dined with Zemmour at
the opulent Hôtel Le Bristol in Paris.
The Le Pens brought with them a dear
friend: Ursula Painvin, born Ursula
von Ribbentrop, the daughter of Joa-
chim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Germa-
ny’s foreign minister. Painvin thought
very highly of Zemmour and sent
him her “most admiring and friendly
thoughts.” Well-to-do racists like her
love Zemmour, because he can parrot
their views but will not be ushered off
the stage. What better way to deny or
diminish the Holocaust than through
the mouth of a Jew? As Le Pen put it
to Le Monde, “It’s hard to call [Zem-
mour] a Nazi or a fascist. This gives
him greater freedom.”
I once asked Le Pen what he thought
his legacy would be. He answered me
immediately, without pausing to reflect:
“After all, they can say, ‘Le Pen was
right.’” In a sense, Zemmour is an unex-
pected gift to the anti- republican, anti-
European, anti- Semitic, anti- immigrant
far right of Le Pen and his predeces-
sors. The Jewish polemicist is the waythey win, if not at the ballot box then in
the minds of the public.Zemmour was born in the Paris
suburbs in 1958, to a family of Alge-
rian—specifically Berber—Jewish im-
migrants. He was raised in a religiously
observant family but one that, in his
telling, considered its identity a private
matter. “The street should not suffer
the smallest affirmation of a religious
identity,” he writes. He looks not to the
history of French Jews during World
War II, who believed in the values of
the republic only to be betrayed, but to
the history of the French Empire and
of the Jews in France’s Algerian col-
ony, who became French citizens only
in 1870, through the Crémieux Decree.
(Muslims in the French colonies did
not receive the same rights.)
Despite that newly conferred status,
Algerian Jews initially faced orga-
nized and violent anti-Semitism from
French Algerians most of all, and they
lost their French citizenship during
the Vichy years—which in many cases
did not seem to erode their image of
France. That inconvenient fact has cer-
tainly not eroded Zemmour’s image
of it. As he writes in Destin Français:
“My ancestors became Berber- French
after having tasted peace and French
civilization.” But many Algerian Jews
also experienced violent Muslim anti-
Semitism during the Algerian War
of Independence between 1954 and
1962, a memory that lingers and that
Zemmour has now mobilized to the
extreme.
The France in which Zemmour
was raised was in the throes of an-
other struggle: how to remember the
trauma of the Holocaust. In the years
immediately after the war, France was
the crucible of both the push to com-
memorate the catastrophe that did
not yet have a name and the growing
movement to deny that catastrophe. It
was in Grenoble in the spring of 1943
that the Ukrainian- born rabbi Isaac
Schneersohn established the Centre
de Documentation Juive Contempo-
rain, the early version of Europe’s first
major Holocaust archive. It eventually
became the museum Mémorial de la
Shoah, on the site in Paris’s Marais
neighborhood of Schneersohn’s Me-
morial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr,
Europe’s first major Holocaust memo-
rial, the cornerstone of which was laid
in May 1953, before Israel had decided
to establish Yad Vashem.
France also became the epicen-
ter of denialism and in many ways its
strongest citadel. Although Holocaust
denial immediately followed the war
everywhere in Europe, in France there
was a veritable movement. Nothing
quite compared to its self- styled in-
tellectual pretentions. At least at the
beginning, it was often an elite, even
literary phenomenon, a coda to the fin-
de-siècle and early- twentieth- century
anti- Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair,
propagated by writers and thinkers
who saw the Jews as once again invad-
ing and dominating their country—this
time with fabricated victimhood.
In 1948, a fateful year in Jewish
history, the fascist writer Maurice
Bardèche published Nuremberg ou la
Terre promise ( N u r e m b e r g o r t h e P r o m -
ised Land), the first major attempt to
publicly deny the Holocaust; the book
was initially conceived as a response to
the Nuremberg trials and the establish-ment of the State of Israel. There has
been a robust French denial industry
ever since. In his anti- Semitic journal,
La Défense de l’Occident, Bardèche
published Robert Faurisson, who went
on to publicly question the existence of
the gas chambers in Le Monde in 1978,
one of the greatest embarrassments in
the newspaper’s history.
This was the France in which Zem-
mour was formed. He was eleven in
1969 when Marcel Ophüls released
The Sorrow and the Pity, his acclaimed
documentary that exposed the extent
of collaboration with the Nazi occu-
pation in the city of Clermont- Ferrand
and that was censored by the French
government for some time thereafter.
He was thirteen when the American
historian Robert Paxton published—in
a new French edition—Vichy France,
his groundbreaking work on Vichy’s
complicity with the Nazis, which shook
the French establishment to its core.
He was nineteen when Le Monde pub-
lished the first of Faurisson’s infamous
letters about the gas chamber; thirty-
three when Jean- Marie Le Pen first
referred to the gas chambers as a “de-
tail” in the history of World War II; and
thirty- nine when Maurice Papon, who
sent hundreds of Jewish children from
Bordeaux to the Nazi concentration
camps in the 1940s, was finally put on
trial. But for Zemmour, all this is the
sign of a culture overly invested in self-
flagellation. “It’s a question of fighting
this repentance that kills us,” he said in
September, “in order to lift up France.”
Zemmour’s candidacy has essen-
tially become a campaign against an
edifice of memory that remains fragile,
however entrenched it may seem. For
Henry Rousso, a prominent French
historian who has written extensively
on the subject, the problem is that once
public Holocaust memory became ac-
cepted by the establishment, it was seen
as yet another part of the establishment
for populists to tear down. “The recog-
nition of Vichy, and particularly of the
Shoah, was the great objective of the
memory wars—in France but [also]
across the Western world,” Rousso told
me.It’s a pillar of contemporary mo-
rality; the Shoah constitutes the
reference to absolute evil, the
crime to which we compare all
others. When [Zemmour] attacks
this understanding, he simply re-
cycles something banal on the
right—a dislike for the question
of repentance—but he goes much
further. He adds a dimension of
provocation.“All historians are revisionists,”
Zemmour told me when we met in 2018.
He then explained his own method—or
lack thereof: “I don’t consider myself a
professional historian in the sense that
I don’t go to the archives to exhume
new pieces, et cetera.” Obsession with
picking away at the past, and the Holo-
caust in particular, is not as bizarre in
France as it appears from abroad. One
of the oddest, most disturbing pecu-
liarities of French life is that so many of
the debates over the soul of the nation
involve Jews as an abstract concept,
often without insight from any actual
members of France’s Jewish commu-
nity (in which Zemmour was raised).
In the French public imagination, Jews
often become metaphors in the wayMcAuley 11 14 .indd 12 12 / 16 / 21 8 : 00 PM