January 13, 2022 13that Jean-Paul Sartre imagined them,
a figurative embodiment of something
besides the real people they are.
The centrality of the Jewish meta-
phor has deep roots in modern history.
During the French Revolution, France
became the first European state to
emancipate its Jewish population, and
the very particular French conceit of
universalism essentially became a de-
bate about Jews: what to do with them,
how to integrate them.^4 The republic’s
answer to those questions—the equal-
ity of all citizens in the eyes of the state,
but also the priority of citizenship above
all other affiliations—eventually led
to the unparalleled success of Jews in
commercial, political, and cultural life.
Jews were exemplary republicans—les
fous de la République (crazy for the
Republic), in the famous phrase of the
historian Pierre Birnbaum.^5 But this
made the republic appear, to its harsh-
est critics, as a “Jewish” construct—la
France juive, to quote the title of an
1886 book, the most infamous anti-
Semitic text in French history.
Less than a decade after its publi-
cation, the Dreyfus Affair polarized
the entire nation. Dreyfus the Jew was
a metaphor, not a real person. For his
defenders, he was the France of reason
and rationality; for his opponents, he
was the anti- France of Jews, foreign-ers, and immigrants. The conclusion of
the affair—the exoneration of Dreyfus
and the suppression of the Catholic
Church’s domination of civic life and
public education—was the triumph of
one metaphor over the other, not to
mention the origin of the professed val-
ues of the republic we know today.
The memory of the Holocaust—and
Jewish affairs in general—is a constant
reference in nearly every French de-
bate over identity politics, Islamism,
and even national decline, three of
Zemmour’s favorite subjects. That his-
tory is constantly being renegotiated,
but appeals to it also long ago became
a political reflex among non- Jews in
particular, the ultimate means of shut-
ting down one’s opponent in public life,
regardless of the subject at hand. The
hashtag “Juifs” trends almost weekly
on French Twitter, typically when a
non- Jewish politician or advocate com-
pares something to the Holocaust—for
example, making an analogy between
Covid vaccine passes and the yellow
star—or argues that a non- Jewish ad-
versary has not thought sufficiently
about the Jews. That such performative
philo- Semitism might itself be a form
of anti- Semitism—sometimes appeal-
ing to an imagined Jewish power struc-
ture, othering Jews in a different way
than more conventional discrimination
does—appears to occur to no one ex-
cept perhaps France’s actual Jews, who
in any case are largely irrelevant to this
psychodrama.As a political candidate, Zemmour
seems already to be floundering. But
this is almost beside the point. Whatmatters is what he represents, which
is not the far right but a distortion of
the French establishment itself: he of-
fers an extreme version of biases and
perspectives that crystalized long ago,
especially on the question of Islam. It
is the establishment that he ultimately
embodies, no matter how much its rep-
resentatives decry him (and rightly so).
The former columnist has made him-
self into something of a collective id, an
ugly mirror that reflects the raw sensi-
bilities of many in France.
Without question, Zemmour’s rise
is inextricably linked to a lingering
trauma. France has suffered the most
brutal of the recent ISIS and other Is-
lamist terrorist attacks in Western
Europe. In addition to the massacre
on Charlie Hebdo journalists and the
kosher supermarket in January 2015,
there was the the assault on the Bata-
clan concert hall and cafés across Paris
in November 2015 that killed 20 peo-
ple. There was the killing of Jacques
Hamel, an eighty- five- year- old priest,
in a village church in July 2016, and
the slaughter on the Promenade des
Anglais in Nice on Bastille Day 2016.
Most recently, there was the beheading
of Samuel Paty, a public schoolteacher
in the Paris suburbs, in 2020 for the
apparent crime of having shown cari-
catures of the Prophet Muhammad to
students in a lesson about freedom of
speech.^6
For years—decades, even—one of
the urgent questions in French polit-
ical life has been the integration andassimilation of the country’s Muslim
population, believed to be the largest in
Europe. That question has only grown
more urgent in the aftermath of these
devastating attacks, especially since a
number of them have been perpetrated
by young men with a very similar social
profile: French citizens whose grand-
parents arrived from former colonial
territories in North Africa in the 1960s
and 1970s and whose families enjoyed
at least some level of success in France,
however moderate. Some of these
young men are even products of the
same vaunted education system that
produced both Zemmour and French
president Emmanuel Macron, yet these
young men managed to fall under the
spell of jihadist extremism. The ques-
tion is why. And answering that ques-
tion has become a bitter fault line in
French public debate.
This was the issue in the highly publi-
cized debate in 2016 between the well-
known French political scientists Gilles
Kepel and Olivier Roy: in brief, Kepel
argued that radicalization stemmed
from Islamic fundamentalism, Roy that
Islamism is merely the most available
way for youths who feel excluded from
French society to express their frustra-
tions. Macron has clearly sided with
Kepel in this debate, but the way his
government has responded to the issue
of terrorist violence after Paty’s be-
heading has been unfortunately to suc-
cumb to public hysteria, no matter the
cost. Zemmour’s line on these events
has always been the same: with or with-
out attacks, he has long maintained
that Islam—not just Islamism—is in-
compatible with the French Republic.
What is striking, even chilling, is howTHE STORIES AND LIVES BEHIND THE ART
NEW BOOKS FROM UC PRESS
“A lively, loping study of Hunter S.
Thompson as litterateur.”
—Kirkus Reviews “Selz manages to capture theexpansive, unwieldy story of
Francis—a vivacious, ego-
absorbed searcher—in both his
intimate and larger-than-life
moments.”
—Hyperallergic“Vividly captures the world
from which The Lodger, the
foundational Hitchcockian fi lm,
emerged.”
—Sidney Gottlieb, editor of
Hitchcock on Hitchcock“A powerful case for The Great
Escape’s prominence within the
generic evolution and the larger
sweep of motion-picture history.”
—Noah Isenberg, author of Edgar G.
Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins(^4) Here I am indebted to Maurice Sam-
uels, The Right to Difference: French
Universalism and the Jews (University
of Chicago Press, 2016).
(^5) Birnbaum’s Le s fou s de la République:
Histoire politique des juifs d’État de
Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992)
remains an essential reference.
(^6) See Marc Weitzmann, “A Rising Tide
of Violence in France,” The New York
Review, February 11, 2021.
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