The New York Review of Books (2022-01-13)

14 The New York Review

the self- professed liberals who run the

country and style themselves as the

last bulwark against fascism have now

essentially adopted this view, whether

they realize it or not.

The proudly centrist Macron, elected

in 2017 on a groundswell of opposition

to Marine Le Pen, has embarked on a

project of combating “Islamist separat-

ism,” but its utter lack of seriousness has

been clear from the start. Perhaps the

most extreme—and Zemmourian—

aspect of the government’s response

to “Islamist separatism” has been its

overt crackdown on academic freedom

and what it calls—with total earnest-

ness—Islamo- gauchisme, or Islamo-

leftism, in French universities, as if

the perpetrators of the recent attacks

somehow became radical extremists in

seminars at Sciences Po. In February

Frédérique Vidal, Macron’s minister

of higher education, told CNews that

Islamo- leftism “plagues society as a

whole and the university is not imper-

vious.” More than six hundred academ-

ics signed an open letter in Le Monde

against Vidal’s comments, and their

names were quickly published on a far-

right blog that sought to destroy their

reputations online and to close oppor-

tunities for students who might wish to

study very real phenomena such as dis-

crimination against Muslims in France.

Under mounting criticism, especially

from CNRS, France’s premier academic

research body, Vidal eventually walked

back her declaration of war.

This is France’s version of the “war

on woke” that has become the fever

dream of the American right. The dif-

ference, though, is that in France, the

loudest and most influential voices op-

posing what Macron called “social sci-

ence theories entirely imported from

the United States” are from the center

left; Zemmour is by no means the sole

knight charging those windmills. For

him, the main threat to contemporary

France is foreigners. “You just have to

look at what’s happening in the streets

to see the great replacement in prog-

ress,” he said in mid- December. But

the same political establishment that

wastes no time in rejecting Zemmour

has nevertheless identified an appar-

ently similar threat in the foreign ideas

that often defend the same foreign

people Zemmour attacks. This may

be a different “replacement” anxiety,

but it’s a replacement anxiety all the

same.

Macron’s hard- liner on these issues

is his education minister, Jean- Michel

Blanquer, who in October established

a think tank, Le Laboratoire de la Ré-

publique, designed to stop the spread

of the allegedly “woke” ideas that, he

told Le Monde, are at the “anti podes”

of the republic. In that interview, Blan-

quer said that there is a

republican vision opposed to this

doctrine that fragments and di-

vides, and has conquered certain

political, media, and academic

milieux by proposing a logic of

victimhood to the detriment of

the democratic foundations of our

society.

I had this exchange in mind when I

heard Zemmour respond to a ques-

tion about “le wokeisme” in Bordeaux.

“You are absolutely right,” he told the

man who asked him.

This woke ideology, which is to say

the people who pretend to have

awakened to inequalities, suffer-

ing real or imagined in terms of

skin color or gender, is a threat to

freedom of thought, intellectual

health, and to our schools and

universities.

Although their respective motives are

different, there was no significant dif-

ference between Blanquer’s comments

and Zemmour’s: the former legitimizes,

and even cedes ground to, the latter.

Finally, there is the problem of

the veil, the eternal blindspot of the

self-professed French “universalist.”

Unsurprisingly, Zemmour reserves a

particular vehemence for veiled Mus-

lim women, but what is truly surpris-

ing is how many others who purport

to loathe his histrionics do not neces-

sarily disagree with him on this issue,

however they justify their opinion. The

veil is banned in schools along with

other religious signs and symbols, but

it is perfectly legal to wear elsewhere in

public. Many of Macron’s mandarins,

however, seem to relish telling France’s

Muslim citizens that wearing the veil

makes them less welcome in public life

and, in a sense, less French. In 2019

France’s former health minister Agnès

Buzyn complained about a runner’s

hijab introduced by the French sports-

wear brand Decathlon. “I would have

preferred a French brand not to pro-

mote the veil,” she said. Blanquer has

also commented that although it was

technically legal for Muslim mothers

to wear headscarves while chaperoning

school field trips, he wanted to avoid

them “as much as possible.”

Thus to see Zemmour merely as a

fascist avatar is to misunderstand his

significance: he is the natural extension

of the French elite and its xenophobic

provincialism. One of the more absurd

recent spectacles on French televi-

sion took place when CNews followed

Zemmour to Drancy, the Paris suburb

where he spent part of his childhood

and where Jews were interned before

their deportation to Auschwitz. He

stood facing a Muslim woman wear-

ing a headscarf, who turned out to

be someone who is rarely veiled but

who was brought onto CNews for the

purposes of this exchange. “France is

laïcité,” said Zemmour, referencing the

country’s cherished value of secular-

ism. “We are not in an Arabo-Muslim

country.... In public life we, we say ‘I

am French.’” The woman took off her

headscarf, which was probably meant

to show her coming to her senses on

live television. As strange as this scene

was, Zemmour said nothing that is not

a fundamental conviction of so many

traditional French feminists and main-

stream republicans who genuinely be-

lieve that no Muslim woman can ever

freely choose to wear the veil. I often

wonder what these people see when

they watch Zemmour, and whether

they can discern their reflection in his

image.

Recently Clément Beaune, Macron’s

secretary of state for European affairs

and one of the government’s most el-

oquent representatives, said, “Éric

Zemmour is bad news for France. He

is the opposite of France, the hatred of

France.” He is certainly bad news, but

he is not the opposite of France. In re-

vealing and disconcerting ways, Éric

Zemmour is France. Q

—December 16, 2021

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