What Eric Zemmour actually believes – according to his books

Who is Éric Zemmour? The 63-year-old French presidential candidate has been fined again for hate speech, after comments he made last September regarding unaccompanied immigrant minors. He is currently on around 14 per cent in opinion polls, splitting the Right-wing vote with the marginally more popular Marine Le Pen.

Zemmour, Jewish, and of French-Algerian extraction, as well as being a popular television host, is also a literary figure – a historian, biographer, cultural commentator, essayist, reviewer and novelist whose 2014 book Le Suicide français (The French Suicide) sold over half-a-million copies, and 2021 polemic La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (France Has Not Had Its Final Word) helped to catalyse his presidential campaign.

What can that writing – as yet untranslated into English – tell us about the man and his political ambitions?

Zemmour explained his views on the emasculation of society in 2006’s Le Premier sexe (the title of which gestured to Simone de Beauvoir). In an analysis which places him somewhere between Left and Right, his melancholic anti-capitalist approach notes the way in which exploitation and commodification sought out new markets and workers (an approach not dissimilar to the analysis of many contemporary feminists, incidentally, although their solution tends not to look backwards):

Zemmour has also written biographies of French politicians Édouard Balladur (in 1995), the former Prime Minister under François Mitterrand, and another about Jacques Chirac (in 2002), whose title translates as The Man Who Did Not Like Himself. His novels, Le Dandy rouge, L’Autre and Petit frère, concern (respectively) the life of the socialist and opera-lover Ferdinand Lassalle, the Fifth Republic, and the 2003 Paris murder of a Jewish DJ by his Muslim friend.

Most of Zemmour’s bibliography consists of yearning, melancholic popular history, such as 2010’s Mélancolie française, which simultaneously bigs up France – opening with “France is not in Europe; she is Europe. France brings together all the physical, geological, botanical and climactic characteristics of Europe” – while bemoaning what France has become. “France is open to all races … it has a universal vocation,” he writes, but adds “on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise France would no longer be France.”

Le Suicide Français, his most widely-read text, is an epic, nostalgic and increasingly depressing account of French history told on a year-by-year basis through a series of vignettes relating to particular incidents – crimes, cultural moments, French figures political and otherwise. Brigette Bardot embodies “a hedonistic universe where the pursuit of pleasure triumphed, but where women strove to take their share”; Charles de Gaulle was “the father of the nation”.

But year by year, the old France disappears, Zemmour suggests, under the weight of immigration and non-French culture, Americanism and capitalism. In La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot, he adds that we are facing “the death of France as we know it”.

He has, assuredly, a way with words. Britain has its lawyers and businessmen, Italy its cruise-boat entertainers, America its real-estate dealers; populism takes on national characteristics, and there are few characters in French public life that more encapsulate the national spirit than Zemmour, paradoxes and all. He recently drew large and volatile crowds in a Parisian suburb on his campaign trail.

He is sometimes compared to Donald Trump, although he comes across as more of a mix of another French provocateur, the novelist Michel Houellebecq, and Anton Ego, the restaurant critic from the animated film Ratatouille. Christopher Caldwell suggests in the Claremont Review of Books that Americans may instead see shades of television host Tucker Carlson.

Zemmour’s new party, Reconquête (Reconquest), clearly announces its crusader-like ambitions to take back France, its website announcing the candidate’s priorities for France, namely “Identité, Immigration, Islam, Insécurité, Instruction, Impôts, Insutrie et Indépendance”, which don’t quite manage to keep all their Is in English: “identity, immigration, Islam, security, education, taxes, industry and independence”. His address last Christmas, translated by an anonymous Twitter user, condemned the persecution of Christians around the world, admired great works of art, praised General de Gaulle, and defended the “infinite respect for truth [that] has allowed the enormous rise of philosophy and exact science in the West” .

Zemmour mingles a love of all things French with a universalism that hovers somewhere between the egalitarian sentiment of the French Revolution, a partisan nationalism and veneration for the traditions of Christianity. A complicated tightrope to walk, and one that makes his politics, in some ways, hard to parse, at least from the outside, though less so if one understands the synthesis of French ideals Zemmour draws upon. Zemmour represents the “other” France – not the ’68ers, with their pro-globalisation rebellious sexual free-for-all, but rather a vision of a “before-time”. As Caldwell puts it, “Zemmour believes in what de Gaulle called la France éternelle”.

So what of Zemmour’s scarier qualities? He was fined by a Parisian court this week for calling teenage migrants “thieves”, “rapists” and “killers”; his previous fine in 2019, also of €10,000, was for suggesting that ancestral French youth face a choice between being colonised or fighting for liberation. (This charge was overturned on appeal on free-speech grounds, though prosecutors are apparently seeking to have it reinstated.) In November, London’s Royal Institution cancelled a planned talk by Zemmour, after conducting what they described as “due diligence”.

Phillipe Marliére has recently suggested in an OpenDemocracy piece that Zemmour has “no direct link with the French fascist tradition” and should instead be understood as a “universalist republican”. Zemmour, for Marliére, is, however politically unpleasant, entirely a “creature of the French political, media and economic establishment”.

The overriding feeling that Zemmour’s literary and historical work conjures up is a kind of mournfulness for a lost France – one that perhaps never existed. Whether Zemmour can turn his provocation and nostalgia into a political project for the 21st century, or whether his campaign will sink into history, remains to be seen.

As he himself puts it, with typical mournful flourish, “debates are like women – the best are those we didn’t have”.