TIMES ON ZEMMOUR
Eric Zemmour provokes France’s elite with claims of national decline
France has been thwarted in its destiny of greatness by the English and is now doomed to collapse into civil war between Christians and Muslim “barbarians”.
You might think that such a prophecy — articulated by one of the country’s top thinkers — would banish its author to the lunatic fringe.
Yet Eric Zemmour is earning fame and fortune charting his country’s decline, with his latest gloomy book Mélancolie Française flying off the shelves.
Zemmour, 51, has emerged this spring as the hero of the ordinary bloke, and a villain to the left-of-centre Establishment. Millions tune in to radio and television to hear him breaching taboos over race, immigration, abortion and, his pet subject, perfidious Albion.
On Saturday night, two million people watched Zemmour clash with Georges-Marc Benamou, a leftish writer and adviser to President Sarkozy, on France 2 television.
Benamou, who is of Algerian-Jewish background like Zemmour, treated him to the ultimate insult: “You are a fascist. You are further to the right than [Marshal] Pétain.”
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The celebrity thinker shrugs off the charge with a laugh. “I say what people think,” he told The Times.
“A lot of people feel, in a confused way, the things that I talk about. They have this fear, but the French elite forbids them to express it. The elites impose a political correctness that the people cannot stand.”
Exasperation with Zemmour has reached a peak since April, when RTL, the most popular radio network, gave him a daily two-minute slot on its breakfast programme to voice his contrarian ideas.
Dominique Sopo, head of the SOS Racism group, has called Zemmour “a person from the extreme Right, in disguise, who gives legitimacy to extremist and hateful thought”.
When an opinion poll showed a sharp rise in racial prejudice last week, the French Jewish Students’ Union directly blamed Zemmour.
The writer argues that France was destined for glory but everything went wrong when King Louis XIV lost to England. By inventing free trade and parliamentary democracy, the British outmanoeuvred the French on all fronts. “We always finish losing,” he said.
“England managed to make out that Napoleon Bonaparte was the aggressor, when I believe that England was the aggressor.”
He said, however, that he admires Britain, and that he thinks that his ideas could be aired freely on the other side of the Channel.
British supremacy in the 19th century led to catastrophe, he said. “I profoundly believe that the English provoked the two world wars.” The US took up the role of global adversary, while Britain has concentrated on demolishing France in Europe, with the help of the French elite, he added.
The European Union was originally a French idea for controlling the continent, but British entry sabotaged the plan, he said. “When you talk to the Euro-enthusiast elite, they tell you ‘our adversary is England, they are stopping us uniting the continent, along with the Germans’.”
The thesis that lands Zemmour in the hottest water is his belief that France sealed its fate when it abandoned its tradition of assimilating immigrants, and embraced the concept of ethnic diversity. “French culture is not Muhammad,” he says. “It is François, it is Christian.”
The result is a new “barbarism”, with the emergence of Muslim ghettos that have broken away from society, he argues in his book. To back his thesis, he quotes Charles de Gaulle as saying that mixing Muslims and French Christians is “like blending oil and vinegar”.
While Zemmour is deemed beyond the pale by much of the Establishment, he enjoys public backing.
Two months ago, supporters demonstrated outside Le Figaro, the most conservative newspaper, after Étienne Mougeotte, the Editor, tried to sack him as a staff columnist.
His offence had been to claim on television that the majority of French drug dealers were of Arab or African origin.
Mougeotte backed down and Zemmour kept his job.
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