The origins of Eric Zemmour French nationalism has a long and bloody history

You can hardly sanction ideas more sternly than by shooting their champions. In France, though, mystic and militant nationalism is the repressed that always returns. Far-Right activism with a literary or philosophical tinge has coloured French politics at least since the Dreyfus Affair convulsed the country in the 1890s. Zemmour merely fronts the latest edition of a well-thumbed publication.

Its features do change. Notably, hostility to Muslim migration has neatly filled the yawning space occupied for so long by anti-Semitism. Still, the editorial line robustly endures. Alien powers have corrupted the true genius of France, abetted by a traitorous liberal and cosmopolitan elite. Formal citizenship granted as an empty, bureaucratic right has supplanted the affinities of blood, soil, language and culture that should define the nation. French identity itself is in grave peril. Behind the changing face of the enemy within — Jews, Protestants and Freemasons a century ago, Muslims and other non-white incomers now — stands the omnipotent malice of global finance. In France, hard-Right and far-Left may enjoy tearing each other apart. They can readily agree a truce on the demonic iniquity of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism.

Le Grand Remplacement, a 2011 polemic by the prolific novelist-turned-activist Renaud Camus, functions almost as the Communist Manifesto for this newest wave of the nativist Right — and a rhetorical cornerstone of Zemmour’s campaign. Long ago, Camus was a scandalous gay icon thanks to outspoken fiction such as Tricks (published with a preface by Roland Barthes). Recently, he has seen his nebulous theory that a top-down strategy of “replacement” aims to substitute the native-born French population with an alien army of non-white, non-Christian incomers go viral, and go global. It reached the American alt-Right by the time of the fatal Charlottesville riots of 2017. A few weeks back,  Zemmour’s centre-right rival Valérie Pécresse uttered the trigger phrase during a stump speech.

Read Le Grand Remplacement, though, and you soon grasp that its allure lies not in reasoning or evidence — beyond the gut feelings of the author — but in the impact of a few key images. It displays the craft of a rhetorician of visceral, subjective experience. But for Camus, race has now replaced sex as the transmission-belt of fear and desire. Camus is haunted (obsessed, indeed) by the figure a veiled woman on a TV chat show. Despite “speaking our language badly, knowing nothing of our culture and, more seriously, overflowing with vindictiveness and animosity, not to say hate, towards our history and our civilisation”, she can sit there and say pleasantly that “I’m as French as you are” (my translation). “If this woman is right,” Camus continues, “being French is nothing: it’s a mockery, a failed joke gone sad, a rubber-stamp on an official document”. He declines to mention the colonial history, with its incorporation of overseas possessions as parts of France itself, that the “I’m as French as you” claim legitimately reflects.

Camus, like his imitators, longs to reclaim an uncomplicated sense of national pride. He speaks in the plangent, self-pitying terms that run like a streak of bitter tears through the language of the French right. “I’ve a nostalgia,” he frankly admits, “for a simple, self-evident belonging, which isn’t perpetually forced to interrogate itself.” These days, however, being French has to be “as ‘problematic’, as ambiguous, as being Belgian”. Self-evidently, no fate could be worse than a Belgian’s…

Camus’s imagery revives a crucial ideological distinction between the “pays legal” of abstract, bloodless state rules and the “pays réel” of authentic identity and belonging. That polarity has driven the cultural right in France ever since Charles Maurras headed the Action Française movement at the turn of the 20th century. This deep flow of what we might call French Powellism (Camus himself has introduced a translation of Powell’s “Rivers of blood” speech) long preceded modern Fascism. It merged with the Fascist mainstream in the Vichy era, and paid the price after the Liberation. Tried in Lyon, the elderly Maurras escaped the firing squad in 1945 but got a life sentence for his collaborationist record.

Famously, Maurras cried as he stepped down from the court: “It’s the revenge of Dreyfus.” Yet the revenge proved incomplete. After the Purge, the Maurras current of ideas resumed its winding but still-influential course. De Gaulle’s shrewd and robust formula for a presidential monarchy managed both to channel and neutralise it. Nativist thought retreated to the noisy margins of “New Right” philosophy and journalism until Jean-Marie Le Pen and his clan brought France-for-the-French activism back into the electoral spotlight. Le Pen senior has honoured both Brasillach himself — and the Resistance fighters who sought his execution.

The great French gloom of the Noughties, its “declinist” spirit exported globally thanks to the morose satires of Michel Houellebecq, cleared plenty of space not just for the prix fixe populism of Le Pen. It boosted the more upmarket gourmet menu on offer from Renaud Camus, Zemmour and the media-friendly philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut. So Zemmour’s political ascent drew fuel from decades of renewed attacks on multicultural modernity.

Older reactionaries often claimed to be saving the inclusive revolutionary ideals of 1789 from later deviations. In spite of his roots in a Jewish Algerian family, Zemmour has changed course. He has sailed on the tide of nativist feeling as it turned from civic towards ethnic nationalism. His 2022 manifesto scorns the idea of a hybrid, hyphenated or cross-cultural national identity. It insists that “if it is possible to assimilate individuals, it is not possible to assimilate peoples”. In this perspective, multiculturalism can never speak French. In his superbly lucid study of cross-Channel cultural habits, How the French Think, Sudhir Hazareesingh notes that Finkielkraut and his comrades show “how far the declinist obsession has pushed French thought away from its Rousseauist and republican heritage”. Once more, blood, not paper, counts above all.

For sure, the national populism of Le Pen père exploited working-class fears about non-European — above all, North African — migration. As does that of Le Pen fille. Yet a strain of republican universalism marked their movements. I recall, in the early Nineties, reporting on a Front National rally in Nice and noticing the genuine cheers that greeted his local Maghrebian, Caribbean and Indo-Chinese supporters as Le Pen welcomed them on stage. Stooges, maybe — but the inclusive optics mattered.

Zemmour, in contrast, has stirred up the ancient soup of salon prejudice that nourished Maurras, Brasillach and their ilk. Don’t dismiss his appeal as a mere side-show of the plebeian resentment felt in left-behind provincial towns. Posh racism, gussied up in intellectual fashion, has lurked in the background of French cultural life since the anti-Dreyfusard heyday of Maurras and his colleague Maurice Barrès. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu supplies an acidly witty running commentary on the rise and fall of anti-Dreyfus opinion, as the wrongly convicted Captain slowly wins his freedom.

In the aristocratic salons of Paris, being chic and well-born means sharing the reflexes of the xenophobic right. “Personally, you know that I have no racial prejudice,” burbles Proust’s super-snobbish Duc de Guermantes in The Guermantes Way, “all that sort of thing seems to me out of date… but damn it all, when one goes by the name of ‘Marquis de Saint-Loup’ one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more can I say?” Proust shows too how smart folk will cast off once-universal prejudices like last season’s hats once they become socially embarrassing. At the work’s close, we learn that “Dreyfusism was now integrated in a scheme of respectable and familiar things. As for asking oneself whether intrinsically it was good or bad, the idea no more entered anybody’s head, now when it was accepted, than in the past when it was condemned. It was no longer shocking and that was all that mattered.”

Zemmour and his confrères have dipped into the nativist soup that long ago nourished the anti-Dreyfusards. They have carefully extracted its now-unpalatable ingredients (anti-Semitism above all) and brought it back to a rolling boil. Since the age of Voltaire, French life has cultivated such licensed agents provocateurs on the edges of political respectability. They have duly let off fireworks from both ends of the spectrum. Blood-and-soil mavericks of the Renaud Camus or Zemmour stripe have counterparts on the left in the diehard Trotskyists and Maoists — such as veteran thinker-activist Alain Badiou — who still cast a spell. These opposites can attract, or even merge. In the 2017 election Alain de Benoist, a pillar of “New Right” philosophy since the Sixties, supported the unsinkable old-Left survivor Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the French Tony Benn, still running hard in 2022. Zemmour himself has spoken with affection of the old PCF (Communist Party) and its stalwart defence of – native-born – workers’ rights.

The theological politics of rupture and upheaval, and a contempt for liberalism, especially in its “Anglo-Saxon” guise, may solder the far ends of French thought into a sort of fraternal enmity. Their battle of ideas has, since the Revolution, often played out like an intimate civil war. Foreigners may miss this antagonistic kinship. By some weird twist of cultural and institutional history, the so-called “French theory” that came to dominate Anglo-American humanities faculties from the Seventies was imported as a unified body of progressive doctrine. Yet it had roots on the Right as well as Left. Richard Wolin’s analysis The Seduction of Unreason brilliantly lays bare the “subterranean affinities” that knotted both ends. Mainstays of the US-UK “theory” curriculum such as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille had close links with what Wolin calls the “Left fascism” of the Thirties, and the cultural arms of the Vichy regime.

The defeat of 1940, and the four ensuing years of humiliation and compromise, transformed a long-standing elite game of poses and provocations into a blood-sport with actual corpses on the ground. Brasillach, the ultimate paper tiger, joined them. The war in Algeria, and its fall-out in France, did for a while prolong the real-world lethality of these ideological disputes. Then De Gaulle, and the modernised prosperity he fostered, made sure that the extremist entertainers of French culture could once again fire freely – and fire only blanks.

Zemmour, the latest heir to this tradition of high-minded outrageousness, may well fade from view after the first round of voting on 1o April. Sooner or later, another firebrand of the cerebral, nativist Right will fill his shoes. However, the genius of the De Gaulle’s republican monarchy is that the system will eventually install another effective Macron-style president: one more “technocratic” ruler whom apocalyptic right and left will agree to detest.

According to travel writer Sylvain Tesson, France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they live in hell. It can sometimes feel that way. In a country of high-quality public services and world-class social infrastructure where productivity now runs (according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics) 18% higher than in the UK, crybaby ideologues will again lament that la France profonde remains the prisoner of multi-cultural traitors and Anglo-Saxon capitalists. Back in London, meanwhile, I can pay my bus fares to the RATP (Régie autonome des transports parisiens, owner of London United and London Sovereign) and my fuel bills to Eléctricité de France. As Robert Brasillach might say, Vive la France quand même!

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Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.

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