To understand Éric Zemmour, the ultra-right candidate who has garnered so much attention in the French presidential election this spring, it helps to go back all the way to April, 1793. On the thirteenth of that month, France’s ruling National Convention voted the arrest of the deputy and journalist Jean-Paul Marat. The violent rhetoric that he spewed out on a regular basis in his newspaper, L’ami du peuple, had long shocked even radical revolutionaries. On one occasion he demanded that two hundred thousand heads roll, so as “to save a million.” Earlier in April, he had called for a popular insurrection to purge the Convention of supposed counterrevolutionaries. Now his enemies hoped that his downfall had finally arrived. But on April 24the Revolutionary Tribunal acquitted Marat, and his jubilant supporters carried him in triumph on their shoulders through the halls of the Paris Palace of Justice. France’s revolutionary First Republic did not have a presidency, but Marat was now indisputably one of the two or three most influential men in the country. Marat, a figure of the revolutionary ultra-left, might not seem to have much in common with the reactionary Zemmour, a journalist who first gained public notoriety with his ferocious attacks on feminists, immigrants, Islam, and the European Union, and his embrace of the noxious “great replacement” theory. But France is a country in which, as the French saying goes, the extremes meet. Decades before attempting to enact a radical socialist program as President in 1981, François Mitterrand belonged to the far-right Cagoule. The leader of France’s mid-twentieth century fascist party, Jacques Doriot, started his career as a communist. In fact, a high proportion of the older men and women who are voting for Zemmour this spring once voted for the French Communist Party. Zemmour himself voted for Mitterrand in 1981, and once counted a far-left rival for the presidency, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as a friend and regular dinner companion. Beyond their shared extremism, Marat and Zemmour have other similarities. In both cases, there is an outsider quality: Marat was Swiss, Zemmour the son of Algerian Jews. In both cases, the men conjure up specters of vast, evil, alien forces threatening France: counterrevolutionaries and foreign enemies for Marat, Muslim immigrants for Zemmour. Like Marat, Zemmour has repeatedly, and deliberately, provoked formal prosecution. Courts have twice convicted him of hate speech, although he has been acquitted of denying France’s crimes against humanity in the Second World War. He recently went on trial yet again for “public insult” and “incitement to hatred or violence.” Unlike Marat, he does not risk the guillotine if convicted. The most important similarity, however, lies in the two men’s backgrounds as journalists and would-be men of letters. To be sure, Éric Zemmour fits into an all-too-prevalent global pattern: that of the populist provocateur who openly appeals to racial and xenophobic ressentiment. He hopes to benefit from the same forces that earlier swept to power such figures as Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and, of course, Donald Trump. But he still belongs to a distinctly French variety of the species. In France, more than anywhere else on the globe, even populists who rail against elites can still pose as intellectuals. Although Zemmour spent most of his career as a daily journalist, he is also a prolific essayist and author. Among his works is a five-hundred-page tome called French Destiny, which tries to summarize a thousand years of the country’s history, attacking professional historians for “deconstructing” the country’s past glories and praising past leaders (including even Robespierre!) who did not hesitate to use fiercely repressive measures against supposed internal enemies. He cemented his appeal to the traditionalist far-right through a detailed, splenetic, and mendacious critique of Robert Paxton, a formidable American historian of Vichy France. If Donald Trump’s Twitter feed generally seemed like the ravings of a demented racist uncle, Zemmour’s often reads like a series of pseudo-literary aphorisms (“my political family is France eternal”). He calls Balzac’s Lost Illusions his favorite novel and compares himself to its ill-fated hero, Lucien de Rubempré, another outsider who made it into the elite circles of French journalism. He even professes a respect for the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, from whom he claims to have derived the idea that seizing political power depends upon first establishing cultural hegemony. Most French intellectuals of the center and left scoff at Zemmour’s pretensions, mock his history-writing as alternately false and banal (which it is), and dismiss his literary references as superficial and trite (also true). Yet he belongs to a long tradition of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals in French politics, of which he himself is perfectly aware. To quote a recent series of his tweets: “Our greatest writers and journalists have thrown themselves with fervor into political life… Journalism, literature, and politics: a magical trio, a French trio, for the best and for the worst… The best is style, grand ideas, grand ideals. The worst is bad faith, invective, sectarianism.” It’s a fine summary, except that Zemmour himself exemplifies only the very worst aspects of the tradition. The grand tradition of the engagé intellectual did not proceed by tweets, of course; and it might seem antiquated and unsuited to the new media universe of Twitter, Instagram posts, viral video clips, and twenty-four-hour news networks. But in fact something of the opposite is true. This new universe favors men and women who can write prolifically and fast, with a knack for delivering memorable quips and insults at a moment’s notice. Twitter was made for bon mots. Zemmour certainly fits this pattern, and it helps to explain his recent success. His intellectual background also explains one of the strangest things about his recent political success, namely how the son of Algerian Jews has been able to assume the leadership of a political current long associated with some of the deepest and most virulent forms of European anti-Semitism. Put simply, Zemmour, thanks to his literary background, has developed a note-perfect imitation of blood-and-soil French Christian nationalism that no
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