Elisabeth Zerofsky, The Right-Wing Pundit ‘Hashtag Triggering’ France, The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2019; original article contains links
Zemmour image from article
Excerpt:
After high school, Zemmour attended Sciences Po, the feeder school for France’s political class, and took the entrance exams for the École Nationale d’Administration, the finishing academy from which almost all of the country’s high officials, including presidents, have graduated; he passed the written entrance exam but failed the oral one, a shock for someone accustomed to being the top student. Zemmour had a literary conception of life: a vague ambition to climb, like a character in a Balzac novel, into a position of social influence. He began working as a political reporter for The Quotidien de Paris, which he described to me as “right-wing anarchist” — a French tradition of irreverence toward the establishment, which, he said, “despises the moralism of progressives.” When the paper closed in the ’90s, he took a position at Le Figaro and began appearing on early-morning television news, where he cemented his reputation for being “fully contemptuous of the liberal bourgeoisie,” as one TV producer put it. In the meantime, he published three novels and 10 books of essays.
Zemmour’s 2014 book, “French Suicide,” was a work of pop history that courses through key legal decisions, pivotal figures and cultural anecdotes in the 40 years following the “soft” revolution of May 1968, when university students famously took to the streets of Paris and upended traditional social structures. Throughout the book, Zemmour polemicizes against the cultural decay that he believes ensued: the “creeping feminization” of society, which prioritized consensus over authority, peace over war and the individual over the family. He portrays the liberated woman as a hapless victim of consumer culture: Contrary to what she claims, she actually needs and wants to be dominated by a man. The problem, Zemmour laments, is that modern man has himself been feminized, reduced from a producer to a consumer. “French Suicide” sold 500,000 copies — more than 6,000 a day at one point — making him one of the most widely read authors in France that year. In retrospect, it is easy to see that the book thrived within the same civic breakdown that, a few years later, would allow Emmanuel Macron to overturn the French political system entirely. Lise Boëll, the editorial director of Albin Michel, Zemmour’s publishing house, told me that she came up with the title while sitting in a cafe in the working-class neighborhood where she lives. “I heard people saying, ‘But this is suicide, it’s suicide.’ And I thought, O.K., something is happening,” Boëll said.
Much of the press coverage of “Suicide Français” fixated, enraged, on a seven-page section in which Zemmour rebutted the widely held view of Vichy, France’s collaborationist government, as fully responsible for everything that happened under its stewardship. Zemmour argued that in choosing to cooperate with the Nazis, Vichy had, in fact, saved French Jews, and it was for this reason that 75 percent of Jews in France survived. That number is accurate, but almost all historians do not believe this is why they survived. Nor does Zemmour grapple with Vichy’s dehumanizing anti-Semitic laws, which led to the deportation and extermination of both French and foreign Jews.
For most of his readers, Zemmour’s fixation on Vichy, a theme he comes back to in “French Destiny,” is mystifying and inexplicable. But for Raphaël Glucksmann, the former editor of Nouveau Magazine Littéraire, a left-leaning publication, it is readily explained by recognizing Zemmour’s real goal. Though Zemmour has denied any interest in participating in electoral politics — there were rumors that Marine Le Pen would have liked to appoint him a minister in a hypothetical government — he has also said that, with his books, he has the impression of engaging more in politics than most politicians. “Zemmour has a very clear ambition, which is to erase the divide between the Republican right and the far right under the banner of the far right,” Glucksmann told me. Softening the verdict on the Vichy regime, the historical ancestor of the French far right, would make such an alliance more plausible. During a radio appearance on France Inter in September, Glucksmann confronted Zemmour with this interpretation of his project. “You have understood me very well,” Zemmour replied. In January, the Republicans, France’s mainstream-right party, invited him to their headquarters to give a lecture. ...
In Zemmour’s imagination, his family is the model of French assimilation. His parents arrived from a Judeo-Arab culture but gave their children Christian first names; Zemmour studied the Torah privately but removed any external symbols of his faith in public, presenting himself as fully devoted to the principle of laïcité, or French secularism. What’s more, he didn’t experience this as any kind of internal contradiction or compromise. Why couldn’t immigrants today do the same? ...
Image from article, with caption: Audience members in the balcony at a talk by Éric Zemmour in September at the Théâtre Montansier in Versailles.
No comments:
Post a Comment