Eric Zemmour

Eric Zemmour

Eric Zemmour is a French writer and TV commentator. Until 2009, he was a reporter for Le Figaro and has since had a column in Figaro Magazine. He has also appeared as a television personality on the shows On n'est pas Couchés on the station France 2 between 2006 and 2011, Ça se dispute on TÉLÉ between 2003 and 2014, and Z comme Zemmour on the radio RTL since January 2010. Starting September 2011, he has hosted Zemmour et Naulleau, a weekly evening talk show on Paris Première, together with Éric Naulleau . His antiliberal and radical positions as well as the numerous controversies he has been involved in, are notorious in France.

In 2014, he was sacked from Ca se dispute for implying Muslims ought to be deported, and predicting a 'civil war' would stem from conflicts connected to the Muslim population of France.

Activities

Zemmour was convicted of inciting racial hatred in 2011 after claiming that most drug dealers are 'blacks and Arabs. That's a fact.'.

He is author of a book called The French Suicide, which reportedly 'argues that France's identity is being destroyed by factors including immigration, homosexuality and feminism'. It has sold over 400,000 copies.

His latest book, Un Quinquenat Pour Rien ('A presidential mandate for nothing') out in 2016, has received criticisms for its islamophobic tone, even though the platform on which he launched his book was deemed quite large by some. He was given a 6-minute interview about his book on RTL, a radio station on which he has bi-weekly chronics, and more air time on several other TV shows.

New Reactionaries

According to the BBC journalist Hugh Schofield, Zemmour is a prominent members of what some have called the 'neo-reactionnaires' (new reactionaries) 'a loose group of writers and thinkers' who represent a 'new intellectual force in France' challenging 'the disastrous post-1968 left-wing consensus' and seeking to 'shake up debate on issues like immigration, Islam and national identity'. Schofield notes that critics believe they are 'providing spurious philosophical cover for the extremism of the National Front'. He reports that ironically Zemmour admires the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci who emphasised the importance of culture in political struggle.

Others deemed to be new reactionaries include aesthete and writer Renaud Camus and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut.

Views

Anti-neoliberalism

Like most 'new reactionaries', Zemmour claims not to vote according to right-wing or left-wing politics. However, the political views that he regularly expresses on his different media platforms are close to the far-right in several aspects. He declares himself to be of the Gaullist or Bonapartist tradition (Stemming from Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon Bonaparte I) while acknowledging the relevance of Marxist analyses, particularly concerning the sources of profit in capitalism, including immigration. Yet he utilises Marxism to take a conservative stance on social issues. For instance, his claim that capitalism destroys structures like the family and traditions in order to impose the rule of the market. He thus identifies himself as a reactionary in opposition to a society striving towards a false goal, liberating the individual who in reality finds himself isolated and reduced to being a consumer.

On feminism and homosexuality

In his books Le Premier sexe (2006), he claims the existence of the "devirilization" of society during the 20th century and asserts that women and homosexuals have been used as a reserve army to satisfy modern capitalism's need for consumers. He accuses feminists of being demagogues and verging into political correctness in denying or rejecting the history of French society and psychological work of Freud. He believes that man is by nature a sexual predator who uses violence, and that the "gay ideology" invites men to adopt the behavior of women.

On the nation, immigration and Islam

As a member of the French assimilationist tradition (that claims immigrants should be 'assimilated' into 'French culture' by abandoning 'their' own), Zemmour strongly opposes immigration and the current model of integrating immigrants which he considers to be 'too lenient'. He uses the example of Ancient Rome, who fell because it failed to assimilate the different peoples they conquered in to their culture, to warn of the possible future of France

In November 2008, he gave an interview where he compared immigration to a 'demographic tsunami'. He also agreed with one of Charles De Gaulle's citation, where he applauded the "yellow, black and brown" peoples within France, but only as a minority, as the French people were first and foremost a european people of white race, Christian religion and greco-latin culture. (" C’est très bien qu’il y ait des Français jaunes, des Français noirs, des Français bruns. [...] Mais à condition qu’ils restent une petite minorité. Sinon la France ne serait plus la France. Nous sommes quand même avant tout un peuple européen de race blanche, de culture grecque et latine, et de religion chrétienne ")

Zemmour also complained in a BBC article:

The sovereignty of the nation has disappeared. The state no longer has the power to revive the economy, or to defend our borders. The state is powerless. There are parts of France which feel like a different continent today. There are neighbourhoods which are completely Muslim - in their appearance, in their shops, in their tradition. And at the same time we have the constant process of Americanisation. Our budget is controlled by Brussels. We have no currency. Our army has to follow Washington's orders. That is what I mean by destruction.

All his recurring views on the theme of immigration, as well as his virulent attacks against certain organizations (LICRA and SOS Racisme in particular, who pursued him in court in 2010) are regularly the subject of controversy.

Comments on race

Éric Zemmour declared on Arte on November 13, 2008 while he was on the show Paris/Berlin that blacks and whites belonged to two different races and that this difference was discernable by skin color. 'If there is no such thing as race, there is no such thing as intermixing.' He continued, 'The sacralization of race during the Nazi period and earlier has been followed by the negation of race. And to me, they're both equally ridiculous.'

On anti-racism

He accuses the antiracism of the 1980s, along with feminism, to be a 'bien-pensant cause' derived from the 'milieu of French and Western pseudo-elites'. He said 'anti-racist progressivism [is] the successor of communism, with the same totalitarian methods developed by the Comintern during the 1930s.' According to him, anti-racism was a tactic initiated by François Mitterrand to make people forget the Left's turn to economic liberalism in 1983. Anti-racism would be an ideology implemented by former leftists who had had to give up their illusions. Such a thesis is very similar to Alain Finkielkraut's ideas.

Implied support for the deportation of Muslims

Zemmour was interviewed by an Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in October 2014, and though the transcript was subsequently deleted it had already been copied and translated into French.

In the interview Zemmour claimed that Muslims 'live among themselves' in suburbs from which French people have been forced to leave. When asked whether he was proposing the deportation of the 5 million French Muslims he reportedly replied 'I know it's unrealistic, but history is often surprising. Who would have thought in 1940 that a million pieds-noirs [Europeans living in North Africa], twenty years later, would have left Algeria to return to France? Or that after the war five or six million Germans would leave Central-Eastern Europe where they had lived for centuries?'

Reactions

When former French education minister Jean-Luc Mélenchon drew attention to Zemmour's comments in December 2014, many leading French politicians condemned his arguments.

Zemmour was sacked from his 11-year job on Ca se Dispute, an iTELE chat show. A Twitter campaign with the hashtag #ZemmourDeporteMoi (Zemmour would deport me) was also sparked.

But Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National defended Zemmour and said his sacking was 'loathsome censorship'.

Ideological proximity with mainstream parties

In an interview with the extreme-right newspaper Valeurs Actuelles, he complained about how, while Nicolas Sarkozy had effectively used the security and identity card to win the 2007 presidential elections, but had abandoned them in 2010, which served the Front National.

He was invited to an event in 2 March 2011 to the national convention of 'The Reformers', a UMP-linked think-tank led by Hervé Novelli, and was given an ovation by the members of parliament from the UMP. In his speech, Zemmour suggested doing away with the laws on racial discrimination, the memorial laws, prosecutions by anti-racist organizations and subsidies to them.

Contact

Twitter: twitter.com/zemmourinfos