James McAuley; Translation: Gong Siliang
Editor's note: As France's far-right presidential candidate, Zemour blames France's degeneration on Muslim immigrants. However, it is hard for Zemur's supporters and himself to deny that Zemur is a Jew, a Jew who spurns Jewish history. In addition, many politicians and scholars have expressed strong opposition to his remarks. Behind the opposition to Zemour, however, is an extension of the French elite and xenophobic localism. Even though many scoff at his remarks, in a way, Zemour represents precisely the extreme ideas of France today. This article was published in the New York Review of Books by James McAuley, a former Washington Post paris-based correspondent who holds a Ph.D. in French history from Oxford University.
Paris, France, held his first rally in Paris, France, on December 5, 2021, when France's far-right presidential candidate, Eric Zemour, held his first rally in Paris.
In mid-November 2021, Éric Zemmour, France's far-right presidential candidate, career demagogue and vicious Islamophobic "patient," campaigned in Bordeaux, one of France's wealthiest bourgeois strongholds. The hall was packed with people, especially young white men in baseball caps, who came to listen to this stirring speech. But there are also many women, several of whom thank Zemour for rejecting "feminist dogmas." Thousands of people lined up outside bookstores to buy his new book, La France n'a pas dit son dernier mot. Whatever happens in the April 2022 election (Zemoul's chances of winning are almost non-existent), he's sure to sell a ton of books. As he does every time he publishes another book lamenting the decline or "suicide" of the state; and as his most famous book, Le suicide français (2014), claims. This may be the moral of the story (if the story has any moral). Zemur echoed the deeply concerned French that the country was in free fall, and that this downward spiral was partly the fault of Muslim immigrants. Zemour grossly exaggerated things that many believed but few dared to admit.
In France, complaints about "degenerate" morality are an intellectual tradition, and in some ways Zemour is only a continuation of phobia at the end of the century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Édouard Drumont, and others denounced the erosion of organic national communities. But most importantly, Zemour is a product of contemporary media, imposed on the public by CNews (the French equivalent of Fox News), which is backed by right-wing billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Zemour used his platform as a television commentator and, at one point, as a columnist for Le Figaro, waged an endless culture war. This forced many people who were much more sane than Zemur to feel compelled to join the fight and fight him. Zemour claimed that his motivation was a perception of history, especially french history, and that sometimes he felt that it would be repeated.
That night in Bordeaux is a stark example. Toward the end of the party, Zemur allowed the audience to ask a few questions. The first question came from an older man, who described himself as the founder of a group called Vigilance Halal, who asked Zemour if the latter were elected president, whether he would ban ritual slaughter, part of the strictly observed dietary rules for Muslims and Jews. "You are the only candidate who says that Islam is incompatible with the republic," the man said. At least, this is true. Zemour has repeatedly declared that Islam does not belong to France, and he has twice been convicted of "racism against Muslims and minorities" in French courts, and he has even raised the idea of expelling certain Muslim citizens. The man clearly endorsed the antics, but he articulated the issue more clearly to ensure that Zemur could clearly understand. He said, "I wonder if you're going to ban religious sacrifices." ”
There was some uneasy cacophony in the audience, and at that moment they were forced to confront something that everyone knew but few wanted to mention: Zemur was a Jew, a Jew who spurned Jewish history. He was more right-wing than the far right in traditional France and drew the ire and embarrassment of the leaders of French Jewish institutions as he tried to deny the true history of the Holocaust in France. Even more paradoxical, Zemour allied himself with unrepentant anti-Semites like Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen is a ninety-three-year-old elder of the french far right and a convicted Holocaust denier, but they still appear in some way fixed in public debate in France. However, Zemour remains a judaist, a member of an Orthodox synagogue in Paris who grew up in a Jewish family, which he describes in detail in his book Destin français (2018).
Zemur is clearly uncomfortable with questions about ritual slaughter, although moments like these, where attempts to reconcile his real identity with the cartoonish toxicity of his political platform are inevitable. Zemur, a man who had never been overwhelmed, suddenly found himself a little stuck. "I admit it's a difficult question," he said, trying to find a way out, "and I'll try to find a compromise." I think we should try to reach a compromise. As I watched him struggle and give answers, I think he understood what the real question was, whether he was French or Jewish, a hypothetical binary opposition that existed in the hearts of many of his supporters. This is the paradox of Eric Zemour: those who "accept him as he is" think he is a charlatan, while most people who love him probably want one of his basic attributes to disappear.
At the heart of Zemoul's discourse is the apparent anxiety of the French people about le grand remplacement, a conspiracy theory articulated by the French writer Renaud Camus that foreshadows that white Christians in France and Europe are being "replaced" by hordes of non-whites, especially Muslim immigrants from North and West Africa. Of course, this theory has resonated elsewhere, including in the United States. Behind the nightmare of demographics and existentialism, there is a nostalgia for a world that never really existed. Unsurprisingly, this yearning for traditional France was the essence of Zemour's campaign; he officially announced his candidacy at the end of November as the modern Charles de Gaulle.
However, there is also manifest violence around the world. Fears of the Great Replacement have sparked deadly attacks around the globe: most notably in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, when 51 Muslims were shot dead by a gunman at two different mosques. Zemur's appearance in Bordeaux condones more violence, which is aimed at preventing racial substitution: "We should have the right to condemn those who attack us ... Those who want us to disappear!" However, he pandered to those who were likely to prefer to replace their Jewish identity with other races, and he included himself in the group that was greatly replaced.
Michel Houellebecq's best-selling novel "Soumission" in 2015 is an allegory about France's decline — this time it was islamists, not Nazis, that struck France. In the book, a North African Islamist wins France's 2022 presidential election, published exactly two days before the attack on a Jewish supermarket on the outskirts of Paris, on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre. So far, in the real-world 2022 elections, the hot candidate is indeed a North African thinker, or a thinker of North African descent, but he is not the figure well-imagined by Wellerbek: he is a Jew from an Algerian family, not an Islamist in Tunisia. The "Great Replacement" was his political commitment, and perhaps his personal commitment. After all, the name of his new party was Reconquête, reminiscent of the Reconquista movement, a centuries-long military movement through which Christians escaped muslim conquerors from medieval Iberian regions. But that movement also ended up expelling the Jews from Spain.
Zemour neither speaks for nor speaks for the Jewish community in France, the largest and arguably most dynamic community in Europe. I'm not French, but I'm Jewish, and during my six years in France, I've been happy to live in the Jewish community in France, with the rigor of its knowledge and the pride of the public. A good example is our Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur of the Paris Synagogue, one of the most famous leaders in liberal Judaism around the globe today: a best-selling author who supports interfaith dialogue at a time when the public is increasingly hysterical about Islam and Islamism, and a respected participant in public debates that sometimes have nothing to do with Jewish affairs. This mentality may be the attitude of the majority of representative members of The French Jewish institutions, but Zemour has expressed an extreme stance on anti-Muslim sentiment, which is evident in some communities.
A complex and undeniable fact is that Islamic anti-Semitism poses an imminent and increasingly violent threat to the Jews of France. In March 2012, Mohammed Merah, an Algerian-French gunman, attacked the Ozar Hatorah Jewish Day School in Toulouse, killing rabbis and three children under the age of 10, including an 8-year-old girl who was grabbed in the head and shot to death. Similar incidents have been happening since then: the 2015 attack on a Jewish supermarket; the killing of Sarah Halimi in 2017, who was thrown out of the window to death; and the torture and murder of Mireille Knoll, an eighty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor in 2018. I will always remember that in my first year in Paris, we were instructed to leave the synagogue together after the prayer (Kol Nidre) ceremony, which had no obvious Jewish symbols.
Zemour's hostility, no matter how vulgar and violent, had a way of channeling a sense of anger and even despair in the Jewish community of France. At other times, he sounded like a Likud hardline, especially in Netanyahu's time. "It's simple, if I dare to say it," Zemour told me in an interview with me in 2018, "anti-Semitism was reborn in France with the arrival of the population from Muslim territories, where anti-Semitism is a culture." But anti-Semitism in native France is a cultural tradition in itself, and Zemour is more keen than other public figures to restore its sharpness and intensity."
Zemour's countless provocations have combined vulgarity and absurdity, and he has twisted his obsession with revision and even denied some of the most painful histories in French and Jewish history. For example, he questioned the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Army captain who was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. Zemour said Dreyfus's innocence was "not obvious." He repeatedly defended Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy government, which openly cooperated with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust to deport Jews from France. Speaking at CNews in September, Zemour said: "The Vichy government protected French Jews and abandoned foreign Jews". It was also the defense provided by Pierre Laval, a senior vichy government official, during the post-war trial of collaborating with the enemy in October 1945. He was subsequently executed by the firing squad.
But, just as he insulted the Jews of the past, Zemur also insulted the Jews of the present. In La France n'a pas dit son dernier mot, he wrote that the families of the Jewish victims of the 2012 attack in Toulouse behaved "less French" because they chose to bury their murdered loved ones in Israel, Zemour said:
Anthropologists tell us that our homeland is the country where we are buried. When it comes to leaving their remains, they did not choose France, they were foreigners and wanted to remain in this state after death.
Even the most outspoken far-right thinkers may not say these things, even if they agree.
"France has not yet spoken its last words"
People like him, openly questioning Dreyfus's innocence, rehabilitated the Vichy government and reopened the debate about the dual identity of the Jewish people. French Jews agree that this is tantamount to encouraging anti-Semitism in France," the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy (perhaps Zemour's most outspoken public critic) recently confessed to me.
"The only difference between Zemour and me is that he is Jewish," Jean-Marie Le Pen said in an interview with Le Monde in October. The details of the interview are hard for even Michelle Villebek to imagine. In January 2020, Le Pen and his wife Yani dined with Zemour at the restaurant le Bristol Paris, a luxury Parisian restaurant. The Le Pen family brought a close friend: Ursula Painvin, formerly known as Ursula von Ribbentrop, daughter of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister of Nazi Germany. Pan Win spoke highly of Zemur and conveyed to him "ideas of respect and fraternity". Wealthy racists like her like Zemur because he can parrot their views but not be kicked off the stage. What better way to deny or reduce the Holocaust through the mouths of the Jews? As Le Pen told Le Monde, "It is difficult to call Zemmur a Nazi or a fascist." This gave him greater freedom. ”
I once asked Le Pen what he thought his legacy would be. He replied without hesitation: "After all, they can finally say, 'Le Pen is right.'" In a sense, Zemour was an unexpected gift to the anti-republican, anti-European, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant far right of Le Pen and his predecessors. The Jewish debater was their way of winning, and even if they couldn't win in the ballot box in the end, they could win in the public eye.
Zemour was born in 1958 to a family of Algerian Jewish immigrants on the outskirts of Paris. He grew up in a devout family, but in his narrative, the family considered their identity a private matter. "Streets should not be affirmed by even the slightest religious identity," he wrote. He was not concerned with the history of French Jews during World War II (who believed in the values of the Republic but were betrayed); but with the history of the French Empire and the Jews of the French Colony of Algeria, who became French citizens by the Cremieux Decree in 1870, but muslims in the French colonies did not receive the same rights.
Despite acquiring a new identity, Algerian Jews initially faced mainly organized violent anti-Semitism from French-Algerians who lost their French citizenship during the Vichy government, which in many cases did not seem to damage their image in France. This unpleasant fact certainly did not diminish Zemur's impression of the incident. As he wrote in The Fate of France, "My ancestors, after tasting peace and French civilization, became Berber Frenchmen. But during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962, many Algerian Jews also experienced violent Muslim anti-Semitism, a memory that Zemour has now mobilized to the extreme.
France, where Zemour grew up, is in the throes of another struggle: how to remember the trauma of the Holocaust. In the years after the war, France became a melting pot, pushing for efforts to commemorate the unnamed catastrophe while denying its existence. In the spring of 1943, the Ukrainian-born rabbi Isaac Schneersohn established the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Grenoble, the predecessor of Europe's first large Holocaust archive. It eventually became the Holocaust Memorial, the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyrs in the Marais district of Paris, the first major Holocaust memorial in Europe. Before Israel decided to build the Holocaust Memorial in May 1953, the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center laid the groundwork for the museum.
However, France also became a center of denialism, acting in many ways as its most powerful bastion. Although Holocaust denial occurred across Europe immediately after the war, a veritable movement emerged in France. Nothing compares to its self-proclaimed intellectual conceit. At least in the beginning, it was often an elite, even literary phenomenon, marking the end of the Dreyfus affair at the end of the nineteenth century and anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century, hyped up by writers and thinkers who believed that the Jews would once again invade and rule their country, this time playing the role of fabricated victims.
In 1948, a decisive year in Jewish history, the fascist writer Maurice Bardèche published Nuremberg ou la Terre promise, the first major attempt to publicly deny the Holocaust; the book was initially considered a response to the Nuremberg Trials and the establishment of the State of Israel. Since then, france has had a powerful industry of denial. Robert Forisson's article was published in Badche's anti-Semitic journal La Défense de l'Occident, who openly questioned the existence of gas chambers in Le Monde in 1978, one of the biggest embarrassments in the newspaper's history.
This was the France in which Zemour grew up, and in 1969, when he was 11 years old, Marcel Ophüls released Sorrow and Pity, a widely acclaimed documentary that exposed the cooperation between the city of Clermont-Ferrand and the Nazi occupation, and for some time afterwards, the French government censored the film. When he was 13 years old, the American historian Robert Paxton published Vichy France, a seminal book about the Vichy government's complicity with the Nazis, which shook the heart of the French authorities. Zemoure was only 19 when Le Monde published Forrisson's first infamous letter about gas chambers; he was 33 when Jean-Marie Le Pen first called gas chambers a "detail" in World War II history; and Maurice Papon was 39 when he was finally tried for sending hundreds of Jewish children from Bordeaux to Nazi concentration camps in the 1940s. But for Zemour, all of this is a sign of an over-invested culture of self-flagellation. "It's a struggle with repentance that will kill us," he said in September, "and only in this way (abandoning self-criticism) can France be revitalized." ”
Zemour's candidacy has essentially become a movement against the edifice of memory, and no matter how entrenched memory may seem, it remains fragile. Henry Rousso, a prominent French historian who has written extensively on the subject, argues that the problem is that once the public memory of the Holocaust is accepted by the establishment, it is seen as yet another part of the establishment that populists are determined to dismantle. Russo told me: "Not only for France, but for the entire Western world, the recognition of the Vichy government, and especially the existence of the Holocaust, is the great goal of the war of memory." ”
This is a pillar of contemporary morality; the Nazi holocaust constitutes a reference to absolute evil, a reference for us to compare all other crimes. When Zemour attacked this understanding, he simply used some mediocre right-wing tactics, namely not liking confession; but he went further and even added a provocative dimension.
"All historians are revisionists," Zemour told me when we met in 2018. He then explains his own method (or exposes that he doesn't have one), "I don't consider myself a professional historian because I don't go to archives to dig up new works." "Obsessed with the past, and especially the obsession with the Holocaust, is not as strange in France as it seems abroad. One of the strangest and most disturbing features of French life is that many debates about the spirit of the state refer to Jews as an abstract concept, often without insight from any actual member of the French Jewish community in which Zemour grew up. In the French public's imagination, Jews often became a metaphor in Jean-Paul Sartre's imagination, the figurative embodiment of something outside of their true identity.
The centrality of Jewish metaphors is deeply rooted in modern history. During the French Revolution, France became the first European country to liberate its Jewish population, and France's characteristic conceit toward universalism became essentially a debate about Jews: what to do with them, how to integrate them. The Republic's answer to these questions, namely that all citizens were equal in the eyes of the state and that citizenship was superior to all other subordinate relations, ultimately led to unprecedented success for the Jews in commercial, political, and cultural life. In the words of the historian Pierre Birnbaum, the Jews are exemplary republicans – les fous de la République. But that made the Republic a "Jewish" structure in the eyes of its harshest critics, the title of La France Juive, published in 1886, the most notorious anti-Semitic text in French history.
Less than a decade after the book was published, the Dreyfus affair polarized the entire country. Dreyfus the Jew became a metaphor, rather than a real individual, to his apologists he was rational France; to his opponents, he represented the anti-French attitude of Jews, foreigners, and immigrants. The end of the events, the acquittal of Dreyfus and the Catholic repression of civic life and public education were triumphs of one parable over another, not to mention the origin of the values proclaimed by the Republic as we know it today.
Memories of the Holocaust, and Jewish affairs in general, are frequently mentioned in almost every French debate about identity politics, Islamism, and even about the decline of the state, and these are three of Zemour's favorite themes. This history is constantly being renegotiated, but recourse to history has long since become a politically conditioned reflex for non-Jews, the ultimate means of blocking out opponents in public life, no matter what the topic at hand. The "Juifs" label is popular on French Twitter almost every week, usually when non-Jewish politicians or activists compare something to the Holocaust: for example, by analogy with a yellow star through a COVID-19 vaccine, or by arguing that non-Jewish opponents are not adequately considering Jews. This kind of performative philosophical Judaism may itself be a form of anti-Semitism. Sometimes a recourse is resorted to an imaginary Jewish power structure to distinguish Jews in a way that differs from traditional discrimination. No one seems to think of these questions, perhaps except for the real Jews in France, but in any case they have nothing to do with this psychodrama.
As a political candidate, Zemour seems to have been in trouble. But this is almost a digression. What matters is what he represents, which is not a far right, but a distortion of the French establishment itself: he offers an extreme version of prejudices and opinions that have been formed a long time ago, especially on the issue of Islam. He ultimately embodied the views of the establishment, no matter how much his representatives condemned him. The former columnist has transformed himself into a sort of collective identity, an ugly mirror that reflects the raw emotions of many in France.
There is no doubt that Zemur's rise is inextricably linked to a lingering trauma. France has suffered some of the most brutal terrorist attacks in Western Europe by ISIS and other Islamists in recent times. In addition to the January 2015 massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists and Jewish supermarkets, there were also attacks on the Batacran Concert Hall and cafes across Paris in November 2015. In July 2016, the eighty-five-year-old priest Jacques Hamel was killed in a country church, as well as the massacre on the Promenade des Blances in Nice on The Bastille Day in 2016. In total, 234 people were killed in those attacks. More recently, in 2020, Samuel Paty, a public school teacher on the outskirts of Paris, was beheaded for his "crime" of showing students cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad in a course about freedom of expression.
On November 2, 2020, in solidarity with beheaded teacher Samuel Patti, a graffiti painting at Finkwiller Primary School in Strasbourg, France, showed a portrait of Nelson Mandela and his famous words "Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world."
For years, and even decades, a pressing issue in French political life has been the integration and assimilation of the country's Muslim population, which is considered to have the largest Muslim population in Europe. The issue became more pressing in the wake of these devastating attacks, especially since some of them were carried out by young people with very similar social characteristics: the grandparents of these French citizens came to France from former colonies in North Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. These families have achieved at least some degree of success in France, but not to a high extent. Some of these young people have even produced the products of Zemour and French President Emmanuel Macron's touted education system, but these young people are bewildered by jihadist extremism. The question now is, why are they being seduced? Answering this question has become a painful fault in the French public debate.
This is the problem in the well-known debate between the famous French political scientists Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy in 2016: in short, Keppel believes that radicalization stems from religious radicalism, Roy believes that Islamism is simply the most acceptable way for young people, and that these excluded groups need to express their grievances in some way. Macron clearly sided with Keppel in this debate, but his government's response to the issue of terrorist violence after Patti's beheading has succumbed to public hysteria, even at all costs. Zemour's position on these events has been consistent: whether there were attacks or not, he has always argued that Islam (not just Islamism) is incompatible with the French Republic. Shocking, even chilling, those who run the country and see themselves as the last barrier against fascism, who profess to be liberals, have now largely adopted this view, whether they are aware of it or not.
The proud centrist Macron, who was elected in 2017 for his opposition to Marine Le Pen, immediately began a plan to combat "Islamist separatism," but from the outset the plan was clearly lacking in seriousness. Perhaps the most extreme aspect (and also the most Zemühr-esque aspect) of the government's response to "Islamic separatism" is the public crackdown on academic freedom and its so-called Islamo-gauchisme in French universities, which is almost like the perpetrators of recent attacks who inexplicably became radical extremists at a seminar at The School of Sciences Po. In February, Macron's minister of higher education, Frédérique Vidal, told CNews that the Islamic left "plagues society as a whole and universities are not immune". More than six hundred academics signed an open letter in Le Monde opposing Vidal's remarks, and their names were quickly published on a far-right blog that sought to tarnish their reputations online and stifled opportunities for students who might want to study real phenomena such as discrimination against Muslims in France. Faced with growing criticism, especially from cnrs, France's premier academic research institution, Vidal eventually retracted her declaration of war.
This is the French version of the "War of Awakening," which has become the fanatical dream of the American right. But the difference is that in France, the loudest and most influential speeches in France, in opposition to what Macron called "a theory of the social sciences imported entirely from the United States," came from the center-left; Zemour was by no means the only knight rushing toward these windmills. For him, the main threat to contemporary France is foreigners. Zemour said in mid-December: "You just have to look at what's going on on the streets to see the great replacement going on. But the same political institutions that did not hesitate to oppose Zemour found a distinctly similar threat (awakening culture) in foreign ideas that often defended the same group of foreigners zemmer attacked. This may be a different kind of "being replaced" anxiety, but it is still "substitution anxiety."
The hardliners on these issues are Macron's education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, and in October 2020, the French government set up a think tank called République aimed at stopping the spread of so-called "awakening" ideas, which he told Le Monde that these ideas are the "opposite" of the republic. In that interview, Blank said:
The republican view rejects this doctrine of division and division, which has conquered certain political, media and academic environments and proposes a logic of victimization that undermines the democratic foundations of our society.
I thought of this exchange when I heard Zemour answer a question about "awakening culture" in Bordeaux. "You are absolutely right," he said to his man who asked him.
This awakening ideology, those who pretend to be aware of inequality and suffer real or imaginary suffering in terms of skin color or gender, poses a threat to freedom of thought, intellectual health, and our schools and universities.
While their respective motivations are different, there is no clear difference between Blank's comments and Zemour's: the former legitimizes the latter, or even concedes to the latter.
Finally, there is the question of the veil – the eternal blind spot of the self-proclaimed French "universalist". Unsurprisingly, Zemour expressed fierce emotions toward the masked Muslim women, but what was really surprising was how many people who claimed to be disgusted with Zemur's pretense did not oppose him on this issue, no matter how they proved their point. The veil is prohibited in schools along with other religious symbols and symbols, but it is perfectly legal to wear them in other public places. However, many of Macron's officials seemed happy to tell French Muslim citizens that wearing veils made them unpopular in public life and, in a sense, made them less like the French. In 2019, Agnès Buzyn, France's former health minister, complained about the runner's headscarf introduced by French sportswear brand Decathlon. "I'd rather a French brand than sell a veil," she said. Blank also commented that while it is technically legal for Muslim mothers to wear headscarves during school field trips, he wants to avoid wearing headscarves "as much as possible."
Thus, to regard Zemour merely as the embodiment of fascism distorts his meaning: he is a natural extension of the French elite and xenophobic localism. An even more absurd sight recently seen on French television is that CNews followed Zemmer to De lancie, where he spent part of his childhood, where Jews were held before they were deported to Auschwitz. He stood in front of a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, who turned out to be a person who rarely wore a veil, but for the purposes of this exchange she was taken to CNews. "France is secular," said Zemour, referring to secularist values that the country cherishes. "We are not in an Arab Muslim country ... In public life, we say, 'I'm French.' The woman took off her headscarf, probably to show she had regained her sanity on live television. As bizarre as the scene is, what Zemour says doesn't conflict with the basic beliefs of many traditional French feminists and mainstream Republicans who genuinely believe that no Muslim woman is free to choose to wear a veil. I often wonder what these people saw when they looked at Zemur, whether they could see their own shadow in his image.
Recently, Clément Beaune, Macron's secretary of state for European affairs and one of the government's most eloquent representatives, said, "Eric Zemour is bad news for France." He is the antithesis of France, the hatred of France. "He's certainly bad news, but he's not the antithesis of France. In the obvious and disturbing way, Eric Zemour is France.
Editor-in-Charge: Han Shaohua