Zemmour’s Challenging Voice

On June 10, First Things was delighted to host Éric Zemmour for an evening at our office. The occasion was the release of Nathan Pinkoski’s English translation of The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution that Destroyed a Nation. When Zemmour’s book was published in France in 2014, it made quite a stir, which was not surprising, because he exposed the fact that the beloved “achievements” of recent decades—sexual liberation, empowerment of women, establishment of the European Union, and multiculturalism—have had disastrous consequences.

Though a presidential candidate in the 2022 French election, Zemmour is more an intellectual than a politician. His remarks at the book event were substantive, and more interesting still were his answers to questions. I found one train of thought particularly arresting.

Zemmour observed that with the advent of ­industrial capitalism, the central problem for modern politics in the West has been the “social question”: How does the nation harmonize the interests of labor with those of capital? One can frame the social question in an even more general way and say that the problem throughout the democratic age has been how to harmonize the new agency of the many with the historic dominance of the powerful few. 

A nation prone to extremes, for more than a century after the French Revolution, France was torn between two solutions to the social question. The right proposed to restore benevolent and paternal governance. The responsible few would tame and constrain the cruel and disruptive power of industrial capitalism to protect the vulnerable many and preserve their traditional forms of life. The left promised various emancipations, which would overthrow the few and empower the many, allowing them to gain control over economic forces and thus forge their own futures.

The history of this contest is fascinating. But in his comments at our evening event, Zemmour insisted that another and quite different problem has come to dominate political life in the twenty-first century. It is, he said, the question of identity, or, as I might put it, the question of belonging. The tensions between labor and capital remain, of course, but a more primitive concern is coming to the fore.

Let me explain. Although communism purported to be an international movement, the contests between labor and capital were fought within nations. France and her political institutions were the taken-for-granted reality in which workers and factory owners arrived at a modus vivendi (or not, as was often the case). Today, the explosive questions concern France herself: her borders, her demographic composition, her traditions and folkways, her religion. And this is true not just in France, but, as Zemmour noted, throughout the West.

It’s easy to fixate on mass migration as the force that has brought the question of identity into prominence. ­Zemmour certainly talks about immigration in The Suicide of France. He recognizes that multiculturalism is not so much an ideology as a social technology, a method for managing discontent as the people of France become aware that new peoples are being introduced, often displacing them. Laws punishing “hate speech” give the state a tool with which to control and deter those whose voices threaten the multicultural management of society. (Zemmour has been prosecuted, convicted, and fined a number of times.)

But there are other forces at work. In The Suicide of France, Zemmour observes that, after 1968, the French establishment, not Algerian Muslims, oversaw legislative changes that disintegrated France’s traditions and folkways, often in the interests of female liberation and sexual freedom. He notes that the same establishment introduced judicial review of legislation, a novelty in the French tradition. At the same time, French elites, including those “on the right,” abandoned Charles de Gaulle’s economic nationalism and midwifed the European Union, setting France on the path of servitude to global financial powers. In each instance, the French state, the political expression of the nation, was weakened and paralyzed, to the point that France herself has become a passive subject, buffeted by economic, ­cultural, and demographic forces beyond her control.

The Suicide of France is structured around telling episodes across the forty years between 1970 and 2010. By my reading, the most arresting took place in 1979. Two elderly intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre, once a lion of the communist left, and Raymond Aron, the most influential anti-communist intellectual in postwar France, visited the presidential palace to lobby French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on behalf of the then forlorn Vietnamese boat people. The feeble Sartre stumbled on the steps. Aron took his arm.

The French press depicted the incident as a great witness to solidarity on behalf of human rights, a warm moment in which the old divisions that had so bitterly divided France were overcome. Zemmour agrees, but he sees more deeply. Moralism was replacing politics; universal human rights were superseding the needs of the nation. “Without a word, [Sartre and Aron] sounded the death knell of the Right–Left divide, h­eralding the renunciations of each of the two camps. The Right abandoned the Nation and the State; the Left rejected the People and the Revolution.” Although Zemmour does not use the term, it was the inauguration of the Uniparty.

As we struggle to understand the agonies of our moment in history, the concept of populism seems useful. The many have lost confidence in the leadership of the few, and they are rebelling. True, but Zemmour taught me to be suspicious of this way of framing today’s political situation. For the concept of populism suggests a reprise of the classic form of the social question, encouraging us in the complacent view that the main issues are income inequality, housing costs, and other economic headwinds. I don’t dispute that these problems are real and have political salience. But they do not bear upon the new social question, that of identity: To whom and to what do we belong?

We should frame today’s populism as more than economic in nature. The many now recognize that their ­places of belonging have been disintegrated—their families, neighborhoods, cities, cultures, and nations. The causes are many, and all of them dovetail with and ­reinforce one another: the battering forces of the global economy, mass migration (a new and rival many!), and progressive moralists who insist that our inheritance amounts to little more than a long list of shameful episodes of patriarchy, racism, nativism, colonialism, and other latter-day sins. Populism waxes as the many come to suspect that the few prefer their dissolution, that the powerful wish to disintegrate their inheritance and make them homeless. Zemmour is alive to this ­unhappy and politically explosive suspicion. He quotes the nineteenth-century writer Edgar Quinet: “True exile is not being torn from one’s country; it is living there and finding nothing left that made one love it.”

Image by Anh De France, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.