Zemmour, between desktop erudition and the nationalist rewriting of the past

Éric Zemmour, when he was a child, attended family after-meals with amazement.

It was the late sixties or early seventies.

The men of the house—the father, the uncles, the grandfather: Jews born in Algeria who had emigrated to France because of the war of independence—discussed politics and history.

They launched their theories, some surely crazy, and ingeniously interpreted episodes from the past.

Zemmour, candidate for the April presidential elections in France, would later recall: "The voices rumbled, the glasses shook, the hands and arms shook, the insults rained down."

It was his civic and political education.

During his years as a talk show host and bestselling essayist, Zemmour used French history to support his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views and raise the specter of civil war.

His was not an academic history.

As in family discussions, he mixed more or less ingenious provocation with after-dinner erudition.

Now that he aspires to the highest magistracy, the particular rewriting of his past is the true trademark of the candidacy.

Zemmour poses a dilemma for the historians' guild.

One option would have been to ignore it.

Is it worth devoting yourself to denying it?

As with fake news, debunking it rarely has an effect on voters.

The case of Donald Trump proves it.

That is why several historians and politicians in France have considered, a few weeks before the elections, that there was a lot at stake and that it was necessary to dismantle the Zemmourian discourse.

“What characterizes Éric Zemmour is the abundant use he makes of history”, writes the historian Laurent Joly in

(The falsification of history, not translated, like the rest of the books cited in this article ), and inscribes this practice in the tradition of the French Action movement and of Charles Maurras, ideologue of anti-Semitic, xenophobic and monarchist nationalism.

Joly adds: “If we manage to impose our reinterpretation of the past, perhaps we will be in a position to impose our ideas, affirmed the master of French Action”.

"All [his] task of his is based on the rewriting of historical facts to put them at the service of his ideology," agrees former Prime Minister Manuel Valls in

(Zemmour, the anti-republican).

Zemmour, in books such as

(The French Suicide) or

(French Destiny), offers a glorious and apocalyptic vision of the past.

His is a history of heroes, from Clovis to Napoleon, passing through Louis XIV.

And it is the story of a collapse: from an idealized France and heir to Rome to the current country, supposedly on the verge of extinction.

In his account, the fall began with May 68, or with the Nazi occupation of 1940, or with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. Or even, as a columnist for

pointed out after Zemmour's work, in 843 , when the Carolingian Empire was divided among the grandchildren of Charlemagne… That is, before France existed.

In his opinion, the elites have nurtured the black legend according to which France is a country guilty of colonization or collaboration with the Nazis.

The elites have nurtured, in their opinion, the black legend according to which France is a country guilty of colonization or collaboration with the Nazis.

President Jacques Chirac is one of the great villains of this story for admitting, in 1995, France's responsibility in the deportation of Jews during the occupation.

The American historian Robert Paxton is the other villain for publishing years before the reference book on the collaborationist regime of Philippe Pétain.

Zemmour believes that this black legend intends to "blame the French people" so that they "submit to the migratory invasion and the Islamization of the country."

According to Zemmour, Pétain "saved the French Jews", a statement for which he was tried in January, and which Joly deconstructs in

and in

, a 60-page book where a group of historians corrects several errors in his historical account.

The prologue reads: “Inaccuracy becomes a method, bad faith the engine of knowledge;

history is summoned as a 'political weapon' despising scientific works and uses”.

According to Éric Zemmour, the collaborationist Phillippe Pétain “saved French Jews”, an affirmation for which he was tried in January

The book does not focus only on Vichy.

Historians address Zemmour's idea according to which the Crusade of 1099 was "an immense French victory", confusing the term "Franks" with that of "French" and ignoring that the crusade also included English, Bretons, Normans, Flemish, Genoese, Castilian… They dismantle the insinuation that the Protestants massacred in the 16th century were executioners and not victims, in an attempt by the ultra candidate to compare them with current Muslims.

Or they remember that there is no factual basis whatsoever for another of his most daring insinuations: that Alfred Dreyfus could have been guilty of espionage and the prosecution against him, an expression of French anti-Semitism, was justified.

Zemmour's program is a program in the nationalist tradition of writers like Maurras and Maurice Barrès or of historians like Jacques Bainville.

There is also a transgressive will that destroys consensus and taboos.

It works: the candidate who vindicates Pétain obtains around 15% of voting intentions in the polls.

He is a candidate who tells the French that what they have been told is not true, that they have been misled by foreign historians like Paxton or renegade conservatives like Chirac, that he is smarter and will tell them the truth.

And this is how, if we were to listen to the candidate, Dreyfus was perhaps guilty, and Pétain was no less heroic than General De Gaulle, and during the Nazi occupation “the German soldier [was] the vector of the emancipation of French women because the French woman will go en masse towards the victors, the German soldiers”.

The discourse on history, in the end, is a reflection of the discourse on the country itself: Zemmour does not like France.

Neither as it is today nor its past.

He loves the dream country;

he is irritated by the one that exists and existed.

For a nationalist like him, the glorification of his country and his history is confused with his detestation.

readings

Zemmour contre l'Histoire 

Various Authors  

Tracts Gallimard, 2022 

64 pages.

€3.90

The forgery of l'Histoire.

Éric Zemmour, l'extrème droite, Vichy et les juifs 

Laurent Joly  

Grasset, 2022 

140 pages.

12 euros

Zemmour, l'antirépublicain 

Manuel Valls  

Éditions de l'Observatoire, 2022 

144 pages.

12 euros

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