‘Immigration is war’: an interview with Éric Zemmour
Éric Zemmour looks down at a copy of The Spectator and cocks
his eyebrows at the unflattering cartoon of him on the cover. He
decides he doesn’t care. “It takes a lot to offend me, you know,” he
says. He then leafs through the magazine making polite and appreciative
noises. “Ah, Doooglas Murray!” he exclaims. “I like Doooglas Murray very
much. We’ve exchanged ideas.”
Zemmour is in London as part of his still undeclared campaign to be
the next president of France — to curry favor with and raise money from
the many French voters who live in the capital. But the British
Establishment has given him a cold reception. Mayor Sadiq Khan said he
wasn’t welcome. The Royal Institution canceled his event. The UK
government ordered Conservatives to call off meetings with him. That
could be because Boris Johnson hopes to repair badly damaged relations
with Emmanuel Macron, the man Zemmour wants to eject from the Élysée
Palace. Or it could just be that Mr Z is considered so right wing as to
be toxic.
Team Zemmour argue that the Tories have missed a trick. A President
Zemmour would be far less antagonistic to Brexit Britain than President
Macron. Zemmour is officially against “Frexit,” yet he is complimentary,
even a touch romantic about Britain’s decision to leave the European
Union. “The conservative elites, at least some of them, are proud to
have respected the choice of the British people, unlike the French
political elites,’ he says, speaking in French because his English is
limited. He compares Brexit with France’s referendum in 2005, when the
French said “non” to the European Constitution, only to be ignored.
“That was disgraceful. I find the behavior of the British elites much
more noble.”
He argues that Emmanuel Macron and the “Brussels technocracy” have made a
“fundamental mistake” in their eagerness to make Britain pay for
betraying Europe. “They want to persuade, I don’t know, Hungary, other
countries, or even France, who might be tempted to leave the European
Union and break up their ideal. I think this ideological and moralistic
approach — ‘It’s not right! We’re going to punish you like a child!’ —
is not appropriate. First of all because it is counterproductive. It
creates ill will, as we see with the fishing story. Furthermore, the
choice of the British must be respected. It’s democratic.”
He’s quick to add that he finds it “cruel” of Britain to have withheld
licenses from French fisherman over waters they’ve trawled for
centuries. “I don’t think this ‘fair,’ as you like to say in England,”
he says, amusing himself with the quaint Anglo–Saxonness of the notion.
“I find it ‘unfair.”’ He also blames Macron for “negotiating very badly”
and throws in a swipe at Michel Barnier, the chief Brexit negotiator
and another candidate in the 2022 French presidential election: “He
showed his limitations there. It’s incredible that he left the issue
hanging in the air and did not deal with it.”
Fishing is one problem; cross-Channel illegal immigration quite another.
What would President Zemmour do to stop the growing number of migrant
boats from France arriving on Britain’s shores? “I’ll tell you what: if I
were president, they would not arrive in Calais.” He says the Le
Touquet agreement, through which Britain pays to support French border
checkpoints, is “disrespectful” to France. “We’re not a third-world
country. I don’t understand why French governments accepted this. On the
other hand, these people… should not enter France. We should do
every-thing possible to dissuade them. I would expel these people and I
would suppress all social aid so that they would not be tempted to come
any more… I saw your home secretary say — and she is absolutely right —
that France should better control its border.”
Frontex, the EU’s border agency, is “in reality useless,” he says. “A
few hundred agents who cannot control anything and when the poor fellows
want to do their job and turn the migrants back, the European
parliament and the Commission in Brussels accuse them of brutality.” He
applauds Poland’s attempt to build a wall on the Belarusian border.
“They should be helped. Contrary to the Commission in Brussels, I think
that walls should be built wherever possible.”
We’re now on to the issue that drives Zemmour’s political mission and
fuels his incendiary campaign. “Immigration is war,” he says, hitting
his rhetorical stride. “They want to invade our European countries.
That’s all. It’s nothing else. It’s war.”
“Do you think Macron is deploying migrants as a weapon of war?” I ask, fishing without a license for a newsline.
“I don’t think he has such malicious intent,” he replies. “He’s not
Erdogan. No, you mustn’t exaggerate. I just think that he is, how can I
put, ideologically in favor of immigration.”
Zemmour has for some years been a leading public intellectual in
France, a popular historian as well as a television provocateur and one
of the country’s most famous journalists. He litters his speech with
great quotes: “As Victor Hugo said… As Voltaire said… As Chateaubriand
said…” He speaks in newspaper columns: press his opinion button and he’s
off. His eloquence is almost hypnotic.
Macron, he goes on, is gripped by “an individualistic ideology. He
thinks every individual is basically the same and can live everywhere.
Of course, he will enforce rules here and there, but fundamentally…the
existence of peoples to him seems outdated.”
Does he blame the economic liberalism of Thatcher and Reagan for the
excessive individualism to which Macron subscribes? “I wouldn’t say
that,” he replies. “It’s more a deviation from Christian humanism. As
Chesterton said: “It’s Christian virtues gone mad.’”
Western societies, Zemmour suggests, have “simply forgotten that in
Christian humanism there is indeed the respect for the individual but
that is rooted in a culture, a religion, a people, a land… [today] we
have the individual who is sacred, very well, but who is completely
isolated from his people, his historical context, his customs. You see
it is believed that individuals are interchangeable, that they are only
consumers. It’s an economistic view that I don’t share. I think that
people are first of all a product of their culture, their people, their
customs.”
Zemmour prefers the English word “globalization” to the French
“mondialisation” to describe this process. “It’s an alliance of left and
right,” he says. “Above all it is cowardice.” By that he means that
European leaders have been weak in refusing to tackle the social and
political ills concomitant with globalization. “For forty years they’ve
been afraid to confront the politically correct, afraid of riots in
suburbs, afraid of being seen in a bad light by the media, afraid of not
obeying the judges.”
For Zemmour, the most craven expression of this hyper-individualism
is militant political correctness — “le wokeisme.” He calls it
“hypersensitivity to the rights of the individual, a generalized
offensive against French and western culture, against the white
heterosexual man. These people want above all to make the French and all
westerners feel guilty, ashamed of their history, so that they amputate
themselves, destroy themselves, abandon their culture, their
civilization, simply so that they no longer feel guilty.”
This wokeness, he argues, is a kind of Trojan horse for the
Islamification of formerly Christian nations. “It is by destroying our
cultures, our history, that they make a clean sweep of all that and
allow a foreign culture, history and civilization to come and replace
it.”
Such talk — echoing as it does “the great replacement theory” of
Renaud Camus — causes consternation in progressive circles. Somebody,
probably David Aaronovitch, will no doubt accuse The Spectator of
giving a platform to nativism or white supremacism merely by speaking
to him. Yet Zemmour is utterly unabashed about his views and he’s
currently second or third in the presidential election polls.
Might his preoccupations with national characteristics, the greatness
of French literature and the collapse of western civilization have
something to do with the fact that he is himself an immigrant child? His
parents were Berber Jews from Algeria. His grandfather spoke better
Arabic than French. His father drove an ambulance.
“What my family has done in terms of assimilating French culture should
be an example,” he says, proudly. “I am a product of French
colonialization. I am not one of these people who condemn the French
colonizer. I say thank you.
“I think that nations are the pinnacle of civilization. I like the
differences of nations. I like the fact that the English are very
different from the French, just as they are very different from the
Germans. The great tragedy of globalization is that previously there
were nations that were different to each other and within each nation
there was a great cultural coherence.”
His press officer has been frantically gesturing for us to wrap up,
so we do. Zemmour has a Eurostar to catch. He’s spent two days in London
and his team seem stressed and exhausted. They just want to get back
to la belle France.
