“Long live France anyway.” Even in front of a 12-man firing squad, Robert Brasillach was never lost for words. The author and journalist turned his dying phrase (“Vive la France quand même”) into a sort of “whatever…” quip on 6 February 1945 at a Paris military base. After General de Gaulle, then chief of the provisional government, had refused to pardon him, Brasillach became the best-known literary figure to suffer the ultimate penalty for collaboration with his nation’s German occupiers.
Although he was technically convicted for treason under Article 75 of the pre-war penal code, everyone grasped that the cocky, clever and pro-fascist editor, columnist and novelist faced the squad essentially thanks to his “crimes of opinion” on platforms such as the noxious anti-Semitic paper Je Suis Partout. From judges and civil servants to industrialists, battalions of high-powered collaborators saved their skins. Brasillach, about whom Simone de Beauvoir later argued that “there are words as murderous as gas chambers”, served as an iconic scapegoat during France’s post-liberation Purge — and proof that his country still took the written word with deadly seriousness. As his biographer Alice Kaplan puts it: “Writers knew that words counted in a court of law. This was both an intimidating and an empowering knowledge: they mattered.”
In France, they still can. Cut to spring 2022. Another wittily provocative right-wing writer — no, never a fascist and, as a Jew, no anti-Semite either — stands consistently at third place in the polls ahead of April’s presidential elections. In the wake of the Ukraine war, Éric Zemmour — until late February a loud Putin admirer — has a microscopically small chance of progress to the second round of voting on 24 April. Probably, his rival Marine Le Pen will carry the hard-Right’s standard into the run-off. If so, she will suffer a steamroller defeat at the hands of Emmanuel Macron — with, as in 2017, an ominously high toll of abstentions.
Although destined to fail, Zemmour’s campaign has proved his ability to convert decades of mordant fringe polemics into a sustained grip on 12-15% of the electorate. The ideas-driven reactionary nationalism voiced by Brasillach and his collaborationist peers did not die in the chilly courtyard of the Montrouge fort. Zemmour, by the way, has sought to exonerate the Vichy regime and its figurehead, Marshal Pétain. He has argued that it worked to protect French Jews while sending their non-citizen co-religionists to the death camps.
You can hardly sanction ideas more sternly than by shooting their champions. In France, though, mystic and militant nationalism is the repressed that always returns. Far-Right activism with a literary or philosophical tinge has coloured French politics at least since the Dreyfus Affair convulsed the country in the 1890s. Zemmour merely fronts the latest edition of a well-thumbed publication.
Its features do change. Notably, hostility to Muslim migration has neatly filled the yawning space occupied for so long by anti-Semitism. Still, the editorial line robustly endures. Alien powers have corrupted the true genius of France, abetted by a traitorous liberal and cosmopolitan elite. Formal citizenship granted as an empty, bureaucratic right has supplanted the affinities of blood, soil, language and culture that should define the nation. French identity itself is in grave peril. Behind the changing face of the enemy within — Jews, Protestants and Freemasons a century ago, Muslims and other non-white incomers now — stands the omnipotent malice of global finance. In France, hard-Right and far-Left may enjoy tearing each other apart. They can readily agree a truce on the demonic iniquity of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism.
Le Grand Remplacement, a 2011 polemic by the prolific novelist-turned-activist Renaud Camus, functions almost as the Communist Manifesto for this newest wave of the nativist Right — and a rhetorical cornerstone of Zemmour’s campaign. Long ago, Camus was a scandalous gay icon thanks to outspoken fiction such as Tricks (published with a preface by Roland Barthes). Recently, he has seen his nebulous theory that a top-down strategy of “replacement” aims to substitute the native-born French population with an alien army of non-white, non-Christian incomers go viral, and go global. It reached the American alt-Right by the time of the fatal Charlottesville riots of 2017. A few weeks back, Zemmour’s centre-right rival Valérie Pécresse uttered the trigger phrase during a stump speech.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe