Zemmour, whose high-pitched, sharp-chinned pugnacity seems distinctly anti-charismatic, is often called the French Trump, presumably because he became nationally famous as a television personality before turning to elective politics. He has also published a couple of best-selling books: “The French Suicide,” in 2014, and, in September, “France Has Not Said Its Final Word.” But the comparison is mostly misleading, not least because the only thing that Zemmour despises more than Islam is America. In fact, the ferocity of his anti-Americanism may be the most startling thing about him, given the generally pro-American tenor of French daily life, which still turns on American entertainments and figures—Josephine Baker was inducted into the Panthéon on the very day of Zemmour’s announcement. The United States, in Zemmour’s view, is a perpetual enemy of French greatness; even the débarquement in Normandy in June, 1944, was an invasion designed to impose U.S. hegemony on France. (Zemmour claims Charles de Gaulle as his predecessor in this interpretation, flattening out de Gaulle’s more complicated and often day-to-day-variable view.) No distinction between U.S. domination and the Soviet kind is possible. Discrimination positive, as the French call affirmative action—a version of which, favoring people from poor neighborhoods, has been used to help students get into élite French universities—is an American invention to deal with our history of slavery, with no relevance to France. And no enemy is higher on Zemmour’s long list than Robert Paxton, the great American historian, who, in his 1972 book, “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,” revealed the truth about the Pétain regime’s whole-hearted and sometimes even first-into-the-pool collaboration with the Nazis, offering anti-Jewish legislation even before it was demanded (a truth that has been confirmed by French historians many times since).
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