'French beserk': The Eric Zemmour effect

Eric Zemmour. Photo: Wikipedia

I was very taken by Adam Shatz ‘s piece in the London Review of Books on “French beserk”.

The piece, titled ‘ The Zemmour Effect’ (paywall), is about the journalist and possible presidential candidate Eric Zemmour. The fact that he is even being talked about in this vein, writes Mr Shatz, makes for a “wild”reality, a hysterical bit of “French beserk”: “The rise of a North African Jewish intellectual who calls for the rehabilitation of Pétain and Vichy, while depicting immigrants and Islam as mortal threats to the Republic.”

His blunt speaking includes describing the supposed threat from Islam as follows: “It’s more even than a civil war. It’s a war of religion that threatens us.”

The rhetoric (it might not actually be rhetoric but reality, as we learnt when Donald Trump took office in the US) is doing well among a certain section of the electorate. Rather than cleaving to the cleaned-up, supposedly de-fanged Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, a lot of peop…