At the gates of power: when will the CIA assassinate Marine Le Pen?

[Paul Rigby]

French Curtains:

Eric Zemmour's raw attack on France's elites is the talk of Paris

Christopher Caldwell

December 8, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 13

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/arti...20204.html

French readers follow the herd. They believe in prizes. When a French author wins the Goncourt or the Nobel, people rush to bookstores and send his books rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists. But today the French have other things on their minds. President François Hollande is France's least popular leader since World War II. His poll ratings are even lower than Barack Obama's. A gay marriage law he rushed through the National Assembly in 2013 has continued to bring enraged (and previously apolitical) protesters into the streets in 2014. Hollande's Socialist party lost 150 cities in last spring's municipal elections. In elections for the European parliament, which took place at about the same time, the National Front became France's largest party. The working-class group, long tarred as fascist, took twice as many seats as the Socialists, who fell to third.

Although the French novelist Patrick Modiano won the Nobel in October, he has lately been bumped off the charts by Eric Zemmour, a talk-show pundit who is persona non grata among the country's intellectual establishment. Zemmour's Le suicide français (Paris: Albin Michel, 534 pages, 22.90 euros) is made for the moment. It argues that, since the French student uprising of May 1968, women's libbers, Muslim migrants, crooked bankers, and overzealous judges have brought France to ruin. To judge from the reaction to Zemmour's bookwhich sold a quarter-million copies in the fortnight after publication despite furious condemnations in all of the daily paperslarge parts of the French public think he is right.

It is tempting to look at Zemmour as a television hothead in the Bill O'Reilly mold. He is that, at times. But his book has a great ambition, too. As Paul Johnson did in his magisterial Modern Times (1983), Zemmour takes a half-century of events that have been shrouded in progressive clichés and places them in a more logical relationship. His method is the one that historian Richard Reeves uses in his biographies of U.S. presidents. Zemmour will take an episode in France's political or cultural life, describe the long train of events that made it possible, and extrapolate to its consequences. These are generally episodes that show the French choosing to do away with something they had formerly cherished: the release of director Bertrand Blier's sexual picaresque Les valseuses in 1974; the 1993 law abandoning the list of approved (usually saints') names that had been in force for two centuries; President Jacques Chirac's abolition of military conscription in 1996; the introduction of affirmative action in one of France's elite universities that same year; the booing of the "Marseillaise," the French national anthem, by North African immigrant spectators during a game against Algeria in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center; the lack of any commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz (1805), perhaps the greatest victory of Napoleon, who until that point had been revered almost as a demigod in French popular culture; and so on.

Zemmour's idea of France is built around its great nation-builders: Richelieu, Napoleon, and above all General (later president) Charles de Gaulle. It was de Gaulle who rescued French honor after the country's surrender and occupation in World War II and unified the postwar nation around a narrative of its fight against the Naziseven if that narrative was mythological, the fight having been in large part confined to Communists, various Christians, and the general himself. De Gaulle's conservatism was different from conservatism elsewhere. He was attached more to the grandeur of the French nation, less to liberty and small government, and he neither admired nor trusted the United States. After his death in 1970, French politicians made their peace with the free market and a less ambitious view of their country's destiny. Its intellectuals came to treat their fathers as a bunch of collaborators. Zemmour now sees the post-de Gaulle consensus as an unpatriotic sellout. "We were taught to love what we used to hate," he writes, "and to hate what we used to love."

The means by which France's institutions were pulled off their hinges will be familiar to Americans. Utopian court decrees had a lot to do with it, but even commonsensical laws could be interpreted in radical ways, leaving French people asking: When did I vote for that? Mass immigration, especially from France's hastily abandoned colonies in North Africa and West Africa, looms over this book as the great unintended consequence. It was already transforming France by the time de Gaulle left power. But a seemingly straightforward antidiscrimination law of 1972, by introducing "the principle of nondiscrimination between French and foreigners," made it impossible to stop. The law was interpreted in a spirit that led not just to equality but to an outright preference for foreigners. The North African traditional family was treated as essential to the flourishing of its members, so that "family reunification" became grounds for bringing in vast numbers of new residents, once a single family member was working on French soil.

By contrast, with the women's movement in full swing, the French traditional family was treated as an oppressive vestige from which wives and children must be liberated. Zemmour sees feminism as one of the central tragedies of postwar France (even if, to the outsider, there appears to have been less of it there than elsewhere). Feminists had called for "liberated" relations between the sexes. Their ideal was the happy-go-lucky cuckold of Michel Delpech's 1973 song "Les Divorcés":

At first it broke me up inside,

It was a challenge to my pride

And I refused to understand.

But now it doesn't seem so bad

And in the end I'm really glad

That you should find another man.

But women turned out not to like that kind of man very much, once they had him. Zemmour notes that the ruthless Don Juans of the old macho sexual order had feared two things above all: pregnancy and marriage. "The paradox of feminism," he writes, "was that it fulfilled the dreams of generations of male predators." The result for milder, moderate, and more tradition-minded men was summed up by a comedian of the time, Guy Bedos: "We separated by mutual agreement," Bedos said. "Especially hers."

The son of North African Jewish immigrant parents, Zemmour is sensitive about immigration in both senses of the word "sensitive." That is, he is highly nuanced and easily angered. Even if it was retreating from a large colonial empire, France had no recent legacy of slavery and segregation to atone for, as America did. But it was not lost on the Socialist president François Mitterrand, who came to power in 1981, what a powerful rallying cry and organizing tool the rejection of racism had proven to be in the United States. In 1984 his government helped establish the NGO SOS Racisme to agitate and propagandize. It was a solution in search of a problem, but it was mightily effective in intimidating French journalists and politicians. Thereafter the press covered immigration, Zemmour writes, through anecdotage, discussing "the individual fates of immigrants, their wives, their children, their emotions, their resentments .  .  . willfully obscuring their collective, historical side, as members of a people that had its own roots, its culture, its religion, its heroes, and its dreams of postcolonial vengeance." Much as feminism was a windfall for macho men, the sort of antiracism that protects the foreign-born from hard questions proved good news for a certain kind of racist. According to the filmmaker Alexandre Arcady, in the public schools of the vast suburban département of Seine-St-Denis, once heavily Jewish and now heavily Arab, there is "not a single student of Jewish faith."

Zemmour has addressed the taboo subject of France's relationship to its Jews without the slightest circumspection or hedging. In so doing he has cost himself the good feeling of many readers who might otherwise have backed him. In 1995, French president Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist himself, apologized on behalf of the French nation for a notorious 1942 roundup. Thirteen thousand Paris-area Jews were corralled into a sports arena near the Eiffel Tower and then shipped to Auschwitz. The apology was much applauded by the press two decades ago. Zemmour finds it appalling. He sees it as a renunciation of the central tenet of Gaullism: that the Vichy government that surrendered and collaborated with the Nazis was not France. The real France, la France éternelle, was the one led by de Gaulle in London that carried on resisting. Chirac broke with the founding principle of the political movement he had been entrusted with leading. It is consistent with Zemmour's heartfelt Gaullism to deplore this.

Less consistent is Zemmour's reconsideration of Vichy's role in delivering to their deaths tens of thousands of Jews who lived in France. In Zemmour's view, shaped by the work of the rabbi Alain Michel, an argument can be made that the Vichy government saved the lives of its own Jewish citizens by first offering up some of the large number of Jewish refugees who had fled to France from the Nazis. There may be a measure of truth to thisthree-quarters of France's Jews survived, whereas almost none did in the Netherlands. But his story is incompleteVichy revoked the French citizenship of its most recently naturalized Jewish citizens, exposing them to deportation. Zemmour is never maleficent in writing about such things. But he is sometimes maladroit, especially when he attacks former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin for his misgivings about Mitterrand's friendship with one of the organizers of the 1942 roundup, René Bousquet. Jospin's complaints were perfectly reasonable and even courageous, given Mitterrand's mythical status in the Socialist movement at the time. It is de Gaulle's account of World War II, not Vichy's, that Zemmour wants to defend. And he is right that a counterproductive "competition of victims" started as soon as that account was called into question. Louis Malle's movie Au revoir, les enfants (1987) was, he thinks, a key event in the popularization of a national self-hatred that had once been confined to intellectuals.

Zemmour is interested in France's antiracism because he considers it an instrument of class warfare, a sign that the progressive "creative classes" who once idealized the poor now hold them to be contemptible thugs. Zemmour cites Yves Boisset's 1975 film Dupont Lajoie, in which a murderer frames a group of saintly Algerians for his own misdeed. One of Zemmour's best sketches is of the French celebrities, led by the lovely actress Emmanuelle Béart, who joined a protest on behalf of the Malian and Mauritanian sans-papiers (undocumented immigrants) in the summer of 1996. The migrants were using the church of St-Bernard, in the 18th arrondissement, as a place to orate, eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. "Not since the days of the Jansenist Convulsionaries," Zemmour writes, "had so many young beauties and high-born men been in a church." He notes, too, that the protesters at the Église St-Bernard, although they did not realize it, were defending their own class's interests against those of the French-born poor. They, the movie stars, use low-wage labor to trim their gardens and fix their gourmet mealsunlike the working classes, who compete against it.

To Zemmour, virtually everything the French government has done since 1983when the Socialist Mitterrand reversed course and opened up France to more free enterprise and international competitionhas wound up selling off some part of the working-class patrimony to benefit the rich. Zemmour sees this as not just an injustice but a mistake. He admires central planning, which he almost always calls colbertisme, after the financial adviser of Louis XIV, to mark its deep roots in French culture. Nonetheless, he argues that planning in the 1950s and 1960s worked particularly wellin space, high-speed trains, nuclear power, telecommunications (including Minitel, a proto-Internet), and aeronautics (including the high-speed Concorde, an engineering marvel that was, he says, "assassinated" by U.S. protectionism). He also argues, plausibly, that in our own age of global finance, France's corporations are simply not well enough capitalized to wheel and deal on an equal footing with the private and public pension funds of the United States or the sovereign wealth funds of the resource-exporting nations.

Global competition was a slap in the face to France's pretensions. But those who urged the policy on the country did well out of it. Zemmour's symbol of the age is Louis Schweitzer, who left his job as the chief of staff to Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius to run Renault. The revolving doorpantouflage, as it is calledis an old tradition in France. It mattered less when the head of Renault was paid little more than a top political functionary. But as the years passed, Schweitzer's income rose into the millions, and Renault kept shedding jobs and moving plants overseas.

For two centuries, France has funded the grandes écoles, where brilliant youths like Schweitzer were trained at public expense for prestigious government jobs. Suddenly France could no longer keep these people on the payroll. Zemmour writes that France now has 400 elite inspecteurs de finances, and all but 60 of them have left to make a killing in the private sector. Worse, time spent as a "public servant" makes such yuppies more valuable to their future employers because it gives them knowledge of the state's regulatory vulnerabilities and loopholesmuch as an ex-congressman can be a better lobbyist for his knowledge of the ways in which Congress is corruptible.

Zemmour, a conservative in most things, was won over by the protests in the 1990s of José Bové, the politically savvy maker of Roquefort cheese who led a group that vandalized a McDonald's franchise under construction in Millau, arguing that McDonald's had violated French laws against hormone-treated beef. Most French people sympathized with Bové, seeing him as a commonsensical defender of tradition (Roquefort) against poison (Big Macs). Zemmour faults him only for having retreated from his initial stridency into a comfortable seat in the European parliament.

In the monthly magazine Causeur, an outlet for the best intellectuals of the French center-left who have not made their peace with political correctness, editor Élisabeth Lévy told Zemmour during an interview that he seemed to be getting more left-wing. "Obviously," he replied. With historical distance, he now takes a somewhat positive view of postwar French communism. The "Gaullist" system, in which the general appeared, to Western eyes, to have triumphed over the Soviet-backed claimants to rule France, was actually a "Gaullo-Communist" system of checks and balances. Each side had won too much legitimacy holding up its end of the French Resistance for the other side to dislodge it.

Under the Fifth Republic, which de Gaulle started in 1958, there was a modus vivendi, almost a separation of powers. Gaullists held the higher posts of state. Communists held the working-class neighborhoods. The housing developments that immigrants now occupy were built as strongholds for Communist political machines. On the bad side, the Communists kept these neighborhoods under close surveillance. On the good side, they sincerely cared about the interests of the French working class.

Immigration flushed the Communist party out of these areasand eventually drove its voters towards the National Front. The Communist leader Georges Marchais was the first and last politician to insist that mass immigration of Muslims was damaging not just working-class economic prospects but the very fabric of French life. For this he was pilloried on left and right as a racist. Zemmour's reverence for Marchais makes his own anti-anti-racism easier to define. It is not racism. It is a belief that France's ruling class uses accusations of racism as a way of discrediting its class enemies, the better to impose on them a capitalism they have no familiarity with and no reason to want.

In 1979 there were riots in the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin. Two years later violence erupted in the Minguettes housing development in nearby Vénissieux. "Contrary to popular belief," Zemmour writes, "the riots at Minguettes were not a beginning but an end. An end of the battle fought by the Communists to hold their territory. Vénissieux was the Diên Biên Phu of the Red Belt." In France at least, communism "wound up being a transitional culture between Christianity and Islam."

We are almost at the end of Zemmour's argument. France, he believes, has made two big, and closely related, mistakes over the past generation: It has embraced American-style capitalism, to which its economy and culture are not adapted, and it has accepted more immigration than its institutions can handle. Why does it show no sign of doing anything to reverse these choices? Zemmour's answer is that France is no long-er a free and sovereign country. It is trapped in the multinational European Union, with its ever-more-grandiose plans and ever-tightening rules. France has traded away its right to self-rule in the name of economic advantages that are failing to materialize. In one positively giddy chapter Zemmour simply quotes, one after another, the extravagant promises made by prominent (mostly Socialist) politicians on the eve of the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht treaty, under which France agreed to exchange its age-old currency, the franc, for the rickety euro. His list begins with then-minister of health Bernard Kouchner"Under Maastricht, we'll laugh a lot more"and ends with then-president of the European Commission Jacques Delors"The euro will bring peace, prosperity, competitiveness, and a million new jobs for France alone." French unemployment has been in double digits for much of the time since, and September's figures from the Ministry of Labor put the number of jobless at 3.44 million, an all-time high.

But this only pushes the same question back one step: Why doesn't France reclaim its ability to solve its problems by getting out of Europe? In the run-up to the 1979 European elections, Jacques Chirac, under the influence of the indomitable Gaullist foreign policy hawk Marie-France Garaud, issued a blistering "Cochin declaration" (which Zemmour reproduces). Chirac described the eclipse of French greatness that would result if France went any further into Europe. He didn't believe it, though. He won only 16 percent of the vote. Eventually Garaud would tell Chirac: "I used to think you were made of the marble they use for statuesbut you were made of the porcelain they use for bidets." Over the decades the French have been unable to resist what the political philosopher Marcel Gauchet has come to call Mitterrand's Lie: "the promise that what we could no longer do in France thanks to socialism, we could do in Europe thanks to Europe."

The reaction to Zemmour's book confirms certain of its theses. Luc Bronner, an editorialist at Le Monde, acknowledges that Zemmour has identified real problems, but thinks they are all matters of stagnation éducative that can be solved by throwing enough government money at schools. Zemmour has been accused by Figaro editor Franz-Olivier Giesbert of "being in total harmony of thought with [National Front leader] Marine Le Pen." Remarks such as Giesbert's used to be a warning of pariah status, but they are losing their bite. In certain recent polls, and now the European elections, the National Front has proved to be France's most popular partyfor much the same reason that Le suicide français spent several weeks as France's most popular book. The French, having decided they need their sovereignty back, are increasingly willing to ignore their misgivings about the only party that can credibly promise to fight for it. Long-term, France is as good a bet to pull out of the European Union as Britain. That does not mean it is moving to the "right" or embracing "hatred." If the Socialists or the UMP ever made a credible promise to allow their members to vote their conscience on the matter of staying in Europe, they would be able to stop Le Pen in her tracks. But they won't. For some reason they can't.

France's predicament was inherent in its postwar position. De Gaulle himself could not have staved it off forever. Hollande, the hapless president, is just the guy who was left holding the bag. As long as Germany was divided and discredited, unable to use its power unilaterally, it required France as a chaperone. France assumed the diplomatic weight of two midsized countries. That is why it never seemed too small, for instance, for its seat on the U.N. Security Council. But France could behave as a world power only until Germany recovered its unity, got its diplomatic act together, and restored its good name. French power could not survive the dissipation of German war guilt.

Here is the deeper reason why the national self-hatred that Zemmour deplores, the painful revisiting of the crimes of World War II, the creeping feminization of a once-virile political elite, gained such a strong hold on France in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Directed outward towards Germany, this revisiting was in France's interests. In fact it was the very wellspring of French power. The expansion of the European Union, mass immigration, and unbridled capitalism did not begin as an attempt to bamboozle the French people. They began with the false assumption that the moral order Europe built in the wake of World War II would last foreve

r.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.