The French Folly: Eric Zemmour wants to kick African delinquents out of France, but his core financial support includes delinquent billionaires who have been found guilty of bribery and murky business deals in Africa.

French fascism has a new face, but the same old financiers are promising a national face lift. 

Eric Zemmour wants to kick African delinquents out of France, but his core financial support includes delinquent billionaires who have been found guilty of bribery and murky business deals in Africa. 

Zemmour , a doomsday writer turned politician, fancies himself as Général de Gaulle, and while 30% of France wants to vote for her past faded glory, can France and the French media dodge the reality that Zemmour’s brand of French nationalism actually depends heavily on poverty-stricken Africa to make their millions or even billions?

On November 30, 2021, all of France was to witness the theatrics of Eric Zemmour as he announced his candidacy for President. Speaking solemnly from a studio into a retro microphone over images of a France beset by violence, Zemmour outlined the death of France by non-white immigration (a brief summary of all his books). However, this time he offered his Chers Compatriots with a sole ray of hope: him or rather his unflinching desire to be the fusion reincarnation of Général de Gaulle and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Polls show that currently not less than 16% of France waxes euphoric on his French fantasy and another 17% crave Marine Le Pen. Thus, it appears that between Marine Le Pen and Zemmour, over 30% of France now tilts in favour of far-right ideas. Macron still mesmerises 24% of France while the Communists claim their 11% and the socialists trail far behind at 4%.

But in a globalised world of changing definitions, it is time we addressed the new interpretations of the far-right, or for that matter even the Conservatives or the Left. For instance, in the ’70s British conservatism, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, crushed the miners[1], but American Republicans (the closest to Conservatism) even in 2016 declared their support for the coal miners and declared war on the American Environment Protection Agency.

Conservatives in Britain backed Church gay marriages, whilst Conservatives in many other countries remain vehemently opposed to even the basic rights of homosexuals.

In fact, even what we define as national interests are more often than not, the interests of a handful of rich citizens who live under the umbrella of tax dodges and tax havens. In a world of twisted definitions, France’s neo far-right has a new torch bearer, Zemmour, who is of Jewish, Berber and of Algerian descent, but sees himself as white, or at least whiter than his brown brothers. He has been consistent in his criticism of everything and everyone foreign on French soil. He repeatedly evokes the theory of replacement and is petrified that France will turn black. His other pet targets are the LGBTQ+ community and women who don’t see men and masculinity as natural leaders of the world[2].

The bitter truth is that no European country has been bruised as badly as France in the past decades. Zemmour’s appeal to save France and the French civilisation from Muslims stems from an uneasy reality that went unnoticed and unaddressed for decades. From No-Go zones, to mindless violence on the streets of France, from Islamist attacks to targeting the Jews, France’s new face has a permanent frown. Polls show that 67% of France is petrified of the theory of replacement[3]and 61% believe Islam is incompatible with the values of the French Republic[4]. But how much of this was the result of policies put into place by the French elite who also revered Général de Gaulle and swore by his ideals of a forte France?

In the ’40s France still had colonies and colonial mindsets were commonplace,  but throughout the ’50s and the ’60s  Général de Gaulle and his murky circle worked tirelessly to secure African resources through French companies[5] and successive French governments used the French secret services to topple regimes in Africa in order to suit French interests.[6] In fact, migration from many of these countries is due to the fact that their populations do not benefit from their resources; it is France or rather French business interests that stand to gain the most from them.  Curiously, these very business interests are extending their moral and financial support to Zemmour.

Zemmour’s supporters and critics fail to address why Africans immigrate to France in the first place. His supporters are quick to attack globalists, but are only too happy to pocket African resources through the infamous Françafrique network that was put into place by none other than Général de Gaulle. Quite naturally, if Africans can never benefit from their natural resources, they will migrate from their misery and France is a natural choice for those who speak French or have been part of her colonial past. Like it or lump it, African immigration is a direct consequence of this pillage at the hands of delinquent French billionaires, amongst others.

Vincent Bolloré, France’s billionaire and media magnate, has made his fortune from maritime freights and African trade. He controls 18 ports across the African continent and in 2021 he pleaded guilty to charges of corruption in order to secure control over ports in Togo. In fact, Bolloré also bribed his way in Guinea for control over the port of Conakry.  When he isn’t pleading guilty to stealing African resources, Bolloré puts his funds into CNews where he cast Zemmour as the TV pundit to dissect the death of France. Zemmour rants on about the death of France by Africa but what about the death of Africa by France?

Zemmour also garners support from Marc Bonnant, the Swiss lawyer and millionaire whose clients include Clive Zuma (Jacob Zuma’s nephew who has drained South African wealth for the honourable cause of his love for luxury cars and cigars) and Beny Steinmetz, the French-Israeli billionaire who has made his fortune through the dodgiest deals in the world’s poorest countries and was also found guilty of bribery charges in Guinea.

History, as we know, is a narrative that is held together by regimes in power until an alternative is provided and the tides turn. During WWII,  Churchill’s wife, Clementine, is said to have remarked that Général de Gaulle was harsher to his friends than his enemies. To which de Gaulle is said to have come back with, “France has no friends, only interests.”[7]

Général de Gaulle is a revered figure in France. He was captured during the Battle of Verdun, but his critics maintain he surrendered during WW1. When France fell to the Nazis during WW11 he infamously or famously fled to London from where he spoke 67 times to his chers compatriots and kept the flames of resistance burning. When the war was won, he made a comeback and side-tracked the communists who were first in line of the defence of France against the Nazis. De Gaulle placed himself as the French Général in control of France and her future. Yet, de Gaulle was excluded from the historic meeting in Yalta when Germany surrendered. He took neither the Americans nor the British as true allies and when the time came for France to let go of her 14 African colonies, he advocated their independence but used the French secret services to secure oil and other resources in Africa.[8]

Zemmour’s France wants to hit the reset button and create an exclusive status for France while keeping out the rest of the world or more specifically, the coloured world. He wants to put France first, never mind the fact that France’s financial interests or at least those of the French rich are tied to Africa. Free trade comes with free movement and there’s no denying that France’s landscape has changed, but many of France’s problems stem from her denial and refusal to bridge gaps between her rich past and uncertain future.

From lax legal systems to schools that fail to assimilate children, immigrants or the French of diverse origins, can only take their share of the blame for the present problems in France. The root cause, however, lies in hands of rich and influential businessmen who served governments from Mitterrand to Sarkozy and are now betting on their new horse, Zemmour, to sell a narrative that keeps them in power. 

Zemmour and the likes of those who want to go back in time to selective chapters of a once upon a time glorious France simply ignore the reality. Take for instance, Zemmour’s interpretation of Napoleon as the saviour of the French Revolution and a true French hero, which drives his crowd delirious. The tiny glitch is that Napoleon also reinstated slavery in France [9]and that decision signed death warrants for Blacks in French overseas territories like Guadeloupe[10]. True, in 1800, he might have been seen as a hero for France, but in 2022, French overseas territories (Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion) might not be inspired by Napoleon’s values. His other contributions to French society include the concept of dictatorship through plebiscites – a concept close to Zemmour’s heart as he calls for referendums on immigration. Their blind admiration for Napoleon means they ignore the fact that his famous referendum in 1800 was rigged by his own brother, the then Minister of Interior, Lucien Bonaparte, in order to show that 3 million had participated in a plebiscite when in fact it was only 1.5 million. [11]

The cherry on the cake, however, was Zemmour’s choice of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony to play in the background while he outlined the sombre suicide of France. It appears that even modern-day French nationalism requires a German composer to declare war on foreign elements. Evoking the prolific Beethoven, whose music served as a beautiful bridge from the Classical to the Romantic era, for the sole purpose of dividing French society is lamentable, but it also highlights Zemmour’s penchant for rewriting history.  In 2006, Zemmour published Le Premier Sexe, and took a cheap shot at feminism and the French writer Simone de Beauvoir’s distinguished work, Le Deuxième Sexe. In 2014, he penned Le Suicide Français, where he attempted to rewrite the ugly passages of WWII by painting Marshal Pétain and the puppet French Vichy regime as the saviour of French Jews. During WW11 Marshal Pétain had turned half of France into a dummy government called Vichy France that was in bed with the Nazis who were given the green light to eliminate foreign born Jews. Saving the French Jews involved sending foreign Jews to gas chambers, but French patriots like Zemmour are proud of Pétain for allowing a purge only on foreign Jews.  For his role in WWII, Pétain had been sentenced to death, but de Gaulle in his wisdom commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

However, Zemmour’s usage of Beethoven’s 7^th, a patriotic German work that was written against the background of the Battle of Leipzig (1813) where the French army suffered a decisive defeat and fled for the Rhine through Hanau, takes the biscuit. Beethoven was ecstatic given the outcome of the Battle of Leipzig and premiered his work in Vienna in 1813 at a charity event for the Austio-Bavarian forces wounded in the Battle of Hanau. Beethoven’s music was the very essence of German patriotism and in a speech before the concert Beethoven said, “We are moved by nothing but pure patriotism and the joyful sacrifice of our powers for those who have sacrificed so much for us.” Zemmour’s shallow patriotism and twisted interpretations of history have graduated from Marshal Pétain saving the Jews to Beethoven cheering for French patriots!