Zemmour too passes through the empty Concorde, imagining the guillotine at its center and the beheading of Louis XVI. Occasionally, police officers stop him for a selfie. Why is this frightening? Zemmour is persuasive. Yet his book is no novel but an argumentative tract. He spends much of it sparring with the late Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci while emphasizing the gulf between them.
He appears to have persuaded about 15 percent of the electorate, according to the latest polls, even if in the past two weeks his rival, Marine Le Pen , has gained ground and is now 1 percentage point ahead of him. But the election campaign has only just begun and, formally, Zemmour is not even a candidate. And despite the relative slowdown in his surge, he may soon gain more strength: he will hold a huge rally in the capital at the start of December.
But he also appeals to some of the conservative bourgeoisie who vote right-wing and have been left basically leaderless, as they are headed by five particularly unattractive candidates.
I liked history, politics, literature. For me, as a Frenchman, the three disciplines were interlinked. Bonaparte and de Gaulle read a great deal and were writers. In his view, the principal problem is immigration and the breached borders, as a result of which France is losing its identity in favor of identities of all stripes: Blacks, Africans and, of course, Muslims — all of whom are, in his perception, and indiscriminately, supporters of radical Islamism. The political discourse, he maintains, needs to focus on the postcolonial colonization: the conquest of France by the Muslims, which, he avers, can be offset by expelling or incarcerating the illegal migrants.
The worshippers were stabbed to death by a Tunisian terrorist in an attack that was attributed to radical Islam; the civics teacher was murdered by a Muslim refugee from Chechnya after he showed caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in class. And from the Muslims we move to the Jews. Moreover, he resorts to history to weave his conspiracy theories about the Jews.
