French booksellers have had to contend with a furious game of one-upmanship in the genre of scandalous bestsellers this fall. Parisians thought that the vengeful memoir by President François Hollande’s ex-girlfriend Valérie Trierweiler, “Thank You for This Moment,” had set an impossible new sales record in September. Then, in October, came “Le Suicide Français,” the Figaro columnist Éric Zemmour’s treatise on the unravelling of France, which sold out its entire first printing in one week. Sales hit five thousand copies a day. Bookshops couldn’t keep it in stock. One reviewer wrote, “The ‘Suicide Français’ phenomenon is a fever that is so traditionally French that it offers a first refutation to its author: France is not dead so long as it can quarrel over a book!”
Sales of the book, which Zemmour presents as a forthright analysis of “the forty years that undid France,” are probably about equally attributable to the pessimism that pervades the country right now and to the media cataclysm that attended the book’s release. Web blurbs and sound bites tended to focus on the point from which Zemmour’s argument embarks: the Vichy regime, which collaborated with France’s German occupiers in the nineteen-forties, and which, Zemmour claims, is widely misunderstood because the accepted historical account overlooks the sacrifices Vichy made to protect France’s Jews. This pronouncement led France’s new Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, to declare war on “the discourse of decline,” an allusion to Zemmour and his Vichyisme. Le Figaro said that Zemmour had become the Prime Minister’s “obsession.” Zemmour made use of an interview with the paper to defend himself: “To devote fifteen days of polemic to Vichy, while it represents seven pages in my book out of five hundred and forty, amounts to intellectual dishonesty,” he said. “Either they didn’t read it, or they deliberately misunderstood it.”
Zemmour may have a point; if people had actually read “Le Suicide Français,” they might have pointed to other features of his argument that, if not more outrageous, are probably more pressing. For instance, as Alexander Stille has noted, “There is an unsettling streak of misogyny running through the book, in which the securing of elementary rights for women is presented as an insidious emasculation.”
Zemmour traces France’s ills to the death, in 1970, of the nation’s postwar patriarch, Charles de Gaulle, which coincided with what Zemmour sees as the tragic death of patriarchy, starting with the May, 1968, protests. “Our immoderate passion for Revolution blinded and perverted us,” Zemmour writes. “The France that came out of May ’68 would ring in the revenge . . . of femininity over virility.” He then demonstrates the many ways in which feminist and other liberationist movements wrought damage, painting a picture of the backward morality stemming from the orthodoxy of “It is forbidden to forbid,” which, he says, has been driving the country ever since. Le père, in his conception, stands for all the principles that a nation needs to thrive—stoicism, sacrifice, delayed gratification—“The father embodies the law and the principle of reality in opposition to the principle of pleasure.” La féminité, in conjunction with feminism, unbound these structures of rectitude, undoing the family. The “quest for happiness became the grand business of everyone,” Zemmour complains. The outcome of the countercultural uprising was the “triptych of ’68: Dérision, Déconstruction, Destruction,” which “sapped the foundations of all traditional structures: family, nation, work, State, school.”
Once Zemmour has identified the source of the rot at the center of everything, it is easy for him to unpack each successive social and legal development that whittled away at France’s glory. The legalization of abortion was a “collective suicide,” because the demographic heft of the French children who were never to be born amounted to “lost power, gone forever more.” The emergence of “triumphant homosexuality” is tied to “the decisive evolution of capitalism,” because Western capitalism has an insatiable need for consumerism, and “the homosexual universe, especially the male one, embodies the temple of unbridled pleasure, sexuality without restraint, hedonism without limit.” The sexual revolution led to a “feminine Bovaryism that is sanctified as a supreme value in relations between the sexes.” The normalization of divorce revealed the “paradoxical destiny of feminists to accomplish the dream of absolute irresponsibility, for which they railed against generations of predatory males.” Zemmour goes on and on: the rise in delinquency in the nineteen-eighties and nineties came mostly from “immigrant families that France had welcomed,” and has been so twisted around by the left that “gangs of traffickers, thieves, and rapists are sanctified, eternal victims of a neocolonial and racist order. What we call delinquency, they call victims; what we call victims, they call guilty parties.” And, of course, once de Gaulle was gone, France was faced with the choice of “bowing down before the American empire or drowning itself in Europe.”
The runaway sales of Zemmour’s book mirror the astonishing rise, over the past year, of Marine Le Pen, who is the president of the far-right National Front Party. The National Front’s first-place win in the European Parliament elections last May brought it out of the shadows—where it had hovered as a fringe movement since Le Pen’s father founded it, in 1972—and gave it the imprimatur of legitimacy. France’s two main political parties are in shambles. The right-leaning Union for a Popular Movement, immobilized by scandal and infighting, has just reinstated as its leader Nicolas Sarkozy, who was voted out of office as President of France in 2012. The left-leaning Socialist Party’s major problem is François Hollande, the most unpopular French President of the modern era, who has presided over a contentious split in his Party over the question of whether France’s economic troubles call for a move to the right.
The chaos suits Le Pen perfectly, and she has made the most of it; Zemmour is one more heralding voice. As Christophe Barbier, the editorial director of the weekly L’Express, put it, “Read Zemmour, believe Zemmour, acclaim Zemmour. . . . It is to give oneself reasons to vote Le Pen. Whereas before, people voted for her father out of passion—anger, hatred, resentment—today they vote for his daughter out of reason, rationality, reflection, because things aren’t going well, and whose fault is that?” Family, sovereignty, culture, Frenchness—these are the anxieties of the French, who never much cared for the idea of globalization, and now are being pressured to open up to a more American-style economic program and submit to increasing European oversight. In France today, Zemmour’s disgruntlement is widespread, and Marine Le Pen exploits it forcefully. Projections for the 2017 Presidential race suggest that Le Pen will make it into the final runoff—and might even win the first round.
*Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post said that projections suggest that Le Pen might win the entire election in the first round.
