The French Connection?

As I write this, sixty thousand men have invaded Ceuta, the Spanish enclave surrounded by Morocco. They did so by swimming from Fnideq, Morocco, to Ceuta. The reason for this method was that the Spanish Supreme Court recently ruled that Moroccan migrants stopped at sea trying to reach Ceuta (or Melilla, another Spanish enclave bordering Morocco) could not be summarily sent back to Morocco. However, soon after the swimmers arrived, the Ceuta border with Tarajal, Morocco, was overwhelmed, almost immediately provoking a humanitarian crisis. While Spanish officials report that forty-eight thousand of these migrants have left, the apparently remaining twelve thousand have descended on the city; some of them have been filmed robbing shops, and the Spanish government has sent in the military.

The Ceuta crisis is just one more example of a broader migrant crisis European nations have experienced since the 2010s. The European Left has insisted that the plummeting birth rates of native populations require that they loosen migration into the nations to do work that the natives failed to provide children to do. The European Right points to the number of migrants who end up on welfare rolls, with the others suppressing working-class wages, increasing crime, and, especially with Muslim migrants, disrupting the residual Christian cultural folkways.

What would be of great use to those concerned about this crisis would be an insightful book about its origins, what makes the problem hard to solve, and what solutions are available to these nations. What we have instead is Eric Zemmour’s The Suicide of France, translated by Nathan Pinkoski. Zemmour obscures the origins of the problems with tedious score-settling. He simplifies the problem by redeploying anti-Dreyfussard narratives onto all Muslim migrants. As for solutions, he has none.

That Pinkoski is the translator comes with a bit of irony. Pinkoski himself is an immigrant to the United States from his native Canada, and he originally came here to hold academic posts for the purposes of teaching and doing research. He was also preoccupied with French reactionary politics. By this, I do not mean his research agenda but rather his participation in their politics and his constant attempts to import it into American conservatism. Just like he understands Muslim migrants to bring their dangerous ideologies to France, as shown below, Pinkoski himself has brought dangerous French ideologies to the United States.

During his postdoctoral studies at the University of Toronto, he published in First Things his apologia on behalf of French antisemite and conspiracy theorist Charles Maurras. While working at the conservative academic foundation, the Zephyr Institute, Pinkoski spoke at a panel on Catholicism at the 2022 National Conservatism conference, where he called for a neo-Gallican response to the papacy of the late Pope Francis, or the need for nationalist Catholic resistance to the “diabolical caricature” of true Christendom peddled by then-Pope Francis. Shortly before he left his academic appointment at the University of Florida, he once again published at First Things to stoke interest in the American audience for Jean Raspail’s 1973 dystopian Le Camp des Saints, or Camp of the Saints. He went on to write an introduction for a recently republished copy of the book by Vauban Press. Thanks in part to Pinkoski’s intrepid work, readers can once again read Raspail’s intense, pornographic details of how morally and physically deformed the people of India are as they load themselves into a barge to sail to France and eat the native residents out of house and home at the behest of the French elites.  

Pinkoski’s latest venture is the translation of Eric Zemmour’s 2014 Le suicide francais - Ces quarante annees qui ont defait la France, which he translated and introduced. Pinkoski changed the title slightly from the original French, rendering it The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Nation. In his translator’s introduction, Pinkoski argues that Zemmour’s book is useful for those interested in how the French Right destroyed the center-right party of Charles de Gaulle and replaced it with the National Rally (formerly the National Front). To be clear, Pinkoski likes that this happened and thinks it necessary, focusing on four contributions Zemmour makes to ensure the political message works outside of France. He first explains how judges steal away executive power with invented constitutional limits. Second, Zemmour points to the loss of paternal authority of the father. Third is the revolt of the French elites. Finally, Pinkoski recommends Zemmour’s attack on the end of Bretton Woods, “neoliberalism,” and the cosmopolitanism of “bobos” this created.  

While Raspail’s novel rides the line between xenophobia and fetish pornography, Zemmour’s history of postwar France is of an ascendent Left that no one after de Gaulle could truly contain. If the Left was the cause of suicide, the weapon was guilt from the Holocaust. As the French operated in the shadow of Vichy, the Left offered atonement found in dreamy humanitarian appeals that transcended ethnic and national identities in favor of human rights. Any right-wing opposition to these appeals was met with the memory of Vichy French collaboration. Hence, when faced with Muslim migrants, often from former French colonies in North Africa, the Left demanded they be let in to avoid another genocide, and the Right had no moral standing to object. Zemmour turns the accusation of collaborator on the Left, this time not with the Nazis but with Islam, and his list of culprits is long and not especially coherent: the French Catholic Church, Airbus, actress Emmanuelle Béart, “female homosexuality,” couscous, chewing gum, “free-market Catholic ideologues,” the 1980s TV show Dallas, and President Georges Pompidou. The only innocents are the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Charles de Gaulle. It is as though Zemmour wants to say, “Who are the collaborators, now?” 

That the French elites created political problems with high rates of Muslim migrants is not hard to figure out, but neither is the self-serving nature of Zemmour’s argumentation. Muslim immigration has made France weaker, but concrete proposals to address it, ones that are actually possible to implement, are completely missing from The Suicide of France. The reason is that the French Far Right holds positions that make these policy solutions unattractive. For example, when the arriving Muslim migrants proved less capable of working than hoped, the French could have cut social welfare benefits to encourage entrepreneurship and employment, but this position ran afoul of Le Pen’s National Front. They wanted the socialism of the welfare state, but they wanted it to be for traditional French white nationals—a white national socialism, if you will.  

Instead of policy solutions, Zemmour focuses on concentrating his readers’ hatreds onto all those who brought France to, in Gen-Z parlance, “unalive itself.” He uses the old French reactionary trope of blaming what Joseph De Maistre called “le secte,” or the scapegoated persons or groups responsible for French decline. For Maistre, they were Jansenists and Calvinists. For Maurras, they had been Freemasons, Protestants, Jews, and foreigners. For Zemmour, they are the French Left, but most of all Muslims. The solution is not one found in legislation or policy but in the extermination of a suspect group. Once the Muslims are gone, so apparently will be the Left, and without them, all the problems facing France. 

Zemmour puts his own twist on his deployment of le secte. He is the son of Berber Jews who emigrated to France from Algeria. Therefore, rather than speak to his audience as a “true” Frenchman as Maistre and Maurras did, he speaks as a Jew. Eli Lake calls this performance the “AsAJew.” The AsAJew invokes his or her identity as the authority to release non-Jews from their responsibilities to Jews and, on behalf of non-Jews, to blame the Jews for the ills that befall them. Zemmour wishes to leave the Holocaust in the past and no longer refer to it as an example against letting Jew hatred get out of hand. Why? Well, apparently, Zemmour, as a Jew, thinks that remembering the Holocaust makes it hard to deal with Muslims. Even the antisemite Jean-Marie Le Pen and founder of the post-war fascist party National Front (now “National Rally”) gets his views explained away:  

“[T]he Maurrassians had come a long way since the end of the war.”  

“Le Pen himself, in remembrance of the Algerian war, was then in favor of the Zionist against the former Egyptian allies.”  

“Le Pen’s thoughts and ulterior motives, his love or loathing Jews, his ambiguous rapport of admiration and aversion, in the tradition of ‘old France’ anti-Semitism, are of little importance.”  

Yes, the Holocaust was horrible, Zemmour admits, but the Muslims are not like the Jews. They are not innocent. They deserve to get what’s coming to them, and, as a Jew, Zemmour is there to give the French that permission. In fact, Zemmour believes the Jews and anti-Semites are natural allies because they have common enemies.  

For Zemmour, Muslims are something like a combination of Maurras’ groups—foreigners who seek to supplant French Catholicism, and they are loyal to a foreign power, the Ummah of greater Islam. Zemmour makes this plain. In 2003, French Muslims demanded an organization similar to the French Jewish organization called Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France. As Zemmour puts it, they “demanded their own consistorial toy, like those Jews who had been presented to them as models of integration for years” and ended up receiving “the creation of the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman” that, according to Zemmour, “gave Islam the protection of a state religion” and “public funding for its mosques (barely disguised as so-called cultural institutions) while keeping its texts and dogmas intact.” Quoting Gilles Kepel, he says that Islam “expresses a break with the values of French society, a desire to subvert it morally and legally.” For Zemmour, when Maurras or Le Pen said this of their Jews, they were wrong, but when their heirs today say it of their Muslims, they are right. This is just the charge of dual loyalty to a higher universal political order, a sort of Protocols of the Elders of Mecca, but Zemmour’s evidence for this is that the French soccer team began to eat halal meals during the 2000s. So what? Food production is cheaper and more efficient if one streamlines the process to comply with religious restrictions all the way down; that’s why so much of processed American food is kosher. 

The book is terribly written, so bad that it cannot be the fault of Pinkoski’s translation. Each chapter opens like a forgotten Wattpad Supernatural/Harry Potter fanfic page from 2015. Particularly egregious examples include: 

Men remain children for a long time. They love to build their Lego sets, making them bigger and bigger and more and more majestic. 

The Homeric epic was quickly written. It described the inescapable return to reality; or, in darker terms, the submission to capitalism embodied by that two-headed devil, Thatcher and Reagan. 

She was lovely. A petite woman with a sad smile, flushed eyes, and a pouty lip, even if some malicious tongues thought that her plastic surgeon had botched the job. 

In the beginning was the image. Encrypted. Decoded. Scrambled. Privatized. Subscribed. Modernized. Deroutinized. Americanized. Casula. Conversational. Uninhibited. Off-beat. Undressed. Glamorized. 

The clown is doomed to end up sad and lonely, hiding his tears behind a laughing mask. It’s his curse, his destiny, his legend. 

It was the day he had been waiting for since his early childhood; the day he entered into History; the day when his flamboyant Narcissus could finally contemplate in his mirror an image worthy of the idea he had formed of himself and his destiny. 

Had these lines been fake, one of them certainly would have been in the running for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Sadly, they are real, and, even worse, written sincerely. 

Finally, the chapters are so enmeshed in the particulars of twentieth century and early twenty-first century French political and cultural history that there is almost nothing for an American reader to grasp as a common point of reference. Even as an academic who has written on twentieth century France, I had to look up tertiary political figures or French language songs from decades ago. These references were probably dated in 2014 for a French audience; they are not improved with another dozen years and a trip across the Atlantic. How on earth was any of this supposed to be of use to American readers? Was it just to accept the dehumanization of immigrants? At least when Vice President J.D. Vance spread the false story of the cat-eating Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, he did it without overgrown adolescent prose and French trivia from the 1970s. 

While he dances around the subject in the body of the book, Zemmour lays his cards out in the Conclusion to his English Edition, endorsing a form of replacement theory. The French thought they were humanitarians, but now they are hostages to their own migrant populations. Who stands athwart the enemy? To start, National Rally does, but so does Viktor Orbán, Donald J. Trump, and Vice President J.D. Vance. So, there you have it: for the 2028 presidential race, Vance can count on the French AsAJew Replacement Conspiracy Theorist vote, though it was not enough to save Orbán’s bacon. 

France really does have a problem with Muslim integration on its hands. Over ten percent of France is Muslim, and much of this population remains in almost completely separate communities, the banlieues surrounding city centers, and living off public assistance. The French government seems to have no idea how to handle this fact, but neither does Zemmour. All he can muster is the language to dehumanize French Muslims to make more acceptable whatever use of force the government might deploy in the future. 

And this fact naturally raises the question: do Americans need more or less right-wing European influence on our politics? The French Right could choose to propose constitutional bargains limiting the size of government to enable economic growth to occur, setting barriers to welfare state payments, proposing French law as a source of authority in the lives of its Muslim immigrants, one that must take precedence in select cases over their Islamic loyalties. But the French Right has not chosen this prudent course; instead, it chooses to be almost as bad as the French Left. The Suicide of France has little to offer Americans as we negotiate our own citizenship and immigration questions. 

James M. Patterson is associate professor of Public Affairs in the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee’s Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs.