A country is heading for trouble when its most popular writers worry that their words will land them in jail. France is that way now. Two years ago, TV commentator and journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide français, an erudite, embittered, and nostalgic essay about the unraveling, starting in the 1970s, of the political system set up under the leadership of World War II hero Charles de Gaulle. (See "French Curtains," The Weekly Standard, December 8, 2014.) The book sold 500,000 copies. Since then, it seems, Zemmour has spent half his time collecting prizes and the other half defending himself in court.

In September, he was let off by a French tribunal for a 2014 remark he made on the radio station RTL. "The Normans, the Huns, the Arabs, the great invasions that followed the fall of Rome," Zemmour had said, "have their modern equivalents in the gangs of Chechens, Roma, Kosovars, Africans, and North Africans who mug, rob, and rape." The French court decided his words were not so extremist that Zemmour needed to be punished, but France's media authority, the Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel, issued a warning to RTL. Over the summer, Zemmour was fined by a Belgian court for making similar statements.

Such censorship, most often carried out in the name of racial harmony, is becoming a normal part of being an intellectual in France. Great philosophers (Alain Finkielkraut, member of the Académie française), great historians (Olivier Grenouilleau, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse), and great novelists (Michel Houellebecq) have all come under the thumb of the country's growing body of speech laws. It is perhaps not surprising that Zemmour's new book, a collection of columns released September 7 under the title Un quinquennat pour rien (roughly, A Wasted Presidency), should have turned into a street battle between the self-described French left, who control most of the country's old cultural institutions, and an increasing number of self-proclaimed rightists, who are coming to dominate the Internet.

For most of his career, Zemmour has been a "rightist" only if you use extreme partisan shorthand. His gripe with post-de Gaulle France is that it surrendered its social democratic system to the global economy and has paid a heavy price in its standard of living. He notes in a recent column that, in the year 2000, 88 percent of French people were among the richest 20 percent of the world's population. Today, only 75 percent are. He blames France's malaise on its policies of uncontrolled immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, and its membership in the 28-member European Union. In narrowly approving the so-called Maastricht referendum of 1992, and thereby permitting a common currency and "ever-closer union" with their neighbors, French voters essentially disbanded their country, Zemmour thinks. Nothing will improve until France's politicians demand their country's sovereignty back. Zemmour's views are not so far from those of Donald Trump. In a recent column, he even attacked Hillary Clinton for describing half of Trump's voters—"racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it"—as a panier de pitoyables.

Zemmour's new book opens with a 50-page essay that places his preoccupations in a darker context. The battle over French self-rule has been lost, he believes. "Sovereignty is still a question, but it is no longer the central one. The question of identity has replaced it as a historical imperative." Something big has happened since Zemmour's last book. Hundreds of French people have been massacred on their country's streets in acts of Islamist bombing, shooting, and other violence—in the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, in various Paris nightclubs and bars the following November, and along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice during this year's Bastille Day celebrations.

As Zemmour sees it, there are many answers to the question What does it mean to be French? But the word "Muslim" does not belong in any of them. Zemmour has thus taken a harder line than the National Front, a nationalistic, immigration-distrusting party that stands close to the lead in public opinion polls seven months from the country's next election. The party's boss Marine Le Pen has made clear that Islam can be part of the French Republic, so long as it is "secularized and enlightened"—a moderate sentiment to hold about religion, but a rather illogical one.

Zemmour sees no important difference between Islam and Islamism. Wearing the veil and machine-gunning café patrons are two means to the same end: taking possession of the undefended public space that is France. In the same way, there is a strong link "between delinquency and terrorism, between drug traffickers and jihadists." The movement of refugees and migrants across the Mediterranean over the past year, 70 percent of them young men, is an invasion. Zemmour has had enough of President François Hollande's rhapsodies about the compatibility of Islam and the modern West. "Islam is incompatible with secularism, incompatible with democracy, and incompatible with republican government," Zemmour writes. "Islam is incompatible with France."

The French, Zemmour reckons, are not only permitting the Islamization of their country—they are abetting and paying for it. Execute people in their music halls and they will light candles and carry signs reading "You can't make me hate." Zemmour believes the reason Muslims did not join the protests against gay marriage that brought into the street millions of French traditionalists of other faiths is this: "They could not help but rejoice, secretly or unconsciously, at such a striking sign of decadence in their oldest enemy." France has marked off heavily immigrant neighborhoods as "sensitive urban zones" (ZUS), which receive big infusions of taxpayer money. Many of these are priority education zones (ZES), a designation that makes residents there eligible for affirmative action and various subventions—though one anti-Islamist website jokes that the acronym should stand for Zones sous l'Emprise du Prophète: "Neighborhoods in the Prophet's Grip."

The book Zemmour has written is rough, tough stuff. That is, it analyzes massacres and rallies survivors using the same tone that the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci used in The Rage and the Pride, the tirade she dashed off in the days after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. There are other such books, even in France. In October, Philippe de Villiers, the aristocratic head of a traditionalist political party, will publish one called Will the Churchbells Still Ring Tomorrow?

But the hostility with which Zemmour's book has been received in France's mainstream press is a measure of how far the debate has shifted since 2001. Certainly the reaction to Fallaci's book was hostile but, given the episode that occasioned it, it was qualified. It was: "Yes, but . . ." The reaction to Zemmour has been all "but" and hardly any "yes." When Fallaci wrote, the war on terror had not yet ended in recrimination. The word "Islamophobia" had not yet come into vogue. Today, London mayor Sadiq Khan instructs us that terrorism is just "part and parcel of living in a big city"—rather like a pumpkin-spice latte, if more painful. Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges reacts to 10 stabbings, claimed by ISIS, in a shopping mall an hour away by preemptively scolding her constituents about "hate." And in France, a new book warns that many of the most influential ideas in politics and publishing, including Zemmour's, have been nurtured on a group of websites dubbed the fachosphère, from the French slang for fascist.

Those hostile to Zemmour's work have sought to bury it under accusations of racism. While Zemmour, who is of North African Jewish background, is fascinated by religious affiliation, race per se appears not to interest him in the slightest. One of the most controversial passages in the book, however, is a quotation from de Gaulle, who said in 1959:

It is all well and good that there be French people who are yellow, black, and brown. That shows that France is open to all races and has a universal calling. But only if they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would cease to be France. Because the fact is, we're a European people of the white race, of Greek and Latin culture, and of Christian religion.

Le Monde questioned whether the source of this quotation— C'était de Gaulle, a 1994 memoir by the general's loyal but gossipy aide Alain Peyrefitte—was to be trusted. In general, Peyrefitte's book has been considered very reliable on a number of topics, especially how early de Gaulle became convinced, despite what he may have said publicly, that France's colonial rule in Algeria had to end.

After Hollande was elected president in 2012, photos of the celebration in the Place de la Bastille showed more Palestinian flags than French ones. There were more French flags, Hollande's defenders claimed, if you looked away from the column at the center of the square. Zemmour was still outraged. He criticized the Guyana-born justice minister Christiane Taubira for not singing the national anthem, the "Marseillaise," at a commemoration of the abolition of slavery. (Taubira replied that sometimes she preferred listening to the anthem rather than singing it, an act she compared to karaoke.) Zemmour sat out the great set-piece racial battle of last spring, when many conservatives questioned whether the Senegalese-French rapper Alpha Diallo, whose stage name is "Black M" and who had called France a "land of kaffirs" in one of his songs, was the right choice to perform last spring at the centennial commemoration of the Battle of Verdun. (The gig was cancelled. Diallo noted in the aftermath that his grandfather had been an army marksman in World War II.) But if certain public scandals over Zemmour involve race, it is less because he has that obsession than because it allows his adversaries to attack from behind a wall of comfortable clichés, with an arsenal of legal protections.

Zemmour operates at high speed. He publishes in quantity—book reviews, features, biographical profiles, in addition to his books. His writing is really graceful. His knowledge of French culture and politics, especially in the twentieth century, is extensive and deep. But we repeat and stress that he operates at high speed. Reading him calls to mind the late Christopher Hitchens's confession that he himself was "one who regards 'pamphleteer' as a title of honor." Zemmour, even when he is superb, can be sloppy with facts. Any American reader will see this. He thinks the island near the Statue of Liberty where immigrants were processed is Long Island. He thinks that those who have returned to Jesus (as in John 3:3) are called "Newborn Christians." So we should take it with a grain of salt when he writes, for instance, that

the army high command knows that the day will come when it must retake these foreign territories that have been established on our own soil. The plan is already drawn up. It is called "Operation Brambles." It has been refined with the help of specialists from the Israeli army.

This is not to say there is anything particularly convincing about the efforts to refute Zemmour's more forceful points. The daily newspaper Le Monde has an American-style fact-checking feature that it calls "Les décodeurs." It recently devoted a page to the errors in Zemmour's past year of column-writing. There is no shortage of these. But what is striking about Le Monde is that the "errors" it highlights are just as often ideological differences as factual mistakes, and the paper is wholly unable to tell the difference. When Zemmour makes an illiberal remark about dialects, Le Monde scolds him for not using the definition of the word "dialect" promulgated in the European Union's Charter of Regional or Minority Languages. Then Zemmour writes that the CGT trade union "no longer represents anything." Not true, says Le Monde! It represented 30.63 percent of unionized workers in 2013, just ahead of the CFDT at 29.71 percent! On top of that, Zemmour, the knucklehead, is unable to tell a North African djellaba from a Saudi Arabian qamis. He can therefore have nothing of value to say about France. This kind of "fact-checking" is self-discrediting. It is a blow struck in the spirit of censorship and "official truth," trying to pass itself off as an exercise in free inquiry.

It gives a hint why the National Front has risen so rapidly in France over the past half-decade. And why newspapers and TV stations in all countries have failed to stop various populist candidates from rising in popular esteem. The arguments the media now want to join are ones that it long suppressed. Voters lost patience—and seem to be resolving those arguments themselves, without the media's help. The young conservative Geoffroy Didier of Nicolas Sarkozy's party, Les Républicains, was interviewed by the newsmagazine Le Point last spring. He had proposed a ban on wearing burkas and building mosques with minarets. In his view, it was too late to do anything else about immigration and Islam, and that was the fault of the entire political establishment. "The left is to blame for pretending it didn't see this coming," Didier explained. "The right is to blame for pretending it did."

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 .