Editor’s Note: The following speech was given by French writer Eric Zemmour at the Convention de la Droite in Paris the last weekend of September. His remarks are currently being investigated by French authorities for hate speech, and were called “nauseating” by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. Zemmour is a controversial figure in France due to his views on Islam and immigration, and while the views expressed here are his own, not those of the Daily Caller, the speech nevertheless offers an important look at a moment in the life of the French right. Moreover, we believe that when governments attempt to shut down speech, especially political speech, the role of the press is to report it anyway.



Good day.

There are many of you [here], really. I didn’t expect that. Someone informed me [of this], but I did not believe it. All these people who come when we tell them about a right-wing convention, of a right-wing union, of a gathering of all the right-wingers, of a popular gathering, and even — who knows — populist? Of a coalition between the National Convention of Republicans and even of the union of populists with the dissidents of the France Insoumise. No, all of these forbidden, impossible words. Somebody told me that people like their illusions, but I didn’t believe that it was to this extent.

Where do you think you are, frankly? In the United States? In Hungary? In Poland? In Italy? In Austria?

No but, you truly believe that you will dodge a second round of Marine [Le Pen]/Macron and the reelection of Macron? You cannot be serious, not sensible. You don’t really believe that do you?

I know that Joseph de Maistre said that the French people were the easiest to mislead, the hardest to set straight, the best at deluding others, but, come on, really!

It’s settled, it’s over, you came for nothing: “Move along, there’s nothing to see here!” You know that you are still in France. And in France, you have the stupidest right-wing in the world… We are the country of human rights and of the stupidest right-wing in the world: that goes together. No, really you are not rational.

And then, I read the theme of the convention: How to find an alternative to progressivism? Why look for an alternative to progressivism? Don’t you hear in this term, the sweet name of progress? Do you think of the fate of our peasant ancestors who suffered from famine and of Louis XIV mistreated by Molière’s doctors? No, you are not serious, not rational.

Progress is the greatest matter of our time, the greatest religion of our time: different from Jesus Christ or Moses, and for two centuries you realize! How can we refuse the progress that holds its arms out to us; how can we not praise this magnificent industrial revolution that permitted the slaughter of Verdun? How can we not praise this science that gave us the atomic bomb? (RELATED: Man Goes On Stabbing Spree In France. Suspect Is Reportedly An Afghan Asylum-Seeker)

How can we not exalt before the sublime French Revolution, which gave us the [Reign of] Terror and its following days that tell of communists, who gave us the Gulag? Yes, frankly, how can we not be progressive? It must be said that we have for a long while hesitated. It was with good reason. Next to these progressive massacres, there were also antibiotics, Penicillin, social security, and cortisone for the voice.

However, for many decades now, the slightest hesitation is no longer possible: progressivism is no longer up for discussion; the domination of the free individual has knocked down the old barriers between human beings and former prejudices.

The patriarchy is dead, and women are free of millennia of oppression. Slaves were freed from their chains. Caroline de Haas and Rokhaya Diallo are queens of the world. This really is [a departure from] Bonaparte and Victor Hugo.

Successful globalization has freed hundreds of millions of Chinese and African people from misery. And, too bad, if globalization has plunged tens of millions of Westerners into poverty and unemployment. Each in turn. After all, white laborers have profited nicely from colonization and unequal trade. It’s only justice that they pay.

The most recent beauties of progress leave me, each day, more astounded. How can we not be attracted to this atmosphere of liberty that reigns over France and the West? How can we not approve all of these laws that punish thought and speech? For we are much freer in thinking pleasantly and in keeping bad thoughts quiet.

How can we not be happy to see these thick hairy men who are able to finally own their true feminine nature … to see women who no longer need disgusting contact with men to get pregnant … to see mothers who no longer need to give birth to be mothers.

As the magnificent Agnès Buzyn [French Minister of Solidarity and Health] said: “A mother can be a father.”

How can we not get carried away by the superb level of the duplicates of countless baccalaureates that amass each year? How can we repel the overpowering charm of this inclusive language with all its little points that resemble the toy trains of our childhood?

How can we not have a taste of the verbal inventiveness of our masters: “feminicide, gender bias, intersectional struggles, racialized women”? This magnificent jargon that only the old-fashioned refuse to adopt.

How can we not be dazzled by the elegance of the clothing of our favorite minister, Sibeth Ndiaye [spokeswoman for Emmanuel Macron], pinnacle of French excellence.

How can we not swoon before a contemporary art, whose beauty sends all our grand painters of the past to the trashcan of history.

How can we not delight before the elegant quill of a Christine Angot [author of “Incest”], who has made Voltaire and Stendhal look like obscure drudge.

Yes, let’s not forget the genius of our architects today, next to whom Gabriel or Lebrun are bumbling academics!

*****

No really, you are not sensible. But because I came here, and there are many of you, I can still try to help you. To find an alternative to progressivism, we must first define it. At any rate, that is how we were taught to work long ago.

I offer you a definition. Progressivism: the religion of progress. A religious doctrine that makes the individual a god and anything from his/her desires to passing fancies a sacred and divine right.

Progressivism is a divine materialism that believes that humans are indifferent, interchangeable beings without sex or attachment; beings constructed entirely like Legos and who can be deconstructed by the beings that created the universe.

Progressivism is a messianism. A secularized messianism. As did centralism, communism, fascism, Nazism, neoliberalism too, or ‘human-rights’-ism … progressivism is a revolution. For that matter, remember the campaign book of our dear president was called: “Revolution.” A revolution tolerates no obstacle, no delay, no qualms …



Robespierre taught us that we must kill the villains. Lenin and Stalin added that we must also kill the heathens.

Progressive society in the name of liberty is a society that destroys liberty: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” The shout of Saint-Just is always on the program. Since the Enlightenment, since the French Revolution, since the Revolution of 1917, until even the Third Republic with its radical French Freemasons, up until today. It is always the same progressivism: liberty is for them, not for others. Only they could appreciate and exhaust liberty. Only they were worthy of liberty. (RELATED: French Government, Media Largely Silent About Rising Church Vandalism, Christian Watchdog Group Director Says)

We believe ourselves free from this gloomy chain of events even though we have reentered it. It’s just that our tyranny has taken an unusual hue and that our masters had the skill to conserve the forms of democracy to better gut them from the inside. To serve this tyrannical power and impose on us this “diversity” ideology, as my friend Bock-Côté [a Canadian writer] nicely called it, we have put in place a propaganda machine that has joined television, radio, cinema, advertising, and, let’s not forget, the guard dogs of the internet.

Its effectiveness makes Goebbels look like a modest artisan and Joseph Stalin look like a timid novice.

Progressivism is the omnipresence of so-called free speech, served by a technology with a power of diffusion never before seen in history. But at the same time, as they like to say, a repressive machine increasingly sophisticated to channel and censure it.

On one hand, liberals and the market opened our countries to grand winds of globalized free trade, knocking down borders and small businesses, transforming former citizens into individualistic consumers and quasi-hysterics, submitted to the injunctions of ad executives and large firms.

On the other hand, the extreme left has traded its Marxism and its handbook on class warfare for the virtuous cause of minorities — whether they be sexual or ethnic — and replaced the barricades and the streets for courtrooms.

Judges, conditioned by the propaganda of the left since judiciary school, have become the representatives and often the accomplices of diverse partnerships, which they arm, to racketeer dissidents and terrorize the otherwise silent — and today, paralyzed — majority.

All those who feel confined by former society controlled by Catholicism and the civil code. All those to whom we have dangled liberation and who legitimately believed it: women, the youth, homosexuals, negroes, Jews, Protestants, Atheists. All those who feel that they are a minority frowned upon by the majority of white, heterosexual Catholic males and who have joyously toppled the statue, to the jerky rhythms of the sway of Mick Jagger’s hips. All of them were the useful idiots for a war of extermination of the white heterosexual man. Not a movement for the liberation of women, not a fight for equality between men and women, not even a debasement of all men in the name of a universal revenge against the patriarchy.

Nothing of all this: the sole enemy to knock down was the white, heterosexual, Catholic man.

The only one who we can make carry the weight of the mortal sin of colonization, of slavery, of pedophilia, of capitalism, of pillaging of the planet; the only one who we forbid the most natural behavior of virility since the beginning of time, in the name of the necessary fight against gender bias; the only one who we extract the role of father, the only one that we transform better into a second mother, or, at the worst, into a gamete; the only one that we accuse of domestic violence; the only one that we get rid of like a pig. (RELATED: French Police Reported Nearly 900 Acts Of Anti-Catholic Vandalism In 2018. What Is Going On?)

We drag a Bernard Pivot [French Journalist] through the mud because he mentions his youth [spent] in love with beautiful Swedish women and we pardon completely a rapper who insults and incites rape, indeed the murder of white women.

I invite you to read the prose of indigenists, of racialized women, of intersectional struggles that corrupt our universities after having decayed the largest American universities … what say they?

That they are first black or Arab or Muslim, that they belong to their race … yes, yes, they have the right to use the word, to their religion “Islam,” to their country, or in any case, the country of their parents. That they only made a solidarity with women who were first for them French, bourgeoise, and above all white … that their husbands are what they are, with their faults, their enormous gender biases, and even their violence; but that they are like this not because they are men but because they were dominated and subjugated by the white man. That their only enemy is the white man and that they need their husbands to knock [the white man] down. They have understood the evolution of the balance of power.

The white, heterosexual, Catholic man is not attacked because he is too strong, but because he is too weak; not because he is not sufficiently tolerant but because he is too tolerant. It is the weak and humanistic Louis XVI that we guillotined, not the unyielding and powerful Louis XIV. We must, thus, sound the hunting cry, finish off the wounded beast. Cioran warned us: as long as a nation is conscious of its superiority, it is fierce and respected; once the nation no longer is conscious of this, it humanizes and no longer counts.

As long as white feminists continue to join them in this singular combat against the white, heterosexual man, they are welcomed. The same for the homosexual, LGBTQ and other XYZ movements.

As soon as all of them no longer want to restrict themselves to this single fight to the death between the races and the religions, they become again, like Cinderella’s carriage became a pumpkin: nothing but dirty white housewives.

*****

Terrific, exceptional success! Our progressives, so remarkable, so arrogant, so passionate about the future and preoccupied with the past, like their last iPhone, who believe we have overtaken the archaic stage of the war of nations and the war of classes, have brought back to us the war of races and the war of religions.

They have brought the future to Charles Martel, and to the 1683 siege of Vienna they have brought the future to war of fire.

We are thus caught between the anvil and the hammer of two universalisms that crush our nations, our people, our territories, our traditions, our ways of life, our cultures.

On one hand, [there is] market oriented universalism, which in the name of human rights enslaves our minds to transform them into uprooted zombies.

On the other hand, [there is] Islamic universalism, which easily takes advantage of our religion of human rights in order to protect its operation of occupation and colonization of portions of the French territory that it transforms little by little, thanks to the weight of numbers and of religious laws in foreign enclaves, inasmuch as the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal — who saw the Islamicists in Algeria operate as such in the 1980s — called the budding Islamic republics.

The human-rights universalism prevents us from defending ourselves in the name of narrow-minded individualism, which does not see that it is not individuals who are implicated but the masses; that it is these civilizations who confront one another in our motherland, in a thousand-year-old combat, and not the individuals who rub shoulders in the short period of their life on Earth.

These so-called liberals forgot the lesson of one of their most reputable masters, Benjamin Constant, who said: “all is moral among individuals, everything is physical among the masses.” An individual is free because he has opposite of him only other individuals of the same strength. As soon as the individual joins the masses, he or she is no longer free.

These two universalisms are both rivals and accomplices. The market adapts to all, as long as it can make a profit. It placed its men at the head of the State to use its monopoly of legitimate constraint as a weapon. Like this, the French state — who made the benevolent genius of French populations; who made this people, gathered in the territory between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the big, feared nation in all of Europe and the entire world — has become by an incredible reversal, the destructive weapon of the nation and of the enslavement of its people, of the replacement of its people by another people, another civilization.

These two universalisms, these two globalisms are two totalitarianisms. Since our great progressive consciences, since our media up to our President of the Republic himself, love the 1930s so much, we will give it to them. We will make a comparison with this time period. We live under the authority of a new German-Soviet pact. Our two totalitarianisms unite to destroy us before they then rip each other to shreds.

It is their common objective, their Holy Grail. To the human-rights liberalism, the cities; to Islam, the suburbs. The one serves, for the time being, as domestics for the other: pizza deliverers, taxi drivers, nannies, cooks of restaurants and drugs.

Others protect their domestics from their media and judicial powers against the deaf hatred of the French people that they feel revulsion for, each and every one. On one hand because they are French and not American, the others because they are Catholic and not Muslim.

Many good minds have compared the last years of the European Union to the defunct Soviet Union, and the monetary arm of the ECB to the chariots of the Warsaw Pact launched in service of the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty.

We see in reality in Italy, in England, how the Parliaments and the judges combat, with uncommon effectiveness, the will of the people. The law and the so-called constitutional procedures are used against the liberty of the people. We have returned to the middle of the regimes who claimed themselves to be popular democracies.

As for Islam, we have the difficulty of choice. In the 1930s, the most lucid writers who denounced the “German danger” compared Nazism to Islam. Yes Islam, they said Islam, and no one reproached them for stigmatizing Islam. At the furthest limits, many found that they were exaggerating a little bit. “Of course,” they said, “Nazism is sometimes a bit inflexible and intolerant, but from that to compare it to Islam …”

Some years later, post-war, another totalitarianism — communism — threatened. And the same comparison returned, up-to-date. Maxime Rodinson, one of the biggest Islam specialists said: “It is a communism with God.” Always this same comparison, this same obsession, some will say.

Well, I know people will accuse me of Islamophobia, I’m used to it. We all know that this nebulous concept of Islamophobia was invented to render critique of Islam impossible. To reestablish the idea of blasphemy in aid of the Muslim religion. An idea of blasphemy done away with, I recall, in 1789. (RELATED: How Accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ Threaten Our Freedom of Speech)

However, the progressives who sanctify the Revolution do not see the contradiction, and are ready to chuck out one of its victories to protect their precious Islam.

What our progressives don’t manage to understand is that the future is not determined by economic curves but by demographic curves. These are relentless. Africa, which was an empty land of 100 million inhabitants in 1900, will be a land filled to the brim with two billion and more in 2050.

Europe, which was a filled land of 400 million inhabitants, four times more, climbed to only 500 million. One for four. The relationship is exactly reversed.

At the time, the demographic dynamism of our continent allowed whites to colonize the world. They exterminated the Indians and the Aboriginals, enslaved the Africans.

Today, we experience a demographic inversion that brings about a reversal of migratory flows which brings about a reversal of colonization. I leave it to you to guess who will be their Indians and their slaves: it’s you!

With each demographic wave corresponds its ideological flag.

Eighteenth century France — once called the China of Europe — conquered the continent with the Rights of Man.

Nineteenth century England — Victorian with its nine kids per family — legitimized its imperialism through the racial superiority of the WASP.

Late 19th century Germany invented pan-Germanism, already racist, then Nazism to legitimize their vital push toward the East.

This time, African demographic vitalism has found a flag: Islam.

Islam, which was already the flag of the East against Ancient Greece and Christianity, was back in use. It hasn’t changed since the Middle Ages, it is ready to be used. To vanquish us with our human rights and dominate us with its Sharia, as the preacher Al-Qaradawi said.

“We approach, today, the days of consequences and irredeemable acts,” said Drieu la Rochelle in the 1930s.

In France, as in all of Europe, all of our problems are aggravated — I don’t say created, but aggravated — by immigration: schooling, housing, unemployment, social deficits, public debt, public order, prisons, professional qualifications, emergency services at hospitals, drugs.

And all our problems aggravated by immigration are aggravated by Islam: it is a double whammy.

All the economists explain to us pedantically that the economy is, first, a matter of confidence. Yet, the great American sociologist Robert Putnam demonstrated that confidence between people diminishes as a society was less ethnically and culturally homogenous.

However, we continue to repeat to ourselves that immigration is a richness. Find the error.

The question to us that now arises is the following: Will French youth accept living as a minority in the land of their ancestors?

If yes, they deserve their colonization.

If not, they must fight for their liberation.

But how to fight? Where to fight? On what to fight?

Shall they fight, as some have over the years, courageously with the old words of the Republic: “secularism, integration, republican order?” Unfortunately, these words no longer make sense. Immigration, integration, delinquency, incivility, living together and even assimilation, republic, republican values, state of law … all of this no longer means anything. Everything has been turned inside out, perverted, emptied of meaning. The old socialists like Jaurès or Blum would not call “Republic” what we today call “Republic.”

All those who still cling to the old republican language are as obsolete as Charles X, when he wanted, at the dawn of his reign, to reestablish the coronations of old, in the manner of his ancestors, absolute kings. He was ridiculous because, in the meantime, the Revolution and the Empire had swept everything away.

Contemporary ideological debates are like the songs of today: recoveries of 1980s hits.

Secularism or liberty, integration or assimilation, right of asylum, opening or closing. They no longer correspond to our time.

These questions, these debates are outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete. Dead questions that still roam like the dead souls of Gogol.

Immigration: it meant formerly to come from a foreign country to give to one’s children a French destiny.

Today, immigrants come to France to continue to live as in their [home] country: they keep their history, their heroes, their customs, their first names, their wives that they make come from over there, their law that they impose by will or by force to people of French origin who must submit to or resign themselves to live under the domination of Islamic traditions and of halal …or flee. (RELATED: Ilhan Omar: I Can’t Talk About Islamophobia Without Talking About Anti-Semitism Too)

Thus, they behave as in a conquered land, as behaved the pieds-noirs of Algeria or the English in India, they behave as colonizers. The military governors and their gangs join forces with the imam to impose order in the streets and in the consciences, according to the old union of the cross and the sword: to be precise, the kalach and the djellaba. There is a continuity from the thefts, rapes, traffickings to the 2015 attacks by way of countless knife-attacks in the streets of France. It is the same ones who commit these acts who come around, without difficulty from one another, to punish the koufars, the infidels.

It is jihad everywhere, and jihad for all and by all.

All of the Ministers of the Interior for 30 years play the braggart for combatting drug trafficking in the suburbs and claiming to restore republican order. They don’t understand that in order to restore the republican order in these neighborhoods, one must first take back France from these foreign enclaves.

In the streets, veiled women and men in djellaba are propaganda in fact, an Islamization of the street. Like the uniforms of an occupying army reminding the vanquished of their submission.

The trilogy of yesteryear — immigration, integration, assimilation — has been substituted for: invasion, colonization, occupation.

I like the slogan of Renaud Camus: “Between living together, one must choose.”

The question today is that of the people. The people for remaking a nation. The French people against the universalisms, whether they be capitalist or Islamic.

The French people both against the cosmopolitan citizens of the world who feel closer to New Yorkers or Londoners than their compatriots from Montélimar or Béziers. And the French people against Islamic universalism which transforms Bobigny, Roubaix, Marseille in as many Islamic republics and that brandish the Algerian or Palestinian flags as soon as their soccer team wins; at last the team of the heart: the team of their parents’ country, not the team of their ID card or their social security card.

We must all rise up.

We must free ourselves from the religion of human rights since it forgets that it speaks also to citizens.

Lamartine wrote in the History of the Girondins: “When there is a contradiction between principles and the survival of a society, it is that these principles are false, since society is the supreme truth.”

We must free ourselves from the power of our masters: media, universities, judges … we must restore democracy, which is the power of the people, against liberal democracy, which has become the means, in the name of the State, to shackle popular will.

We must abolish the oppressive laws that, in the name of non-discrimination, render us strangers in our own land. We must, quite the opposite, everywhere restore to honor the principle of national preference, which is nothing more than the foundation of a nation, which has reason-to-be only if it privileges its preferences to the detriment of others.

We must take upon ourselves our ideas of ecology: that which protects the beauty of our landscape, of our places, of our way of life, of our culture, of our civilization.

Of course, we must be guardians and custodians of our identity but what can we guard since everything has been destroyed?

Our task is more immense, almost hopeless: we must restore.

I am not saying that the question of identity is the only question that is posed to us. I am not saying that the economy does not exist, that deindustrialization does not exist, that difficult end-of-months do not exist, that small pensions don’t exist, that the labor code does not exist, that outsourcing doesn’t exist, that the constraints and defaults of the Euro don’t exist.

I claim only that the question of the identity of the French people precedes all of them, that it pre-exists all, even that of sovereignty. It’s a question of life or death.

*****

A French Islamic Republic would be able to be sovereign. But how would it be French?

This question of identity is also the most unifying, since it unites the working classes and the middle-classes and even a part of the bourgeoisie that has stayed attached to its country. Yes it unites all of the right-wing up to a left-wing that remains close to the French people, except for the internationalist left and the globalist right who have already gone to the side of the progressive Macron-ists; and for whom France no longer exists and for whom the only important cities in the world are those where the banks that manage their money are located.

We must know that the question of the French people is existential, when others pick up the means of existence. Will French youths be the majority in the land of their ancestors?

I repeat this question because never has it been asked with such intensity.

In the past, France has been threatened by disruption, Polonization, as one says in reference to the division of Poland. France was occupied, bled dry, enslaved. But never were its people threatened by replacement on their own soil.

Don’t believe those who have lied to you for 50 years. Don’t believe those who, like Macron today, reuse the same words as Hollande, Sarkozy, Chirac and Giscard.

When you hear that our immigration policy must be both firm and humane, you can be sure that it will not be firm, and that it will be humane for the immigrants but not for the French. (RELATED: How To Reconfigure The Right: A Speech To The New Right Conference In France)

Don’t believe the demographers and their media-friendly messages of good news. Remember the phrase of Churchill who said: “I don’t believe in statistics that I didn’t doctor myself.”

Don’t believe the optimists who tell you that you are wrong to be afraid. You are right to be afraid. It is your life as people that is at stake. Don’t believe these optimists who are like the pacifists of every age: they voluntarily blind themselves. They are like Aristide Briand, the great pacifist after WWI who cried: “[wage] war on war” and who wrote to the German Chancellor Stresemann: “I set aside every day, the reports of my general staff who show me evidence of German rearmament.”

Likewise, our Briands today set aside all the collections of Korans that we bring them filled with sura who give the order to slit the throats of all miscreants, infidels, Jews, and Christians.

Don’t believe the optimists. Recite the famous phrase of Bernanos that many already know: “Optimism is the false hope of cowards and imbeciles. True hope is despair overcome.”

But, I know that if you are here today, it’s because you are overcoming.