Eric Zemmour, an Algerian-born French Jew, is a best-selling author and the most popular figure on the French Right. He delivered the keynote address at Marion Maréchal’s big Convention Of The Right in Paris last weekend (TAC’s Scott McConnell reported on it here). Zemmour is an extremely controversial figure in France. A French-speaking reader writes to say that after delivering his speech on Saturday

Zemmour is now facing multiple lawsuits from anti-racist groups, has been roundly condemned in a petition by a French journalists’ association and has had media appearances and contracts cancelled. If nothing else, [the speech] should inform you as to the mood in France, at least among a rather large faction of the right.

The reader translated the speech into English for this blog, though he asks that I not identify him, as it could hurt him professionally to be associated with Zemmour in any way. I am publishing the speech below not because I endorse it, but as an important political document for American readers to understand what’s happening in France now.

Below, the speech by Eric Zemmour, delivered in Paris on September 28:

“Hello. Ah, I see there are quite a few of you! I… I didn’t expect that. I had been warned but didn’t believe it. All these people who come when you talk about a convention of the right, a union of the right, of bringing together all forces of the right, of a popular and – who knows? – even populist gathering, of an alliance between the Rassemblement National [ex-National Front] and the Républicains [center right], of a gathering bringing together populists and the dissidents of France Insoumise [far left]. So many impossible, forbidden words. I’ve been told that people love their illusions but I didn’t think it was to this point.

But, really, where do you think you are? In the United States? In Hungary? In Poland? In Italy? In Austria? Do you really believe you’re going to avoid Marine [Le Pen]-Macron in the second round [of voting in the 2022 presidential election] and the reelection of Macron? You’re not serious, not reasonable, you can’t really believe it, can you? I know that Joseph de Maistre said that the French people were the easiest to deceive, the hardest to set right, the best at deceiving others, but even so! It’s settled, it’s done, you came for nothing. Move along, nothing to see here! You know that you’re in France, don’t you, and that the French right is the world’s most stupid. We’re the country of human rights and the world’s most stupid right. They go together.

No, you really aren’t very reasonable. And I’ve read over the theme of this Convention: “How to find an alternative to progressivism?” But how and why would you seek an alternative to progressivism? Don’t you hear that the word progress in this pleasant term? Have you given a thought to our peasant ancestors dying from hunger or to Louis XIV as he was tortured by Molière’s doctors?

No, you are not serious, not reasonable. There’s nothing more important to our era than progress, it’s our great religion. Better than Jesus Christ or Moses. And do you realize it’s been two centuries? How can you refuse the outstretched hand of progress? How can you not praise the magnificent industrial revolution that paved the way for the slaughter of Verdun? How can you not praise the science that gave us the atomic bomb? How can you not go into raptures over the sublime French Revolution, which gave us the Terror, and the bright future of communism, which gave us the gulag? Come on, really, how can you not be progressive?

It must be admitted we long hesitated. And there was ample reason. Alongside these massacres, so very progressive, there were also antibiotics, penicillin, social security and cortisone shots for your voice.

But in the last few decades, the least hesitation has become impossible. Progressivism can no longer be debated. The reign of the free individual has brought down ancient prejudices and the old barriers between humans. The patriarchy is dead and women are freed from thousands of years of oppression. The slaves have been released from their shackles, Caroline de Haas [feminist activist] and Rokhaya Diallo [anti-racist activist] are queens of the world. It’s a far cry from Bonaparte and Victor Hugo.

Happy globalization has freed hundreds of millions of Chinese and Africans from misery. Too bad if it has plunged tens of thousands of Westerners into poverty and unemployment. Everyone gets their turn. After all, white workers profited from colonization and unequal trade. It’s only justice that they pay for it now.

The beauties of the most recent progress leave me each day more astounded. How can you resist the charm of this wind of freedom now blowing across France and the West? How can you not approve all these laws that punish thought and speech since one is much freer when one thinks correctly and silences bad thoughts?

How can you not be happier when you see these very hairy men finally admit their true nature as women, when you see these women who no longer need the disgusting contact of men to make babies, when you see these mothers who no longer need to give birth to be mothers? As the wonderful Agnès Buzyn [French government Minister of Solidarity and Health] puts it, “a woman can be a father”.

How can you not be swept away by the brilliant exam results of these countless high school graduate piling up year after year? How can you resist the heady charm of this inclusive language, with all its little points resembling the toy trains of our childhood? How can you not appreciate the verbal ingenuity of our masters: “femicide”, “gender prejudice”, “intersectional struggle”, “racialized woman”? This magnificent jargon that only squares refuse to adopt.

How can you not be dazzled by the elegant clothing of our favorite minister, Sibeth N’Diaye [French government spokeswoman], the height of French refinement? How can you not swoon before the beauty of contemporary art, its beauty consigning all the great painters of the past to the dustbin of history? And how can you not go into raptures over the oh-so-elegant prose of Christine Angot [French novelist], which makes Voltaire and Stendahl look like obscure hacks?

Yes, and that’s without mentioning the genius of our architects, next to whom a Gabriel or Lebrun is no more than an academic drudge?

* * *

No, you really aren’t very reasonable. But since I’m already here and there are so many of you, I may as well try to help you out.

To find an alternative to progressivism, you first have to define it. Or at least that’s how they used to teach us how to go about things. So I’ll offer you a definition: Progressivism: the religion of progress, a form of millenarianism that makes a god of the individual and a sacred and divine right of even his most capricious desires.

Progressivism is a form of deified materialism that sees men as undifferentiated and interchangeable beings without sex or origin, beings that, like so many Legos, have been entirely constructed and may thus be deconstructed at will.

Progressivism is a form of secularized messianism, as were Jacobinism, communism, fascism, Nazism, neoliberalism and the ideology of human rights.

Progressivism is a revolution. Indeed, you may recall that our dear President titled his campaign book, Révolution. A revolution that can tolerate no obstacle, no delay, no qualms. Robespierre taught us that the wicked must be killed. For Lenin and Stalin. the good were to be killed, too.

The progressive society that values freedom is deadly to freedom. There is no freedom for the enemies of freedom. Saint-Just’s cry is still on the agenda. Since the Enlightenment, since the French Revolution, since the October Revolution and all the way up to the Third Republic and its radical freemasons, all the way till today, it’s always been the same progressivism: freedom is for them, not for the others. They alone can appreciate and exercise freedom. They alone are worthy of freedom.

We believe we’ve escaped this deadly spiral when in fact we’ve reentered it. This is because our dictatorship clothes itself in unfamiliar garb and our masters have had the cleverness to retain the forms of democracy so as to all the better empty them from the inside.

To serve this tyrannical power and impose its diversitarian ideology upon us, as my friend BockCôté aptly calls it, a system of propaganda has been created that brings together television, radio, film and advertising, to say nothing of the watchdogs of the internet. It has proven so effective that it makes Goebbels look like a humble artisan and Stalin a timid novice.

Progressivism is the omnipresence of so-called free speech served by a technology with a historically unprecedented power of diffusion but which at the same time, as they like to say, doubles as an ever more sophisticated repressive apparatus to channel and censor [that speech]. On the one hand, the liberals and the market have opened up our country to the high winds of globalized free trade, pulling down borders and corner stores, transforming those who were once citizens into individualistic and quasi-hysterical consumers subject to the edicts of advertising agencies and large corporations.

On the other hand, the far left has swapped Marxism and its holy bible of class struggle for the saintly cause of minorities, whether sexual or ethnic, and replaced the street and the barricades with the courts.

Conditioned by the left’s propaganda starting at the School of Magistrates, judges have become the conduits and often the accomplices of various associations, serving as their enforcers to bully dissidents and terrorize the once silent, now paralyzed, majority.

* * *

All those who felt cramped in the old society governed by Catholicism and the common law, all those before whom the gleaming promise of liberation was dangled and who legitimately believed it – women, young people, homosexuals, the dark-skinned, Jews, Protestants, atheists – all those who felt themselves to be a despised minority within the heterosexual white male Catholic majority and who joyously tore down the statue to the staccato rhythm of Mick Jagger’s swaying hips, they were all the useful idiots of a war of extermination against the heterosexual white male.

Not a women’s liberation movement. Not a fight for equality between men and women. Not even a drive to bring down all men as universal revenge for the patriarchy. None of that. The heterosexual white male Catholic was the only enemy to be destroyed.

He is the only one made to carry the weight of the mortal sin of colonization, of slavery, of

pedophilia, of capitalism, of destroying the planet, the only one forbidden what since the dawn of time have been the most natural masculine behaviors, the only one from whom the role of father has been torn, the only one who is turned, at best, into a second mother, at worst, into a gamete, the only one accused of domestic violence, the only one to get #metooed [le seul qu’on balance comme un porc].

A Bernard Pivot [French journalist and chairman of the Académie Goncourt] is held up to public obloquy because he mentions that he was enamored of pretty Swedish girls in his youth and all is forgiven the rapper who insults and calls for raping, even murdering white women.

I suggest you read the prose of indigenists, of racialized women, of intersectional struggles that blight our colleges after having corrupted the greatest American universities. What do they say? That they are above all 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 that of their parents. That they could not care less about solidarity with women who are for them primarily French women, bourgeois women and above all white women. That their men are as they are, with their flaws, their huge gender prejudices and even their violence. But that they’re that way, not because they are men, but because they had been dominated and enslaved by the white male. That their only enemy is the white male.

And that they need their men to destroy him.

These women have understood how the balance of power has changed. The heterosexual white male Catholic is not attacked because he is too strong but because he is too weak, not because he is not tolerant enough but because he is too tolerant. It was the weak and humanist Louis XVI that lost his head in the guillotine, not the inflexible and powerful Louis XIV.

One must thus go for the kill, put down the wounded beast. Cioran had warned us: “As long as a nation is aware of its superiority, it is fierce and respected. As soon as it no longer is, it becomes more human and no longer matters.”

As long as white feminists continue to join them in this single combat against the heterosexual white male, they are welcome. The same goes for homosexual, LGBTQ and other XYZ movements. As soon as the latter are no longer content with confining themselves to this one fight to the death between races and civilizations, they once again become, like Cinderella’s stagecoach once again becoming a pumpkin, dirty white middle-class women.

What an excellent, incredible success! Our progressives – so brilliant, so arrogant, so keen on the future and as interested in the past as they are in their last iPhone – who thought they had moved beyond the archaic stage of the war of nations and of classes, have brought back the war of races and of religions. They have brought the future back to Charlemagne and the 1683 siege of Vienna, they have brought the future back to the quest for fire.

We are thus trapped between the anvil and hammer of two universalisms that crush our nations, our peoples, our territories, our traditions, our ways of life, our cultures: on the one hand, the market universalism that, in the name of human rights, enslaves our brains to turn them into deracinated zombies; on the other, the Islamic universalism that very cleverly takes advantage of our religion of human rights to protect its operation to occupy and colonize portions of French territory, which it is gradually transforming, by the sheer force of numbers and religious law, into foreign enclaves, into what the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who saw the Islamists in Algeria operate in this way in the 1980s, calls “Islamic Republics in the making”.

Human rights universalism prevents us from defending ourselves in the name of a short-sighted individualism that does not see that it is not individuals who are in question but rather great masses of people, that it is civilizations that are confronting one another on our soil in a thousand year struggle, not individuals who rub shoulders in the short lapse of their lifetimes. These so-called liberals have forgotten the lesson of one of their most famous masters, Benjamin Constant, who said: “Everything is moral for individuals but for the masses everything is physical. Every individual is free as an individual since he or she has only to deal with himself or with forces that are no greater than his own. But as a member of a group, the individual is no longer free.”

These two universalisms are at once rivals and accomplices. The market can adapt to anything as long as there’s a profit to be had from it. It has put men at the head of the state to use its monopoly of legitimate violence as an enforcer. Thus, the French state, which was the benevolent genius of French populations, which protected them from feudal lords and foreign predators, which made this people assembled on the land between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic the great nation feared throughout Europe and the entire world, became, by an astonishing reversal, the arm of the nation’s destruction and the enslavement of its people, of that people’s replacement by another people, another civilization.

These two universalisms, these two globalizations, are two totalitarianisms. Since our great progressive consciences, since our media and even our President of the Republic himself so love the 1930s, I’ll give them some 1930s. I’ll make a comparison with that time.

We live under the reign of a new Hitler-Stalin Pact. Our two totalitarianisms have allied to destroy us before tearing each other to pieces. This is their shared objective, their Holy Grail. To the liberal human-rights crowd go the cities. To Islam goes the suburbs [les banlieus]. For now, the one group provides the other with domestics: pizza delivery, taxis, nannies, restaurant kitchens and drugs. With their media and judicial power, the others protect their domestics against the muted abhorrence of the French people they both loathe – one group because they are French and not American, the other because they are Catholic by culture, not Muslim.

In recent years, many clever people have compared the European Union to the defunct Soviet Union and the monetary weaponry of the ECB to the Warsaw Pact tanks launched in service of the Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty. In Italy, in England, we presently see the unusual effectiveness with which parliaments and judges are fighting the people’s will. Law and so-called constitutional procedures against the freedom of peoples. We have fully returned to those regimes that, in their turn, also claimed to be people’s democracies.

As for Islam, we have an embarrassment of riches. In the 1930s, the clearest-eyed authors who denounced the German threat compared Nazism to Islam. Yes, Islam they said, and no one complained that they were stigmatizing Islam. At most, many found that they went a bit far. Of course, they said, Nazism is sometimes a little stiff and intolerant but from there to compare it to Islam…

A few years later, in the postwar years, another totalitarian threat – communism – appeared on the horizon. And the same comparison came back into style. Maxime Rodinson, one of the greatest specialists of Islam, said: “It’s a form of communism with God.” Always this same comparison, this same obsession, some will say.

Yes, I know, I will be accused of Islamophobia, I’m used to it. We all know that this hazy concept of Islamophobia was invented to make it impossible to criticize Islam, to reestablish the notion of blasphemy to the benefit of the Muslim religion alone. A notion of blasphemy that was abolished, I remind you, in 1789. But the progressives who regard the Revolution as sacred don’t see the least contradiction and are ready chuck one of its victories to protect their dear Islam.

* * *

What our progressives are incapable of understanding is that the future is not governed by economic curves but by demographic ones. The latter are relentless.

Africa, which was an empty land of 100 million inhabitants in 1900, will be overflowing with 2 billion and more by 2050. Europe, which was a land full of 400 million inhabitants – four times more – has only risen to 500 million – one for four. The relationship has been precisely inverted.

At the time, the demographic dynamism of our continent allowed whites to colonize the world. They exterminated the Indians and the Aborigines, enslaved the Africans. Today, we are experiencing a demographic inversion that is resulting in an inversion of migratory flows, leading to an inversion of colonization. I will leave it to you to guess who will be their Indians and their slaves. It’s you.

Each demographic wave comes equipped with its own ideological flag. Eighteenth-century France – it was called the China of Europe at the time – conquered the continent with human rights. Victorian England of the nineteenth century and its nine children per family justified its imperialism in terms of the racial superiority of the WASP. The Germans of the late nineteenth century invented the already racialist pan-Germanism and then Nazism to justify their drive for living space in the East.

This time, Africa’s demographic vitality has a ready-made flag: Islam. Already the flag of the East against ancient Greece and Christianity, Islam has been put back to work. Oh, it has not changed since the Middle Ages, it is ready to be used to conquer us with our human rights and dominate us with its sharia, as the preacher al-Qaradawi said.

* * *

“We have today reached the time of consequences and the irreparable,” said Drieu la Rochelle in the 1930s. In France as elsewhere in Europe, all our problems are worsened – I do not say “created” but “worsened” – by immigration: education, housing, unemployment, social welfare deficits, public debt, law and order, prisons, professional training, hospital emergency rooms, drugs. And all our problems worsened by immigration are worsened by Islam. It’s double jeopardy.

All economists sagely tell us that the economy is primarily a question of trust. Yet the great American sociologist Robert Putnam has shown that, the less a society is ethnically and culturally homogenous, the less trust there is between people. But they continue to drum it into us that immigration is an asset. Spot the mistake.

The that arises for us is thus as follows: will young French people be willing to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors? If so, they deserve to be colonized. If not, they will have to fight for their liberation. But how to fight? Where to fight? Against what to fight?

To fight as some have done for years, bravely, using the old words of the Republic – secularism, integration, republican order? Unfortunately, these words no longer mean anything. Immigration, integration, delinquency, uncivil behavior, harmonious cohabitation and even assimilation, Republic, republican values, the rule of law – none of that means anything anymore. Everything has been overturned, perverted, emptied of meaning.

Old socialists like Jaurès or Blum would not recognize what we today call the Republic. All those who still cling to this old republican language are as old-fashioned as Charles X when, at the dawn of his reign, he wanted to reestablish the coronation of bygone times after the fashion of his absolute monarch ancestors. It was ridiculous because the Revolution and the Empire had swept all away in the meantime.

Contemporary ideological debates are like today’s songs: covers of hits from the eighties. Secularism or freedom, integration or assimilation, the right to asylum, openness or closure… they no longer suit our time. These questions, these debates are out-of-date, outmoded, obsolete. Dead questions that still wander like the dead souls of Gogol.

Formerly, immigration meant coming from a foreign country to give one’s children a French future. Today, immigrants come to France to continue living as in their country of origin. They keep their history, their heroes, their mores, their first names, their wives they have brought from over there, their laws that they impose whether they like it or not on native stock French people, who must submit or go elsewhere – that is, live under the domination of Islamic mores and halal or flee.

They thus behave as if they are in conquered territory, like the Pieds-noirs behaved in Algeria or the English in India: they behave like colonizers. The gangsters and their gangs ally themselves with the imam to bring order to enforce order in the street and in people’s minds in keeping with the old alliance between the sword and the mitre or, in this instance, the Kalashnikov and the jellaba. There is a line running from the rapes, thefts and trafficking to the attacks of 2015 and the countless knife attacks in the streets of France. It is the same ones who commit them, who seamlessly pass from one to the next to punish the kafirs, the infidels. It is jihad everywhere and jihad for all, by all.

For thirty years, all of our ministers of the interior have boasted of fighting drug-traffickers in the suburbs and claimed to reestablish republican order. They do not understand that, in order to restore republican order in the neighborhoods, you first have to bring France back to these foreign enclaves.

In the street, veiled women and men wearing jellabas are de facto propaganda, an Islamization of the street, just as an army of occupation’s uniforms remind the defeated of their submission. For the bygone triptych of “immigration, integration, assimilation” has been substituted “invasion, colonization, occupation”.

* * *

I like Renaud Camus’ way of putting it: “one must choose between living and together” [a play on words on the slogan “vivre ensemble”]. The question today is thus that of the people. The people can remake a nation. The French people against the universalisms, whether market or Islamic. The French people against the cosmopolitan citizens of the world who feel closer to the inhabitants of New York or London than to their compatriots in Montélimar or Béziers and the French people against the Islamic universalism that is transforming Bobigny, Roubaix and Marseille into so many Islamic Republics and which waves the Algerian or Palestinian flags when its football team wins – I mean the team it loves, the team of their parents’ country, not the team of their ID or health insurance card.

We need to put everything back on its feet.

We need to free ourselves from the religion of human rights since it has forgotten that it is also meant for citizens. In his Histoire des Girondins, Larmartine wrote: “When principles are in contradiction with society’s survival then the principles are false, for society is the supreme truth.”

We must free ourselves from the powers of our masters: media, universities, judges. We must restore democracy, which is the power of the people against liberal democracy, which, in the name of the rule of law, is now used to impede the will of the people.

We must abolish the laws that kill freedom and that, in the name of non-discrimination, make us strangers in our own land.

We must to the contrary everywhere restore to its proper place the principle of national preference, which is nothing other than the foundation of a nation which has no reason to exist unless it favors its own to the detriment of others.

We must accept our conception of ecology, an ecology that first defends the beauty of our

countryside, of our sites, of our art de vivre, of our culture, of our civilization.

We must of course be conservative and conserve our identity but what can we conserve since everything has been destroyed? Our task is more immense, nearly hopeless: we must restore.

I do not say that the question of identity is the only question that arises for us. I do not say that the economy does not exist, that deindustrialization does not exist, that scraping together enough money to get through the month does not exist, that poverty in retirement does not exist, that labor law does not exist, that outsourcing does not exist, that the constraints and shortcomings of the Euro do not exist.

I only claim that the question of the French people’s identity precedes them all, that it preexists them all, even that of sovereignty. It’s a question of life or death. A French Islamic Republic might be sovereign but in what way would it be French?

This question of identity is also the most unifying for it joins the working and middle classes and even that portion of the bourgeoisie that remains attached to its country. Yes, it brings together all currents of the right and even that part of the left that continues to have ties with the French people – all of them except the internationalist left and the globalist right, which have already joined ranks with the Macronist progressives and for whom France no longer exists and for whom all that matters are the cities of the world where the banks that manage their money are located.

We must understand that the question of the French people is existential while the others are means of subsistence. Will young French people be a majority in the land of their ancestors? I repeat this question for never has it been so sharply posed. In the past, France was threatened with being broken up, with what was called Polonization in reference to the partition of Poland. It was occupied, ransomed, enslaved but its people were never threatened with being replaced on their own soil.

* * *

Don’t believe those who have been lying to you for fifty years. Don’t believe those who, like

Macron today, use the same words as Hollande, Sarkozy, Chirac and Giscard. When you hear that our immigration policy must be at once firm and human, you can be sure that it will not be firm and that it will be human for immigrants but not for the French.

Don’t believe the demographers and the good news of their media spokesmen. Remember Churchill’s remark that: “The only statistics you can trust are the ones you have falsified yourself.”

Don’t believe the optimists who tell you that you’re wrong to be afraid. You’re right to be afraid: it’s your life as a people that is at stake.

Don’t believe these optimists who are like the pacifists of all eras. They willingly blind themselves. They are like Aristide Briand, that great pacifist of the post-World War One years who cried “war against war” and wrote the German chancellor Stresemann: “Every day, I throw in the trash the reports of my general staff showing the evidence of rearmament in Germany.”

Similarly, our Briands of today throw in the trash all of the Koranic collections they are brought full of sura calling ordering the faithful to cut the throats of all non-believers, infidels, Jews and Christians.

Don’t believe the optimists. Recite the famous words of Bernanos, which many of you already know: “Optimism is the false hope of cowards and fools; true hope is despair overcome.”

But I know that, if you are here today, you have already overcome.