A presidential candidate patriotic Frenchmen can believe in.
Well, he’s in. And he did it in a pretty spectacular way.
Last week, in a seven-minute video, Éric Zemmour – the fearless columnist and TV commentator whose latest book, France Has Not Yet Had the Last Word, I wrote about here last month – officially announced his candidacy for president of France. And it could hardly have been more powerful. It wasn’t just an announcement; it was an oration for the ages.
“My dear compatriots,” began the man widely known as “France’s Trump,” “for years, the same feeling has gripped you, oppressed you, haunted you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession.” As he spoke, music played. Beethoven’s Seventh. Many commentators jumped on this: how could a man so preoccupied with all things French use a German symphony for his music bed? Fair enough: it would’ve made more sense to pick, say, Faure’s Requiem or Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.
Zemmour continued. “You walk the streets of your city and you don’t recognize it. You look at your screens and you are spoken to in a language that is strange and, quite frankly, foreign.” The video cut back and forth between a shot of Zemmour reading his announcement – an old-fashioned radio microphone in front of him, a wall of old books behind him – and images of street violence, girls in hijabs, soccer players “taking the knee,” subway crime. Continue reading Zemmour Throws His Hat in the Ring
