Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously

For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in France, France is ‘the sick man of Europe’. The land of liberty was once admired by the whole world. Then came May ’68, feminism, immigration, consumerism and homosexuality. On the surface, nothing has changed; espressos are still being plonked down on zinc counters, and ‘the legs of Parisian women still turn heads’. But ‘the soul has gone’. Gays and Muslims are taking over, and France is ‘dissolving in the icy waters of individualism and self-hatred’.

The blurb calls Le Suicide français an ‘analyse’, but there is nothing analytical about it. Society, according to Zemmour, is a mass of self-righteous fools who must be held in check by powerful men. All social change, other than natural degeneration, is the result of laws passed by politicians. The more those politicians resemble Napoleon or de Gaulle, the healthier society will be.

The tale begins (like Sarkozy’s autobiography) with the funeral of General de Gaulle. ‘Here ended the series of providential French men initiated a century and a half before by Bonaparte, a national speciality like Camembert or Gevrey-Chambertin.’ ‘Providentiel’ is the term conventionally applied to French leaders who plotted or carried out coups d’état for the good of the patrie.

This ‘big cheese’ view of French history provides the filling of an interminable, half-baked baguette of indigestible prejudice. Criticism of Zemmour’s book in France has focussed on his dismissive remarks about the Vichy régime: instead of indulging in an orgy of self-castigation, France should congratulate itself on having saved so many Jews. There are many other inflammatory and unsupported statements. He suggests, falsely, that the Muslim boys whose death sparked the Paris riots of 2005 had committed a burglary.