HE is perhaps France’s best-known professional provocateur, as much adored by the xenophobes of the far-right as he is reviled by immigrants, women and gays. But Éric Zemmour might also be misunderstood by his allies and enemies alike, a sort of hopeless intellectual whose nuance is lost in the sensationalist jumble of the media world he inhabits.
A slight man with a quick tongue and a fearsome intellect, Mr. Zemmour, 52, has made a career of speaking on the edge in a culture where the ideal of social harmony often takes precedence over freedom of speech. He can be heard daily on French radio, read weekly in the news media and seen all over television; he is routinely accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, fear-mongering and narcissism, or some combination thereof.
“I’m reviving the ‘French polemic’ in a world that’s on the one hand Americanized, and on the other, that people want to see sterilized by antiracism, by political correctness,” Mr. Zemmour said over coffee at the back of a dark Paris cafe. “That it is to say, where you’re not allowed to say anything bad about minorities.”
In comments that his critics have parsed and denounced and parsed again, he has spoken of a “white race” and a “black race,” decried what he sees as the feminization of society and called homosexuality a social disorder. Last month, though, his pronouncements for the first time brought him before a court, on charges of defamation and “provocation to racial discrimination.”In a televised debate last March he argued that blacks and Arabs were the targets of illegal racial profiling by the French police “because the majority of traffickers are black and Arab; that’s how it is, it’s a fact.” The same day, on another channel, he suggested that French employers “have the right” to deny employment to blacks or Arabs.
The comments surely do not rank among his most incendiary, and, however uncomfortable, the first point might well be true. Even the rights groups that brought the case acknowledge that France’s poor, immigrant populations account for a disproportionate amount of crime, if not a clear “majority,” in a country that does not keep official racial statistics.
MUCH to Mr. Zemmour’s delight, his three-day trial in January drew droves of supporters, including several prominent politicians, along with hordes of critics and a crush of reporters and photographers. His comments had already fueled months of controversy and hand-wringing; he was nearly fired from his post as an editorial writer at Le Figaro Magazine, and Canal+, the television station that broadcast his statement on traffickers, received a warning from the French audiovisual authority.
The intense reaction to Mr. Zemmour’s case — and more broadly, to Mr. Zemmour himself — seems a measure of the tensions in France around race, Islam and integration. And it speaks to the difficulty of discussing those issues in a nation that is committed constitutionally to treat every person simply as a “citizen,” with no acknowledgment of ethnicity, color or religion.
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