The author of the following essay, Éric Zemmour,  is the founder and head the most outspokenly patriotic French political party, La Reconquête (“the Reconquest”). Zemmour founded Reconquête in 2020, after having spent many years as a polemicist and journalist, starting in 1986, when he began contributing to the daily newspaper Quotidien de Paris. Born on Aug. 31, 1958, to an Algerian Jewish family that settled in a Paris suburb, Zemmour gained both renown and notoriety for his politically incorrect social stands. From 1996 to 2009, he reported regularly on politics for Le Figaro, the leading center-right French national newspaper. As a reporter as well as a rising star on television and podcasts, the young controversialist never held back from expressing bitter truths. In his bestselling 2006 book Le Premier Sexe (“The First Sex,”) Zemmour castigates the feminist movement for its disruptive effects on Western society and for its blurring of biologically rooted gender distinctions.

In his many television interviews, Zemmour has never ceased to shock the propagators of leftist party lines, by noting, for example, the high crime rates of Muslim immigrants, the declining fecundity of the indigenous French population, and the contempt shown by the French intelligentsia for their national past. He has never shied away from clashes with the French justice system by uttering “hate speech,” that is, by warning against indiscriminate immigration and the glorification of
alternative lifestyles.  

La Reconquête has become a vehicle for Zemmour’s brand of patriotic populism, and the party typically takes more daring positions on cultural and social issues than the larger Rassemblement National (“National Rally”) Party headed by Marine Le Pen. Although Zemmour only garnered 7.1 percent of the vote in the French presidential election in 2022, his party nonetheless has critical effect on the French right. It serves as a control on the Rassemblement National, helping to keep the larger nationalist party from deviating from its core principles. It also raises issues that the perpetual ruling party bloc headed by President Emmanuel Macron, consisting of globalists, government workers, and the cultural left, would be delighted not to have discussed.