Semiologist Cécile Alduy has put the writings and speeches of far-right essayist, journalist and now presidential candidate Eric Zemmour through the mill, to show how he twists the French language to advance his political and ideological ambitions.
Zemmour has never held elected office and only really broke onto the political scene in 2021 with a book on the alleged decline of France, which he blames largely on immigration and Islam.
But such books and speeches provide keys to what has powered his rapid ascent in the polls.
Using sophisticated software Alduy has dissected them all and published her conclusions in 'La Langue de Zemmour' (The language of Zemmour) – a short book which references 'The Language of the Third Reich' by philologist Victor Klemperer.
“The idea is that it’s not about the individual Eric Zemmour but about the kind of ways to speak and frame issues through language and wording that he creates,” says Alduy, a French expert on the political uses of language at Stanford University in California.
“It’s not just the way he speaks, himself, but the entire structure of his discourse that I’m interested in.”
Listen to a conversation with Cécile Alduy in the Spotlight on France podcast:
'War' in a time of peace
The corpus of data she assembled show a universe “saturated with violence” and his “morbid fascination with war, death, conquest and domination”.
“'War' is the third most used noun in Zemmour’s text, which is amazing considering that he’s been just chronicling the everyday life of France in a time of peace mostly,” says Alduy.
“What it tells me is that his entire worldview is structured around conflict and antagonism: antagonism between the sexes, between peoples, between races.”
This funnels the idea that you have to destroy the other in order to survive.
"It's the best way to stop reflection,” and it “subliminally plants the idea you have to choose your camp,” she writes.
Using the word ‘race’
Zemmour is “one of the very, very few French politicians to use the word race with no qualms at all,” she explains.
But he coats it with a veil of respectability, quoting well-known figures such as 19th century French philosopher Ernest Renan, or more recently General Charles de Gaulle, both of whom used the term but "at a time when race was not the taboo it is today".
Zemmour uses a number of techniques to try and polarise French society – the first of which is straightforward repetition: his works are overflowing with references to "colonisation" and "war of civilisations".
He also "sugarcoats things by enveloping his rhetoric in tonnes of historical references and citations, backed by the appearance of literariness," Alduy explains. "But when you look at the detail, it’s extremely in your face.”
Embracing radicalism
Alduy unpicked the rhetoric of hard-right politician Marine Le Pen in a 2015 book, and explored how she has softened the language of the far-right, dropping the word “race” and favouring “immigration” or “migration policy” over the more stigmatising term “immigrants”.
Le Pen took over the National Front from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011 and later rebranded it the National Rally.
Like Zemmour, Le Pen’s radical views are cloaked in soothing speech, but Zemmour’s language marks a return to the brazenly xenophobic tradition of Le Pen's father.
“Marine Le Pen has tried to polish the discourse of the far-right, to clean up the vocabulary of the National Front, make it normalised and kind of mainstream,” Alduy says. “Zemmour is doing exactly the opposite, which is to radicalise it, to make it much more offensive and in your face.”
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Zemmour’s penchant for transgression has proven popular with a section of the population who, Alduy says, feel “orphaned” since Marine Le Pen made the party more mainstream.
“Many people want to go back to this radical far right that says things as they are, in their opinion.”
Re-interpreting history
Things, however, are not always how Zemmour portrays them.
A collective of historians recently published “Zemmour contre l’histoire” (Zemmour against history) to dismantle some of his wilder claims – such as France having protected French Jews during the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime.
“When he defends the Vichy regime for supposedly saving French Jews – which is not true – what he’s trying to do in the minds of people is to train them to differentiate between people according to their nationality,” Alduy points out.
It's just one part of "a narrative of Frenchness that is practically an imaginative one, a grand narrative of what he calls eternal France – a nation that would date back to the Middle Ages, rooted in Christianity and a universalist mission to enlighten the world".
For Alduy, Zemmour's writing and speeches prepare minds to see races rather than people, foreigners rather than children, enemies rather than citizens.
“For more than 15 years, book after book, phrase after phrase, Eric Zemmour has manipulated language, texts and history to instill at the very heart of language – our common good – a logic which destroys both meaning and people.”
Listen to a conversation with Cécile Alduy in the Spotlight on France podcast.
