A reporter who infiltrated Éric Zemmour’s presidential election team has claimed he witnessed a culture of casual racism and a covert online campaign involving a “shadow Facebook army” and repeated rewrites of the far-right polemicist’s Wikipedia page, the most viewed in France.
Vincent Bresson, 27, says he spent more than three months as an increasingly trusted member of “Génération Z”, as Zemmour’s young supporters’ group is known. He said he witnessed multiple racist remarks from both volunteers and senior staff.
“Officially, if you’re black or of Arab origin, Zemmour believes in ‘assimilation’: work hard, adapt to ‘French culture’, and you can be French ‘like the rest’,” said Bresson, a freelance journalist who has written for publications including Le Monde.
“In reality, it seems some Zemmourists will always see you as ‘less French’. And these are supposedly the more moderate, publicly acceptable faces of the campaign. I think it poses serious questions about promises of equal treatment for all under a Zemmour presidency.”
Zemmour, a media pundit who promotes the far-right “great replacement” theory that Muslim immigrants are supplanting the populations of European countries, denies he is racist but has two convictions for racist hate speech and is appealing against a third.
Less than two months before the first round of voting, he is vying for third place in the polls with the rightwing Les Républicains candidate Valérie Pécresse, behind the far-right National Rally leader, Marine Le Pen, and the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron. Bresson said in an interview he decided to infiltrate Zemmour’s campaign because “there was at least a chance he could be president”.
On his first evening with a group of young activists putting up posters last October, Bresson recounts in his book, Au Coeur de Z (At the Heart of Z), published on Thursday, “one of them used the word ‘negroes’, and nobody batted an eyelid”.
On another occasion, a volunteer joked of a black driver delivering campaign leaflets: “If he only knew what he was carrying”. A rare Zemmour supporter of Arab origin was told by another activist he could never sell him his flat, “not with your face”.
He says he also witnessed a conversation between two senior team members who referred to black parking attendants at the Villepinte exhibition centre outside Paris, where Zemmour held his first campaign rally last December, as “Mamadou”, a Francophone African first name sometimes used in France to describe a black labourer and recognised as a racist insult.
Bresson said he had targeted Génération Z as the easiest way into Zemmour’s campaign because as a “young, white, university-educated man called Vincent – a name in the Christian calendar – and brought up a Catholic, I looked like a plausible recruit”. Zemmour has claimed that if he were elected president he would ban families from giving children non-French first names, meaning people could no longer call their sons Mohammed “but would be allowed to use it as a middle name”.
Bresson said he was astonished at how quickly he had been integrated into the group, progressing from late-night or early-morning flyposting expeditions to joining teams of activists trawling social media for potentially serious threats to Zemmour’s safety.
He was also promoted to an “elite” list of trusted individuals tasked with sleeping at Zemmour’s campaign headquarters in rue Jean Goujon in the capital’s 8th arrondissement, acting as security guards in exchange for a signed book, photo or lunch with “Z”.
“I was astonished at the lack of security,” Bresson said. “I changed my surname and invented a job in PR, but never once was my ID checked. Often, I could have searched Zemmour’s desk, for example – though I never did. I’m a journalist, not a spy.”
Bresson also joined Zemmour’s highly sophisticated covert online campaign, run through Telegram chat groups by the candidate’s director of digital strategy, Samuel Lafont. “This isn’t public at all, it’s covert,” he said. “This is not transparent political campaigning.”
The book describes how a “shadow army” of hundreds of Zemmour volunteers are instructed to join a huge array of diverse Facebook groups, ranging from fans of the late French rocker Johnny Hallyday through supporters of Lens or Lyon football clubs to pizza lovers, anti-vaxxers and radical protest movements.
“They’re asked to pile in, as many as possible, posting pro-Zemmour content – articles, videos, links to his supporters’ website – and asking what people think of him. Flooding Facebook, commenting and reacting as much and as often as they can, constantly raising their candidate’s profile,” Bresson said.
“They can copy-paste material from a central campaign site; they can post exactly the same content across 20 different groups. It’s about creating an impression of huge numbers of people, of a massive online movement.”
The book also relates how volunteers are called on for mass campaigns, orchestrated by Lafont, aimed at ensuring pro-Zemmour hashtags – such as #STOPcensure (#STOPcensorship), when the candidate’s Instagram account was briefly suspended last August – trend on Twitter, attracting media coverage.
Another unit, known as “WikiZédia”, is charged with editing Wikipedia entries relating to Zemmour, particularly the polemicist’s individual page, which was viewed 5.2m times in 2021, making it the online encyclopaedia’s most consulted page in France.
In an online strategy document seen by Bressson, WikiZédia members are expected to make Zemmour “as visible as possible on Wikipedia” by linking to his entry and citing his views on as many subjects as possible, as well as listing his TV appearances.
One activist was also engaged in online revisionism in support of Zemmour’s assertion, disproved by historians, that during the second world war France’s collaborationist Vichy régime tried to help French Jews rather than send them to death camps, Bresson writes.
The activist, a respected Wikipedia contributor, inserted photos of Vichy’s leader, Philippe Pétain, and prime minister, Pierre Laval, on Zemmour’s Wikipedia page, adding that their “responsibility for the Shoah in France is debated”.
Bresson cites a senior French Wikipedia administrator, Jules, as saying WikiZédia’s activities were “unprecedented” for a political party in France and contravene the website’s fundamental principles of objectivity and neutrality.
Lafont on Thursday confirmed efforts to “improve” Zemmour’s pages, which he said were “skewed … by changes made by the left”, insisting this was “the Wikipedia game. It’s a participatory encyclopedia. It’s normal for everyone to chip in.” He did not comment on allegations a senior Wikipedia contributor was a Zemmour activist.
Au Coeur du Z took six months from idea to publication and is published by Éditions Goutte d’Or, whose other undercover reports have also made headlines. Its manuscript was, until late last week, in the hands of one of France’s top media lawyers.
One of the book’s publishers, Geoffrey Le Guilcher, said legal action against the book by Zemmour was a possibility but the company was confident there was “absolutely nothing untrue or unverified” in Bresson’s 300-page account.
“This is about infiltrating for more transparency,” he said. “Éric Zemmour is the only presidential candidate convicted of racist hate speech. His campaign’s online activity is at the very least amoral. There is a very clear public interest.”
• This article was amended on 18 February 2022 to remove a reference to Telegram chat groups as being “encrypted”.
