Yesterday, after trailing his skirts for several months, Eric Zemmour finally announced his candidature for next April’s French presidential election.  He did so with a brilliantly crafted speech, which I reproduce below.

Nationalists, meanwhile ... real ones ... have likely already discounted the possibility that a Jewish anti-Islamist and culturist would, if elected, deliver a nationalist outcome.  Yes, he says “The Third Worldization of our country and our people impoverishes it as much as it disrupts it, ruins it as much as it torments it.”  But he also says, “So that the French will feel at home again and so that the latest arrivals assimilate to their culture and appropriate their history.”

Then there is much confusion caused by his adoption of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement terminology (which Marine Le Pen has not taken up).  Does that signify adoption of the theory as such?  Is he at all hostile to non-Muslim foreignisation, if those foreigners integrate culturally?  Yes, he says “we will not allow ourselves to be replaced”.  Yes, he speaks of “the minorities who never stop tyrannizing the majority”, but is he speaking only of Muslims, Islam and jihad?

The one certainty is that his language and his candidacy will push the future of the true French to the centre of the campaign, and force the traitor-parties to speak of the one thing of which they are most afraid.  If, as seems possible, Zemmour beats Le Pen and the other challengers to proceed to the second round against Macron (presumeably), the Great Question of nationalism is very likely to become the great question of French politics, win or lose.  That much this man can do for true nationalists.

Here is his speech:

For years, the same feeling has gripped you, oppressed you, haunted you. A strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You walk in the streets of your cities and you do not recognize them. You look at your screens and someone speaks a strange language to you. And to be honest, a foreign one. You take an eye and an ear to your children’s advertising posters, TV series, football games, movies, shows, songs and textbooks. You take subways and you take trains. You go to stations and airports. You are expecting your daughter or son when they leave school. You accompany your mother to the hospital emergency room. You stand in line at the post office or the employment agency. You wait in a police station or in a court and you feel like you are no longer in the country you know.

You remember the country you knew in your childhood, you remember the country your parents described, you remember the country you find in movies or in books, the country of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV, the country of Bonaparte and General De Gaulle, the country of knights and ladies, the country of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand, the country of Pascal and Descartes, the country of the fables of La Fontaine, the characters of Molière and the verses of Racine, the country of Notre-Dame de Paris and the bell towers in the villages, the country of Gavroche and Cosette, the country of barricades and Versailles, the country of Pasteur and Lavoisier, the country of Voltaire and Rousseau, Clémenceau and the poilus of 1914, De Gaulle and Jean Moulin, the country of Gabin and Delon, Brigitte Bardot and Belmondo, Johnny and Aznavour, Brassens and Barbara, the films of Sautet and Verneuil.

This country both light-hearted and brilliant. This country that is both literary and scientific. This country so intelligent and whimsical. The land of Concorde and nuclear power plants, which invented the cinema and the automobile. This country you are looking for everywhere with despair, for which your children yearn without even knowing it. This country that you cherish and which is disappearing. You haven’t moved and yet you feel like you’re no longer at home. You have not left your country, but it is as if your country has left you. You feel like a foreigner in your own country. You are exiles from within.

For a long time, you believed that you were the only one to see, to hear, to think, to fear. You were afraid to say it, you were ashamed of your impressions. For a long time, you did not dare to say what you see and above all, you did not dare to see what you see. And then you told your wife, your husband, your children, your father, your mother, your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors. And then, you told it to strangers and you understood that your feeling of dispossession was shared by all. France was no longer France and everyone realized it. Of course, you have been looked down upon. The powerful, the elites, the self-righteous, the journalists, the politicians, the academics, the sociologists, the trade unionists, the religious authorities were telling you that it was all a decoy, that it was all mistaken, that it was morally wrong. But you understood over time that they were the ones who were being deceived, that they were the ones who had it all wrong, that they were the ones who were harming you.

The disappearance of our civilization is not the only issue that harasses us even if it dominates them all. Immigration is not the cause of all of our problems, although it makes them all worse. The Third Worldization of our country and our people impoverishes it as much as it disrupts it, ruins it as much as it torments it. This is why you often have a hard time making ends meet.

That’s why we have to re-industrialise France. This is why we must rebalance our trade balance, reduce our growing debt, bring our companies that have moved back to France. Put our unemployed back to work. That’s why we need to protect our technological treasures and stop selling them off to outsiders. That’s why we must allow our small businesses to live and grow and be passed down from generation to generation. This is why we must preserve our architectural, cultural and natural heritage. This is why we must restore our republican school, its excellence and its cult of merit, and stop handing over our children to the egalitarian experiments of pedagogists and Doctors Strangelove in gender theories and Islamo-leftism. This is why we must regain our sovereignty, abandoned to the technocrats and European judges who have stripped the French people of their ability to decide their fate in the name of the dreams of a Europe that will never be a nation.
Yes, we must return power to the people, take it back from the minorities who never stop tyrannizing the majority and from the judges who substitute their legal rule for the government of the people, by the people, for the people. For decades, our rulers on the right and on the left have led us on this fatal path of decline and decadence. Right, left, they lied to you. They hid from you the seriousness of our downgrading, they hid the reality of our replacement from you.

You’ve known me for years, you know what I say, what I diagnose, what I advertise. For a long time I was content with the role of journalist, writer, Cassandra, whistleblower. I thought then that a politician was going to seize the torch that I passed on to him, I told myself to each his profession, to each his role, to each his fight. I have stepped away from this illusion. Like you, I no longer have any trust. Like you, I have decided to take charge of our destiny. I have understood that no politician would have the courage to save the country from the tragic fate that awaits it. I have understood that all these so-called competent were mostly helpless. That President Macron who presented himself as a new man was in fact the synthesis of his two predecessors, and worse. That in all parties, they would be content to reform when time is running out.

It is no longer time to reform France, but to save it. That’s why I have decided to run for president. Why I have decided to ask for your votes to become President of the Republic. So that our children and our grandchildren do not experience barbarism. So that our daughters are not veiled and our sons are not submissive. So that we can pass on to them France as we knew it and received it from our ancestors. So that we can still preserve our ways of life, our traditions, our language, our conversations, our controversies over history or fashion, our taste for literature and gastronomy. So that the French remain proud of their past and confident of their future. So that the French will feel at home again and so that the latest arrivals assimilate to their culture and appropriate their history. So that we remake French people in France and not foreigners in an unknown land.

We French are a great nation, a great people. Our glorious past pleads for our future. Our soldiers conquered Europe and the world. Our great writers and artists have aroused universal admiration. The discoveries of our scientists and the manufacturing of our manufacturers have marked their times. The charm of our art of living is the envy and the happiness of all those who taste it. We have had huge victories and we have overcome terrible defeats. For a thousand years we have been one of the powers that wrote the history of the world. We will be worthy of our ancestors. We will not allow ourselves to be vassalized, conquered, colonized, we will not allow ourselves to be replaced. In front of us, a cold and determined monster will rise up that will seek to sully us. They will tell you that you are racist, that you are driven by sad passions when it is the most beautiful of passions that drives you, the passion for France.

They’ll tell you the worst about me, but I will hold fast. Gibes and spitting won’t impress me. I will never lower my head because we have a mission to accomplish. The French people were intimidated, paralyzed, indoctrinated, made to feel guilty, but they are raising their heads, removing the masks, dispelling the lying miasmas, they are chasing away their bad shepherds. We are going to continue France, we are going to continue the beautiful and noble French adventure. We will pass the torch on to the next generations. Help me, join me, stand up. We French have always triumphed—over everything.