In a wide-ranging interview, the first he has given to the foreign press since the French race riots erupted late last month, Éric Zemmour—the former journalist who now leads the national Right party Reconquête—answered questions relating to Islam in France, the future of the country, the nature of the civil insurrection, its source, who is to blame, and what measures must be taken to prevent subsequent catastrophes.
The interview, conducted by Jose Maria Ballester Esquivias for the Spanish digital newspaper El Debate, gave Zemmour ample opportunities to speak his mind on the perilous issues facing France, and as usual, speak his mind he did.
“[France] is on the verge of civil war,” Zemmour said candidly. “I’ve been saying this for a long time, and the recent guerrilla scenes prove it.”
For Zemmour, despite what liberal politicians and the mainstream press say, the link between the riots and mass migration is clear and undeniable. “No one can ignore reality anymore,” he “In spite of everything, most of the political class wants to believe that it is a social crisis when the root cause is obvious: immigration.”
“No politician has taken the measure of what awaits us if we do nothing. These riots are just a glimpse of our future,” Zemmour said ominously.
“Make no mistake, these revolts are above all revolts against France,” he told Esquivias. “They are more violent than the previous ones, and if we do nothing, I assure you that the next ones will escalate another rung of violence until we can do nothing more.”
He recalled how he’s spent the past two decades “denouncing the dangers of this totally uncontrolled immigration,” and said that with the arrival of massive numbers of migrants from the global South who are “so far removed from our cultural and civilizing canons,” the level of violence seen during the rioting was inevitable.
Photo: Nicolas TUCAT / AFP
When asked why the riots were so much larger in scale than those that erupted in 2005, Zemmour simply replied: “The numbers.” He said the “rioters of 2023 are the children of the rioters of 2005. Add to that the hundreds of thousands of foreigners France has taken in since then and you have an answer.”
The rioters, Zemmour insisted, do not “want to be French and are not considered as such by the rest of the national community.” He noted that most of the rioters were young immigrants of “the third, fourth, or even fifth generation, who have French nationality,” and added that this tells one all the need to know about the “state of the assimilation model in France.”
Ultimately, Zemmour lays the responsibility of the riots at the feet of the entire French system: the politicians, media, school system, judicial system, and parents who’ve given up on educating their kids.
“There are the politicians, of course, who, out of ideology and fear, look away from the evidence that I call the “great replacement” [of one population for another]. Some of them, he continued, believe the French are mere consumers, interchangeable with any other that can come from anywhere. Others are afraid of telling the truth and of being accused by the media, as I was, of “adding fuel to the fire.” The media are also to blame, he asserted.
“Then there is the failure of our school system which, in addition to failing to fulfill its primary mission of instruction, has showered these ‘young people’ with anti-French rhetoric from an early age.”
As usual, Zemmour pulled no punches in his criticism of Islam and its place in France. “I refuse to distinguish between Islamism and Islam,” he began. “The truth is that Islamism has not stopped growing for decades, and exponentially in recent years. It could be said that France is becoming Islamized at breakneck speed. An Islamization that has been possible thanks to an unprecedented migratory invasion and the total and lasting submission of our elites to these minorities.”
Added to this, he continued, are “the new generations of Muslims born on French soil, increasingly fanatical about their beliefs,” adding that the “majority of young Muslims believe that Islamic laws take precedence over those of the Republic.”
“And what do our leaders do to combat what they call Islamism? They keep proposing more Islam, more mosques, more imams … If we continue in this direction, due to demography and democracy, France could one day become an Islamic republic. We must not forget that Islam is a religion of conquest.”
But for Zemmour, there is still hope. This is not a foregone conclusion, he said. “It is possible to reverse the trend, whenever the French want,” he insisted.
Lastly, with regard to potential solutions, Zemmour wrapped up the interview by stating emphatically that the French state must “attack the root of the problem: immigration.”
The French must recover the peace they deserve, he said, and in order to do this, my party, Reconquête, “advocates for the establishment of an immigration shield that includes a series of measures, including the suppression of family reunification and the right to legal status, the prohibition to regularize illegal immigrants, the suppression of benefits to foreigners and the return of foreign criminals to their countries.”
Zemmour’s comments echo statements made days earlier by Pierre Brochand, France’s ex-foreign intelligence chief, who described the race riots as an “uprising or revolt against the French national state by a significant part of the youth of non-European origin present on its territory.”
“In terms of amplitude, official statistics suggest—for historians to verify—that nothing comparable has happened in French cities since the Revolution of 1789 or, at the very least, the weeks following the Revolution,” Brochand told the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro in a rare interview.
