Grégoire Kauffmann is a historian, author ofEdouard Drumont (Perrin, 2008), the most complete biography of the anti-Semitic polemicist, and of the New FN. The old clothes of populism (Threshold, 2016). He sees in Eric Zemmour a distant descendant of the far-right journalist Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) and, for the first time, the resurgence of an old right with little attachment to the Republic.
What do you think Eric Zemmour’s political legacy is?
If we are interested in the genealogy of the rights, something unprecedented is happening today with Eric Zemmour: the resurgence of a right that we thought was dead and buried for a long time. In the 1880s, the monarchist and Bonapartist right wanted to be radically hostile to the nascent Republic, which imposed itself with the first anticlerical laws. A journalist, Edouard Drumont, appeared on the public scene in 1886 by publishing Jewish France : he himself comes from Catholic traditionalism, believes himself invested with a mission once morest the Jews, whom he accuses of wanting to de-Christianize France: there is really for him a link between state anti-clericalism, assimilated to Jews, and this desire to re-Christianize France through anti-Semitism.
The monarchist rights recognize themselves quite widely in Drumont, for fear of a dechristianized France. But the year 1892 was a fundamental and dizzying moment for the right: Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical Amid the cares, where he asks Catholics to accept republican institutions. These rights, originally very reactionary and traditionalist, but respectful of the word of the Holy Father, will somehow rally to the Republic. Drumont follows the movement and, from then on, its anti-Semitism calls itself republican. He will make the major Republican mottos his own, such as freedom – it is no coincidence that he calls his newspaper Free Speech – a word that would be gagged by the Jews, while Drumont would be the one who speaks the truth. The rights, therefore, will play year following year the game of republican institutions.
Except the French Action?
Except the French Action, founded in 1899, and which, with other small groups, persists in wanting to restore the monarchy. But it’s a fairly marginal approach, even if Charles Maurras [1868-1952] has an immense influence and will train several generations of intellectuals. There is no political current stricto sensu likely to shake up the major republican forces that share power. The largest political formation ever assembled is the French Social Party [PSF], created in 1936 on the rubble of the banned Croix-de-Feu, a mass party that shakes up the political game, with more than a million members. The PSF is a right-wing, authoritarian, anti-parliamentary party, but which remains deeply republican – and announces somewhere the Rassemblement du peuple français [RPF] Gaullist. The Republic is considered the natural regime of France, and the right will sometimes outbid themselves to call themselves more republican than the left because they want to be part of the game.
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