Éric Zemmour’s rise on the French political scene may seem dazzling — but it certainly didn’t fall from the sky. The likely transfer of the main far-right media heavyweight into the party-political arena is a symptom that encapsulates the deeper trends of the current period.

Let’s briefly summarize what these trends are. Since the period of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency in 2007–12, the center of gravity of French public debate — or rather, what we have instead of public debate — has radicalized to the right. Themes that used to be the sole preserve of the far right are today saturating mainstream media’s political discourse. They cover a space that runs from the (supposedly) “republican” left of former Socialist Party prime minister Manuel Valls and Laurent Bouvet’s Printemps républicain to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), as well as the bourgeois right and the representatives of Emmanuel Macron’s government. For these forces, too, have rallied to the fight against so-called “Islamo-leftism” and Muslim “separatism.” These themes are articulated around a now-unabashed racism, fierce in its Islamophobia, and which ends up in the myth of the “great replacement” — a myth full of potential for exterminatory violence.