“Everyone hates the Quotidien,” the crowd roars in unison, a sea of French tricolores waving overhead. Amid the general excitement, a handful of burly security guards remove the camera crew of the popular talk show, running the gauntlet between the packed rows of chairs. Calls of “Quotidien collabo” — collaborator — alternate with the punches thrown in the journalists’ direction.

By late Sunday afternoon, some twelve thousand Éric Zemmour fans had gathered at the Villepinte convention center, north of Paris, buzzing with anticipation. Originally scheduled to be held at the more welcoming Zénith concert hall, the speech was moved to this isolated exhibition space to avoid clashes with planned protests in the capital, where several thousand anti-fascists gathered in the rain.

Last Tuesday, the TV pundit and best-selling author Zemmour had formally announced his presidential bid, in a burlesque video released on YouTube. Against a backdrop of leather-bound books on mahogany shelves, the sixty-three-year-old polemicist described a France on the cusp of civil war, speaking into a retro microphone harking back to Charles de Gaulle’s 1940 radio address from London. “We will not let ourselves be replaced,” Zemmour announced in the ten-minute film, again invoking the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that has become common currency on the European right.