“I need Gaullists. . . .  I need sovereignists. . . .  I need all the family of the right!” Éric Zemmour called on the crowd at the Place du Trocadéro in Paris on March 27. With the vast square overflowing, this was Zemmour’s biggest rally of the election.

It was the last gasp — a bellow — of a remarkable, transformative campaign. A month ago, Zemmour was riding high enough in polls to put himself in contention for the runoff against Emmanuel Macron. Yet since then, his campaign has stalled. With the war in Ukraine, Zemmour’s past calls for a “French [Vladimir] Putin” came back to haunt him — sending him tumbling to fourth or fifth place.

Still, Zemmour’s rise, on a platform of carrying out a “remigration” of millions of “undesirable foreigners” (a million in his first five-year term alone, he promised) to prevent what he terms a “great replacement” of the native French, has accelerated an increasingly sinister turn in French political life. The new party he launched in December, Reconquête – a transparent allusion to the Spanish Reconquista, when Muslim forces began being driven out of Iberia in 722 AD — claims over 100,000 dues-paying members just four months later.