# Éric Zemmour **Born 31 August 1958 in Montreuil**, to Berber Jewish parents who left French Algeria for France in 1952. Journalist, television polemicist, and the man who took the [[Great Replacement Theory]] out of the literary margins and put it on prime-time French television every weeknight. Zemmour matters to this vault for a mechanism rather than a career: he is the clearest case of **media pipeline as party formation**. He did not build a movement and then get coverage. He was given a nightly slot on CNews from 2019, used it to normalize a vocabulary, and converted the resulting audience directly into a presidential candidacy — announced 30 November 2021, party (*Reconquête*) launched five days later. ## The Convictions France prosecutes hate speech, and Zemmour has been convicted several times and acquitted six. - **2011** — €1,000 suspended fine for incitement to racial discrimination. - **2018** — €5,000 for inciting religious hatred; the conviction was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in December 2022. - **January 2022** — €10,000 for inciting racial hatred over remarks about unaccompanied migrant children. - **April 2025** — €10,000 for repeating his claim that [[Philippe Pétain]] protected French Jews during [[Vichy France]]. That last one is the one to hold onto. **His Vichy revisionism is not an eccentricity attached to his immigration politics — it is the same argument.** The claim that Pétain saved French Jews by sacrificing foreign ones is a claim that a French state which sorts people by origin was acting protectively. Everything else he says follows from it, and French historians have demolished it consistently since Robert Paxton's work in the 1970s. ## 2022 and After He finished fourth on **10 April 2022 with 7.07%** — roughly 2.49 million votes — and endorsed [[Marine Le Pen]] in the runoff. Reconquête's real function that year was not to win but to **move the boundary**: by occupying ground to Le Pen's right, he made her look moderate at precisely the moment she needed it. The party then fractured. [[Marion Maréchal]] led Reconquête's 2024 European list, broke with Zemmour publicly during the campaign, and was expelled. The RN absorbed most of what was left. By late 2025 the Elabe series had him at **4.5% for 2027 — behind Sarah Knafo, his own former campaign adviser and MEP, at 6.5%.** He remains a fixture on the international circuit; he appeared at [[Tommy Robinson]]'s [[Unite the Kingdom Rally]] in London in September 2025. **The pipeline worked and the party did not.** That distinction is the reusable finding: a media operation can manufacture a candidate and a vocabulary in eighteen months, and neither of those is the same thing as an organization. ## See Also - [[Renaud Camus]] · [[Great Replacement Theory]] · [[The Camp of the Saints]] - [[Marine Le Pen]] · [[Jordan Bardella]] · [[National Rally]] · [[Marion Maréchal]] - [[Vichy France]] · [[Philippe Pétain]] · [[Laïcité]] · [[Islamophobia]] - [[French History Hub]]