FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE, the new president of France, is the first to occupy the Élysée Palace with a live-in companion instead of a wife. The political journalist Valérie Trierweiler is pictured above at yesterday’s swearing-in. (Tiberge of GalliaWatch writes about the event here.) Mrs. Trierweiler still covers politics for a television network. She is twice married and twice divorced.

She has three teenage sons, who are now in the uncomfortable position of having a mother in a public relationship with someone other than their father. Concern for that kind of thing, however, is passé in France, where the whims of adults reign freely over the lives of children. Selfishness and superficiality are terribly enlightened to the French, who redesign the family while their culture fades into the night.

Mrs. Trierweiler, an attractive woman with a quintessentially French face, told the New York Times: “I haven’t been raised to serve a husband. I built my entire life on the idea of independence.” As we can see from her outfit yesterday, this independence entails a certain degree of sexual aggression.

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WILL the French journalist Éric Zemmour be silenced? It is hard to imagine a man as outspoken as Zemmour, who was convicted of defamation in French court last week for publicly stating that most drug dealers in France are Arabs and blacks, not speaking his mind. At his trial, Zemmour said: 

“I am not a provocateur. I say what I believe and what I see. Sometimes the reality is unbearable and brutal. This is about freedom of expression. When you describe reality, you are treated as a criminal.”

The blog Galliawatch is a good source for background and ongoing news about the celebrated and despised journalist. The author Tiberge wrote this longer piece on Zemmour last year and a recent post on the trial. Zemmour was fined 5,752 euros. Further fines were deferred and will be automatically collected if he comes up for more charges.

A recent profile in The New York Times described Zemmour as a “hopeless intellectual.” In his critiques of multiculturalism and mass immigration, Zemmour complains that France is being “Americanized.” He is an outspoken critic of feminism too. In his book, Le Premier Sexe, the journalist accused feminism of undermining virility, authority and social order.  

Zemmour is a reactionary in the best sense of the word, a critic of the grinding loss of meaning imposed on the individual by the wearing away of national identity and traditional roles. Read More »