Saturday, November 27, during his trip to Marseille, Eric Zemmour sent a middle finger to a passer-by, who had herself made this gesture for him. Since then, the quasi-candidate has found himself under fire from critics, so much so that he had to admit on Twitter to have had an inelegant reaction. In rhetoric, the gesture sometimes has more impact than the word.
Madam, it was not the place of a debate as I like them, time was limited to me. So I used the only language that you and your “antifa” comrades understand immediately: yours. However, imitating you was very inelegant, I readily admit.
EZ– Eric Zemmour (@ZemmourEric) November 28, 2021
The controversy has indeed been invited, since Saturday, November 27, in all the interviews and on all the debate platforms: the middle finger of Eric Zemmour! Everyone went there with their little comment. Valérie Pécresse spoke of a “totally unworthy gesture” and Michel Barnier cracked: “We do not improvise President of the Republic”. As for Marine Le Pen, she soberly emphasized that Eric Zemmour had “not very comfortable” in the exercise of presidential candidate.
Are we still in a rhetorical debate? It really seems like yes. In rhetoric, there is a key concept: ethos, which is the image that the speaker projects of himself or herself through their speech. And it is as much about the words we say as it is about the clothes we wear or the gestures we make.
By responding to provocation by provocation, to insult by insult, Eric Zemmour imprints a double inflection on his ethos. On the one hand, he reinforces the iconoclastic, frank, even virile image that he has cultivated since the start of the campaign and to which, obviously, part of the electorate seems sensitive. This explains why, at first, his entourage claimed the gesture, quite proudly.
But on the other hand, it also conveys the image of a man who fails to control his impulses, gives in to provocation and, indeed, shows inelegance. To put it in a nutshell: what is at stake here is whether or not its image is presidential.
Can Eric Zemmour really, in a single gesture, degrade his image as a candidate to such an extent? This is precisely one of the characteristics of the ethos: it takes months, even years, to forge an image. It is a treasure that patiently accumulates, from intervention to intervention, but it only takes an instant to squander. And in this matter, there are many precedents.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon in September 2019, exclaiming “The Republic is me!”. Marine Le Pen in May 2017, with his astonishing “Look, they are here…” during the jump ball debate. And of course, the famous “Get out of the way poor asshole” by Nicolas Sarkozy, in circumstances very similar to those of Saturday, November 27. So many outings to which, subsequently, these politicians have never ceased to be brought back: each time, it is the presidentiality of their image that was attacked.
However, we have not just witnessed the failure of Eric Zemmour’s campaign. History is never written in advance and a lot can happen by April. On the other hand, for the first time, the question is asked explicitly in the debates and the interviews.
I don’t remember hearing so many people wondering: “Will Eric Zemmour still be a candidate?” when he declared that Pétain had protected the French Jews, in contradiction with all that established by historical research. Nor when Médiapart published two long articles, reporting a series of accusations of sexual assault. Nor, either, each time the two convictions of Eric Zemmour were recalled, for provoking racial discrimination and religious hatred towards Muslims.
It is true that the case of the middle finger comes at the end of a succession of blunders, to use a neutral term: the gun pointed at the journalists, at the end of November and the charge against François Hollande in front of the Bataclan, the anniversary day. attacks. So is Saturday’s middle finger just the straw that broke the camel’s back? Is the image too sharp, too sharp, too viral to be ignored? Or our obvious propensity to be shocked by this gesture, more than anything else, does it say something deeper about our society? This question has not finished bothering us.