This Saturday evening in November in Paris, Mathieu Bock-Côté receives the author Franz-Olivier Giesbert for his book The startle on General de Gaulle. The program is called It is necessary to talk about it. It is broadcast live on CNews, a private 24-hour news channel. The chronicler deciphers the Franco-French news with his guests.
“His rocket went up very, very quickly,” says essayist Giesbert, after the show, speaking of the Quebec columnist. “He became very popular in a very short period of time. As he was unknown, his audiences are necessarily explained by his own qualities. There is a real oratory: it is someone who takes you by the guts and who fascinates people. “
It is also very difficult to miss it. In addition to this Saturday production, Mathieu Bock-Côté (MBC) delivers editorials in Facing the info CNews, Monday through Thursday, 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. On Sunday morning, he joins the Big Rendezvous of radio Europe 1 organized with CNews, two media of the Vivendi group.
The inexhaustible comment machine publishes in addition to columns on weekends in Le Figaro while keeping its weekly Quebec forums in The Journal of Montreal, a podcast on QUB radio, the panels of The Joust (LCN) Monday and Wednesday evenings, and then now The Balance Sheet of Friday. Did someone say mediacrate or omnicommenter?
“I have always worked a lot and, in all modesty, I have a real knowledge of history as well as of French political and intellectual life”, says laconically the verbomotor I met a few hours before the recording ofIt is necessary to talk about it.
The meeting was given at the Town Hall Café, on Place Saint-Sulpice in chic 6e arrondissement, now its corner of Paris. He arrived there in the clothes of a TV columnist, with a well-cut suit. The CNews driver then came to pick him up to take him to the studios on the outskirts of the capital.
The publication of a first book in France (Multiculturalism as a political religion, Cerf) in 2016 opened the platforms of the Figaro until the recent explosion of exhibitions. “The questions that I have been addressing for a long time, the French see them coming from afar, and Quebec offers a kind of outpost to observe this transformation,” said MBC to further explain his hiring in France. We resist it while facing it, if only through the Canadian regime and the American border. It all ended up with my being here, under the circumstances. “
Z for Zemmour
The context is notably that of a presidential election to come in 2022 against a backdrop of socio-political crisis. France is leaning more and more to the right, to the very extreme. The candidacy of Eric Zemmour, formalized since Tuesday, crystallizes this trend. The polemicist wants to make the election of the Head of State a vote on the future of French civilization, nothing less. “It is no longer time to reform France, but to save it”, declared the journalist and essayist to justify his leap into the arena.
Éric Zemmour left the daily Facing the info September 8, because his media speaking time was now counted in the same way as other potential political candidates. Mathieu Bock-Côté took over and basically kept the audience at nearly 700,000 viewers. That said, CNews is only making just over 2.2% ratings per month.
If he had been immortalized at the French Academy like his compatriot Dany Laferrière, Mathieu Bock-Côté should have praised his predecessor in the chair. The remark makes him smile a little and he accepts to play his role of commentator on the news by judging his illustrious colleague who has become presidential.
“My thesis on him is that he is going to tackle the strong questions: immigration, identity, French society”, he said before the announcement of the entry in the running to which everyone s ‘had been waiting for months anyway. “For the rest, it doesn’t have to be bright. He just has to be serious. You don’t have to be great at everything, you just don’t have to be too bad. “
Eric Zemmour lights many fires that scorch him. He wants to ban first non-French names and “send back foreigners” by the millions.
“I find that the lawsuit against him is delusional, continues MBC. On the sets, he is often presented as a defender of Vichy. But it’s wrong. This is objectively false. He is called a pétainiste while this guy is a maxigaullist. I observe a process of demonization. “
In any case in his solemn and emphatic declaration on Tuesday, Mr. Zemmour again spelled out references to the “great replacement” by Muslims, a racist and conspiratorial thesis born in France a decade ago.
“The concept is too poisonous,” says MBC. We have to talk about the issues that are real and that everyone agrees on. We have to talk about massive immigration. We have to talk about integration. We can say that in certain districts, the customs of a most retrograde Islam take the place of French customs. But we must avoid this concept of great replacement, ideologically overloaded, crushed by I do not know how many contradictory definitions. “
Christine Kelly, channel presenter, host of Facing the info, worked with the two commentators, Zemmour and Bock-Côté. “He gives his opinion, often very incisive, but without going too far,” she said of her new Quebec collaborator. He does not insult anyone and pays attention to the words chosen. “
Diversity diet
In its orderly perspective, a new political regime is established with the wokism as a radicalized form of political correctness. This diverse regime transfers political legitimacy to the identity margins deemed to be the most emancipatory. This ideology, totalitarian in its claim to hold the truth, also fights the debates of ideas and reintroduces censorship everywhere.
Criticism can reach defenders of secularism or freedom of expression on the left. It seems to bite much more on the right and the far right, which adds to it the detestation of multiculturalism or intersectionalism.
CNews and the other media of billionaire Vincent Boloré (including Paris Match recently) are involved in this struggle. The channel has been described as the French Fox News. The world Recently spoke of the Boloré empire as a “media war machine”, as Pierre Karl Péladeau is sometimes criticized for using Quebecor’s media to promote an identity and nationalist agenda.
“It’s ridiculous: the palette is wide in mautadit and the diversity of points of view is there, corrects the star chronicler of the two empires. We accept opinions other than those coming out of compulsory progressivism. I am for the diversity of points of view. The lawsuit against CNews seems unfair to me. “
The chronicler of the two worlds can also compare one to the other, the chicane in the one and the other hut. He suggests that in Quebec intellectual conversation should be confined to the university space (which, in his eyes, “reproduces all the tics and quirks of the clerical milieu”) while in France it irrigates the media and finds its place in the heart. from the city.
“I occupy in the Quebec public space a small function which is mine in the nationalist current, a place to which I hold in the last instance. My basic civic existential commitments are there. I would not have seen myself abandoning this contribution. […] I will stay in France. A year ? Yes. Two years ? May be. We’ll see. I have a return ticket. We have a country to do in Quebec. My basic beliefs do not change on this matter.
This report was partly funded with support from the Transat International Journalism Fund –The duty.