His name is Tanguy David. Two weeks ago, no one knew who this 18-year-old young man, a law student in Caen, was. Today, he is known throughout France. We even saw him on Cyril Hanouna’s popular show Balance your post! Until recently, he received more than 3000 messages a day. And not just any messages. In these anonymous missives, he was called “sold”, “bastard” and more. They even threatened to behead him, like the teacher Samuel Paty was in the middle of the street a little over a year ago.
So what did this young Frenchman who speaks an impeccable language and lives with his parents do? It has been a support claimed since the start of Eric Zemmour, the famous polemicist who is now a presidential candidate. You wonder where the problem is. I forgot, it’s that Tanguy is black. So he had to face a torrent of racist insults. When you don’t call it a “house nigger” or “service”, it is called “Bounty”, named after that treat that’s black on the outside and white on the inside.
This racist campaign on social networks had started a month earlier, during a first assembly of Eric Zemmour in Nantes. It continued in Villepinte, on December 5, when as a representative of the Normandy region, Tanguy stood behind the candidate and he appeared on the screens.
For a month, Tanguy has been the victim of this house arrest which is the first rule of communitarianism. It stipulates that the law of “community”, regardless of whether it is racial, ethnic, religious or sexual, takes precedence over the rights and duties of the citizen. Isn’t this the same narrow-mindedness that candidate Joe Biden expressed last year when he argued that a black who voted for Trump was “not a black”? Words that he fortunately regretted thereafter.
This violence gives an idea of the tension that characterizes this presidential campaign four months before the election. We have rarely seen so many names of birds flying from all sides, especially to designate the troublemaker Zemmour. “Extreme right”, “fascist”, “neo-Nazi”, “racist”, “negationist”, “reactionary”, “hard right”, “Pétainist”, “uninhibited right”, “right of the right”, “ultra-right”, a dictionary would not be enough to list this flood of epithets.
Interestingly, most of these insults are taken directly from the old Stalinist anti-fascist blooper, which is now experiencing an astonishing resurgence on the left. This was brilliantly explained in 2014 by political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff in an essay devoted to the National Front (Of the devil in politics, CNRS Éditions). Taguieff concluded that these invectives generally defied any political analysis of the programs. They were only ersatz intended to designate “Evil” and to avoid any debate of ideas.
Because in terms of program, doesn’t Eric Zemmour especially breathe nostalgia for the RPR, the old Gaullist party from the time of Charles Pasqua and Philippe Séguin? Likewise, his proposal to abolish family reunification only takes up the analyzes of former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
In the same vein, the daily The world recently condemned the “strange benevolence” of the elites towards Zemmour. The article put in the same bag intellectuals from such diverse backgrounds as Alain Finkielkraut, Marcel Gauchet, Michel Onfray, Jacques Julliard and Luc Ferry. Their unforgivable fault would be to have recognized, as Ferry wrote, that Zemmour did nothing but say “loud and clear what millions of French people think, like him, namely that the atomization of society, the Islamization of certain neighborhoods, the proliferation of arms and drug trafficking in lawless areas are not worthy of a republican country ”. Those who have read them know that these same intellectuals also have criticisms to address to Zemmour. But the time is no longer in the shade. In the name of an alleged “anti-fascist” fight, everyone is called upon to choose their side!
It is no coincidence that, whatever one thinks of him, Zemmour has so far imposed the main themes of this campaign, from Marine Le Pen to Emmanuel Macron, including the sovereignist Arnaud Montebourg and the green Yannick Jadot. If Zemmour is still far from the second round, his last assembly showed that he was not just a shooting star. However, he will have a lot to do to win against the newcomer Valérie Pécresse, who won the nomination of the Republicans. One thing is certain, to convince this majority of French people who recognize themselves on the right, they will not be able to be satisfied with a catalog of invective. To hope to win, says political scientist Dominique Reynié, it “must restore a right of conviction and firmness”. In other words, understand the Zemmour phenomenon and not be satisfied with boasting, as the left has been doing for months, with the result that it has become marginalized in this campaign.
Throwing epithets, isn’t this what the French elites have done for thirty years to fight the National Front? With the result that we know.