The Suicide of France
The official release of Éric Zemmour's bestseller, with my introduction and translation
I was recently on a book tour with Éric Zemmour to commemorate the release of his wildly successful The Suicide of France into English with Encounter Books. This marks the first of Zemmour’s books to have been translated into English.
Right in time for the fête nationale, you can now purchase the book via Encounter or via Amazon.
To whet your appetite, the good people at The American Mind have also published an excerpt from the book.
During his American tour for the book launch, Zemmour was interviewed by Mayeul Aldebert for Le Figaro, Ben Smith for Semafor, Ian Ward for Politico, and Tunku Varadarajan of the Wall Street Journal for the WSJ’s free expression series (Zemmour has been indicted for his political speech critical of Islam on several occasions, and has been forced to pay costly fines).
Zemmour also appeared on the podcast of American Moment for a long interview with Nick Solheim (the CEO of American Moment):
To discuss the book and the situation in France and the West more broadly, I also appeared on the First Things podcast.
If you need a primer on Zemmour and The Suicide of France, I wrote about the book’s significance a few months ago. You can read the rest at the link below.
Finally, you might ask: how could a figure of the French right countenance to release his book on July 14th, a day that marks the unravelling of the French monarchy?
While many Americans believe that the French national holiday of July 14th commemorates the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789, the date was in fact chosen as the national holiday of France by the Third Republic to serve a different purpose. It commemorates the Fête de la Fédération that took place one year later, in 1790.
That 1790 event was supposed to be a celebration of national unity after the tumult of 1789, wherein the king, the army, and deputies from France’s regions pledged to serve the nation and its law. The Marquis de Lafayette took part, extending the imprimatur of the American Revolution to the French one. Honoring that day is the conservative republican interpretation of the French Revolution. This interpretation strives to distinguish a “good” moment such as this from other, “bad”, moments of the Revolution (the periods of violence of 1789 and of course the Terror). Whether that distinction is ultimately tenable is another matter.