In his editorial for this Monday, February 14, Paul Sugy, journalist at Le Figaro, returns to the use of the expression “great replacement” by Valérie Pécresse on Sunday during her meeting at the Zenith in Paris.
It’s a transgressive word, and Valérie Pécresse knows it, she calculated it perfectly. It’s a word that alone will earn you an immediate excommunication, pronounced lataessentiae the very minute after it was uttered, on every news channel in the country. Moreover Valérie Pécresse pronounces it with a gesture of defiance, and an assured intonation in the voice which must have made more than one tenor of the party choke in the stands.
So we can always do the exegesis of the passage and try to underline the distance that the LR candidate takes with the concept, since she seems to be responding to Éric Zemmour by saying that neither the great replacement nor the great downgrading are inevitable, the fact remains that using the word as your own without emphasizing immediately after that it is a far-right conspiracy theory is a political marker that is enough to classify you in the eyes of most editorialists as being in outside the scope of admissible opinions. You have to bet that in the coming days, this is the pretext that those on the right who will no longer believe in Valérie Pécresse’s chances of success will choose to justify their rallying to Macron’s candidacy.
The “great replacement” is a concept forged by the writer Renaud Camus, who is basically a Chevènementist, who then slowly swung into the identity camp, and whose work is notably marked by a fierce criticism of multiculturalism and consequences of mass immigration.
He uses the expression “great replacement” in one of his books in 2010, which he does not present as a concept but as a concept, stamped with the seal of evidence: “A people was there, stable , occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or more other peoples take their place. He is replaced, it is no longer him. »
It is indeed Éric Zemmour who introduced the word in the campaign while Marine Le Pen refuses to use it, but before Zemmour, many political figures of the nationalist right had taken it up, from Jean-Marie Le Pen to Robert Ménard via MP Jacques Bompard, and more recently, Jordan Bardella and Éric Ciotti. Moreover, when asked about the use of this word by Ciotti, Pécresse replied in November “I hate this expression, but it refers to a reality experienced in a certain number of neighborhoods where we have ghettoized and practiced urban separatism “.
By using this term, the candidate has made a mistake. On the one hand because Valérie Pécresse gives the impression of being in tow of Éric Zemmour, and endorses the fear that her party is in a state of brain death. Éric Zemmour’s supporters invited him to join the candidate after his meeting…
Secondly, because the “great replacement” is an ambiguous expression, and at the very least when using it, some clarifications must be made. And at the same time, I understand that we want to use it, because for voters it is a word that has simply become synonymous with mass immigration. In any case, it illustrates the very widely shared impression that immigration does not only affect socio-economic living conditions in France, but that it has consequences for the destiny of the country.
Except that with the “great replacement” we do not really know what we are talking about. The word flirts with an ethnicist conception of the people, and can recall racist theories. Then he lets it be understood that mass immigration is basically only the instrument of an intentional project of annihilation of the French people. Moreover Renaud Camus had imagined the word in reference to the humorous sentence of Bertolt Brecht: “wouldn’t it be easier for the government to dissolve the people? »
And this is where it would be necessary to specify what this intentionality is. What is true is that immigration is a desired and organized phenomenon, by political and economic circles, whether to compensate for declining demographics or even to weigh down wages. And what is also true is that this immigration is accompanied by a civilizational renunciation, it is the refusal to defend a republican model of assimilation such as was the case for a long time.
But that, Valérie Pécresse does not say it, and worse still, nothing in her speech allows to think that she will play on these springs which precisely make mass immigration inevitable.
And besides, all that does not allow us to talk about the replacement of people by another. Mass immigration seems to me rather to be an uncontrolled, chaotic phenomenon, which dissociates the people and dissolves them in a magma where the chapels and the communities merge pell-mell, but there is not a new people, it is perhaps even the whole drama: a people is “a set of human beings living in society, forming a cultural community, and having in part a common origin”. Valérie Pécresse, who defends a “new France”, would do better to explain in her speeches how she will culturally bring together the disparate communities that today form the vast French archipelago.