zemmbezz

Béziers, 18 Oct

I have heard it said that the battle of ideas and the political battle are two distinct things. There are those who say that Zemmour mistakes politics for a battle of ideas. I admit that they are correct.

In those people's minds, on one side there is the electoral battle, involving compromises (sometimes including betrayals of principle); and on the other side the intellectual battle, a rarified Parisian battle, in books and TV studios. But think about that: to say that politics isn't a battle of ideas is to say that politics is nothing but a battle for appointments. It disrespects the voters. It regards politics at worst as a straightforward power struggle and at best as a civil service competition.

Above all, it is a failure to comprehend the greatest achievement of the left: even when the left loses elections, its ideas continue to influence the policies of the state. I was reading an article by Jacques Juillard in the Figaro that explained that for the 60 years of the Fifth Republic, we've had 40 years of the right in power and 20 years of the left in power. It's simple, said Juillard, the right has had the political power and the left has had the cultural power. He forgets one small thing: when the left is in power, it applies its ideas; and when the right is in power, it applies the left's ideas, because it is completely indoctrinated by the cultural power of the left.

Because the left has never ceased to fight the battle of ideas. That battle which the right refuses to fight. That battle which the right disdains even when it is in power, I would even say *especially* when it is in power. And it is what is at stake in my speech today. I want to tell you that the intellectual battle is crucial, not only to win elections but when in power.

To fight the cultural battle we must draw on our authors, our shared references, our interpretative mindset in order to propose a destiny for French society in the century to come. And when we come into power, we can finally put our convictions into practice.

It is what voters have been waiting for for half a century. Because the French have understood that the strayings and betrayals of their political representatives come from a lack of profound convictions. In all of the opinion polls, France is more to the right than it's ever been, meanwhile its political "right" is more to the left than it's ever been.

The fault is in a generation of the political class without intellectual roots, which bend like reeds at the first breath from the politically correct media. General cultivation is the school of leadership, as General de Gaulle liked to say. But by acquiescing in being respectable administrators without an intellectual underpinning, politicians are condemned to disappoint their voters and betray their promises.

Politics is doing, as dear Madame Pecresse once told me. What an admission of weakness. Politics reduced as they say to the conduct of responsibilities, without ideas, without a vision of the world, without ideology, is no doubt sufficient when one aims at the job of prime minister Emmanuel Macron. But France is worth more than that.

Without convictions, politicians can no longer convince French voters. And without an ideological backbone they can't, while in power, stand up to the moral blackmail of the left.

The so-called "professional" politicians don't understand a fundamental thing. The battle of ideas isn't limited to a campaign of seduction once every five years. Because the savvy among them understand that the French are a literary people, a political people, they unfurl big ideas during their electoral campaigns only to put them away neatly upon their arrival at the Elyssee.

When we vote them in, we imagine that they're going to set off on a journey. They on the other hand, believe themselves to have reached their destination. We think that their election marks the start of a policy. In reality it marks the crowning of a career.

It's a mistake we mustn't make again. Once in power, a new battle awaits us. Universities, media, schools, culture. Since the post-war years the left has systematically exploited its electoral successes to implant its own people and agendas, and to drive out its rivals. It is time for us to play by the same rules. To stand up for our convictions to get into power, and once in power to promote our own ideas.

The first battle is about the schools. Our schools have collapsed. The extreme left has infiltrated them for fifty years, installing into pupils' minds Marxist software initially and later on an antiracist LGBT left-islamic ideology. Enough. We need to reinstitute the republican meritocracy in our schools against the egalitarian catastrophe of the left. We need to reestablish academic selection so that good students can continue to learn while weaker students can get the guidance they need. We need to fight against the ecological and anti-racist school catechism. We need to restore the French school as a temple of knowledge; and to restore the authority of teachers over students. We need to reestablish strict selection for teachers with more demanding competitions and do away with pedagogical fads with aims other than the transmission of knowledge. We need to reestablish the school as a machine for manufacturing French people, assimilated French people with a perfect mastery of the language and history of France recentered on its chronology. We must enforce the respect for secularism in our schools and erect barriers against the Islamisation of our youth.

In universities we must fight against the anti-colonial and LGBT ideologies imported from the left wing American campus. We must remake French higher education into a path of excellence for professional competence. Therefore the baccalaureat must become the baccalauret again. We must forbid the massacre of our French language by "inclusive" writing.

After school and university, the third pillar is that of culture. We must cease enriching the caste of "artistocrats", and redirect the bulk of public funding towards the protection and appreciation of our historic and religious patrimony.

I have described in my books the manner in which singers and filmmakers and actors indoctrinated a population, how they changed our way of seeing things - the family, the nation, the relation between men and women, and even what is a man or a woman. In my childhood, it was the entire world of art that cooperated to create French people - TV series, films, songs. The cultural service of public television, even run by Communists, made us all proud to be French. What could be said about that of today? Public broadcasting today is a propaganda machine in the service of an ideology that hates France and the French. Those people, paid with your taxes, spit on you permanently. They spit upon the history of France. They spit on French culture, wishing for its extinction. They spit on the French people, wishing also for their extinction. We should in truth abolish the license fee: those people don't deserve your money.

No, the battle of ideas isn't an irrelevant intellectual leisure activity. It is the sine qua non condition that once in power we won't betray our convictions. To ignore that reality is to condemn ourselves to experience disillusion. We must therefore arm ourselves intellectually to execute this beautiful project and resist the nihilist pressure of the left.

What are we armed with? We know that good and evil are consubstantial with man. Every society, every people has patiently put in place traditions, habits, symbols and taboos to keep in check the worst human passions and to sublimate the best human passions. Hope makes revolutionaries of the left, wisdom makes conservatives of the right. We, unlike the left, have the humility to accept the world that our ancestors have bequeathed to us. And choosing to sublimate it, rather than wishing at all costs to transform it, rather than wishing at all costs to destroy it.

The great Englishman, Chesterton, said that the right is more democratic than the left because it counts not only the votes of the living but of the dead. Let us pause for a moment, 1500 years of history is looking at us. We have inherited one of the oldest nations in the world, a nation that has succeeded in attaining the summits of refinement while winning an unequalled number of military victories. For this, France is admired and envied. Being French is a privilege. Let us be proud of it. Let us embrace our greatness in order to put France in the place it deserves in the world. It is our duty and above all it is the best gift we could give to our children and grandchildren. We are the compatriots of Descartes, the compatriots of Chateaubriand, the compatriots of Pascal. We need to stop seeking our crimes everywhere. Let us abandon the resentments of the small against the giants. Put ourselves on the shoulders of those great men who made France and we will go further because of them.

If we pick up the thread of our history, then we can rejoice. That is what politics is for me. Continuing the history of France. The people of France have not said their last word. France has not said its last word.