The new hero of the French far-Right formally launched his presidential campaign this week, via an incendiary video depicting two very dif...
The new hero of the French far-Right formally launched his presidential campaign this week, via an incendiary video depicting two very different nations.
One was a bygone Gallic idyll, where people cycled serenely through the streets of Paris, marvelling at such historic landmarks as Notre Dame.
The other was a powder-keg of religious and cultural division; a France now supposedly under siege from unchecked immigration and Islamic fundamentalism.
Deliberately inflammatory though this juxtaposition was, even his detractors had to concede that Eric Zemmour's ten-minute film, which name-checked a litany of (white, French-born) icons, from Joan of Arc to Brigitte Bardot, was a propaganda masterstroke — one that could extend his poll lead over his extreme Right-wing rival Marine Le Pen and pile pressure on the increasingly inept-looking incumbent, Emmanuel Macron.
French far-right media pundit Eric Zemmour and Sarah Knafo, pictured in Paris in April. A few days ago, Ms Knafo - his campaign manager and muse - was revealed to be expecting his baby, although he is married with three grown-up children
Suggesting that he could return France to the glorious days of La Belle Epoque, the former TV current affairs show star added a theatrical touch by hunching gravely over a period-piece microphone propped on his library desk, replicating the scene when General Charles de Gaulle rallied the Resistance against Nazi occupation in June 1940.
His performance will surely have impressed his campaign manager and muse Sarah Knafo, 35 years his junior, who was revealed a few days ago to be expecting his baby, although he is married with three grown-up children.
In 2018, I have learnt, Ms Knafo wrote a 'practical guide' to the deportation of immigrants interned in France.
Yet as she watched the 63-year-old firebrand present himself as a morally upright traditionalist, one beautiful but troubled young Belgian woman felt only disgust.
Writer Aurore Van Opstal, 31, claims that when she briefly met him, two years ago, he subjected her to a sordid sexual ordeal.
Last weekend, when the French magazine Closer revealed that Zemmour, who has been married to a prominent lawyer for almost 40 years, was expecting a baby with 28-year-old Ms Knafo, the scandal was widely dismissed with a Gallic shrug. It was suggested that their affair might enhance the perceived virility of a man who, with his scrawny 5ft 4in frame, receding hairline and careworn features, hardly exudes machismo. (Above, Ms Knafo and Zemmour)
'I watched the film for a couple of minutes, then I had to stop because it made me feel sick,' she told me.
'Zemmour is like all these powerful men: Bill Clinton, JFK, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the disgraced former International Monetary Fund chief who allegedly sexually assaulted a New York hotel chambermaid, hired harems of call-girls and participated in orgies). He believes he can do whatever he wants. That he's untouchable.'
And, as I discovered while investigating Zemmour's surge in popularity, Ms Van Opstal is not the only woman to accuse him of predatory behaviour.
Seven others now allege he either molested or behaved inappropriately towards them.
They include a young press officer who claims to have retained a bombshell text message she allegedly received from Zemmour after she rejected his advances in 2018. 'So, I'll wait until you invite me into your home to rape you!' it apparently says.
As yet, the full details of these disturbing allegations have been published by only one major French news outlet, the respected website Mediapart.
Belgian writer Aurore Van Opstal (above), 31, claims that when she briefly met Zemmour, two years ago, he subjected her to a sordid sexual ordeal
Gaelle Lenfant (pictured) is a municipal councillor in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence. Now in her early 50s, she alleges Zemmour sexually assaulted her at a Socialist Party summer camp in 2004
And however disturbing the claims may be, it must be stressed that they remain unproven. As Zemmour has not been arrested or charged, the truth has not been established by any court.
While his campaign gathers momentum, however, the allegations are creeping into mainstream profiles on him in the influential Paris newspapers — which is potentially damaging to him, since the #MeToo movement is belatedly throwing the spotlight on high-profile Frenchmen.
In the Parisian corridors of power, though, there is a longstanding acceptance — indeed, even an ill-concealed admiration — of libidinous politicians. From Nicolas Sarkozy to Francois Hollande and Francois Mitterrand to Jacques Chirac (who became known as 'Mr Three Minutes, Shower Included'), philandering presidents with many mistresses, and sometimes illegitimate offspring, abound.
So last weekend, when the French magazine Closer revealed that Zemmour, who has been married to a prominent lawyer for almost 40 years, was expecting a baby with 28-year-old Ms Knafo, the scandal was widely dismissed with a Gallic shrug.
It was suggested that their affair might enhance the perceived virility of a man who, with his scrawny 5ft 4in frame, receding hairline and careworn features, hardly exudes machismo.
Although Zemmour and Miss Knafo have filed lawsuits against the magazine for breach of privacy, some people even suspect his aides choreographed a paparazzo photograph of them embracing in the Mediterranean during the summer.
After all, runs the salon gossip in far-Right circles, if the sexual assault allegations are to be believed, isn't Zemmour simply practising the philosophy he espouses in his notoriously chauvinistic bestselling books?
'Man is by nature a sexual predator who uses violence . . . a conqueror,' he asserts in a tome entitled Le Premier Sex. And in The French Suicide, a 527-page diatribe that has sold 500,000 copies, he avers that women 'long to be dominated by men'.
Incidentally, in the same book, published in 2014, Zemmour names various prominent 'enemies' of the French people.
Among those listed are Freddie Mercury (for promoting homosexuality), Dustin Hoffman (for glamorising the 'New Man' in the film Kramer vs. Kramer), J.R. Ewing, from Dallas (for encouraging the French to watch American TV), and Margaret Thatcher (for championing free-market capitalism).
Given such views, not to mention his convictions for inciting racism and his frequent lapses in judgment — last weekend, when a protester at his Marseille rally gave him a one-fingered salute, he responded in kind — it would be easy to dismiss him as a cranky no-hoper in the presidential stakes.
That would be a dangerous underestimation.
For as France reels from crisis to humiliation — losing its important contract to build Australia's submarines and its right to fish freely in British waters; failing to curb cross-Channel migration and simmering discontent in the suburbs; being beaten by Britain in the 'vaccine war' — almost a fifth of voters have faith in his homespun brand of nostalgic nationalism.
Last weekend, when a protester at his Marseille rally gave him a one-fingered salute, Zemmour responded in kind
Moreover, thanks to his ratings-topping current affairs show, 'Z', as his followers call him, had cultivated a receptive audience for his xenophobic, misogynistic, anti-LGBT, anti-woke rhetoric long before throwing his chapeau into the presidential ring. There are shades of Donald Trump here, to whom he is frequently compared.
Ironically, it was Zemmour's enormous appeal to both the blue-collar classes and wealthy Catholics that brought about his meeting with Aurore Van Opstal.
As a feminist writer — her latest book is entitled The Men Who Killed Marilyn (Monroe) — she abhors most of his views.
But her father, a retired supermarket warehouseman, was a huge admirer, the more so because he and Zemmour were born on the same day: August 31, 1958. So, knowing her father would be thrilled to meet him, Ms Van Opstal emailed him and requested a meeting.
Then, as she was working as a political and social affairs journalist, she thought it would be interesting to debate with him.
Surprisingly, he soon replied, suggesting they meet at a café near the Paris offices of Le Figaro, the newspaper for which he wrote a column.
So on March 18, 2019, she and her father took a train from the Belgian district of Chatelineau to the French capital. Ordering coffees, Zemmour beckoned them to a small table and sat next to her, she says. Her father sat opposite.
Soon, she and Zemmour were discussing French existentialist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir — a conversation that went over her father's head.
The new hero of the French far-Right formally launched his presidential campaign this week, via an incendiary video depicting two very different nations. One was a bygone Gallic idyll, where people cycled serenely through the streets of Paris, marvelling at such historic landmarks as Notre Dame. The other was a powder-keg of religious and cultural division; a France now supposedly under siege from unchecked immigration and Islamic fundamentalism. Zemmour adopted a pose that was clearly based on wartime leader Charles De Gaulle
Then, as the mood lightened, she says she felt a hand on her leg. 'He started caressing me along my left thigh, right up to the top of my jeans,' Ms Van Opstal claims. 'And as he did this, he even looked at me and asked, 'May I?'
'I didn't say anything at all, I was in shock. It was right in front of my father, but he couldn't see.'
Ms Van Opstal showed me a photograph she took of Zemmour with her father, and the emails she exchanged with him.
When Zemmour said he must return to the office, he rose from the table and urged her overweight father to go on a diet, adding with a laugh: 'And I'm going to teach your daughter all about feminism.'
She says she later received an email from Zemmour suggesting they should meet again, this time alone. She ignored it.
Ms Van Opstal did not mention her allegations about Zemmour to her father.
However, in April this year, when she saw a similar complaint about Zemmour on social media, she decided to go public with her claims.
The second complainant was Gaelle Lenfant, a municipal councillor in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence. Now in her early 50s, she alleges Zemmour sexually assaulted her at a Socialist Party summer camp in 2004.
She says they first met socially at a dinner party. At a workshop the next day, Zemmour sat in front of her and they chatted amiably.
But as they left the seminar, she claims in a YouTube video, he grabbed her 'by the neck', told her he liked the way her dress fitted and French-kissed her 'by force'.
Presented with this damaging accusation, Zemmour has said he can't recall it. However, the alleged assaults on these two women prompted Mediapart to probe his sexual conduct, whereupon more lurid claims emerged.
Journalists from the news website spoke to an anonymous young press attache who claims that after she requested an informal professional chat in April 2018, she too was directed to his favourite cafe.
Warned beforehand that he was inclined to be 'flirty', she says she wore a long dress and covered her shoulders 'to avoid sending signals', yet his hand wandered onto her thigh. Flustered, she told him to remove it, which he did.
She decided to forget the incident, she says, and over the next two days they exchanged texts about sport (he loves tennis and swimming). But his messages became more sexual and on April 22, at 10.44pm, she says she received the chilling 'rape' message.
'When I read that, I fell ten storeys,' she told Mediapart. 'I played dead. I didn't say anything more.'
Several friends say she told them about the assault at the time. And she claims to have had the text message verified by a bailiff, a legal measure used in France to prove one is telling the truth.
Mediapart has published several other reportedly first-hand accounts of forced kissing, fondling, lewd comments and ogling. All the complainants' profiles are similar: ambitious young media types in thrall to a charismatic celebrity polemicist.
Yesterday, when the Mail offered Zemmour the opportunity to comment on the womens' allegations, his PR failed to respond.
While most of these women appear to have escaped relatively unscathed from the alleged ordeals, not so Ms Van Opstal.
When one of Zemmour's philosopher friends went into print to cast doubt on her story (and cruelly alluded to her emotional fragility), she sank into depression and, damaged already by an abusive childhood, leapt from a 60ft bridge.
Local news bulletins pronounced her dead, but five months later she is slowly rebuilding her life.
'People might say I'm crazy but he's the real crazy one,' she told me. 'Not all his ideas are bad and he's a very cultured man, but he has only one real policy: getting rid of the Muslims. And he's a classic narcissist. He only wants to be president for money and status.'
Considering Zemmour's upbringing, she may be right.
Born to a family of Berber Jews who fled Algeria during its war of independence in the 1950s, he was raised on one of the grim 'sink estates' outside Paris, where immigrant families were dumped. Home was a cramped flat in a five-storey social housing block.
He now subscribes to the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which preposterously holds that Asian and African incomers will eventually 'outbreed' the indigenous white European population and drive it to extinction.
His worldview was also shaped by his parents, who were so determined to 'Frenchify' themselves that they embraced every aspect of Gallic culture, from food to music, and swapped their Arab names for Gallic ones. (Were he to become President Zemmour, he would try to make it illegal for French-born babies to have Muslim names).
Zemmour broke free from les banlieues by excelling at school, though he failed to get into the National School of Administration (ENA) which trains France's leading public servants. He then embarked on a media career.
Along the way he married Mylene Chichportich, now 59, a Tunisian-French Jew who rose from equally unpromising beginnings to become a lawyer.
Lucrative twin careers brought them Caribbean holidays, influential friends and an elegant Paris home where they raised their three children, now aged between 17 and 24. Outwardly, they were the perfect middle-class family — and according to a revealing new biography of Zemmour, Mylene wanted to maintain the status quo.
At the funeral of a far-Right comrade last year, she was overheard berating someone who urged her husband to run for the presidency. He would lose, she fretted, and the family would be without his fat TV salary.
Zemmour ignored her entreaties. For his strings were now being pulled by another woman who shared his political views and was born into a more idealistic generation: his beguiling, ambitious personal assistant, Ms Knafo.
Knafo was just 13 when her father, a businessman also of Berber heritage, introduced her to Zemmour. As a mentor, he helped with school and university work. But as she progressed (winning a place at ENA), their roles began to reverse and she helped to shape his political thinking.
They also share a passion for great figures in French history, such the writer Honore de Balzac and Napoleon, declaring their core philosophy to be 'Bonapartist'.
Knafo said recently: 'At first it was filial, then our relationship became equal.'
When they began sharing a bed is not clear, but it was over a pizza supper at her Left Bank apartment that he announced his intention to run for office. Insiders say he and his wife are now 'estranged'.
Zemmour is highly unlikely to be France's next leader. In the country's presidential contests, far-Right candidates have recently tended to do very well as voters register their discontent with the Establishment, only to fall away in the final run-off, when they plump for a more centrist figure.
However, between now and the two votes next April, we shall doubtless learn more about this disarmingly charismatic zealot.
He will relish being cast as France's version of Trump. But when it comes to his behaviour towards women, there are stories he will no doubt wish to conceal.
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