In recent times, however, these brotherly bonds have been placed under severe strain. For the last year, France and its most-cherished former possession, Algeria, have been locked in a diplomatic cold war. And perhaps the most prominent figure to be caught in the dispute is none other than Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Grand Mosque.

Over the past few days, Hafiz, a native of Algiers who pledges support for the French Republic, has been accused of playing a shady double game. On the one hand, the Left-wing (and pro-Republican) newspaper Libération has called him “Algeria’s secret Ambassador to France” or the “eye of Algiers” in France: in other words a spy. All the while, the Algerians increasingly suspect him of working for the French secret services, while also sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood and other enemies of Algeria’s secular regime. Hafiz’s dilemma, then, is a neat encapsulation of the challenge facing both France and Algeria: how to dovetail two very different realities — grounded not on fraternal affection but in long years of mutual contempt?

In April this year, the French government announced that relations with Algeria are at their worst since 1962, the year Algiers gained its independence from Paris following a bloody and protracted war of liberation. That same month, the French ambassador was recalled from Algiers while 12 Algerian diplomats were expelled from France: after Paris accused them of espionage. The immediate cause of these tit-for-tat expulsions was a French police investigation into the involvement of an Algerian official in the temporary abduction of a TikTok influencer called Amir Boukhors. A vociferous critic of the Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the man known as “Amir DZ” boasts over a million online followers. For its part, the Algerians have accused Boukhors of fraud and what they call “infractions terrorists” — though his supporters argue he’s being targeted for supporting the Algerian version of Hirak, a youth movement that’s flourished in several Arab countries since the Arab Spring. Boukhors had been in France since 2016, and was given asylum status in 2023. During this time, Algeria issued nine international arrest warrants against him, but the French consistently refused to extradite him.

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In truth, though, the spat over Amir DZ is part of a far wider dispute. The current crisis arguably date back to July 30, 2024, when President Emmanuel Macron, in a letter to the King of Morocco Mohammed VI, wrote that “the present and future of the Western Sahara were part of Moroccan sovereignty”, even as he backed Rabat’s 2007 plan to take control of the region. This was partly to reward Morocco’s developing and successful business relationships with France. This was an unexpected and direct affront to the Algerians, who have long supported the pro-independence Sawhari Polisario group, which claims the desert territory as its own. No formal ceasefire in the Western Sahara conflict has ever been announced — the French, then, had jumped the gun, swerving ongoing negotiations over the territory and offending Algiers in the process. Algiers, for its part, then took the offensive and recalled its ambassador from Paris.

Since then, the Algerians have refused to back down, accusing the French, among other things, of “destabilizing” Algeria via the DGSE (its equivalent of MI6). At the same time, France has said Algeria had refused to repatriate citizens suspected of terrorism. For this, France threatened to drastically reduce the number of visas given to Algerians, the largest immigrant population in France. Tensions have been further heightened by Macron’s call for Algeria to free the 71-year-old Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who has been condemned to five years in prison on dubious charges of “undermining the integrity” of the nation.

In a further provocation, the 36-year-old French football journalist Christophe Gleizes, a specialist in African football, was arrested in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabyle region of Algeria, and has recently been given a seven-year sentence for “supporting terrorism”. His “crime” was interviewing a local football manager who was also known to be associated with the pro-Berber MAK (the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie), which the Algerian government proscribed as a terrorist organization in 2021. Despite the intervention of the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and the pro-Muslim Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Algerians have so far refused to free the unfortunate Gleizes.

For many observers on both sides of the Mediterranean, there is a wearying familiarity about the current conflict. Journalists in the Algerian media have necessarily been unable to voice their criticisms of their government publicly. El Watan, the distinguished French language newspaper in Algiers, has been strikingly neutral on the issue, fearful that funding cuts from the government will finally drive it into the ground. Online, however, there is a consensus among Algerian dissidents, at home and in France, that this overseas bickering is merely a distraction from Algeria’s deep domestic crisis.

Worse still, Algeria looks like it is being left behind by its Moroccan rival. At roots, the country’s woes are economic: which is why the government faces such fierce opposition from Hirak and other dissidents, who can plainly see from France and elsewhere that for all its beautiful beaches and historical wonders, Algeria remains a poor and isolated state stuck in last century’s anti-colonial mindset.

No wonder, then, that the philosopher André Comté-Sponville, writing recently in the pages of the business magazine Challenges, argued it was easier for the Algerians to “surf the wave of anti-French resentment than to modernize the country”. Comté-Sponville also pointed out that the French had largely moved on from their war with Algeria, and that the legacy of the pieds-noirs (French settlers forced to leave Algeria in 1962) and the harkis (Algerians who fought for the French and either settled in France or were killed in vast numbers back home) were now part of history.

But this is apparently not the case for the Algerians who, argues Comté-Sponville, have been caught up in a post-colonial fantasy of “hysterical” revenge against their old enemy. Citing Freud, the philosopher describes the Algerians as trapped in their own neurosis, refusing to see reality.

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Certainly, it is true that the complicated love-hate relationship between France and Algeria has as much to do with psychoanalysis as with politics. To an extent, this has its tangled roots in the poisoned soil of Franco-Algerian history. Soon after the French occupied Algeria, they turned the country into a département of France. This had the effect of immediately disenfranchising the Muslim majority population: which did not qualify for French citizenship, or otherwise couldn’t reconcile their faith with the demands of a secular state (something that’s still true in contemporary France). The result was a deeply divided society whose tensions defined the cruel and bloody tactics used by both sides during the War of Independence.

This has remained true since 1962. Most significantly, however, neither the Algerian government nor France has ever admitted their murky complicity during the so-called “black decade”, between roughly 1992 and 2002, when the Algerian authorities fought an insurgency of well-armed and well-organized Islamists. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people died during this period, though in many of the massacres it wasn’t always clear who was doing the killing: Algerian security forces and the French DGSE were both alleged to have been involved in secret operations.

While the eyes of the world have lately been on the Middle East, meanwhile, France and Algeria have found themselves once again in a Mexican stand-off, where further aggression on either side is liable to tilt dangerously. In geopolitical terms, the strategic stakes for France could not be higher, as the country has withdrawn from Burkina Faso and Mali and needs to keep Algeria onside to strengthen its hand in the Maghreb. There is a wider European dimension here too: the Maghreb is a kind of international buffer against migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of the instability and chaos of the Sahel region.

In the meantime, few French presidents have ever done as much as Macron to curry favor with the Arab world. It was no surprise, therefore, that the Elysée Palace pledged at the end of July that France would join Spain, Ireland and Norway — and now possibly the UK — in recognizing a Palestinian state. In the meantime, France has begun encouraging other European and Middle Eastern states to recognize Palestine too, working tentatively with Saudi Arabia on a two-state solution to the deadly stalemate in Gaza.

Macron’s deference to the Arab world is unsurprising: he wants to leave a legacy as a world statesman and peacemaker, as well as placate his own restive Muslim population — the largest in Europe. It is also in line with one of France’s oldest objectives in foreign policy: to be “une puissance musulmane” (“a power in the Muslim world”). This is an ambition which dates back to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798, and includes the occupation and division of Syria and Lebanon, protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and the annexation of Algeria. But as France tries once again to make its mark in the Middle East, it is Algeria, once France’s most prized jewel, which is proving to be the sharpest thorn in the French diplomatic side.

All the while, France’s economic presence in Algeria, long dependent on a shared history, is now been rivaled by China and even Italy — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warmly praised President Tebboune on an official visit to Rome and said that relations between Algiers and Rome were at an all-time high. At the same time, Algeria has been building links with Russia and Turkey, which have also been maneuvering aggressively against the French. They’re especially keen to take an interest in Algeria’s oil economy, which has flourished in the wake of the Ukraine war.

For its part, Algeria needs to reassert itself as the leader in the region after decades of retrenchment, which has seen it be overtaken by Morocco as the West’s most favored client. As it is, Algerian paranoia towards the West, and France in particular, has only hardened with a sense that the country is being surrounded by enemies. For the time being, then, there is no easy way out of the impasse, even if the Grand Mosque remains as charming and alluring as ever.

And if what Frantz Fanon called the “red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” of decolonization are as vicious as ever in politics and the banlieue, France’s bookshelves aren’t being spared either. One of the most vivid examples of recent times is A Counter-History of French Colonization, a fusillade in paperback. Written by Driss Ghali, a novelist and essayist, and published in English late last year, it promises to provide “an antidote to the poison distilled in bad faith” by “apostles” of postcolonial thought, those who’ve distilled the complexities of French colonialism into a game of heroes and villains.

In a vivid riposte to these activists, Ghali says he can offer a fresh and “dispassionate” view of this still-urgent moment of history, arguing that it’s time to move on from 19 March and everything it stands for. It’s a position increasingly echoed across France and Algeria, a shift with potentially revolutionary consequences for the politics of both countries. All the same, we shouldn’t necessarily expect Paris and Algiers to bury the hatchet just yet, especially given the incentives Arab elites have to perpetuate hate — and the underlying tensions that endure right across France itself.

Before you even get to Ghali’s argument, A Counter-History first deploys identity. A Moroccan and a Muslim, the author is a product of French colonial history, one whose personal story can be traced to both flanks of the Mediterranean. His great-grandfather fought against the French in the Twenties, while his grandfather fought for them during the Second World War. As such, Ghali is able to report directly from the front lines of the conflicts that currently plague France, to say nothing of its erstwhile colonial holdings in North Africa.

Ghali’s claims are as striking as his background. The French Republic, he says, has been slowly fractured, corroded in gradients by social change which threatens its very existence. The most significant of these changes has been the growth of its banlieues into something like mini-cities, with their own codes, cultures and languages. They are usually at odds with mainstream France and the Republic, which in the form of the police is seen as an intrusive, oppressive presence (sometimes the word “colonialist” is used in provocation).

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For all the loose language bandied about in the past few years, there is as yet no civil war in France, though Ghali does not rule it out. But there is, he says, a permanent stand-off between those who believe in France as an ideal of civilization, and those who have no interest in such abstractions, and even violently oppose them. This, Ghali argues, is probably the greatest division in contemporary French life.

He’s far from alone. The spectre of civil war may feel hyperbolic to Anglophone readers, but in recent years it has been a staple of French cultural discourse, appearing as the major theme in the novels of bestselling authors like Michel Houellebecq and Laurent Obertone. Another good example is Athena, a popular Netflix drama that depicts a battle between the French police and the eponymous fictional banlieue. Throughout the film, the French media persistently report on what’s happening as “civil war”.

The theme of civil war is a notion that’s also been picked up by politicians, notably Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, with similar language increasingly common across the Right. In April 2021, for instance, Valeurs Actuelles published an open letter from military officers, addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron. In the so-called lettre des généraux, 20 retired generals, together with 1,000 French soldiers, condemned what they saw as an attack on French values, emanating from Islamism and “the hordes from the banlieues” — who for their part were dismissed as gangsters, drug dealers or terrorists.

At the heart of these tensions is France’s unsolved colonial legacy, especially in North Africa. Beyond Napoleon’s abortive adventure in Egypt, things really started in 1830, when King Charles X invaded Algeria. That was followed by the establishment of French protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco.

Yet beyond the arrival of Europeans on the Mediterranean’s southern shores, it’s really their departure that continues to haunt France every 19 March. As the Algerian fight for freedom grew hot, from 1954, France deployed torture and mass killings as weapons of war, and to protect the million or so whites who’d made the country home. But the violence wasn’t all one way. On the Arab side, insurgency, terrorism and assassination were legitimized as tools against the European oppressor. One obvious case study here is Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which presents an unvarnished account of Algerian nationalist attacks on innocent civilians during the war of independence.

Notwithstanding the cliches of French historians, then, Ghali suggests that France wasn’t the only agent of history during its messy escape from empire. More than that, he argues that the Maghreb’s failures since decolonization are largely its own fault. The end of empire offered an opportunity for these newly independent states to create their own futures on the model of what Ghali calls “the civilized world” — but which have instead wallowed in corruption, religious fanaticism, inequality and tribalism. These problems have been particularly acute in Algeria, where the stale and intransigent government helped spark civil war in the Nineties. Fought against Islamist extremists, about 200,000 people died. Tunisia and Morocco, the other French possessions in North Africa, were spared such horrors, but they too have chafed under cruel and authoritarian rulers.

Not, of course, that France is blameless here. Quite aside from the brutality of colonial rule — and though Algerian independence was formally conceded decades ago — neo-colonial exploitation persisted right across the region. Consider the clientelism of the sort seen in Morocco, or else the kind of financial, military and political influence found under the umbrella of “Françafrique” and which has ravaged countries from Senegal to Mali. As Ghali notes, that’s before you factor in the Hexagon’s enduring cultural influence, whether in television or fashion, or getting a job at a French firm.

Yet whatever Africa’s own discontents, Ghali sees the worst consequences of France’s colonial legacy in the way North Africans now make up the bulk of the immigrant population of France. Roughly 30% of the country’s immigrants hail from North Africa, while the country has over five million Muslims overall, the largest such community in Europe.

In one of his most controversial claims, Ghali is critical of what he calls reverse colonialism — which has seen millions leave the former French colonies for metropolitan France. This, he says, is a betrayal of their home nations, though he does concede that fleeing poverty and war are greater motivations than idealistic nation-building. Most importantly, this process has created an imbalance between France and its former territories, one still being played out at home and abroad. Bleakly, Ghali describes a situation where millions of euros return to the former colonies from immigrant economic activity in France, who in return offer criminality and Islamist terrorism.

Is this fair? Certainly, it ignores much of the cultural richness which has emerged from the postcolonial relations between France and the Maghreb. Yet it’s a perception that’s not only grown popular on the far-Right of French politics, but has also increasingly entered the mainstream, especially given the ever-present terrorist threat. In 2023, after all, even President Macron himself said that France had “an immigration problem” while also pushing through a law distinguishing more sharply between French citizens and migrants.

None of this is inevitable: Ghali himself is testament to the ways Arabs can straddle both shores of colonial divide. But for that to happen, both sides need honesty, and to finally face up to their shared history, not least by owning up to historical atrocities. It’s a process that Macron has sought to start, publicly acknowledging French errors and crimes. Among other things, that’s involved acknowledging responsibility for the “disappearance” of the pro-Algerian activist Maurice Audin in 1957.

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So far, though, any “reconciliation” has been strikingly one-sided, even if Ghali isn’t totally alone in pushing for change in the literary space. In the pages of Marianne, for instance, the historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet, a heavyweight voice on the center-Right, declared that Ghali’s book was a must-read for Macron and any other European politician serious about understanding the twin processes of decolonization and mass immigration. For Gauchet, Ghali is not only courageous, but also accurate in his assessment of the French imperial experience — as a tragedy which has brought misery both to the colonizers and the colonized.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Arab intellectuals have had less time for such ideas, even accusing Ghali of echoing the far-Right rhetoric of Éric Zemmour. Yet here, too, change is coming. Progressive journals like Tel Quel in Morocco have, for instance, started testing long-standing taboos around the French colonial experience, questioning the collusion of powerful elites who have a vested interest in sustaining anti-French feeling to maintain their own positions. After many years of working in universities across the Maghreb, I was recently heartened at an academic conference in Morocco to hear similarly dissident views, especially surprising coming from the postcolonial academic establishment.

Just as significant, there has been a generational shift here too. A younger generation of North Africans no longer accept everything their elders tell them about the imperial past. A true postcolonial culture, they instead argue, must be forward looking: working out new geopolitical strategies for North Africa, beyond the old tensions brought up every 19 March. This thinking has even gained some momentum in semi-official circles, with Moroccan media quick to condemn Algeria’s latest arguments with France as outdated and pointless. Yet with the banlieues as unhappy as ever — Paris alone saw around 100 gangland clashes in its suburbs last year — we shouldn’t imagine that these decade-long struggles can be solved by writers alone.

The massacre of Algerian demonstrators by police in central Paris on 17 October 1961, and its decades-long cover-up, burns all those who touch it. This October, on its 60th anniversary, President Macron’s guarded avowal that the killings represented a “crime” unleashed the wrath of Marine Le Pen and other nationalists. Since then, it is the Right-wing maverick Éric Zemmour, who comes from an Algerian Jewish family, who has set the tone for next spring’s presidential election — even if his candidacy fails, as it will.

Millions of French people, like Zemmour, descend directly or have close links to the pieds-noirs: European Algerians who resettled in France after the brutal independence war led to French withdrawal in 1962. Millions more belong to Arab and Berber families with Algerian roots. The intimacy and intensity of this almost-domestic quarrel explains much about the country’s recent politics.

In 1954, when anti-colonial revolutionaries of the FLN began hostilities, Algeria became an early example of those causes that, in the age of mass media, polarise opinion not just in their own backyard, but among rival tribes of impassioned onlookers. As French paratroopers routinely turned whips and blowtorches on suspects plucked from the Casbah of Algiers, as settler militias murdered their Muslim neighbours, and as FLN guerrillas executed “traitors” by the score and planted bombs in cafés packed with European families, the now-familiar rhetoric of “With-us-or-against-us” and “Whose side are you on?” carved its acid path through a worldwide language of partisanship and recrimination. There it remains, its corrosive power massively enhanced by social media, which has glamorised the fury of the bystander — the vicarious passion that drives so many battles for the moral-political high ground that spill over their original borders.

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For that reason, the tormented but always-lucid responses of Albert Camus to the agonies of his native land have lost none of their vigour and value. Famously, Camus chose not to choose between the commitments of his Arab and his European friends. He detested racial and social inequality, the “institutional” abuses of colonialism (his adjective), and the laws that enforced them. He demanded democracy and self-determination for all Algerians in a federation of free peoples. But he opposed formal rupture with France, and stoutly defended the rights of European Algerians to flourish in the only homeland they had ever known. For Camus, all Algeria’s peoples “must live together where history has placed them, at a crossroads of commerce and civilisations”.

When his refusal to share the “bitterness and hatred” of either settlers or revolutionaries isolated him, he fell silent on the subject closest to his heart and mind for well over two years. “I have passionately loved this country, in which I was born and from which I have taken everything I am,” he said in his final public statement in Algiers in 1956, “and among my friends who live here I have never distinguished by race”.

Camus was the impoverished Algiers-born child of a father who (in his infancy) died on the Western Front, and a deaf, illiterate mother who cleaned houses. He could never conceive of himself and his working-class peers as part of an oppressive colonial elite. He could, and from an early age did, not only recognise but fight against the racially-coded injustices of French rule. Indeed, his outspoken 1939 reports on famine and hardship in the Kabylia region for the Alger républicain newspaper got him blacklisted by the colonial authorities, and prompted his move to France.

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However, his great works of fiction in the 1940s — first L’Étranger and then La Peste — quickly attracted not just acclaim but doubtful scrutiny. Critical readers argued that they masked or dodged the realities of the Algeria he so loved: in the unspeaking anonymity of the “Arab” gratuitously killed by Meursault in L’Étranger; or in the sidestep into allegory undertaken when Camus depicts pestilence raging in Oran in La Peste. Later critics, from Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edward Said to the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud — who in 2013 brilliantly rewrote L’Étranger from the perspective of the victim’s family in his novel The Meursault Investigation — have found large, non-European elements of Camus’s native land “of happiness, energy, and creativity” missing in the stories that he told about it.

In his essays, public statements and journalism, however, Camus lays bare the internal divisions that tore his pied-noir soul in two. A new Penguin Modern Classics collection of speeches and lectures, Speaking Out, collects interventions on the burning topics of his day: from post-Second World War cultural despair, to the them-and-us blind loyalties of the emergent Cold War; from the obscenity of state violence against workers’ uprisings in the Communist countries of eastern Europe, to the growing respectability — which disgusted Camus, whose mother had Spanish origins — of Franco’s still-vicious dictatorship in Spain.

It also contains his remarkable “Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria”, delivered in Algiers in January 1956. When it came to the future of his birthplace, Camus did not so much sit on the fence as dance naked in no-man’s-land. Exposed to raking fire from every side, he spoke with the almost-naive courage that had carried him through the war as a Resistance activist and editor of the underground journal, Combat.

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His “Appeal for a Civilian Truce” is the classic testimony of an embattled pluralist who will resist political and ethnic tribalism to his last breath. Camus looks on aghast at the “fratricidal struggle” that has locked “the two peoples I love” — European and Arab Algerians — “in mortal combat”. For him, “The endless dispute over who committed the first wrong becomes meaningless”. He appeals beyond militants and partisans to a wider “community of hope” that embraces diversity. Camus re-states his faith “in differences, not uniformity, because differences are the roots without which the tree of liberty withers and the sap of creation and civilisation dries up.”

Camus well knew how deeply rancour and suspicion suffused both camps. He asked, for the moment, not for any cessation of hostilities; merely a promise by combatants not to target civilians with terror or reprisals, because “no cause justifies the deaths of innocent people”. As he spoke, in the hall of the Arab-owned Cercle du Progrès in Algiers, diehard settlers heckled him. Outside, a large crowd of angry demonstrators brandished placards demanding “Death to Camus”. At this stage, though, Camus still enjoyed protection from the FLN. One of their more conciliatory leaders — his old friend Ferhat Abbas — later joined him on the platform.

But the FLN did not listen; neither did the militant settlers; still less the French army. The round of atrocity and counter-atrocity — what Camus elsewhere calls “the bloody marriage of terror and repression” — rose into a spiral of ever-intensifying savagery. Even independence in 1962 failed to stem it: thousands of harkis, Algerians who had fought with the French, were slaughtered, along with their families, after the colonial administration packed its bags.

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Distraught and despairing, Camus said and wrote nothing on Algeria between early 1956 and mid-1958, when he collected his articles and speeches into a book. Behind the scenes, he interceded with French ministers to show leniency to Algerian fighters sentenced to the guillotine. By 1958, however, no one in a with-us-or-against-us climate of mutual detestation wanted to hear from the sad guy in the middle of the road. The publication flopped; and it took until 2013 for these Algerian Chronicles to appear in Arthur Goldhammer’s first-rate English translation. It remains an exemplary, even inspiring, act of conscience and of witness.

Camus’s Algerian dilemmas had nothing to do with “centrism”, with compromise or with even-handed detachment. He knew, he loved, and he suffered with, both irreconcilable sides. Riven to the core of his being by divided allegiances, Camus the Algerian appears, in hindsight, to be as much of a tragic figure as any of the existential heroes he created in works such as The Fall or The Just. Posterity, and reputation, has sometimes blunted the force of the wrenching ambivalence that he felt about his homeland and its fate. Read his own words and this conflicted integrity comes into dazzling focus.

In 1957 — as Algerian Chronicles though not Speaking Out explains – Camus ran into trouble after he had travelled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. At a press conference the next day, an FLN journalist attacked his stance. Camus responded by reaffirming his belief in “a just Algeria in which both populations must live in peace and equality”. But he also condemned “blind terrorism” in Algiers. “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers,” he said. “My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother”.

Le Monde, however, reported a twisted paraphrase of what he had said: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” Worse, a grossly distorted version of his meaning passed into political folklore when later writers pretended Camus had stated: “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.” Yet the thrust of his remark was to show that indiscriminate violence against civilians never counts as “justice”. Divided souls, even one as eloquent as Camus, may struggle to get their message of balance, nuance and plurality across. Now, in another age of fervent faith and monocular vision, we need to hear it again.

Any professional Instagrammer would shudder at the amateurish unsophistication of the video. But that is the point: Zemmour, 63, a bestselling author fired by his publishers this summer and a TV polemicist regularly sued for hate speech by advocacy groups (so far he’s won more often than he’s lost), reaches the parts of the electorate others don’t.

Although he still hasn’t formally declared his candidacy, his ramped-up media presence in recent months finally prompted polling institutes to include him in their first round voting intentions surveys. In three weeks, Zemmour jumped from 6% to 15%, ahead of Hard Left three-time candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (9%), Green primary winner Yannick Jadot (9%) and Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who in the same period dropped from 7% to 5%.

But Le Z’s chief victims are all on the Right. He has all but killed off Marine Le Pen, who has dropped from 28% this summer to 17%. The two main Centre-Right candidates, Paris Region president Valérie Pécresse and Xavier Bertrand, both former Sarkozy Cabinet members, are lagging at 12% and 14% respectively, with Michel Barnier, the former Ogre of Brexit unexpectedly turned sovereignty champion, battling them for the Républicain nomination at 11%.

All are uninspiring: le Pen has been left seeming incompetent since her defeat by Macron in 2017; Pécresse and Bertrand are spouting the same things France has heard a hundred times before; and Barnier is baffling because the French, unlike the British, mostly don’t know who he is.

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Zemmour, much like other disruptive populist figures, appeals to those voters (and many no-longer voters) who had despaired of ever finding a candidate expressing their concerns. He speaks to their fears: the loss of French identity and rising insecurity caused, he believes, by unchecked immigration. His books, which have sold in the hundreds of thousands, compare a rose-tinted past Republic, where teachers were respected, fathers held solid jobs, families stayed together and classical culture wasn’t derided as pale and stale.

So far, so Trump — with a touch of Tucker Carlson. A Le Figaro journalist, Zemmour came to national pre-eminence when he was given his own daily debating show two years ago by CNEWS, a rolling news TV cable station which was re-inventing itself as the French Fox News. CNEWS’s ratings shot up, overtaking its CNN-like rival BFMTV. Le Z’s style, however, couldn’t be further from Trump’s. “Unlike my rivals, I write all my own books,” he jokes. He is highly cultured, even if one might argue that his erudition is preserved in aspic: he quotes 18^th-century philosophers and 19^th-century historians, with nary a concession to popular topics. (He does like football and the Rolling Stones.)

This fits French particularism: Les Déplorables here rarely object to cultural literacy, as long as they don’t feel it’s used to belittle them, Énarque-style. (Emmanuel Macron specialises in such putdowns.)

“Je comprends rien à ce qu’il raconte, mais il parle drôlement bien,” is a typical reaction to a Jacques Bainville- and Charles Maurras-quoting tirade by Le Z. His style and accent are demotic, his sentences are clear and his opinions trenchant. In a country where columnists, even in tabloids, prefer weighty circumlocutions to punchlines, this singles Zemmour out.

In common with Donald Trump, he relishes dropping live grenades in any debate. His first polemical essay (he’d already written a number of political biographies, including one of Jacques Chirac), published in 2006, was called Le Premier Sexe, in clear reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex. It bemoaned the “feminisation” of values, and whenever talking about it Zemmour never shied from adding fuel to the fire. “How did women enter the National Assembly and the Senate? Through parity laws that forced parties to select them. And I need not tell you how they were picked… They put in friends, wives, mistresses, etc.”

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He believes in the “Great Replacement” theory: he described in his Le Figaro column those areas in Paris where “one feels best, physically, the disappearance of the French population […] while, coming from the suburbs, at the end of a long journey from the depths of Africa, an Arab-Muslim people has replaced the former inhabitants.” He has continually hammered home his idea that foreign immigrants to France should give at least one “traditional” French first name to their children, drawn from the saints’ calendar, helping them to assimilate better into French society. “Your parents should have called you Corinne,” he told the television personality Hapsatou Sy, born near Paris of Senegalese parents.

In this, the Paris-born Éric Justin Léon Zemmour, son of French-Algerian Jews who had to leave Algeria in the Fifties during the independence war, harks back to the old French Républicain model of “assimilation” rather than of “integration”. “I’m a Frenchman of Berber origin,” he says. His peculiar brand of nostalgia dovetails with the long-standing history of France as a country of immigration, that, until recently, seamlessly crafted Frenchmen and women from anyone who wanted to become French.

This approach proved successful for centuries. So much so that the character who most defines, fondly, the French foibles, Astérix the Gaul, was created by the sons of immigrants: René Goscinny, a Polish-Argentinian Jew, and Albert Uderzo, an Italian builder’s son. (Another Italian builder’s son, François Cavanna, founded Charlie Hebdo.) This resonates with Zemmour’s audiences, who smart from being hectored by New York Times journalists shrieking that France is a country riven by structural racism.

Zemmour has used his personal story as a shield while positing particularly contentious theories, such as his idea that Marshall Pétain, the President of the puppet Vichy régime under German Occupation, “made a pact with the Devil, allowing the Nazis to deport foreign Jews in France in order to save French Jews”. This is a known far-Right trope in a country that carries the complicated trauma of the Collaboration.

It’s hard not to see here the influence of the old Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father and founder of the National Front, now 93, whom Zemmour used to regularly visit in his Château de Montretout lair just outside Paris for long, lively discussions. Le Pen, who was fired from his own party by his daughter, himself joined the Resistance for a few weeks in 1944, aged 18. But he’s specialised in obsessive remarks about the Holocaust ever since. He is more of a provocateur than a dyed in the wool anti-Semite (which is not the case of a fringe he emboldened within his party) and probably helped cultivate Zemmour’s own taste for scandalous statements.

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By John Lichfield

Le Pen was never forgiven in France for his provocations; hence his own daughter’s symbolic parricide. But what is interesting about Zemmour is that, like Donald Trump, his mounting crowd of partisans discount his verbal excesses as just “Le Z being le Z”. In a country where, for centuries, strong opinions have had to be coated in supercilious obfuscation (there’s a reason why, for decades before the advent of the Internet, the French press was losing money), Zemmour is largely seen as an unscary shock jock, not a threatening fascist — except among the chattering classes, whom he enrages. This, of course, serves him.

What he has achieved, though, is in putting the three-I concerns of his potential voters — immigration, identity and insecurity — at the centre of the political discourse. Even a character as cautious and grey as Michel Barnier, in an effort to gain traction for the Centre-Right nomination, has now demanded a five-year moratorium on immigration to France, and attacked ECJ rulings as harmful to French sovereignty.

“The debate on immigration only exists in the [Paris] media now, no longer in public opinion,” says the shrewd social geographer Christophe Guilluy, the man who theorised “La France Périphérique”, the French version of David Goodhart’s Somewheres vs. Anywheres. This is an area where the rest of the political class, especially on the Right, usually runs scared. Their every new statement now pushes for “chosen immigration”, more means for the police, stricter criminal sentencing. Yet as former members of previous governments, however, none of the Républicain candidates seems credible on the subject.

Zemmour seems keen. He has hired a campaign team and rented a 4,000 sq ft campaign HQ less than a kilometre from the Élysée, funded by a sympathiser financier, Charles Gave. But he’s no professional politician. This an obvious asset now, that could turn into a flaw in the heat of a long campaign. If current trends hold, though, and it’s a big “if”; Zemmour might well get to the second round next year.

While all polls give a clear victory to Emmanuel Macron in the run-off today, against any candidate, the President’s reasonably high ratings of 40% last week have now slid to 34%. He is also facing a winter of discontent, with energy costs skyrocketing. His prime minister Jean Castex has just announced that the hikes would be deferred until next May, which utterly coincidentally happens to be after the April election. Added to which, 2017’s fresh young man in a hurry has now become the incumbent in a fractious country.

This is all to the disruptor’s favour. Zemmour has suddenly made France’s tired political race risky again. What if Macron didn’t even manage to clear the bar of the first round?

“How could we not feel, as in the darkest times in our history, a deep solidarity with the people of the United States, to whom we are so close, and to whom we owe our freedom?” wrote Jean-Marie Colombani, possibly the then-most powerful opinion-maker in France, in that special grandiloquent style the French adopt to signal momentous thought. In the next paragraph, he warned the West not to fall for the “monstrous hypocrisy” of “finding excuses for the perpetrators of this murderous madness, crediting them with the ‘good intentions’… to avenge the wretched of the world against their supposed sole oppressor, America… They do not want a better, fairer world. They simply want to wipe ours off the map.”

Strong words after the shock of 9/11. The last paragraph of this 1250-word tirade did warn, accurately as it turned out, against escalation — “[the terrorists’] attitude is obviously suicidal. By going to the extremes, they want to force Muslim opinions to ‘choose sides’ against ‘the great Satan’ [and] to spread an unprecedented crisis throughout the Arab world. They want to attract the whirlwind. Our leaders must see the danger of causing the nations these warmongers covet to buy into this suicidal logic.”

Le Monde duly supported the French government’s October 2001 decision to join both the US-led military coalition for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, as well as the NATO international security task force. This, despite France not being bound by NATO’s charter (having been spectacularly pulled out of the Organisation by Charles de Gaulle in 1966), was met by popular support that never rose to jingoism. Both Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist president, and Lionel Jospin, the Socialist PM he’d been forced to take on when his party lost the surprise 1997 General Election, were for once in agreement. France sent 4,000 crack troops. By 2010, the French were the fourth largest contributor to the war in Afghanistan (after the US, UK and Italy).

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Benard-Henri Levy

Not only did France carry her weight during the War on Terror; her expertise on Arab and Islamic terrorism was invaluable, acknowledged by both the Americans and the British. French investigative magistrates draw on over half a century’s experience with every variety of bloody attacks: during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s-1960s; Left-wing Palestinian in the 1970s; Iranian in the 1980s; Algerian again in the 1990s as France became the hinterland of the 1992-2000 civil war in her former colony. When 9/11 came, only the scope of it was different from what the juges d’instruction had been working on for decades.

The French decision to leave Afghanistan in 2012, was met with relative public indifference, which is a more normal response The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specific measurements, states (Art. 15) that the President of the Republic is “the head of the armed forces, decides on the use of military force and to this end has the responsibility and the power to engage nuclear forces if necessary”. Essentially, the otherwise-ornery French have left successive presidents to it. Even before Jacques Chirac put an end to conscription in 2002, there were next to no protests when the French military, including conscripts, were deployed in Lebanon, Chad, Kosovo or Bosnia.

The French see their military (and nuclear capacity) as part of a cherished mental dreamland: it’s the last acceptable refuge of the Grandeur invoked from Louis XIV to Le Général. This Grandeur sublimates France from mid-size power to major player, with a seat at the Security Council, an impressive armaments industry for a country of 67 million people, a capacity of foreign deployment roughly similar to the UK’s (currently 17,000 troops from the North Sea to the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, Syria and the Baltics), and the respect of her soldierly peers. From the 19th century, the French Army, whose officers signally refused to back populist leaders like Général Boulanger, has been known as La Grande Muette (The Great Mute): this held during the Algerian Independence war when two generals-led military coups ended in ignominious failure. It’s the civilians, not the military, who, from Danton to the Yellow vests, try to overturn the Republic.

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By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Predictably, perhaps, the post World Trade Center transatlantic love affair soured fast. Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s grand-standing Foreign Secretary (an obsessive collector of Napoleoniana, he has taken on some of the traits of his hero), came to speak to the UN General Assembly one year after the attacks, on 12 September 2002, and again on 14 February 2003, to urge jaw-jaw and not war. He brushed off any illusion that, after Afghanistan, France would also join the coalition to unseat Saddam Hussein from his quarter century iron rule over Iraq. The French sat out the Iraqi war, earning themselves a variety of soubriquets, the nicest of which, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, had been stolen from The Simpsons.

As it turned out, France was right, but for an unholy combination of cleverness and wrong-headedness. The French, who over the years had furnished Saddam with some $5.1 billion’s worth of weapons for his eight-year-war against Iran, not including the making of his fledgling nuclear capacity, also knew that Germany had built the plants that enabled Iraq to manufacture the Sarin and Tabun gas that killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja. In other words, if anyone knew that Saddam Hussein was in the process of obtaining WMD, they sat in government offices in Paris — none more so than Jacques Chirac, who’d started cultivating the Baath ruler of Iraq since 1974. The French pushback against “Iraqi Freedom”, which would turn out to be an inspired decision, and keep us out of that mess, was more motivated by deep cynicism than by the romantic illusion that deposing a brutal Middle-Eastern dictator would start “a virtuous circle of democracy” in the area. (Prof. Bernard Lewis’s phrase.)

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By John Lichfield

Like every French president and Foreign secretary since de Gaulle, Chirac and Villepin prided themselves in understanding what they saw as the realities of the Middle East. The Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, has long pushed la politique arabe de la France. This is a mix of heady Gallic Orientalism, cold calculations (all those Mirage and Super-Étendard planes, Exocet missiles, helicopters, air-to-surface guided missiles, and more), power assessment, and entrenched underlying anti-Americanism (which often lumps the British in the Anglo-Saxon package).

It’s also arguable that the practice of French politics (the alliances, the reversals, the treasons, the conviction that idealism is for mugs) is much closer to Near East traditions than to the Jeffersonian (or Burkean) approach. It remains that French scepticism, in this instance, was inspired.

The glorious picture of Alaa Salah, the 22-year-old captured against the evening skyline in long white robes and gold jewellery, woke the world to seismic events taking place in this huge north African nation. An insurgency, that began with street protests over rising bread prices four months ago in the city of Atbara, has led to the sudden deposing of Sudan’s strongman leader, Omar al-Bashir, after 30 years in power.

The generals stepped in to remove him, the only world leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Even some soldiers joined the protests. A military council will now remain in control for two years before elections supposedly take place.

The extraordinary sight of exuberant Sudanese crowds waving flags and chanting for freedom, peace and justice comes just days after mass demonstrations led to the departure of another long-serving and elderly north African autocrat: Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria.

Rarely seen in recent years, confined to a wheelchair since a stroke, 82-year-old Bouteflika had nonetheless sought to cling to office by standing in a fifth election. But, in the face of rising unrest, the army that gave him power in 1999, after brutal civil war, finally dumped him. Bouteflika was replaced by an elderly ally as caretaker president and pledges of free elections were made.

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Unsurprisingly, these, too, failed to quell demands for more significant changes to end cronyism and corruption. After tear gas was turned again on crowds bearing placards reading ‘Systeme Dégage’ (System Get Lost), the army chief announced a July election date and promised that judges would investigate ‘the whole gang’ – the term used for Bouteflika’s cabal.

These are tense moments in nations that have been trapped for decades under grim regimes, and which are both still under the grip of generals. They are like belated echoes of the Arab Spring, which swept the region with such immense consequences eight years ago. The impression is intensified by the fact that one general in Libya is trying to grab the capital Tripoli with his tanks and planes, while another – the former spy chief who crushed Egypt’s revolution after a coup – has been visiting Washington.

Each country is different, of course, and each protest has local patterns. Activists are certainly more cautious than was the case eight years ago. In Algeria and Sudan, they say they have learned lessons of the past, when despots were ousted only to be replaced by bloody chaos or harsh counter-revolution.

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By Sam Leith

One country in the region did turn its revolution into positive change, though: Tunisia. And its former president, Moncef Marzouki has described the peaceful rotation of power in Algeria as “one of the most successful revolutions of the Arab Spring“.

It’s true that these uprisings all have a communality that reaches back to 2011, linking them directly to that revolutionary fervour that shook the world after a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire to protest corruption.

The roots of current discontent can be found in the same foetid swamp that gave birth to the protests of eight years ago, nurtured by the arrogance of self-serving autocracies. These young societies are frustrated by rampant youth unemployment, infuriated by state-captured capitalism, dismayed by corruption, inflamed by social media and angered by rich old men who refuse to share power or wealth.

In Algeria – Africa’s biggest country – more than two-thirds of its fast-growing population of 42 million is under 30 years old. These are the ones most affected by rising unemployment, with almost 30% of them jobless.

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Its well-trained army swiftly stopped riots in 2011 over corruption and economic dislocation, aided by painful memory of the savagery of its war against Islamists during the 1990s after elections were cancelled. The anger, though, over bad governance, economic woes and lack of freedom has remained profound.

The sparks vary from uprising to uprising. It was the tripling of bread prices and flour shortages amid rampant inflation in Sudan – a country where almost half the population lives below the poverty line and the end of an oil boom has devastated the economy. But the chant is the same. “Al-sha’b Yurid Isqat al-Nizam” (The people demand the downfall of the regime) was heard in Tunisia in 2011, and Sudan in 2019. It came from the mouth of one courageous army colonel in Khartoum. And was the potent phrase scrawled by teenage schoolboys on the wall of their school in Daraa one night after a game of football, which proved to be the innocent start of Syria’s conflagration.

In the West, we focused on the Arab Spring’s failures, transfixed by the tragedy of Syria, the terror in Egypt and the meltdown of Libya. Yet we largely ignored that the conditions that lay behind the original uprisings remained firmly in place, fuelling that explosive desire for dignity, freedom and social justice.

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Revolutions take time to brew, says the Egyptian-born, Cambridge-based historian Khaled Fahmy. In an essay he wrote four years ago, he pondered how far back we might trace the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, finally asking if the Tahrir Square protests were really rooted in the foundation of the modern Egyptian state in 1805.

Fahmy concluded that five factors thwarted the transformation of Arab nations. These include the impact of foreign intervention, the scourge of petro-dollars funding despotic Gulf regimes determined to stop democracy, and the surge of political Islam. “Despite these deep problems, I remain confident that the future is ours and our revolution will prevail…it would be naive to expect its victory overnight with one decisive knockout blow.”

He is right. Just as the demands of the French revolution did not dissolve when Napoleon Bonaparte took control in 1799, so the pressures of these troubled societies are still bubbling beneath the surface.

There was naivety aplenty in 2011, not least from journalists such as myself who gave too much credence to middle-class protesters they met on the streets and too little weight to the impoverished masses slaving away in fields and factories. The dreams of democracy founded on protest were soon dashed on the rocks of reality.

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And some sceptics still dismiss hopes of democracy in these benighted societies, making bigoted assumptions about Arabs and Muslims, or sneering at their right to have the same freedoms that we enjoy as they endorse cruel and thieving regimes. We have seen the pendulum swing in the United States – still the global superpower despite mounting challenge from China – from a foolish president who thought he could impose democracy on despotic states, to an even more foolish president who flirts with vile autocrats.

But from Syria to Sudan to Saudi Arabia, the choice and issues remain the same for those of us lucky enough to live in democracies: do we support the people pushing for more open societies and stand up for human rights? Or do we espouse such ideals at home, while ignoring them abroad in a misguided search for stability and perhaps a bit more trade.

The answer is clear, as seen in both Algeria and Sudan: never expect the status quo to last in places where aspiration is stifled by autocracy. This is not historical determinism, simply a reflection of human desires and needs. For that brave female student in a protest in Sudan showed the same demand for basic dignity and fairness that led to the Arab Spring – and the pressures in places filled with frustrated young people cannot be contained for ever.