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Eric Zemmour is, without a doubt, the superstar of right-wing journalism in France.
The 56-year-old is a columnist for weekly magazine Figaro and a news pundit for RTL, a major private radio station, as well as a frequent guest on political talkshows.
In 2010, when rumours emerged that Figaro was firing him after he allegedly made racist remarks - he had stated on a TV show that "most drugs traffickers are Arabs or blacks" in France - crowds of supporters demonstrated day after day in front of the magazine's office until it became clear that he would keep his job.
Mr Zemmour, who is Jewish, recently published an essay entitled Le Suicide Français ("French Suicide"), a vitriolic attack on both socialists and political conservatives. He turned the piece into a book, and it now tops France's bestseller list, ahead of the latest novel by Patrick Modiano, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The book is clearly provocative by design, but in one particular assertion Mr Zemmour appears to have gone too far: he writes that the Vichy regime tired to save as many Jews as possible.
Zemmour claimed the Vichy regime tried to save Jews
Unsurprisingly, National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen backed Mr Zemmour, adding that "only 29,000 French Jews" were sent to Auschwitz (the remaining 45,000 who were massacred were foreign or born to foreign parents).
While some in the Jewish community have previously taken pride in Mr Zemmour's superstar status, his latest ideas on Vichy are alarming many.
It is true that two-thirds of the pre-war French Jews survived the Holocaust, but that had more to do with the fact that civil registries did not include references to religion - which hindered the search for Jews - than any reluctance on the part of the Vichy regime to help the Nazis in their genocidal mission. Another reason was the geography of France which, at least temporarily, provided many safe havens for those being persecuted.
Mr Zemmour has written extensive critiques of immigration, which he sees as a social catastrophe; the "anti-racism" dogma, which he derides as racism in reverse; "human rights" militancy, both at home and abroad; feminism and gay-rights advocacy; the EU; the euro. For all that, he is no fan of globalised capitalism either, nor of an American-led Western alliance. He would like France to remain an idiosyncratic nation-state in the grand tradition of Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle.
The fact that he is Jewish certainly appeals to the French right - and gets on the nerves of the left. Mr Zemmour is not just of Jewish North African descent but a fairly traditional Jew: he keeps a kosher home and his children went to private Jewish schools.
Despite this, he has never publicly taken a pro-Israel stand, which many in the Jewish community resent. In the wake of his latest book, that antipathy looks set to grow.
