A reporter who infiltrated Éric Zemmour’s presidential election team has claimed he witnessed a culture of casual racism and a covert online campaign involving a “shadow Facebook army” and repeated rewrites of the far-right polemicist’s Wikipedia page, the most viewed in France.
Vincent Bresson, 27, says he spent more than three months as an increasingly trusted member of “Génération Z”, as Zemmour’s young supporters’ group is known. He said he witnessed multiple racist remarks from both volunteers and senior staff.
“Officially, if you’re black or of Arab origin, Zemmour believes in ‘assimilation’: work hard, adapt to ‘French culture’, and you can be French ‘like the rest’,” said Bresson, a freelance journalist who has written for publications including Le Monde.
“In reality, it seems some Zemmourists will always see you as ‘less French’. And these are supposedly the more moderate, publicly acceptable faces of the campaign. I think it poses serious questions about promises of equal treatment for all under a Zemmour presidency.”
Zemmour, a media pundit who promotes the far-right “great replacement” theory that Muslim immigrants are supplanting the populations of European countries, denies he is racist but has two convictions for racist hate speech and is appealing against a third.
Less than two months before the first round of voting, he is vying for third place in the polls with the rightwing Les Républicains candidate Valérie Pécresse, behind the far-right National Rally leader, Marine Le Pen, and the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron. Bresson said in an interview he decided to infiltrate Zemmour’s campaign because “there was at least a chance he could be president”.
On his first evening with a group of young activists putting up posters last October, Bresson recounts in his book, Au Coeur de Z (At the Heart of Z), published on Thursday, “one of them used the word ‘negroes’, and nobody batted an eyelid”.
On another occasion, a volunteer joked of a black driver delivering campaign leaflets: “If he only knew what he was carrying”. A rare Zemmour supporter of Arab origin was told by another activist he could never sell him his flat, “not with your face”.
He says he also witnessed a conversation between two senior team members who referred to black parking attendants at the Villepinte exhibition centre outside Paris, where Zemmour held his first campaign rally last December, as “Mamadou”, a Francophone African first name sometimes used in France to describe a black labourer and recognised as a racist insult.
Bresson said he had targeted Génération Z as the easiest way into Zemmour’s campaign because as a “young, white, university-educated man called Vincent – a name in the Christian calendar – and brought up a Catholic, I looked like a plausible recruit”. Zemmour has claimed that if he were elected president he would ban families from giving children non-Fre
