Éric Zemmour definitively condemned for racist words of 2019

The Court of Cassation confirmed, Tuesday, September 16, the conviction of Eric Zemmour for provocation to racial hatred and racist insults. The President of Reconquer challenged a decision of the Paris Court of Appeal which, in February 2024, had sentenced him to a fine of 15,000 euros for remarks made in 2019 during a “right agreement”. On that day, Zemmour qualified immigrants as “colonizers” and described the veil and the djellaba as the “uniforms of an occupation army”. The highest jurisdiction has judged his appeal unfounded, making the conviction final.

But this judicial victory is not enough to stop a well -oiled media machine. Despite his multiple convictions, Éric Zemmour continues to occupy a central place in public debate. From TV sets in radio studios, he is received as an ordinary political actor, even as a “essential” polemicist. This multi -registration of the courts, a true offender of public speech, benefits from a preferential treatment that many anti -racist voices or from minorities do not know.

This discrepancy between the severity of justice and the indulgence of the media illustrates a deeper drift. In the name of the hearing and the “clash”, many editors deliberately choose to give him the floor, thus trivializing a speech that the judges qualify as hateful. The logic of the spectacle prevails on journalistic ethics: scandal increases the audience, it does not matter that it undermines living together and social cohesion. Beyond the Zemmour case, a whole conception of the public space is questioned. Leaving so much room for a recurrence of hatred is to make extremism a media product like any other, and to accustom opinion to the unacceptable.