French candidate adopts Beethoven to lead far-right campaign

French candidate adopts Beethoven to lead far-right campaign

News

norman lebrecht

December 02, 2021

The polemicist Eric Zemmour, who has displaced Le Pen as the far right challenger for the French presidency, uses the Allegretto of Beethoven’s seventh symphony to push his message of alienation – the alienation of French citizens in their own country.

‘La France is no longer La France, and the whole world knows it.’

The agenda is distortive, the music unsettling.

Comments

  • Brettermeier says:

    It always strikes me as absurd when nationalists use “foreign” music to push their simple-minded and xenophobic agenda.* One might think they have enough great French composers they could exploit for this purpose. But sure, you, do you (and be hypocrites)! 🙂

    *) Even as choosing a German one might be seen as a “hint.”

    • Affreux Jojo says:

      The latest réchauffé of segregation history concocted by the German government today should incite some to humility
      That said this candidate has yet to offer his opinion on the health issue and this attitude among other things makes him widely perceived as a made up candidate used by the same lobby enjoying profits from viral fear mongering to corral the French disgust for the governing elites
      The more things change the more they remain the same
      So there is more than meet the eye about Z

    • Sue Sonata Form says:

      Politics abhors a vacuum and of course these groups are going to find favour. When you make decisions light years from the wishes of the ordinary people what do you expect; them all to fall into line with your version of what constitutes a society?

      Consult and reflect the will of the people or tolerate extremism. You choose.

    • Neil Walker says:

      The use of Beethoven’s music is both unfortunate and absurd, as this little French dictator, who is opposed to universalism, spews his hatred and racist agenda using the music of a non-French universal composer. If that would be the only fault with this supposed campaign launch video, that would already be enough to realise that France is truly a nation that has learned little from their appalling racist anti-Semitic past.
      Add together Mr. Zemmour, Ms. le Pen, Mr. Melenchon and all of the other French weird collection of what they think can be presidential material and you have more than 50% of the country backing and believing in individuals who would be taken as jokes in nearly every modern democracy in the world.
      Apart from its vile hate-filled content, the video looks like something that a group of 14 year olds pout toothier at school for their film club and who receive a poor grade for their creative and technical skills. France is indeed not the same country it once was, but that is not due to Mr. Zemmour’s reasons for this dramatic decline. The French have only themselves to blame for their being probably the most old fashioned, politically unimaginative and depressive nation certainly within Europe, but perhaps everywhere in the world.
      The majority of French have truly lost the plot, following candidates with the look, discourse and ideology of candidates in Germany in the 1930’s.
      What amateurism this video reveals and at the same time it reveals just how lost France really is….still, in 2021, a place where many “educated” professionals have a level of English language and other foreign language skills equal to a peasant in most developing countries and unlike those peasants, the French won’t show you much friendliness or be welcoming to you. A democratic nation deserves the candidates that it gets and France is at the forefront of out of date candidates, lacking oratory, policy and basic language skills.
      Not a country that leaves you feeling good and optimistic. Sad place.

  • A.L. says:

    He should understand that LvB was not French and, moreover, that LvB’s music is widely understood, right or wrong, as “universal”. And when understood as such, negates notions of nationalism and supremacy.

  • Peter says:

    hE’s LiTeRaLlY hItLeR

    Come on, Norman. Say it.

  • John Borstlap says:

    It is indeed very disturbing that this dangerous crank – a Jewish antisemite – misuses the work of a composer who symbolizes the ideals of humanism to get his message across. Just as the nazis did.

    Zemmour’s critique of French modern society is the general critique on the abstractions of Enlightenment thinking: progressive on paper, but in the reality on the ground often disruptive because people don’t live according to rational ideals but to customs, bonds with family, milieu, locality. So, he offers the old demons as an alternative, which have already shown to be the most destructive forces in Western society, eventually leading to the holocaust. The list of his misconceptions and lies is very long, and like Trump, fuels the emotional frustrations of people who look for scapegoats because that is simpler than trying to understand reality.

    • Peter says:

      A Jewish antisemite. Sorry John, that is simply not possible. As impossible as a square circle.

      How about this… finding some arguments against mr. Zemmour rather than the over-used hE’s hItLeR rEbOrN

      • John Borstlap says:

        It is an established fact. Zemmour is from Jewish parents who fled to France during the Algerian war.

        Zemmour suggested “….. that the wartime government of Marshal Philippe Pétain that sent more than 72,500 Jews to their deaths was not so bad after all. – The comment was shocking not least because Mr. Zemmour is Jewish. From 1942 onward, there is no evidence that the Vichy regime tried to protect French Jews. It collaborated with the Nazis to round up Jews, whether foreign or French.”

        https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/world/europe/eric-zemmour-france-jewish-bernard-henri-levy.html

        This was not only noticed by the NY Times but also by other media. It is a well-known story.

        It shows the twisted ‘thinking’ of this man. Jean-Marie Le Pen said that Z’s Jewishness ‘protected him’, in other words: he may say such outrageous antisemitic things because he is Jewish himself, while non-Jews ‘would be burned on the stake’.

      • Tom Phillips says:

        There are tons of Jewish anti-semites sometimes known as “self-hating Jews” e.g. the Israeli-born British Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, Bobby Fischer, the California Tech billionaire Ron Unz, etc. each of them holocaust deniers and admirers of Adolf Hitler.

    • Sue Sonata Form says:

      Your ‘reality’ is bound to be very different from somebody else’s. Consult with the people or fight extremism. It’s that simple. People fall overthemselves to accommodate Extinction Rebellion and they’re bourgeois anarchists.

  • PS says:

    Weekend Update: Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve (Saturday Night Live)

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ku-tRgWZuc

  • Concertgebouw79 says:

    Poor Beethoven!

  • V.Lind says:

    Damn. My favourite of the symphonies. Hope it does not catch on in this context.

  • msc says:

    Given Beethoven’s politics, yes it is unsettling. There is enough nationalistic music written by French composers without Zemmour appropriating Beethoven. Someone should point him towards Gailhard’s Ode à la France Blessée. That would fit just right. To adopt Beethoven simply underlines the internal contradictions of Zemmour’s thinking — France is great, wonderful, a mighty nation, France should put the “French” first, and yet he reaches for a German composer to create an emotional bond with the supporters he is courting.

  • D.O. says:

    Please leave sociopolitical commentary out. This article is not about music and is an editorial. I love to learn what’s going on in the music world through your site and as a refuge from sociopolitical punditry. Please stick to music.

  • CYM says:

    So shameful !! I wish that Beethoven could fight back with the ‘Ode to Joy’ from his 9th Symphony – ‘Freedom, Fraternity, Brotherhood’

    • Sue Sonata Form says:

      I love the symphony but I still regard those words as bogus refulgences from and for the politically naive!! Sorry Ludwig. There it is.

      • John Borstlap says:

        It’s the music which conveys the message, not the words so much. That’s where music is for. Nobody reads Schiller’s drinking song poem and thinks of humanity.

  • Karl says:

    If I was running I would use the classic Blue Oyster Cult song ME 262 about a German pilot shooting down English bombers in WW II.
    “ME-262 prince of turbojet
    Junkers Jumo 004
    Blasts from clustered R4M quartets in my snout
    And see these English planes go burn..”

    The damn English still owe me and my Scottish brethren reparations for centuries of oppression!

  • Matthias says:

    Ah yes, the famous black French composer Louis de Beethoven!

  • Herbie G says:

    Am I the only one who sees a curious resemblance between this odious megalomaniac and another one who runs Russia?

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