Storied French Publishing House Becomes Factory for Right-Wing Pseudohistory

​As many of you know, the problems with fabricated history are not confined to the United States. Over in France, there is growing concern about the increasingly extremist tomes that the once-prestigious Librairie Arthème Fayard publishing house has put out since the publisher’s parent company saw control pass to far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré. I am indebted for this story to the Histoire Medievale account on X, which wrote about this at length. 

​Since Bolloré’s holding company took control of the Louis Hachette Group, the parent of the parent of Fayard, in 2023, Bolloré has installed his own preferred CEO for the publisher. The new CEO has published a growing number of right-wing titles, which led to public outrage this fall when Fayard released three far-right tomes in a single month by extreme right authors including Philippe de Villiers and Éric Zemmour. These books are then, in turn, promoted on Bolloré’s television channels and other media outlets.
 
De Villiers’s book, Populicide, is a French version of the Great Replacement Theory (indeed, he calls his idea the grand remplacement), in which de Villiers writes of his fear that the original population of France is being replaced through the evils of multiculturalism. Similarly, Éric Zemmour’s La messe n’est pas dite (The Mass Is Not Said) is a polemic calling for the reinstitution of Christianity in French political and social life.
 
In the United States, these authors’ volumes would be classified as political tomes, put out by a right-wing imprint like Regnery, and then completely ignored outside the right-wing media bubble. But in France, they are seen as serious works of cultural history, which is why critics have been shocked and outraged by the way a distinguished publisher let its authors play fast and loose with rewriting history.
 
For instance, de Villiers uses the history the Byzantine Empire as a comparison to France, arguing that both were being destroyed by Muslims. He casts the history of Europe as a civilizational battle between Islam and Christianity, conveniently omitting the complicating facts, like the Christian sacking of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade and various European monarchs’ alliances with the Ottoman Sultan against other Christian powers.
 
Similarly, Zemmour also offers a revisionist history of the Crusades in which he argues that they were essential to push back against a Muslim invasion of Europe—one that actual history does not support. As Histoire Medievale showed, Zemmour borrowed his fractured fairy tale heavily from Joseph de Maistre, a nineteenth-century anti-Enlightenment monarchist. (All translations are my own.)

It was the crusade launched by Pope Urban II that saved the West from the Islamic threat: after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which saw the defeat of the troops of the Eastern Roman Empire at the hands of the Turks, the soldiers of Islam were already sweeping toward Constantinople, eager to hurl themselves upon the rich lands of Western Europe.
 
For centuries, the Muslims persisted, but even when they finally succeeded in seizing Constantinople in 1453, they ran up against Vienna (the sieges of 1529 and 1683), which never fell.
 
In his praise of the papacy, Joseph de Maistre could not fail to pay it tribute:
 
“Fortunately the tiara saved us from the crescent. It has never ceased resisting it, fighting it, seeking out its enemies, gathering them, stirring them, bribing them and directing them. If we are free, learned, and Christian, it is to her that we owe it.”

Compare Zemmour’s description with the text from Maistre he paraphrases right before the lines he quotes directly—and note how Zemmour subtly but strangely changes de Maistre’s propaganda piece:

For a long time torn apart by the barbarians from the North, Europe found itself threatened by the greatest evils. The formidable Saracens were descending upon it, and already its most beautiful provinces were being attacked, conquered, or encroached upon. Already masters of Syria, Egypt, Mauretania, and Numidia, they had added to their conquests in Asia and Africa a considerable part of Greece, Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Apulia, Calabria, and part of Sicily. They had besieged Rome and burned its suburbs. Finally, they had launched themselves against France, and by the 8th century, it would have been all over for Europe—that is to say, for Christianity, science, and civilization—had it not been for the genius of Charles Martel and Charlemagne, who stemmed the tide. This new enemy was unlike the others: the noble children of the North could adapt to us, learn our civilization, our arts, our sciences; but these mortal enemies of our faith are today what they were in 1454: a camp of Tatars, settled on European soil. War between us is natural, and peace is forced. As soon as Christian and Muslim come into contact, one of the two must serve or perish.
 
Between these enemies, there can be no treaty.
 
Fortunately the tiara saved us from the crescent. It has never ceased resisting it, fighting it, seeking out its enemies, gathering them, stirring them, bribing them and directing them. If we are free, learned, and Christian, it is to her that we owe it.

​De Maistre credited Charles Martel with stopping the Muslim advance into Europe, while Zemmour grants the Crusades that honor in order to launch a revisionist history of the Crusades and make the case for offensive rather than defensive action against “invaders” past and present.
 
Yet another Fayard book from this year, Quand la France perd le mémoire (When France Loses Its Memory) by right-wing author Dimitri Casali is explicitly a history book, albeit polemical. It at least gives Charles Martel his due, but does so by framing the 732 Battle of Poitiers as a “clash of civilizations,” which he implies medieval people saw as an existential battle between Christianity and Islam.
 
This is, of course, not true. There are few contemporary or near-contemporary accounts of the battle, and what is known does not support the later propaganda claim that the caliphate in Spain sought to conquer France; it was more likely intended as a raid on Tours. Similarly, at this time, there is not really an understanding in Europe of Islam as a different religion or a threat to Europe. Europeans understood the people who took over Spain as “Ishmaelites” from a different part of the world, but they did not view them as a different civilization, at least not any more different than the Greek East. Indeed, the two most common views about Islam at the time were either that it was a heretical sect of eastern Christianity or that it was a pagan faith that worshipped idols. It was only in the ninth century and after that Europeans developed a deeply negative view of Muhammad as a so-called “false prophet,” but even then Christians and Muslims were not neatly divided into two opposing camps on religious lines.
 
Histoire Medievale provided examples of many more books of skewed and substandard history that now pollute Fayard’s catalog, but most of these would not raise an eyebrow in the United States, where lightly sourced, sensationalist books about the so-called “mysteries” of history are common.
 
Nevertheless, this is a good example of how the U.S. right-wing media propaganda playbook is being exported to other countries, and public understanding of history continues to suffer.