After some false signals and feints, the French populist, polemicist, and ultra-nationalist Éric Zemmour announced on Tuesday, in one of the most bizarre videos ever offered by a would-be leader to his nation, that he is running for President of France. In the video, which is ten minutes long, he reads a prepared statement, head down, as music by that echt-Gallic composer Beethoven plays solemnly--the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony, which, as Zemmour perhaps knew, perhaps did not, was broadcast on wartime German radio on Hitler's birthday. As he continues to read, the video shows street violence and football players taking a knee, among other things, as well as Muslims praying, all apparently exemplifying the grand remplacement he warns against, along with a collage of images of the douce France that he thinks is being "replaced." This last is represented by a strange mélange of characters, including the radical republican Victor Hugo and his oppressed Cosette, the sixties chanteuse Barbara (the Paris-born daughter of a Ukrainian-Alsatian Jewish family who spent her wartime childhood in hiding from the government of Marshal Pétain that Zemmour now defends), and Charles Aznavour (who was born in Paris to Armenian parents who named him Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian). Images illustrating the grandeur of French heritage include the Louvre pyramid, which was designed, of course, by I. M. Pei, an Asian American. It's an odd roll call for a hyper-nationalist manifesto, made odder by the reality that Zemmour, for all that he casts himself as the last defender of the legacy of Jeanne d'Arc, the perpetual heroine of the far right, is the offspring of an immigrant Algerian Jewish family welcomed into France in the nineteen-fifties. This shouldn't be any real surprise: leaders of extreme nationalist fervor always tend to rise from the extremities of a nation--Napoleon the Corsican, Stalin the Georgian, and even Hitler the Austrian.

Zemmour, whose high-pitched, sharp-chinned pugnacity seems distinctly anti-charismatic, is often called the French Trump, presumably because he became nationally famous as a television personality before turning to elective politics. He has also published a couple of best-selling books: "The French Suicide," in 2014, and, in September, "France Has Not Said Its Final Word." But the comparison is mostly misleading, not least because the only thing that Zemmour despises more than Islam is America.