Imane El Hamzaoui, a politician in the far-left party France Unbowed, has delivered a racist speech defaming everything about France before mass immigration. Now, right-wing politician Éric Zemmour has responded to her with a sharp rebuttal.
“We all know that the word ‘France’ carries within it slavery, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy,” said El Hamzaoui. Referring to the France before mass immigration as “Eternal France,”, she said that “Eternal France is a fable. The latter is a fable, not a true past. It is the tale of an imaginary community defined by lineage that never truly existed, whereas New France stems from today’s concrete realities.”
El Hamzaoui refers to this old France, which featured an almost entirely homogenous White population that built France into a cultural, technological, and artistic powerhouse over the course of thousands of years, as “racist” and “colonial” and a mere “fable.” Her comments came at a summer political university organized by a decolonial group in Gennevilliers near Paris, which went viral and triggered intense political backlash.
🇫🇷🔴 This far-left French politician really doesn't like the "old" France, the one filled with White people.
"We all know that the word 'France' carries within it slavery, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy."
Imane El Hamzaoui, a politician in the far-left party France… pic.twitter.com/SI46xTdOjT
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 8, 2026Speaking in defense of her party’s concept of the “New France,” El Hamzaoui directly attacked the idea of an “Eternal France.”
She continued, saying: I” would say that the far-right fights against the new to preserve the fading status quo.”
She added that the right is right to be afraid.
“New France sounds like the death knell of France, or more precisely, of their France. The one they enjoy exclusively, which is their sole claim to glory, and where rights are measured by the depth of family roots in soil. They have every reason to be afraid, and we must acknowledge their lucidity and foresight: their cries are the sighs of those who see their hegemony fading away.”
In contrast, she defines “New France” as grounded in present-day realities, including a massive and growing immigrant population.
In many ways, she echoes the Great Replacement sentiments of Mélenchon.
Éric Zemmour, president of the Reconquest party, posted a direct, eloquent rebuttal on X, quoting and dismantling El Hamzaoui’s argument point by point. His response referenced fables by La Fontaine, French cultural heritage, and France’s historical greatness, almost of which was built by ethnic French people over the course of hundreds of years.
“If Eternal France were a fable, you would not present yourself to us dressed and made up in the Western style, but covered from head to toe in a shapeless sack, hiding your eyes and your hair.
If Eternal France were a fable, it would be a fable by La Fontaine: elegance, clarity, finesse, refinement of manners, sweetness of life, irony, banter, insolence, without forgetting the inspiration drawn from Greek and Roman Antiquity, Christian morality and compassion.
If Eternal France were a fable, you would not say it in this French language which is the most accomplished expression of the genius of its people, and which you handle without spoiling it with words like ‘wallah’ and other ‘wesh’ that usually grate on our ears. I am grateful to you for that.
You recognize a certain lucidity and clairvoyance in me. I recognize a certain frankness in you. You have set the scene: ‘everything will be played out between them and us,’ you say. Yes, everything will be played out between Eternal France and the New France.
Eternal France which is the emanation of this French people which exists, like it or not, for more than a thousand years, and the New France which is only the semantic dressing of an Islamized, Africanized, Orientalized France.”
Zemmour also issue a warning to El Hamzaoui, writing: “Do not sell the bear’s skin before having killed it: Eternal France has not said its last word. Eternal France will prevail against all those who want to enslave it. La Fontaine would have made a fable of it.”
Zemmour was far from the only critic of El Hamzaoui, Various accounts quickly drew accusations of anti-French sentiment, promoting “great replacement,” and racial division. Outlets such as Le Journal du Dimanche reported on July 8, 2026, that the speech had provoked a major outcry on the right, with commentators viewing it as a candid admission of France Unbowed’s transformative agenda.
Of course, fears over the Great Replacement are real and not relegated to a right-wing fringe. Polling shows that 60 percent of voters believe France is witnessing “a replacement of the French population by non-European populations.”
