France Obsesses Over an Existential Decline

French booksellers have had to contend with a furious game of one-upmanship in the genre of scandalous bestsellers this fall. Parisians thought that the vengeful memoir by President François Hollande’s ex-girlfriend Valérie Trierweiler, “Thank You for This Moment,” had set an impossible new sales record in September. Then, in October, came “Le Suicide Français,” the Figaro columnist Éric Zemmour’s treatise on the unravelling of France, which sold out its entire first printing in one week. Sales hit five thousand copies a day. Bookshops couldn’t keep it in stock. One reviewer wrote, “The ‘Suicide Français’ phenomenon is a fever that is so traditionally French that it offers a first refutation to its author: France is not dead so long as it can quarrel over a book!”