However the publication in October of polemicist Eric Zemmour's controversial 534-page book The Suicide of France: The 40 Years That Defeated France struck a resounding blow against the establishment and sold 500,000 copies in the first month.

One aspect of the book has stirred up outrage in the media: Zemmour, like the founder of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has come out as an apologist for the  wartime Vichy government. Le Pen père notoriously claimed that the Holocaust was a mere "point of detail" in the Second World War and that the collaborationist regime was not responsible for the deportation of Jews (many of the FN's early members, after Le Pen founded the party in 1972, were left-overs of Vichy). Zemmour's stance is somewhat more nuanced. A French-born Sephardic Jew whose family came from Algeria, Zemmour is highly critical of France's repentance over the war crimes of Vichy. He contends that by sacrificing foreign and stateless Jews in the deportation process they managed to save many Jewish French nationals. He disagrees with Serge Klarsfeld, the scourge of Nazi war criminals, and blames the US historian and WWII expert Robert Paxton's work on Vichy France for irremediably damaging France's image.

The contrition to which he refers is the brave speech by President Jacques Chirac on July 16, 1995, on the occasion of the anniversary of the biggest arrest of foreign and stateless Jews. Chirac recognised for the first time the French state's role in the deportation, 53 years earlier to the day, of 13,152 people — including 4,000 children — who were rounded up and dispatched by train to Auschwitz from the Vel' d'Hiv bicycle race track in Paris. Only 100 survived. Chirac's courageous act allowed mourning worldwide for surviving victims of the Holocaust and their offspring and so did Hollande's decision in December to give a €60 million for US victims of the Holocaust. Zemmour foolishly compares Chirac's "betrayal" of de Gaulle with Brutus's betrayal of Caesar.

The author tries to prove his point in the most maladroit fashion, stirring outrage and drawing attention away from other points of interest which made him an instant bestseller, particularly the decoupling of the elite and the people. "France is dead and our elites are spitting on its grave and trampling its corpse underfoot," he writes. According to Zemmour, the agony of France dates back to the French theory movement, launched by intellectuals such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1960s. The deconstruction of the traditional structures which held French society together was set in motion and has yet to stop. In the 1980s Bernard-Henri Lévy's famous work, The French Ideology, accelerated this process.

Zemmour argues that for the past 40 years the elite has failed to protect the legacy of the nation's great past. He claims they consciously stripped France of her ability to survive among other nations, leaving no viable collective structures (family, state and nation). Rebuilding France from its ruins will involve great future sacrifices, clearly sacrifices that recent administrations lack the moral fibre to undertake.

It is easy to see why the clique (and claque) who rule the political, economic, administrative, intellectual, artistic and media elites are perceived as a self-serving nomenklatura. Their members intermingle and intermarry, send their children to the same schools, meet in the same gatherings and parties, shop together, eat together, and holiday together in the same ski resorts, or in Marrakech.