Le Suicide français hits its targets as energetically and indiscriminately as it misses them. Generalizations often rest on nothing much more than sprightliness. For effect, he goes in for sequential sentences of one word each, or just three or four words without a main verb. Zemmour’s hero is General de Gaulle, and he holds that nothing has gone right since that great man’s death. The adjective “American” in the vocabulary of this ersatz Gaullist is not a compliment. He resents that the unfavorable portrait drawn by the American historian Robert Paxton of Marshal Pétain’s wartime regime at Vichy is now generally accepted. In common with General de Gaulle, he thinks, Pétain wanted to finish up on the winning side and his only mistake was to pick the loser.