“No one, least of all me, is proposing to get rid of Victor Hugo, of our cheeses or baguettes, and replace them with something else.”

This was how Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ahead of his 2022 presidential bid, rebutted the claim that an “Islamo-leftist” plot sought to destroy France’s traditional way of life. But unlike other wild rumors of secret global conspiracies, this one had managed to spread across an entire nation in record time.

Over the last decade, xenophobic pundits like Éric Zemmour have adopted conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus’s notion of an elite “replacist” plot to tear up the roots of French culture and substitute “pure-blood Frenchmen” with immigrants. With such ideas becoming increasingly mainstream, Mélenchon’s campaign instead took up the language of “creolization” — the eternal blending of different influences that together make up a national culture.