PARIS - Eric Zemmour fell over his own words, they were tumbling out so fast. He was describing his latest book, “French Melancholy,” which has moved up the best-seller list here.

“The end of French political power has brought the end of French,” Mr. Zemmour said. “Now even the French elite have given up. They don’t care anymore. They all speak English. And the working class, I’m not talking just about immigrants, they don’t care about preserving the integrity of the language either.”

Mr. Zemmour is a notorious troublemaker. Detractors have lately tried to get him fired from Le Figaro, the newspaper where he works, for his inflammatory remarks about French blacks and Arabs on a television show. In his view France, because of immigration and other outside influences, has lost touch with its heroic ancient Roman roots, its national “gloire,” its historic culture, at the heart of which is the French language.

Plenty of people think Mr. Zemmour is an extremist, but he is not alone. Recently, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, complained about the “snobisme” of French diplomats who “are happy to speak English” rather than French, which is “under siege.” French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French. More than 50 percent of them are African. French speakers are more likely to be Haitians and Canadians, Algerians and Senegalese, immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean who have settled in France .

So what does French culture signify these days when there are some 200 million French speakers in the world but only 65 million are actually French?

In Canada the Quebecers tried outlawing signs and other public expressions in anything but French. Basque separatists have been murdering Spaniards in the name of political, linguistic and cultural independence, just as Franco imprisoned anyone who spoke Basque or Catalan.

The fact is, French is thriving as never before, if you ask Abdou Diouf, former president of Senegal, who is the secretary general of the International Organization of the Francophonie . “The truth,” he said, “is that the future of the French language is now in Africa.”

There and elsewhere, from Belgium to Benin, Lebanon to St. Lucia, the Seychelles to Switzerland, Togo to Tunisia, French is just one among several languages. This means that for writers from these places French is a choice, not necessarily signifying fealty, political, cultural or otherwise, to France.

Different racial and ethnic groups in France have begun to argue more loudly for their rights and assert their cultures. The election of Barack Obama in the United States hastened the process, by pointing out how few blacks and Arabs here have gained political authority.

“The world has changed,” said Nancy Huston, a Canadian-born novelist who moved to Paris in the 1970s. “After the war French writers rejected the idea of narrative because Hitler and Stalin were storytellers, and it seemed naive to believe in stories. So instead they turned more and more to theory, to the absurd. The French declined even to tell stories about their own history, including the war in Algeria, which like all history can’t really be digested until it is turned into great literature. Francophone literature doesn’t come out of that background. It still tells stories.”

Yasmina Khadra is a best-selling Algerian novelist, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul. A 55-year-old former Algerian Army officer who fought against the French and now lives in Paris, he writes novels critical of the Algerian government under his wife’s name, which he first borrowed because the military in Algeria had banned his literary work.

“I decided to become a novelist in French partly because I wanted to respond to Camus, who had written about an Algeria in which there were no Arabs,” he said. “I wanted to write in his language to say, I am here, I exist, and also because I love French, although I remain Arab. Linguistically it is as if I have married a French woman, but my mother is still Arabic.”

“Paris is still fearful of a French writer who becomes known around the world without its blessing,” Mr. Moulessehoul added. “And at the same time in certain Arab-speaking circles I am considered a traitor because I write in French. I am caught between two cultures, two worlds.”


MICHAEL KIMMELMAN


PHOTOGRAPHS BY BÉATRICE DE GÉA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES


Éric Zemmour, above, is among those who say France has lost touch with its anguage and culture, in part because of immigration. The 18th Arrondissement in Paris is home to many migrants from Africa; half of the 200 million people who speak French are African.