To the spontaneous mobilization against terrorism was added the slogan "I am Charlie", which maintained the vagueness on the exact meaning to be given to the Republican march of January 11. Subsequently, politicians shied away from tackling the real issues.
- The state of shock in French public opinion following the attack on Charlie Hebdo highlighted the failures of our postmodern society.
- The slogan "I am Charlie" has maintained confusion about the reasons for the January 11 mobilization.
- Society is fractured on the question of the sacred: on the one hand, a French society which has become deeply secularized; and on the other, populations resulting from immigration who, on the contrary, are experiencing a considerable revival of religiosity.
- Faced with a society that no longer has a religion, a large part of the political staff is tempted to compensate by introducing a real and disturbing "republican religion".
- The political class persists in saying that the first victims of the attacks are the Muslims, not realizing that they are thus contributing to further fracture society.
Atlantico: The French took to the streets by the millions on January 11 during the "Republican March". During the days that followed this historic event, there was much talk about the importance of secularism, freedom of expression and more generally republican values. Even if these questions were taken into account, is it only for these reasons that the French spontaneously gathered? What is the role of identity reflex in their need to meet, both on January 11 and on the very day of the attacks?
Guillaume de Premare: If the French felt the need to come together, it was first to affirm their rejection of terrorism and to pay tribute to the victims, which is quite natural after such a massacre. I don't think that when the French people spontaneously gathered in the street on the very day of the attack, there was any desire other than to recover from the shock together. Subsequently, the political and media class, as one man, wanted to give political content to the January 11 rally.
We must place what happened in the context of the historic change that our country is going through: the Charlie Hebdo massacre only accelerated what was already underway. The state of shock has highlighted the failures of postmodern society, and in particular the void in terms of values and common sense within our society. The question is posed: does living together still have common bases? Michel Houellebecq argued in an interview that the Enlightenment had passed their turn: "atheism, secularism, the republic, are 'dead' he said. Our civilization has therefore lost its common reference. Seeing the mobilization of 11 January, the members of the intellectual microcosm which had been somewhat shaken by this thesis of Houellebecq thought that it was invalidated by the gathering of all these French people behind the slogan "Je suis Charlie", and therefore behind Voltaire and Rousseau.
It was a little fast. After the euphoria, they still realized the fragility of this idea that the common sense that guides us could be identified with Charlie Hebdo. It is a demonstration by the absurd of the emptiness of our society to say that what we have left of common values comes down to a satirical newspaper.
To what extent did the slogan "Je suis Charlie" contribute to maintain the vagueness on what mobilized the French? Can we say that he screened off certain questions that cross society?
Vincent Tournier: I'm not sure that everyone, especially young people, understood what Charlie Hebdo was. The following anecdote was told to me by a teacher who participated in one of the first gatherings, on January 7th. As she left the gathering, she heard a young girl saying on her phone: "I don't know what's going on, I think someone named Charlie got killed". In reality, Charlie was a peripheral, marginal newspaper, no doubt trivialized by the ambient media derision. And yet, he was truly unique. For many people, therefore, the attack on Charlie boils down to an attack on freedom of the press in general. But by situating the debate at this level of generality, we drown the fish. We forget that the heart of the subject is indeed the criticism of religions, which we note that it has paradoxically become absent from the traditional media. And that is where the heart of the problem lies. Of course, Charlie Hebdo's traditional targets, which range broadly from Catholics to the far right, are far from fans of the paper. But the problem is not there. We can clearly see that we are witnessing a fracture on the very question of the sacred: on the one hand, a French society which has become deeply secularized, and has been for a very long time; and on the other, populations resulting from immigration who, on the contrary, are experiencing a considerable revival of religiosity. In short, the sacred disappears in some and becomes omnipresent in others. If it's not a clash of civilizations, it looks like it. However, the causes of this revival of religiosity are not found only in France: we are dealing with a global dynamic, as shown by the anti-Charlie demonstrations which are multiplying almost everywhere in the world.
Guillaume de Premare: This slogan created a Pavlovian reflex. Coming from social networks, it was picked up by the media, then found everywhere in our daily lives: above highways, on municipal billboards, on all the walls... We were close to Orwellian delirium ! This wave has now passed, because we realized that we had to find something much more solid than "Je suis Charlie" to rebuild common sense. It was then that the notions of the Republic and secularism came to the fore. Houellebecq tells us that there can be no society without religion, and that if ours is collapsing it is because it no longer has any. The political class therefore urgently wants to restore a meaning and a religion to France, like Claude Bartolone who declared: "There is a supreme religion: it is the religion of the Republic", or even Rama Yade, for whom "the Republic must reconnect with its spiritual vocation and once again become a messianism, with what is transgressive, collective, disciplined, demanding and moral." As Patrice de Plunkett wrote, “this is the definition of a disturbing regime; and if Rama had written "virtuous" instead of "moral", it would squarely be a return to the Incorruptible", that is to say, to Robespierre. The journalist René Poujol reacted to this ultra-secularism by asking himself: "Does secularism today require, in order to survive, the solemn proclamation of a State atheism and [...] of combat?"
>> Also read Rama Yade's interview about the need to recreate a national feeling "After 40 years spent prohibiting them from standing out, we cannot ask Muslims today to oppose the attacks"
By focusing their discourse on secularism, and by restoring their republican image in passing, have the politicians therefore missed the problem?
Vincent Tournier: Forgive me, but I am not sure that secularism was at the center of the discussions, except in the form of a very general incantation, and that is precisely the whole problem. It seems to me that the seriousness of the problems should lead to a much broader debate, starting with this question: isn't it time to review everything, to completely overhaul our secular pact? The 1905 law is more than a century old. We will commemorate his hundred and tenth birthday at the end of the year. However, French society has changed profoundly. Catholicism is no longer a threat to the Republic. But Islamism yes. The problems are multiplying and the legislative framework that was designed to fight against the Catholic Church is clearly not suitable, whether at the university, in companies or in public services. The principal of a vocational high school told me recently that the problem is no longer the veil, but the dress code, since young girls now come fully covered, except for their hair. The 2004 law is silent on this point. Schools do not know how to respond, and everyone does as they want in their corner.
Should this situation be allowed to continue? At a pinch, we could: sometimes you have to know how to close your eyes, let things happen, even if it's not very comfortable for the actors in the field. But the problem is that, behind all this, there is a large-scale social and cultural divide.I recently heard on the radio an associative activist working in sensitive neighborhoods who denounced the abandonment by the Republic of populations with an immigrant background. This is a common argument, but which seems to me both questionable and hemiplegic. Questionable because the institutions of the French Republic always have the ambition to leave no one on the side of the road; schools operate everywhere with the same means, even with additional means in these difficult areas. Secondly, hemiplegic because it amounts to refusing to see the other side of the mirror, namely that, when schools or social centers are burnt down, when civil servants (and not only police officers) are prevented from doing their job or to enter certain territories, it is not the Republic which abandons populations, it is populations which manifest their desire to abandon the Republic. Faced with such a situation, the response should not be content with a simple reminder of the main principles. Let us remember all the same that the law of 1905 is part of a vast legislative paraphernalia, in which we find the law of 1901 which regulates religious associations and the law of 1904 which prohibits congregations from teaching, not to mention all the others. provisions adopted in the 1880s and which today could safely be called Christianophobic.To pass off the 1905 law as a liberal and tolerant law is to have a simplified vision of history, to say the least.
Guillaume de Premare: Secularism, as it is expressed today by a large part of the political class and the media, takes an almost religious turn. Will common sense accept that secularism is thus redefined as a transcendence? That in his name, the public authorities adopt an extremely rigid attitude? Above all religions, would the republican religion be placed, which would be the only one to have citizenship in the public space, confining the others to the private space?
Beyond that, it is everyone's conscience, parental education that are called into question by this vision of totalitarian tendency of secularism. What these political leaders propose is in a way the republican religion to which the Montagnards aspired during the Revolution. In this idea, the Republic is no longer simply a form of government accepted by the greatest number, but a mystique, a religion which imposes itself on all and which does not tolerate any deviation.
François Hollande, Manuel Valls, the rector of the Paris Mosque, Luc Besson… All insisted on the fact that the Muslims of France were the first victims of the attacks. By insisting on the need to fight against Islamophobia, did their discourse not have a counter-productive effect? Basically, isn't the reinforcement of a feeling of victimization within the French and world Muslim community what the Islamists want?
Vincent Tournier: This is a question that is so obvious that no one dares to ask it: why such insistence on the idea that Muslims are the first victims?Why such a need to twist reality so strongly that it ends up becoming insulting to the real victims? Why, for example, did the media and politicians go to such lengths to highlight the Muslim identity of the policeman who was killed outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo? As far as I know, this policeman was not killed because he was a Muslim, but because he was a policeman. And that I also know, in a secular country, the President of the Republic is not authorized to know the religion of a civil servant.
As a result, this insistence causes discomfort. It's a bit like saying: the Corsicans were the first victims of the attacks committed in Corsica, or the Catholics were the first victims of the Inquisition, which is not false on a strictly factual level but leads to take all their meaning from such events. I would add that, in the heyday of the attacks in Corsica, the State had much less scruple in saying that there was a "Corsican problem". And no intellectual or militant then endeavored to denounce a possible "corsophobia", even though the cartoonists gave themselves to their heart's content to denounce the supposed archaism of this population.
With Islam, the problem presents itself very differently. We can clearly see the cause: we are still living under the weight of the double trauma of Collaboration and colonization. The main enemy can only come from the extreme right and the Islamophobic camp. By a strange chance of the calendar, it was exactly the speech which unfolded without scruple just before the attacks, including the very morning of this famous January 7th. The enemy was clearly designated: it is the extreme right and the reactionary intellectuals. It was easy to neutralize him: just get rid of Zemmour, Finkielkraut and Houellebecq, so that everything goes for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The attacks against Charlie Hebdo disrupted this well-oiled reading grid: why the hell didn't they attack Minutes or Current Values? The hypothesis that the killers took the wrong target was even surreptitiously mentioned by Laurent Joffrin in Liberation. The amazement was such that it left speechless. But very quickly, the natural returned at a gallop. The traditional explanatory framework has taken over to avoid facing too painful a reality. Reality is so displeasing that it is better to evacuate it, transform it, exorcise it. The conditioning has become too powerful. This is why, personally, I am rather pessimistic about our collective ability to make the right diagnoses.
Guillaume de Premare: All that is communitarianization and victimization of Muslims in France goes in the direction of what the Islamists are looking for. The message delivered by François Hollande is incredibly ambiguous: on the one hand, it fuels this victimization and de facto reinforces communitization, on the other, it honors absolute freedom of expression, which allows blasphemy and insult and therefore accelerates the cultural divide with Muslims, which contributes to degrading the idea of national community. Freedom of the press is essential, however I do not believe that insult should be placed at the top of the pyramid of freedom of expression. When the pope says that one cannot insult religions in this way, but that one cannot kill in their name either, he is only calling people to common sense.
In Marseille, which is a city with a strong cultural mix, the mobilization under the banner "Je suis Charlie" was not as strong as elsewhere. Have we deluded ourselves into thinking that all of France "was Charlie"?
Guillaume de Premare: In the heat of the action of the large gatherings of January 11, the organizers thought to maintain the illusion, then they gradually woke up, in particular because of these minutes of silence which were not respected in schools and administrations. They have realized this discrepancy, and in response they are proposing secularism in its most aggressive version.
Raphael Liogier: In Marseille, some minutes of silence were not respected in schools. However, almost all Muslims in France are for freedom of expression, that is to say that they accept the rules that are essential in French society. Incidentally, during the first cartoon affair, when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad in 2005, which were later taken up by Charlie Hebdo, a petition was signed by thousands of Muslims in Denmark and elsewhere of Europe to defend freedom of expression. Certainly, they did not find these caricatures funny, they even found them open to criticism, but they considered themselves happy to live in a society allowing them to express themselves freely. It is this logic which consists in saying that we have the right to criticize Charlie Hebdo, but that at the same time this newspaper has the right to do what it does.We can consider that it is indeed a blasphemy, without wanting to prohibit it. Catholics may consider some cartoons to be blasphemy, however most of them are also committed to freedom of expression.
On the other hand, many Muslims have the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that today this freedom of expression is variable. Their feeling is that they are more targeted than the others. On this subject they are not entirely wrong, insofar as we have witnessed a dramatization of the Islamization of Europe and the West, which has had the effect of generating laws which, de facto, related only to Muslims. They never asked for halal food to be imposed in canteens: this was done to anticipate this Islamization which does not exist. Same for the headscarf, the fact that a young woman wants to wear it is not the symptom of a war. A halal grocery store is not a way to impose yourself on society. And if the mosques were bigger, the street prayers that so terrified Marine Le Pen would not exist.
Muslims have the annoying impression of systematically finding themselves in the crosshairs, while the jihadism that has emerged is not the product of communitarianism, since it does not come from a population that has had a theological education, population which therefore did not go through Islam.The individuals in question are social cases who were separated from their community and met other individuals who made them believe that they could be heroes. These people are not the problem of the Muslims, but the latter suspect that we are trying to accuse them. By dint of saying that Islam is the problem, there is no more room to say that Muslims, in their vast majority, are for freedom of expression.
Furthermore, to what extent does the front page of Charlie Hebdo contribute to increasing this mismatch between public authorities and reality?
Guillaume de Premare: Of course, it increases this lag. Especially since this front page has become the supreme symbol. When Manuel Valls ostensibly shows it to the whole world at the exit of the Elysée, he shows recklessness and irresponsibility.
Some believe that François Hollande and Manuel Valls acted with a great sense of responsibility; I think exactly the opposite. No one asked Manuel Valls to ban the front page of Charlie Hebdo, but no one asked him to advertise it either as if it were the symbol of France. We are governed by irresponsible people who give the impression that they want to force people to accept the idea that Charlie Hebdo is the symbol of freedom of expression. This fuels tensions and violence in the world.
Raphael Liogier: The front page of Charlie Hebdo doesn't bother me. Its members have been attacked for making use of this freedom of expression. I am shocked by the ignominy of this attack, and by the fact that we are trying to gag freedom of expression. But quite logically, Muslims do not like people to speak for them, or to have people speak on their behalf who do not really represent them, such as Imam Chalghoumi. As a result, the feeling develops that a plot aims to prevent them from expressing themselves.
What reflections and responses does this situation call for?
Guillaume de Premare: The site is educational and cultural. At school, he does not go through incantations on secularism such as Najat Vallaud-Belkacem envisions, but through the opposite of what has been done so far, that is to say: a real transmission of basic knowledge, and teaching of French history and culture. It is carnal France that must be loved first and not the abstraction of a pure and hard secularism. It is therefore necessary to reform the school in reverse of what has been done in recent decades by the pedagogism which leads to a cultural decomposition.
The level of ignorance is flagrant:it is amazing that churches are burned in Niger, because neither Christianity nor France can be assimilated to Charlie Hebdo. On both sides, we are witnessing an escalation, a "shock of lack of culture", in the words of François-Xavier Bellamy. I think we are getting closer to the realization of what Alain Finkielkraut prophesied, who wrote in 1987 in "The Defeat of Thought" that the cultural decomposition that was at work was going to give way "to the terrible face-to-face of the zombie and the fanatic". People who are neither in the void of meaning symbolized by the zombie, nor in fanaticism, observe, frightened, what is happening.
It is a global issue, at a time when Islamism is carrying out a project of political-religious war of conquest, including on our soil. This is different from the terrorism of Carlos, for example, which had as its main aim to exert pressure on the foreign policy of France. Today Islamism intends to recruit its fighters in France, on the breeding ground of a Muslim opinion increasingly separated from the national community. The government does not want to see this issue, worse: it provides responses that are against the grain and aggravate this separation.
Raphael Liogier: The problem is the injunction made to Muslims to show solidarity, because from the outset they are assimilated to potential accomplices, and that is what disgusts them. In these circumstances it is not surprising that some people are reluctant to associate themselves with the slogan "Je suis Charlie". The main solution would be to get out of this focus on Islam as such, and stick to the terrorists. It would suffice to apply secularism in the strict sense, without variable geometry. Because today a restrictive interpretation is made of Islam: it is not a question of submitting to the desiderata of Muslims, on the contrary, one must avoid fantasizing about what one believes to be their demands. Even the question of mixed or non-mixed pools can be negotiated, moreover it is a secondary question. The same applies to consultations with male gynecologists. A few people pose difficulties, but the majority do not ask to be yielded to. It is therefore not necessary to headline as Le Point did on "this Islam without embarrassment". Third Worldism left us with a politicized vision of Islam, but that is no longer a reality today. However, I understand that one can be afraid of political Islam. There is international terrorism on our soil, and certain minority attitudes can be considered sexist, for example. Therefore, it is legitimate to be suspicious. But as soon as we examine the question in detail, going beyond appearances, we realize that the reality is quite different: the Muslim world is divided, and it does not have the global project that some attribute to him.
Interview by Gilles Boutin
source: Atlantico.fr
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