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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
In the wake of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015, millions took to the streets to demonstrate their revulsion, expressing a desire to reaffirm the ideals of the French Republic: liberté, égalité, fraternité. But who were the millions of demonstrators who were suddenly united under the single cry of 'Je suis Charlie'? In this probing new book, Emmanuel Todd investigates the cartography and sociology of the three to four million who marched in Paris and across France and draws some unsettling conclusions. For while they claimed to support liberal, republican values, the real middle classes who marched on that day of indignant protest also had a quite different programme in mind, one that was far removed from their proclaimed ideal. Their deep values were in fact more reminiscent of the most depressing aspects of France's national history: conservatism, selfishness, domination and inequality. By identifying the anthropological, religious, economic and political forces that brought France to the edge of the abyss, Todd reveals the real dangers posed to all western societies when the interests of privileged middle classes work against marginalised and immigrant groups. Should we really continue to mistreat young people, force the children of immigrants to live on the outskirts of our cities, consign the poorer classes to the remoter parts of the country, demonise Islam, and allow the growth of an ever more menacing anti-Semitism? While asking uncomfortable questions and offering no easy solutions, Todd points to the difficult and uncertain path that might lead to an accommodation with Islam rather than a deepening and divisive confrontation.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
1 A Religious Crisis
The terminal crisis in Catholicism
Religious decline and the rise of xenophobia
Catholic France and secular France: 1750–1960
The two Frances and equality
From the One God to the single currency
François Hollande, the left and zombie Catholicism
2005: a missed opportunity in class struggle?
Difficult atheism
Notes
2 Charlie
Charlie: middle-class and zombie Catholics
Neo-republicanism
1992–2015: from pro-Europeanism to neo-republicanism
The neo-republican reality: the ‘social state’ of the middle classes
Charlie is anxious
Secularism versus the left
Catholicism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism
Notes
3 When Equality Fails
The difficulties of secular, egalitarian France
The anthropology of a capitalism in crisis
The Europe of inequality
France, the Germans and the Arabs
Germany and circumcision
The great pro-European happening of 11 January 2015
Russia: an exceptional case
The mystery of Paris
The memory of places
The four stages of the crisis
Notes
4 The French of the Far Right
The slow march of the National Front towards la France centrale
A perversion of universalism
Republican anti-Semitism
Le Pen, Sarkozy and equality
The Socialist Party and inequality: the concept of objective xenophobia
Mélenchon and inequality
The insignificance of human beings and the violence of ideologies
Notes
5 The French Muslims
The disintegration of North African cultures
Mixed marriages: Jews and Muslims
Ideologues and exogamy
The crushing of young people and the jihad factory
Scottish fundamentalism
Moving beyond the fear of religion
Islam and equality
The inequality of the sexes
The anti-Semitism of the suburbs
Notes
Conclusion
The real republican past
The neo-republican present
Future 1: confrontation
Future 2: the return to the Republic: an accommodation with Islam
A foreseeable deterioration
The secret weapon of the republican revival
Notes
Index
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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For my father
Who is Charlie?
Xenophobia and the New Middle Class
Emmanuel Todd
Maps and diagrams by Philippe Laforgue
Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
First published in French as Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse, © Éditions du Seuil, 2015This English edition © Polity Press, 2015
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0581-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Todd, Emmanuel, 1951- author.[Qui est Charlie? English]Who is Charlie? xenophobia and the new middle class / Emmanuel Todd. -- English edition.pages cmFrench edition published: Paris : Seuil, [2015] under title, Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-5095-0577-7 (Hardback)1. Xenophobia--France. 2. Social classes--France. 3. Religion and social status--France. 4. Religion and sociology--France. 5. Social problems--France. 6. Islamaphobia--France. 7. France--Social conditions--1995- I. Title.HN440.S62T6313 2015306.440944--dc23
2015022107
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
And all must love the human form,In heathen, Turk, or Jew;Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwellThere God is dwelling too.
William Blake, ‘The Divine Image’, 1789
Preface to the English Edition
In all Western societies, a Charlie lies slumbering. In all of these societies, a dominant social stratum, a middle class reaping the benefits of globalization, and comprising the highly educated and the well-off as well as the elderly, is ready to defend its privileges and, above all, its sense of moral superiority, against the excluded – indigenous workers and the children of immigrants. In all of them, the extending of higher education has dissolved the homogeneous body of citizens, and freedom of trade has led to increasing wage inequality. In all of them, liberal democracy is gradually changing into an oligarchical system that restricts real citizenship to just half the population at most. In all of them, this privileged body of active citizens is anxious, feverish, gnawed by an ever-increasing economic uncertainty, by the vacuum of a culture that has replaced religious values with the values of the stock exchange or a monetary idol. Everywhere, Charlie rules, but he does not know where he is going. Even though he consciously claims to be following positive universal values, he is unconsciously on the lookout for a scapegoat. Everywhere, xenophobia, until recently a characteristic of the poorer sections of society, is starting to pervade the upper half of the social structure, generating a long-term oscillation between Islamophobia and Russophobia.
As a result, in all Western societies, a fit of ‘French-style’ collective hysteria is possible if a senseless act of terrorism suddenly brings the ‘universal’ Charlie back to the reality of the unjust and violent world that he dominates and condones.
This book has been written by a Frenchman exasperated by his own society. He has no sympathy for a France that idiotically thinks of itself as the heir to the Great Revolution of 1789, to the values of liberty and equality, to the idea of the universal human being, at the very same time as the behaviour of its ruling classes is in practice unequal and anti-liberal, more reminiscent of the darkest hours in French history, the periods of the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy Regime. There is no naively idealistic Islamophilia in this book. While it argues in favour of an accommodation with Islam, it also points to the evidence of a real anti-Semitism spreading among many young people of Arab origin in the French suburbs. It takes apart the infernal machinery that leads from a decaying or ‘zombie’ Catholicism to Islamophobia, and then from a decaying Islam towards anti-Semitism. It also suggests that, if things continue this way, anti-Semitism will return to its source, the middle classes, and in an even more dangerous form. But not just in France. It would be a ridiculous mistake to believe that the author views France as particularly affected by all these regressive developments, and thinks that his own country is particularly despicable or bears a special guilt. France is just a typical example. Things could be more or less serious in other countries, depending on whether their anthropological roots are egalitarian or inegalitarian, and whether their religious past is Catholic or Protestant.
My analysis is based on the anthropology of family structures and the sociology of religions: these make it possible to reach beyond the universality of regressive phenomena to grasp the diversity of Western reactions. A study of what is happening in France is essential, not because this is an extreme case, but because the anthropological and religious duality of France means we can observe differences in behaviour between its central regions (where there is equality on the family level and a deep-rooted attachment to secular values), and its peripheral regions (where inequality and zombie Catholicism are the rule). The diversity of France opens up the possibility of a nuanced approach to the Western world: diverse family structures and values explain the specific temperaments of the Anglo-American, Germanic and Latin worlds. The downward slide of the French system is just one example of the disarray of the Western and, more precisely, the European system. In a final act of modesty, I locate the epicentre of European Islamophobia outside France, as the reader will see: it lies in a world that was once originally Protestant, and more particularly Lutheran, one that has inherited, with dire consequences, the inegalitarian concept of predestination. This claim has not been inspired by any Catholic sense of resentment, as the author’s origins are not exactly Catholic.
I was impelled to open my discussion by quoting the last stanza of a poem by William Blake: both for what it has to say about the human and the divine, and also because reading Blake has always given me renewed courage. I insisted on this stanza appearing in English in the original French version of this book, as I wanted to try to remind the French that they are not the only people in the world.
Introduction
We can now say, with the benefit of hindsight, that in January 2015 France succumbed to an attack of hysteria. The massacre of the editorial board of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, as well as of several police officers and the customers of a Jewish shop, triggered a collective reaction unprecedented in our country’s history. It would have been impossible to discuss it in the heat of the moment. The media joined hands to denounce terrorism, to celebrate the admirable character of the French people, and to sacralize liberty and the French Republic. Charlie Hebdo and its caricatures of Muhammad were enshrined. The government announced that it was giving a grant to the weekly so that it could get back on its feet. Crowds of people followed the government’s appeal to march in protest throughout the land: they held pencils to symbolize press freedom and applauded the state security police and the marksmen posted on the rooftops. The logo ‘Je suis Charlie’ (‘I am Charlie’), written in white letters against a black background, could be seen everywhere: on our screens, in the streets, on restaurant menus. Children came home from school with a letter C written on their hands. Kids aged seven and eight were interviewed at the school gates and asked for their thoughts on the horror of the events and the importance of one’s freedom to draw caricatures. The government decreed that anyone who failed to toe the line would be punished. Any secondary school pupil who refused to observe the minute’s silence imposed by the government was seen as implicitly supporting terrorism and refusing to stand in solidarity with the national community. At the end of January, we learned that some adults had started to behave in the most incredibly repressive ways: children of eight or nine years of age were being questioned by the police. It was a sudden glimpse of totalitarianism.
The TV channels and the press told us over and over again that we were living through a ‘historic’ moment of communion: ‘We are one people, France is united in adversity, born anew by and for liberty.’ The obsession with Islam was of course ubiquitous. Not only did political journalists listen to imams and ordinary French Muslims telling them, as did everybody else, that violence was unacceptable, that the terrorists were odious and had betrayed their religion. Journalists demanded of these Muslims, as they demanded of all of us, the incantation of the ritual formula ‘I am Charlie’, which became a synonym for ‘I am French’. If they were to be fully accepted as part of the French community, they needed to admit that blasphemy, in the form of caricatures of Muhammad, was an integral element of French identity. It was their duty to blaspheme. On our TV screens, journalists wagged a professorial finger as they explained the difference between an act inciting racial hatred (bad), on the one hand, and religious blasphemy (good), on the other. I found it really hard to have to listen to Jamel Debbouze, a central figure in French culture,1 being forced to undergo this ordeal when he was interviewed on the TF1 TV channel. He wanted to state that he was a Muslim, that he felt a sense of loyalty to the young people in the suburbs, that he loved France, that he had a non-Muslim wife, that his children had been born from a mixed marriage and that they were the France of tomorrow. He tried to explain to his inquisitor, courteously and painfully, that blasphemy was difficult for a Muslim, that it was not part of his tradition. This was not enough: to be French meant not that you had the right to blaspheme, but that it was your duty. Thus spake Voltaire. I could not fail to remember what I had read about the Inquisition, which interrogated Jews who had converted to Christianity in an attempt to make sure they really did eat pork, like all true Christians.
The relaunch of Charlie Hebdo with a state subsidy marked the zenith of the national reaction to the drama. Its cover yet again allowed us to admire Muhammad, with a face as long as a penis, wearing a turban from which hung two round shapes like testicles. This elegant figure had been drawn on a green background – the colour of Islam – but it was a dull, insipid green, far from the extraordinarily beautiful and subtle greens that adorn Muslim places of worship.2
Any historian who studies long-term trends (la longue durée) and is familiar with religious crises, when iconophiles and iconoclasts fought it out, cannot fail to observe that when the French state turns an image of Muhammad depicted as a prick into a sacred image, this constitutes a historic turning-point. France really is going through a religious crisis, one that follows all the religious crises that have given shape to its history, and to European history as a whole, ever since the last days of the Roman Empire. So we can, for once, follow the media in describing the 11 January street demonstrations as ‘historic’ – a description that was intense, repetitive, obsessive, incantatory; in short: religious.
At that time, I refused to take part in any interviews and debates on the crisis.
And yet I had not hesitated to express my opinion in 2005, when the suburbs erupted into rebellion: I stated that the young people setting cars on fire all over the place were absolutely French. Their acts were strictly speaking criminal, but in my view merely expressed a demand for equality, one of the two fundamental French values. I also emphasized the admirable restraint of the French police, who did not open fire on these kids from the suburbs any more than they had started shooting at the middle-class youngsters in May 1968. In 2005, France was tolerant and free, in spite of the reactions that were naturally and deservedly hostile to the disorder. It was useful to say what one felt. Neither the government, nor journalists, nor society as a whole had succumbed to panic. There was no trace of hysteria to be seen. In 2005, we, the French people, were admirable. We kept our emotions to ourselves. The fear felt by elderly people was silent and led, without any immediate threat to the freedom of expression, to Nicolas Sarkozy’s election as president in 2007. The average age of his electorate was higher than for all the right-wing presidents who had preceded him.
But in January 2015, a critical analysis would not have gained a hearing. How could anyone have claimed that this mass mobilization, far from being ‘admirable’, showed a lack of sang-froid and, in a word, a lack of dignity under pressure? Or that condemning the terrorist act in no way implied that you were divinizing Charlie Hebdo? Or that the right to blaspheme against your own religion should not be confused with the right to blaspheme against someone else’s religion, especially in the fraught socioeconomic context of contemporary French society: repetitive and systematic blasphemy against Muhammad, the central character in the religion of a group that is weak and discriminated against, should – whatever the law courts have to say – be treated as an incitement to religious, ethnic or racial hatred.
How could anyone oppose virtuous ignorance on the march, or dare to state that these demonstrators, with their pencils as symbols of liberty, were insulting history, since, in the anti-Semitic and Nazi sequence of events, caricatures of dark-skinned, hook-nosed Jews had led to physical violence? How could anyone explain calmly, taking their time to argue their case, that the most urgent thing for French society in 2015 was not an investigation of Islam but an analysis of how it had become paralysed? How could anyone show that the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly were indeed French, the products of French society, and that the use of Islamic symbols does not inevitably turn those who resort to them into real Muslims? Or that these men were merely the mirror image, a pathological reflection, of the moral mediocrity of our elected leaders, more intent on ensuring they get their maximum pension than on freeing young people from the exploitation inherent in the low wages they are paid or the way they are marginalized by unemployment?
How was it possible, in the heat of the moment, to suggest that François Hollande, by deciding to call for a mass demonstration, risked glorifying the Kouachi brothers, conferring an ideological meaning on an act that should have been given its true and lesser worth by a psychiatric-style interpretation? After all, madness, as a loss of contact with reality, needs the ordinary forms of social symbolism: schizophrenics imagine they are Napoleon or Jesus, paranoiacs think they are being penetrated by the sun or persecuted by the state. It would have been possible to view the action of the Kouachi brothers with a certain disdain, thereby weakening its meaning. This kind of approach did not, of course, rule out a sociology of the psychosis of Islamism in France. But such an approach was rejected. Instead, we had the dubious privilege of seeing the authorities endow the problem with a negative sacred aura, and this entailed an aggravation of the religious tensions in our society and in our relations with the rest of the world. This had been Bush’s choice in 2001, albeit on the basis of much more serious events. Were the 17 people who died on 7 January really the equivalent of the 2,977 who died in the World Trade Center? Even more than an America so often mocked for its emotional excesses, France overreacted. What had happened on 11 January 2015 to the rational, ironic, witty cast of mind associated with France?
How can people be persuaded to admit that France, as a whole, in its middle classes and not just on its margins, is going through a crisis that is no longer just economic but also religious, or quasi-religious, because the country no longer knows where it is going? The problem of French society cannot be reduced to the suburbs ravaged by the rise of Islamic terrorism: it is much more far-reaching. The focus on Islam actually reveals a pathological need among the middle and upper strata to hate something or someone, and not just the fear of a threat arising from the lower depths of society, even if the number of young jihadists heading off to Syria or Iraq also deserves sociological analysis. Xenophobia used to be confined to the poorer sections of society, but these days it is moving up to the top of the social structure. The middle and upper classes are seeking their scapegoat.
And then there was the disturbing way that the commentaries underplayed the anti-Semitic dimension of the event, even though it came after the killings in Brussels in May 2014 and Toulouse in March 2012. The real question for France is not the right to caricature, but the rise of anti-Semitism in the suburbs. Racism is spreading towards the top and the bottom of the social structure at the same time.
Too many complex, paradoxical, counterintuitive things needed to be explained. It was impossible, in January 2015, to venture such an explanation at a time of national and republican self-celebration. Throughout that period, the state sent its police vans and armed soldiers across France, meticulously positioning them in places where there was absolutely no risk. The new terrorism does not strike blindly; it chooses its targets: blaspheming Islamophobes, police officers, practising Jews. Three guards posted in the right place could probably have prevented the killings at Charlie Hebdo, whose offices had long since been labelled a target by Islamic terrorists. The Interior Minister, who had failed in his task, nonetheless strutted around without attracting any criticism. In short, everything about the way the state behaved in January 2015 was rather ridiculous, but anyone who pointed this out would have been seen, given the unanimous atmosphere of the time, as offering support to terrorism.
I also remember that I greeted the news of a lorry drivers’ strike as the first signal of a return to reality, a proof that the France everyone envies had survived – the individualistic and egalitarian France that does not take orders from above.
I don’t regret having waited. What a researcher can usefully contribute to the public debate is not a purer morality or a better-quality ideology, but an objective interpretation of facts that have escaped the notice of those who actually took part in the events, who were swept away by emotion, impelled by often obscure or downright unconscious emotions. And the ‘I am Charlie’ of those weeks, whether it expressed the real will of the masses or was a piece of pure media tactics, was, at the heart of our post-industrial society, an emblematic demonstration of false consciousness.
The 11 January demonstrations were interpreted as the re-emergence of a united, resolute France. The Republic reaffirmed its values, with as many images of Marianne as were necessary. Strength, grandeur, rebirth: you could not fail to sense the aspiration to a collective identity, a rise in national feeling, here defining itself as against religious intolerance. The crowds of 11 January were far from being unlikeable, of course. They were marching on behalf of a respect for liberty, with a scattering of flags of every nation, stating loud and clear the difference between radical Islam, which was rejected, and ordinary Islam, accepted just as much as Catholicism if it respected the French principle of secularism. However, the demonstrations did not mention equality. The exclusion of the National Front gave a particular stamp to the event, which was now ‘guaranteed 100 per cent non-xenophobic’. The demonstrations were peaceful and well behaved. Also, it was difficult to get those taking part to provide any precise justifications for their presence in the crowd. The main feeling was the need to ‘stand together’ after the horror, to affirm a few basic ‘values’.
So it would be wrong to imagine that the crowds of 11 January were essentially like-minded in the same way that the unanimous media were. Hard-line secularists of the kind who gobble down priests, rabbis and imams for breakfast marched alongside the many more numerous people who justified their presence as showing a general support for freedom of expression and the need to defend an ideal of tolerance. Several discussions convinced me that, in the days after the ‘republican march’, tens of thousands of participants definitely, and perhaps even hundreds of thousands, wondered what they had really done, or condoned, by joining the march on that day. Many of them experienced the ‘I am Charlie’ event as an episode in which they were alienated in and by the thoughts of others, suffered a temporary depersonalization and ended up with an ideological hangover that shortly led to the memory of the whole thing being consigned to the file labelled ‘Very Bad Trips’.
But we are still only at the conscious, explicit level here. We need to dig deeper and inquire into the sociological factors that led these crowds to gather in a state of spiritual communion.
There was a part of France that was not there on 11 January, and the part that was there, anxious to pass itself off as the whole, was neither as sure of its values nor as generous of spirit. The poorer sectors of the population were not Charlie; the young people from the suburbs, whether Muslim or not, were not Charlie; the provincial working classes were not Charlie. On the other hand, the France of the upper-middle classes was out in superior force, as it were, and on that day it showed that it was able to take the middle strata of French society along with it thanks to the way it could express its emotions. And yet even today the French middle classes, far from being the bearers of the ‘positive values of the nation’, are fundamentally selfish, autistic and repressive in mood. They have even abandoned the principle of equality. And they are often, as we shall see, closer to the old Catholic bedrock of France than to the tradition of secularism. In short, they may be the France of today, but they are definitely not the France of the revolutionary tradition.
At this point, the Marxist concept of false consciousness and the Freudian notion of the unconscious spring to mind. In particular, we need to return to Émile Durkheim’s definition of sociology: this discipline, he says, starts to be a science when it accepts that human beings are sometimes driven by social forces that transcend them. Their conscious interpretation of their actions is not always correct. This is why the founding text of modern sociology, Durkheim’s Suicide, begins by rejecting the explanations that some people who commit suicide leave behind them and the reasons given by the officials who register their deaths. Instead, Durkheim seeks the meaning, or rather meanings, of this phenomenon in the objective statistical distribution of acts of suicide – in time, in space, and according to family situation and religion. This is exactly what we need to do if we are to grasp the ‘I am Charlie’ phenomenon. This approach means we will leave out the demonstrators who were often unable to give any real explanation for what they were doing there, and we will ignore the political journalists who assumed the task of giving us ‘the meaning behind it all’, and were swept away by the copycat intoxication of an overcrowded media field.
We must not go too far in absolving people because they were unconscious of what was driving them, however. We have also had to deal with cowardice and cynicism. The politicians consciously exploited the event to try to escape from their unpopularity, and many journalists deliberately neglected their critical duties. As for the crowds, which were admittedly made up of many different elements, uncertain and likeable as they were, we cannot absolve them straightaway just because they were not conscious of their motives. Ignorance of the law is no excuse; there is no excuse for not knowing why you are demonstrating. France is lying to itself. Often, France thinks that it is great when it is in fact petty, but sometimes it says it is great when it knows that it is petty. This book is also an essay on lying. Charlie – an impostor?
Who, socially speaking, were the demonstrators? Where did they come from? Answering these two simple questions will enable us to identify the France that took to the streets on 11 January and to recognize in it an old enemy, one that is becoming radicalized and in its own way fundamentalist.
So the time has come to take the events of January 2015 seriously – but we will do this by focusing not on the massacre of Wednesday 7 January, but the exaggerated reaction of French society. The main demonstrations, on Sunday 11 January, gave rise to hasty estimates of the numbers attending: these were probably exaggerated and not always compatible, but they can at least be treated statistically. Between 3 and 4 million demonstrators means between 4.5 and 6 per cent of the French population. The presence of children at these marches debars us from taking these overall figures as representing adults alone. But they can legitimately be seen as including citizens from the 85 biggest urban areas, which gives a very high rate of participation, between 7 and 10 per cent. The demonstrations (taken in their collective sense, including Paris and the provinces) thus spontaneously established themselves, so to speak, as an object for sociological study. So a cartography of these demonstrations will show us what exactly they were.
I have on three occasions carried out a cartographical analysis of French society, in 1981, 1988 and 2011, and when I looked at the map published in Libération on 12 January, I immediately felt that the distribution of emotion across French territory was not uniform and that the appropriate statistical treatment could tell us what social and religious, or crypto-religious, forces had brought so many people out onto the streets. Is it not absolutely dumbfounding that estimates rushed out the day after the demonstrations could produce correlations that are, from the point of view of statistical theory, highly significant? Irrespective of this, the unanimity so loudly trumpeted by the media is a fiction. This should not come as a disappointment, and we ought not to draw the conclusion that it was an illusion that has left nothing in its wake. Quite the contrary. Understanding how part of society was able to impose a false image of reality on the population as a whole is to lay bare the reality of our social system. Thus it is that the demonstrations of 11 January, that moment of collective hysteria, present us with a fantastic tool for understanding the mechanisms of ideological and political power in current French society.
Several major surprises await us. For example, we shall see that the present debate on secularism has deviated from the tradition of secular values, and that forces that are now claiming to support the Republic are not in their essence republican: in short, Marianne is no longer the lovable woman we used to know. We will be seeing how the great French political system has seized up at its very heart; we will understand why the Socialist Party has put down anchor on the political right, and why the right is floating around in French waters without really knowing what it is. We shall seek to identify the powerful, efficacious and altogether despicable forces which have confined France to a straitjacket of political and economic policies that are destroying some of its population. We will have to admit that France is no longer France, but we will also have to wonder whether it has any chance of becoming itself again with – why not? – the help, one day in the distant future, of Islam and the electors of the National Front.
But before we start to think up possible remedies, we need to diagnose the illness that has caused the frets and fevers that afflict us. We need to know what kind of society could have brought between three and four million people out onto the streets to show their solidarity with a magazine identified with a caricature of Muhammad, one that specialized in stigmatizing a minority religion, Islam, and designating it as France’s number one problem.
