Where is the Charlie Hebdo spirit, 10 years on?
After the massacre, millions took to the streets and social media to say "Je Suis Charlie". Fewer would do so today.
On 7 January 2015, two masked men equipped with assault rifles drove to a quiet street in Paris. They were looking for the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly that had moved to an unmarked location when their previous HQ was bombed.
After first entering the wrong building, the gunmen found their target. In the lobby they killed a maintenance worker and forced a journalist, who was returning after picking up her daughter from day care, to enter the keypad code to the newsroom where an editorial meeting was underway.
Minutes later, another 11 people were dead, including Charlie Hebdo's editor, his police bodyguard, a well-known economist and cartoonists who were household names. Survivors heard the gunmen shouting "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad".
The attackers, who were eventually gunned down by police, were identified as French brothers of Algerian descent who had joined Al-Qaeda. Charlie Hebdo had been a target for Islamists and militants since the paper reprinted cartoons of the Prophet in 2006 – hence the (inadequate, it turned out) police protection and the unmarked premises.
The massacre is perhaps best remembered for the outpouring of support it triggered. In Paris alone, two million people rallied for free speech – the city had not seen such a crowd since Victor Hugo's funeral in 1885.
The slaughter of journalists shocked many foreigners. The next day I saw a queue of people at 6 a.m. outside an international newsagent in central London to show their support by buying Charlie Hebdo's special edition. Around the world, millions adopted the slogan "Je suis Charlie".
But as it emerged, not everyone – even in France – was Charlie. The huge march in Paris on the Sunday following the attack was not the moment of unity it purported to be. The far-right National Front, which was already France's largest party, was not invited.
Moreover, few brown and black faces could be seen among the crowds. It was not just people of immigrant origin who failed to understand why those murders deserved particular attention. Many Catholic traditionalists struggled to regard leftists who had lampooned a faith as paragons of free expression.
In time a few dissident intellectuals joined the resistance to the Charlie spirit. Six months after the attack, I wrote an account of those debates for the Times Literary Supplement.
I focused on four books: two by pro-Charlie journalists and two by naysayers. Rereading my article, I felt it was worth reposting here. One reason is that the ideological forces feeding scepticism about the Charlie movement are stronger now than they were 10 years ago.
The left is no longer dominated by moderates steeped in France's Enlightenment tradition of secularist universalism but by identitarian multiculturalists. They may not all feel that Charlie Hebdo brought the attack on itself. But in their "oppressor v. oppressed" view of the world, the paper is not on the side of victims.
On the other side of spectrum, support for the far right and its allies has risen from a quarter to a third of the electorate. A presidential election held today would almost certainly crown the populist Marine le Pen.
Again, voting for her does not make you a Charlie sceptic – Le Pen did ask to join the march but was prevented from doing so. My point is that the sentiment behind the right-wing objections to the movement I mentioned in the article has grown over the past decade.
From that perspective, a provocative rag published by holdovers from the 1960s counter-culture and surviving on state handouts summarised everything that was wrong with France. Denunciations of progressive elites who claim to defend free speech while arresting people over social media posts are now routine on French radio and TV.
I believe that pro-Charlie mobilisation would be more muted today than it was then. This is why I want to make my own position clearer than I did in this article. In my attempt to be fair to the "Je ne suis pas Charlie" crowd, I was overly non-committal.
I never read Charlie Hebdo. It is not my cup of tea. But when journalists are killed for their work, I am Charlie. I do not understand those who reserve their grief for the rights martyrs and their outrage for the right issues – Islamobophia, state-subsidised radicalism, woke censorship.
Neither will I get used to the idea of a newspaper having to operate behind steel doors at a secret location surrounded by plain-clothed police at a secret location, as Charlie Hebdo does to this day.
"Death to Ruritanians", Times Literary Supplement, 21 August 2015 (I've made a few cuts in the version below to keep the word count down)
Review of:
- Caroline Fourest, Éloge du blasphème
- Daniel Schneidermann, On n'a pas fini de rire: Quelques mots à ma nouvelle famille
- Emmanuel Todd, Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d'une crise religieuse
- Serge Federbusch, La Marche des lemmings: La deuxième mort de Charlie Hebdo
The French are not given to outbursts of patriotic fervour. This makes the reaction to the carnage at Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket in January all the more extraordinary. More than four million people marched to honour the victims. For the first time since Armistice Day 1918, the Marseillaise was sung at the National Assembly. "Je suis Charlie" became the rallying cry of a nation seemingly united around the basic "republican" values of secularism, tolerance and free expression.
It soon emerged, however, that not everyone in France was Charlie. In areas with large Muslim populations, few mourned journalists who had insulted the Prophet. Many supporters of the far-right Front national (FN) also begged to differ. To them, the fact that the political establishment rallied in support of an obscenely offensive sheet run by holdovers from the 1960s epitomised everything that was wrong with the country.
In a way, the naysayers helped galvanise the "Je suis Charlie" mainstream. They could be dismissed as Islamists or fascists. Either way, they had no place in a modern, liberal country. The true people of France had to strike an even stronger blow for the République.
But as time went on, visceral reactions gave way to debate. It became acceptable to question the Charlie movement. Why did the killings unleash unprecedented emotion in country that is no stranger to terror? What did the magazine stand for? What did proclaiming "Je suis Charlie" or "Je ne suis pas Charlie" mean? The books under review approach those questions from a wide range of perspectives.
Caroline Fourest weighs in as a friend of Charlie Hebdo. She worked at the magazine when it reprinted the Danish drawings of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, and knew those who paid for that decision with their lives. She eloquently makes the classic case for freedom of expression: "To those who dislike blasphemy, let us restate that no one is forcing them to like it - or to buy Charlie Hebdo, draw Muhammad, or go and see plays mocking Jesus. But they cannot forbid others to think freely." She calls the marches "moments of intense communion" when the whole nation stuck up for that simple principle.
Éloge du blasphème is an impassioned defence of Fourest's fallen friends. The paper has been accused of Islamophobia - as part of the civil war on the French left between secularist traditionalists and multiculturalists. The charge resurfaced soon after the Paris attacks. But Fourest denies that Charlie Hebdo ever insulted Muslims. It had always portrayed Muhammad as dismayed by his violent followers ("It's tough being loved by idiots," a famous caption said). Who are the real Islamophobes, Fourest asks: the satirists or those who regard an attack on fanatics as an attack on Islam itself?
Fourest has no time for those who depict the murderers as victims - "monsters" created by the "fractures of our society," as one commentator put it. Muslims do suffer discrimination in France. But using this fact to explain the killers' actions sits oddly with the widely accepted notion that they were in no way representative of their community. To suggest that a broken childhood and marginalisation lead to murder is to present every struggling banlieue youth as a potential time bomb. The best refutation of this view comes from the brother of the Charlie Hebdo attackers: "My brothers cannot say they got there because they were orphans. I am one too, and I am not like them."
Fourest's other targets include journalists who lecture Charlie Hebdo about "responsibility". A week after the massacre a new cover featuring Muhammad was accused of sparking militant attacks against Christians in Nigeria. But, Fourest retorts, such atrocities "happen all year round at the slightest provocation and will continue with or without Charlie". News organisations, she argues, should be able to determine their own standards without being hectored about encouraging terror. But Fourest ignores her own advice by rounding on those, particularly in the British and US media, who have refused to show the cartoons. She regards "self-censorship, Anglo-Saxon style" as surrender to intimidation.
The basic problem with Fourest's combative book is that the right to blaspheme she defends morphs too easily into a duty to blaspheme. That was not the position taken by the marchers. They waved symbolic pens, not Muhammad drawings. In a way, Fourest is not best placed to make the case for free expression. Freedom of thought, as the saying goes, is freedom of the thought you hate. And Fourest loves Charlie Hebdo.
Daniel Schneidermann makes a more convincing advocate. A left-wing media watcher, he has been broadly sympathetic to the magazine but regarded the Muhammad cartoons as provocative. Yet when the killers struck there was no doubt in his mind: he was Charlie. On n'a pas fini de rire is a collection of articles written as debate unfolded over the followings weeks, followed by a more considered essay. The guiding thread is ambivalence, a refusal to wage old wars or fall back on familiar certainties. The attacks changed everything.
Schneidermann was now standing shoulder to shoulder with people he had previously denounced as reactionaries. He describes being "torn by absurd emotions" as he considers his new "Charlie friends". They include world leaders - some of them unlikely champions of freedom - who turned up in Paris on 11 January for a photo opportunity ahead of the main demonstration. In happier, pre-lapsarian times he would have inveighed against their hypocrisy. But he chooses to swallow his misgivings and rally behind them: "I don't think we have a choice."
Schneidermann is a conflicted Charlie, but not a half-hearted one. When an outcry erupts over the new Muhammad cover - said to include a hidden penis - he argues that both the furore and the paper's feeble denials are wide of the mark. "Even if they did it on purpose, in the name of what should we expect them to refrain? That's what they died for (...) I feel slightly ridiculous defending the inalienable right to draw a penis. I'm not saying I find this drawing funny. I'm not saying I approve of it. We have long gone beyond the stage of laughing or approving. All I am saying is that we do not currently have any choice but to defend that right."
On n'a pas fini de rire admirably captures the complexities of the "Je suis Charlie" movement. Emmanuel Todd, a social anthropologist with a zest for political argument, throws a much harsher light on it. France, he states at the outset in Qui est Charlie?, experienced a "totalitarian flash". Millions of marchers rushed "to proclaim the right to spit on the religion of the weak" as a national priority. Mass "hysteria" was whipped up by the government. Schoolchildren were forced to observe a minute's silence, with non-compliance treated as support for terrorism. Charlie Hebdo's subsidised relaunch, Todd writes, was a "historic turning point", as it marked "the sanctification by the French state of a image of Muhammad in the shape of a cock".
Liberal readers might be taken aback by such venom. But the book is more than a politically incorrect rant. It draws on decades of research to reveal the forces which Todd believes lie at the heart of January's patriotic spasm. In a previous book he divided France into two geographically-based cultural blocs: central and south-eastern areas where secularism and egalitarianism have always been strong; and peripheral, notably western, regions with a history of devotion to religion and hierarchy. These blocs have remained largely stable over time.
Todd wields an impressive array of scientific tools, from electoral maps to multiple linear regression, to show a correlation between mobilisation for Charlie Hebdo and the inegalitarian centre. Huge crowds turned up at the march in Lyon, a thriving city with a strong Catholic tradition. By contrast in godless, rabble-rousing Marseille - which sits at the heart of an area where the far-right has replaced once-dominant communists - turnout was low.
A key factor in the Charlie phenomenon, as Todd sees it, is "Zombie Catholicism", the scar left by the death of religion. The inegalitarian periphery is where Christianity collapsed last - in the 1960s. The elitist bent of the local culture was no longer held in check by the social conscience and universalist message of the Church. The resulting spiritual vacuum led the post-Christian bourgeoisie to stigmatize the poor despoiled by its policies. The fixation on Islam, Todd writes, reveals "a pathological need by the middle and upper classes to hate something or someone."
His conclusions are startling: the Charlie camp embodied the opposite of national unity around secularism and freedom. The authoritarian orphans of catholicism marched en masse to ram their reactionary values down the throats of the underprivileged. Todd admits that the anti-Charlie lot – poor migrants and struggling white workers - can be intolerant too, but they are the true heirs of France's egalitarian, revolutionary tradition.
Todd's strident tone and determination to take logic to contrarian extremes make him sound like a mad social scientist. At the same time, the boldness of his claims commands attention. No student of the Charlie marches can ignore his deeply unconventional book.
Serge Federbusch attacks the movement from a different but equally original perspective. He is a libertarian conservative - a rare breed in France, which makes his book, La Marche des lemmings, all the more intriguing. He starts by criticising Charlie Hebdo itself, noting that its mix of anticlericalism and bawdiness had become profoundly uncool. Cartoons of Pope Benedict sodomising a baby or the Virgin Mary raped by the Wise Men had lost their shock value. Only when Islam was targeted could the magazine reliably offend. With the Muhammad cartoons, Federbusch suggests, it was courting controversy in an attempt to recapture its lost mystique.
Some of the charges are overdone. He puts the worst possible interpretation on the official response, accusing President François Hollande of jumping on the Charlie bandwagon to shore up his popularity and divert attention from security failures. Equally uncharitably, Federbusch regards the marchers' unwillingness to name the enemy as radical Islam, and their focus on safe, far-right villains, as cowardice. He likens them to lemmings seeking safety in numbers rather than confront danger, neglecting what can just as easily be seen as a genuine desire to send an inclusive message.
Federbusch is at his most persuasive when he exposes some dubious upholders of liberty. This includes a government that helps keep newspapers afloat with subsidies worth about €1bn a year in the name of "the independence of the press". Despite its freewheeling pose, Charlie Hebdo was a ward of the state. Shortly before the attack, its owners had gone cap in hand to the Elysée Palace to secure extra help. The fact that few commentators saw anything odd about Mr Hollande joining the marchers to beat the drum of "free expression" highlights the cozy relationship between French officials and journalists.
The problem goes deeper than a dependent press. Just as the government was defending Charlie Hebdo's right to be outrageous, it was denying that right to the paper's critics. Dieudonné, an anti-Semitic comedian, received a two-month suspended sentence for a bad joke suggesting solidarity with one of the Paris killers. In the weeks after the attack, about 100 people were prosecuted under the vague charge of "incitement to terrorism". Many got custodial sentences of up to four years over drunken outbursts during run-ins with police ("Your Paris colleagues got what they deserved", "Allahu Akbar, screw France, Arabs are here.") Some were jailed for saying similar things on social media. School-age "apologists for terror", including one as young as eight years old, were questioned by police.
As Federbusch notes, "for years the general climate has been unfavourable to free expression in France - a trend abetted by the organizers of the 11 January march". All of them support Draconian incitement and discrimination laws that amount to bans on certain forms of idiocy. No one in France argues that a civilised society should allow hateful bigots to discredit themselves in open debate. It is a country where someone who wrote on Facebook "Les Ruritaniens sont des salauds" could be fined up to 12,000 euros for "public insult" (if Ruritanians existed). As long as such laws remain on the books, the Charlie movement will be remembered as a touching but ultimately hollow show of sympathy.