{"id":58798,"date":"2015-06-01T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T11:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=58798"},"modified":"2015-05-28T19:59:23","modified_gmt":"2015-05-28T18:59:23","slug":"in-france-post-charlie-debate-hits-a-new-level-of-vitriol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/in-france-post-charlie-debate-hits-a-new-level-of-vitriol\/","title":{"rendered":"In France, Post-Charlie Debate Hits a New Level of Vitriol"},"content":{"rendered":"

25 May 2015 – <\/em>When millions took to the streets of several French cities one Sunday in January, chanting \u201cJe suis Charlie<\/em>\u201d and holding hands, the demonstrations were seen around the world as those of a country united in grief but defiant in its defence of freedom of expression. Suddenly, everybody was Charlie.<\/p>\n

After the Jan. 7 assassination of a dozen people in the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo by two radicalized Muslim gunmen, and the subsequent attack on a Jewish supermarket by another self-styled jihadi<\/em>, it seemed all of France stood as one against terrorism.<\/p>\n

So, why are so many members of the intelligentsia and political class now at each other\u2019s throats in post-Charlie France? Big societal debates are never exactly polite in France. But the level of vitriol in this verbal slugfest is off the charts.<\/p>\n

Perhaps no one is more to blame for that than historian Emmanuel Todd, whose new book Qui est Charlie?<\/a><\/em> (Who is Charlie?) purports to paint a demographic portrait of the four-million-plus people who took part in the January marches. It is not a pretty picture. While the largest of the marches, in Paris, was dominated by left-leaning, white professionals whom Mr. Todd calls \u201cradical secularists,\u201d those who participated in regional demonstrations were right-leaning cultural Catholics. Young people, working-class whites and immigrants were all but absent.<\/p>\n

In short, those who already hold power in France were simply making a show of it. The marches were an act of \u201cdomination\u201d and a warning to marginalized members of society to stay in line. They were the act of a deeply insecure elite reclaiming as \u201cits highest priority the right to spit on the religion of the weak.\u201d All the talk of freedom of expression, Mr. Todd concludes, was a \u201csham.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you think this is laying it on a bit too thick, so does most of France. But that has not stopped Mr. Todd\u2019s book from generating reams of news coverage and escalating an already feverish debate about the role of religion in French society. For Mr. Todd, the radical secularism of the elites is the new state religion; the artisans of Charlie Hebdo constitute \u201can Islamophobic sect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls weighed in with an op-ed<\/a> in Le Monde, defending Charlie Hebdo\u2019s blasphemous (to Muslims) caricatures of Mohammed as being \u201con the side of those who bear the weight of fundamentalism [and] the violence of fanatics who destroy, terrorize and assassinate. There is an inversion of values, a perversion of ideas [in Mr. Todd\u2019s book] that consists of thinking that those who kill are weak.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unless you know your French history, the country\u2019s debate over secularism and freedom of expression can be difficult to follow at times. In Mr. Todd\u2019s view, French secularism is really a form of \u201czombie Catholicism\u201d and a manifestation of the country\u2019s inability to live up to its officially pluralistic values. It\u2019s one thing to stand up for free speech. It\u2019s quite another to celebrate the systematic piling on of a disenfranchised minority. Some disgruntled members of PEN expressed similar discomfort after the organization recently gave an award in New York for \u201cfreedom of expression courage\u201d to Charlie Hebdo.<\/p>\n

Days before the release of Mr. Todd\u2019s book, a 15-year-old girl in Reims was kicked out of class for wearing a full-length skirt deemed by her teachers to be in contravention of a ban on religious symbols in public schools. The girl had removed her Muslim head scarf before entering class, in accordance with French law. But her teachers did not like her \u201cproselytizing\u201d attitude.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe personnel asks that students dress in a manner that is respectful of secularist principles before entering the establishment,\u201d the school administration said after the incident hit the news. \u201cIf any students were invited to change their attitude and clothing, no one was excluded.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the kind of radical-secularist overkill Mr. Todd finds so disturbing. \u201cLet\u2019s leave France\u2019s Muslims alone,\u201d he said in an interview<\/a> published in the magazine L\u2019Obs. \u201cLet\u2019s not do to them what we did to the Jews in the 1930s by putting them all in the same boat, regardless of their degree of integration. \u2026 Let\u2019s stop forcing Muslims to think of themselves [only] as Muslims.\u201d<\/p>\n

A colleague warned Mr. Todd he wouldn\u2019t have \u201ca single friend\u201d in France after his book came out. It\u2019s looking like he was right.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theglobeandmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The marches were an act of \u201cdomination\u201d and a warning to marginalized members of society to stay in line. They were the act of a deeply insecure elite reclaiming as \u201cits highest priority the right to spit on the religion of the weak.\u201d All the talk of freedom of expression, Mr. Todd concludes, was a \u201csham.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}