When Charlie Hebdo was struck in 2015, France was defiant. When blood soaked the floors of the Bataclan later that year, France despaired. Now, after seeing a schoolteacher assassinated for simply doing his job, for doing what the Republic asked of him, France is furious.
For France, the time of hashtag solidarity and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” has passed. After years of terrible bloodshed on its streets, the usual lines and excuses are well worn out among French audiences. Now, France is clearly staking out its position: that the jihadist terror they’ve endured — more than any country in Europe — is a product of the growth of Islamist ideology inside its own borders, and the cultural chasm it creates.
In a speech to honour the slain schoolteacher, the French President himself could barely hold back his emotions, while in private he is said to be ready for a “fight to the death” with Islamists. His interior minister has denounced “Islamist barbarism” and said it’s time for Islamists to feel the fear and shock of France’s actions, not the other way around. The public, too, wants real action.
While most ire is directed firmly at the Islamist murderers and their apologists, a portion of French anger is reserved for la presse Anglo-Saxon. A growing number of people, both in and out of government, feel that their country is being madly misread and misrepresented in the Anglosphere.
Among what little discussion of Macron’s campaign against Islamism in France there has been, it’s not unusual to find accusations of pandering to the far-right, electioneering, attempting to reform Islam, and enforcing hard-line secularism, or even state atheism. Macron’s policies on such a complex and sensitive issue are of course open to criticism, but they are none of these things, nor are they a knee-jerk reaction — he’s been talking about this problem for years.
Macron is not chasing a bogeyman. What he describes as “Islamist separatism” in France is a problem more developed than just about any other Western country, but there has been little recognition of this starting point. Neither has there been much recognition that Macron wants to tackle France’s own culpability in the social fault lines — the racism and the inequality that afflicts too many in the banlieues.
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