Just over a week after the killing of Aboubakar Cissé in a mosque in the small former mining town of La Grand-Combe in the south of France on April 25th, the French government is still trying to shake off accusations that it has displayed a lack of interest and urgency over the murder. In the National Assembly on Tuesday, leading figures from the ruling coalition made grandiose declarations assuring MPs of their emotions over the killing and of their determination to act. “Every day we will champion our moral duty to live together,” pledged prime minister François Bayrou.
Before that, former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who now leads President Emmanuel Macron's party, called on people to “fight for the Republic”, a Republic which “brings people together” and which “protects”, as well as calling for “universalism”. A similar line was taken by Aurore Bergé, junior minister for combating discrimination, who summed up her thinking with the words: “The Republic, the whole Republic, nothing but the Republic!”
The government approach adopted last Tuesday had been set out the day before by Emmanuel Macron, at the start of a meeting of ministers. As Le Parisien reported, the president, reacting to the tragedy in the La Grand-Combe, asked the government to stand behind “every French person” and urged his ministers to deliver “an ultra-republican message”.
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In the minds of the president and his supporters, invoking the totemic symbol of the Republic is a clever way of sending two messages at once. On the one hand, it is a way of denouncing the crime in La Grand-Combe itself and defending equality as a principle; on the other hand, it attacks the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, who have been accused of exploiting the issue and using it to appeal to its electorate. “Shame on those who make the worst choice, that of factionalism!” declared Gabriel Attal, to applause from centrists, the Right and the far-right.
Bayrou holds ministerial meeting on ... space
The presidential camp's public utterances, however, struggle to disguise ministers' difficulty in producing a concrete political response to the April 25th attack. “You can sense that after a few days they realised the extreme seriousness of what happened,” pointed out Sabrina Sebaihi, a green MP from the Paris region. “But, at the moment, they are stuck at the communications stage. If no strong action ensues, it will actually be a sign of great hypocrisy.”
Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Paris mosque, and Najat Benali, president of the Paris-based Muslim organisation the Coordination des Associations Musulmanes de Paris, similarly called on Emmanuel Macron to act after they went to meet the head of state at the Élysée on Tuesday. In a later statement, the two religious leaders said they had told the president of their “legitimate expectation of concrete actions and courageous decisions” to fight against anti-Muslim hatred.
“Only a response that measures up to the scale of the ordeal our society is going through will make it possible to restore the damaged trust and preserve the unity of the nation,” their statement noted. Yet it is precisely this question of what form any response should take that remains unclear in the upper echelons of the state. Though he is a fan of breakfast ideas meetings, François Bayrou did not amend his agenda for the week. And while several members of the government were indeed invited to the prime minister's official resident on Friday morning to brainstorm, this was about France’s space strategy.
Symbolic of this lack of clarity over a concrete response is the fact that the main debate to emerge from the wave of emotion after the murder has centred on the use of the term “Islamophobia”. On the Left, as well as among centrists, rifts have continued to surface on the issue. After François Bayrou spoke on X of an “Islamophobic ignominy”, the overseas territories minister, Manuel Valls, warned against a “term that should not be employed”. That view is shared, among others, by interior minister Bruno Retailleau and Aurore Bergé; the latter making clear her desire to “firmly reject” that word.
Ludovic Mendes, MP for Macron's party Ensemble pour la République and co-author of a parliamentary report on the issue, admits that the topic is a divisive one within the former ruling majority. “There's a lack of knowledge and shared feeling on these matters,” says the MP, a spokesperson for the parliamentary group led by Gabriel Attal. “I believe that after what's happened, no one can honestly claim that Islamophobia doesn't exist in France. It was not just an anti-Muslim act, it was an Islamophobic act, carried out in a place of worship,” he said.
Macron’s failures over the issue of discrimination
Beyond the wrangling over terminology, the president’s camp seems unable to add real political content to its lofty talk of republican universalism. The task is a tough one after years spent looking at Islam only through the narrow lens of its place in public life, and how to reduce it. “For weeks, months, years, that's been the only debate,” regrets the green MP Sabrina Sebaihi, who tried to set up a study group on Islamophobia in the National Assembly. “The moment we dare speak of this, people automatically bring up the issue of secularism. And nothing moves forward,” she said.
The era when Emmanuel Macron was swept into the Elysée on a pledge to fight tooth and nail against discrimination now seems long gone. Eight years on, one of his closest adviser admits: “It's our biggest failure and our deepest regret, for sure.” A former minister sighs and shares the same sense of disappointment. “He believes he’s now confronted by a French society that has shifted to the Right,” the ex-minister says of the president. “I want to believe that he's still sensitive to this issue, but he’s shut it away.”
Among the various reasons for the lack of progress in this area, one that stands out is Macron’s steady shift towards the thinking, voters and leadership of the traditional Right. “All of this is shaped by power struggles in which the far-right very clearly sets the political agenda,” the sociologist Julien Talpin, an expert on discrimination, noted recently. “The door Macron opened in 2017 has now closed. The issue has vanished from the Macron agenda, partly out of fear of adding fuel to the fire of the [far-right] Rassemblement National and ultimately helping it.”
Though it cannot be denied that Emmanuel Macron has indeed veered rightwards, that alone does not explain this abandonment of the fight against discrimination. Back in the 2000s, presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy gave far more forceful speeches than any now heard on the need to crack down on racism and discrimination.
What we say to the Macronists is this: there's an oppressive mood of Islamophobia; you helped to create it, but you now have the chance to put things right. So act.
In a speech on the issue in 2005, Chirac spoke of the need not to rely on hollow talk about equality, since it was “not a principle set in stone once and for all”. And the then-president reminded his audience of the need to give real resources to the fight against racism and to “ceaselessly affirm, strengthen, and defend the living principle that is equality”.
Twenty years on, the words of Chirac have given way to empty rhetoric about the Republic, equality, and universalism, all bandied about as if they were timeless truths, whose mere utterance would make them real. Among Emmanuel Macron’s backers, a few quietly urge a return to taking up the cudgels of anti-racism and the fight against discrimination. “But to say what?” replies one of the president's close allies.
Indeed, with no real policy work having been done on the matter, concrete proposals have become scarce. And most of the people who used to keep these issues in the forefront of the president’s thinking have now drifted away from the Élysée and from the head of state's Telegram group. “There's a lot of expectation over this issue, but these are public policies that can't be implemented with a shock measure and a bit of spin,” says researcher Julien Talpin. “They require hard work, concrete measures to be carried out, resources to be provided, and strong symbolic stands to be taken.”
On the Left, Sabrina Sebaihi calls on her camp not to let the next news cycle drown out this issue. “We have a duty not to let this drop,” she says. “What we say to the Macronists is this: there's an oppressive mood of Islamophobia; you helped to create it, but you now have the chance to put things right. So act. I will be one of those who won’t let it drop, in order that we don't forget Aboubakar Cissé. If not, it's the sort of abandonment that can break people’s trust in the institutions.”
Other such calls have already shattered against the hard reality of the presidential camp’s indifference. In the summer of 2020, when the death of George Floyd in the United States and large protests in France led the head of state to speak of “police violence”, it only took an outcry from the police unions for Emmanuel Macron to remove his interior minister and bin his ambitions to reform the police.
It was the same again in the summer of 2023, when the death of Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre in the western suburbs of Paris brought fresh demands to do something about the state of working-class areas, relations between young people and the wider public, and equal access to public services. After appearing willing to listen, the president ultimately answered the unrest with a simplistic slogan: “Order, order, order.” And nothing was done in response to the calls to combat discrimination in the country.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter