With the exception of those dark hours when France no longer belonged to itself, never has the call to abolish the republic and its rule of law been expressed so clearly, so loudly and at such a level. Never, in the name of the horror shared by a whole people, and by most of the world, have leading politicians gone quite so far. Never had any of them previously dared to say, with such weighty consequences, what Nice’s conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Éric Ciotti said about the victims of the Bastille Day attack in his city: “Them, they don’t talk any more about the rule of law.”
The dead no longer speak and Ciotti has taken over their voices. He proclaims himself to be their interpreter. What is he thinking when he calls for an end to what he describes as knick-knacks, nonsense, pettifoggery, things and stuff? What’s on his mind is the rule of law, meaning the mesh of texts that are the foundation of a society by defining rights, duties and limits. Yes, limits, and concerning Monsieur Ciotti, he’s had enough of them. Up to his eyes. He doesn’t want to bother about them anymore.
Because he is an MP, Monsieur Ciotti represents the law, but he reckons the law is an obstruction, a nitpicking thing aimed at making the unsupportable supportable or, worse still, allowing criminals to escape behind a wall of words. He expresses himself with all the certainty of someone who has at his disposal the real, the good, the bad - and a solution. He promises to sort out suspects, in a process in which he’d play all the roles: the policeman, it’s him. The judge is him. The civil parties are him. The victim is him. The jury is him. And the suspects are them over there. It suffices to designate them, and terrorism is done with. That they be locked up before they kill! That they be punished before they act, and "silence over there". Whoever raises an objection will be an unworthy citizen of France, and Éric Ciotti will throw the victims at them, accusing them of indifference.
Ciotti is not in himself the whole of the Right, it’s true, and the problem is beyond him. He’s not the only one to demand the law be scrapped. The logic of his arguments were repeated from one representative of the Right to the other as of the very first hours following the massacre on the Promenade des Anglais, and into the wee small hours during the parliamentary debate overnight Tuesday on extending the state of emergency.
Remember how Nice strongman Christian Estrosi, also a local MP, and head of the regional council, was designating the guilty while the dead and injured still lay on the pavement. He pointed out the murderer, secondarily, but he first accused the president, the prime minister, the interior minister, the whole of the government, the Left in general, and all those who “don’t take action”. The developments of this immediate polemic quickly followed on the social media. The killer was not so much the cruel madman who crushed women, men and children under his truck's wheels but rather the politicians who, during the length of their mandate, drive the tank of state. Because we are nearing presidential and parliamentary elections, in the spring of 2017, the target of a certain Right is more their political adversaries than the killer himself.
Hear what Laurent Wauquiez, the N°2 of the conservative Les Républicains party, said to French prime minister Manuel Valls in parliament: "Your answer is which? The European human rights convention. Watch out, we’re going to violate their personal freedom. Careful, we cannot take measures that remove freedoms. Watch out, it’s not in line with the constitution. But change the laws! That’s exactly what the French ask you to do. Change the law. You’re there saying “we reason with existing laws”, but we aren’t here to reason with existing laws. We are here to tell you to take measures that allow us to adapt. And the true difference between you and us is that you, you talk of the personal freedoms of terrorists, we say “there are no freedoms for enemies of the republic.”
It is a little surprising to hear Laurent Wauquiez borrowing the famous quote from Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, during the French revolution in 1789, but that’s not the issue. What is most striking is the desire to accuse the republic. Like Ciotti, like Estrosi, like the Républicains party leader Nicolas Sarkozy - who one cannot imagine did not give the green light before the troops spoke in such terms – there is the same aim in all these comments. Openly expressed, and now as strongly as the far-right Front National party, is the will to take shots at what represents the grandness and the effectiveness of democratic societies, to point a finger at “freedoms”. It amounts to a total victory for conservative Républicains party MP Alain Marsaud (a former magistrate) who, speaking before the National Assembly after the terrorist attacks in France in 2015, said that it was necessary “to sit on individual freedoms”, even boasting that he carried a gun.
Smother the law in the name of effectiveness and in respect for the victims is the official line, which prompted Spanish newspaper Noticias de Navarra’s headline: “The far-right and Sarkozy want to take advantage of the attack in Nice”. On Wednesday morning this week, after a night of debating in parliament over the extension of the state of emergency powers, former international judo champion and now conservative MP, David Douillet, made the following, rather singular comment to France Inter radio station. “The Left is frozen and systematically seeks refuge in the sacrosanct constitution, but we’re here to change all that.” Good grief! The “sacrosanct constitution” of that old pest, General Charles de Gaulle…Well, why not create the Sixth Republic which part of the Left have for so long called for?
'The Islamic State kills, our extremists reap the results'
We can understand from this proposition put forward by those who are the political heirs of the General that the Right has begun a head-down charge, set off before thinking things through, to outclass the far-right. The contradictions that surface from it are indeed major and many.
The first of these would make one laugh if the debate was not so tragic. Before its limitations were showed up, Christian Estrosi was more certain of the efficiency of the CCTV network (almost 1,300 cameras) he set up in Nice when he was mayor. Following the terrorist attack in January 2015 against the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, in which 12 people died, he told the French parliament that the perpetrators, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, would not have been able to cross three crossroads in Nice without being arrested.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
No-one will ever know for sure regarding the Kouachi brothers, but what we do know is that the 19-tonne truck of Nice attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was able to reconnoitre the Promenade des Anglais, despite it being banned to heavy goods vehicles, over the two days before he committed the massacre there, without being stopped or even noticed
CCTV, touted as a magic tool, did not serve to stop the massacre but did provide images of it. The victims cited by Estrosi will be grateful. This local failure in prevention no doubt explains the virulence of Estrosi’s comments at a national level.
A less anecdotal contradiction is the Right’s insistent demand that all those who are recorded by intelligence services as Islamists in so-called "S files" (who are placed under surveillance but not necessarily regarded as an immediate danger to society) be placed in preventive detention or given an electronic tag. Éric Ciotti, Christian Estrosi, and Laurent Wauquiez argue for such a move, which is unconstitutional, as part of the arsenal of measures they want introduced and which, to listen to them, would have stopped Bouhlel from carrying out the attack in Nice. But it turns out that Bouhlel did not appear on any intelligence service records. But, so much for the facts, the exceptional measure was demanded repeatedly by conservative MPs during the debating overnight Tuesday.
Another weakness in the operation of the Right, and more clearly electorally-driven, is the adoption by Nicolas Sarkozy of the image of a man of experience, with a view to his party’s primary elections in November to pick a presidential candidate. As he explained on TV channel TF1, he speaks with knowledge on the subject of terrorism. He’s been interior minister and president, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the intelligence services. He has both the will and the policies to ensure that no-one could let potential terrorists get away. In the spring of 2012, when Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah, well known to the intelligence services, murdered a soldier on March 11th, then two others four days later, then three Jewish children and the father of two of them in a school in Toulouse on April 19th, we must apparently believe that the then-French president was not called Nicolas Sarkozy, and that he had not been surprised by the events. But that’s French politics for you, with its eternal recurrences; failures one day, promises the next.
The examples of improvisation are numerous. The greatest contradiction, however, is hidden elsewhere, between the lines of the speeches. Something’s not right with the two battle orders of Wauquiez and his allies. They don’t fit together. The first sets out a priority, that of “protecting the French people”. The second spells out an urgency, of “leading a war”. On the one hand, the champions of a hardline Right develop the idea that the terrorist attacks should have been avoidable and that each victim represents a failure for the ruling political powers. On the other hand they give themselves the image of war chiefs: “It will be them or it will be us,” said Nicolas Sarkozy on TV channel TF1.
So there we have it. On the one hand the maximum protection, which amounts to no-one dying, and on the other a total engagement in “war”, which implies a possible sacrifice. In the first scenario, every dead victim places the state in the box of the accused. In the second, the common cause, namely the fight against terrorism, could lead to the sacrifice of innocents. There is never a war without deaths. Thumping on the drums to galvanise the people, all the while gently rocking the chairt with reassurances, the Right and the far-right hope for their cake and to eat it, with an icing on the urns.
They might succeed in this, but at what political price? This is without doubt the gravest and most destructive issue. It seals the devastating alliance between obscurantist and barbaric forces with political parties which have the ambition of governing France. How cannot it not be recognised that the events in Nice put in place an unnatural duo, but one with common interests? On the one hand, the Islamic State group which wants to divide France, to the point of civil war, by spreading terror. On the other hand, the extreme forces of the Right which make the dead speak up, transforming them into political ammunition. The Islamic State kills, our extremists reap the results. On the one hand is the Islamic State group which hates our freedoms, on the other hand are French politicians who are ready to sacrifice them.
In this noxious climate, every terrorist attack, and by consequence every woe, can become a windfall for certain electoral candidates. It is already the case that since the Nice attack there have been opinion polls favourable to the Right and a flood of membership applications for the Front National. Are we not also witnessing a rivalling spiral of heated declarations from candidates running in the primaries of the Right, and on a subject that demands measure?
Does all of this mean that criticism should be smothered in the name of national unity? Not at all. Restraint does not demand complacency towards a worn-out government. It simply implies having conscience of a superior interest which has to be looked after, before and after the elections in May 2017.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse