When millions took to the streets of several French cities one Sunday in January, chanting “Je suis Charlie” 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, reports The Globe and Mail.
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, it seemed all of France stood as one against terrorism.
So, why are so many members of the intelligentsia and political class now at each other’s 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.
Perhaps no one is more to blame for that than historian Emmanuel Todd, whose new book Qui est Charlie? ('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 pipost-Charlie%cture. While the largest of the marches, in Paris, was dominated by left-leaning, white professionals whom Mr. Todd calls “radical secularists,” those who participated in regional demonstrations were right-leaning cultural Catholics. Young people, working-class whites and immigrants were all but absent.
In short, those who already hold power in France were simply making a show of it. The marches were an act of “domination” and a warning to marginalized members of society to stay in line. They were the act of a deeply insecure elite reclaiming as “its highest priority the right to spit on the religion of the weak.” All the talk of freedom of expression, Mr. Todd concludes, was a “sham.”