unity

For the second night running, in towns and cities across France people honored those who paid with their lives for press freedom.

The government, the Left and most leaders on the Right have joined calls for “national unity” or a form of national union as the French nation collectively mourned those killed in Wednesday's murderous attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Senior figures across the political spectrum will also take part in Sunday's 'Republican march' in Paris as an act of solidarity. But already some politicians on the hard right, and notably those in the far-right Front National (FN), have raised doubts about the national consensus. In particular the FN's president Marine Le Pen has reacted angrily to the fact that so far she has not been invited to the weekend march. As Mathieu Magnaudeix and Marine Turchi report, the far-right has in fact already started to play on the fears of French citizens in the wake of the massacre.