RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tignous (Bernard Velhac) was very publicly buried last Wednesday at the great Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, which already shelters Parisians as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and Pierre Abelard (d. 1142, of Abelard and Heloise fame), among many others. The plain coffin was increasingly decorated with cartoons his friends and colleagues were invited to draw during the ceremony, featuring, as one would expect, political statements, naked women, rude parts and jokes.

Among the mourners, tears rolling down her face, was Christiane Taubira, the dauntless Guyane-born Minister for Justice, a Socialist who once ran for the presidency on an independentist platform for France’s overseas territories. It was her depiction as a monkey in a cartoon by Charb in Charlie that had prompted accusations of racism and “white male privilege” in America and elsewhere. Taubira is a sometimes divisive politician in France but, like all of us, she “gets” Charlie Hebdo and its insolent irony in referring to truly racist previous attacks.

^{Pallbearers carry the coffin of Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Tignous (Reuters)}

Indeed, our feeling of unity and something like happy defiance has been increased by our perception that outside France, people are mostly bemused by what seems to us so obvious. To us, secularism, with religion remaining a private affair, is taken for granted.

We learnt that around the world, and especially in America, people were subscribing en masse to Charlie Hebdo. While we were hugely grateful, it was difficult not to wonder and giggle at what they would make of the mix of profanity, gratuitous insults, jokes and blasphemy they would discover when their first issue dropped into their mailbox. (In itself, it sounded like such a very Charlie prank.)

It has brought us together in sometimes very odd ways. The employees of such staid institutions as BNP, the giant bank, and Caisse des Dépôts, the national financial establishment founded by Napoleon to administer the state’s holdings and which not so long ago had a conservative dress code for employees, have been given subscriptions to Charlie, bought to help support the magazine.

Every staffer at Les Echos, the financial daily belonging to the LVMH luxury goods conglomerate, received on Wednesday one precious copy of the sold-out survivors’ issue, bought by the group in support. Before Pope Francis controversially uttered his “punch in the face” line, and expressed his disapproval at offending someone’s faith, the French Jesuits (his own order!) reprinted some of Charlie’s most incendiary anti-Catholic cartoons in their learned journal Études. They included one of a nearly-naked Pope dancing a samba in a Rio Carnival parade, possibly demonstrating that they were French first and Jesuits second.

The cartoons, which had drawn about two third favourable comments and one third criticism, were later withdrawn from the Études website, the speculation being it was on orders from Rome.

Frigide Barjot, the Catholic maverick who led huge demonstrations opposing the gay marriage bill a year ago and who is a sometime lecturer at the Vatican-sponsored Collège des Bernardins next to Notre-Dame, marched last Sunday carrying the issue of Charlie Hebdo that had featured on its cover the most insulting of the magazine’s many caricatures of her, drawn by Cabu.

Every hyperbole has been used to depict last Sunday’s “Marche Républicaine”, and most of them are true.

Yes, there hadn’t been that large a crowd (possibly two million) in the streets of Paris since its liberation from Nazi occupation in August 1944.

Yes, it was peaceful, inclusive, extraordinarily moving. (In the figurative sense: there were so many people on the two-mile Boulevard Voltaire and on every side street and adjacent avenue, that actually marching was essentially impossible.)

Yes, at one week’s remove, we still think that it has changed France.

From a country that was neurotically unhappy with itself, divided, depressed, and bickering, France fell in love with the feeling of unity experienced that 1/11 Sunday.

Place de la République all the way eastwards to Place de la Nation is the classic route of countless May Day parades, the natural terrain of unions, Left-wingers and the discontented. (Because the old Left is in many ways in tatters, shorter, alternative routes have been used of late; République to Place de la Bastille, at about half the distance, is a favourite.)

Last Sunday, seeing marchers saluting or kissing policemen and raising a huge cheer when police sharpshooters appeared on the roofs, had a surrealistic quality. (In my checkered student past, you threw raspberries and in some cases paving stones at the fuzz while marching between République and la Nation.)

The policemen looked bemused, if rather pleased and later in the week the Police Nationale Facebook page published many of the messages of thanks officers had received, including, yes, cartoons.

We had 50 heads of state and of government (some of them decidedly dodgy); every politician except Marine LePen was there but in so many ways their presence did not matter at all: they were dwarfed by the sheer size of the crowd, carrying every possible variation on the Je Suis Charlie sign. It was the people talking to the leaders, not the other way around.

And the vast crowd did not so much address its supposed betters in anger but in indifference.

No wonder then that the first five million print run of last Wednesday’s issue of Charlie Hebdo sold out in moments. You do not queue up in the January cold before 5am in front of still-closed news kiosks just because you are curious to see what the magazine has come up with: it was also a way of not letting go of the fantastic high experienced on 11/1.

Again and again, throughout this week, I met people telling me they were proud to be French, in a way that would have sounded impossibly bombastic mere days before, especially to the usual Charlie readers who would have told you then it was its anarchistic, knowing sarcasm they liked best. Ironies piled up while we seemed to slip seamlessly into a post-Charlie era, accepting we would be targeted again (sales of tranquillisers have gone up 18.2 per cent in the past days) and finally facing up to unpleasant realities. (France has, for a long time, lied to herself or at the very least averted her eyes rather than looking at problems.)

Anyone familiar with the unwieldy monster that is France’s state education system (the old joke used to go that it employs more people than General Motors but fewer than the Red Army but it’s likely to number more than either, perhaps both, on today’s payrolls) knows that in recent decades, it has found it increasingly difficult to fulfil the mission the Third Republic imparted it after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, almost a century and a half ago.

Teachers, nicknamed the “black Hussars of the Republic” because of the black uniform the students wore in their first years as teaching assistants, were expected to mould the French Republican identity, welding the nation together on shared values. In recent decades, however, young teachers have been thrown with little specific training and no support from their hierarchy at the Ministry of Education into classes of children of diverse nationalities and cultures, becoming, in effect, the unacknowledged front line fighting to integrate France’s new populations.

Yet journalists and writers who reported on the rise of lawlessness, radical Islam, or a toxic combination of both, were generally ignored.

No longer, as radio programmes and mainstream newspapers finally admitted that too often, the only instructions teachers and school principals receive from their superiors is to not “make waves”.

In many of the nation’s schools in depressed areas, pupils either refused to honour the dead during the national minute of silence last week, or spouted conspiracy theories (the killings did not happen, or were perpetrated by Mossad, and anyway the cartoonists had it coming).

Speaking quite seriously on Europe 1 radio, one boy said: “It wasn’t reasonable to kill 12 people. Charb, yes, he deserved to be killed; he offended the Prophet. Not the others.”

So what happens next? The answers to the kind of problems that gave rise to home grown extremism are political and this is where France’s unlikely unity may fracture in coming weeks. Yet no politician wants to break the current consensus: neither François Hollande because for the first time, he and his government enjoy broad approval for the firm way they have handled the crisis; nor Nicholas Sarkozy, who has supported the measures advocated by PM Manuel Valls and especially his successor at the Ministry of the Interior, the discreet former Cherbourg mayor Bernard Cazeneuve, who is polling an 80 per cent approval rating over his recent performance.

Valls’s electrifying National Assembly speech last Tuesday at Government Question Time, was applauded by both sides and followed by a rousing Marseillaise sung by the entire House, something that had not happened since the end of the First World War.

A good deal of calculation is bound to enter into this touching unanimity. Hollande, according to some of his aides, is persuaded that the Charlie tragedy has in effect pressed a reset button on his ill-fated presidency but it is worth noting that the area in which Sarkozy and Hollande are closest is the conduct of foreign and security policy.

While Obama’s America seemed to want to retrench, both presidents deployed French troops in Africa and vowed to fight Islamism. The great political loser, against all predictions, is Marine Le Pen.

^{Marine Le Pen (Reuters)}

Having been rejected among the political leaders who marched last Sunday, she could have reconnected with her populist electorate by joining the massive Paris demonstration as a simple citizen. Instead, she called her supporters to a National-Front only march in Beaucaire (pop. 15,505) an FN-run town between Camargue and Provence, where she was joined by only a few hundred.

Her main statement in the past 10 days was to demand the return of the death penalty for terrorists and lay the blame for the killings on the government’s security failings.

On Friday her father embarrassed her further by giving an interview to the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda (as it happens, the Front National’s shaky finances have been shored up recently with a series of loans adding up to 40 million euros from FCRB, a Moscow bank).

In the interview, he seemingly supported a conspiracy theory in which all the killings were carried out by some mysterious foreign intelligence outfit, with the support, or at least tacit approval, of the French security services. (He has since said his statements were “inaccurately translated from the Russian”. He then strengthened the disconnect, blustering: “Moi, je ne suis pas Charlie.”)

Many French commentators, and almost all abroad believe Marine is poised to benefit from the heightened perception of the Islamic threat to France but that is missing the main motivations that have pushed, in recent years, as many French citizens from the Left as from the Right to vote for the Front National.

Despair, defiance, a feeling of being ignored, rejected, despised, lied to by a bunch of privileged Paris technocrats and their Brussels friends all enter into this.

The flagging economy and the rising joblessness numbers have played a part which was considerably amplified by François Hollande’s many statements that recovery was around the corner and that the unemployment “curve” was about to swing back.

A vote for “Marine” was rarely a happy decision, more of an “end-of-my-tether one”. A country that marches with signs saying I am Charlie, I am Ahmed, I am a Jew; that kisses its policemen and gives a standing ovation to its government is, to borrow an Internet expression, no longer in that head space.