How the Left betrayed Charlie Hebdo They put piety over progress

Over the last decade, there’s been a remarkable shift away from unequivocal denunciation of the Charlie murders. In a 2020 IFOP poll, conducted when 14 accomplices to the attacks were still on trial, 31% of the French population thought that Charlie Hebdo had brought the attacks on themselves via a “useless provocation”. This same view was shared by 69% of French Muslims. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, 21% of under 25s didn’t condemn the killers either.

This process of denial, or appeasement depending on the way you look at it, began as far back as September 2015 — in the French press itself. That month, the Right-wing philosopher Pierre Manent published a book called Situation de France. In it, he wrote that the Charlie Hebdo killings not only signalled the moral decay of France, but also the failure of secularism. He proposed a new “compact” between Muslims, Christians and Jews, made “in friendship” and “in community”. This would pull potential radicals away from extremist influences, and cut off the cashflow from fanatics in the Gulf.

This approach was welcomed on the Catholic Right, in newspapers like La Croix and Le Figaro, most likely because the bishops have long loathed French intransigence on secularism: the first laws targeting the power of the Catholic Church were passed back in 1905. Yet even at this early stage, French society seemed unable to agree on how to proceed. Supporters of Charlie, still raw from the killings only nine months earlier, saw this approach as naive, to say nothing of opportunistic and defeatist. But even Gilles Kepel, perhaps the leading expert on Islam in France, agreed with Manent that the killings were a symptom of “a malaise in our society” and that French governments have some responsibility for what happened.

As those shocking poll numbers imply, meanwhile, negativity towards Charlie has quietly grown outside academic circles. This has not simply been a “vibe shift” — to use a contemporary borrowing from the Anglosphere — but rather represents a fundamental change in how erstwhile progressives understand their society. That’s clear enough in politics. The far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has broadly drifted away from outright support for Charlie’s right to blaspheme towards an accommodation with the country’s Islamic minority: those four-fifths of French Muslims who see the attacks as a useless provocation.

And if Mélenchon has now gone from defending Charlie to dismissing it as a far-Right mouthpiece, French liberals aren’t much better. Just a week after the killings, for instance, Le Monde published an editorial, signed by prominent Left-wing intellectuals, condemning Charlie’s “obsession” with Muslims and attacking French immigration policy and police brutality. More recently, journalists in Left-wing papers, with Libération leading the way, have openly expressed scepticism for Charlie Hebdo — even suggesting the magazine was guilty of racism.

No wonder Charlie Hebdo feels betrayed by the very people that should have had its back. It continues to publish, naturally, and is marking the anniversary of the attack with a new book. Entitled Charlie Liberté, le journal de leur vie (“Charlie Freedom: The diary of their life”), it’s dedicated to those who died. Yet though it’s clearly meant as a homage to the victims, Charlie Liberté also contains a decidedly bitter tone. More precisely, Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, the managing director of Charlie Hebdo and himself wounded in the attack, writes that Charlie has been betrayed on all sides over the last decade — but most of all by what he calls the “spineless” Left. This includes media and academia as well as politicians, all of whom spent the last 10 years dodging direct conflict with Islamism.

That, of course, begs the question: why? Why, despite France’s long history of secular struggle, have so many on the Left and centre abandoned their comrades so absolutely? For Riss, the answer is partly to do with physical cowardice, with lawmakers and journalists simply too frightened to face the Islamist menace. To be fair, these fears are sometimes justified: an unnamed senior editor of a leading “progressive” magazine once told me he couldn’t openly support Charlie for fear of his life.

More than that, though, Riss attacks the political cynicism of supposed progressives eager to court the Muslim vote, or anyway avoid specious accusations of racism. The earlier rhetoric of someone like Mélenchon is bad enough here, even as it’s hardened over more recent years. In 2020, in a complete reversal of his earlier positions, Mélenchon denounced “all those who now repaint themselves as secularists (laïques) using fine words to detest the second religion and the Muslims of this country”.

Whatever the causes, at any rate, Riss is in no doubt about how this sordid mix of fear and expediency was best crystalised. One of the most sickening moments of the last decade, he writes, was at the memorial held in the Sorbonne for Samuel Paty. In October 2020, the history teacher was beheaded, close to his own school, after students falsely accused him of showing images of the Prophet Muhammad during class. Riss, there that day at the Sorbonne, regarded the event as simple hypocrisy.

As Riss noted, the great and good who assembled in the august university were the same political class who had, just a few years earlier, chastised Charlie Hebdo for taking liberties with the Prophet. These included the likes of Jean-Marc Ayrault, a veteran Socialist who for years before 2015 had criticised Charlie Hebdo for being too tough on Muslims. These were the people who, through their own complacency and complicity, had created the conditions in which jihadists could continue to flourish long after 2015.

To be fair, Riss isn’t entirely alone in sticking up for the traditions of French secularism. In the political arena, after all, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) leads the way, using freedom of expression as a key marker of French identity. When I attended an RN rally last summer, Le Pen had only to utter the word “Islam” to provoke angry jeers and the flying of tricolours from the crowd.

And if Le Pen obviously has electoral incentives to be tough, other corners of the Right are moving in a similar direction. One good example is Causeur. A non-partisan journal with a growing influence in France, it’s given over its latest issue to the events of 7 January. The editorial line is simple: since January 2015, nobody in French politics or the media, whether of the Right or the Left, has had the courage of their convictions when it comes to freedom of expression, and more specifically challenging Islamist totalitarianism.

Among other things, Causeur’s special edition carries an interview with Philippe Val, a former editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo. Val is a controversial figure in the French media. He’s been accused of flirting with the far-Right, most notably defending the editorial policies of the ultra-conservative Valeurs Actuelles. The reality, though, is that he’s that very old-fashioned figure: a French free-speech absolutist. This is a position that sits badly with the shape-shifting Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Yet according to Val, the fact is that, though the security forces do their best to contain Islamist violence, the larger political problem is that the Left refuses to believe there is a small but dangerous part of the French population which hates the Republic and wants to destroy it.

Little wonder, then, that the language of war has endured, a full decade on from that lunchtime in the 7th. In 2022, for instance, a group of retired generals called for a real declaration of war against “Islamists and others who want to destroy us”, a proclamation that won tens of thousands of supporters in polls. The surveys, for their part, were organised by the mischief-makers at Valeurs Actuelles, who obviously knew what kind of trouble they were stirring. All the same, their antics do give a real sense of the way that ordinary French people, outside the political and media classes, sense that their country has been under threat — and still is. To dismiss this feeling as overblown emotion, or populist ignorance, is only to further alienate regular citizens and fuel their disdain for mainstream politics. This, in turn, explains the present paralysis of French politics: the centre has collapsed, yet neither Right nor Left can command a consensus beyond their own tribes.

It goes without saying, of course, that radical Islam, like mass immigration, is a Europe-wide phenomenon. But in France, there is always a special, local meaning to conflicts with the Muslim world. That’s partly due to the complexities of the former French Empire. Since its earliest 19th-century conquests in North Africa and the Middle East, France has always sought to establish itself as “une puissance musulmane” (a power in the Muslim world). Yet this position has long been tainted by the brutal Algerian War alongside other colonial crimes. France’s status as the world-leader for militant secularism obviously matters too, which is why it has been targeted by militant Islamist groups from Morocco to Pakistan.

The upshot? Even more than Germany or Sweden or Britain, how France balances freedom and faith is remarkably tricky. And if that explains, in part anyway, how the writers and cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo were fatally caught in the crossfire, between French civilisation on the one hand and Islamist theocracy on the other, it also explains why their sacrifice remains unresolved. All the while, the Republic’s cold war rumbles on, and could yet turn hot once more.