At first sight, there is not much new here: after a decade or so of street violence, from the demonstrations of the Gilet Jaunes to the recent protests against pension reform, taking in the 2023 riots against the police killing of young North African in a Paris suburb along the way, the French public is now accustomed to scenes that in any other country would look like freeze-frame snapshots from a war zone.

It is, however, the vicious quality of the violence from young people which has been genuinely shocking. Notably, in Paris, a lone young trainee female police officer was pursued, tripped and then battered on the ground by a gang of youths. In Belfort, a city in northeastern France, a plain-clothes officer was almost killed by a “lynch mob” — so-called by the press — of hooded teenagers who pinned him to the ground and repeatedly kicked his head. And in Marseille, a young woman at a bus stop was sprayed in the face by an improvised flamethrower wielded by a laughing kid.

Equally terrifying is the eerie, almost incomprehensible way that the violence, which has erupted outside schools all over France, from Lille to Marseille, came apparently out of nowhere. So far, over 1,000 secondary schools have “mobilized”, which means student strikes, barricades and fires in school buildings. The damage will cost millions of euros to repair. Over 3,000 arrests have been made, mainly of young people.

The unrest began at the end of September, taking the form of a series of reasonable protests in the Paris region by school pupils. They decried the degraded state of the French educational system, making legitimate complaints about poor timetabling, lack of teachers, and rotten buildings in a state of Soviet-style shabbiness: freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer heatwaves. It is not only the students but also the teachers who have been complaining about these conditions. My friend Laurence has taught science in a variety of Parisian schools over the past 10 years and testifies that she has never seen conditions so bad or students so angry. “It is as if the government actively despises us,” she said.

Student anger has also focused on the “Parcoursup”, an online system that, in 2018, replaced the old university application system. Parcoursup offers students the ability to apply to many more universities than previously, and allows universities to rank applications via perceived merit rather than allocating them by lottery, as its predecessor did. But the basis of the rankings is opaque, with the Left arguing that it privileges better-off students, that France is not a true meritocracy, and that this is an assault on the core concept of “égalité”.

This has been one of the rallying cries of the radical Left party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The party is the closest challenger to the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls for the presidential elections next year. The LFI has been courting school-age students and teachers for years, with their strategies for further investment and a reshaping of university policies, controversially opening up elite colleges to educationally disadvantaged students. But this is the first time that the Macron government has explicitly pointed to the LFI’s role in deliberately stirring up subversion. This at least was the view of the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who, while calling a crisis Cabinet meeting last Friday, pointed the finger directly at Mélenchon, stating that “the LFI and its ultra-Left proxies are at the origins of this movement”.

His accusation has been given substance by the sight of the LFI Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, jubilant and dancing in front of the burning shell of the Lycée Paul Eluard. There have also been calls by the LFI activist Ritchy Thibault “to march on the Elysée Palace and burn it down”. Intelligence agencies for the police have also spent much time tracking preparations for the disorder on social media since early September, noting among the calls for “armed action”, the language of the far-Left — notably “the end of neo-Liberal democracy”, “disrupting the social order”, “challenging state violence”.

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, leveling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a “Sixth Republic” — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and “a New France”. Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants. The aim is not assimilation into an old order, but destroying it altogether.

All of this has the potential to backfire on Mélenchon. Two years ago, the Minister for Justice, Gérald Darmanin, identified the overall LFI strategy as “bordelisation” — a word that is hard to translate but roughly means in slang terms “deliberately creating chaos”. More recently, Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and a presidential candidate for 2027, described the LFI as “an absolutely seditious party with a fascination for violence” and called for a debate on banning the LFI. Mélenchon’s slyly sarcastic response to Retailleau was that this was “absurd” and that not a single LFI document could be traced to recent disturbances, unless he had incited them “by telepathy”.

Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the “Old France” — which still makes up the majority of French people. With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s. A recent poll in the newspaper Le Figaro found that 78% of French people thought that the LFI was “aggressive”, and 70% thought they were actively “dangerous”.

The precedent for all this violence and rebellion is of course the near-revolution of 1968, still a nostalgic meme for Old Leftists. Students and school kids who were in revolt angered the older generations so much that they effectively delivered Right-wing governments until 1982.

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But the 21st century is a totally different political landscape in France, shaped by tensions over race, religion and ethnic identity as much or more than the neo-Marxist dreams of revolution cherished by the LFI. This is why Le Pen also has a substantial youth vote to match or even overtake the LFI, a youth which craves order and discipline over anarchy. I have been to enough RN rallies over the years to see how Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young and handsome protegé and president of the RN, is greeted with pop-star style adulation when he speaks to an often hip and well-informed young audience. We are a long way from the fascist brutes of the old days of the Front National, the predecessor of today’s RN.

Le Pen has now come out on national television, accusing Mélenchon of stirring up trouble in the schools. Her prescription, sidestepping the issue of immigrants, is for new, stricter laws to punish so-called “casseurs” — the most destructive of the rioters.

None of this stops Mélenchon from invoking the specter of “fascism” when he talks about his opponents, and especially Le Pen and the RN. The more he does this, however, the more even centrists and those on the Right, normally opposed to Le Pen, see the sense in her analysis of the situation. Put simply, the harder Mélenchon drives the strategy of chaos, the more deeply retrenched even the milder conservatives become, scared of the forces yet to be unleashed and what their country might look like if Mélenchon ever comes to power.

It would be a savage irony if the LFI, the party of insurrectionary challenges to the “bourgeois order”, also turned out to be the party that opened the way for an RN presidency.

Parisian police officers might take some hope from the fact that relations between France and Senegal have never been as fractious and bitter as those between France’s former colonial possessions in North Africa. Indeed, Senegal achieved independence without a bloody war of the kind that has scarred Algeria. But the Senegalese in France have high rates of unemployment and poverty, and as such form a central part of the marginalized populations of the banlieues. 

This is the same population that brought havoc to Paris only two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Champions League final between Arsenal and PSG. Once again, battle lines were drawn in the glamorous heart of the French capital between the riot police and so-called casseurs — meaning “wreckers” — the name given by the media and politicians to the nihilistic hooligans who so regularly enjoy a fight.

Within minutes of the end of the Champions League match, the French news channel BFM had already switched its coverage from a football match to the center of Paris, where you could watch in real time bins being set alight, youths dancing on burning cars, hire bikes on fire, shop windows being smashed and shops being looted. Bare-chested youths were flinging their arms open wide, goading the police to attack, while their comrades fired an onslaught of acid-filled bottles, fireworks and homemade mortars, often launched at police lines from cars or scooters in full flight. 

It was not the first time that a PSG victory in the Champions League had led to riots — last year’s triumph over Inter Milan had led to similar scenes. But on this occasion the police were prepared. On the morning of the final, the police had deployed 8,000 officers in central Paris and 14,000 more officers throughout France. In the event, there were 890 arrests — 45% more than last year — with 178 police officers injured, some of them seriously. One officer was badly burnt by a mortar firework and another run over by a stolen car.  

These scenes were not confined to Paris. More than 71 cities, towns and villages reported “violent incidents” through the night across France. If you did not know that this was in the name of a football match which had just taken place in another, distant country, you might have thought that France was in the throes of full-scale insurrection. As President Emmanuel Macron greeted the victorious footballers at the Elysée Palace on Sunday, he was moved to add a comment on the riots in his congratulations. “We are sick of it,” he said. Certainly, by midnight on Saturday, to most viewers this was less a celebration of a football victory than it was a scene from a war zone. 

That was also the immediate reaction of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), whose leaders were quick to condemn the violence. First to attack the government’s handling of the riots was Julien Odoul, an RN spokesman from Burgundy who decried the “unpunished hordes” and accused Macron of leading a government in “fire and blood”. The President of the RN, Jordan Bardella, was quick to follow up, using the same language, and denouncing “scenes of a near-civil war” in Paris and the provinces. On Monday morning, Bardella also made it clear that “there is obviously a clear link between our 30-year failure to manage immigration and the conflicts in question”.  

The response from the Left was less incendiary, less accurate and less honest. The Left-wing newspaper Libération barely mentioned the violence, preferring to devote its first six pages on Monday morning to the death, at the age of 104, of the distinguished Leftist sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin (who was, a rarity amongst French intellectuals, a football fan). At the same time, throughout France, representatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) were arguing lamely about poor “police mismanagement” of the “celebrations”, with lightly veiled accusations of police heavy-handedness. Clémence Guetté, Vice-President of the LFI in the Assembly National, went one step further and explicitly accused the police of “arresting people for no reason, firing grenades at families and young people simply because they had come together in a crowd”. Guetté said that there was a need for more “fan zones” and “better planning” to avoid future conflicts.  

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This was at best disingenuous, and amounted to a slur on those officers — publicly thanked by Macron at the Elysée alongside the triumphant team — who had literally been in the front line against an out-of-control mob of some 20,000 people on the Champs-Elysées. Understandably, the police argued strongly against the LFI’s version of events. In the pages of the conservative Le Figaro, Yoann Maras, the spokesman for the police union, said that it was too easy to launch “a witch hunt” against the police. “We refuse to accept the growing gap between official discourse and the reality lived by our colleagues on the ground,” he said. He went on: ‘There was not a single incident in Budapest (where the Champions League took place). We have this only in France.” The question Maras left hanging in the air was why this should be so.  

There is in fact no easy answer to this. What was clear to the police, however, who had been following encrypted messages on social media for weeks before the Champions League final, was that most of the casseurs on the Champs-Elysées were not city-center-dwelling Parisians but had flooded into Paris from the banlieues, which have fast, direct links to Charles de Gaulle Étoile, the vast metro station beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The common theme on social media was that the casseurs were planning to “bouffer les flics” (“devour the cops”). Many of them had little or no football affiliation. “I’m not really that into football,” said Raphaël D., arrested for drunkenness and insulting the police. “I’m more into basketball,” he said to a reporter from Le Parisien outside his court hearing. But he had come with his mates anyway for the ruckus. The same applied to Hichem S., an Algerian normally resident in Barcelona, who had also been arrested. Hichem S. presented himself in court as an unconvincing PSG supporter, having traveled from Spain to “kick up some trouble” with his mates in Paris.

Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, compared the phenomenon of street violence in France with British football hooliganism. The British problem had been solved, he wrote in Le Parisien, only by “extreme repression”. This, he said, was the only solution. For Bauer, the violence was therefore a problem of policing rather than a political issue. 

Nobody in France, on the Right or Left, really agrees with Bauer: his is a quite simplistic form of wishful thinking. Rather, it has been clear for several decades that the make-up of the French population has changed, partly due to mass immigration and the reluctance, generalized in most EU countries, to tackle this issue head-on. Immigration is only part of the story, however. The real political issue is that there is a substantial part of the population which hates the French Republic and which likes to take this hatred out on the most visible part of the Republic: the police.

One of the paradoxes here is that the French team is largely made up of players from an immigrant background. The tough training grounds of the French banlieues produce some of the best players in the world. Certainly most of Senegal’s best known exports to France and Europe are made up of footballers, including Sadio Mané, formerly of Liverpool, and Benjamin Mendy, formerly of Manchester City. 

On recent form, the French team, partially made up of players from the banlieues, are already looking like they could win the World Cup again. They have a formidable attacking force, not just with the speed of Kylian Mbappé but also with the likes of Ousmane Dembélé, Rayan Cherki and Michael Olise — who scored a hat-trick in the recent friendly with Northern Ireland — all looking to make their mark. 

Each of those players, being of immigrant heritage, are part of what the LFI is now calling “the new France”. It is a term first used, and sometimes still used, to describe the French colony of Quebec, but it has been reinvented by Mélenchon, who also speaks hopefully of the “creolization” of France. Mélenchon is enthusiastic about this strategy because he sees it as a genuinely new “revolutionary” strategy to transform France. His own family background — he was born and raised in post-Independence Tangier — is also a factor in determining his sympathy for the Arabic-speaking Muslim vote. (Mélenchon himself speaks a workable street Arabic.) For Mélenchon, “the new France” describes the hybrid demographic of the banlieues, a demographic whose votes the LFI are deliberately targeting as part of a campaign of “infiltration”: taking the voting system into areas which traditionally have a low voting record. 

This strategy is perhaps laudable, at least from the point of view of making democracy more accessible and even necessary to a disillusioned and disenfranchised section of the population. The RN, too, would like to court these votes, if only to break the deadlock which prevents them finally taking power at each successive presidential election. 

The stumbling block here, however, is that the RN is less prone to denial and euphemism. The Left likes to talk about les jeunes du quartier, as if they were a sparky group of teenagers rather than coked-up rioters; the RN talks about voyous — criminal hooligans. This language naturally sets them at odds with the voters in the banlieues, who often feel stigmatized and angry. 

Yet the “old France”, so despised by Mélenchon and his party, has not yet gone away. The political fall-out from the violence after the Champions League final — an almost universal howl of outrage from all parts of the center and the Right — proves as much. It remains to be seen, however, how long this low-key civil war in France between the “old” and the “new” can last before the current proxy war between the banlieues and “official France” becomes real — and therefore ever more vicious. Such a development would deepen the fractures in an already fragmented and damaged country.

Soon enough, the basic facts became clear. On 13 November 2015, 10 years ago today, ISIS-inspired terrorists brought death to the city by the Seine. Three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, killing one. Yet it was the roving commandos in the city’s heart that were most shocking. Spreading havoc from a rented SEAT Leon, one group of gunmen killed dozens of innocents in cafés and restaurants. Worst of all, though, was the Bataclan, the music venue where 1,500 rockers were attending a concert. Ninety were mown down in the theater as they danced; 132 died overall.

Now, a decade on from the massacre, the killings still seem unreal. Naturally, France does its best to memorialize the slaughter. Last Sunday, some 2,000 runners wended their way from the Stade de France to the Bataclan for the so-called Marche de Liberté (“Course for Freedom”). That’s been shadowed by more official homages. Today, Emmanuel Macron and Mayor Anne Hidalgo will unveil a memorial garden at the Town Hall, and the Eiffel Tower will be bathed in the colors of the tricolor. Yet if all this happens under the rubric of Paris se souvient, Paris remembers, that barren bewilderment endures. For all the official homages, the attacks of November are still barely understood, and closure seems a very long way away — bad news for the Republic and the capital both.

In some ways, of course, France has found closure. Quite aside from the commemorations and vigils this week, there have been innumerable films and books covering the mayhem from every possible angle. One striking recent example is Paris, 13 Novembre 2045, written by the sociologist Amélie M. Chelly. Her novel follows the survivors of the attacks and the nightmares that haunt them. More prosaically, the Abécédaire du 13 Novembre, edited by Catherine Brun, covers the atrocity from a kaleidoscope of different directions, covering everything from songs to poems to graphic novels.

Then there were the trials of 20 people charged with involvement in the 2015 attacks, an epic affair lasting 10 months from September 2021. The longest criminal trial in modern French history, it encompassed over 300 lawyers and represented 2,500 plaintiffs, and was greater in scale than even the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and infamous “Butcher of Lyon” during the Second World War.

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Beyond their simple vastness, the trials exposed France to countless tales of tragedy. Among the stories was that of Maia, a young architect, who was sitting that fateful night at an outdoor café with Amine, her Moroccan husband. When the attackers came, Amine was killed instantly; Maia was stunned by the sudden silence when the firing finally stopped. Then she heard the gasping and wheezing of a young man she did not know. He was leaning on her, squeezing out his last breath. Maia later said that she would never forget him, but also that she would never know his name.

Beyond these stark personal revelations, incomprehension arguably endures on a societal level. In part, this is explained by the subsequent direction of French politics. For sure, there have been further Islamist attacks, yet the full-scale confrontation between France and jihadi, promised by ISIS among others, never materialized. This was partly due to the hard-headed police and military response to potential threats. A much-improved intelligence service doubtless helped too. Among other things, that involved tightening communications with other agencies, especially the Belgians whose laxity had created a security “black hole” exploited by the terrorists.

All this has arguably meant that France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned the 2015 attacks — an ideology which, as an article in the ISIS magazine Dabiq paraded in the aftermath, involved sharing photos of semi-naked corpses. Perhaps more telling was the article’s English headline: “Just Terror!” Amid the gloating, this represented a genuinely new slant on terrorist violence. What ISIS announced here was that indiscriminate murder was not merely a weapon of war, but also a perverted form of justice. It represented a shockingly direct challenge to both Western morality and the West’s conception of justice, based as it is on secular and utilitarian principles.

France, for all its secular earnestness, has yet to truly level with this fact. Certainly, political Islam remains a question to which no one has provided an adequate answer. For the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it’s simply a matter of integrating Islam into a non-sectarian Republican program: an impossibility given Islamist extremists violently oppose the very concept of the Republic. The far-Right, for its part, talks openly of “a war” against “foreign religions”: specifically targeting Islam. But, again, this is mere shadow boxing. Actually tackling France’s internal enemies would, among other things, involve targeting a sophisticated propaganda network and a prison system that fosters the formation of Islamist cells. Stuck in the middle, Macron applies more and more hardline secular principles, even as senior civil servants lately warned of Islamist “entryism” into the French state.

Yet amid these high-flown political tensions, it’s perhaps Paris itself that has most struggled to come to terms with the Bataclan. At the end of the last century, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote an influential essay called “Paris, Capital of the 21st Century”. Following Walter Benjamin, he argued that Paris could regain its Belle Époque position as “Queen of the World” — by opening itself to outside, non-European cultures. The massacres of 13 November shattered such heady utopianism, revealing the multi-ethnic capital as riven by hatred, especially in its forgotten banlieues where the French-born terrorists lived. This lays bare the identity crisis as the heart of modern France: how a secular, democratic Republic can contain the factions that loathe it.

To be fair, some are still trying to grapple with the attacks. One good example is “Programme 13/11”, an interdisciplinary research program under the auspices of the Sorbonne. Directed by the historian Denis Peschanski, it is gathering first-hand testimony for future generations. Peschanski himself has called the scheme a kind of “living monument” — even as he believes that, somehow, the savagery of the terrorists can be met with the “sciences” of the French academic system.

Perhaps: yet there is scant evidence to show that many radical French Muslims have been “deradicalized” by such initiatives. That’s shadowed by other traumas: a so-called “French Intifada” may not have happened, but the country has continued to be wracked by jihadi terror, from the 2016 Nice truck attack to the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty. It all points in the same direction: towards a deepening trauma across France’s collective memory.

Yesterday, every Paris resident received a special edition of À Paris, the city’s listings magazine. Inside, Anne Hidalgo addresses her public, proclaiming a message of “liberty and hope”. But as a Parisian myself, I can say that few of us really believe this — the wounds are still too raw.

In recent times, however, these brotherly bonds have been placed under severe strain. For the last year, France and its most-cherished former possession, Algeria, have been locked in a diplomatic cold war. And perhaps the most prominent figure to be caught in the dispute is none other than Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Grand Mosque.

Over the past few days, Hafiz, a native of Algiers who pledges support for the French Republic, has been accused of playing a shady double game. On the one hand, the Left-wing (and pro-Republican) newspaper Libération has called him “Algeria’s secret Ambassador to France” or the “eye of Algiers” in France: in other words a spy. All the while, the Algerians increasingly suspect him of working for the French secret services, while also sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood and other enemies of Algeria’s secular regime. Hafiz’s dilemma, then, is a neat encapsulation of the challenge facing both France and Algeria: how to dovetail two very different realities — grounded not on fraternal affection but in long years of mutual contempt?

In April this year, the French government announced that relations with Algeria are at their worst since 1962, the year Algiers gained its independence from Paris following a bloody and protracted war of liberation. That same month, the French ambassador was recalled from Algiers while 12 Algerian diplomats were expelled from France: after Paris accused them of espionage. The immediate cause of these tit-for-tat expulsions was a French police investigation into the involvement of an Algerian official in the temporary abduction of a TikTok influencer called Amir Boukhors. A vociferous critic of the Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the man known as “Amir DZ” boasts over a million online followers. For its part, the Algerians have accused Boukhors of fraud and what they call “infractions terrorists” — though his supporters argue he’s being targeted for supporting the Algerian version of Hirak, a youth movement that’s flourished in several Arab countries since the Arab Spring. Boukhors had been in France since 2016, and was given asylum status in 2023. During this time, Algeria issued nine international arrest warrants against him, but the French consistently refused to extradite him.

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In truth, though, the spat over Amir DZ is part of a far wider dispute. The current crisis arguably date back to July 30, 2024, when President Emmanuel Macron, in a letter to the King of Morocco Mohammed VI, wrote that “the present and future of the Western Sahara were part of Moroccan sovereignty”, even as he backed Rabat’s 2007 plan to take control of the region. This was partly to reward Morocco’s developing and successful business relationships with France. This was an unexpected and direct affront to the Algerians, who have long supported the pro-independence Sawhari Polisario group, which claims the desert territory as its own. No formal ceasefire in the Western Sahara conflict has ever been announced — the French, then, had jumped the gun, swerving ongoing negotiations over the territory and offending Algiers in the process. Algiers, for its part, then took the offensive and recalled its ambassador from Paris.

Since then, the Algerians have refused to back down, accusing the French, among other things, of “destabilizing” Algeria via the DGSE (its equivalent of MI6). At the same time, France has said Algeria had refused to repatriate citizens suspected of terrorism. For this, France threatened to drastically reduce the number of visas given to Algerians, the largest immigrant population in France. Tensions have been further heightened by Macron’s call for Algeria to free the 71-year-old Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who has been condemned to five years in prison on dubious charges of “undermining the integrity” of the nation.

In a further provocation, the 36-year-old French football journalist Christophe Gleizes, a specialist in African football, was arrested in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabyle region of Algeria, and has recently been given a seven-year sentence for “supporting terrorism”. His “crime” was interviewing a local football manager who was also known to be associated with the pro-Berber MAK (the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie), which the Algerian government proscribed as a terrorist organization in 2021. Despite the intervention of the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and the pro-Muslim Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Algerians have so far refused to free the unfortunate Gleizes.

For many observers on both sides of the Mediterranean, there is a wearying familiarity about the current conflict. Journalists in the Algerian media have necessarily been unable to voice their criticisms of their government publicly. El Watan, the distinguished French language newspaper in Algiers, has been strikingly neutral on the issue, fearful that funding cuts from the government will finally drive it into the ground. Online, however, there is a consensus among Algerian dissidents, at home and in France, that this overseas bickering is merely a distraction from Algeria’s deep domestic crisis.

Worse still, Algeria looks like it is being left behind by its Moroccan rival. At roots, the country’s woes are economic: which is why the government faces such fierce opposition from Hirak and other dissidents, who can plainly see from France and elsewhere that for all its beautiful beaches and historical wonders, Algeria remains a poor and isolated state stuck in last century’s anti-colonial mindset.

No wonder, then, that the philosopher André Comté-Sponville, writing recently in the pages of the business magazine Challenges, argued it was easier for the Algerians to “surf the wave of anti-French resentment than to modernize the country”. Comté-Sponville also pointed out that the French had largely moved on from their war with Algeria, and that the legacy of the pieds-noirs (French settlers forced to leave Algeria in 1962) and the harkis (Algerians who fought for the French and either settled in France or were killed in vast numbers back home) were now part of history.

But this is apparently not the case for the Algerians who, argues Comté-Sponville, have been caught up in a post-colonial fantasy of “hysterical” revenge against their old enemy. Citing Freud, the philosopher describes the Algerians as trapped in their own neurosis, refusing to see reality.

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Certainly, it is true that the complicated love-hate relationship between France and Algeria has as much to do with psychoanalysis as with politics. To an extent, this has its tangled roots in the poisoned soil of Franco-Algerian history. Soon after the French occupied Algeria, they turned the country into a département of France. This had the effect of immediately disenfranchising the Muslim majority population: which did not qualify for French citizenship, or otherwise couldn’t reconcile their faith with the demands of a secular state (something that’s still true in contemporary France). The result was a deeply divided society whose tensions defined the cruel and bloody tactics used by both sides during the War of Independence.

This has remained true since 1962. Most significantly, however, neither the Algerian government nor France has ever admitted their murky complicity during the so-called “black decade”, between roughly 1992 and 2002, when the Algerian authorities fought an insurgency of well-armed and well-organized Islamists. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people died during this period, though in many of the massacres it wasn’t always clear who was doing the killing: Algerian security forces and the French DGSE were both alleged to have been involved in secret operations.

While the eyes of the world have lately been on the Middle East, meanwhile, France and Algeria have found themselves once again in a Mexican stand-off, where further aggression on either side is liable to tilt dangerously. In geopolitical terms, the strategic stakes for France could not be higher, as the country has withdrawn from Burkina Faso and Mali and needs to keep Algeria onside to strengthen its hand in the Maghreb. There is a wider European dimension here too: the Maghreb is a kind of international buffer against migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of the instability and chaos of the Sahel region.

In the meantime, few French presidents have ever done as much as Macron to curry favor with the Arab world. It was no surprise, therefore, that the Elysée Palace pledged at the end of July that France would join Spain, Ireland and Norway — and now possibly the UK — in recognizing a Palestinian state. In the meantime, France has begun encouraging other European and Middle Eastern states to recognize Palestine too, working tentatively with Saudi Arabia on a two-state solution to the deadly stalemate in Gaza.

Macron’s deference to the Arab world is unsurprising: he wants to leave a legacy as a world statesman and peacemaker, as well as placate his own restive Muslim population — the largest in Europe. It is also in line with one of France’s oldest objectives in foreign policy: to be “une puissance musulmane” (“a power in the Muslim world”). This is an ambition which dates back to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798, and includes the occupation and division of Syria and Lebanon, protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and the annexation of Algeria. But as France tries once again to make its mark in the Middle East, it is Algeria, once France’s most prized jewel, which is proving to be the sharpest thorn in the French diplomatic side.

All the while, France’s economic presence in Algeria, long dependent on a shared history, is now been rivaled by China and even Italy — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warmly praised President Tebboune on an official visit to Rome and said that relations between Algiers and Rome were at an all-time high. At the same time, Algeria has been building links with Russia and Turkey, which have also been maneuvering aggressively against the French. They’re especially keen to take an interest in Algeria’s oil economy, which has flourished in the wake of the Ukraine war.

For its part, Algeria needs to reassert itself as the leader in the region after decades of retrenchment, which has seen it be overtaken by Morocco as the West’s most favored client. As it is, Algerian paranoia towards the West, and France in particular, has only hardened with a sense that the country is being surrounded by enemies. For the time being, then, there is no easy way out of the impasse, even if the Grand Mosque remains as charming and alluring as ever.

These days, of course, the truth is more prosaic. Rowdy “bals populaires” can still be found, full of drinking and dancing, the most famous being the bal des pompiers held at the firefighters’ barracks at Port-Royal until 4am (not a good night for your house to catch fire). Usually, though, the arrival of 14 July simply marks the beginning of high summer. Rather than “Vive la France”, you’re more likely to hear “Vous partez quand?” (“When are you leaving?”) in Paris shops and offices. It’s a reference to the grandes vacances that will soon sweep France, reducing all activity in business and politics to the absolute minimum.

And though the march-pasts and fly-overs will still dominate the capital today, this demonstration of confident state power has increasingly faced an anarchic counterpoint. Over the last couple of years, the night of 14 July has seen running battles between the police and youths in the banlieues, with fireworks designed to celebrate the French nation instead aimed at the so-called “forces of order”, as well as schools, libraries and other Republican symbols. These battles took on a frightening intensity in June 2023, after a 17-year-old was shot at a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Back then, there was some talk of banning the 14 July festivities entirely. That didn’t happen, but this summer, too, there are nightly skirmishes in the cité (council estate) not far from where I live, muffled howls echoing off the graffitied concrete walls.

This is nothing new. Between order and disorder, indifference and activism, 14 July has long been contested territory. The bickering first began in 1879, when a semi-official public festival was held in France to commemorate that epic day 90 years before. The event proved so popular that the Third Republic decided to turn it into an official celebration. Yet then, as now, the problems started with that nastiness at the Bastille, with conservatives instead preferring a commemoration of the more peaceful Fête de la Fédération. Falling on 14 July 1790, it was a suitably wholesome celebration of Republican virtue, and safely free of lynching too.

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In the end, of course, the conservatives lost the debate. From 1880, the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall has been a national holiday. And, in a sense, the violence it recalls is appropriate, given the festival was partly encouraged to promote national unity after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. Yet, as the yearly chatter around grandes vacances implies, the French have often been unsure about what 14 July is really commemorating and why. Is it about the institution of the Republic? The French nation more generally? Or is it simply about bloody insurrection, one that famously freed only a handful of prisoners? Notably, there has always been a small but vocal fringe Royalist faction that believes the French Revolution was a mistake and that “Bastille Day” is simply the grubby glorification of proletarian violence.

Interestingly, though, this is not the position of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which has always proudly embraced 14 July — albeit with rising warnings of anti-Republican “barbarism” in the banlieues. And no wonder: the most shocking recent example of anti-French violence came on 14 July 2016, when a Tunisian terrorist ploughed a 19-ton cargo truck into the holiday crowds at Nice, killing 86 people.

Recent criticism of the holiday has come from the Left. Some have argued that the displays of military might are crassly jingoistic in an age of European unity, even as invitations to Algeria and Morocco cause a degree of post-colonial angst. These controversies have been compounded by absurd exhortations by well-meaning Leftist for Muslims to “pray for France” — on a day, let’s not forget, that commemorates the refounding of France as a strictly secular state.

There has always been an ambivalence in France’s Muslim Community — the largest in Europe — towards Le Quatorze. Hardliners insist that Islam forbids celebrating festivals belonging to non-Muslims, or “miscreants”. There have also been well-intended gestures from moderates such as the Union des Mosquées de France (UMF) who regularly appeal to Muslims to join in with “the spirit of fraternity” in the interests of national unity. The truth is however, that most Muslims of varying shades of piety think that Le Quatorze Juillet has nothing to do with them.

Most significantly, today’s celebrations have come under attack from Left-wing historians, with Patrick Boucheron, a medieval historian at the Collège de France, leading the charge. Boucheron is not only an academic but a media figure in France, regularly appearing on television to expound against French exceptionalism, the idea of the “Great Nation” with a duty to show the world how to live.

Instead, Boucheron argues that French history is merely a component part of what he calls “global history” — the complicated matrix of geography, geopolitics, and colonialism which have together shaped the present. His opponents accuse him of being “anti-French”, using dubious Anglo-American ideas to rewrite French history in favor of diversity. This was a talking point during the opening ceremony of last year’s Olympic Games in Paris, partly scripted by Boucheron, and which depicted the French Revolution, and especially Marie Antoinette, in an irreverent way (the unfortunate queen was shown holding her head in hands, singing a revolutionary anthem). There was also, most provocatively, no mention of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. “The Revolution was violence,” said Boucheron in his defense. “We have to show how it was. We should not exalt it.”

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It’s clear, then, that 14 July has lately morphed not just into a debate about history, or even the legacy of the past on the present. Rather, it has become a proxy for a far broader dispute — about what France is. For their part, Boucheron’s enemies accuse him of being part of a globalized intellectual élite, one which loathes France and its people. Typical here is Loris Chavanette, a specialist of the Revolution. In the pages of Marianne, a Leftist publication skeptical of liberal handwringing, Chavanette argued that Boucheron and his friends helped prod France towards “cultural and moral decadence”. Ignorance of 14 July, he added, “is the symptom of the fracturing of our national bonds”.

Yet for all their diffidence towards the holiday, and even if their own historical knowledge is blurred and unsure, most ordinary French people would probably side with Chavanette and not Boucheron. Though attitudes towards the 14 July are indeed a clear marker of how “fractured” France is these days, whether they think they are celebrating the patrie or the Republic most people still need to feel, even in some vague way, French. At the same time, a recent IFOP poll found that some 63% of French people, although in favor of Le Quatorze Juillet, were unsure of the meaning of the term Republic these days.

And besides, whatever the controversies that surround it, the fact is that the storming of the Bastille is not merely one of the most important moments in the story of France — it’s also a key moment in world history. It’s a totem, still alive in many political cultures across the world, not just Marxist but socialist and liberal too. Despite the apparent cultivated indifference of the French, it is also impossible to imagine France without Le Quatorze Juillet, a sentiment endorsed not only by the French at home but also homesick French expatriates who celebrate it in South Kensington, and other international French enclaves, as fervently as they do in Paris. Just whatever you do, don’t call it “Bastille Day”.

Immediately after Le Pen’s sentence, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party said it would never use the courts to defeat its opponents. As Mélenchon himself stated on X: “The decision to remove a politician from office should be decided by the people.” It’s a telling statement, and one that goes a long way towards explaining his backing of a woman he once dismissed as “semi-demented”. For if he is a populist like his Right-wing rival, Mélenchon is also a fundamentalist when it comes to that most cherished of French political ideas: that le peuple, the people, represent the country’s collective will, over and above judges or the state.

It’s a theme Mélenchon returns to in his latest book. Published in English today, Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century is a paean to people power, carrying its readers from the earliest human societies to the fractured, anxious France of the 21st century. Not, of course, that the people are simply there to admire. On the contrary, Mélenchon believes that the Le Pen farrago is a “historic moment for France” and that her treatment could be “the spark” that ignites the peaceful revolution he thinks the country needs. He may be right about the revolution — but risks being disappointed by the path his beloved people finally take.

The modern political usage of le peuple dates back to the Revolution. Three years after the storming of the Bastille, in 1792, the First Republic was proclaimed, introducing a new constitution and handing sovereign power to the citizens of France. Since then, each iteration of the Republic has always deferred to “the people” as the nation’s true rulers, clear everywhere from Delacroix’s painting to the rousing chorus of the “Marseillaise”.

Mélenchon clearly sees himself in this tradition. Quite aside from his recent pronouncements, he always describes himself as a “Republican” and not a mere “Leftist”, frequently comparing himself to Jean Jaurès, the legendary founder of the contemporary French socialist movement. Yet if invocations of popular sovereignty are common across French politics — even haughty centrists like Emmanuel Macron adopt the idea — Mélenchon argues that the French Revolution did not go far enough. True freedom, he suggests, can only be found in permanent revolution, the constant updating and upending of political realities driven by ever-shifting material conditions.

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As you might expect from a self-styled French political philosopher, Now, the People! is a long, rambling, complicated work. Ranging from economics and globalization to climate change and artificial intelligence, the author hopes to influence nothing less than the future of humanity. The book begins with a call to arms, an appeal for a veritable citizens’ revolution — by which Mélenchon means political change led by a peuple who finally understand how oppressed they truly are.

It’s a familiar if slightly outdated dream, as if John Lennon’s “Imagine” had reappeared as political praxis. Certainly, it sits comfortably alongside Mélenchon’s established style as a media figure, to say nothing of his owlish features, his penchant for Nehru jackets, and his political awakening in the Trotskyist and Maoist ferment of Sixties France.

Yet Mélenchon is also a tough old bird and no lazy nostalgic. He references an eclectic variety of past thinkers, not only Marxists and other enemies of capitalism but the Jesuit theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Along the way, he calls for a new Republic, the Sixth, with a new constitution fit for purpose in the 21st century. In practice, that means replacing the one-size-fits-all universalism of the 1789 Revolution with a more inclusive and dispersed form of freedom than that found in the rubric “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” — now dismissed by many modern Leftists as an outmoded form of European “totalitarian democracy” and unsuited to the postcolonial age.

To justify these claims, Mélenchon quotes three recent examples of civil disturbances over recent years. These are the revolts of the Gilets Jaunes; the agitation over pension reforms; and the riots of the summer 2023 provoked by the police shooting of Nahel Merzouk, a 17 year old of mixed Moroccan-Algerian heritage. Merzouk was targeted, Mélenchon claims, precisely because he was part of a minority that the Republic does not recognize. For Mélenchon, then, the Merzouk affair was not merely an instance of unbridled police violence, but rather a demonstration of the limits of Republican universality.

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Yet if his theoretical ambition is impressive, Mélenchon’s understanding of contemporary France is distinctly lacking. The fact is that his case studies cannot easily be subsumed into any single strand of discontent. The uprising of the Gilets Jaunes was an angry cry from what is often termed “peripheral France” — the abandoned and ignored towns and villages far from well-heeled metropolitan centers. The mini-riots over pension reforms were a simple show of frustration at Macron’s economic policies, and his high-handed autocratic manner. For their part, the unrest of 2023 were a mixture of youth nihilism leavened by fierce anti-Republicanism. These teens in the banlieues don’t want a new Republic, they just want to destroy the status quo, clear enough when they targeted post offices, schools, libraries, and any other building carrying the imprimatur of the French state.

Apart from anything else, it’s hard not to notice the bizarre contradiction that self-proclaimed Leftists like Mélenchon should argue in favor of rioters, many of whom actively despise the Left-wing Republican model. If, moreover, Mélenchon’s diagnosis is dubious, his cure is too. Towards the end of the book, and echoing the theories of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, he espouses what he calls “creolisation” — as a way of linking the universalist aspirations of the First Republic to the kaleidoscopic multicultural reality of contemporary France.

To be clear, “creolisation” isn’t multiculturalism, anathema to many French Leftists. Nor is it assimilation or integration in the American model. Rather, it envisages the creation of a new hybrid society, one where the culture of the “oppressed” creates a new national culture blending French and non-French traditions. Out, then, are the hardy perennials of state secularism and centralization, replaced by “the concrete universalism” of difference. That inevitably involves a total reshaping of every institution in the Republic, from schools and universities to the armed forces. This, Mélenchon argues, is the only solution to the divisions and conflicts that currently plague the country, from suburban riots to the rise of the far-Right. As Mélenchon breathlessly concludes, this new France will be “the future of a humanity which is soaring to new heights”.

How to explain these ideas, so radical in their opposition to the 1789 framework? In a sense, they’re the logical endpoint of a political culture obsessed with le peuple — especially as those universalist principles push up against the reality of the modern Republic.

France, after all, is a place where old class divisions no longer apply, and where roughly a tenth of people are immigrants. Given these demographic inescapables, Mélenchon would probably argue he’s just bringing the Leftist view of society up to date. But as he does so, with all the high-end intellectual pirouettes demanded by “creolisation”, the author risks losing touch with the very peuple he so cherishes. What’s in no doubt is that activists across the political spectrum are appalled by his ideas. He has unsurprisingly been attacked from the Right, which sees him as pandering to an Islamist agenda, but also by elements on the Left, who consider his vision of people power as not only “anti-French” but an actual betrayal of the secular Enlightenment values upon which France is founded.

The ordinary French public, and not necessarily just white people, has mostly reacted with horror at Mélenchon’s theories too, seeing them as the extinction of French identity in the name of an untried political experiment. Some have even compared Mélenchon’s “creolisation” to Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission, in which the novelist imagines France gradually turning into an Islamic state, while rumors appear online that the politician hopes to make Arabic an official language of the country.

That last one is unsubstantiated — but it’s also true that Mélenchon was born and raised in Tangier, and still jokes that the first political slogans he ever learned were cries in Arabic for Moroccan independence. It is hard to think of a boast more likely to antagonize the minority that still mourns the loss of France’s colonial empire, let alone the countless millions who fear the rise of political Islam in the Hexagon itself.

Indeed, it’s hard not to see this combative swagger as Mélenchon’s fatal flaw. The fact is that, far from wanting to smash the Fifth Republic in the name of a fantasy revolution, most French people are exhausted by the disorder of recent years — and ache, instead, for stability. More than this, they are desperate for their voices to be heard. This is the real fallout of the Le Pen affair, with many voters seeing it as a deliberate block by the state on a legitimate political party, denying the votes of all those who voted for Rassemblement National at the last election. It goes without saying that this is a far more likely trigger for revolt than Mélenchon’s dream of creolisation.

And if what Frantz Fanon called the “red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” of decolonization are as vicious as ever in politics and the banlieue, France’s bookshelves aren’t being spared either. One of the most vivid examples of recent times is A Counter-History of French Colonization, a fusillade in paperback. Written by Driss Ghali, a novelist and essayist, and published in English late last year, it promises to provide “an antidote to the poison distilled in bad faith” by “apostles” of postcolonial thought, those who’ve distilled the complexities of French colonialism into a game of heroes and villains.

In a vivid riposte to these activists, Ghali says he can offer a fresh and “dispassionate” view of this still-urgent moment of history, arguing that it’s time to move on from 19 March and everything it stands for. It’s a position increasingly echoed across France and Algeria, a shift with potentially revolutionary consequences for the politics of both countries. All the same, we shouldn’t necessarily expect Paris and Algiers to bury the hatchet just yet, especially given the incentives Arab elites have to perpetuate hate — and the underlying tensions that endure right across France itself.

Before you even get to Ghali’s argument, A Counter-History first deploys identity. A Moroccan and a Muslim, the author is a product of French colonial history, one whose personal story can be traced to both flanks of the Mediterranean. His great-grandfather fought against the French in the Twenties, while his grandfather fought for them during the Second World War. As such, Ghali is able to report directly from the front lines of the conflicts that currently plague France, to say nothing of its erstwhile colonial holdings in North Africa.

Ghali’s claims are as striking as his background. The French Republic, he says, has been slowly fractured, corroded in gradients by social change which threatens its very existence. The most significant of these changes has been the growth of its banlieues into something like mini-cities, with their own codes, cultures and languages. They are usually at odds with mainstream France and the Republic, which in the form of the police is seen as an intrusive, oppressive presence (sometimes the word “colonialist” is used in provocation).

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For all the loose language bandied about in the past few years, there is as yet no civil war in France, though Ghali does not rule it out. But there is, he says, a permanent stand-off between those who believe in France as an ideal of civilization, and those who have no interest in such abstractions, and even violently oppose them. This, Ghali argues, is probably the greatest division in contemporary French life.

He’s far from alone. The spectre of civil war may feel hyperbolic to Anglophone readers, but in recent years it has been a staple of French cultural discourse, appearing as the major theme in the novels of bestselling authors like Michel Houellebecq and Laurent Obertone. Another good example is Athena, a popular Netflix drama that depicts a battle between the French police and the eponymous fictional banlieue. Throughout the film, the French media persistently report on what’s happening as “civil war”.

The theme of civil war is a notion that’s also been picked up by politicians, notably Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, with similar language increasingly common across the Right. In April 2021, for instance, Valeurs Actuelles published an open letter from military officers, addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron. In the so-called lettre des généraux, 20 retired generals, together with 1,000 French soldiers, condemned what they saw as an attack on French values, emanating from Islamism and “the hordes from the banlieues” — who for their part were dismissed as gangsters, drug dealers or terrorists.

At the heart of these tensions is France’s unsolved colonial legacy, especially in North Africa. Beyond Napoleon’s abortive adventure in Egypt, things really started in 1830, when King Charles X invaded Algeria. That was followed by the establishment of French protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco.

Yet beyond the arrival of Europeans on the Mediterranean’s southern shores, it’s really their departure that continues to haunt France every 19 March. As the Algerian fight for freedom grew hot, from 1954, France deployed torture and mass killings as weapons of war, and to protect the million or so whites who’d made the country home. But the violence wasn’t all one way. On the Arab side, insurgency, terrorism and assassination were legitimized as tools against the European oppressor. One obvious case study here is Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which presents an unvarnished account of Algerian nationalist attacks on innocent civilians during the war of independence.

Notwithstanding the cliches of French historians, then, Ghali suggests that France wasn’t the only agent of history during its messy escape from empire. More than that, he argues that the Maghreb’s failures since decolonization are largely its own fault. The end of empire offered an opportunity for these newly independent states to create their own futures on the model of what Ghali calls “the civilized world” — but which have instead wallowed in corruption, religious fanaticism, inequality and tribalism. These problems have been particularly acute in Algeria, where the stale and intransigent government helped spark civil war in the Nineties. Fought against Islamist extremists, about 200,000 people died. Tunisia and Morocco, the other French possessions in North Africa, were spared such horrors, but they too have chafed under cruel and authoritarian rulers.

Not, of course, that France is blameless here. Quite aside from the brutality of colonial rule — and though Algerian independence was formally conceded decades ago — neo-colonial exploitation persisted right across the region. Consider the clientelism of the sort seen in Morocco, or else the kind of financial, military and political influence found under the umbrella of “Françafrique” and which has ravaged countries from Senegal to Mali. As Ghali notes, that’s before you factor in the Hexagon’s enduring cultural influence, whether in television or fashion, or getting a job at a French firm.

Yet whatever Africa’s own discontents, Ghali sees the worst consequences of France’s colonial legacy in the way North Africans now make up the bulk of the immigrant population of France. Roughly 30% of the country’s immigrants hail from North Africa, while the country has over five million Muslims overall, the largest such community in Europe.

In one of his most controversial claims, Ghali is critical of what he calls reverse colonialism — which has seen millions leave the former French colonies for metropolitan France. This, he says, is a betrayal of their home nations, though he does concede that fleeing poverty and war are greater motivations than idealistic nation-building. Most importantly, this process has created an imbalance between France and its former territories, one still being played out at home and abroad. Bleakly, Ghali describes a situation where millions of euros return to the former colonies from immigrant economic activity in France, who in return offer criminality and Islamist terrorism.

Is this fair? Certainly, it ignores much of the cultural richness which has emerged from the postcolonial relations between France and the Maghreb. Yet it’s a perception that’s not only grown popular on the far-Right of French politics, but has also increasingly entered the mainstream, especially given the ever-present terrorist threat. In 2023, after all, even President Macron himself said that France had “an immigration problem” while also pushing through a law distinguishing more sharply between French citizens and migrants.

None of this is inevitable: Ghali himself is testament to the ways Arabs can straddle both shores of colonial divide. But for that to happen, both sides need honesty, and to finally face up to their shared history, not least by owning up to historical atrocities. It’s a process that Macron has sought to start, publicly acknowledging French errors and crimes. Among other things, that’s involved acknowledging responsibility for the “disappearance” of the pro-Algerian activist Maurice Audin in 1957.

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So far, though, any “reconciliation” has been strikingly one-sided, even if Ghali isn’t totally alone in pushing for change in the literary space. In the pages of Marianne, for instance, the historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet, a heavyweight voice on the center-Right, declared that Ghali’s book was a must-read for Macron and any other European politician serious about understanding the twin processes of decolonization and mass immigration. For Gauchet, Ghali is not only courageous, but also accurate in his assessment of the French imperial experience — as a tragedy which has brought misery both to the colonizers and the colonized.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Arab intellectuals have had less time for such ideas, even accusing Ghali of echoing the far-Right rhetoric of Éric Zemmour. Yet here, too, change is coming. Progressive journals like Tel Quel in Morocco have, for instance, started testing long-standing taboos around the French colonial experience, questioning the collusion of powerful elites who have a vested interest in sustaining anti-French feeling to maintain their own positions. After many years of working in universities across the Maghreb, I was recently heartened at an academic conference in Morocco to hear similarly dissident views, especially surprising coming from the postcolonial academic establishment.

Just as significant, there has been a generational shift here too. A younger generation of North Africans no longer accept everything their elders tell them about the imperial past. A true postcolonial culture, they instead argue, must be forward looking: working out new geopolitical strategies for North Africa, beyond the old tensions brought up every 19 March. This thinking has even gained some momentum in semi-official circles, with Moroccan media quick to condemn Algeria’s latest arguments with France as outdated and pointless. Yet with the banlieues as unhappy as ever — Paris alone saw around 100 gangland clashes in its suburbs last year — we shouldn’t imagine that these decade-long struggles can be solved by writers alone.

It certainly felt like it. That grainy, stuttering film, of hooded figures with kalashnikovs, showed the Charlie Hebdo massacre barely half an hour after it happened, and just two miles from where I was sitting in that numbed and broken café. The killers were soon named as Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, both born in France and both “soldiers” for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with the group quickly claiming revenge for the magazine’s satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. By a queasy coincidence, Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (“Submission”), a disturbing tale about the Islamic takeover of France, had been published that very day.

Ten years on, that crisp January day has entered French history, just one in a long list of infamous massacres to have ravaged Paris in recent years. Yet if the terror a decade ago has almost been superseded by even worse horrors — the Paris attacks of November 2015 killed 130 — the impact of the Charlie Hebdo murders is very much alive. For beyond the bloodshed, and the shock, they continue to speak to a deeply divided France, a country that seems unable to accept it’s at war, let alone decide on how to make peace. That’s clear enough, certainly, among the country’s politicians, but also among its press, the very people who should have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Charlie from the start.

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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.

Suggested reading

The French Left against Islamism

By Liam Duffy

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.