Compass World: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Millions of French citizens walk the streets in demonstration against the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks. (Wikimedia Commons)

Last Thursday, a 21-year-old Tunisian man carrying a copy of the Quran killed three people in a church in Nice, France. One victim, a 60-year-old woman, had throat wounds so deep she was described as decapitated, while another managed to escape to a nearby restaurant before dying of stab wounds. 

Though police detained and hospitalized the subject, who cried, “Allahu Akbar,” (God is great) as he advanced on police, this attack echoes the one against Samuel Paty on October 16. Paty, a French history school teacher, was targeted and beheaded by a radical Islamist for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class. For the majority of Muslims, depictions of the prophet are strictly forbidden.  

French President Emmanuel Macron has conceded that while Muslims may have found the cartoons shocking, he would “never accept that violence can be justified,” citing Paty’s murder as an attack on French values and the freedom of expression. While international support and sympathy have been forthcoming, countries including Turkey, Malaysia, and Pakistan have criticized Macron for “fueling hate” against Muslims and “invoking false narratives.” Macron’s pledge to crack down on radical Islam has been met with protests and boycotts in various predominantly Muslim countries.

French nationals themselves have also objected to Macron’s reaction, dismissing his plans to train imams in France and curtail homeschooling and the influence of foreign countries on France’s Muslim populations as too little too late. 

Dozens of people mourn at a memorial in remembrance of the victims of the November 2015 Paris attacks.(Wikimedia Commons)

The Terrible Pastcrime

These attacks are just the latest in a long series of related terrorist attacks that have plagued the country for years. In the case of Paty, the controversial cartoons’ republication comes five years after the January 2015 attacks against Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper. The comics in question depict the Prophet Muhammad in unflattering, pornographic positions, and while many French people find the magazine’s existence extreme, they defend its right to exist. 

But in January 2015, two French-born al-Qaeda extremists stormed the newsroom and called out various Charlie Hebdo employees by name. 11 people were killed, including the chief editor and several cartoonists. Four more were also killed in a related attack on a kosher supermarket two days later. 

Eleven months later, in November 2015, a series of coordinated Islamic terrorist attacks shook the country once more, killing more than 130 people in the deadliest show of violence seen in France since World War II. The French president at the time, Francois Hollande, called it “an act of war.”

In a show of international support, several world leaders openly condemned the bombings. Sri Lanka’s president offered thoughts and prayers and commiserated with France. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered all possible assistance to the French government. In the United States, holdovers from the aftermath of the November attacks can be seen even today, with the push against Syrian refugees. Legislation to ban Syrian and Iraqi refugees from entering the country until harsher screening measures were in place was passed in the House of Representatives. 31 state governors protested the admission of refugees after the reveal that at least one of the Paris bombing suspects had entered the country amongst the wave of Syrian refugees. 

The state of emergency that was declared after January 2015 was extended until July of the following year, when it was extended yet again after the 2016 attack in Nice, when a 19-ton truck was driven into a crowd on Bastille Day, killing 89 and injuring 458 others in another act of jihadist terrorism.  

France is the number one provider amongst the EU of foreign terrorist fighters in Syria and Iraq, which leaders of other countries like Turkey and Syria have not failed to point out. It is also the single most targeted European country in the context of the Syrian-Iraqi conflict. 

A pamphlet mocks Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism in the long-standing French tradition of caricature. (Wikimedia Commons)

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, France has fiercely defended its secular policies and republican values of freedom of religion and expression. These policies are seen by jihadists as hostile to Islam, who view France as an obstacle to establishing a caliphate. “We will cede nothing,” Macron declared in the face of the most recent terrorist attacks. “We will not give up our cartoons. He (Paty) was killed because he incarnated the Republic.”

The French people feel similarly. Following the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, some 3.7 million people across the country marched to show their commitment to freedom of speech in a Marche Républicaine. Members of parliament, both ruling and opposition, sang France’s national anthem at the Assemblée Nationale in a show of solidarity for the first time since the end of World War I. 

A simple illustration by Joachim Roncin, an art director at a magazine in central Paris, simply stating the words “Je Suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) spread rapidly throughout social media, becoming what has been described as “the biggest hashtag of solidarity in history.” It was used over 7 million times on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in the week following the Charlie Hebdo attacks. 

The French tradition of caricature is an old one, harkening back to the days before the French Revolution when scandal sheets were used to denounce Marie-Antoinette and target the royal family with rumors and tales of corruption at the court of Versailles. The tradition is to combine left-wing radicalism with provocative, borderline obscenities. While the targets today have changed and fabrication has been swapped for satire, the same spirit of insolence lingers. To be French is to be outrageous. 

Founded as Hara Kiri in 1960, Charlie Hebdo embodies these values. Its motto was "bete et mechant,” meaning "mean and nasty.” But the magazine has faced its fair share of opposition. It was briefly banned in 1970 for mocking the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle, upon which it resurfaced under the name Charlie Hebdo. Before the January 2015 attacks that thrust it into the spotlight, it was never particularly popular either—it even ceased publication for a decade in the 1980s due to the lack of funds. 

And yet, the French people will defend it to the last as a symbol of French secularism and free expression. François Boucq, the illustrator for the ongoing Charlie Hebdo trial, has said that “Charlie has become a kind of lighthouse for the freedom of expression. If Charlie disappears, other publications should be afraid, because next it will be their turn.

“You can criticize Charlie,” he said. “You can say that Charlie is just schoolboys making bad jokes. But they have the right to do it.”