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Macron on Friday in his speech: Who is Charlie?
Photo: Julien de Rosa / AFP
Emmanuel Macron tried on Friday to reach the hearts and minds of his compatriots with his speech on the 150th birthday of the French Republic.
He spoke in front of the Pantheon, the hall of honor for the illustrious dead in French history, a place of consensus.
The republic is indivisible, he said - an old mantra that is supposed to encourage.
As is so often the case in French political rhetoric, there is a problem with this statement.
Because it describes a norm: The republic should be indivisible, with equal rights and duties for all.
You have to make an effort to achieve this goal.
But so pronounced it sounds like a description of the state - and then it doesn't fit.
Then the gap opens between what France would like to be and what it is.
Because in reality, French society is currently more divided than ever, between dealing with Islamism, new anti-Semitism, racism and coming to terms with its own colonial past.
The citizens of their country have become uncanny.
The French may want to believe Macron when he talks about unity.
But the more often it repeats itself, the stronger the doubts that France can no longer find out.
Most recently, this doubt also crystallized in the process of alleged helpers in the attack against the satirical newspaper "Charlie Hebdo" and the kosher supermarket "Hyper Cacher", which began this week.
It is supposed to be a historical trial, many accused, many days of trial, all of which will be filmed for posterity.
Great expectations for criminal proceedings against accomplices, mostly petty criminals without Islamist relevance.
As if the Nuremberg trials had been conducted against drivers and secretaries of the Reich Chancellery.
Can the law, can the language of statements, the law, at least dispel the horror that still traumatizes France?
That's the promise.
But the mood in the country is such that hope dies first.
more on the subject
Five and a half years after the attack on "Charlie Hebdo": Terror in court Tanja Kuchenbecker reports from Paris
After the attacks in January 2015, the country was united as never before since the end of the Second World War.
France recognized itself, its values in the ethos of the victims.
"Je suis Charlie" - the slogan was spontaneously shared by everyone, because the anarchic spirit of the caricatures in the paper is in fact a source of French identity, of freedom.
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Police officers in front of the former editorial office of "Charlie Hebdo": Who is the victim, who is the perpetrator?
Photo: Stephane de Sakutin / AFP
But the saying developed complicated side effects, because there was no debate about who Charlie actually is.
To be Charlie, that implies showing the same courage as the murdered people.
And who can attribute this to themselves at any time with a clear conscience?
Charlie is committed to a very specific French tradition of being able to etch anything and everything.
Here every priest is a horny pederast, every policeman a real cop.
When everyone was moved by the photo of the dead Alan Kurdi, Charlie honored him with a drawing showing his body in front of a McDonalds advertising poster for "Happy Meals".
And the line: So close to the goal.
But not everyone can be Charlie.
And some don't want to because the debate didn't take them into account.
Danièle Obono, for example, MP for the left-wing "France Insoumise", a favorite target of the right, has her problems with the complete works of "Charlie".
And because of this, he was massively criticized by the journalist Éric Zémmour, who polemicizes on the extreme right.
In an interview, Black Obono was later asked whether she felt no grief after the attacks, which she understandably understood as a questioning of her humanity, an exclusion through asking: "Such a mass murder of unarmed people, do you think that's good or bad? "
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MP Obono: The undertones are clear.
Photo: STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP
Obono was drawn and described by the right-wing magazine "Valeurs actuelles" in the summer as a half-naked, tied slave, in the context of a summer novel about the history of African human trafficking in the 18th century.
Obono filed a criminal complaint.
The gag of the story should be that Africans were also involved in human trafficking, which every schoolchild knows, but was emphasized again here.
The undertones are clear: Not only "we whites" were angry, the others too.
Who is the victim, who is the perpetrator - that's what the Hebdo debate in France is currently reduced to, a perfect setting to go round and round for years.
Because the history of colonialism, the Algerian war, and relations with Africa are not really researched, enlightened or taught.
A large, popular exhibition on entanglements, promises, migration and propaganda in France's relations with the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa is urgently lacking.
The residents of the suburbs don't really have a say either.
The attack on "Charlie Hebdo" was seen as an attack from outside, an act by foreign powers - but that was only part of the truth.
The political reaction of then President Hollande was to revoke the perpetrators of such attacks of French citizenship.
As if the French couldn't be Islamist killers because they weren't supposed to be - here too the gap between what French should be and what they sometimes are.
A theatricality of hatred
The author Marc Weitzmann is someone who is following the cultural and political development of France with great concern.
In his book "Un temps pour haïr", Time of Hate, he describes how the refusal to face the age-old but rapidly increasing anti-Semitism has led to a poisoned situation.
It is, he says, as if the old ideological camps of the Communists and the Gaullists had melted away and now what lies beneath it, what no one wanted to see or hear: an original hatred of Jews, of modernity - all the unfortunate notions of one original, rural and male-dominated France.
They are still haunted.
Added to this is the refusal and inability of the left liberal camp to respond to emerging Islamism.
How do you create trust and overcome silence?
The well-intentioned solidarity with migrants blinded the political agenda of the preachers and their followers.
The assassinations added a new dimension to this ideological mixture, a theatricality of hatred, violence and militancy that, according to Weitzmann, reinforces the self-hatred of many intellectuals.
As in the thirties, one admires men of action and despises the moderate, frequent talkers, a new harshness and irreconcilability characterize the country.
Some see an unprocessed colonial past everywhere, others are convinced that the great population exchange is taking place in which the long-established Gauls are being replaced by people from Africa.
A powerful right-wing conspiracy theory that is spread almost daily on Twitter by the author Renaud Camus, who lives in his castle in the south of France.
Both sides share a longing for masculinity, the Islamist and the right-wing radical agree in the admiration of the fighters and the disgust for strong women, gentle men and non-binary persons.
Something fundamental is breaking through in France, a struggle for civilization and identity.
How do you create trust and overcome silence?
Which extremes poison the discourse instead of promoting it?
Who is charlie
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