Each week, Olivier Babeau deciphers the times for FigaroVox. He is president of the Sapiens Institute and, moreover, professor of management sciences at the University of Bordeaux. He recently published
The New Digital Disorder: How Digital Is Exploding Inequalities
(Buchet Chastel, 2020).
It is a plaque, unveiled a few months ago by the town hall of Paris in the courtyard of the former barracks of the Minimes.
It pays tribute to Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, assassinated in March 2018 in a supermarket in Trèbes, after having voluntarily taken the place of several hostages held by an Islamist terrorist.
If the plaque has been visible for several months, a detail recently shocked: to believe the last line of his inscription, the gendarme would have been
"victim of his heroism".
Certainly, the family validated this text.
Certainly, the formula recalls another:
"victim of duty"
, honorary distinction awarded by decree of the President of the Republic, which distinguishes a member of the public service, or assimilated, having died in the exercise of his functions.
"Victim of his heroism"
, undoubtedly wants a stronger and more striking version, insisting also on the individual character of the act of Beltrame, on its exceptional personality.
The formula nevertheless rings curiously.
Death like a hero, Arnaud Beltrame?
there is no doubt.
But certainly not a victim of his heroism, as if it was his fault.
As if there was something curious, fundamentally about risking one's life to protect one's fellow citizens, to defend the values of one's country, to accomplish what one considers one's duty.
This courage which goes as far as giving of oneself is not, however, an old-fashioned model: it was at the heart of Colonel Beltrame's commitment, like all French people who, at each jihadist attack, responded present, took risks or even gave their life.
Faced with the one who gave his life, we do not even have the courage (very modest by comparison) to speak.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing about this affair is an absence.
If the plaque mentions terrorism, that word is placed there, as if in abeyance.
The word terrorism does not say anything: it is after all only a mode of operation, violent, condemnable, but which does not indicate reality.
This reality is the war declared on us by radical Islamism.
This is the enemy we must name.
Terrible cowardice that which silences us at the very moment when we pretend to celebrate heroism.
Faced with the one who gave his life, we do not even have the courage (very modest by comparison) to speak.
Since 2012 and the killings in Montauban and Toulouse, this totalitarian ideology has cost the lives of 264 people in our territory.
Not to mention the hundreds of wounded bruised in the attacks and those who will remain traumatized by the brutal outbreak of Islamist terrorism in their lives.
If the French mostly remember the Bataclan or Charlie Hebdo massacres, new attacks regularly remind us that the scourge is not contained: on April 27, in Colombes, in full confinement, a man who pledged allegiance to Daesh voluntarily struck three police motorcyclists with his car, seriously injuring them;
on September 25, a man attacked two people with a chopper in front of the former Charlie Hebdo premises.
France is one of the countries most affected and the most targeted by the Islamist attacks committed in the West since the 1990s. The movement has intensified since the proclamation of the "caliphate" of Daesh on June 29, 2014. Obviously, said pseudo- caliphate no longer exists, defeated by the international coalition in Iraq and Syria.
But jihadist groups continue to target our country, inviting their supporters to strike France and our fellow citizens using all operating methods, even the most rudimentary.
If the French mostly remember the Bataclan or Charlie Hebdo massacres, new attacks regularly remind us that the scourge is not contained.
But Islamist radicalism cannot be reduced to the bloody attacks carried out on our soil.
It is also deploying a whole insidious work, a work of undermining, a work of indoctrination to turn some of our fellow citizens against their own country.
We are faced, in many lost territories, with a coherent ideological offensive.
Its target: our most fundamental principles, freedom, secularism, democracy and our Republic, all the values that make the cement of our common life beyond memberships, convictions, origins.
Its goal: to conquer people's minds to gradually impose its arbitrariness, its retrograde ideas, its totalitarian ambition.
Colonel Beltrame did not die of heroism, nor the victim of disembodied "terrorism".
He succumbed to the blows of Islamic radicalism, of which France and its values are the designated targets.
Let us know how to name this enemy who names us.
It is the first condition for successfully carrying out and on all fronts - from the prevention of terrorist acts to the reconquest of lost territories - the war which opposes us to it.