THE REVERSALS OF THE MUSLIM VOTE
The election of François Hollande in spring 2012 changed the political dynamics of France. If the intense distrust of Nicolas Sarkozy was reflected in a vote to punish him, the victory of the first Socialist president since 1988 was accompanied by great expectations in the economic and social sphere in a country that had suffered from the aftereffects of the 2008 economic crisis, rising unemployment, and job insecurity.
The left had mobilized during that presidential campaign, expecting to move beyond the Sarkozy years. For voters in the banlieues, Hollande’s victory signaled the possibility of change in the government’s policies toward the country’s marginalized neighborhoods and their residents. Very quickly, however, the efforts of Jean-Marc Ayrault (Hollande’s prime minister) to spur job growth reached their limits, thus weakening the president’s position early in his term of office. Campaign promises went unkept, leading to deep disappointment. And whereas the pressing issues of the banlieues had been at the heart of French political debates during the electoral campaigns of 2002 and 2007, in the new socialist administration of Hollande, it seemed to be pushed to the side. As soon as it attained power, the left, in effect, turned away from this key constituency, put the issue of the banlieues on the back-burner, and reverted to its earlier tendency to take for granted the voters in these marginalized communities. For the new socialist government, it was almost as if the banlieue riots of 2005 and all the post-riot talk of the need for serious attention to these areas had never happened. (The Hollande government’s security policy did include an urban component with the establishment of “priority security zones” in select cities to target crime hotspots. However, there was no concerted effort to attack growing inequality and poverty in the most troubled neighborhoods. The government’s efforts, which without exception have been small-scale and piecemeal, have done nothing to attack the root problem and are far from meeting the heightened expectations of the residents of these neighborhoods for concerted action.)
The growing mistrust in government in the banlieues was shared by a second-generation cohort of young people raised in immigrant families, a cohort born and politically socialized in France that had always known the far-right National Front to be a significant political force. This is a generation with a different political frame of reference than the rest of the country, whose experiences have led in an unprecedented ideological direction.
THE RISE IN UNEMPLOYMENT AND INEQUALITY
High unemployment rates have remained a constant in France, before and after the 2012 elections. On the eve of Hollande’s election on May 6, 2012, France’s unemployment rate was 9.7 percent. Nicolas Sarkozy had succeeded, in the first phase of his term as president, in reducing it to less than 8 percent before the 2008 financial crisis put an end to that. In the fourth quarter of 2012, unemployment crossed the threshold of 10 percent, and in the second quarter of 2013, it neared the threshold of 10.5 percent—then finally crossed it in late 2014.
The government’s image has suffered as a consequence, reflecting a growing mistrust of politics and politicians throughout French society. From 2009 to 2014, the number of people who believed that political officials did not care about voters rose from 81 percent to 89 percent. At the same time, the number of those who believed that democracy was not functioning leaped from 48 percent to 73 percent. The inability of successive governments to take effective action to increase employment transformed the political environment of 2012 into one of incipient crisis from which the National Front would reap benefits.
One can discern the crisis more clearly by examining the situation in the banlieues. According to the data provided by INSEE, the proportion of the population in the northeastern Parisian département of Seine-Saint-Denis that was between fifteen and sixty-five years old and unemployed increased from 12.2 percent in 2006 to 13.1 percent in 2011. To this we must add 11 percent of adults (not including students and retirees) who were without work. In May 2012, Seine-Saint-Denis had 125,700 unemployed. Three years later, there were 36,700 more. This hardscrabble area, until recently a bastion of political support for the left, has been struck by a rapid and deep deterioration of the labor market. The situation is especially bad for individuals of lower-middle-class and immigrant background. In Seine-Saint-Denis, 14.6 percent of French citizens born in France are unemployed, whereas the unemployment rates for French citizens who have acquired French nationality, foreign residents of North African origin, residents of sub-Saharan origin, and residents of Turkish origin are 19 percent, 31 percent, 27 percent, and 33 percent, respectively.
This disparity between the unemployment rates of different national groups is even greater in other urban départements such as Rhône and Bouches-du-Rhône—in the Lyon and Marseille areas, respectively—where the employment prospects of native French citizens are better in general. If a college degree provides some protection against unemployment, it does not reduce inequality among social classes or nationalities. The inequalities are maintained even when levels of education are the same.
Statistics typically understate the seriousness of the situation. A large number of young people in disenfranchised banlieues such as Seine-Saint-Denis cannot find their first job, so they appear in official government statistics only as “inactive” rather than as unemployed. Similarly, the official data do not record the unemployment and underemployment of illegal immigrants. The grim employment outlook has produced lasting effects, particularly among young, unemployed college graduates of immigrant background, who have grown disillusioned after having placed their hopes in the educational system.
This situation had immediate political repercussions for the Hollande government. Frustration with the left has been even greater in the disenfranchised banlieues than in the rest of the country, where Hollande’s popularity was rapidly sinking. From July 2012 to September 2015, the president’s approval rating fell from 55 percent to 13 percent. This 40-point drop is unprecedented in French political history. In November 2016, as the campaign for the 2017 presidential election began, only 4 percent of French voters approved of Hollande, an abyssal fall.
In the banlieues, the disillusionment with the left compelled residents to search for alternative solutions. For some young people, spirituality was the answer. Religious engagement offered them an opportunity to regain a personal dignity and social legitimacy unavailable through work—which was nonexistent—or political participation. While youth involvement in electoral politics in these communities has not vanished entirely, the plunge in the left’s popularity has led to a marked withdrawal from the political arena as well as—among some—an increased willingness to explore new political options. In a time of disappointment with the established parties, some banlieue youth have asked themselves whether the painful prospect of a political coalition with the right might not be in the best interests of the French Muslim immigrant community.
FROM SOCIAL DESPAIR TO AUTHORITARIAN CONSERVATISM
Neither the riots of 2005 nor the sporadic revolts that have broken out since have offered a clear path for the political integration of the children of postcolonial immigration. On the contrary, we are beginning to discern a process of social disintegration marked by heightened mistrust of these young people, whose economic situation remains precarious and whose cultural and religious practices are marginalized or rejected outright by the cultural mainstream.
Faced with this mainstream shunning, some young people in the hardscrabble banlieues, in particular Muslims, are in turn shunning the mainstream. Their desire to get out of the ’hood is transformed into a need to dissociate themselves from France—to leave it and its republican institutions behind. These days, this distancing takes the form of an embrace of an all-encompassing, strict form of Islam characterized by careful, systematic, and religiously sanctioned efforts to exert control over all aspects of life, including gender relations and family life. The appeal of this authoritarian puritanism lies in its promise of a return to a “natural order of things” and a reestablishment of a form of social stability in which everyone knows his or her place.
This intersection between a self-righteous denunciation of inequality and injustice and the advocacy of authoritarian practices holds an undeniable attraction for some young people, even if those who embrace authoritarian solutions are few in number at present. The attraction is also felt by individuals who have not grown up in a Muslim family but who have shared the painful experiences of social exclusion. In groups destabilized by the experience of colonialism and migration, by job insecurity and poverty, by being made to feel inferior culturally and symbolically, the imposition on oneself and one’s community of a set of rigorous religious norms can be seen as a way of restoring social stability and control.
In French Muslim populations, the tendency toward cultural authoritarianism can be combined with a different sort of conservatism issuing from the community’s best-educated and most economically well-off members. Many members of this Muslim middle class, particularly those who are active in Islamic affairs as clothing manufacturers and retailers and as businesspeople in the halal food industry, are in principle receptive to the standard right-wing critique of the social welfare state, with its suggestion that generous public assistance fosters dependency and discourages entrepreneurship.
The sociopolitical configuration of the banlieues is far from homogeneous. Not all Muslims share the same ideological convictions, and the translation of religious conviction into political preference does not lead Muslim voters down a single path. The children of the second and third waves of Muslim immigration are following different trajectories in French society. While (for example) opposition to the largely anti-immigrant right wing remains strong, a conservative revival in this community has created a small but discernable political opening for the political right in the banlieues. This opening was discernible in the aforementioned Manif pour tous of January 2013—organized by largely Catholic groups to protest a law legalizing same-sex marriage—in which a notable number of Muslims participated.
THE EMERGENCE OF TRADITIONALIST ISLAMIC GROUPS
Another recent manifestation of a discernable conservative tendency in the French Muslim community is the mobilization of the Fils de France (Sons of France) collective, a group that purports to give voice to the “silent majority” of French Muslims who identify wholly with the nation. Launched officially in March 2012, its sponsors include conservative politicians, prominent media personalities, and other public figures, such as Nicolas Dupont-Aignan; Robert Ménard, then a host of Sud-Radio; Father Michel Lelong, a regular guest on the right-leaning radio station Radio Courtoisie; and Tareq Oubrou, the rector of the Bordeaux mosque. These figures gave Fils de France media visibility in the course of its first three years.
Operating primarily online, Fils de France has appropriated traditional republican iconography (its logo, a Gallic rooster, is an age-old symbol of French nationalism) and some of the far right’s vocabulary, including in particular its rejection of globalization. It calls for a fusing or transcending of particularisms via a strong nationalism rather than via adherence to republican principles:
We want to assert an obvious truth: a French Muslim can be a patriot just like a French Catholic, Jew, Protestant, agnostic, or atheist.
In an interview with the Boulevard Voltaire far-right website, Camel Bechikh, the president of the association, declared that it was “natural that French Muslims defend the traditional family.” In the course of the interview, he also made clear his affinity for and affiliation with the Manif pour tous organization and its “exceptional” leader Ludovine de La Rochère. Bechikh is also close to the Parti chrétien-démocrate (PCD, or Christian Democratic Party), a right-wing, largely Catholic political group founded in 2009 whose leaders include Christine Boutin and Xavier Lemoine—the mayor of Montfermeil, an eastern banlieue of Paris adjacent to Clichy-sous-bois, where the 2005 riots started. On February 23, 2015, Bechikh published with Lemoine a joint interview conducted by Guillaume de Prémare, a member of two conservative Catholic groups, Ichtus and Civitas, whose members seek to harden the line of the Manif pour tous.
A very different conservative initiative had a more visible impact in the banlieues. The Journées de retrait de l’école (JRE, School Boycott Days) was a protest launched in December 2013 by a teacher, author, and activist of Algerian descent, Farida Belghoul, of the teaching of “gender theory” and the ABCD de l’égalité (ABCs of Equality [between boys and girls]) in French public schools. Belghoul denounced this curriculum for its supposed promotion of homosexuality and its challenge to traditional family values. The objective of JRE was to persuade parents to keep their children home from school one day a month in protest until the targeted programs were withdrawn. This initiative targeted Muslim parents in particular and enjoyed considerable success when it was rolled out in January 2014. On the first planned absentee day, 30 percent of students stayed home from school in those Parisian banlieues having large Muslim populations.
Farida Belghoul’s career is emblematic of a certain postcolonial French elite that can trace its origins back to North Africa. Initially an activist of the left, Belghoul was present at the Marche des beurs in 1983. The following year, she organized the Convergence 84 demonstration, another antiracist initiative that attracted sixty thousand people to Paris and that took aim at the ruling Socialist Party for its hijacking of the antiracist movement. After a long period of withdrawal from political activism of any sort, in 2013, Belghoul was drawn toward the far-right message of author and essayist Alain Soral. She began posting her attacks on gender theory and its alleged propagation in public schools on Soral’s Égalité et réconciliation website, an online forum also supported by traditionalist Catholic movements on the far right. She was delighted with the “Islamo-Catholic convergence” that her initiative created and declared victory when the decision was made, in June 2014, to halt the distribution of the ABCD de l’égalité program. But by then, her JRE had run out of steam, and she broke with Soral after a year of having been close to him.
Prospects for a more across-the-board Christian-Muslim convergence over values issues are uncertain at best. Traditionalist Christians and Muslims are on opposite sides of other issues, such as those connected with the much-contested French tradition of laïcité (secularism). Right-wing voters typically see laïcité as a shield against “Islamization” and brandish it as a weapon of resistance against Islamist activists’ religious demands such as the right of women and girls to wear the veil in school or the niqab in public. Where there are political convergences between these groups, they tend to arise in communities in which Muslim families have decided to send their children to private Catholic schools in order to avoid the public schools in their district, which they may see as inferior or violent. In such cases, social proximity facilitates the development of communities of interest.
Secularism (laïcité) is sometimes perceived in France as a discriminatory practice that targets Muslims and in this vein is regularly denounced as a pretext for monitoring and controlling their religious practices (clothing, swimming pool hours reserved for women, the consumption of alcohol, etc.).
In September 2012, Minister of National Education Vincent Peillon announced his intention to establish a program of instruction in “secular morals” (morale laïque) in French schools starting in the fall of 2013. The goal was to bring into the schools debates on fundamental moral issues important for the development of self-aware, thoughtful citizens. In Le Journal du dimanche, Peillon declared that “although these questions are not asked, reflected upon, and taught in the schools, they are taken up elsewhere—by merchants and by fundamentalists of all kinds,” adding that
the goal of secular morals is to allow each student’s self-emancipation, because secularism’s starting point is the absolute respect for freedom of conscience. To allow for freedom of choice, we have to be able to detach the student from all kinds of determinism, whether familial, ethnic, social, or intellectual, in order afterward to make a choice.
At the same time, a drama unfolded in the French court system involving a nursery school that shifted the debate over laïcité and “secular morals” away from the public sphere and into civil society. The case of the Baby Loup nursery school featured the director of a cooperative preschool being sued by one of her former employees. The former employee, who had been employed as a teacher, after having returned to work from a long maternity leave wearing an Islamic veil, was fired by the school when she refused to remove her veil to conform with legislation, passed in France in 2004, banning the wearing of “ostentatious” religious articles and signs in public schools. (The school in question is partly financed by taxpayers’ money via local governments and is considered a public establishment.) At the end of a long series of hearings, the Final Court of Appeal decided in favor of the school director in a ruling handed down on June 25, 2014, reversing a Paris Court of Appeals decision which had ruled in favor of the employee. The final judgment defined “the conditions under which a private person, in this case an association, can restrain the freedom of its employees to display their religious convictions in the workplace.” The court added that the principle of laïcité does not apply to all religious practices in private enterprises and that “the restriction of freedom to display one’s religion […] does not take the form of a general interdiction but [is] sufficiently precise, justified by the nature of the tasks accomplished by the employees of the association, and proportional to the goal sought.”
The Baby Loup affair attracted the attention of the nation as a whole and triggered numerous reactions. This was understandable, because it is always questions concerning public schools—the institution through which individual fates and life chances are determined—that crystallize French society’s tensions, divisions, fears, and uncertainties. While the organizations traditionally favoring laïcité mobilized resources to help with the defense of the nursery school director, Islamist associations in particular took the employee’s side.
The laïcité issue became even more fraught and destabilizing after a government report on the French policy of integration, commissioned by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in 2012, was released in December 2013. The report exposed disagreements between different factions on the left and within the government. One section of the document suggested reconsidering the 2004 law banning the wearing of the veil in the schools, thereby opposing the official position of the minister of national education. The authors of the 2013 report maintained that “it is important to reflect on the conditions of the development of an inclusive and liberal conception of laïcité, of a shared laïcité, sensitive to both the contexts and the consequences of its implementation.”
The call for compromise and negotiation regarding the terms and modalities of applying the principle of laïcité fractured the fragile consensus within the government and bureaucracy. In a sign of smoldering confrontations, the report was taken down from the government’s website in the weeks that followed its release. In the end, although one part of the left continued to demand “recognition” of France’s “cultural diversity,” the office of the president decided in favor of continuity with the 2004 law and with the policies of socialist governments extending back to the 1990s.
Less than a year after taking back the presidency and the National Assembly, the socialist majority appeared divided, contested by part of its base and in a compromised position. Whereas during the 1980s the defense of laïcité and antiracism had played the role of an ideological glue for the left after the adoption of Mitterrand’s tournant de rigueur,1 the years following 2010 led to a shattering of the consensus on how to regulate religious practice and combat racism.
Contrary to the situation that prevailed during the last quarter of the twentieth century, when the social ascension of many descendants of North African immigrants was accompanied by a secularization of behavior and their identification with radical and progressive French institutions such as the Communist Party, the CGT,2 and even the Socialist Party, by the early twenty-first century, the influence of Salafism gradually changed the situation. An alternative model of rupture with the values of “infidel society” became a serious rival to the earlier model of social rupture with “bourgeois society.” It is in the context of this shift that we can understand the rise of a professional class of college graduates, managers, and entrepreneurs who while embracing the laws of the free market and related right-wing values are also imbued with Islamic culture.
The intensification of Salafist identity politics was imported from Saudi Arabia and expressed by this professional class in how they behave and what they consider halal (permitted) or haram (not allowed). Salafists hoped to establish themselves among the disenfranchised young people of the banlieues as “organic intellectuals” who had culturally “disavowed” infidel society. Success in this project in the name of their all-encompassing version of Islam would allow them to transcend class differences and contradictions between themselves and the marginalized young people whom they seek to lead and from whom they seek political support.
The campaign against gay marriage—something that is haram, understood as a cardinal sin in the eyes of Islam—appeared as a political gift to this Salafist cadre, which saw the issue as a means of breaking its target group’s social attachment to the left. By having made permissible the sin committed by Lot (Lout in Arabic, from which is derived the colloquial Arabic epithet louti, or “faggot”), the Socialist party, in this Salafist view, now finds itself cursed as a “corrupter on Earth.”
The most orthodox interpretations of the Islamic tradition insist that sodomy be punished with the greatest severity, even prescribing the execution of its practitioners. Thus in January 2015, the seventh issue of the online jihadist magazine Dabiq published an illustrated report on the Muslim purification of morals in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which had fallen under ISIS’s control. In it we see a blindfolded “sodomite” perched on the top of a building before he is thrown off it. His broken body, lying on the ground, is then desecrated by the crowd. The article accompanying the images justifies this punishment in the name of the holy scriptures. In a similar video posted by ISIS, one can see the images of the stoning to death of a couple of homosexuals in Homs with the text of this hadith superimposed:
The Messenger of Allah—may Allah’s blessing and salvation be upon him—said “Anyone you find who acts in the manner of the people of Lot, kill the active and the passive!”
For those who consider gay marriage to be sinful, including both the imams who have railed against it from their pulpits and their like-minded congregants, the “marriage for all” bill signed into law by President Hollande in May 2013 posed a problem of principle. Indeed, in the eyes of some believers, the law in question gave the lie to the vaunted universalism of French law in its opposition to the application of Muslim marriage law. If, the Salafists reasoned, a well-organized lobby could succeed in using its political influence to legalize an immoral practice that used to be illegal (but that remains immoral), why couldn’t they build an effective Islamic lobby to advocate for official recognition of Muslim marriages in accord with the rules of sharia? All it would take would be an Islamic lobby as effective as the gay lobby to give the force of universal law to the right this community demands.
Hollande’s same-sex marriage law of 2013 had two related effects: it pitted a significant segment of the Muslim electorate against the Socialists, and it encouraged some Muslim citizens to organize themselves as an electoral lobby in order to ensure that they, too, win certain community rights. This development has favored the entry into politics of so-called “halal entrepreneurs” who, in the municipal elections of 2014, contributed to the rightward shift of cities with working-class traditions, such as Bobigny, the prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis, or the large city of Aulnay-sous-Bois in the same département. In addition to the disaffection of the Muslim electorate in the banlieues, which in recent years has decided to punish the left for the government’s economic failures, Islamic community leaders have begun to appear on right-wing electoral slates—in particular, those of the UDI,3 led by the mayor of Drancy, Jean-Christophe Lagarde, that have captured a religious vote hostile to the Socialist “corrupters on Earth.”
This recent phenomenon was still fairly limited in the 2014 municipal elections. Nonetheless, it was an unprecedented development and perhaps a harbinger of the future. Anti-leftist Salafist identity politics could play a central role in future elections. This would compound the massive rejection of the left already seen in the white “native French” working-class electorate, which has gravitated to the National Front. And the NF has a few Muslim elected officials—as well as a certain number of voters—who are carrying out its battle against “globalization” and the European Union, which they see as contributing to impoverishment and job insecurity.
MANIFS POUR GAZA AND JIHAD AGAINST THE JEWS
It was in this context of heightened identity politics and increasing social fragmentation in French society that certain events occurred in the Middle East that accentuated the rending of the French social fabric. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) seized Mosul on June 10, 2014, and proclaimed an Islamic caliphate several weeks later, on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. At the same time, the intensification of the Syrian civil war, which threatened the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, led al-Assad to call upon the Lebanese Shiite militia group Hezbollah to supply aid by fighting the Sunni jihadists who had cut the road to Damascus, Homs, and the Alawite coast. With the blessing of Hezbollah’s patron Iran, Hezbollah fighters crossed the Syrian border, using against the Sunnis the weapons originally provided by Teheran to fight the “Zionist entity.”
Hezbollah’s fighting prowess had been on display eight years prior to these events during the so-called Thirty-Three-Day War against the powerful Israeli army. But in the summer of 2014, the Shiite militia’s decision to engage in the Syrian conflict left it short of troops on the Lebanese-Israeli front. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw this as an opportunity to strike against Israel’s other adversary, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas, which was entrenched in the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah, bogged down in Syria, could not come to Hamas’s rescue with its missiles, and Egypt’s new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former Egyptian Army head and an enemy of the Hamas-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood, maintained a tight blockade of Gaza’s southern border. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, for its part, which was (and remains) a bitter rival of Hamas, did not look with disfavor on the prospect of its destruction at the hands of the Israelis. And to make a bad situation even worse for Hamas, it was also in the doghouse with Iran, whose Shiite clerical rulers were unhappy with Hamas’s professed solidarity with the Syrian Sunni rebels opposing Bashar-al-Assad’s Iran-friendly regime.
The context was thus favorable for an Israeli offensive against Hamas in Gaza, and the opportunity to strike was afforded to the Israeli prime minister by the kidnapping on June 12, 2014, of three teenaged West Bank settlers. Yeshiva students who were hitchhiking home to Hebron at the time of their abduction, they were found dead on June 30. Retaliating for the kidnapping, which was attributed to Hamas activists, a group of vigilantes from the Jewish settler community kidnapped, tortured, and burned alive a young Palestinian boy, an atrocity that triggered a Hamas rocket attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip. Thereafter the Israelis began seven weeks of military attacks on Hamas in Gaza, an operation dubbed “Protective Edge” by the Israeli Defense Forces. The 2014 Gaza war ended in late August of that summer with seventy-two Israelis and approximately two thousand Palestinian Gazans killed. The conflict further damaged Israel’s international reputation as the Jewish state came in for strong criticism for its shelling of Hamas targets in civilian areas and for the disproportionate number of Palestinian dead. Hamas, for its part, survived the onslaught with its stockpile of missiles and other weapons diminished but not destroyed and its own reputation in the Arab world enhanced.
In France, the 2014 Gaza war both exacerbated social tension between the country’s ethnoreligious groups and brought to a fever pitch the widespread dissatisfaction with the president of the Republic. Hollande’s office stirred up a hornet’s nest the day after the conflict began when it published a communiqué that drew on the president’s conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu in the hours after Operation Protective Edge had begun:
He [President Hollande] assured [Prime Minister Netanyahu] of France’s support regarding the rockets launched from Gaza. He reminded him that France strongly condemned this aggression. It is the Israeli government’s responsibility to make every effort to defend its population against these threats.
The French head of state, having thus given his blessing to the Israeli offensive in Gaza, was immediately accused of having betrayed France’s balanced policy with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even though the very next day, in the course of a conversation with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Hollande deplored the fact that Israeli military strikes had already caused many Palestinian casualties, the damage was done. The equivocation damaged the government’s credibility and unleashed all kinds of protest demonstrations.
The subsequent mobilization in support of Gaza deepened the antagonisms in French society along cultural and religious lines. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century and the emergence of a new generation of French-born Muslims, solidarity with Palestine, and more particularly with Hamas, has given political visibility to Islamist movements seeking to offer Muslim youth in the economically hard-hit banlieues a universal projection of their social frustration. This had already occurred during the earlier military conflict between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2006 and in 2010 and 2011, during operations intended to break Israel’s naval blockade in the Gaza Strip. Support for Palestine was the glue that held French Muslims together. It represented a cause that was both anti-imperialist (a feature that also appealed to left-wing voters) and ostensibly humanitarian (which appealed to French society as a whole). Media coverage that summer of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which revealed the extent of the civilian casualties and which featured graphic video images of Palestinian children being killed on Gazan beaches by fire from Israeli warships, inflamed Muslim public opinion and led to protest marches on the streets of France.
In Paris, the marches on July 13, 2014—on the eve of Bastille Day—featured both the left and far-left movements and Islamist groups with ties to the anti-Semitic far right. Among the Islamist demonstrators, amid shouts in Arabic calling for Hamas’s missiles to bombard Tel-Aviv, the Sheikh Yassin collective, named after the founder of Hamas, who was killed by Israel in 2004, led the crowd in chants of “Citizens, resistance! Hamas, resistance! Jihad, resistance!” Signs read “Israel Murderer, Hollande Accomplice” while cries of “Death to Jews” and “Death to Israel” rang out and a black-on-white Salafist banner bearing the twofold Muslim confession of faith now made popular by the ISIS flag stood out among the forest of Palestinian flags. Nearby, fans of the popular French comedian and militant anti-Zionist Dieudonné—those of the so-called Dieudosphère—were also taking part. The mixture of ideological registers between the latter and the Islamists could be seen in particular in a group of young people brandishing a cardboard Qassam missile and making Dieudonné’s notorious quenelle4 gesture, a photograph of which was published in the weekly magazine Marianne.
This demonstration signified the disintegration of the decades-old alliance between the humanitarian left and Islamic groups and the concurrent rapprochement between Islamists and radical elements of the Soralian far right, united by a common hatred of “Zionism.” Jean-Marie Le Pen himself—distinguishing himself from the entourage of his daughter, who was eager to dissipate recurrent suspicions that the very recently proclaimed “leading French political party” was anti-Semitic—forcefully denounced the martyrdom to which Palestinian civilians were subjected.
Later that same month, two subsequent demonstrations took place that further inflamed relations between France’s Jewish and Muslim populations. The first, on July 19, occurred on the boulevard Barbès, in a neighborhood with an especially high percentage of Algerian immigrants. The second, a day later, took place in the city of Sarcelles, known for its less than successful postwar experiments in urban planning, which produced sterile and depressing public housing high-rises. Sarcelles is also a city in which a third of residents are Jewish, most of them from North Africa, and in which another third are Muslim.
In Barbès, where the demonstrators ignored police instructions to disperse, the tear gas grenades used by the riot police on defiant demonstrators were analogous, in the minds of the latter, to Israel’s bombardments of Gaza. The vandalism committed by some of the demonstrators was similarly analogous to Hamas’s resistance. This symbolism of confrontation metaphorically transplanted the conflict in the Middle East to French society, identifying the Palestinians oppressed by Israel with the children of North African immigrants oppressed by the postcolonial Republic. This comparison had already been made, a decade earlier, by activists involved in the 2005 riots. In this version of the clash of civilizations, the enemy is not the white nationalism of the far right but rather a French state administered by a socialist government and said to be in league with Jewish interests.
In the Sarcelles demonstration, the stakes were different. There demonstrators sought a confrontation not with a pro-Zionist French “colonial” state but rather with the local Jews, seen as the very incarnation of the despised Zionist ideology. Jewish stores in the shopping center located at the heart of the large housing project were targeted, whereas the Muslims’ stores, especially those owned by Turks, were left untouched. Initiated by a local elected official who wished to represent “diversity,” the Sarcelles demonstration was originally intended to protest what the demonstrators regarded as the excessive influence of Jewish organizations on the municipal government. The protests quickly escaped the organizers’ control, particularly when Islamist groups from northern Paris banlieues arrived on the scene chanting “Allahu akbar!” as they confronted the lines of riot police blocking access to the neighborhood of the synagogues. Some of the young demonstrators took advantage of the disorder to start looting Jewish shops. In a metaphor that reversed the situation in Barbès, where the “colonial-Zionist” state besieged the Muslim neighborhood, in Sarcelles, the Islamist persecution of minority sects in Iraq by the “caliphate” in Mosul was replayed by demonstrators against the contemporary mellah5 of the Jewish minority. Six months after this protest aimed at Jews, the Jihadist gunman Amedy Coulibaly engaged in a deadlier protest against a Jewish business when he took hostage customers at a kosher supermarket and then began executing them.
Seen through the prism of Abu Musab al-Suri’s Global Islamic Resistance Call, the incidents in Sarcelles on July 20, 2014, looked like skirmishes foreshadowing the “war of enclaves” anticipated by the theorist of jihadism once the success of the attacks carried out during the first phase had fractured European societies, made Muslim zones autonomous, and triggered a civil war on the basis of a confrontation between homogeneous ethnoreligious areas.
1 A radical change in economic policy adopted by President François Mitterrand in 1983 after the failure of the far-left program he pursued at the beginning of his first term of office.
2 Conféderation général du travail (General Confederation of Labor), one of the largest French trade unions; it has close ties to the French Communist Party.
3 Union des démocrates et indépendants, a center-right French political party founded in 2012.
4 A hand gesture created and popularized by Dieudonné that has been interpreted as an inverted Nazi salute and an expression of anti-Semitism. A quenelle is a sort of sausage-shaped pâté, and the gesture also has similar connotations to “giving someone the finger.”
5 An Arabic word referring to a walled Jewish quarter in Morocco, analogous to a European ghetto.